Today has been great so far. I went with Professor Kirkby on the river bluffs hike to preview it for next week, and he was talking about how all the surveys the students were taking were going. I didn't want to ask how my student's evaluated me but he just told me on his own I got good marks. I'm kind of surprised and super relieved, not that those things matter at all, but I did put alot of effort into teaching that lab. Seriously though, I skrewed up so many times this semester. My favorite was the first day when I couldn't decide what to say so pretty much just stood at the front of the class and rubbed my stomach.
After the hike, we talked about the evolution of primates in paleontology and then the prof took out some fossil skulls, and it was super fun. Then I got some work done on a term paper, went to a review session, and found out I probably won a scholarship for next year from the department. I was pretty stoked, but also at the same time crashing from having drunk coffee a couple hours earlier. It was wierd.
Kansas State is coming tonight, they'll probably get in at 1 in the morning like last year. Those guys are cool though - Smelser, Brady, and Dallas are all good guys and know how to race bikes.
One final thing, my roomate Matt got two wisdom teeth removed this afternoon, and is currently on his way to Madison for the Mifflin Block Party. He has assured me he isn't drinking tonight, but will wait until tomorrow. I guess he's in the car with two cups of ice pressed against his mouth, and in considerable pain. However, I'm 95% sure he will be compeltely hammered tomorrow night. I have no idea how he does it. We used to call him the living legend, after he took that train home from a party. His 21st birthday was pretty impressive too, when he took 16 drinks in an hour and fourty five minutes (drinks like the three wise men and such). Anyway, a rainy Ken Woods race is in store for tomorrow, should be fun.

ed

I start staying at my parents house tomorrow night to make sure my little brother doesn't have any parties while they are out of town. Staying with Peter is always interesting, one moment I want to punch him in the face or hit him with a homemade sword and the next I'll be rolling on the ground laughing about some stupid star wars anecdote about astromech droids or something. He knows those movies way better than I do. Before episode III came out, he was on starwars.com every day waiting for the newest trailer to come out and checking to see if they updated the character database to include episode III characters. Yeah, a little over a week of just me and pete... Anyway, I'm going to make him help out at opus on sunday because we need the help. If anyone of the three or so people who read this wants to help out or knows someone we could use another couple people to corner marshal and stuff.

I gave my last class their lab finals today, I think they went pretty well. When I went to copy the final, not only did I get the copier to collate, but staple as well. It was great, i was pretty excited. Hey, so I'm leading my river bluffs tour next week, if any of you want to come along you probably can (if you behave yourself). It'll be a big group cause the other instructor can't do it so she asked me to take her kids who wanted to do it. They get extra credit for going. I want it to be fun, and festive. Maybe we'll even find some trilobites or something, and I suspect I'll end up doing something stupid, like sliding down a ledge or something, we'll see. Hurray!

Ed

back from opus, i felt really tired. todd was there, on the first sprint i was on like 5th wheel and took off but had nothing in the tank and all of a sudden someone comes around me and its todd. he took third, it was cool. he'll be a really good bike racer if he sticks with it. he doesn't train at all, and he raced that race without a warmup (he drove to the race, registered, rolled around for 5 minutes and raced). on the third sprint todd, me and two other guys got a gap somehow at the base of the hill and i figured todd was feeling good so i went to the front and started hauling, to make sure the pack wouldn't catch us and to lead him out, but i ended up dropping todd and one of the other dudes and the last one who stuck to me didn't try coming around, so i actually won a sprint, that was cool i guess.

i have to grade a zillion things for tomorrow, and i skipped class today, so i feel kind of miserable. oh well, i could always make some homemade tacos from the maseca mix...

Back from Nebraska. what a weekend. actually it was pretty rutine, except for the camping. I think the racing was good, everyone was fast pretty much, so we didn't have to worry about people gapping others off. Field sprints in both again. It was sweet seeing ben win the road race. i got an 11th and 10th place, so i guess that's ok. It was cool having skreech work for me at the end of the circuit race, except it blew apart before we could do our thing, oh well. I'm going to make some tortillas out of the mix i bought in nebraska in a few minutes, its going to be great.
Things skreech and mikey missed out on in van ride:
1. Scott Roberts and Brain ripped on my grading scheme for my labs for probably close to an hour. I invited them to the rip-on-ed-all-night party there's talk of having.
2. Scott Roberts told stories about having Ben Richter for a TA, he said whenever they went to him during office hours for questions he just give them vague hints and sent them on their way. When we asked ben if he graded hard, he just said "I grade Fair." we figured nick is an easy grader, like me. it was funny. then we hypothesized who would win between Ben Richter and Nick in a battle of wills, you know, who would get their way first. the consensus was ben. All this comedy is really a TA thing, most of you wouldn't get it. Brain does, cause he was helping me grade my papers (the TA has a TA).

Also i want to know if it was the Iowa state guy who was ripping on me during the race, saying don't order people around when your about to get dropped or something. I don't know if it was him, but i do know i kicked his ass in both races this weekend... yeah, that's not like me. i just really wanted to catch those three guys and i suck at closing gaps, for the record i gave a half hearted attempt to pick up the pace, and did succeed in getting nebraska to do the work i was supposed to do for a while.

ed

just got back from opus. some good things and some bad things happened. Good - i took a second and a third in sprints, so hopefully i got fourth, maybe fifth overall. Ann Hansgate won the womens race, which had 23 riders, it was cool. Bad - the race was canceled after the women finished because the police were pissed at the riders. people riding the wrong way on one-ways, and not letting traffic through on the course. i'm not sure what i think about it. there was hardly any traffic first of all, so not many cars were being affected. i did see a number of people going the wrong way on a number of roads, which was stupid. at least there didn't seem to be anyone pissing in the woods across from the finish line. whatever.

i locked myself out of the house on sunday after a ride. i had to take a nap and go for another ride. then i stayed up all night working on my paleontology term paper. that's why i was so tired on monday and fell asleep - while watch Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkabeckthst - and missed the meeting. i'm hungary. i have to go.

Nebraska!! fun race weekend coming up.
this picture is from nebraska last year of skreech wearing some old lady's glasses at the host house. it was one of the funniest moments of my life i think, especially since we were trying to be quiet so as to not wake up valerie? and her parents.
also, i'm going to start the campagne now. I'm not racing the team time trial. remember this. the bad news is that i just counted the A's going to nebraska and the initial count is 8, which is not a good number if i want to get out of the TTT. maybe we can upgrade meat or something.

in other news...
a bunch of idiots were over last night destroying out house. it was this girl tova's 21st birthday. i like tova, she's nice, but some of the other guys, (pretty much all from my high school) i'm not such fans of. anyway, they broke our plexiglase window covering on our front door, they destoryed half of my buns and the muffins my mom had just given me. i'm not sure why, but when people destory my food i get really angery. other things don't bother me as much, but my food just infuriates me. I think it's because my mom had just hours earlier taken the time to put the muffins in a ziplock bag and give them to me, because she knew i'd want them. now no one enjoys them. they also ate most of the brownies my mom gave me, and woke me up. then they leave behind a huge mess, come over a couple weekends later, act like gorillas and destory more stuff. why do my roomates invite them?

ok, big news from the track!! not really but i did hear some great cycling stories about a junior aged bob. so he learns about track racing from a bike shop, ended up getting a bike at some point and gets set to race his first race. he eats carnation instant breakfast before the race and hurls in the middle of the 5 mile race (or 10 mile, he wasn't sure). he also talked about going to the elite nationals at encino around 1971. He said he didn't do too great but the real specticle was the tandem races. The tandems weren't able to control themselves on the track and kept hurteling up track and breaking through the surrounding wall. eventually, they had to hold the race in the frontage road next to the Rose Bowl. must have been fun.

also learned a few other things while i was up there,
1. Dave Gray has purchased earplugs in the event a certain someone is present at the track with him (courtesy of Brain).
2. The Van Dessel rides nice
3. Bob has seen everything on bikes that can be seen.
4. Bob remembers names and times better than me - just ask him about the 1966 junior state track championships. i dare you.

I had a lot of fun last night. skreech's air guitars were out of control, and the comedy show was really funny. so this morning came as a shock to me. i've been kind of dehydrated for the past couple weeks because i'm always drinking coffee and never water or juice or anything. Last night i had three beers and this morning i woke up with a terrible headache. i still have a little one. i've been kind of miserable all day. anyway, i'm going to ride up to my parents place and put together the dessel, possibly ride it at the track tonight. i'm pretty excited. i'll bring the bennotto back to st. paul too, but mikey i doubt i'll be back before eight. oh, and i mentioned i wanted to get hammered tonight, i don't think i want to anymore, big surprise. i don't know why my body can't handle the slightest bit of dehydration without screaming at me to fix it. whatever. if i'm up at the track i'll chat with bob about who has the state pursuit record and if it is indeed a 4:48.

ed

ok, today was a good day. my class went well, i even lectured them for about ten minutes about stuff, and my paleontology class got an extension on our term paper rough draft. this morning for my sed/strat lab we went to the minnesota geologic survey to look at some drilling cores. it was fun. there's only four of us in the lab, along with our TA. he's a cool guy, he was the one that told us about that old Fox tv show called Man Vs. Beast that i've been trying to download for a while. i guess they pit man vs. different kinds of animals in contests of various sorts, like a hot dog eating champion versus a bear in a hot dog eating contest (bear smokes man). or a foot race sprinter vs. a giraffe in a sprint (giraffe smokes man), and finally my favorite, 50 migets vs. an elephant in pulling a jet along a road. it sounds like a really cool show to me, but i guess every animal rights group in the country disagreed. if brian crosby ever reads this he should try to find that show on that network thing he was talking about that they have at the dorms.

stargate's on at 5, so it looks like i'll be having a pretty exciting night.

ed

ok, i don't know if this is going to work.

i just got back from rolf's team bonding/strategy meeting. he didn't show up.
highlights from the meeting include me getting chewed out pretty good for not promoting a team time trial for conference, so i promised to look into it. also seeing andy cook ride up on his motorcycle was pretty cool and funny too - it's big. mmm, that's about it.

ok, so to finish up, i'll just tell one short cycling story. it harkens back to the early days of the velodrome, it was 1992, so i must have been eight. dad hauled me and my older brother out there for the olympic trials. this local flanders rider named bjorn carlson was racing, boy we were excited because he smoked everyone in the qualifier and won it. i thought he had the olympic team made. i didn't understand that the qualifier was pretty pointless. anyway in the final john fry (shaklee) and robbie ventura (future postal service) got in a break and fry was doing all the work so the crowd was totally into him, but ventura would come around every time for the points. i think ventura won but i'm not sure. i don't think i really cared that much at the time. bjorn took 8th or something, i don't remember exactly. incedently, I think he might have the track record in the pursuit - not sure, might be like a 4:48 or something.

finally, like every year, i think that this year we should all be fast at the track, that should be our goal.

now i need to grade some papers,

ed

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