What comes through in his postings is that he is a real nice guy and a loving father and husband.  In between his rants about overpriced bike clothes, he shares what it feels like to care for a spouse living with cancer.  Really meaningful stuff.  Susan is blessed to have that particular blogging cyclist as a caring husband.  And while I just walk around wearing a yellow wristband, he helps raise tens hundreds of thousands of dollars for cancer support and research.

A few days ago, “Fatty” and Dorothy Gibson and Cicloposse (and several other readers who donated frequent flyer miles) got together for a contest: Donate to the Lance Armstrong Foundation and be entered in a raffle for a chance to win a cycling vacation in Italy. Since I’ve always wanted to cycle in Europe, I was one of hundreds of people earlier this week that helped them reach their goal of $5000.

And yesterday when my wife and I got home from a local production of Rent, there was a message on the answering machine from Dorothy telling me I was the winner.   With Fatty’s post today, I suppose it is official.  In his post he mused over the many good things for the week.  My raffle win is mentioned as #8.  It pales in comparison to the importance of #6: His wife made out of bed to watch TV with her family.

Win Susan.

Click to see the "Encoding Process" for image

Original picture of Claire taking a picture while on the back of the tandem.

P.S. How many of you guys clicked on the image’s red X to close the image?

Claire's picture of the Mayor

It is called the Ride of Silence because the riders ride in a tight group at a solemn pace and none is supposed to talk.  After waffling back and forth, I decided to take my youngest daughter Claire.  My rambunctious one.

Before the Ride of Silence

On the drive downtown she was her usual talkative self asking one question after another (“What is a googolplex times another googolplex?” ), but with the promise of ice cream if she stayed quiet (“twist in a cone with sprinkles!”), Claire was 99.44% compliant during the ride.

But the moment the ride was over, she was back to her regular form.

Claire, after the ride

To alleviate some of the boredom and to give the rider something to do (other than poking the cell phone in my back pocket), I put a speedometer on the bike for the stoker. Claire kept on announcing her speed and she continually asked me what my computer was showing.  After several reports were exchanged, I eventually explained to her that the front half of the bike goes the same speed as the back half.  She seemed to accept that.  On the way out, we went  too fast for her liking: a whopping 13mph.

We stopped, as usual, at the school to allow her to stretch her legs and play on the school’s playground equipment.  She could only do the two older slides, because all the new slides emptied out into wood chip indentations that were filled with ice water runoff from last week’s snow.  The rock climbing wall was puddle free, but the jungle gym spanned another big puddle.

But the swings were too enticing for her.  She gingerly boarded the swing from the edge of the ice puddle underneath it, but after she lost her back and forth momentum, she submerged both her feet extricating herself from her perch.  We moved to a bench and she tossed her now wet shoes at me.  She wanted me to air dry her shoes with the frame pump I had pointed out a hour earlier while we prepping the bike.  I puffed on her shoes instead.

When I told her that I would not allow her to pedal in her stocking feet, she put her shoes back on and we headed home after reading the playground rules.  The first rule said you weren’t supposed to play on wet equipment.  The last rule said you weren’t supposed to take off your shoes.  Claire said it was okay because there were no teachers around.

On the way home she asked whether we would be warmer going to slow or fast.  After I told her we’d spend less time in the cold if we rode fast, 14 mph was no longer fast enough for her and she started pedaling harder and shifting her weight.

I told her to stop wobbling and she responded:

I’m not wobbling; I’m fastering!