london calling

right then. it's m-focking cold out there. i don't ski under zee-ro. and, even if gus is out there riding still . . . . i mean i was his age once too and i lived by bike - god bless that dude. he is a peters - what else is there to say - he rules as do they all.

so then, before i return to blogging proper when the temps rise, nicky insists i throw one more pic up as we hide out in the house looking at old images. here is nicky's old dad throwing down hard with a barking layback lipside at an underground sk8spot near the legenday Slam City Skates shop in london. even in this day of flippy-rail-slides and so on in sk8ing, this bad-ass old-skool move will guarantee instant cred.

back to blogging proper tommorrow or later this week !! sorry for the slide show !!





PS will your wife mtn bike 6 hrs a day for a month in remote locales of the UK, covered in sheep shit as russell wisely insinuated - and then hang out at total dirtbag london underground sk8spots full of various undesireables when she could be shopping ?? choose wisely, my friends.

there can be only one

the view in the scottish highlands, looking for another highlander . . . . . . . .

look, we aint riding up here, so let's play a game instead !!

see how many 80's references you can find in this shot of the aggro gretchen ripping up the yorkshire dales footpaths in the UK, circa 1986. bonus points for the ones that coulda caused an international incident, and double bonus for modern "hot" product that appeared here on gretchens killer ibis 25 years earlier. finally, we see what gretchen was doing mtn bike wise in 1986 - what were YOU doing ?? ready, go !!! ! !!

uuuhhhh, can somebody call social services ??

since wors travels to remote WI locales, i like to keep this look available for relating to the locals. it works well !! for post-race hugs & kisses from the lovely wife . . . . rather less well - but that is what daughters are for, as you see.

one of the main reasons i wanted to start this blog was looking forward for a year. one aspect of which is MK being a HS senior, a year from now - theoretically - she will have been off to school, with one semester under her belt. we will be chillin' with gretchen and nicky rearranging her bedroom. so, i want to kinda document it all, or whatever. in the meantime, we spent some of last season already in nostagia mode.

this race was a hi-lite of 08 - MK's first ever elite podium in wors. it was also the first one ever on a SS, if anybody's keeping track. it was an epic battle, with a very worthy rival in patti K more most of the race and with that battle, even tho numbers were down, she felt like she earned it.

her attention these days is directed to school next year. she's off to a pretty good start with her 2 early-app choices. one represents her long-time dream of a smaller school, with the intimacy and close relations of students and profs and individualized studies direction - with the bonus being ric damm's wicked cool new varsity cycling team at Ripon College that go with that. she is super excited and honored to be invited to a special scholarship-day competition coming up at this ultra sweet small school in a couple weeks.

her other early app school was in a different vein and represented a diferent dream - big-time and big-risk and big-rep crazy-hell-selective MIT. she pulled down an acceptance there, complete with a personalized flattering phone call immediately after the acceptances were posted on-line, also. not too shabby, for a nobody kid from a tiny public school in a nothing ice-covered town. it might be said that her insistance of stupidly riding a SS in the elite Fe field on drop bars is perhaps misleading . . or at least does not cross over past mtn biking ??

lots of things need to be looked at, and decided. many of which she has no control over, and some that need defining by her. in the meantime she is both trying to keep expanding options, and narrrow-down direction. it is pretty crazy, as i am sure any parent knows. but things could be worse than having a shot at a full or otherwise very nice scholarship from a place as sweet as ripon and being honored with the acceptance at a place like MIT. all the same, if you see a toothless old guy getting a little misty ( in this pic it was the dust, i swear - the dust ) at the races this year as we wind 09 down maybe cut him a break, and so.

eyelash-icles ??

i'm guessing that is what ya call those. 2.5 hrs skate-skiing for MK today with old dad. HR only grazed 198 a few times, so as usual she was slacking big time.

snowboard trip postponed

we were s'posed to go snowboarding in a sweet coach-style manner today, but i guess it is now next week. so, i kept up my gangster-theme roller rides with 105 minutes of scorcese's "Casino", followed by another 105 minutes XC skiing, and now i am gonna git my application for nicky and my annual week at lake owen skate-camp off into the mail. lake owen might ring a bell for many, you drive past a sign for it a mile down the road from telemark when yer at the chequamegon. as you can kinda see in the pics, this place is fabulous - who knew one of the best skateparks in the midwest was snuck into the woods outside telemark ??

i am camp nurse for a week, and nicky skates. i can skate as much as i like, too. check out that sweet little new kidney bowl in the corner of the pic and the rest of the park - cannot wait to hit that. i skated places like del mar, marina del rey in CA back in the day, and surf'n turf in milwaukee after that so for a guy 49 y/o i can actually still drop in there roll around and carve it up and stuff alright and it's cool. bonus for nicky - 150 of the campers are female gymnasts. it is fun to the watch the skaters and gymnasts circle each other at first, and then slowly move in. the camp itself is a beyond-first rate organization, and i can truthfully say i am honored to think that i can contribute to the work they do with young active-sports athletes. with 250 young skaters and overacheiving gymnasts flying everywhere 14 hours a day, as nurse it is a week with no sleep, pretty much, but i would not miss it for the world.

one thing else - the gymnasts have a total pro set-up in two huge pole-barns. they do a lot of their stuff on those bars down in pits, so that as you stand there at normal height you are right at the level of the bar as they are swinging around, launching, and grabbing/bailing and so forth. there are super-hi-quality athletes here in addition to little kids and i can tell ya, those gymansts are crazy impressive when seen inches from the action like that.

so if yer in the telemark area in summer, or by all means if ya got a young skater, check it out !! one of the best kept secrets in WI.

meta-blogging, and the madden curse

like most folks, my college career is notable largely for providing disjointed and otherwise useless trivia-contest answers. one notable exception being that i was once the beneficiary of a weekend of "slumming" down in the dregs of the dating pool by the stunningly hot gretchen - even moreso by the subsequent and highly unlikely parlay of that weekend on my part into close to 25 years of "marrying up". but, one of the things i do recall learning about is some foolishness called "meta-fiction" by a wacky english professor - this being: a work of fiction with its fictional subject being the fiction of its fictional self. or something like that.

so then, i find myself in a state of meta-bloggage. a blog with a topic about other blogs, blogging about my new blog. if it was the 70's instead of the 00's i would apply for a grant from the Natl Endowment of the Arts for all of us as performance artists. first of all, buddy and kindred spirit caffeine-powered hits me up - nice !! love that guy - few people are more fun to watch suffering on the bike than our man caff-powered.

but this one has me worried. after a post like that, how can a melt-down of shaun alexander proportions not be far behind ?? this is gonna hurt.