Thinning

 So it's come to this: once a week blog posts with almost no content. I've just been too slammed to put anything up here. And bikewise: I'm barely doing anything. A guy can only write so much about the boring-ass flat 20 miles on a multi-user trail that is my commute.

Highlight of last weeks' commute: coal train.
Not to be confused with a soul train.

However, now that I'm in academia (ahem), I will get big gobs of time off throughout the year. In about two weeks I'll start a nearly month-long break. My buddy Bill (of Bill's Ass fame) asked me what I was going to do with all this time and I didn't have a good answer, except, "Well, I plan to catch up on writing a bunch of product reviews."

And that's true, because they're piling up; I'm obligated, and that's pretty much my game plan for maintaining my high-zoot, high-maintenance wardrobe over the next few years.

One thing that's interesting about this end-of-quarter thing that never struck me back when I was a student 20 years ago, is the finality of it all. After being in the software business forever, my take on schedules is that they are always these negotiable, slippery, hand-wavy, mystical, enigmatic guessing games of chicken.

 But in school: the end of the quarter is a hard f'ing date that is REAL. And that is both a mutha of a reality biter and a wonderful thing of forcing-function beauty.

So while you're in the overwhelming depth of work with more crushing down upon you and wondering how you will ever get it all done, there's an underlying calm in the knowledge that it will all be over and done in just a handful of weeks. It's a wonderfully liberating place to be, especially if you've been in a similar work-crushing scenario where you just can't see an end or solution in sight. Ever. I'm in heaven here.

Anyway. "Thinning," is the title of this post. The point. And thinning is not what I'm doing unfortunately. Pat is. That dude is slimming down.

We went riding a couple weeks ago and he was on his new tires that he was so excited about. We were resting at the top of a particularly difficult climb when I asked him, "How are your knards?"

And that was in earnest. I didn't even think about the double entendre there until he sort of paused, tilted his head a bit, furrowed his brow, and then broke into a laugh, "They're great. They really stick."

The next weekend, as I rode behind him, I couldn't help noticing that his ass was shrinking. My verbalizing that fact, in the context of the previous weeks' fox paw, turned out to be a bit awkward.

And now I'm realizing that I started this post off with an off-handed reference to Bill's ass and I'm  feeling sort of odd about it all.

The fact is, the thinning refers to some work that is going on down on the HD trails, which, incidentally, are just friggin teaming with runners, hikers, and dogs on Sunday mornings. Joe and I rode down there this morning and were reminded why the SOS River Trail ride has become the standard Sunday morning route.

They're taking out a zillion little scrawny trees and chipping them up across the forest floor. It's a good plan, as a fire down there is just a matter of time.