helper bee

sunday morning I woke at four-forty-something, dressed, prepared a to-go cup of coffee, grabbed the things I'd set out the night before and stowed them away in the car, then plunked myself behind the wheel and set off for Blacksmith Fork Canyon.
this was the most aggressive thing I'd done in at least ten days, and I was hoping I was up for the adventure.

this last weekend was the MS fundraising bike ride, which I had to sit out.
this was not easy.
saturday my bad ass cycling team met early in the morning at the fairgrounds in logan, rallying for the 100-mile ride that began at seven. they eased each others' pre-ride jitters, drank a bit of coffee, gathered for the team photo, then took off at the very front of the ride, a place of honor given to them for being the highest fund-raising team of the previous year.
saturday I sat on the couch and moped.

the bad ass team also sponsors a rest stop along the route, where they provide water and electrolyte drinks, fruit, snacks, temporary hawaiian-themed tattoos, spritzes of water, sunblock, bug spray, paper towels, sunglasses cleaning, and general cheer. their rest stop on saturday was in weston, idaho.
sunday dawns bright and early with another ride (just a 75-mile max this day), which many of the bad ass riders complete as well. on sunday the team sponsors another rest stop, this one located at the top of Blacksmith Fork Canyon, at the Hardware Ranch, 23 miles into the ride.

I'd decided earlier in the week that if I felt up to it, I'd like to help out at the rest stop, showing a little team spirit. by friday I knew I wasn't ready to be at the saturday event, but after hours of moping around on saturday I decided I would give sunday a shot.

thus, 7:20 am found me at the Hardware Ranch, ready to help the other bad ass volunteers set up the rest stop. let me just say, what a production. I think it's a given in the cycling-event circuit that not all rest stops are created equal; the bad ass team knows how to do it right.
our first cyclists arrived at 8:30, and for the next 3 hours I greeted and held bikes and chatted and cleaned sunglasses . . . and saw the backside of a cycling event.
these are just a few of the things I learned:

• very, very, very few people look really good in lycra bike shorts.
• a great many people like to hang out for a while at rest stops.
• lots of people like to have their picture taken at such rest stops (my apologies to all, as I am not a fabulous photographer).
• I don't like guys in short short cycling shorts.
• I prefer guys to wear jerseys with at least some bit of a sleeve.
• there are about as many different body types out there as there are people.
• some cyclists are very, very proud of their bicycles.
• apparently Breathe Right strips can help cyclists with narrow nasal passages have a more enjoyable ride.
• I can survive experiencing envy.

it was good to be on the other side for once. I felt some sadness at not riding, but also knew that I physically couldn't have done it. these balanced out into a feeling of gratitude for just being part of something bigger than myself.

I left the Hardware Ranch at 11:40 that morning, passing the final handful of cyclists on their descent at different places on the way down. I gave them a wide berth and a smile and wave, and knew that I would soon be able to be just like them, out on my bike, heading down from the peak of a unique and beautiful utah canyon.
see ya out there soon.

hoary cress

so I've been wanting to write about hoary cress for quite a while now, but have been distracted by a few other things.
I may have heard about hoary cress before two weeks ago, but I certainly didn't remember the term, and since I believe a great many of you must be in this same boat, I am going to forthwith tell you the story of hoary cress, as viewed through my (somewhat selective and slightly skewed) eyes.

many many years ago a wild and wicked weed lived a life of carefree bliss across the welcoming fields and vales of the balkan penisula, turkey, iraq, and neighboring countries.
one day a traveler set his tired body down upon a large and curved rock to draw a lump of bread from his sack and rest. the wind was mainly mild and gentle, but would occasionally burst forth with a small gust, sending loose leaves and tiny seeds scattering about. a small handful of such seeds, from the frothy, white-topped hoary cress, floated upon the gust and with its cessation, settled into folds in the weary traveler's trousers.
some weeks later our traveler found work in the alfalfa fields, harvesting and readying seed to be sent to market. a couple of the stowaway hoary cress seeds fell from his trousers into a bag that slowly worked its way from market, to a ship which bore it across the atlantic, to long island, new york, in the bonny year of 1862.

and from these few, errant seeds, this noxious, invasive weed has worked its way across our continent, infesting pristine areas and choking out native plants, often creating dense monocultures whose roots connect deep beneath the soil's surface.

thus many states, including our very own state of utah, send worker bees out in late spring and early summer to spray hillsides where the hoary cress has spread, reducing both biodiversity and wildlife habitats.
and it was two such worker bees I passed while on my slow-ride-on-chip-seal two weeks ago.
I saw the truck pulled off to the side of the road near little dell, and could tell the men working the hose were obviously spraying something up on the hillside. curious, I thought, as this area seems to be fairly well left on its own.
when I passed them again, on my way back up, I decided to ask what they were spraying for (against?) and this is when I learned of a noxious, invasive, white-crested weed named hoary cress.
[all research errors are my own, as the worker bees provided nothing but the name, a physical identification, and the two descriptors used above.]

there is always something to learn if one has a curious nature, and I'm sure my little but quite busy brain will never, ever, become full.

taking a pass

ok, it's my birthday, and I really don't feel like writing.
so, I'm going to take a birthday pass today, just because I can.

but before I go, I will say this: I don't care for oxycodone, percocet, morphine, naproxen, or just about anything in those varied classes of pain killers.

the good news is this: I would make a terrible drug addict, and I plan to stay that way.

here's to all of us 48-year-old women who bike!!!
(I plan to be one, soon!)

weller

like at one of those carnival midway games, my mental gun is trying to shoot quickly fleeting, amorphous words from a indistinct background.
it's not working so well.
perhaps tomorrow it will work better.
or the next day.

until then, if you didn't already know, surgery stinks.
well, actually, those two hours were fine.
it's just the aftermath.

all is well, but will be weller tomorrow, and I'm just grateful it wasn't worse.
g'night.

puttering

there exist periods in our lives of outwardly-enforced down time.
I am experiencing one of such right now, and it is not entirely negative.

had I not wrecked and injured myself last tuesday I would have accomplished a great deal more in the past five days. but perhaps ~ just perhaps ~ what I've been accomplishing instead is even more important that the unweeded flowerbeds, the dusty furniture, the unwritten notes, the uncooked meals, the growing pile of laundry, and the other myriad tasks that lay about in states ranging from "never begun" to "almost completed, but not quite."

it hasn't been easy.
each time I look outside I ache to be out there cleaning up my yard.
I look at heavy items that need to be somewhere else and I have to consciously move my attention away.
everything I do I do more slowly, each task takes twice as long as it would have a week ago.
although I can still type fairly well, my arm develops an ache the longer I continue and I pay the price later on.

but I've also had time for things I've put off for quite some time, and even more importantly, I feel this strangely inexplicable sense of peace. it's all just fine that I can't ride my bike, can't mow the lawn, can't weed the garden. it's okay that I can't unload the dishwasher or drive my car.
the universe has told me to slow down, and it finally found a way to make me listen. thankfully, it didn't take away all of my abilities, and thus I am left in a place of puttering.

I walked to the bank the other day.
I actually sat and watched a television program without multi-tasking.
I had a phone conversation without multi-tasking.
I folded laundry, slowly and carefully, taking time with each piece and resting between folds.
I breathed deeply (though not too deeply, as that hurts) and chewed my food thoroughly.
I cleaned a counter, slowly, with my left hand, paying complete attention to what I was doing.
these are all new experiences, ones done with deliberation and patience.

later this morning is my clavicle surgery, and I'm expecting that to slow me down even more.
is there a state of movement less than puttering? will I soon be pottering or poking or frittering?
sigh.
I'll soon be doing something less, and I will have to adjust again.
and then eventually I'll begin doing something more, moving back into fiddling, then up to puttering and before we know it, I'll be back to Accomplishing Things the way I used to.
but maybe some of this down time will have affected my psyche, and I'll remember the good old days when I took extra time for each step of my day. when I still got done what Absolutely Needed To Be Done, and saved everything else for the next day.
or the next.

and everything was just fine.

absenteeism

did you notice I wasn't here tuesday?
I noticed, but only in a fuzzy, hazy, morphine-induced witless way.
in other words, I was "in hospital" as they say across the water, having crashed on my bicycle early tuesday morning.
yes, my wonderful Biking Anniversary celebration plan went splat on the bike trail two miles into my 50-mile ride up Big Cottonwood.
splat.
crash.
rip, tear,
ow.

my right clavicle has two breaks in it, my right achromion is chipped, and I have a few broken ribs over there as well.
as well, the shorts are shredded, the jacket has a few serious scrapes and a new hole, the helmet is scraped and cracked, one water bottle lid is smashed and ruined, and I have some slightly-tender spots of road rash decorating my right side from my forehead to my calf. oh, and the bruise on my left inner calf, from the pedal, I suppose. oops, I forgot, the banana looks pretty bad, too, bruised and decidedly squished mid-section.

I do not know exactly what happened ("did you lose consciousness?" was one of the top questions at the hospital, to which I answered, um, I really don't know . . . what does that say about it? ), only that at one moment I was upright and saw a large weed-thingee leaning across the bike (and my) path, and the next moment I'm aware of I was on the ground crying out, oh God, oh God, oh I hurt, oh God . . .
he heard and sent a few helpers, I limped my way back over the bike path to a spot where a car could pick me up, and a wonderful friend of those great helpers (his name is Matt something, perhaps Thomas?) gave me and my bike a ride up to the emergency room, where another helper-be filled out the form for me because my right hand didn't feel like playing the writing game.

and now I am mostly back to the living. amidst countless offers of help and concern, and some pretty uncomfortable sleeping hours. this big bump-ridge-thingee on my clavicle gives me the willies, and I try not to think about the pictures.
as my amazing I-am-so-honored-to-have-this-person-as-a-friend friend ivy says, now I am in excellent company: lance and I will now both have titanium plates on our clavicles. woo hoo.
yep, surgery monday, after which the surgeon tells me I'll be able to hop back on my bike.

hmmm.

at this moment, I don't know that I want to do that.

but I've been without coffee for a couple days, and I'm really not back to my real self yet, so I'm going to give that a while to change. because the tao of cycling wouldn't be much without the cycling part, in fact, it would just be the tao of, and I don't think I'm qualified to pontificate on such a vast and limitless subject.

no, I am not on painkillers.

so, chances are I will eventually (okay, soon) be back on my bike, though I might take it a bit easy for a while. which is okay, because there's still a lot of life to observe on quiet rides throughout the neighborhood, and little, leisurely jaunts up small canyons, and really, just about anywhere one chooses to go.

velvet and foxes

I have a friend who spent the weekend in another state, and I received a text yesterday that said, saw a fox!
I was immediately jealous and quite put out. I've been riding all over our canyons and lonely places for years and have seen nary a fox. very little wildlife at all, relative to all of the hours I spend out and about in the early morning hours.
why haven't I seen a fox?
when's it going to be my turn?
my pout lasted about ninety seconds, and then I got on with life.

it rained yesterday, almost incessantly. gale force winds came with it, whipping supple foliage to near horizontal positions and pushing less flexible flora to its limits. it cleared twice, the road just beginning to dry before it all began again. I thought I'd be able to sneak a ride in between the bouts of rain, but by about 9 am I decided I was quite happy to spend the day indoors, working and puttering and watching twigs and branches fly past.
as evening was settling in the rain stopped and the wind calmed, and I ventured outdoors to pick up organic litter from my lawn. two large branches and a quarter thousand good-sized twigs later, my yard looked almost as it had the day before, if one disregarded the thousand bright green leaves scattered everywhere.
therefore, this morning when I woke to the sound of cars driving past on dry pavement, I was determined to jump on my bike before the rain came back.
my knee was hurting a bit and I wasn't feeling terribly energetic, so I decided a wasatch boulevard tour was in order, heading south for twenty miles or so before turning to head back.
I left the driveway and looked skyward---gray and cloudy---then turned my eyes lower, to the tops of the foothills. to the south, unfortunately, I couldn't see the tops of the foothills, as they were covered with low-hanging, damp-looking clouds. to the north things looked brighter and clear, and thus I ended up heading up emigration.
I worked out a path in my mind, possibly heading toward east canyon but turning around before the steepness set in for good (it was "give my knee a break" day), then somehow finding more miles, possibly back down on wasatch, given a clearer picture by that time.
as things always go, I changed my mind. I did the first part, turning around halfway up big mountain, but then I decided to go down to mountain dell golf course and washington park. which meant a hill on the way back up. I chuckled to myself, yeah, no climbing today.

the lower hills surrounding little dell reservoir were velvet, rich with rain growth, solid masses of multi-shaded green velvet. lush growth is everywhere, absolutely everywhere, yellow and purple and white flowers throwing their heads up only to save us from drowning in the voluptuous sea of green.

washington park is a little treasure nestled at the east end of the golf course, cool and tree-shaded and significantly underutilized. I rode through to its far pavilion, then turned to head back to the golf course then up the big hill to the reservoir.
the road past the golf course slopes down toward the freeway exit, and I was enjoying the effortless speed when ahead on the road, in my lane, I saw a small shape. I slowed, the slowed more as I kept my eyes focused on the peculiar, long legged animal staring back at me, motionless but for a slight twitching of pointed ears.
red-tinted fur, black legs, pointy little vixenish face . . . oh my gosh, I am looking at a fox.
as this kicks in, I notice movement to my left and there are three little kits, golden brown and kitten-faced, staring at me as well from just outside their earthen den.
I stare at mom, I turn my eyes slowly to look at the kits. mom moves tentatively, closer to the berm, and I send her every vibe I possess that says I'm safe.
mom finally heads off into the shrubs, knowing that her kits are separated from me by a chain link fence, and that I, human in a neon green jacket, couldn't possibly want to cause her family harm.
I dig for my phone, and try to operate the camera function as the kits playfully wind amongst themselves and cease to worry about me. two take off to the west, and one remains by the mouth of the den. I've snapped my silly photo, and finally begin to move on, keeping an eye on both sides of the road. mom doesn't come back out, and then I see the two kits joined with yet another, twenty feet from the den, and I grin one of the biggest grins of my life.
I pedal on down the road, singing out loud one of those songs you learn in camp,
oh the fox went out on a chilly night, and it prayed to the moon for to give it light
for it'd many a mile to go that night, before it reached the town-o, town-o, town-o . . .

I sang halfway up the hill, and I haven't stopped grinning yet.