I was going to ride to work today, but after I took my morning shower, my hip was oozing. With the high forecasted temps, I'd rather not take the risk of deterring the healing process of my hip. I tend to think that bacteria thrive in the heat and humidity. I may not be at all correct, but I'm took the train just to be sure.
Quietly Schemeing, lots of cool stuff there. I was able to implement the Flex application in my last post, inserting my own images and trying to make in dynamic with multiple galleries. It's still a work in progress. The next application I've found is a Flex component called LightTable. As far as I can tell, you give it a query term and it searches Flickr, returning images that match. What's neat is how you can browse the images. Try it out: 
Critical Mass uses a lot of flash. I don't know anything about flash. So yesterday, while I was reading the Rich Internet Application (RIA) wiki page, trying to learn more about RIAs and flash, I found this link. It's very very cool stuff, much like the album cover viewer in the latest major release of iTunes. Adobe has an Eclipse-like development environment you can download and create your own Flex applications. I'm gonna try it.
I'm finally on the mend...but not back on the bike. I still haven't gotten my bike back from Turin. I had the chance to get in there and figure things out, but haven't yet. I spent the bike-free morning cleaning up around the house and watching Leipheimer storm to victory in the TT. In retrospect this has been a great tour. Great racing, good scandal, favorites taken out by mindless crashes. You may have noticed that the only riders that went down in Vinokourov's crash were Astana riders. Anyway...
Erin and I decided to go to Ikea for decorating ideas. On the way we stopped by my grandparents house to grab a set of paint chips (book of paint colors) and say hi. While at Ikea we realized how cheap their stuff really is. I used to think it was nice...but then I graduated from college. Not so nice now. At least we got some good ideas. Now it's out to dinner with Dad, Emily, Joanne, and Donald.
Credit to photographer Joel Lerner for this shot. The Evanston Review had at least one photographer at the race taking photos. The pictures are pretty good and worth a look.
I think I'm finally getting better after seeing Rhonda and changing my antibiotics to Doxycyclin. She took a culture last night and we should have the results tomorrow. Maybe I'll finally find out what attacks me every time I fall down.
These frickin' pro riders let me down every time somebody gets caught. Is it really that hard to follow the rules. Are they so greedy and self-serving that inject themselves with performance enhancers? It makes me glad that I demoted cycling to a hobby. I don't have to worry about measuring up to dopers anymore. Cycling is supposed to be fun, but doping would take the fun out of it for me. This sucks. May the winner of this tour be remembered as more than the winner of another doped tour.
I crashed at the ENH Grand Prix yesterday. It sucked. The race however did not suck. I didn't feel as well I as had hoped to, but I did feel well enough to bridge John into the winning breakaway. That's teamwork. The two of us came rocketing down the start/finish straight, closing a 15 second gap like it was nothing. I was blown before we got there, but he closed the last little bit and brought home Turin's first NRC top ten.
Coming into the first corner with 2 laps to go, somebody crashed, and I went over the bars. I'm pretty banged up. Rhonda (Dr.) took a look at me and prescribed antibiotics, so we'll see how this round of wounds go. The only thing I'm really concerned with is my right hip.
Last night Erin and I went out to The Little Mexican Cafe for a celebratory dinner and then to see Talk to Me at the Evanston theaters. The movie was really good. I had never heard of Petey Green before I saw the movie. To give a little summary, the movie is about Petey, a controversial DJ in Washington D.C. in the 60's and 70's. He was on the air when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. It's a really interesting and compelling story.
As I write this, I'm watching David Millar start to dissolve the Tour de France field on the way up the Hor Categorie Port de Pailhères Climb. Rabbobank is taking over now. ENH Grand Prix this afternoon...
Erin and I have found an apartment. We had to see some lemons before we found a place that felt right, but we finally found it. Before seeing the place that we settled on, we saw a high rise near Broadway, Sheridan, & Montrose. It was a nice place with some lake views and many amenities so we were in good spirits when we went to see the place in Lincoln Square.
The apartment in Lincoln square is at 2655 Leland. It's a garden apartment (partially underground) but still has good light and good airflow. It has 3 bedrooms, one bath, a living room, eat-in kitchen, laundry room directly outside our kitchen door, and attached storage room. The closets are plenty big enough for Erin's needs, and I can use the storage room as a bike room. While the apartment is in descent condition now, Pat, the land lord is going to make some updates before we move. We also are going to be
able to pick paint colors for the rooms. We also have a back yard with patio and a small patch of grass. This all, not to mention an inexpensive rent for the area, 1/2 block from the CTA Brown Line, and another break on rent if we mow the lawn in the summer and shovel snow in the winter. I have some more pictures of the neighborhood on Flickr.
I think we're going to go out and celebrate the find.
Today Erin accepted a job offer from Edelman, Combs, Latturner & Goodwin LLC. It's a consumer rights law firm in the Chicago Loop. I'm excited for her. The program is designed for ambitious college grads who are interested in going to law school. She'll basically be a paralegal for one of the partners. This is very exciting.
I once again rode my bike to work. The problem today is that it rained heavily right before I got out of work. It let up for my ride home, but it was still raining in spots. I'm still glad I rode to work.
Before we get to Pond Cat, I have to commend Gene in his skillful maneuvering to avoid crashing during the Judson ride this morning. A rider next to him sank into the cracks between pavement and hit Gene while freeing his bike. Gene was pushed into a cross street where he saved himself from a curb-collision. I mention this because Gene's a Turin riders (and employee) and is going to do well this cross season.
Now for Pond Cat. Toby came back into the house today meowing very loudly. I wasn't quite sure what was wrong till I got a good look at him. It appears that he fell or took a dip? into/in the pond in the backyard. I know for a fact that Toby doesn't like water. I suppose he was just curious.
On Thursday I started riding my track bike to work. It was nice to be able to ride before and after work. Today when I came out of work I found that the rear wheel had been stolen. It's was bolted on, so someone had to wrench it off. It was locked up outside my office, on the corner of Michigan & Lake. There's got to be at least 100 people walking by there per minute. I can't believe somebody got away with that. I had to call dad to come pick me up.
I was supposed to meet Erin to see a couple apartments in Lakeview at 5, but that plan was shot. She called me around 6 and said that I had to come in the city and see a few of the better apartments that she'd seen. There was one near Roscoe and Seminary that was pretty nice, but we decided not to take it because we weren't thrilled with it. Since we're going to be living in the apartment for a few years we want to make sure it's what we want.
Work has been good, but a bit frustrating. There's a lot of things to learn to be up to full speed, but everyone is so busy that I feel like I'm annoying people. It'll get better when I have actual tasks.
Relaxed 4th. Spent the morning relaxin' with Erin. We have plans to go to Barb & Chris's later. They're the family friends through whom we got the house sitting gig. It's my first paid day of vacation ever!!!
We had a bit more down time at work today than we did yesterday. Two of the other new hires got pulled out of orientation to start working. I'm glad I get another day of adjustment. Here's a few more facts: One of the people used to work at Harpo Studios where Oprah is filmed. The office receptionist made it to the final 70 people on American Idol. It's a really relaxed, open, and fun office. The big summer party is coming up in a few weeks, so I'll get to meet many others in the office then. I took a picture out the window of the office. The view is north, straight up the Magnificent Mile of Michigan Avenue. The river you see is the Chicago River.
We got out of work early, so I headed over to the Taste again where Tom's band, Cobalt, was playing the second stage. Tom's come a long way since we played in Decoy together in high school.
My first day at Critical Mass was pretty exciting. We didn't actually do any work, but I went through orientation with 4 other new hires. I found out that 4 months ago, there were about 40 people in the office. There's about 95 now. I learned lots of other cool facts, but my fact retention rate isn't that high. Erin met me at the end of the day so that we could go to the Taste of Chicago. After using our tickets, we stopped by the Petrillo Band Shell to see Tomlin, who's assistant stage managing for the Taste.
A Cat 4 woman died during the Proctor Road Race this weekend. She crashed and was almost immediately stuck by oncoming traffic. Her name was Beth Kobeszka, a recent grad of Northwestern and a member of the xXx Racing-AthletiCo team. I will say no more than that it is a tragedy.
On the lighter side, John and I got 5th and 9th in the road race. We decided to donate our winnings to Beth's family. Today John got in the winning breakaway and finished 5th. The race got a bit out of hand near the end, so no one else did particularly well, but John was able to finish fifth again.
