Track report February 16th & 17th 2008

Another track weekend has come and gone. Aside from being a little sore we've all (bikes and humans) returned unscathed. Here's some pictures.

I had a really rough start. Around last Wednesday I'd started to get a bit of a sore throat, Thursday it had escalated to headaches and runny nose. On Friday I felt like it was tapering off and that by Saturday morning I'd be fine for sure. So Friday morning Joe and I loaded everything up, I slipped into my role as transporter, and we aimed the rig north. We got to the track and setup shop. My co-worker Luke arrived with his bike a little after we did, so we helped get him setup too, all the while I'm popping Ibuprofen and DayQuil when I can. After dinner on the way back to the track I knew I was in trouble. It was cold outside but I was shivering uncontrollably. When we got back to the track, Joe setup a bed for me. I was in double layered sweat pants, a long sleeve shirt, a hooded sweatshirt, wool ski socks, a sleeping bag and two heavy blankets on top of that. I felt like being sunburned in a hot shower, I got a little delirious for a few minutes and then mercifully passed out for a couple hours. I woke up drenched but human again, peeled of some layers and slept the rest of the night. By the second session on Saturday morning I was within one second of my fastest time ever on the track. I think that sometimes the line between determination, stupidity, and luck simply goes on vacation.

This event was put on by Rob Johns, a track friend of ours for a couple of years now. It was his first effort at organizing and hosting a track event. The organization is called Track Attack, his sticker now adorns the front right of both my, and Joe's track bikes. He didn't seem to think that hosting a track event was enough and had a fund raiser for the Red Flag Fund this weekend as well. There were raffles and auctions of donated gear. I won a highly useful kickstand replacement called "The Krutch" and some truly horrendous (on me at least) sunglasses. They had Sonny's BBQ bring in dinner Saturday night. Rob even managed to get some truly fast guys to come out and show the rest of us around the track a bit. There was a mock race on both Saturday and Sunday between some of the hot talent. We were allowed to stand behind the jersey barrier at the front straight and watch. They were just goofing around at a pace over 10 seconds a lap faster than what Joe and I typically run. It was really amazing to see up close. The cherry on top was a lead/follow session (track ride where speed is controlled by event staff) in the opposite direction of what the track is always run in. Safety concerns prevent running the track in reverse at speed, but I'm told that there are serious discussions among the powers that be about making the necessary safety modifications to allow for it.

Sunday night we had dinner at a Japanese Steakhouse called Mori in Valdosta with about eighteen other track addicts ( I bet you can't guess what the dinner conversation was about!). We crashed at the track, then packed up and drove home this morning. I'm wiped out, more than a little sore, but happy.

Braaaaaaains!

So I'm a bit of a zombie now having spent more than a week sleeping on either a futon mattress on the floor or the couch. My pampered ass needs a bed. Fortunately today is the day it gets delivered.

Wednesday January 9th at about 11:30 PM I'm ready to climb into bed. My pillow is wet. Christy and I have had this waterbed mattress for over 10 years now. It's a 80 percent waveless bladder with a nice pillow top. We've loved the bed, and were always glad to return home from vacations and other trips that took us away from our bed.

Last summer we went to Colorado for a friend's wedding. In our cabin, we discovered a conventional bed that was as comfortable if not more so than our waterbed. Until then we had not thought it possible and had effectively resigned ourselves to never having underbed storage, and renting equipment to drain the bed whenever it was necessary to move it. Suddenly a whole new world of sleeping options had become available. We returned from our trip with a seed planted, that someday we would have a conventional bed.

Discovering that our beloved waterbed had sprung a terminal leak was not fun. I was about ready to pass out by the time I staggered to bed only to find a wet pillow. I spent about 45 minutes trying to get a siphon drain going on the bed while Christy snagged the futon mattress from Colin's room and made up a "bed" on the living room floor. I awoke the next morning to find that my siphon had failed after draining maybe three or four gallons. I called my boss to take a personal day, then I went to Lowes, rented the waterbed pump for what will hopefully be the last time and drained the bed. I busied myself with other bed dismantling tasks then arranged to meet Christy at the first of three mattress retailers during her lunch break.

The first thing to know dear readers is that the mattress industry goes to great lengths to ensure that you don't know what you're talking about when you walk into a store. The major brands make the same products for all stores, but different retailers get different names for the same product. So unless you have a photographic memory, the chances of you being able to successfully comparison shop two retailers is next to nil. The other thing to know is that mattresses sell for a whole heckuva lot more than you might expect. That Sleep Number thing that is all over the TV; the cheapest one retails at about $2500.

At the first store I rapidly realize that the imaginary prices I had in my head were laughable, suitable perhaps to cover the bedding and pillows. We find a couple mattresses within the new and still difficult to swallow price range that I'm thinking in, have the sales guy write his pricing for these products on the back of his business card and head for the door. As I'm reaching for the handle, the salesman knocks about $350 off the price of one of the mattresses, throws in delivery and a bed frame. It's a clever move on his part, I can't show this deal to another retailer because it's not on his card, but I did just learn that there is a LOT more room for movement on the price of these things than the sticker wold lead you to believe.

At the second store we find another salesman with similar products. Christy hops around from bed to bed until she has a couple that she likes and are not insanely expensive (although predictably, our price range grew a bit more). This salesman is a lot more friendly and we wanted to give him a sale, but we had decided to check three stores and there was one more, so we got his prices on the products Christy liked on the back of his business card and headed for the door. This guy also gave me a better verbal deal than the one written on the card.

The third store was looking to be more of the same, and we were pretty seriously thinking about going back to the second store and placing our order when we were presented with a couple of Kingsdown beds. The mattresses are obviously made using an altogether distinct type of fabric on the outside and felt very comfortable. The stitching all looked to be very good quality and it even had double the warranty at twenty years vs ten for the other manufacturers. In a room full of very nice mass produced beds, it stood out as being a cut above. It was priced accordingly. Having learned that there was room to move on the price from the first salesman, I started leaning on this guy a bit. He did a very nice job of holding his ground without being rude or confrontational about it. After about fifteen minutes of stalemate, during which Christy and I had already agreed that if we had to pay full price, we would, I told him that as much as I thought it was a superior product, I still needed to feel like I was getting a better deal. He made a phone call, something about trying to write up the order as if it were a commercial sale, blah blah blah. When he got off the phone he had come down nearly $400. Done. 24 months equal payments, no interest financing? Duh! So now in spite of having three cars and two motorcycles all paid off, I have a bed payment.

So we've come full circle now. Since that day when I committed to pay for two years on a bed, I've been sleeping on my couch. I'm cranky, I haven't actually slept for more than about two hours at a time without waking up to change position. I'm hoping that I'll wake up tomorrow having had a sleepiphany, and every day from now on will be a little bit brighter because I bought an extraordinarily comfortable bed.

Got some new tank pictures today. The Xenia has expanded even further and a section of it looks ready to move off to college. Other updates are covered by the captions for each picture.



Google Reader is a cool way to use RSS feeds to more quickly scan through content on sites that you regularly visit. You can also quickly share the articles that you think are interesting and others can subscribe to an RSS feed of your shared items. Think of it as a pull distribution method for all the web articles that you sort of want to email links to everyone about, but know that it'd be irritating if you did. Over there on the right of my blog page you can see some of the articles that I've recently shared.

Let me know if you start using this, I'd like to subscribe to the shared article feeds of any friends and family that use this.

Here's some pretty amazing video of indoor trials riding. Looks like even the spotters have tough jobs here. I'd like to see this sort of thing live, it looks really intense.

indoor de toulouse: toni bou / adam raga
Uploaded by photobysergio

Sunday

The guys over at Aztec8 rock! I called them Friday morning about a 5-3/4" dual headlight kit for my SV1000. They caught the fact that my Gixxer 1000 forks taper out where the brackets mount and ensured that I got the right size, then they put some extra effort into making sure that my order was prepared and shipped same day. It arrived yesterday. Fortunately I had kept the headlight harness from the stock crashed SV headlight assembly. With a bit of soldering and splicing, I was able to use that harness to power the Aztec lights for a clean plug and play installation. I think it looks great!

Saturday

Last night, Christy and I went to see The Golden Compass. It was a cool youth magic/adventure style movie. I expect that the book is better. There were a few characters that were obviously very complex but the movie format didn't really allow for sufficient time to develop them. The ending was quite good in that they obviously had more to do but it was a good time to break the action before the inevitable sequel.

In the reef tank, things are going pretty well for most inhabitants. The Tonga leather however is worrying me. She's looking rather shriveled and her filter polyps or whatever they're called are not spending much time in their extended and feeding position. There's a symbiotic, photosynthetic algae that grows within these corals and provides the bulk of their food. In light (nice pun,eh?) of this, I moved the leather to a spot closer to the light. I'm also about to go get a Calcium test kit and some Calcium dosing product (on the advice of my reef mentor and former owner of the tank). Hopefully things will turn around soon.

Thursday night, Colin had a Christmas concert performance, he was quite good and we have some footage of that to post as well. He's been at my mom's house since Thursday night and Cailan went to Christy's mom's house yesterday afternoon. They don't often spend time away from each other, so this is a little new for them.

Colin Xmas concert

Minor Update

There hasn't been much going on in the reef tank lately. Or rather not much that I feel the need to write about. There are no pictures in this update.

I pulled the live rock out of the tank last night and removed as much of the red bubble algae as I could reasonably see/access. A secondary achievement was discovering that my Turbo Snail is still alive, despite being seemingly pissed at me for some reason.
I did my first water change plus filter sponge rinsing on Sunday, was a largely uneventful process. It looks to me like the Zenia is preparing to split or otherwise self propagate. Aside from that, it's live as usual in the reef tank.

In all honesty taking daily tank pictures and writing them up in a blog is something that I knew wouldn't last forever. I suppose I thought it would last a little longer than this, but it looks like that is not to be. If this blog is to be updated at all, (hard to say at this point) expect that the subject matter will be more variable.