getting ready to pedal the plains!

I just finished packing for the pedal the plains trip! I'm feeling pretty good considering I haven't had much time to ride my bike. Well, what ever happens happens, I need to work on having fun doing stuff instead of trying to make everything a physical torture fest (though, I find that fun...what's wrong with me).

Even if everything goes to shit and my knee blows up or my hip flexors kill me, the beer garden is open from 9 am to 9 pm.

In other news, today I finally went to a Rockies game. I've walked past stadium I can't even estimate how many times (a lot) but the thought of baseball never appealed to me. But my company gave me a free ticket so I decided what the the fuck. I went with a bunch of my colleagues and two colleagues that were in one of the work movies I made showed me around the stadium. It was so cool. I definitely want to go back there again and I feel bad that my dad suggested we go to a game when he was in town and I declined...

My colleague P, who was a great collaborator on my work movies, patiently answered all my baseball questions (he has kids, so he's used to annoying questions). He also insisted I try a pumpkin flavored micro brew (the bartender said "if you don't like it throw it on him and I'll get you what ever you want for free" - P said "did you give him a bigger tip than I did?").

I found the stadium (which was only a quarter full) totally relaxing. It was cool to watch the pitchers warm up only feet away from where we were standing (you can go to this one part of the stadium and look down into their dug out thing or what ever it's called). And it was a pretty fast moving game for, I guess, a baseball game. I understand now why people have told me that it's better to watch in person.

I had a chicago hot dog for the first time (I was assured that it was beef, no pork). A chicago hot dog has cucumbers, tomatoes, hot peppers, celery salt, relish, and brown mustard on it. The CTO of my company, who was sitting behind me, said "I have never seen someone eat a hot dog with a fork" (it was too big to fit in my mouth - insert joke here). My colleague D laughed, because he's chinese, and he said "great, I have no experience eating this kind of food and I get sat next to the one american who doesn't know how to eat a hot dog".

Eventually everyone sitting around me was jumping in with baseball facts to increase my knowledge (there's a row of purple seats in the stadium that mark exactly where a mile high is, there's numbers on the fence to show how many feet away from the batting mound a ball has been hit, each player gets to pick their own theme song which plays for a few seconds when they are up to bat, you get points if you hit the ball and someone gets a home run, that's called an RBI).

Right then. Off to put my knees through electroshock therapy. Stay tuned for updates on the ride...