Animated

I made the mistake of not looking at the symphony program prior to Friday night's concert. It was a pretty common "evening at the symphony" line-up featuring:

Rossini - Overture to The Barber of Seville
Mozart - Violin Concerto No. 4
Tchaikovsky - Symphony No. 4

It is almost impossible to think of the Barber of Seville without thinking of one of the all time, cartoon classics.

It saddens me to think that kids growing up these days will likely never be exposed to the classics, neither the Looney Tunes variety nor the musical masterworks. Oh well, their loss . . . In addition to the quality of the line up Friday night, the guest conductor provided some top notch entertainment. I have yet to figure out the conductors real purpose because I have never seen a conductor perform so horribly that the musicians could no longer read the music on the sheets in front of them. Giancarlo Guerrero was one of the most lively conductors I have ever seen in action. Even his exit from the stage was energetic, with a little vault off of the conductor's stand followed by a full trot to the wings of the auditorium. In the picture below, he's about to take flight.


I also managed to get out for a couple rides this weekend, unfavorable forecasts be damned! Saturday, I headed up to Boulder for a ride with Brian and Chuck. It was a pretty standard ride minus the fact that Chuck had sold his road bike already and was riding the fixie. Nothing like watching somebody come down a steep hill at about 150 RPM and still go for the town line sprint at max cadence. He didn't take it, Brian shifted into a gear beyond Chuck's capacity in the 46x16 and collected maximum points.


I am still envious of weather forecasters in Colorado. I want to be wrong most of the time in my job and suffer no consequence. Not just wrong, but horribly wrong, almost to the point where I have started planning for the opposite of what they say will happen. The shot above was from the first "bump" on Golden Gate Canyon Road . . . looks like a pretty nice day and it was. Both Joey and I were over dressed on Sunday. Vests and arm warmers would have sufficed, but we both had our thermal jackets which ended up not being too terrible.

A perfectly lovely ride went south when we turned around to come back down Golden Gate Canyon. About midway down the descent, I heard the POP-PING of a spoke breaking on my front wheel. I rode it out and came to a stop to assess the damage. The wheel had a nice wobble and hop to it, good argument for a 32-spoke wheel for training purposes! Everything was rubbing pretty badly, but we were also out of cell phone range to call in for reinforcements. I limped my way down the hill and about the place where cell phone reception came back there was the BOOM of the tire wearing through and the tube violently exploding. We called in the rescue and waited in the wind that was getting progressive chillier, the longer we sat. Thanks to Matt, we didn't have to wait too long. I have to thank Joey for not resorting to cannibalism, especially since his bike still worked and we were mere miles from civilization.

I tried to give myself a warm welcoming to the work week this week.


It is going to take more than just fresh bread . . .