Snowman

Snowy day today. I guess with all of the snow I just have to shovel my driveways to stay in shape.

I have been working on an Email Santa website. I will continue to improve it but I think it is ready for people to start using now. Try it out and let me know what you think. http://www.stnickemail.com

My own cannon

This is a story I heard when I was a kid, I don't know where it came from.

Once upon a time there was a small town that had one man who didn't have a job. He wasn't about to take charity so the town leaders met together to see how they could help him. They decided that they would give him a job polishing the cannon at the town park. The man accepted the job and for years every day he would go and polish the cannon. He faithfully performed the job of polishing the cannon for many years. Then one day he walks into the city office and gives notice that he is quitting. The town leaders were shocked. "How can you quit?" they asked. "Well," he says, "I have been doing this job and saving my money for 23 years now. I bought my own cannon and I'm going into business for myself."

Well after 23 years of working for Novell I finally found myself on the layoff list. The job market for software developers in the area seems to be strong, but I have decided to go into business for myself. So I am working on opening a bike store. Now I am waiting for my store to be built. It looks like it will be June or July before I will be able to have my grand opening. I have however started working on the web site for my store Epeak Biking.

Friday Pie-day

A couple of years ago my wife started a tradition of Friday Pie-day. We always have left over pie from Thanksgiving so we invite friends and family over to goof off all day and eat pie. Of course this was the plan for this past Friday Pie-day.

Then my Bishop calls and asks if I want to go for a two hour bike ride at 11. Sounds great! I can burn off some of the pies I have been eating and get back before things really get going. Of course we don't get started on time, oh well half an hour won't kill me. Then as we get started I am informed that this is a 2 1/2 hour ride, now I am pushing it for getting into trouble. It is cold and there is a nice wind out of the North. I guess this just means the trip back will be faster, right?

By the time we get to the turn around point it is obvious this is going to be a bit longer than the 2 1/2 hours the ride was suppose to take. Then as I am turning around I go off the paved trail by about 1 inch for about 1/4 of a turn of the wheels. Scared that there might be goat heads in the dirt I jump off as quick as possible and check my tires. Arrrrrggghhh, about 5 goat heads per inch! I pull them out and sure enough both tires are leaking. I brought one spare tube and one CO2 cartridge. My bishop also has a flat at this point from some glass he ran over earlier. luckily he brought two spare tubes. We replace the tubes and are about to continue on and BANG! his rear tire explodes. I guess he put too much air in it. Now he has to get out a patch and patch the tube with the least number of holes in it.

The trip back is faster while I am going down wind, but I don't think bladed spokes work well with cross winds. It just seems that the cross wind slows me down a lot more than it should. By the time I finally get home everyone has been there for hours and I am in trouble for taking 4 hours to do a 2 hour bike ride.

I guess it is like software development. Take the amount of time you think it should take to finish the ride and double it.

RAT A U LAD

Ride Around Timp And Utah Lake in A Day.
I rode the RANATAD a few days ago. Today when I did a ride around Timp and Utah Lake, and in the spirit of RANATAD I named it RAT A U LAD. My Garmin Edge had a dead battery this morning so I only captured the first hour of the ride. Using Google Maps I created a route showing where I actually went, but could not figure out how to save it in the My Maps feature. Anyway here is the route.

White Rim 2007

Well, we did it again. I think I have ridden the White Rim around Canyonlands every year since I started mountain biking. Sometimes we take multiple days and a few times we have ridden the whole thing in a day. This year we did it a bit different. The goal was to ride the whole 100 miles unsupported. Also usually we start at the turn of to Mineral Bottom road and ride clockwise. This year we started at the bottom of Shaffer's trail and did it counterclockwise.

Like I said, the plan was to start at the bottom of Shaffer's trail and go counterclockwise. This would give us a big climb at the start of the ride while the legs were fresh and then at the end with a downhill when the legs are tired. Also we could stash some extra water at the turnoff to Mineral Bottom. And the last great idea of this plan was that we would be riding downhill on the long Mineral Bottom Road. Going clockwise the road is long boring and tedious, so we sometimes skip that part of the loop.

So I started out with a gallon of Gatorade in my Camelbak, and two water bottles on my bike. Amazingly everything worked as planned and I ran out of water just a couple of miles before the finish. We only had a few problems. Before we had ridden half a mile from the truck I broke my chain. It was a brand new chain I had put on the day before because I broke the previous chain on the Tuesday before. So we fixed the chain but couldn't get the shifting to work quite right. As the ride continued on my shifting got worse and worse, until by the end I only had the lowest gear and a couple of the highest gears that I could use. It turns out the cassette was loose and getting worse as I rode. The only other problem we had was my biking buddy ate too much at "lunch" (at around 3 pm) and got stomach cramps. So we had to rest for awhile on a rock.

The place we stopped to rest had an amazing view. I sat there for awhile and wished I had my camera. I didn't bring my camera with me because on these one day trips we typically don't have much time to get good pictures, and my pack was already too heavy with all the Gatorade. Anyway the view was off into the Maze district of Canyonlands. It was a beautiful view of white cliffs hanging over the red rock below and the red rock formations found in the area. The canyon with the Green River below was a lot like looking at the Grand Canyon. It was a great view and made the recovery stop more than worth while.



Dawn at the tip of White Crack at Canyonlands National Park
© jaovandelagemaat All rights reserved.

Like I said I didn't take a camera with me, and after that beautiful view of the Maze district I wanted a nice picture to add to my blog. I searched the internet for a good picture of that area and couldn't find one from that spot. But I found this beautiful picture of the sunrise at White Crack which wasn't far from there. Thanks, Jao for letting me use your photo in my blog. (Click on the picture to go to its web page)


And finally here is the motionbased viewport to the ride data: