got no friends in arizona

the title's not what you think! it's a tea leaf green (aka coffee bean brown) song, one that happens to be my bike & build theme song.

so here we are in page, arizona, at page middle school. i chuckled when i realized the school's abbreviation. there is internet, whoohoo, but the school's system blocks e-mail sites! balls to that. blogs are cool, though; go figure.

two days until the grand canyon.

the thing about the southwest is that there are hills here, boo. but now my legs have some hills in them, too.

ok. time to see if apple support and i can coax my ipod into functioning once again.

huuugs!

oh man, soon i will have a summer's worth of achewood to catch up on. i can't wait!

superstition

dallas gave us a much needed chance to go to a bike shop. i got a new pair of shorts and more ass lube to keep my bum happy, and assorted other goodies. i considered a new tire, but decided to hold off. one of the leaders, josh, got a new pair of armadillo tires, a brand with a lot of happy, low-flat-count riders.

so this morning, in the route meeting. josh tells us we're going to have more car traffic than usual, since we're going through dallas, fort worth, and irving. (irving? i think.) and then he tells us to "watch out" for him on the road, because he'd just put on two new armadillos.

about two minutes later, we hear the sound of a gunshot.

now, we were staying in a rough neighborhood in west dallas, so a gunshot wouldn't necesarily be out of place. not many shootings happen at 6:45 in the morning, though. the sound was just the blow-out of a tire. of josh's tire.

whoops!

June Critical Mass: Special New Orleans edition!

Locals I’d talked to about NOLA Critical Mass weren’t sure if the rides still happened, so it was with apprehension and hope that I showed up in Jackson Square at 5:30. There were two other cyclists there, and they didn’t seem to be there for a ride. I consulted a map to make sure I was in the right place, prompting a woman on the bench behind me to ask, “OK, where are you trying to go?” I chatted with her for a while, then with a guy she knew named Scratch. This guy was a character, half-covered in tattoos (including spiders dropping from the side of his eyes like teardrops!). Somehow ATM fees came up—one ATM fee I’d seen was $4—so I asked Scratch if there was an ATM for my bank in the area. There was one all of three blocks away, so I went off.

When I returned, much to my surprise, there was a group of 5 or 10 bikers standing in a clump in the Square. “There’s your Critical Mass,” said Scratch, who had been talking to them.

…more later!