Overdue Post

Apparently it has been a while since my last post.

The holidays came and went. Nothing too exciting there, I had to work on December 24, 25, and 26. I also had to work on the 31st and January 1.

The people I work for do not believe in holiday pay either. It was all straight time. Oh yea they also decided to send a bunch of people home on the 24th, without pay. So just about everyone got the "bonus" of a missing days pay.

The company "party" consisted of leftover food that was going to be thrown away if nobody ate it. I arrived to the "party" about 30 minutes after it started (I had stuff to take care of in the office) and by the time I got there the leftovers were cold, and everyone was bailing out. I looked at the pathetic joke of a "party" and just left.

And since I had to be at work early in the morning on January 1, there was nothing to do on New Years either. I had to come home, shower, grab some take out at Denny's, then crash. But I did manage to get some bike riding in. 15 miles in 1 hour and 8 minutes. That works out to an average speed of 13.5 mph.

Oh yea, I got back into bike riding. I acthally have a fairly decent mountain bike. It is a Specialized Hardrock Sport. It has disk brakes and fairly decent components. It has indexed shifting, which makes gear hunting easy. It also shifts smooth.

The problem is that there are not very many mountains here. The bike I have is nice - and I have a decent amount of money locked up in it - but as a road bike it sucks. It is too heavy and the riding position leaves much to be desired. Putting new tires on it that are better suited for the road than for the trail helped, but it is still brutal to fight a head wind for long distances. Even for distances of only a few miles a head wind is tough. So I need to get a road bike. I am looking at a Trek all carbon bike for around $1600 or so. A step down gives me a bike with carbon forks, rear stay, and seat post with an aluminum frame for about $1300 or so. A step down from there is aluminum everything except for the forks, and then a step down is aluminum everything.

Carbon has some flex to it, and it is lighter. So the more carbon you have the softer the ride tends to be. And to complicate matters, each step up is about $250 - $300 up to the $2,500 mark then each step up is another grand.

So lets say you want to spend no more than about $900 for a bike. Well there are some good options for you - but for another $200 you can go to the next step. Well if you have $900 to spend, you can just hold off and save up that extra $200. And then at $1100 the next step is another $200 or so away, and so on.

And if you get something, then decide later that you want to upgrade, you eat a fairly decent loss when you trade in your old bike or try to sell it.

In other news, it is cold as shit here. For two days in a row there was ICE on my windshield in the morning. ICE. Now this is just not right. This is South Florida, not Montana. The only ice that should be here is in frozen drinks and freezers - not car windshields.

But this did not stop me from going out to the everglades last night. Sure it was frigid - but the skies were clear and there was no moon. So I lugged out the telescope and set it up. I saw Saturn and Mars. But it was so cold that I lost the ability to use my hands, so most of the time I was just looking at the sky without using the scope. Plus for some reason the scope does not track well. I have to research why and maybe even recalibrate it.

On the plus side - there was not even ONE bug. No mosquitoes. For the everglades, this is uncommon. I think they all froze solid.

There were also SNOW FLURRIES. Nothing lasted on the ground, but there was actual snow in the air.

Now this cold weather always brings out stupidity. This time around the "King Dumb Ass" award goes to some idiot who decided to collect a bunch of large WILD iguanas that fell out of trees on account of the cold. He loaded them up in a station wagon. Well the heater in the car warmed up the lizards, and they became very agitated at the whole situation. And being wild animals, and lizards, they freaked out. One rather large lizard jumped on the guys head which caused him to lose control of the car - wrecking it.

It must have been pretty funny to watch, unless it was your car or property that the guy crashed into.