More pics from early summer

Hey guys so I have finally found some time to get some pics up from the last week or two. I went up to Fort Collins to see our friend e-strong grind it out on sunday. Walking back to my car to leave for my dads house, i noticed someone who has fantastic taste in fine cycling equipment.

Next is my dinner the night before this bike race from above. I marinated a t-bone and grilled it. Next I placed asparagus on the grill with EVOO and S/P. I plated these two items on top of a bed of Parmesan couscous. It was delicious!

Below is a picture of my new bike rack(no matter how I uploaded this pic it was sideways)

Here I am driving to my dad's house

The Pics have finally arrived!

The trip back continued to be lesson in cultural differences. The bus service that we paid for to get us to and from the airport and the dog show site every day, never came to get us for the return trip to the airport. We were lucky that the one taxi driver at the hotel with a large SUV whose name was Andres pulled up just in time to save the trip to the airport. When we finally get to security to get to the gate, the federal police decide that the dog (which is flying on the plane) cannot go through the x-ray machine with out documentation. After a few minutes of me arguing with the security guard I got an American Airlines employee to come over and explain that it was ok for the dog to ride inside the plane with the passengers. Once finally through security after an hour of discussion, it was time for me to have a drink. The trip back was uneventful.






These three pics are of murals inside the palacio Nacional painted by Diego Rivera.







These pics are of the ceiling inside where the Mexican govt has its meetings. Note the all seeing eye.






Look at these plants



Drinking at the Dog Show


Keeping myself occupied






This is what the dog looked like
at the airport


Look at this crowd!

Teotihuacán Pyramids near Mexico City and even a BIKE RACE!!!!

Today was our last and only completely free day to visit historical and cultural places of interest here in Mexico City. With the dog show over we decided to make the 50 Km drive to the pyramids build by the mesoamerican people before the time of the Aztecs. We met a very nice couple while eating breakfast yesterday and decided to go together to share the cost of the trip. Mind you I use the term couple loosely, because this particular couple was without a penis between the two of them. We set out at 8 in the morning and made the 1 hour drive to the north of the city and after sitting in morning traffic (which is a spectacle in itself) finally made it to Teotihuacán. My new lesbian friends and I walked to the top of the pyramid of the sun ( or Sol for my spanish speaking friend). My mother waited at the top of the first level catching her breath. I'm happy to say that my extensive experience in cardio activities enabled me to get to the top first. The view from the top of this pyramid would have been much better if the haze aka pollution was not so bad ( but it is the most polluted city in the world). Videos and pics to follow once I am able to get my hands on a camera cable.

You will never guess what I saw yesterday morning. Do I have you salivating yet..... . I had the pleasure to see a family bike race on the large avenue near my hotel. Don't worry I took pictures of some bikes and the race. It was more of a community ride on one of the largest streets in the city than a race. I did see a few people with were dressed in the correct attire ( I even saw a kit on a kid from Mexico) Many of the people were riding steel "double suspension" mountain bikes. There were only a few road bikes, but I did manage to see a Colnago from at least the 70's (very cool), a few bianchi's, and best of all an ORBEA!!!! (but alas it was a mountain bike) I felt relatively confident that I would have been able to drop all but a few people in the race. I got a few weird looks for taking picture of people's bikes. This bike race was accompanied with a women only 5 k run(walk). Any way it is time for me to go back to a restaurant that we at a few days ago that has possibly the best mexcian food in the world. Their daily special on mondays is mole ploblano, muy delicioso! I will have some time to kill in the airport tomorrow, so be expecting an update. And unless it is too much trouble post a comment you bastards!

Floating gardens a bust

Today I was blessed not to have to make the long and boaring journey to the dog show. Instead I slept in and then had to figure out how to describe to a driver on the phone where and how to pick my mother up from the show ground. With my limited spanish skills this was quite the challenge. I would say that my spanish skills are similar to Evan's (not good). When my mother finally returned to the hotel, she was intent on going and dpending one of our few sightseeing days at this place called the floating gardens. 1e aquired a driver for the approx 1 hour trip across the entire city to the south. We made our way to the edge of the canal system in which a large number of boats that were so brightly coloured (that's for my european friends) that if you looked uppon them for to long blindness was certainly to follow. We boarded a boat that way surrounded by other boats on all sides. We then some how got the boats around us to part like moses and the red sea to allow us passage onto the canal system. The propulsion system was a man with a large stick much like you would see in venice, but with none of the class. We were them bombarded by merchants peddling their crappy tourist items via smaller boats. I think that I have said "no gracis" so many times that I will be saying it in my sleep. Apparently the gardens which were susposed to be breath taking are still in the dead stage of life. We went about 2 k up the canal and turned around and continued back the way we came. The total elasped time of said boat ride to look at the non existant gardens 38 minutes. The price for the fabulous forae on a dirty canal 300 pesos ($30 for my american friends.) We then had to endure horendous friday afternoon traffic to get back to the hotel so we could again return to the god forsaken dog show to engage in more waiting and sitting on a concrete floor until I no longer have feeling in the lower 2/3 of my body. As I am sitting here writing this a black lab owned by a mexican rescue team member took the liberty to squat and take a massive shit about 15 feet away from where I am sitting. How joyfully plesant! Let me asure you that this was not the first occurance of a dog performing this action in my immediate vaccinity. The only benefit that I can possibly see from todays adventure was getting to see much of the city from the back seat of a car. I drove right by the national university which according to my driver has 250,000 students. + guess I am out of inspiration, thanks for suffering through my slaughter of the english language. Adios para ahora.

floating gardens a bust

Mexico D day + 2

If I had to sum up today with one sentence it would be bored out of my mind at the dog show. I awoke this morming not feeling so hot (too many margs last night) at 5 am. After getting dressed I made my way to the bus (without coffee) that would be taking us to the dog show. The show started an hour late (still no coffee) all the while not a chair in site. I was finally able to have breakfast at 9:30 (finally good strong coffee). I followed this breakfast with 3 beers all the while reading cycle sport. These beers were followed closely with nap time. After a much deserved nap (all be it a bad one) I was able to Procure my mothers blackberry which I discoverd could be a very usefull for sqelching this everlasting boardome. I took this time to catch up on all of the giro action that I have been missing here. I then had to spend countless minutes tryinh to get into my blogger account on the mobile device. You can see that I was finally sucessful due to this update. I am now at hour number 11 at the dog show with no end in sight. I hope to eventually return to civilization before the day is out. Asta lluego.

Leaving for Mexico City

For those of you who don't know I am now in Mexico City sitting at the lobby bar working on a looong over due update. This trip had a very insteresting start. I went out to dinner with my new older lady friend the night before I left. After an uneventful dinner, I returned back to my casa and got the rest of my things together for the trip. I then went to her house in Kersey to spend some quality time with her before I had to continue to my mothers house to leave for the airport the following morning. When I got to Kersey I walked in the door to a very dejected looking lady friend. I soon discovered that one of her children, yes she has two kids, was in trouble for something. Learning all of the juicy details, I discovered that the daughter was caught trying to steal a shirt from the Greeley mall.(This is after going shopping with mother earlier that day) I found out that she sent the father(x-husband) to bail out the daughter from the loss prevention office at the mall. This put a serious damper on our "quality time". We then discover that the store had decided to involve GPD (Greeley Police Department). We figured that this would buy us some time. One thing led to another and to keep this post PG-13, we were indisposed when the doorbell rang. I then got to listen to lady friend and X argue about the punishment while sitting in the master bedroom in the dark, hoping not to be discovered by said x-husband. Pretty Funny.

My flight down to Mexico City was uneventful except for the fact that my mother brought the dog on the airplane as a service dog aka seeing eye, complete with a home made leather harness. The dog layed down at our feet taking up every inch of foot room infront of myself and my mother. Because of this dog in the airport I was forced to become the center of attention at the ariport. I had to field questions from all sorts of people about what the dog was for ( and I could not say that we were just swindling the system). We were even stopped in Mexico's airport so a senior could take a photo of the dog. We spent our first day (today) going over the dog show site (yes we were here for a dog show) and then we did some sightseeing. We went to the palacio nacional which houses many of Diego Rivera's epic murals. I would be including pictures, but my mother neglected to bring the camera cord home from work, so I am unable to upload pics. Any way I guess that is all for now Adios y buenos Noche!

Spring Break BITCH!

Spring break is almost half over, I can't believe it. I started my spring break on last Friday by drinking at a house party(the first in months), followed by the Dug Out. I had a total of 4-5 drinks all night and I ate dinner. When I woke up on Saturday, I felt like I had 10-12 drinks. I made it to boulder, only 2 hours later than I had planned. I sacrificed my st. Patrick's day blackout for the CU road race on Sunday. I was DD for one of my friends in boulder, I waited until 1:30 to go back up Boulder Canyon (where I was staying), and the person I was driving around decided to stay in boulder. So basically I hung out with a bunch of drunk people, while I was sober for no reason. The race on Sunday after a restful 3.5 hours of sleep went like I expected, 47 minutes of pure hell. I managed to stay in the race for 2 out of the three laps. When I finished with my DNF certificate of participation, I looked at my heart rate monitor to discover that for 47 minutes of racing my average heart rate was 191. After the race I did my best to pay my respects to st. Patrick a day late. Monday consisted of going on a hike near red feather lakes off of the peak to peak highway. We manage to get 8 miles of hiking on top of snow. I cooked dinner for 7 people and it came out great. Sunday started with me getting up a 9:30 in the morning and thinking my calf's were going to explode when my entire 135 lbs of weight were applied to them. I was just a little bit sore to say the least. We finished out the day with a few hours of rock climbing after a two year hiatus from the sport. It has been a good break so far. Tomorrow I am riding up boulder canyon and sugar loaf mountain. 8.4 miles of pure pain. If you make it this far than please ask me to recommend you a good book, because there are sure better things to do than listen to me ramble via text. Thanks for checking on my fanastic piece of the universe

Auf Wiedersehen Der Kaiser

You will notice the devil chasing after Der Kaiser. I took this devil to symbolize the urge to dope in the sport of cycling. Der Kaiser you will be truly missed!






On another note argyle is making a come back, but I think this is going a little to far to put a jersey onto a rat's excuse for a dog!

Crashes!!

As some of you know I had a crash of my own inside a gas station, but what don't know is I took another dive due to albert squeezing me into an ice patch. With all of these crashes I though that I would offer this video!

My Box in a Box

This video is really funny! For your viewing pleasure

So I am President Now

So with half of the offices for the cycling team abandoning ship, this left leadership roles in the top tier of the team. After talking with the only remaining commissioned officer, this role of president fell onto my shoulders. After becoming president, it became very apparent that we have some serious work to do if we want to get our crit onto the schedule for this season. I have been pretending to be president for only about one week, I have sent more emails than I sent over the entire winter break. I sent an email to the coach of CSU to find out if they are planning on having two days of racing , or if we could continue to have our race on the same weekend. Our other date that is an option is the weekend of April 7-8, which is open. I am writing this during class and should probably be listening instead of blogging. Have a good day and keep on keeping on.
Dana

Am I susposed to update this myself?

Do to the long dramatic absence of updates about my exciting life, I felt that I should relieve the anxiety of my fellow readers and give you a riveting description of my life. I have spent the last month before school working every shift you can imagine. One week I did 4 nights shifts 6p-7a. Followed the next week with two day shifts 6a-7p. The effect that this has on an individual is cruel and unusual punishment. Another event that transpired over the break was getting to look at my bike on the trainer in the middle of my kitchen for weeks at a time. Every time that I walked by the bike, I thought I should ride that thing. Did I act on that thought? Oh course not! I spent about 5 days over the break in Louisville and boulder trying my best to avoid g-town for a few days. I got up into the mountains for a snow shoeing trip on the 31 of December. As you all know, school started yesterday, and I got an interesting email from the office of financial aid office. To summarize the letter for you it said that the financial aid office is withholding my financial aid for the semester because I have exceeded the maximum of allowable credits without graduating. After going all over campus getting "herbie handcock" from the many different adviser's that I have for my may different degrees, I turned the form in. A few days later, I got an email that said that "I was approved until may 2008 only!". Well this is long enough for now. I will be updating again later today. Thanks for reading about my boring life. Dana

I can't believe IT

Its 3:15 am and what am I doing up at this hour if I am not DRINKING? Thats a very good question. Well I had to complete a homework assignment to by 12:pm earlier or I would no longer be in nursing school. To make a long story short, I got the assignment completed, but it took me 9 hours to finish it today. So with all this productive work completed today, I felt it was only fair to spend a few hours rotting my brain away on the Internet. And what better place to destroy brain cells then the per verbal myspace the black hole of time and productivity. During my quest to find the end of the Internet I was able to run across this video that my faithful readers will enjoy. That is to say. if I have any readers left after my long stints of being above continuous blogging.

You Have to watch this video

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=558456953


Ps- Are you enjoying this refreshing cold weather we have been having. You mean we get smell cow shit all day and freeze our ass off, where do I sign up, that right I already did about 3 years ago. I woke up thursday morning (the day after the snow storm) no water. Pipes frozen. No problem I'll just shower at work. Come home no water. no problem go to bed. Get up go to school (no shower). Go to work take shower. Clock in. Come home. no water. get up saturday. no water. Get home at 3 pm. you got it.no water. Went to library got back 8pm and got water. One would think that this would make me at least sing a little tune, and it did for a little while. Toilet flushes-good/-very good. But alas this pinnacle of light would not last but only a short time. Went to take shower 12am. water. COLD WATER, and ONLY COLD WATER. And it makes me warm inside to know that I get to give these people a very large sum of green backs to tomorrow and they have prevented me from the joy of depressing the toilet lever for 72 hours. Until tomorrow(or 2 weeks), I bid you good day.

Arrived in Berlin!

Against all odds we were able to navigate our way across the border of Poland and into germany. I only almost crashed the car twice. We are going out on a bar and pub tour of berlin tonight. German beer here I come.



Above you can see a statue in the town square of poznan poland, a polish flag, the air plane that we flew from munich to poland, and the cars in poland parking on the side walk.

Poland Day + 2

SO it has been two days and I still have not been able to post any pictures because they will not let me connect my camera to the computers here are the internet cafe in Poznan. We went to the dog show today, and no I didn't have a chance to see any corgi's for steve. My Mom's camera had a major memory card malfunction today, but you are in luck because I have another card. I am hoping that when we go to berlin tomorrow I will be able to upload some pictures. The weather here has been cold and wet, what a big surprise, eastern europe in november. We have had some good food, and yes pork is the meat of choice here in poland. We have parked our rental car 3 or 4 times, and have gotten 2 parking tickets so far. It was an adventure trying to figure out the parking ticket system, which was not in english. We decided that we may pay these when we give the car back at the end of our trip. Today I was able to wear clean cloths, because they lost my baggage when I got here on wednesday. The time change has been hard to adjust to, but not in the way that you would think. I would have thought that I would be up late and have trouble getting up in the morning, but the reverse is true. We are going to bed early and having no trouble getting up in the morning. Tomorrow we set out on the trans european adventure to find berlin. We don't really know how to get there or what the signs say, but with the grace of god we will make it and find a hotel with wi fi for a picture update. We are heading south west to berilin from poznan, but don't know what direction that is.(evan thanks for not reminding me to bring my compass, what an eagle scout you make), Well that about all that I can come up with for today, I would say that it is expensive to use the internet, but that would be a lie, its about a dollar an hour. So until tomorrow from germany, gutentag!

Lost in Poland

So apparently they will rent a car here in poland to just about any one. The fight went pretty well with both my mother and me sleeping most of the way, thanks in part to xanax. Against all odds we were able to navigate our way to the hotel in the dark, which is a feat considering there are no street signs at intersections. It is harder to find internet here than I thought it would be. When I finally found it, I realized that I forgot my cable to up link pictures. To my dismay, they didn't have wi-fi and so I was forced to use their computer, which is in polish. The word for the back button is (wstecz) and forward (dalej). We made it to the national museum which was filled with polish art dating back to the 1300's. We have been driving our rental car around town and have realized that driving here is rediclous, people park their car on the side walk (picture to follow), there are very few signs and when ther is a sign it is impossible to pronounce the street name. On the positive side, most restaurants have english on the menu and the people here speak some english. I will try to make it back here tomorrow with my camera cable and see if I can up load pictures. Thats all for now. Dana from eastern europe.

On the air plane flying over the atlantic

So I was unaware that airlines offered wireless internet in flight. I am some where over the atlantic flying towards munic germany. I have about 5 hours to go and are starting to get sleepy. I will be posting pictures of poland tomorrow, unless I have trouble finding an internet connection. Keep checking back and I will do my best not do disapoint any of my trusty audiance! Until tomorrow, Dana the world traveler!

Flying over the BIG pond to the east

Greeting to all!

For all of you faithful blog readers, I wanted to let you know that I am going to Poland and Beriln tomorrow so check back often because I will be posting picture of the trip for all to see. I would give you a picture right here, but I broke my camera the other day. I hope all is well in every bodies world.