Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Mountain Bike Branding

In response to my wife's earlier post below, -sorry honey, but I know everything- :D. No, I am glad to see that Lisa is taking an initiative to contribute to and update the blog. It makes it a better blog and it lessens the amount of work I need to do to maintain it (regardless if I ever actually do that work or not!).

Anyway, a few weeks back, a friend of mine and I started mountain biking at night. I am totally addicted to this practice. It is almost a necessity here in the phoenix area. Especially since we are already reaching temps in the nineties. So, we have begun riding more and more during the cooler nighttime hours. Hopefully this will allow me to bike through the summer and not lose any physical gains that I have achieved over the last few months. Well, we (my friend and I) were doing a pretty extensive ride one night and towards the end and with about 1200 feet of elevation to descend, my buddy's light started going out. It was shorting (which I later, in a masterful manner I must add, repaired). I know, I know, I am a mechanical genius - please I don't need any adoration - it is bad for me. SO, I went awfully slow with lots of break use in an attempt to allow my friend to use my light to get down the mountain. Needless to say and unbeknown to me, my disc brakes heated up like a hot branding iron. Here is a pic. of the disc I am talking about. The disc work just like those in a car, it is squeezed between to brake pads via a hydraulic mechanism.Ok, so that little disc got burning hot (I know - you see where this is going - just bear with me). Well, at night (at least this particular night) it was still pretty cold. My legs were fairly icy after having been exposed to this cold for about 2 hours. Well, at the bottom of the hill I leaned my icy cold leg up against this burning hot disc. WaLa - A perfect mountain bike brand.I especially like the little holes. It stung pretty bad but I didn't realize I had branded myself until I got home and took a shower. I was so proud of my "stupid" injury I woke my wife up (it was about midnight) and made her look at it. She responded, "Nice, leave me alone!" She later came around. :)

Monday, April 6, 2009

I AM SO SMART!!!

I know it sounds dumb, but I just figured out how to change the background on our blog. I am very impressed with myself, especially since I had to login to Torel's part of the blog to do it! The best part is, he doesn't even know! Ha ha. So Happy Easter!!