Riding for Kris

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Christmas time comes around and my family cuts loose. There’s a food, drink and significant plunges into credit card debt due to totally-exorbitant and highly-detailed Christmas lists. Christmas Eve has big food items on deck, including Beef Wellington also known as steak donuts or bow-tie beef depending on whether you ask me or my sister.

We were into our third round of wine getting said dinner ready, when we got the call—that my godmother Kris hadn’t shown up for dinner with friends, and was she ok?

Kris was technically my godmother, but she’d been around since I was wee. One of those surrogate aunts you read bout in books that I was lucky enough to actually have. She was diagnosed with an aggressive  cancer when I was maybe 12, and was in remission for a long damn time. She never really talked about it, at least not to me, and I imagine if they get the internet in the afterlife, she’ll be upset with me for writing about it at all. But it happened and I hope she can forgive me.

In 2007, while I was dealing with the great-domestic-realignment, her health was also on a bit of downslide again.  At thanksgiving though, she seemed ok and we had a great meal, and some great conversations and one of the last things she said to me was, “I’m going to get better, Wade-O, I’m going to beat this thing.”

As my parents rushed over to Kris’s house on Christmas Eve, to see what was going on Kendra and I put away the food and sat and waited (we also almost inadvertently killed my moms dog, but that’s a story for later). Twenty minutes later, the helicopter roared over our house and ten minutes after that, again the thunder of  rotors. Lifeflight, the local air-ambulance. Such weird thing to think of someone you love thundering over your head at 150mph. We went to Houston that night, and tried to sing Christmas carols on the way, as I attempted to find some moderation in my driving between getting to the hospital before the helicopter and freaking out my mother. We celebrated Christmas the next day in typical Treichler fashion, with presents being opened all day, and multiple toasts with enough food to feed an aircraft carrier, because we needed it after the year our family had, and we felt that Kris, in her ever reticent manner about her illness, wouldn’t have wanted us to make a fuss.

Kris left us a few weeks later.

Fast forward six months—I’m sitting at my computer at work, signing up for the Lance Armstrong Livestrong Ride this October, a quite frankly, I’m pissed as hell. I don’t understand many things about this world, one of them being why the hell haven’t we beaten this god damned disease yet? We can land on the moon, we can build a global communications network, we can crack the atom but we can’t cure cancer?  More than anything though I’m mad that I don’t get to spend Christmas with Kris this year.

So this year in the Livestrong Ride, I’m not riding for the cause, for cancer-funding legislation, or any grand philosophical ideals. I’m riding for Kris, and I hope she doesn’t mind (although she probably wouldn’t like all the attention). Hopefully, some of you kids can pitch a little money to the cause. Maybe it’ll help somebody get one more Christmas with their godmother.

I’ll be putting up a permanent link in the side bar later this week, but for now, click here.

Update: I have to say I’m a bit stunned – I didn’t expect to make my fundraising goals in one day. Thanks so much to everyone who pitched in, it means an incredible amount to me. Your generosity is awesome.

Survey

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A List Apart is running a very comprehenisive survey for, in their words, people who make websites.

The Lorrain

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I tend to like apartment complexes that aren’t exactly new. Preferably built after sheetrock was discovered but before the three-prong plug was introduced is ideal. A little bit of character, not one of these acres-long mega-complexes that populate former farm fields on the outskirts of our cities, like some kind of mutant crop.

The Lorrain (sadly not spelled like the song) is such a place. A bit of character, stuck on a hill above Lamar, where, if you crane your head just right, you can see the capitol dome. Unfortunately, the management that owns the Lorraine has been making some improvements to the facilities lately. Did they fix the water pressure? As anyone who’s ever bathed at my apartment knows, when the water pressure drops in shower, it’s best to quickly move out of the stream of water to avoid second degree burn from the liquid magma now issuing forth from the shower head. No, they’ve done nothing about the water pressure problems, but they did pressure wash the walkways (except they stopped  ten feet before they got to my door for some reason).Did they paint the raw plywood that makes up the cladding outside my front door? No it’s still plywood colored, but they did stain the floor in the laundry room with a lovely color of concrete stain. Well, how about the staircase that’s so unstable, I’m pretty sure I”m going to be thundering down it one day with a bike and have it collapse into a pile of splinters, my broken bones and SRAM component. Nope, no word on the stairs – we did however get a letter phrased in questionable grammar asking that we please remove all our grills from the courtyard, as they are making the place look junky. Any grill left in the courtyard would be tossed in the dumpster. Not donated to Habitat for Humanity or Goodwill, no fines or penalites, we’re just going to junk them. In response to this I filed a maintence request asking them to please remove the dumbasses from their office, perhaps placing them in the dumpster with all the BBQ grills. Last i checked it was still pending, but I bet they get to it before they fix my stairs.

Design Mentor

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From the Authentic Jobs Board –  Design neophyte seeks design guru with Yoda-like intensity. Awesome.

Letter from the World

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The world, as in all those other countries besides ours, has written an open letter beseeching McCain to drop out of the race because…well…if he wins, we’re all going to have to move to the previously mentioned other countries.

“Look, this isn’t funny,” said a world representative, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “You’ve got one candidate who has a reasonably sane and comprehensive foreign policy combined with detailed knowledge of American domestic affairs, and another candidate who isn’t always sure which country he’s talking about and whose domestic policy consists of telling people to stop whining. Why are you even throwing this open to a vote? Are you people out of your minds?”

Read the rest (Via Clusterflock).

Abandoned Real Estate

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20 abandoned buildings from around the globe, oddly beautiful in their decay.

Cycling in Austin

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Texans are insane. It’s the heat and the good food. More specifically though, Austin cyclists are really insane. By some lucky quirk of geography and wind patterns, the weather in Austin is dry enough (a little more so than the eastern parts of the state) for us to pretend like we’re in a really hot, less mountainous version of Colorado. With no pine trees. And no snow.

People in this city are active, almost psychotically so. You want  to drive across downtown on saturday morning ? Forget about it, there’s a 5-10-15k going on. Probably most Sundays too. Something wrong with your car and you need to pull off to the side? Chances are peloton of road bikers are going to be asking you if you need a hand.

And all this while it’s 100 degrees out (and god knows how high with the heat index). I like to think it makes us tougher than our neighbors to the north who tend to stay inside or do non-stupid sports (frisbee golf? ) when the weather gets ridiculous. Or maybe we just work to hard – most of my motivation for getting on a bike after work has to do with dispersing some of the rage built up from sitting in an air-conditioned mausoleum all day and having photons unsympathetically shot at my face. An effort to dial the asshole meter back to a more tolerable four or five so my co-workers will be able to deal with me the next day.

I think we instinctively, biologically miss the old days, when working for a living meant physical effort, whether ti be tilling an existence out of the land, or earning a wage via the fabrication of something physical. Although I’m certain my Great-Great-Grandfather, a farmer from southern Oklahoma, would probably think I’m absolutely insane for waking up and riding a bike 25 miles for fun. Different times I guess. He probably wouldn’t get the time-investment involved with this website either (neither do I sometimes).

To cycling specifically, though,  Austin breeds some hard riders. Setting aside that one guy who won the Tour de France a few times, there are hard-core people out on the roads and trails – this dude for example who’s doing an eight day, 530 mile endurance race on the Colorado Trail (A race with camping sounds pretty fun – anybody?). There’s two weekly Crits that go on through out the summer, even when your tires are starting delaminate from the heat coming off the pavement. There’s also a Short Track Mountain bike race in the fall and a rumored Cross Season. There’s even just plain stupid people like us who do dumb shit like ride Lost Creek after work, when the average temperature is 98 degrees.

I was in a meeting recently, with some guys who know what they’re talking about and someone said that I was an average Austin cyclist – In this town, that’s one hell of a compliment.

Conjunctured

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Conjunctured is a coworking site – pay a fee get an office/workspace for part, full time or for whatever time you need it. Neat concept.

Whoa Shit…

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Obviously, things are not well in server land.

Update: When Moses came down off the mount (or wherever it was he got the commandments from – I’m a little fuzzy on that, and I only have one Jewish friend to verify these things and she’s busy), it turns out he left a few up on the hill (after all the were heavy, being made of stone). Among these lost commandments include – Thou shall not waste money on premium Gasoline as it doth not improve performance, Thou shall not mix vodka with diet tonic, nor nay even ever consort with fiendish diet mixers, and most importantly thou shalt always keep comprehensive, redundant back-ups of the files on your webserver (even if your hosting company claims to be doing this for you) to avoid inexplicable deletions of the entire server by unknown parties. 

In short, $75 and some lost sleep later, we are back in business. 

WordPress for Iphone

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After some struggling, and some unkind words about steve jobs maternal lineage, I have defeated the new WordPress for iPhone app, and can now tap missives from anywhere with a cell signal.