reference point:

what were you doing when you were 26? not this i bet (you may have to link here first). me? i think i was riding bikes a lot and the most complicated thing i was dealing with was the whack ass "race lace" spoke lacing pattern (scroll down for the picture, yo) me and anderson used to monkey with at the bike shop. and speaking of complicated, to this day i have a problem with "your" vs. "you're" ... some people could attest to this first hand. its silly i know, but i dunno, i struggle ....

todays 'cross stoke.

.... speaking of which i was a bit of a slacker this weekend. slept in on sat., ran for like a 1/2 hour, then played with my new computer the rest of the day. sun. i didn't do shit as i was feeling under the weather and the weather (as it was) wasn't all that conducive to riding. ahhh shit who am i kidding? it is cyclocross we're talking about here.

yeah, well - at least i'll have the beer drinking part down.

work is crazy right now. we got 8.5 million bucks on a grant from the state a couple weeks ago to build this. bike trail grand opening is this month but we still need money for the bus rapid transit element of the project. best part is we can leverage that towards a federal grant ... in the end it will be a ~70 million dollar project with about a 20%local/80% federal cost sharing arrangement. thats a 5 to 1 return, with only about a million of local money contributed. a wise investment, i might say. i'm not the project lead but its something i've been working on for the last 4 years (on top of my other duties) ... everything from the travel demand modelling, to the development of regulatory land use controls that will support transit oriented development, to the authoring of the draft environmental impact assessment required by NEPA. we are a staff of 4 individuals and we are in there competing for grants with the likes of New York, Boston, San Fran., etc who have entire divisions of personel to do the analysis and jump through the hoops that the Feds put up. needless to say its a fantastic feeling to make some headway towards implementation of this project.

and its hard to believe it is the fifth anniversary of 9/11. although there is a shitload of material available to comment on and think about (the immediate aftermath, the course of action(s) we took, the overall politicising of the event, etc. and so forth ...) i'm not taking the bait. instead, I'm gonna just float this, because its something i read in those days after it happened that has actually stuck with me. make whatever you want of it.

peace.