i'm officially blogging on the go with my new I-Phone

Yes i know it has been over month since my last post. The cause for this lack of updates was due my lack of a digital camera. Today my contract with Verizon ended and I was finally able to start to have fun with my new I-Phone. Life has not been all that interesting as of late. I recently finished my clinical rotation in public health at the weld county health department. To fill this void in my schedule, I started working at a mental hospital in fort Collins. I had the lucky ability this week to get two decent rides in this week, Eaton and most recently Johnston. I'm loving being able to ride again with 2 cycling shoes. It has been about a week and half since i started wearing two regular shoes. I'm not even having to use the cane anymore. Its a miracle to be regaining some element of normalcy back in my life.

I drove out to my Mom's house to exchange the mini van that I have been driving with my BMW. When I got there I discovered that my mother forgot to take my only key for my car off of her key ring. What does this have to do with anything you my be asking yourself, it means that I' m still stuck with the mini van for another day. I did get a chance to play with the 1 month old greyhound puppies at her house. I guess the trip was not a total loss. I will up load some pictures tomorrow when I get back from my dads house. Thanks for checking in.

Back On the Bike BABY!

Yes your eyes have not deceived you, that is a picture of me on a bike.

I have ridden the bike for the last 2 days in a row. Today I even made it all the way to Kersey. A whole 9.5 miles. It felt exactly as you expect, terrible. My broken leg felt fine, but everything else felt as though I hadn't ridden a bike in about 15 weeks! It has been one week since I got my below the knee cast off. My new air cast can be seen in the picture above. I forgot just how glorious it is to shower without a garbage bag on my leg.

I scored a free ticket to the Bronco game against the Raiders. It was fun, but a challenge in my current role moon lighting as a cripple. By the time we got to the stadium, all of the close handicapped parking was taken. We solved this minor speed bump by finding parking a short 5-6 blocks from the stadium at the honest price of $25. The parking attendant tried to set my mind at ease by assuring me that this fair price for parking was going to benefit some sort of children's center or something. After the warm fussy feeling dissipated, I started my trek to the stadium. As you can see from the picture below our seats were almost up at the very top of the stadium ( 5th level) 31 rows up. I'll have to say that I was climbing the stairs better than the morbidly obese people all around my seats. The cane did a great job. Sorry still no pictures of the cane.

This is Walt a fellow nursing school chum

This is picture of two new neighbors, who recently moved into my building. They took a moment out their busy moving day to reflect on the finer nuances of life in front of my house.

I think we all know who this is

Can you believe that Evan can wrassle this beast into submission long enough to get a bike helmet to perch upon it substantial mass.

Other than that life is good, glad to be in unencumbered from the cast. School is a big pain in the butt to keep it PG. I finished the my first paper of the semester a modest 21 pages. It was not worth that much only 40% of my grade. I saw on the news today that we have new dopers coming out of the wood work every day, houston from the broncos (weed), Marion Jones (vitamin Steroids). At least some other sports are taking some heat. I hope every one is enjoying fall. Until next time.

Field Trip

My wonderful Lady and I just returned from a field trip to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, shown above at night. I now feel a little more cultured.

This was the exhibit that we drove down to see.

We decided to take in the IMAX Show before we brought our eyes to rest upon the artifacts. Like any IMAX show it was very well done and had new footage of the inside of the ship. This footage was obtained from little vehicles that were brought down with submarines to explore places the submarines can't go. The new pictures were breath taking.

These are the submarines which were used to get down to the Titanic, which is 2.5 miles below the surface, with a pressure of 6000 psi. These subs seat 3 people, dives usually last 12-15 hours. It takes 2 hours of sinking to reach the bottom.

This is a picture from the IMAX movie. They used lots of new camera technology, which included another ship that suspended a lighting chandelier to light up the reck for better video.

This is a copy of the boarding pass that they gave at the beginning of the exhibit. It has a bio of a passenger on the Titanic on the back, which could be used to see if your passenger survived at the end. Alas my person was not among the living. So sad!

Labor Day Weekend in Eagle County

I hope all of my fellow reader had a good holiday weekend. I made my way up into the mountains for a weekend with Koch and E-Strong. I arrived at Koch's house just in time to go out to the bars. Thanks to Matt's roommate, Jeremy, I had a cane to walk my crippled ass around instead of toating around the single crutch. Apparently some time during the drunkiness I agreed to go the mountain bike race with Evan on Sunday morning. Because of this blunder on my part, I was awoken up at 6 in the morning by Evan's bushy afro head. We made our way from Edwards to Keystone so Evan could pay some money to suffer for a few hours. The picture below sums up how Evan and I felt Sunday morning.

Its ok Evan, I was tired to. Evan finished the 18 miles of cross country in the fast time of 3 hours or so. That a boy!

This man was riding a unicycle down the finish of the race that came down a blue ski run. I'm certain that I would have had difficulty riding down this run on a mountain bike. Later I saw this man riding his unicycle with his daughter (also on a unicycle) who was probably 10-12.

This was taken on labor day at 1:30pm on my way back to Denver in Frisco. The temperature was absolutely perfect. I am ready for summer to be over! I had to stop and get gas because I knew I may hit some bad traffic.

I knew when I went up to the Mountains that I had the potential to get stuck in the holiday weekend traffic on my way back to Denver. Man, did I hit traffic. I got stuck about a third of the way up the hill to the tunnel.

This is me waiting patiently on the I-70 parking lot. It was really boring

I have officially started driving with my right foot again! Back in the game baby.

Another great shot of the I-70 parking lot

Required materials for a drive of this length, too bad my I-pod battery ran out about half way home. It took me 4.5 hours to get home. It only took me 2.5 hours to get to Vail on Saturday. So I spent 2 extra hours in traffic, fun times let me tell you.

I can bend my knee again, sort of.

I'm not even sure where to start. I have been back in Greality for a little over a week. I have spent the last 4 nights sleeping in one place (my apartment). I have not spent 4 consecutive nights in the same place in almost 11 weeks. Last Friday was the "Rec Fest" at the university rec center. Unlike last year I was aware of this engagement before the date. Let me tell you a little something about gettting to the rec center when you are handicapped. It is quite a haul from the main parking lot to the west of the rec center. Fear not, I made it to the door after fighting my way through a very long line of freshmen. When I finally got the small gym where the tables for club sports was set up, I discovered that I had to share a table with another club, any guesses....The fencing club. I thought to myself why the fencing club. Any way I could only take that torture for about 90 minutes or so. I followed up that boring endeavor with another hot event, the fall bizarre . We got better interest that we got last year, but it was almost 100 degrees and I am still a cripple. My 15th semester started on tuesday with a large amount of trepidation about putting up with the bull shit again. I did however pick a good time to hurt myself, I have got the green light from my clinical teachers to work as a cripple.

Here is the new below the knee cast that I have about 3 weeks left to wear. I have had to completely regain the range of motion in my knee that I had before the 10 week imprisonment. Note the very classy shoe that I was blessed to probably pay $300 dollars for. I can now bare about 50-70 % of my body weight on this great blue leg. I was planning on going out to purchase a cane today, but I have not made it to the store yet. I have achieved about 80-90 degrees of knee flexion, which still is not enough to complete a whole rotation of the pedals. I think that I will have to wait until i get this cast off to start "riding" again.

Here I am working really hard with two computers surfing and downloading things
(not actually doing any real work)

This is Bentley the most spoiled of all the dogs at my moms house, He is the only one that gets to sleep on her bed.


This was his best attempt to get a nose print on the lens of my camera. He also tries very hard to leave a nose print on recently cleaned sun glasses.

This is me at the Greeley kennel Club dog show a few weeks ago. If you look closely you can see the show rings in my glasses.

This was a competitor at the dog show, note the very large bald spot and the compensating long rat tail. Who has a rat tail when they are at least 50 and bald?

I was trying to show just how dirty the first cast got by the end of 8 weeks. Sorry the lighting was not very good.

I took this picture while I was driving back to Boulder from Sterling, picking my dad up to buy a new car. These sun flowers were wild growing on both sides of the road along I-76, some times as far as the eye could see. My dad who has driven this road for 50 years or so, said the flowers had never been this vibrant.

Here is my dad standing in front of his new 2004 VW passat 4 motion, which I helped him find and buy. He paid cash for the car and it still took us the entire day to take possession of his new car. His last new car was in 1990.

Thats all I have for now. I will be updating with pic of the first cycling meeting of the new semester in about a week.

I can't believe that it is August 13th

Every one loves needle point owls!

Greetings to all my naked legged friends out there. I decided that I have accumulated enough pictures to formulate a post that is worthy of your time. Not much has changed since my last post. Still working in boulder and commuting back to g-reality for second half of the week. I'm not really sure how people maintain their sanity whilst being imprisoned to a desk for 40 hours a week. I'm only working 30'ish hours a week, and what I do here I can't in all honesty call "work". It takes a special person to stand for this torture. My leg is still attached, and healing slowly. I will be going back to the doctor in 10 day to get a new cast that will be a little smaller than the current one, just below the knee. This will be just in time to have the new cast before my 15th semester of school starts. It is going to be interesting to see what my professors say when they discover that I am unable to ambulate during my clinical hours that are required every semester.

Here is a picture of the flatirons coming into boulder

This is me driving after I realized that I left the Rudy Projects in Greeley. Note still in the greatest chick magnet in the entire world - the mini-VAN!

A little democratic propaganda for you ( on the side of some ones car)

When I captured this piece of photographic genius, I was under the impression that there were colors associated with the democratic and republican parties, blue and red retrospectively. When I asked my republican lady friend, she did not feel that this association was legitimate. She instead took it to be a relic of the Cold War and those fascist communists. So the jury is still out on if this is a anti republican or anti communist slogan.

Here I am with 2 of my second cousins, both of which share my fantastic last name. We were in sterling for a 40th wedding anniversary of a family member. The party was at the Knights of Columbus building. The air conditioning worked about as well as the time period for which the building was named after. I was fortunate enough to have my father wanting us to leave this sweaty sauna of a place much earlier than my fellow cousins.

Keeping with Brian's theme, I shot a few pics of dinner yesterday. I made a take off of a basil pesto. I didn't want to stay with tradition and took a Mexican foot path to this delicious dish. A traditional pesto 5 ingredients; basil, pine nuts, olive oil, garlic, and Parmesan cheese. The dish consisted of cilantro, pumpkin seeds, manchego cheese, garlic, and olive oil. The usual piece of kitchen equipment for this production is a food processor, but I didn't have access to one of these, so I was forced to use a blender. This got the job accomplished, but took about 4-5 times long as the correct piece of equipment.

Here is the penne after I added the "pesto"!

The post would not be complete without the a finished product. It was very delicious. Although I failed to document the wine, I did have a great glass of German Riesling to accompany this fantastic new recipe

I guess thats all for today try to stay cool in this hellish heat

A day in the life of a cripple

It has been a long few weeks. I have been spending Monday through Thursday working at my mothers accounting practice, moonlighting as a receptionist. Because of the exorbitant price of fossil fuels these days I've been carpooling into work with my mother, which of course includes spending 3 nights a week at her house. The best perk of this deal was the access to Tivo for recording the TOUR. Now that the tour is over I feel like I am forced into once again surfing aimlessly for anything on that's worth watching.

This is me troubleshooting a computer problem. I have spent the majority of my 1 month here trying to fix problems with both computers here at the office. Total time spent talking with Microsoft support - 4.5 hours. Number of computers requiring re-formatting---- all of them (2).

As you can see here in this pic, the fixing of the problems is going just as expected, poooorly! I feel like giving up, but then I remember I must have the Internet to waste the time away at the office. If I didn't have the Internet or computer problems, then I would be forced to do actual work.

I finally was able to get some pics of my leg prison for your viewing enjoyment

Note - cast is 5 weeks old in this picture (still sort of clean, bottom notwithstanding)

This gives some perspective to the extent of my imprisonment. Note my still great biking tan (6 week hiatus from the sun) and my left quad still looks great. I went to the doctor yesterday hoping to have this cast removed, only to be replaced with a new one that is right below my knee. Unfortunately the X-rays didn't show enough new bone growth at the break site to risk replacing the cast, so I am stuck in this monstrosity for another 3 weeks, bringing the total time in this cast to 8 weeks!

This is the arrangement that I have for maintaining my mobility in my crippled state. I am shifted out of my typical driving position to facilitate viewing of the leg position. Driving with your left foot is easier than one might think. It only took about one day to master. Although I would not want to have to explain this to the MAN! I have the foot in question proped up on a sleeping bag to help eliminate the pain of my knee trying to break through the top of the cast and take a breath of fresh air. The vehicle that you see pictured here is a 2000 Chrysler Town and Country Mini Van

With 150,000 miles on it. The day that it broke the 150,000 mark, I was blessed with a break down at Red Rocks amphitheatre. I think it was a clogged fuel injector. I was able to get running again, but it would not idle, forcing me to keep my foot on the gas (even while stopped or breaking) Now I like to see some of my faithful readers try to keep pressure on the gas peddle while applying break pressure at the same time---with only one FOOT. I made it to the shop and they gave it a much needed tune up.

Here I am driving with the only dog (Tiger) I have ever met that would smell a McDonald's french fry and not eat it.

This is the same french fry from above- note (still in tack) and the french fry was hot! Don't worry I was just surprised as you that there is an animal out there that would turn is nose up at the corner stone of the McDonald's empire-----The FRENCH FRY

This car was in font of me in the drive through to receive my delicious french fries from above. I am all for standing up for a cause that one believes in, but to obstruct one's view with that message is a little extreme

This is the license plate that I cut off above. Apparently this person is all about the messages on their car, even the license plate is a message. Well I guess that all for now, I have to try to get out of boulder before the traffic starts to get bad. Greeley here I come-- :(

Thanks for reading.

- Borat Causes Heavy Crash -

I love toast!

Borken

I have had quite an eventfull couple of weeks. On june 20 I went to boulder to visit a friend that lives in flordia. He had the great idea to go tubing down the boulder creek, which runs out of boulder canyon from nederland. I tried to convience him to let me drive to the creek, but he insisted in taking his dad's sports car. We bought the tubes and started filling them up with air. It was at this time that it occured to us that we didn't have much room to put the filled tubes inside the car. Since I didn't know the pressure rating of said tube, I filled the tubes up to what I considered an adequate volume. After all I didn't want a blow out of the tube right in my face. So we made our way up to the park near the mouth of the canyon. My brilliant friend embarked on this adventure with a pair of flip flops. We changed into our swim suits and made our way to look for a put in spot. When we saw the water it was clear just how bad of an idea this truly was. The creek was not a creek, but a raging torrent of a creek. We found a decent place to get in and discovered that our tubes were grossley underfilled. My friend floated out in the cold water and stayed on the tube for about 20 seconds before a rapid filpped him off his tube and made him hold on for dear life. I lasted about 45 seconds before I went over a large drop off into a big eddie of swirrling torrent. I had to swim real hard to make it to the edge and grab onto some rocks. It is important to note that right above this eddie was a walking bridge over the creek, with a few people wathcing as I was tossed violently right under their feet. So I am stuck on the wrong side of the river. I decided to try to jump back in and try to get to the other side. I was forced to swim for my life. The Dane Cook joke was going through my head as I made it back to the same rocks that had been my savior a few momments ealier "don't float over me when I'm dying in the abyss". I finally made it bavk to the correct side of thr river without being sodamized by a shallow rock, but I did get brussed up pretty good. My friend with the flip flops lost one right where I had all of my truble, but was able to retrieve it. All told we probably only went 300 yards down stream.

The next evening a different friend and I decided to make the best use of the summer solstice and go dirt biking to find a good place to practice our marksmanship with our handguns. The dirt bike that I was riding was a old honda 250. It was getting dark on our way back, with no problems. The problems statred when I missed the turn to go back to my friends house. I turned around to go back to the turn, it was up hill and I killed the bike.I tried about 5 time to get the bike up this hill which was on pavement without any luck, the bike just kept stalling no mater how much gas or clutch I gave it. I was starting to get nervous because I was in the middle of a paved road "sugar loaf rd" in the dark without a tail light. My buddy suggested that the bike was low on fuel, so I switched the reserve switch to try and get the bike up this rise. This is when all the trouble started. I gave it too much gas or let go popped the clutch, and I lost control of the bike and made a bee line for the left shoulder of thr paved road. It was here that I layed the dirt bike down on my right side. I got up and realized that I was not able to put any weight onto my right foot. My buddy got the bike running again after a few minutes as I slowely tried to put weight onto my "sprained ankle". I rode the bike the mile or so back to the house with my leg dangling. As soon as I got back I sat down onb the ground and let my buddy put the bikes away. It was at this point that I decided that I didn't want to navigate the stairs into the house and we went to the hospital for some x-rays. After the doc had a chance to review the films, he came in and said " well the good news is your not going to lose your leg". It turns out that I broke both boned in my lower leg right above the top of the hiking boots, which saved my ankle.I spent one painful night in the hospital, not becuase the break was really bad, but because the nurse waited hours to get me pain medication once I got admitted. I was released later the next day to wait for the swelling to go down. I went home to my mother's house for a few days. I went back to the hospital on tuesday 26th not knowing if I was going to just get a cast or have to have surgery and then cast. The surgeon didn't know which option he would have to employ until my splint came off and I was asleep. So when I woke up in recovery I didn't know if I had surgery or not. The answer to tht question was no surgery. The surgeon was able to just cast the leg. I'm in a full leg cast that goes above my knee and half way up my thigh. I'm still not sure how long I will have to be in this cast, but its going to be a long time. I will find out in about a week when i visit the doctor again. Well I'm getting tired of typing all of this on a blackberry so I will keep all of you posted. Thanks for checking in.

Climbing Mt Yale

My friend Matt and I decided to continue our quest to climb all of the 14ers in Colorado. On Wednesday we drove up to Buena Vista and found a great camp site (in the daylight) and set up camp. Thursday morning at the crack of dawn, 5 am we broke camp and left for the trail head. Below is a picture of the surrounding mountains that lie to the west of Mt Yale. This picture was taken fairly early in the morning and as you can see I'm still below tree line (which is 12200 ft for my non hiker friends)

This picture shows the ability of biking clothing to be made useful in different sports, I'm fairly certain that this vest could be seen from space.

This is getting closer to the top, note the elevation at which the trees stop growing, again this picture is looking west from Mt. Yale

Here I am at the top of MT. Yale, 14206 ft. If you look behind me you can see path we had to follow to get the summit. A path of snow that was flanked by large drop offs on both sides made this rather interesting. It took us almost 5 hours to get to the top. Our total time for the hike was 8 hours with time alloted for stopping for lunch and of course bathroom breaks. It was a great time, and I had no problem asking my massive cycling legs to propel me up to the top of Mt. Yale.