Monday, August 31, 2015

Fall is Coming

Big push for the ending of August 2015.  And it was a crazy busy month with work, trips to see my dad in central VA along with various cousins, biking a fair amount, and limited trailwork.

The last week was really the peak of busyness. Work was insane with shipping issues:

CX Practice
Trailwork Rosaryville
Racing at Motormile Speedway (Drag Racing).
Ad-hoc trimming at Wakefield
TNR
MORE Summer Picnic

What a great event yesterday.  The MORE summer picnic was EPIC worthy.  Lots of fun and smiles had.  Tons of people sessioning the skinny of doom of Team XXL and tons of folks riding the hell out of Todd B's skills gear!  I mean if there weren't 5-10 people riding it near constantly between 11 and 4pm I'm shocked and later in the day at times there were 20+ people constantly working on skills.

The Poker Race was huge and tons of fun was had I think.  It made the event way more fun than just some natty old ride in the woods.  People talking good natured trash to each other.  New friendships made.  Bike rode.  Tons of food eaten.  Near perfect amount of hotdogs and hamburgers, we only thru away about 4 hotdogs and maybe 5-10 hamburgers.  Took a ton of chips home for future TNR/Fall Camping Trip.

Afterwards lot of fun and games with skills competition, raffles, and general fun.

The slide of doom returned.  Ribs are sore.  Big smile.

Cleanup was pretty painless and we were mostly done by 5.  I hung till 6 and helped a teammate finish de-marking the course for the last mile or so.

Too much fun.  Can't wait for the camping trip now.

Now to only survive the next 8 days of work and get in some bike rides.

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Et tu transmission?

Not my transmission fortunately, but the big green bus tranny suffered yesterday during the Patapsco Epic apparently worse than many riders:



Other than this issue, it was a great day out at the Patapsco Epic 2015.  I did course marshaling at the 35/50 mile split.  Mostly successfully the yellow of the 35's was often hard to see differently than the red.  The 35 sweeps were a tad late so we didn't clear out till almost 130.  Then I rolled over to the start/finish at McKeldin area.  I talked with a few people and opted to ride out a bit.  Ended up doing the 15 loop which was awesome minus one sucky push/climb.

Got to hang out with lots of peeps afterwards and had AWESOME Taco's from a baltimore taco truck:  The Jolly Pig - http://www.thejollypig.com/

DAMN Good!


Then hung out more with XXL and Wicked Wash peeps before getting into investigating issues with The Mystery Machine/Big Green Bus.  Someone had taken the keys back to VA when it died.  So after many conflicting reports I narrowed it to Transmission or Powersteering.  I checked the transmission stick and it was dry though since it was on a slope I wasn't confident and it was some REALLY nasty dirty fluid that I thought was way to brown for transmission.  Eventually I got in-touch with Yawn and Helen and they headed up.  After a search for food, they arrived and we got down to checking it out.  After some futsing around we found the powersteering resevoir was nearly full.  uh oh.  Yep transmission fluid.

Jan opted to try and move it under power but no dice in reverse or forward.  Bad Sounds.  We eventually rolled it forward out of the road it was blocking to a utility company service site.  Ugh.

Today I skipped the ride to work so I could pickup breakfast food for the next 2 weeks and such.  Gonna be a busy few weeks of work and stuff.  Lots of projects pushing forward.

Almost had a moment of major weakness and almost test rode the new Trek Stache 7.  Bad Ass bike by looks for sure.  Really curious to try it but not in the financial cards right now.  Need to do rear brakes on the MTB and see about finding a replacement frojk as Dicky would say.