February. Is it over yet?

Hello peoples.  Two weeks since my last post.  Whew time flies.  I dont even have anything to write about, but I have to make an effort to write about something otherwise it will be 2 months.  

Winter finally started dropping some snow--its pretty cool to be swimming outside in a blizzard!  I should add that to the list of perks of swimming at FAC that I outlined in my last post.  Also, I have ridden my bike to school every single day since I have lived in colorado = 2.5 years.  Rain, snow, ice, nothing can stop me.  One time I rode through about 14 inches of snow!  This is a shot from this week on the way home.  No big deal really.  It gets a little slick.

I have kept the swimming up and recently have been collecting swim caps.  As I mentioned in the last post about swimming, the coaches include Dave Scott and Simon Lessing, and each of them run their own coaching business which they promote through swim caps.  Haha.  I was getting a lot of crap for my old cap which is orange and see through (sorry Joanna), so Simon gave me a cap to wear (Boulder Coaching).  Well, that cap was not kosher at Dave's practices, so he gave me one too.  Now I have to make sure I wear the right cap on the right day!

Oh yeah I dont think I wrote about this yet, but one of my roommates Ginna is in school for acupuncture and other Chinese medicine rituals.  She is like a witch doctor (Sorry Ginna, I am a chemical engineer, I cant handle non-science (though I certainly do believe in the placebo effect...)).  She works on Rob and Nate sometimes (my other roommates) but I dont let her touch me with any of them needles.  Why?  Here is a perfect example.  I come home from school one day and she is lighting her foot on fire.  Literally.  With some herb that smelled a lot like marijuana.  She is a runner (which is why I still love her (plus she is super nice)) but I think she was trying to remedy a case of plantar fasciitis? I dunno if it worked, but it blew my mind.

Besides that, I also failed to mention in my last post the awesome law classes I have been taking.  So, just to be clear, I am still doing a PhD in Chemical Engineering but have finished all the coursework required for that degree--more than a year ago--so now I just have an undefined amount of research in my future.  So, just for fun, I have been taking energy policy classes in other departments, and last fall, I took Energy Law in the Law School.  It was mind blowing.  Of all the different departments I have now taken classes (both in undergrad and now in grad school) including engineering (duh), the business school, environmental science, environmental policy and law, law is by far my favorite, probably because it is also the most erudite.

And, my professor has a PhD in science as well as a J.D. so I think he has a soft spot in his heart for scientists.  Anyway, he convinced me to take Environmental Law with him this spring.  I am such a sucker for learning; I signed up.  Law school is sooooo cool!

Maybe it is just because I have a flipping amazing professor, but I have learned more in these two classes than in anything else I have ever taken, I think.  Well, I probably learned a whole heck of a lot in graduate thermo but not much of that applies to everyday life...plus it is still kinda fuzzy what exactly we did learn...it was all abstract stuff like partial derivatives of thermodynamic properties which honestly make no real physical sense anyway even though pretentious enginerds pretend that they do; dont let them fool you.  (Rule of thumb: just because someone's area of expertise makes no sense to anyone does not mean they deserve deference.)  In contrast, law is just rational thought applied to everyday circumstances.  Its like, "Joe Schmoe is angry because his land is now covered in toxic chemicals from the chemical factory that got built next door."  Its like yeah I get it Joe, I would be mad too.  Figuring out the solution in terms of the law can be complicated (and funky) but the circumstances of the case are pretty easy to understand.  

Anyway, reading for the class is taking all my spare time, but I am also ramping up the piano playing as of late.  I recently learned Requiem for a Dream, the theme song from Peanuts, Moonlight Sonata, and Dawn (theme song from Pride and Prejudice haah).  I am working on Claire de Lune, but its pretty tough, not gonna lie.  I have a tendency (OCD/perfectionism/possibly both) where I cant stand learning the watered down version of piano music because I feel like I would be offending the original composer, but in the case of Claire de Lune, I really dont know how it is physically possible to even hit all those keys with only 2x hands.  Claude DeBussy must have had like 4 hands at least.  When it feels too daunting, I just look up and Mohammad Ali tells me that impossible is nothing (I have had that poster since high school).

Also, I am having some serious problems right now because my electric keyboard has only 76 keys (though it was only $50 on craigslist).  Naturally, all of these pieces I am learning pretty much require the full 88.  A real piano is kinda out of the question at this point, but one day I will have one... mark my words...

Rudy

My new Blue. Its black. And has red components.

As promised it has been less than 3 months since my last post.  Read it and weap momma.

One of the new advancements of this spring is that I have upgraded my bike.  Back in 2011 at Age Group Nationals, I had the fastest overall bike split and "won" a Blue Bike Frame.  After sending +/- a zillion emails to various employees of Blue, I never received a frame and so I entered 2012 basically giving up.  Then, I had the fastest bike split at Collegiate Nationals in April 2012 and "won" another Blue Bike frame.  So at this point, I emailed them and was like, look guys, if you just send me one full bike (not 2x frames) that would be cool.  I even contacted the CEO to try to light a fire under their buns.

So finally they said ok yeah they would send it in May...I wasnt fooled.  I tried to put it in the back of my mind for the summer and sure enough, after "warehouse problems" and "shipping problems" and large chunks of time without contact, I finally got a bike in November approximately 15 months after "winning" the first frame.  Better than never I guess! I still got a brand new bike although, looking back it was hardly free--for the time I spent contacting them and the value of the bike it worked out to about $3.50 per hour which I am pretty sure is less than minimum wage.

Anyway, when I "won" the 2x bikes they put you up on stage in front of everyone so every random person seemed to know I should be getting a new  bike and have been asking about it for like 15 months.  So here you go, here is the story.  I finally can say yes it came.  And here are some pictures.  They ended up sending me their limited edition Matte Black frame so it looks pretty cool, but it doesn't actually have red components like they said it would, surprise (it has SRAM force).  Still, they have won this battle, I concede, I am not sending it back to them.  By the time they got back to me there probably wouldn't be roads anymore.

And of course the old Cervelo P2 is now out gunned.  I got the Cervelo back in December 2008 and have ridden it all over the US, won a couple national championships on it, got 16th at Hy-Vee on it this year, taken it on century rides--not to mention all the quality trainer rides we have had together.  In deciding what to do with it, I was talking to my friend Drew Scott who said that his dad Dave still has his first bike that he raced Kona on back in 1980.  Its probably steel and has like 5 gears and some downtube shifters.  In short it is pretty much worthless to anyone except for the personal nostalgic value it holds for Dave.

I know I know its sad but, I decided that although that bike and I have had some great times together that it was time for it to move on and get on with living its life.  So, I sold it to a nice guy who promised to treat it well (I think he could tell it was meaningful to me).  I figured, (a) this guy could get good use out of it or (b) it could sit and collect dust for a couple years by which time the value and usefulness would inevitably decrease leaving me with a rusty dusty outdated unridden bike that would be viewed as 'junk' by anyone other than myself.  (Its probably good too since I still have like 5 bikes.)  Maybe I will even see it out there on the roads sometime!  Until then, it will be remembered:

Besides the bike news, my dad recently sent me a bar of dark chocolate.  Normally this would not be noteworthy, but in this case the bar in question weighed 5kg or about 11lbs.  It has like 125 servings, 30,000 calories (roughly) and enough caffeine to jump start Sonya Sotomayor's rate of speech from its dismal state of 40 words/min to the audiobook recommended level of 150 words/min (I'm speculating but the world can only hope).  I also ate too much last night and couldn't get to sleep until like 4am...

If you want one for yourself, good luck... the bar was imported from Belgium.  My hobiless dad (to the endless vexation of my mother) apparently has nothing to fill his time since there are no more soccer tournaments and little league baseball games, so he started going to this french bakery every morning at like 4am (since he apparently doesn't sleep either).  Now he and the baker are BFFs and this baker imports all of his chocolate from Belgium because it is of higher quality than is obtainable in the US.  He gave my parents a chunk of a bar at one point (which was sitting in our freezer at home) and over Christmas I pretty much demolished that stash.  Sensing that I like dark chocolate, my dad arranged to have a whole bar sent to me!  HAH!  11lbs...it will  probably last me like 3 weeks.

Side note, the bar is like 2 inches thick so you cant bite it and you cant break it.  Apparently my dad cut his with a band-saw in the garage (which I think is terribly wasteful), so I got a chisel and a hammer and have been shattering mine to get it into bite-able sizes. 

Thats all for now, hopefully my arteries wont clog up with saturated fat before my next post. (Each serving of the chocolate bar is 50% of daily value).

Rudy