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My cousin Dawn works in New York City's cut-throat film industry. After 6 solid months of work, her latest film just wrapped, and she found the money and time to come for a visit, so she's finally here!
Dawn hearts NY, for sure. If you ask her (as at least a few here have) where she's visiting from, she says "New York" without hesitation.
Then, if you ask her (as the same people did) exactly where she lives in New York, she replies, "Jersey City."
I wonder if, when she told people that she was going to visit her favorite cousin in the whole wide world, she said she'd be staying in San Francisco's Oakland district?
We've been having a fabulous time.
Thursday: Dawn called me "perfect-ish" (I chose to take that as a compliment, though clearly it can go either way). She also used the word "avocado" as a verb (in the cafe's sandwich line: "I like the way he's avocado-ing that").
Friday: Dawn, who doesn't own a car, much less a stick-shift, drove down my skinny road on my skinny hill from my tricky driveway and picked me up from work in my manual VW Golf. She's good. Then I got behind the wheel and we headed to Bear Valley for the night. Over the 3-hour drive that took 4+ hours, I subjected the poor thing to my ipod, which contains about 90% bubblegum pop. By the time we were almost there, she was so disoriented that she agreed Justin Timberlake has talent.
Saturday: Dawn slept in, and then spent the day enjoying Lake Alpine, vacation-style. I, on the other hand, awoke at 5:45 am so that I could, um, not eat until after 7 (Nothing was open! And then we went to the wrong place! And then there was an oatmeal situation!) and be 40 minutes late for the start of the Ebbetts Pass Century, a new ride of 101.7 miles and 12,800 feet of climbing in the Sierras. Joining me were some 2007 Camp Blacksheep alumni (and possibly one or two future Black Sheep campers?), who were kind enough to wait for me. It is unbelievably beautiful up there. And oxygen's overrated.
Then we won stuff at the post ride dinner/raffle! It was tres fun. I scored a cross-country skiing day pass for two with free rentals, and Dawn came home with a bottle of wine (the winnings of a rider who doesn't drink, and whose name, ironically, is Chuck -- as in "Two-Buck"!). Then, Dawn drove us home. The seat belt was cutting into her neck, so in one swift move, while driving, she adjusted its height and resolved the problem. That seat belt has been digging into my neck for the 7 years that I've had the car. I never knew it was adjustable. She's never even owned a VW!
Sunday: Brunch! Shopping! Manicures! Pedicures! We were barely home! But unfortunately, during the period of time that we DID spend at home, "Y" was unhappy, and came upstairs to knock on the door and let us know it. Twice. Apparently, New Yorkers living in Jersey City walk more loudly than San Franciscans who live in Oakland. And just when I thought my neighbor karma had stabilized ......
*sigh*
Amy called me at work today. Amy's my oldest friend. Not "old" like "senior citizen," but "old" like "we met in kindergarten." Which we did. One of my first memories of Amy involves giant clumps of white hospital tape. She showed up at kindergarten with it stuck to her head in what looked to be random places near her scalp, all entangled in her hair, making quite a little rat's nest of it. I must've gone up to her to ask her what was up with her hair, because I found out that her mom accidentally shut the trunk on her head, or backed over her or something. The details were a bit fuzzy and then I think we had to go learn to spell our names, so I was distracted. But I remember thinking the remedy a bit ineffectual. And I was in kindergarten. But that's neither here nor there. I miss Amy because she's back east, and because our conversations are almost always fleeting due to time zone issues or child distractions, unless I'm having a personal crisis and we block out some time. Today was not a personal crisis day, and the conversation went like this:
Me: Amy Beth!
Amy: HEY. LISTEN.
Me: ......
Amy: I'm just calling to tell you that I can't talk.
Me: OK. Thanks for letting me know. Bye.
Amy: Just listen. I want you to know that I'm AT THE GYM. I have on BOXING GLOVES. And I look really cool. I mean, I look like I know what I'm doing.
Me: That's so great!
Amy: OK, I have to go. You shouldn't talk on cell phones at the gym.
Amy just got into working out. Isn't that so cute?!
I should be able to say that I've now biked the Sierras. However, I have been informed, by the former press secretary of the Sierra Club no less, that no matter how many of the Sierras have been climbed (and/or cursed while climbing), it's still singular: The Sierra.
Screw that.
So I survived an entire week of cycling the Sierras and surrounds. Well, really 6 days of cycling, with a rest day thrown into the middle. The rest day consisted of a 5-hour meandering hike/walk around a portion of Lake Tahoe. It felt really good on the legs for the first half. I was a little tired during the second half, so I entertained Morgan and myself with some "watch out for the bear"s muttered to passing hikers. I felt really bad though, when this cute little passing family did a double take, and the cute little dad went, "REALLY?!"
Anyway, back to the cycling. All told, I put 437 miles on my bike in a week, and I climbed 41,400 feet. Wait. How can that be right?! Some of our bikes requested a group shot (see above). Mine is in the foreground.
Some random highlights (huge thanks to various Black Sheep for all the trip photos, as I was too lame to have a camera):
1. No flats or mechanical malfunctions on my bike whatsoever (both a blessing and a curse, I would discover on day 4, when everybody else was invited to the "let's fix each others' bikes" party in the parking lot). Unless you count the very beginning of the first day, when I so enthusiastically pulled the pump nozzle off my freshly self-pumped tire that half of my tube's stem came with it, thereby compromising the tube and necessitating the first tire removal/tube change of the entire trip, which hadn't even started. I was afraid to touch the pump after that morning, so I enlisted others to pump my tires to 120 psi every single morning thereafter, for 2 very important reasons:
a. Why ride on stale air when you can ride on puffy, fresh air!?! Hullo!
b. My bike mechanic told me that 120 psi would reduce the risk of broken spokes (I didn't have spare spokes because they're all different sizes, and they have to be special ordered, and there was no time).
A certain Head Counselor of Camp Blacksheep (www.blacksheepadventures.com), while accommodating, wondered aloud whether I'd been a 300-lb man when I last visited my bike mechanic. Which leads me to believe that this certain Head Counselor may be anti-inflation, or possibly anti-obese transgender. I'm not naming names, but his initials are Fred.2. Absolutely stunning scenery. 
My personal faves: going over a beautiful green suspension bridge (where WAS that and why oh why are there no photos of it?), and Mosquito Lake (also love this rock formation on Ebbetts Pass...and the sky really was that blue!). Though, at one point, I was chatting with Marc during an ascent, and we agreed that it was too bad that it just doesn't matter how damned pretty it is when you're about to arrest.
3. Amazing descents. I hit my all-time high speed of 47.3 mph on day 2. Yay!
4. There was foosball in Quincy. And plush terrycloth robes for everyone in the rooms! Why was I the only one to get excited about that?!
5. Judy saw a bear while hiking alone in the wilderness (...wrestled it to the ground, made bear jerky out of it, and gave it to Mark, who was handing it out at the pool...)
6. Becky and I crossed the street and stumbled carefully into Lake Tahoe immediately after a difficult ride to experience the ice bath effect (my brilliant idea!). Of course we later discovered that the motel pool, which was closer, was just as cold (but not as cool, so there!). Oh, and at one point Becky looked down at her feet and said, "look at the little lobster!" which I deduced later was actually a crawfish. There are crawfish in Lake Tahoe!
7. Tahoe City may be home to the only ice cream shop (or non-aircraft structure for that matter) in the world that smells exactly like the inside of an airplane.
8. Gluttony without guilt. On the evening of day 5, I ate a rib eye with the best mashed potatoes I've ever had in my life. And then I ate half of Andrea's rib eye and the remainder of her mashed potatoes. Then, I started chewing my own arm off. Kidding!
9. We had a party in the breezeway of the Inn at Markleeville, 
with beers and crushed up gorp that had spent the entire day in someone's pocket, yet was strangely yummy!
10. 
The morning after she and Jerry were seen cooing to a bear cub without worrying about a silly thing like its mother possibly being nearby (I may have panicked slightly), Courtenay The Uberrunner ran 18 miles up Ebbetts pass. At altitude, and in the dark, stopping only to write "go fatass" with a rock, her thoughtful prose totally lost on Wendy, who simply didn't see it. Anyway, Grizzly Woman's legs took her where cold hard impenetrable steel could not (her bike had finally sputtered and died on the previous ride -- oh, and it might have been aluminum). She was mauled at the top by a cattleguard.
11. By the end of the ride, I was able to ride no-hands just like Himgan! 
I haven't been able to do that since I was a kid. Next, I shall learn how to strip off my arm warmers at the same time, like Himgan! Eventually, I shall bring a novel (Breaking Away?) and read it aloud to the group while riding 24 mph against a headwind in the flats. Baby steps.
12. The support v
an totally broke down in the middle of some highway on the last day while we were cycling, so a bunch of us cyclists were corralled (marooned?) at a dinky store in rural Dinkville for a few hours after 50 miles of what was supposed to be the week's longest ride, while the Head Counselor scrambled to get the van back and salvage the day. Yes! This is in the highlights section! Turns out, we had done all of the day's (substantial!) climbing by the time we hit the store, so the ride was effectively over anyway and we didn't have to feel robbed. There was much Mexican beer and rejoicing. Chris, who looks really hot both with and without my lipstick on, led the drinking games. I did not cheat. And I recall being really good at Hearts. Oh and there was arm wrestling!! We cyclists live in the mind. We are sophistoclists.
The HC eventually got the van back, assisted by Mike the CIT (promotion!) and Sarah. A bee had gotten into the air filter and disabled the entire vehicle! Hah! I find this particularly interesting, because on my very first ride (March 17, 2007), I was stung on the tongue by a bee during what I considered at the time to be a rather terrifying descent (I think I was doing, like, 18 mph?). Meddling bees!
OK, so I can only think of one lowlight in the entire trip: It ended.
I'm tres depressed.
Bad neighbor situations suck. I know, because I've had my share. I had this neighbor, when I lived abroad, who'd decided to go out one night and leave her new yappy dog at home. Of course it barked incessantly until she came home. I lay in wait! When she returned (at 4 am on a weeknight), I ran to her door. When I told her that the dog had been yapping since she left, she looked at me, and said,
"What am I supposed to do, stay home every night?"
This entire conversation happened in a foreign language. Have you ever tried speaking coherently in a foreign language while livid? I'd say it's pretty high on the list of extremely challenging cognitive endeavors. I'm pretty sure I just stood there blinking for a while before switching to some colorful English.
So I won't bore you with my many other "bad neighbor" stories. Instead I'll bore you with my "best neighbor" story! Yay! We'll call her "X." I told X that I could hear her walking above me at 5:30am every morning, and she figured out it was her loud shoes, immediately switching to softer soles. I noticed a mysterious vibration in one corner of my bedroom over the last few nights; together we discovered that it was her oscillating fan, and she turned it off. Every time she sees me, she asks with genuine concern about the noise situation!
Now I feel really badly about having asked her to close the doors more gently...because further investigation has revealed that the door slammer is my downstairs neighbor, whom we'll call "Y."
Wow, X must be miserable. Whatever it is that she's calling me in her blog, I'm sure it has an "!" and a "#" in it.
