red tongue

this weekend was alright. i can't complain. i was super crabby friday night. work, the weather and lack of riding i'm sure are to blame. i decided to hit the group ride leaving out of palos 9am saturday. man, i was sooo slow. i had nothing in me. i just couldn't pedal. my skills are still there as the downhills and fast singletrack were all good. my cornering comes n goes, but that's more lack of concentration than anything. it was a 2 hour ride with stopping which was fine with me. i didn't really know anyone on the ride, but it was fun. i ended up doing something to my knee coming out of the staging area singletrack for the second time. ouch. pushing too hard of a gear? i dunno. but i couldn't put any pressure on the pedals, in fact i need to get out and see if it still bothers me.
john spent the morning with nick putting in the new water heater. i swear just when you think you are getting ahead something happens. thanks to nick for helping john out.
later that afternoon i started to tackle casey's room. good gawd. what a wreck! she has the toys of 5 houses. i packed 8 garbage bags full of toys and two boxes of clothes she has completely grown out of. we brought most of the stuff to goodwill. hopefully good timing for christmas. as i got deeper into the chaos, john stepped in to help. things go by much faster and are less frustrating when everyone pitches in. her room is unbelievable now. in fact i'm almost in shock when i walk past it. even when it was clean before there were so many toys in there, you could barely make out the floor. the whole upstairs is a shocker actually. it feels good to walk up there now.
next is our room. boo. our room is crazy. i don't think it'll ever be in good shape until we get some closet organization going on. what will help is we cleared out a bunch of closet space by ridding ourselves of a lot of clothes. i will probably tackle the linen closets before i do our room. should help a bit.
yes, i know boring post, but it felt good to get it down.
sunday we headed to the cross race...




















we arrived around 10 or so. frank was already there in full get up. and when i mean full i mean full. two pairs of shorts, thermal vest (and who knows what else under that), long knee warmers, arm warmers... it was 50 degrees and sunny! we convinced him to take it off... frank was there to redeem himself from his last place finish from the previous race.
the race started and it was strung out before the first barriers... it was a fun race to watch, for awhile the leader switched a couple times, 3rd and 4th were iffy. there was a pack of about 5 after that, which included frank. john was a pack behind them. it was a long flat course. frank loved it, john hated it- he said it was a good one to get the cobwebs out though. in the end frank took 6th overall in the As! in the money- sweet. john hung in for 11th or 12th. it was a super strong field with a lot of guys.
casey and i, along with raymo and ryan cruised around the course. casey had an exhausting day, for the most part she spent it on a sugar high playing catch me...