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Mission Bay Park North

Bwaaahhahahahahaha

OMG it finally posted! And it's horrible! I love it!

You owe me big time Mira and Valerie!

$2500!!!

I was able to squeeze in a 20 mile ride this morning and seem to have finally settled on a good, staple route for the 1.5 hours I have before work. My speed is improving greatly. I also installed some new aero-bars on my bike this past weekend and they do wonders for the wrist-buzz I get occassionally from my grip on the handlebars. I've notice that they also boost my speed considerably on flat roads and downhill stretches.

On another note, I finally passed the $2500 mark in my fundraising! Thank you all so much for the support!

The San Diego Ride4AIDS will happen this Sunday. This one is a 50 mile ride (see details in earlier posts). I will be experimenting with the cell phone during the ride, and will keep some updates during the event for you all to see. This will be a good test run for LifeCycle this June.

Every cloud and it's silver lining...

It was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day at work today. All of the promotional materials that I have been working on for the National HIV/AIDS Update Conference coming up the week after next seem to have fallen on their face. My team is to sponsor an information booth at the conference while some of our staff are attending lectures, and part of the products that I ordered had a wrong phone number printed... on 1000 items. I will now be spending the next 7 days scrubbing phone numbers from pen barrels with nail polish remover. And then our shirts came in too expensive. I have been wanting to cry all day. Oh, and the mp3 of me singing All Is Full Of Love with Björk still will not post on audio blogger.... I guess it's too awful for them to publish.

But then I get home tonight to find some new sponsors on my LifeCycle page. I am now up to $2465 in donations! Only $35 to go until I reach the minimum goal to enter, $2500! See... silver lining indeed!

Saturday ride around the Bay

Here are some photos from today's ride along the Bayshore Bikeway... 31 miles total. 44 miles for the week. I saw about a million butterflies, almost swallowed a few. And the Coronado Ferry is always beautiful here in San Diego. Enjoy!

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Cruise ship at the Broadway Pier.

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Kids inside the Ferry Boat.

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On the Coronado Ferry.

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Under the bridge.

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Coronado Bridge and Downtown San Diego.

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Silver Strand looking across the ocean to Point Loma.

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Butterfly along the trail.

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Entrance to Main Street bikepath in Chula Vista.

Beautiful Morning

Here are some photos from my ride this morning. I made it out to the ocean this morning, riding along the San Diego River. Enjoy!

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Mission Bay

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Pacific Ocean

Rain Rain Go Away!

The rain is back.

Got in to work at around 6:00am this morning and there was nothing but downpour in the valley. The forecast is saying that today should clear up a little after today. Everything is green and beautiful out here, but COME ON ALREADY!!!!

Last week’s mileage was 42 for the week. This week, so far… big fat zero. Monday and Tuesday were spent working from home in the early hours of the morning on graphics design for conference promo materials at work before deadlines… yesterday and today… rain.

I have signed up for two rides in April as training for AIDS LifeCycle. Both of them are one-day 50 mile rides. The first is the Ride4AIDS here locally in San Diego on April 3rd. The next is the Rosarito-Ensenada Fun Ride on April 30th. Ride4 AIDS is a charity event for local San Diego HIV/AIDS agencies that I support every year in addition to the AIDS Walk. Rosarito-Ensenada is a ride that attracts over 10,000 riders annually down in Mexico. Both are going to be a lot of fun and good training for the 600 miles from San Francisco to Los Angeles I’ll be doing for AIDS LifeCycle.

This weekend, I’m intending to plan a ride around the Bayshore Bikeway if the weather will cooperate. Probably won’t have many photos this week as my training is getting more serious, but I’ll post what I can.

A Day at the Park

Bill and I got up around 8:00 this morning and went to brunch at St. Tropez Bistro in Hillcrest. They have such a wonderful menu for breakfast. Afterwards, we took a walk at Balboa Park and visited the Japanese Friendship Garden. We got a surprise when we went and found that they were having a Ikebana display there to celebrate the Spring Equinox. We found the whole park full of azeleas, jasmine and wysteria. It smelled and looked incredible. Spring time in San Diego is unbelievable... especially this year after all of the rain that we have been receiving.

Bill recorded a voice message here and posted a couple of photos from his phone. Since he is going to be along for AIDS LifeCycle this June as a road volunteer, we're talking about the idea of getting him to where he can post to this blog as well when the time comes, so that he can put his photos and thoughts here as well.

Another day... it's going on midnight and I'm beat!

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You're such a doll!

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I love you babe :)

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Cool japanese softdrink we bought that had a glass marble inside the bottle neck

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Little sleeping buddah

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Wysteria arbor, it smells so beautiful! Jasmine too all over the park.

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Koi pond

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Doll reading

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Ikibana

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Bill @ the gardens

saturday in san diego

Hi Folks! Bill & I are at the Japanese Friendship Garden in Balboa Park today. Here are some photos. Enjoy!
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Wonders of the WWW

Today's posts took over 14 hours to make it to publish. The photos never posted at all and I had to repost them all tonight. Frustrating. I hope there won't be these kinds of problems from the ride in June. I did get in 15.5 miles today. That makes 41 for the week so far.

Okay 10:30, I'm off to bed.

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Goodmorning San Diego

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Mission Bay Bridge

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Sea World

Six and 1/2 hours

Okay. So there's a little bit of latency between the time I record a voice message and the time it gets posted here... only 6.5 hours or so.

Then again, it's free, so who am I to complain. Bah.

And that Sprint phone of mine doesn't have the world's best resolution. I'm thinking that must be, what, 20 dpi or so. Could you get on that for me Sam... please. Trust me, the guys out there waterskiing... you'd be wishing I had telephoto zoom on this stupid phone if you'd seen what I saw!

Fiesta Island

Well the photos seem to have posted just fine. I did send a voice message along that ride at around 7:30 am though, which doesn’t seem to have posted yet. Hmmm… It’s now 10:30 am and I’m in the office. Let’s see how long it takes to post. 3 hours and counting.

Anyhow, for those of you interested, here is a map of this week’s route. On today’s route (purple), I did a little bit of route scouting (very technical cyclist term meaning, well, route scouting ), looking for other trails in the area, and got in 14 miles. Hoping to make tomorrow’s ride (pink) in the same area and swing out around Sea World.

Beautiful morning in San Diego!

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Downtown.

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Mission bay towards the valley.

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Goodmorning!

What have I been up to?

Funny you should ask, I was just going to begin a diatribe…

I’m going to skip all the “since the last time we spoke” crap, sorry folks. If you want those details, then I’m probably long overdue to give you a phone call or send a letter… in which case you may feel free to send me guilt mail. Helen and Loyal, I fully expect yours to arrive within the hour.

For the benefit of those that haven’t heard, I am training for AIDS LifeCycle 4. In a nutshell, it’s an HIV/AIDS benefit bicycle ride that begins in San Francisco and covers 6 days and 585 miles to Los Angeles. As of this morning, I have raised $1950 of the $2500 I need in donations to qualify as a rider, and my training is going well.

How well you ask? As many of you know, Southern California has been getting some strange weather this winter. Rain, rain and more rain. In fact, more rain so far this year in LA than in Seattle, and more in San Diego than in Portland! I thought this place was supposed to be sunny and mild 3/4 of the year, sheesh! As a result, my training has been limited to my training in Tai Chi and being on a stationary bike in spinning classes at my gym… one hour a day, five days a week. The weather seems to have finally cleared up though, and today, I was finally out for a 12 mile ride before work… on an actual bike and an actual road!

I’d like to start keeping track of my training to update you all here. That is going to include a lot of experimentation early on. Let me know what you think of it.

My eventual idea with this “blog” is to make it into a “moblog”. That way, I will be able to post voice messages, text messages and photos from my Sprint mobile phone from the event, June 5-11th.

(Attention Sam, and any other Sprint folks reading: for further shameless advertising plugs, please contact me about negotiating my free lifetime Sprint service plan and corporate sponsorship of AIDS LifeCycle… I’d be happy to receive both for trade of advertising your name here)

At any rate, I will be experimenting with that too on my training rides here in San Diego.

(Attention electronically challenged family members: click on the underlined words in this journal entry to see more information about that particular word or topic)

Introducing...

So many of you have been asking what’s going on with me these days. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not the best at setting aside time for phone calls, letters and email… any of you that know me even just a little know this much about me. I’ve been considering how to remedy that without the feel and flavor of a form letter, because it just doesn’t carry the personal depth that I feel my friends, family and colleagues deserve. Which brings me to this “blog” thingie…

I am not going to spend a lot of time introducing myself to those of you that may have happened onto this page by accident. I’ll save that for the profile section of this blog, which I intend to fill in later. Another thing most of you already know about me is that I tend to be a radical procrastinator.

Another thing… I can be way too verbose at times. One of my goals with this blog is to be a little more focused. My writing ego would at times like to think of himself as some kind of poet. I would ask you to call me on it when I get to be too wordy.

So, without further rambling, I simply give you

… a few miles in my moccasins.