the view from saturday [09/09/2006 21:05:28]
I bought a road bike. I can't exactly afford it, but there's no way I'm going to make it through a hundred plus miles on my mountain bike. I did forty miles last thursday at silver comet, a trail that's got maybe two climbs (bridges, not hills) and a whole lot of flat, paved, well-shaded trail. I mean, this used to be a train track, so they levelled everything. Anyway, it took forever. I think I hit the mile zero post around four thirty, and it was well past sundown when I staggered back into the parking lot. I'd hoped to do fifty miles, but it just wasn't going to happen. The whole way back I was wishing for smaller tires, bigger wheels, better gear ratios... So I put it on a credit card.
I haven't seen the bike yet. It's a 2007 Giant OCR1. They don't even have it on their website yet, though I'm told it looks like the 2006 model but midnight blue and polished aluminum instead of black. The store was offering 15% off Giant bikes for team in training participants, so at least I got a discount to make up for the interest. Anyway, they had to special order it. Hopefully it'll be in Monday.
I did 20 miles Tuesday with no problem, but then today, with the group, I got to the top of the second hill and felt like passing out, throwing up, or both. I wound up just bailing on the group. I couldn't keep up with them anyway. Lessons learned: 1. I haven't been eating right and 2. I need to do the biking every day.
I did go to the fundraising clinic this morning. Can't say I learned a lot. I sent out a newsletter to my customers with a long letter asking for donations (there's a copy on my donation site (and while you're there, how about kicking in a few bucks?)) That's brought in over $400 so far. I threw in some myself, and even traded one of my old, unused domains to someone for a $150 donation. I'm pretty sure I'll make the $975 "recommitment day" minimum, but I'm still a long way from $8000.
I'm actually blown away by how many people I barely know have donated. And kind of sad that several of my friends (who are on the list because I host their sites for free) haven't even read the letter (and others have been very supportive). I guess the next phase is to lean on my friends and call in some favors.
I figure most of it's going to come out of my pocket though. Or at least my company's pocket. I'm planning to do another lifetime hosting event. The only reason I haven't is those dang T-shirts. I promised everyone who signed up for a lifetime account last year a T-shirt. It was a spur of the moment thing, and only one two people even mentioned it when they signed up (one offering to make them, and one giving me a shirt size). I really handled it poorly. I basically started seeing it as a problem and waiting for someone else to take care of it. And how do I collect the shirt sizes? And are all the addresses correct? And how do you make shirts?
I've been working on the T-shirts behind the scenes for a couple weeks now, since I posted to the innercircle list about doing the lifetime thing again. It just doesn't feel right to do it again until I ship out those shirts, or at least set the process in motion. I decided to ask my mom to make them. Instead of screen printing them, she'll be embroidering them on this super high tech embroidery machine she has. She sent me a prototype she made based on a giant GIF of my logo. It looks really nice, but the letters are kind of odd. Now that I know her embroidery software speaks TrueType, I walked her through re-creating the logo from the actual font (franklin gothic demi cond, baby!!) and so hopefully there'll be a new version sometime next week. We decided to go the extra-large-for-everyone route (she already bought the t-shirts), but I still need to double check everyone's address and send her the labels.
Once that's squared away, I'm gonna start pushing the lifetime hosting thing, and a portion of every signup will go to the Leukemia/Lymphoma Society until I hit my $8,000 goal. I might open it up to the rest of the team, contribute to their funding as well. Not sure about that yet.
One other note from the leukemia front: one of my customers pointed out his amazingly well-written site about his ordeal with leukemia in 1990. It's at leukemiasurvivor.com ... Robert has a real gift for storytelling, and a lot of it is downright scary. It's long, but defitinely worth taking time to read.
Besides being a gripping narrative for their own sake, his memiors have given me a lot of food for thought about my own writing project. I mean, it kind of made me realize that we all have stories worth sharing, and that there's actually a value for other people in sharing the painful events from your past. I could probably rattle off a hundred thousand words about depression and suicide or the healing power of atheism, and while that would be a pretty easy book to write in terms of writing what you know, it would also be a very hard book to write in terms of going back through those memories.
The book idea I've been playing with so far isn't about the past, but about the future. It would take place in 2026, when I'll be 50 and the US will be 250. It would be a lot about technology and medicine and trying to project the trends that are affecting us today another twenty years. I mean, I look at my parents, and I know they're thinking about retirement and the future and what happens when they're gone... But there's a whole other side of that, which is: what do you do with a zillion baby boomers that are living well past the traditional retirement age? I'm really struck by the idea of all these ex-flower-children going back to the communes after sixty years simply because they're alive and healthy and there's not much else to do. Not that either of my parents were hippies. But young labor is cheap, and old labor is expensive, and global competition is likely to keep pushing wages down. And then there's the web, and video blogging, and smaller, faster, cheaper computers... I don't know, but I think it would be really cool to take all that and use it in a story. Sort of a near-term science fiction I guess. But we'll see. Right now it's just a bunch of notes in Writer.
Speaking of word processing. I got my new keyboard and I'm really liking it. I decided to keep it in dvorak mode, so I've been re-learning how to type C-x C-s to save in emacs. It's not so bad. And I've been practicing touch typing on the number row and using the various brackets and symbols and I think I'll actually be able to program on this thing. Which is good because my wrists love it.
Anyway, I've been adding to this post off and on while I catchup on email. I need to finish that up and maybe get some sleep.