happy easter

we're not exactly regular church-goers. i'm a bit of reluctant catholic. but that good ol' catholic guilt always makes an appearance around the holidays and i feel a need to suddenly drag everyone off to church.

 

so i start making arbitrary we're going to go to church announcements. sometimes weeks in advance. sometimes days. sometimes i just spring it on the kids on the actual day of the most holy holiday of the year just as they dig into their baskets.

my husband says i should work on my timing.

so annabel goes downstairs and announces to lulu
mom says we're going to church.

 to which lulu responds
what! that's gonna ruin the whole day!

and then annabel says
lulu! it's a big day. it's the day jesus rose from the dead.

and lulu says
what!

annabel
well, it's not like he's a zombie or anything.

we never did make it to church. instead, we planted some seeds, picked up some poop from the backyard, went for a bike ride and had some friends over for a beer and the tour of flanders.

i’ll be going to hell in a handbasket someday. i hope my husband takes the kids to church.

resume

you’re gonna need to put together a resume.

i’ve been dreading hearing these words. so much so that i’ve been thinking maybe i’ll just go back to waiting tables. they don’t ask for resumes to wait tables, do they? surely i can channel my cocktail waitressing days. i really was a whiz at the one handed tray full of drinks while weaving through a drunken crowd thing. figured it would be a double bonus cause i bet i’d get to see some friends when they came in to eat and we could catch up between can i get you something to drink and would you like your buns toasted?

when i called the lady to say i heard through the grapevine that there were some openings and i was thinking about maybe thinking about maybe applying for the positions, only i didn’t quite say it like that – it was so much more professional - she was excited and said you’re gonna need to put together a resume.

i told her it had been a long time since i had a resume. she said not to worry and assured me i had plenty of life experience with which to fill up a resume.

so i was all excited and fired up to list my life experiences but when i sat down to type out the list, i couldn’t remember anything. so i went to the basement to look for old papers and the yearly calendars that i’ve been keeping for years. and photos. anything to jog the memory of any fabulous shit i’ve done that might help me land a job.

but i’ve been cleaning the basement lately and all those old papers and boxes of memorabilia to jog the memory of where i’ve been, what i’ve done, who i was, who i am and what i can be was shoved into the farthest reaches of basement shelving. i hadn’t anticipated needing to research myself.

so down i go to the basement for my research. and then i forgot why i was down there and what i was doing.

cause i found the david clark headset and my log book and remembered my first solo flight and hearing through that headset the warnings from the tower that there were two people on the edge of the runway. i figured it was my mom and grandmother trying to get a better picture. as i came in for the landing, sure enough – i could see my mom and grandmother jumping up and down. they were escorted away. but not before getting some good shots.

skilled at landing small aircraft, able to come in high and hot and grease it on the numbers.

i found the picture of myself the morning of my first solo cross country. you don’t go cross country, but you have to leave one airport and land at another, then return to original airport. i thought there was a bit of a discrepancy between the instruments and my charts. namely, i noticed that the river on the chart i was following wasn’t headed right into a mountain, but i was.

successfully able to vector a course to get back on track before crashing into side of mountain. learned valuable lesson on trusting instruments.

i found the page in the 1999 calendar where i was practicing and deciding how we should spell our second childs’ name. annabelle or annabel. we went with the latter. and the one in the 2001 calendar when lulu was born and we brought her home on the fourth of july and i wrote: claudia comes home. huge hole in kitchen ceiling. (courtesy of the pipe that burst in bathroom upstairs). ceiling still not repaired. claudia is eight.

highly adept at keeping entertained during the early maternity leave months by spelling baby’s name in alphabet noodles. on his face.

i’m trying to remember the years i started and ran my own business and i wonder why i folded it. i go into my craft room and think of another business to start -

extremely creative in a manic, whim sort of way and optimistic that folks want to purchase the things she makes so she doesn’t have to come up with a resume.

- but not before throwing the pile of laundry at bottom of chute into the washing machine.

able to perform mundane tasks year after year. after year.

i hit the mother lode when i found the drawer-full of old cassette tapes mostly from college and had to go through every one of them. was not was? cocktail waitressing. john hiatt? flying lessons. everything but the girl? senior year boston university.

uncanny ability to recall specific events and songs in direct relation to each other.

i found wedding albums, yearbooks, old letters, five shoeboxes full of photos of various cross country road trips, our various homes and apartments in los angeles, boston, maine and kentucky. there are milk crates full of school work and drawings of thirteen years and three kids.

writes everything down. engaging writer with enormous attention to proper grammar and a flair for artistic license - someone should pay this girl to write a book – it would be a nice addition to a resume. partial to sharpies. likes a colorful calendar page. has had the same handwriting for ten years. possibly longer. may benefit from organizing the five shoeboxes full of photos.

wait a minute. what am i doing down here again?

blog-worthy?

i’ve had lots going on in my life since i last blogged over a month ago about how i was the tool can that crashed out a friend and teammate. i’ve got a gnarly (ok. it’s not that gnarly. my husband just laughs at it) battle wound of a scar on my elbow to show for it and said friend has since had surgery and even thanked me for the whole incident cause it gave him time to slow down a bit and think. about a girl.

i’m all for crashing people out if it somehow in a round about sorta way helps set them up with someone that is just perfectly perfect for them.

i’ve had lots going on and lots of ideas for blog posts, but i’d always wonder, yea – but is it blog-worthy?  which would then always make me think of one of my favorite seinfeld episodes. you know the one.

anyhow. i was gonna write about how my first thought upon seeing my daughter in her nutcracker costume when i was spending nearly every waking moment volunteering in the children’s dressing room for a bunch of little angels (no pun there, they really were angels) was that she looked like foxy brown in her wig. they were supposed to look cherubic. i thought she looked like foxy brown.

i had all kinds of dressing room backstage stories to tell. one of which was the fact that i think i missed my calling as a stage manager. cause for the 3rd year volunteering for the ballet, i watch the stage manager and all that goes on backstage and am fascinated. and i think, shit – i missed my calling. it’s like being a fly on the wall back there, but the stage manager tells them all what to do. damn. i want that job.

one of my favorite fly on the wall scenes was when the little girls were all lined up waiting to go on stage, watching one of the principal dancers dip her shoes into some sandy grit that would prevent her pointe shoes from slipping. they asked her if dancing was fun. (these little girls have all been dancing for at least three years) she turned around with her big stage make-uppy smile and asked the girls what they thought. all the girls said that yes, it was fun. and the principal dancer agreed and said we wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t fun, right? i laughed to myself and thought i’ve heard that same statement about bike racing and thought that could be arguable at times. then she turned away to wait for her cue. and the little girls secretly reached out to touch the tulle layers of her beautiful rose skirt.

heck, i wanted to reach out and touch it too, but i figured that would be weird.

let’s see. what else? the shit hit the fan at my husbands’ company a while back - the same one that he and his business partner have been busting their asses over for ten years, and they’re still mopping up the stinky mess. now that was some blog-worthy material. but i’m not here to air that sort of dirty laundry. although shit, it was like a soap opera. good stuff. or, not so good, really. more like the creepy lifetime movie kinda stuff.

the sort of stuff that makes you drink a lot and wonder how you’ll get through christmas. but you get through it just fine. somehow. putting your wine in a fancy decanter that you got as a wedding gift just like they do in soap operas and lifetime movies helps.

kids who don’t get bummed out at all about how they didn’t really get anything that was on their list and in fact say it was the best christmas ever also helps.

a week before christmas, my mom came to visit for the first time in nearly two years for what was originally just going to be a quick weekend visit, but thanks to the snowstorm back east that delayed travel and closed airports she was able to extend her stay through the holiday.

she brought a book that my dad’s sister and her husband wrote. my dad is one of nine kids and the book chronicled his parents’ lineage and was full of stories of their childhoods and how they met and what life was like with nine kids. i’ll say it again. they had nine kids. and twenty grandchildren and i believe they went to every one of our high school graduations.

it included stories and letters written to my grandparents over the years from their kids and grandkids – one line from a friend of my grandmother’s talked about how there was “a new tole every year”. 

i used to wonder how my grandparents did it. how did they hold it all together with nine kids?

reading the book just reiterated what i already knew. they held it together cause they laughed a lot, drank a bit, did what they loved- be it golfing or skiing (my grandfather still raced at age 73) or the weekly card game with the ladies. they had great friends, loved each other and had amazing kids. my grandmother also said the rosary every day of her life.

eh. i’ll take long hiatuses from writing because i feel like i don’t have anything “good” to write about or i’m just not feeling it – till i feel like i’m gonna explode if i don’t write about something. truth of the matter is; it might not always be blog worthy. it might not always be funny. it’s just life. all the good, bad and the lifetime movie shit-hitting-the-fan sorta shit. we just muddle through with each other, including the laughing a lot and drinking a lot and make the best of it.

some days i think i should look for those glow in the dark rosary beads my grandmother gave me all those years ago. they’re around here somewhere.

i was the tool can

until i started cycling, i had never heard of people being referred to as tool cans.  i don’t know if it’s part of a universal cycling lexicon, or if it’s just a regional thing or just a weird louisville thing. god knows there’s a bunch of weird louisville cycling things, so that could be the case.

i actually just did the google for cycling slang and came up with the roadie slang dictionary only to find that ‘tool can’ is not even on the list, so maybe it’s just a weird thing in our house. god knows there’s a lotta weird stuff in our house too.

my husband would come home from rides muttering about some tool can out there who didn’t know how to ride in a paceline and jacked everything up. he made up a joke about being at the start line of a race and looking around for the tool can – if you can’t find him, then its you.

so when i started riding two years ago, i really wanted to know all the cycling etiquette so i wasn’t a tool can. i didn’t want to be ‘that’ girl . the one riding out by the double yellow lines instead of in the paceline, the one who couldn’t hold her line.

but most of all, i didn’t want to be the girl who crashed out herself or  worse – a bunch of other folks all riding in a nice neat little paceline. 

being the tool can who crashed everyone out was probably my second worst fear after actually crashing.

today? today i killed two birds with one stone.

my first thought as i went over the weirdly awkward railroad tracks and i saw my wheel get caught in the groove and the next thing i know i was lying on the pavement was:

wow. that whole crashing on your bike thing happens fast. too fast to even be scared about crashing your bike.

my second thought as i lay on my right side in the road over those damn tracks was: that’s my teammate flying over me.

and my third thought was: shit. i think that was my fault which would mean that in addition to just having my first crash, i was also the tool can that took other people out.

two birds. one railroad track. truth be told, three birds went down.

it was a nice little winter team training ride of 6 folks. the ride and route were both my idea. we were all chatting. having a lovely ol’ time of getting in some leisurely base miles. there were a whole bunch of tracks on the route – all of which if you just kept going straight over them, you hit them just fine & pretty much perpendicularly dandy.

but this one set of tracks was a little odd, a little off camber-y, old and rutted up a bit. and in the nano-second between crossing the first track and the second, i thought i needed to adjust my perpendicular-ness and then in another nano-second i was lying on the pavement watching a teammate fly over me.

i saw my wheel get sucked up in the track. and my husband said “you were looking at your wheel?” yes. and of course i wonder if  maybe i wasn’t looking at my wheel and instead looking ahead at where i wanted to go – instead of where i didn’t - cause i sure as shit didn’t want to go down on that track; that maybe my teammate wouldn’t have taken a flyer over me & separated his shoulder and another wouldn’t have gone down and gotten a flat and i wouldn’t have had to get eight stitches and have my calf run over.

since i started riding, crashing has been my biggest fear. it’s done. and and on one hand, i am weirdly happy that i got it over with. i’m only sorry that there were others involved.

i have crasher’s guilt and wish i had gotten the worst injury, not my teammate.

here’s what i learned:

• don’t change your mind in a nano-second. just look where you want to go, and assuming you don’t want to go down on railroad tracks, just keep going.
• crashes really do happen way too fast to be scary. one minute you’re riding your bike and the next minute you’re not.
• the adrenaline will ward off any crying fits that you imagine you’ll have when you first crash.
• teammates & friends are the best thing to have around when you crash.
  
• the G3 iphone google map thingy with the blinky “you are here” blue dot is an awesome feature for when you have to call folks to come get you when you don’t even know where you are.
• wine helps.
• so does ice.

u.s.g.p.

another usgp has come and gone.

i’ve been trying to come up with the perfect post to describe the awesome-ness that is this weekend. there’s a pretty good account of the awesomeness here. but read this one first. then go there.

the usgp came into our lives – our city, our cycling community and very literally, our house three years ago when the “race people dudes” (as lulu used to call them – a.k.a the folks who ran the show) were our houseguests. it’s become a regular gig now and now she calls them by name. every october for a week, we’re sorta the official unofficial usgp louisville headquarters when the gang comes to stay (except for the one girl that would come to stay so often we just convinced her to move here). we really love having them and i think they really like staying with us even though sometimes the towels are holey, they’re sleeping in the driveway and we only have one bathroom.

i think it says a lot when your houseguests come into the kitchen to get some coffee in their underwear and nobody bats an eye. it’s important to me that my guests are comfortable and lets just say that we’ve really moved beyond “houseguests”.  total bonus if one of your houseguests has just come off of hiking the appalachian trail for months. even the holey towels and blow up bed are a luxury.

for us, the usgp is so much more than the event itself. it’s seven days of a whole lotta crazy, exciting chaos. it’s like the holidays. the kids get to eat whatever they want. they stay up way too late for their own good and i have to write notes to the teachers about why homework didn’t get done and i add that they should come down to the races and check ‘em out cause it’s super fun. and lulu has to explain to a friend that she couldn’t go to her birthday party “cause it was the usgp bike races”. and when the friend says “but its just a bike race”, lulu responds with “um. it’s the USGP. there’s a green monster and everything”.  sheesh.

it’s the one time each year that we get to see folks that have become good friends and i finally get my pumpkin seed oil stash replenished. we chat and catch up like it hasn’t been a year since we’ve seen each other. (and in bruce’s case, it hasn’t – the airstream is his home away from home). we talk about our hopes to win the lottery so the five of us websters’ can go over to austria to visit them.  we cook breakfast and dinner together and do dishes and laundry together. and god knows i need help with my laundry.

over the umpteenth pot of coffee that gets brewed every morning, we chat about the event and how the community here embraces it, lives for it, volunteers for it, counts down the days till it’s here, races in it, promotes it through sheer enthusiasm and pride in the fact that our city hosts an event of such awesomeness. and how invaluable all of that is.

i love this week. i love our guests, i love stapling numbers to registration forms and hanging snow fence with friends. i love seeing the course all set up. i love the watching the long train of racers in the men’s 4 race. the dollar bills thrown on top of the mud, the bourbon in the flasks, the kids in the blow up chairs, resting my eyes for just a minute in the back of the jeep cause there was too much bourbon in my post race 10 am coffee. love all the chatting with, cheering for and heckling friends. i love finally not even blinking an eye at the top of the green monster on the second day and just going down without a thought of how stupid steep it is.

it’s a good week.

it’s the sort of crazy, super cool kind of week where simon burney comes over for dinner, and another night we’re out to dinner with richard fries. and then when the racing is over, and the course is torn down and the  girls bring garbage bags of course tape home so they can set up a ‘cross course in the front yard and they throw sram and selle italia tape all over the tree and even put up a barrier - all for the impromptu celebration at which we all crowded around our dining room table to have dinner, drinks, laughs and stories with tim, jamey and jesse.

winner winner post usgp dinner.

in our house, the usgp is a weeklong, whirlwind affair that has brought more friends and fun into our lives than we could have ever imagined and after i sleep off some of this usgp hangover we’ll start counting down the days till everyone comes back and we do it all over again.