A real day off

It took me eight hours today to get motivated to get some exercise. Because of my procrastination, the gym was closed by the time I got my act together. I decided to run to the high school and run the stairs at the football field stadium. It had cooled down and I got to watch the sunset as I jogged. It actually felt good to clear my head and listen to the music on my ipod nano.

I was online a significant portion of the eight hours preceding my run. The Internet is becoming my new television - a total distraction that dominates way too much of my time. Oh well, it was nice to do nothing for a day. Those days are few and far between lately.

Lesson Learned: It's okay to relax sometimes.

More scrapes and bruises

Last night was the virgin mountain bike ride for the click in pedals my sister got me for my birthday. On two separate occasions in discussions beforehand, two guys, one who I don’t even know, looked straight at me said with certainty: "You're going to fall." I did. Three times. This is the second ride I've gone on with my friend, Steve, who was my supervisor at a ski resort I taught snowboarding at last winter. We went once last week in retroactive celebration for me graduating from physical therapy (I say that because I was going anyway).

Let me back up. For those of you who don't know, about four years ago, I fell and injured my lower back snowboarding. I wish I could tell you it was launching off some cliff or bombing down a black diamond. No. Actually it was almost flat where I fell. And I'm pretty sure I wasn't going much faster than a pommel lift. My only excuse is that it was really icy. So I caught an edge, landed on my hip. It twisted my pelvis and parts of my back and that's the way they have stayed since. It hasn't bothered me too much until about two months ago. When it didn't go away after four weeks, I started seeing a physical therapist.

But, for the most part, I'm healthy again and have been going mountain biking as much as possible. Falling over as I struggle to take my feet out of my pedals probably isn't great for my back. Oh well. Steve and I headed up to a reservoir, where there is a fire road that goes for miles. It was a nearly three-hour ride on terrain that's not too difficult. But there were a few tricky spots where the ground had softened into sandy pits or where you have to navigate around rocky patches. I fell the first time at one of the dried-out creek beds we had to cross. Its walls are pretty steep with rocks at the base. I jut tipped over coming up the other side. The second time was on pavement. The third time was just because there wasn't enough blood from the first two falls.

I’m pretty sore today, and I keep finding new bruises.

Lessons Learned: Twist heals out.

An upleasant surprise for one local resident

At the newspaper I work for, our "News of Record" has become somewhat notorious. People will buy the paper just for that, even some who live out of state.

My favorite log item was one we published a few months ago when a man walked into the Sheriff's Department and asked how he could legally kill someone. It was later featured on Jay Leno. Living in a rural area like the foothills makes people a little wacky it seems.

Today we had another one: A man found a naked male and female sleeping in his living room. Is there a protocol for etiquette in a situation like that? Or can you play pranks on them? They’re just begging to have stuff written on their foreheads in permanent marker.

Anyway, back to normalcy, since right now after hearing that I feel very normal.

Last night we had a going away dinner party for Michelle, our page designer at the paper who is leaving for another job. We're all sad, of course, but it sounds like an awesome opportunity. It was cool to get almost all of the younger staff together. It's been a little while. Seeing the people I work with act out famous people (or other people we all know) during a game of Charades made my day. Mike wins the prize for best sound effects. It's interesting how all the people he did sound like monkeys.

My job was to be Josh. Since he is the only reporter who does Ninja in the office and serenades us in a falsetto voice, this wasn't too difficult. He was actually the one who guessed it. The other one I got was Napoleon. My mind read that as Napoleon Dynamite, which is a really sad commentary on my grasp of history. Maybe it was wishful thinking (Napoleon Dynamite is easier to act out in my opinion); maybe it was just plain stupidity.

Lessons Learned: If you are going to break into someone's house to crash for the night, keep your clothes on. And Napoleon does not equal Napoleon Dynamite.

20 miles later

So we're on day ten of over 100 degree temperatures. People are going to extreme measures to survive. We reported one lady actually filling her hot tub with blocks of ice.

For me, it meant sleeping on my bathroom floor Sunday night after I got back from Truckee. In my absence, my apartment had heated up like a human oven. The cups in my cupboards were warm to the touch and my plastic shower curtain looked like it was about to melt off its hangers. I tried sleeping in my bed with the air conditioning and fan on, but I was still miserable. So I pulled out my Thermarest, threw my comforter over it and dozed off.

Since then I have been recovering from the 20-mile mountain bike ride my mom, a friend of hers and I took on Sunday. I'm not as sore as I thought I would be, I'm just nursing some bruises and something I tweaked in my foot. Other than that, I was the ride I've been waiting for all summer. We drove up to Castle Peak to ride the trail, called "Hole in the Ground." It's a roller coaster single-track trail riddled with rocks and tree roots. There are also a few hairy switchbacks and rock steps.

I had to walk some sections, and I tipped over three times, but it was fun to challenge myself. I haven't been so tired in a long time. The last stretch is across the parking lot of the Boreal ski resort, and although it was flat, I had to will myself to turn over every pedal.

Now I'm back to work. More drama with a school district I'm covering ... working on a long-term project ... more on school construction ...

Lessons Learned: The bathroom floor is surprisingly comfortable.

Catching up

So here goes. I feel like I just woke up from a coma, technologically speaking. For the past two years, I haven't had the Internet. In that time, wars have been fought, advances made and whole civilizations formed. It was only within the past couple of months that I heard about Internet revolutions like MySpace, Technorati and Blogger.

Okay, you can laugh.

Instead, I've just been focusing on my little self-contained world in the foothills. Here, I know what's going on. That is my job after all.

Given my immaturity in the Internet world - sleeping for two years will put you behind - you're going to have to give me a break. This blog is a work in progress. I'm sure I'll find my angle as I go.

This post might be a little longer than normal, since I just started it and I have a whole weekend to share.

Every year, my mom and I attend a play by Shakespeare at Sand Harbor at Lake Tahoe. This weekend was it, so after work Friday night I headed up to the Tahoe area, where my mom lives.

I came up Donner Pass just in time to see the sun setting in my rearview mirror, ribbons of pink cloud above and an electric storm in the distance. The backdrop for this was the jagged ridges of the Sierra. The mountains almost looked surreal after living the rolling foothills. I pulled into town just after the storm had passed, and mom and I celebrated her birthday, which is Aug. 1.

Saturday mom and I slept in and then went for a bike/run. This is a tradition we established when I lived with her for a summer during my Internship. She runs; I ride my mountain bike. We do a variety of loops, which all have one or two nearly vertical hills, on a course near her house.

This particular morning, she took me on one that I wasn’t really that familiar with. As I struggled up one of the hills, through rocky and loose dirt tracks that lie between patches of shrubs, I heard the inevitable pat of mom’s running shoes behind me, then beside me, then leaving me in the dust.

I have long since stopped feeling bad when mom passes me on the steep parts of a ride. There are a variety of possible excuses: She weighs less therefore has less weight to haul up the hill; she is acclimated to the elevation; she's superhuman.

The truth is, none of that is really a factor. My mom is just in much better shape than I am. She measures her runs in hours, not miles.

As I zigzagged up the fire road, my heart rate shot to 192. I began to wonder how high it has to get before you die. Still, it was refreshing to be on my bike, and it gave me an excuse to binge on the huge dinner we brought with us to the play later that night.

That is part of the Shakespeare tradition by the way. We all pack coolers full of food and wine, then set up camp in the sand in front of an outdoor stage. We saw Othello, which was one really impressive for a play that you can hardly understand. No really, I loved it. One highlight, though unplanned, was when Othello came running across the stage to greet his wife, and a knife that was tucked in his boot shot out of its sheath and into the front row of the audience.

After a bit of nervous laughter, the actors recovered and the show went on.


Lesson learned: Avoid the front road during Shakespeare tragedies.