1. Houdini has returned. Mrs. Debbie has long called our cockatoo, Narcissus, Houdini. I always kind of wondered about the name, and I also wondered why there were these random clamps with Narc’s stuff…until the last few days. Yes, the bird can open his cage in three different spots at will. He sticks his little talon through the cage, moves it over, flips the locking mechanism, and voila, there’s Narc, on your shoulder. This morning, he let himself out of the cage and went to lay down with Ashley in bed. It’s hilarious to watch, but it’s also a bit dangerous while we’re out of the house, so the clamps are back in use. No more Houdini for a little while.

2. I rode 5 hours and 45 minutes yesterday. I don’t know what happened. I rode 3:45 with the awesome new Wednesday ride, went home, then rode another 2 with Ashley, and suddenly it was a 5:45, 4000kj day. Ouch. I’m really tired. I haven’t done a ride like that since February 2008. No joke.

3. Ashley sometimes flabbergasts me with her moments of brilliance. Yesterday she looked at my cycling computer and said, your computer doesn’t work, it says 8:42 and it’s still ticking upward!

Ashley, that’s the clock. It’s 8:42.

HAHAHAHA. We’re still laughing about that one. I love my Ashley.

I don’t know how I did it, but I rode 15 hours last week. Amazing. I haven’t ridden 15 hours in a week in eons. I’m getting it started early again this week in hopes of another 15er. Bike riding is fun when it’s 70 degrees and you have some good company to ride with. In my case, I’m spending about half of my time solo, a quarter riding with Eric Murphy, and a quater riding with Ashley. That’s a perfect combo for me.

I’m presently sitting at the Jittery Joe’s being blasted by air conditioning again. I still don’t understand it. I had to take a little break from EuroTrash. Too much typing, too early in the morning.

This will be a busy week in the Norruber household. Monday thru Thursday here in Athens, then on Friday we’re driving northward to Kingsport, Tennessee to spend Halloween with Ashley’s sister, Cindy. We’re looking forward to the hilarity of a Halloween with her three baby nephews. We’re big fans. En route to Kingsport on Friday, we’re planning a stop near Greenville to ride up Caesars Head. I’ve been meaning to take some pictures and write a piece about Greenville for a long while…this should be a good excuse to get started. Sometime on the weekend we also hope to ride Roan Mountain, which is about an hour from Kingsport, right on the Tennessee/North Carolina border. We’ll see though.

I love travel biking. It’s so much fun, stimulating is a good word to describe it.

I’ll be on my bike in less than two hours though, so I better back get to work.

Here are some of my thoughts for my upcoming review on the Garmin 705. I sound pretty excited about it, I know, but I really am excited about it, so there.

We recently got a Garmin 705 to test – it’s the full-on cycling computer GPS with the wireless ANT+ capabilities, which means it reads the wattage from the Powertap wireless hub we have. It’s an incredible tool. I love exploring on my bike, and I used to do a lot of aimless wanderings during 5-7 hour rides. Times have changed a bit though for me, and my ride times are down in the 2-3 hour range, which means a lot less time to fool around.

Everyday before I go ride, I sit down at the map on my computer, look for some interesting new roads, plot a map using the Garmin software or MapMyRide, load it to the Garmin, and head out the door. From there on out, the Garmin keeps me on track as I follow the route. Yesterday, I did an 80k ride with a ton of turns, the kind of ride I’d never willingly subject myself to without a GPS, because I’d assuredly get hopelessly lost, but with the Garmin – no big deal. Turn here, turn there, etc etc. It has changed my biking world.

I can get out of the house, get into a new area of roads, and explore to my heart’s content without fear of making a +2 hour wrong turn. For me, that’s a big deal. Gone are the days where I’d write up long cue sheets with turn by turn instructions, gone are the days of where to from here?

It’s great for Ashley as well – I did my own ride yesterday, and then she went in the evening. I hate to have her riding the same roads over and over again right now, because that’s all she knows, so I plotted a map quickly, loaded it to the Garmin, and sent her on her way. An hour later, she returned, happy as can be, no problems. Well, there was the one problem about one of the roads having literally washed away in the past week, no biggie.

I haven’t even mentioned anything beyond the mapping capabilities yet. When it comes to the computer part – it has everything. I’ve got everything I need for power, speed, heart rate, etc etc ad nauseam. It has more functions than a utility knife. For 2/3 of the price of an SRM computer (500 for the Garmin), I get a full cycling computer, a GPS, altimeter, and more.

Hell, I can even race myself on it. Take that SRM.

Seriously, I’m loving it, Ashley is loving it.

Next time – my complaints (minor and not many).

Here’s a link to my page on the great Garmin Connect site. You can follow there to see what Ashley and I are up to for training everyday.

Ok, back to work. Lots to do before I go biking today.

I finally finished my Fulbright application. Everything is out of my hands at this point, and I’ve done the best that I can. That’s all I can do, right? My application lacks a hard copy of a letter of reference that is supposedly coming in from Austria last week. Fingers crossed that it gets there today or tomorrow. The hard copy has to be mailed out tomorrow. I sure hope it gets in by then, otherwise my chances go down considerably. So it goes. Keep all appendages crossed for me! 

It’s 54 degrees outside. It’s great. It’s going to be a beautiful day – the rain is finally gone for at least a few days. While Ashley does her best to get through two classes today after her second consecutive all-nighter, I’m sitting in the Jittery Joe’s coffee shop trying to finish up my work so I can go riding later – and I’m freezing. I don’t understand it. I’m wearing a jacket and pants, but I feel like I need a parka, gloves, and a hat. 

I’m hoping to finally get going with the biking this weekend – Friday, Saturday, Sunday would be awesome.

Here’s a funny news tidbit from Slate: the mayor of Moscow has banned snow in the city. I’m still chuckling.

I hope Ashley’s test goes well. Drucken die Daumen! That’s, cross your fingers, in German.

I’m writing it right now. I couldn’t be happier. Well, I’m not terribly happy to be writing anything at all right now, but I am happy to know that there won’t be any race previews that need writing for a long while to come. That is good news.

Ashley and I are both hard at work tonight. Ashley has a big Microeconomics test tomorrow, and I have a typical race preview (Lombardia) that needs posting. I think Ashley’s work is a wee bit more important than mine. I keep getting varying reports on her success though – I’ll hear a string of ‘oh, I get it, no big deal,’ then there’ll be a ‘oh, I don’t think I’m understanding this at all.’ It’s amusing to listen to, but the general trend is definitely in the positive direction. She’ll be fine tomorrow for the test. The real question is what she’ll be like after that.

I have an answer: asleep.

Me? I’m shooting to get my work done early, so I can get out on my bike. I have to get my workload situated so that I can be on the bike during the middle part of the day and not on my computer inside.

The weather was awful today – drizzled the entire day. I haven’t seen weather like that in a long while. Gave me a chance to play with our new Garmin 705. That thing is awesome. I think this little GPS will get me out on my bike just so I can play with it. It’s incredible.

Ok, back to work.

We’re back home. The drive back to Athens tallied up to just under 8 hours, which was fairly good considering the rain that followed us most of the way home. I’m thinking 7-8 hours will cover the range of 95% of our drives to and from NOLA.

Ashley thinks that her interview went really well, so I think it did too. Ha. She looked great and confident when I left her to do her interview. For some reason I wasn’t invited. Fine. I didn’t want to go anyway.

After the interview, we ran a whole bunch of errands around campus, but finished it all up with some great Vietnamese food and bubble tea. Dessert was a new lens bought by the gift certificate winnings from Ashey’s photo contest win last year. Did I ever mention that? The gift certificate has been waiting for Ashley for going on a year now, but we finally picked it up, drove over to the camera shop, and bought a lens that I’ve been eyeing for a long while: a 50mm f/1.8 prime lens. It’s awesome. The price was perfect too: the gift certificate was 150, the price was 146.80. Yahoo.

The drive home was another good 8 hours of chatting. I said earlier that I’d be happy if the drive home was half as much fun as the drive to NOLA…well, it was at least as fun, so I’m really happy.

On tap this week? I’ve got to ride today, because the weather coming our direction looks horrible: they’re talking 3-5 inches of rain tomorrow with another front coming later in the week. Sigh. I’ll pass the time catching up on editing, testing, phoning, and lots more. Ashley shouldn’t be too bored this week – she has a paper and two tests to look forward to.

I bet we’ll be spending some time at the bookstore. I love the bookstore.

Ok, back to work.

There’s one thing I absolutely cannot complain about when it comes to my life with Ashley (well, I don’t really have anything to complain about) – it’s never ever boring. Right now, I’m sitting in Ashley’s sister Christi’s house working on EuroTrash Monday and a vast assortment of other stuff. That means we’re in New Orleans.

Yep, we drove down Saturday morning. Ashley has a big interview with the Fulbright committee on Monday morning (I guess it is Monday morning right now). It has been a long process to get to this point with Ashley’s application, but she has done a wonderful job bringing it all together. She just read me her ‘final’ essays and they sound pretty damn good. We won’t find out for a good long while whether she gets the teaching assistantship or not, but if she does, we’ll have a very distinct plan from about September 2010 to summer 2011. We’re crossing all of our available limbs…hoping. It would be a great opportunity for Ashley and a great opportunity for us to give it a real go at living in Europe, specifically Germany.

After her interview in the morning, we’ll get back in the car and aim for Georgia. We should hopefully be home early Monday night, which is good, because Ashley has class the next morning. It’s an adventure, a fair bit of work, but it’s a lot of fun for the most part. I don’t think I’ve ever had such a fun 7.5 hour drive than our trip down here on Saturday. If the trip home tomorrow is half as fun as Saturday’s drive, I’ll be pretty happy.

In other news, I’m keeping up with my work: writing, editing, working on a lot of tech stuff for PEZ, and even biking. I’m in the middle of a really interesting test comparing the SRM, PowerTap, and iBike powermeters. The iBike software allows me to graph all three at once. It’s a pretty unique opportunity to be an all-out bike geek for a little while. Yeah, my news isn’t nearly as interesting as Ashley’s. Oh well.

Alright, time for some sleep. We have to get up in a little over five hours.

Fingers crossed for Ashley today!!

These aren’t anything special, but they’re the result of a new tripod, a 2 yard piece of black velvet, and some painfully slow editing. It’ll all pay off with some good tech pics for PEZ soon…I hope.

Anyhow, it’s getting late, which means it’s time to start a movie.

We like Up!