FOUND IT!!!!!!

Those gotta be my two favorite words. I have a tendency to lose things. Sometimes things I put down only seconds ago, sometimes things that I haven’t even put down yet at all. My wife (and probably anybody who has been in my presence for over two minutes) thinks I am a scatter brain. She is wrong. I have the focus of a laser, and that is part of my problem. All I see is the one thing I am thinking about and pretty much nothing else, so anything that happens in the periphery gets lost.

My buddy Steve thinks I am forgetful. He says he wouldn’t have a hard time believing that I did bong hits for breakfast and lunch daily since I was about three years old and ate funky brownies for dinner. He’d come down to visit me when we lived in Carbondale, and we would be getting into the car to go hiking or something, and he would buckle up and proceed to smoke three cigarettes while I went back to the house three or four times for various items. These delays were compounded by the fact that I often times had to look for the item I went back into the house to retrieve. My memory isn’t bad though, it’s just selective. I can tell you the speed of sound. It’s about 760 mph at sea level. It’s about 660 mph at 40,000 feet AGL, depending on temperature and a few other variables. Not only can I tell you this, but I can tell you when I learned it. I got it out of a book I checked out from the school library in the fifth grade. It was about an air force fighter pilot who got 44 kills over Korea in an F-86. The aceleration of gravity on Earth? 32 feet per second per second, or 9.8 meters per second per second- I got that juicy tidbit from Mr. Sutter, sophomore year’s space science class. The speed of light? 186,000 mps, Mr. Klien’s physics class senior year.

None of this gets me on my bike and out on the street any faster though. Sometimes the simple act of getting the bike from the sun porch to the curb can be an hour long project. There are things to gather, cell phones, helmets, patch kits. There are water bottles to fill, seat bags to stock, headlights to put batteries in, tires to pump blah blah blah. I need gloves, socks, shorts, shoes… What? No, not those gloves, what the hell would I do with two left Pearl Izumi gloves? What? How the hell would I know where the two right ones are, maybe over there somewhere? If I am lucky, most of the stuff can be found in the general vicinity of this:

That is my favorite pile in a house full of piles. In case the wife is reading this, I cropped out about two thirds of the pile. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t want pictures of the whole thing being broadcast over the internet. In fact, I’m pretty sure I might pay a little bit for revealing just that much. It has most of my bike stuff, sometimes, if I’ve been a good boy. If I haven’t, some of it may be in the kitchen on the table, under the bakers rack, or on the desk, or next to that place where I keep my car keys and cell phone, sometimes. Some of it is more than likely on the computer desk in the room, or maybe even on the tool bench down in the basement.

Every once in a while, something disappears for a few months, then turns up again, in the minivan, or at my mom’s of all places. That is so Christmas! This morning’s gem- my heart rate monitor strap. It’s been AWOL since last August. My wife found it on the floor in front of her dresser. This is a bit of a double edged sword though. Now that I have it, I’m gonna have to start taking my training a little more seriously and quit tooling around town like some fat knob. Oh well, it was a fun week.