Sailing the Gulf Islands

Vacation. I love it. Christine and I took last week off to go visit Livia and Carol on their sailboat in Canada and sail in the Gulf Islands. I hadn't been on a boat in a long time and I had never sailed before, so it was sure to be an adventure.

Sailing away

Eventually I'll put together a worthy post about the week Christine and I spent with Livia and Carol sailing in the Gulf Islands. The short story: It was a great time. The weather was perfect (barely a cloud in the sky until Saturday), and we learned a lot about sailing. I now understand what it means when Livia tells me that they added a 3rd reefing line in the main.
Pictures and stories to follow. Stay tuned...

Car vs. Bike

On Tuesday, someone on our lunch ride got hit by a car really bad.

Longmont Crit

I always spend a lot of time deciding whether or not to do a crit. It's a stressful event. Today I decided to line up for the Longmont crit and at least get some good exercise.

Garden 2009

I haven't talked much about the garden this year, but it's back in full force. We had some good early season success with spinach and radishes. I was too late on that last year, but I got seeds in the ground early this time. I left a radish in the ground just to see how big it would get. It ended up getting pretty large and it even flowered.

Vive le Tour

It's July, and that means it's time for the Tour de France! It's shaping up to be a good race and I can't wait to see how it all unfolds over the next 3 weeks. I brought in a satellite receiver to hook up to the TV at work so I could watch the stage finishes. I like to think it's helps my productivity. :) Plus it keeps me from burning bandwidth at work by watching online video streams.

If you've ever wanted to know about cycling (and stage races), now is a great time to watch the Tour. With Lance Armstrong racing again, the people at Versus know there are a lot of new viewers and they spend more time than usual explaining things (at least in these opening stages). And if you've got some more questions, you can fire them off to me.

Yesterday's stage was surprisingly interesting. It should have been a pretty straightforward stage with a sprint finish. Instead, one team (Columbia) caused a split in the group when they came into a crosswind. It was great to watch it all unfold. They lined up all of their guys on the front and formed an echelon that was just big enough for their team, leaving everyone else to suffer in the wind. (An echelon is a way of riding in a crosswind that allows riders to "hide" from the wind while one person takes most of it. It looks like a paceline that's been blown sideways.) The result was that all of the overall favorites (except Armstrong) lost time and Columbia's sprinter won the stage.