Month: March 2009

Nearly there now

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments
Back in business: Herself's new-look office.
Back in business: Herself's new-look office.

Seven weeks after the shit monsoon, the basement is 99 percent finished. Drywall, carpet, vinyl and tile all have been installed and Herself’s office and bathroom resurrected. All we’re waiting on is a special-order door for the loo. Until it arrives, Herself will have to endure visitations from Turkish and Mia Sopaipilla while she is perched atop the throne, thumbing though Vogue.

Upstairs, the dishwasher, which blew up at about the same time as the basement, has been repaired. Everything removed from downstairs has been returned to its rightful place or disposed of, and now a guy can walk from room to room without twisting an ankle or barking a shin.

Seven weeks ago, this crapper was a shithouse.
Seven weeks ago, this crapper was a shithouse.

While the basement was undergoing its restoration, every square inch of upstairs storage in this place was filled to overflowing, and I went through it like Sherman did Georgia.

The oldest Macs and various accessories went to the recycler — the Quadra 650, the Power Computing PowerBase 200MT, the PowerBook 2300c with MiniDock, a Tandy laptop, a UMAX SCSI scanner and an HP inkjet printer. The office G4 450MHz “Sawtooth” Power Mac, two MacBooks, two iBooks, a G3 500MHz “Pismo” PowerBook and an Asus Eee PC survived the purge, so we’re not exactly back to chisels and tablets here.

Meanwhile, the Sawtooth has been enhanced with a 250GB FireWire drive, so I can finally back up its internal drives, one of which has been making some dire noises of late (it’s only 10 years old, f’chrissakes). That will have to wait for tomorrow, however. Today I’m in the barrel at VeloNews.com, where the chamois-sniffers will soon be congregating, desperate for news about Lance Armstrong’s collarbone surgery.

I never got surgery for either of mine, probably because my health insurance sucked. And I could have used a little savvy knifework on the second break, which was nasty. Says my doc: “The good news is, as long as all the fragments show up on the same bit of X-ray film, the break will heal. Eventually.”

Symphony of pain, scored for clavicle

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
The Mighty Dog, circa 1990, riding for the Sangre de Cristo Cycling Club in Santa Fe, NM.
The Mighty Dog, circa 1990, riding for the Sangre de Cristos Cycling Club in Santa Fe, NM.

Lance Armstrong and I have something in common, in addition to brains, good looks and wealth — we both waited until our 30s to break a collarbone.

I was 35 and getting set to start my first real season as a bicycle racer when I laid it down on March 7, 1989, on the road to the Puye Cliff Dwellings on Santa Clara Pueblo near Española, N.M. I don’t remember the crash because in addition to snapping my left clavicle I coldcocked myself, totaling my beer-cooler helmet. I decided afterward that I’d probably let my Look cleats wear down a bit too far and unclipped while sprinting up a short rise, going over the bars and then landing on same. I took note of the calamity in my training diary:

“Tore off a hunk of scalp, raspberried both knees and elbows and picked up a Technicolor bruise from left thigh to waist. Doc says I can’t ride the road for a month but can do the trainer if I can stand the pain.”

I could and did, getting on the trainer for a 20-minute spin two days later. Oh, Lord, did that hurt. My heart rate was in six figures, and simply getting out of bed was an exercise in pain management; I had a water bed, and the one quick situp required to get out of the sonofabitch was no fun at all.

But I was religious about a daily trainer workout, and finally got outdoors for a road ride — on a mountain bike — three weeks later. Two months from the crash I rode the Santa Fe Century in under five hours, and on Memorial Day weekend I raced the Iron Horse Bicycle Classic, albeit without distinction.

So I wouldn’t bet against Armstrong being able to bounce back in time for the Tour. It isn’t exactly the Iron Horse, true, but a guy needs a goal, no matter how modest.

Late update: The Armstrong kerfuffle sent me to rooting through the cerebral attic, trying to find a tantalizing bit of data I’d misplaced, when all of a sudden it came to me: In 1995, at age 32, Rebecca Twigg won a sixth world title and set a world record for the individual pursuit despite breaking a collarbone less than two weeks earlier. Oh, yeah — she had a cold, too.

Tell me why I don’t like Mondays

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments

Mondays always remind me of work, a recurring affliction that gives me a painful rash on the frontal lobes. And today was no exception.

First, I had to give up on trying to make a cheap USB 2.0 wireless adapter work with this elderly MacBox, which has been limping along for years with a Bronze Age 802.11b internal Airport card. But the adapter wouldn’t let the old bastard sleep, and at its advanced age, the MacBox needs all the Z’s it can get. This perverse product would let the monitor sleep, but wouldn’t let it wake up. It also crashed me a half-dozen times, just ’cause. So off it went, exchanged for a more upscale PCI adapter that should finally let me crank the wireless connectivity in these parts up to 802.11g. Look out. Nothing can stop me now.

Then Lance Armstrong went and crashed himself out of the Vuelta a Castilla y León, collecting his first broken collarbone in the process (I’ve done ’em both, and yes, it hurts), and nobody had any oh-the-humanity crash pix we could run over at VeloNews.com, where the merest mention of LA draws more eyeballs than Pamela Anderson attending a frat party wearing only Jäger goggles, kneepads and a smile.

And finally, spring and its 70-degree temps waved bye-bye. As we speak, it’s 40 and raining, with a chance of snow. If we’re lucky, we might be back into the 60s by next Monday.

I want to shoot the whole day down.

It must be spring . . .

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments
The light at the end of the tunnel.
The light at the end of the tunnel.

. . . the basement has turned green. Six weeks after the shit monsoon, we finally have our basement back. Well, kinda, sorta. We’re still missing the door to the loo — a special-order item, and Pan only knows when that will arrive — and none of Herself’s gear has been moved back downstairs yet. But at least two people can pee simultaneously around here without one of them being outdoors or employing a sink.

That final week was a hectic mother. Herself was mostly out of town, I had work to do for VeloNews.com and Bicycle Retailer, and all of a sudden the big push was on, with construction types trooping in and out at all hours with glues and solvents, pads and carpets, tile and vinyl. Plus I had a house guest due in, an old college roomie and fellow ink-stained wretch, and I didn’t want him to be sleeping on the coffee table and peeing out a living-room window, although we both have done this in the past. Never went over big with the neighbors.

The plumber finally paid a call the morning of the day my buddy was due to arrive. Seating the toilet was no problem, but the pedestal sink took a bit of doing; we had decided to go with tile in the crapper instead of the original vinyl, and the additional height of the floor means the sink now has a slight tilt toward the wall. I’ve spent many an enjoyable evening tilted toward one wall or another, and occasionally a floor or ceiling, so I don’t have a problem with an off-kilter sink.

Especially if I don’t have to pee in it.