6:00pm: My boss wouldn't let me ride back to the car shop with the impending monsoon and flash flood warnings, so he gave me a ride over. I want to go for a short run (I love running in the rain) but again, flash flood warnings aren't cool. I think I might just do some yoga later, though I might also just take it easy and some of that so-called tapering business. I DID actually register for the tri on Sunday, btw.

9:10am: The Tank is still fun to ride. I have to raise the seat up a bit though, as for some reason it feels low to me now. This is not actually an easy thing to do, as it requires a weird size wrench because the aluminum lug structure requires you actually take the seat off to adjust the seat height. As Sheldon Brown (that old crotchety fixed gear [bleh] advocate) writes: "Instead, they used a seatpost with an expander wedge like that of a handlebar stem...you had to remove the saddle from the seatpost to adjust the height, then re-install the saddle! Even sillier, many of these frames had what looked like a conventional seatpost bolt mounted in a projection of the rigid lug, simply to provide a place to mount a cable stop for the center-pull caliper brake!" Yeah, the Tank is tons of fun.

The ride to work was actually not so bad at all, as I found a shortcut through an apartment complex parking lot to ride through so I don't have to ride down the part of 48th St that doesn't have a bike lane. I've done it before and it is a little sketchy since the Ahwatukee SUV soccer moms are often speeding and on cellphones and drinking Starbucks and yelling at their kids all at the same time.

Did I mention the Tank has been hit by a car before? With me on it? And nothing happened to either of us, other than a very slightly bent rim on the bike? Yep.

I don't want to know how many things are wrong with my car.

7:30pm: Short swim to test out my sports bra / tri shorts configuration I am going to use at the sprint tri on Sunday. It didn't really seem to affect my times that much but it did feel kind of weird. It was also a crappy swimming day in general, one of those days where I just don't seem to float right. I also have water stuck in my ears now. Hrmph.

I am biking to and from work tomorrow from the car shop, since I am going to drop the Volvo off to get the a/c fixed. I am guessing there will be like 8402342 other things wrong with it. The bike ride is like 5.5 miles each way, nothing major. I am thinking of taking out The Tank to ride on, which is my mom's old stainless steel Kabuki (Bridgestone) that I inherited after she forgot how to ride a bike (it had been sitting in the garage for at least fifteen years when I got it). I used it to commute all the time in Boston and every now and then in California and now it's just been sitting around. It actually rides really, really smooth and fits well and is super fun... it just weighs like 30 lbs. It's some sort of bike relic, as someone actually offered me $500 for it once (hello, cult of Bridgestone) but I can't bring myself to sell it.

In other bike news, Z dug out some clip-on aero bars out of his random bike parts box for me to use on Sunday. I've never used aerobars before. This seems like a bad idea but I figure I'll take a short ride with them and if they feel okay I'll leave 'em on. Apparently, they are also some sort of bike relic, as they used to belong to Greg Lemond. Yep. I am not going to do them justice.

8:35pm: Ah, Monday. More semi-crises at work, then I got kicked out of the (indoor) pool because there was lightning outside. The explanation was that all the pools were connected by the same water system or something... ah well.

Since my workout ended early I went over to Tribe to pick up a race belt. I've never been to Tribe before but it looks like an all right place, though I think I like trisports.com in Tucson a little better because of my love of clearance racks. I recognized the house framebuilder and his wife from the Handbuilt Bike show Z and I went to a year and a half ago. 

Drove out from Tempe to the Manker Flat campsite just north of Mt Baldy Village. It was a pretty uneventful drive except my finicky air conditioning decided to die for the hottest part of the drive, and I found out my passenger seat no longer moves back and forth - I think the seat motor is dead. That happened to the driver's seat and it was a $300 repair... guh. Time to take the Volvo in for some repairs. We stopped at the Yard House in Palm Desert for a beer and some food and had to wait 20 min and then got semi-crappy service, so we didn't get to the campsite until around 12:30am. My sister and her friend Will had already been there for an hour and a half and were about to go back down the mountain to call us. Z gathered up some firewood and we roasted marshmallows and drank some port (the $7 Porto Morgado from Trader Joe's is surprisingly decent - think a very slightly less good Warrior, for half the price) and crashed.

There was a bizarre sign right outside of Blythe (a totally dead town on the California side of the CA/AZ border on the 10) advertising "microsurgical vasectomy reversal". We also saw some parked car makeout/humping sessions while driving up Mt Baldy, which was pretty entertaining.

8:25pm: Kinda sore and not enough sleep. Had to wake up early to get my tires balanced at Discount Tire. Taking a rest day tomorrow to drive out to Pasadena, hiking on Saturday, not sure if I'm going to do anything on Sunday.

I need to practice bike->run transitions and see how swimming in my tri shorts works next week. I don't really have any specific goals for this upcoming tri other than to see what an actual race is like. I want to not freak out during the swim, not blow up on the bike, and run through the whole run. 

There were a lot of hot guys at the pool today (who actually were swimming). What's up with that?! Not that I'm complaining.