Good weekend, overall. Nothing too exciting happened Friday night, except I went to happy hour with some coworkers at "Kaya":http://www.bigburrito.com/kayawebs/. Some belgian white was drunk, and probably some inappropriate comments were made. All in all, a fun night. Saturday was an "alleycat race":http://www.pabstville.20m.com/ around Pittsburgh. An alleycat, for those of you who don't know, is an underground bike race, organized and mostly run by "messengers":http://messengers.org/.[1] "Everyone":http://feralboy.textamerica.com/?r=565079 "met":http://feralboy.textamerica.com/?r=565089 at The Point downtown around 2, we each paid $5 ($6 if you didn't have a helmet), and we were off at 2:30. The format of this race was a little different than the one I did "last time":http://feralboy.textamerica.com/?r=448441; the previous one laid out your route along with your checkpoints, but this race you were just told what your 15-odd checkpoints were, and your final destination, and you had to figure out the most efficient route yourself.

"Brian":http://ankle-biter.net/log/ "was there":http://feralboy.textamerica.com/?r=565095, which was good, because I had someone that knew parts of the city that I didn't, like the North Side. Also, he was riding his "fixie":http://www.fixedgeargallery.com/2004/janaszek.htm, which meant that me riding my bike with all the gears had at least a chance of keeping up. There were checkpoints in all of the neighborhoods near downtown, so we hit them in this order: South Side, back Downtown, Strip District, North Side, Bloomfield, Squirrel Hill, and then ending in Oakland.

We got a little lost on the South Side, and ran into a messenger from Columbus named Randy. He had gotten separated from his buddies somehow, and was totally lost in an unfamiliar city, so he came along with us. Actually, it was Brian and Randy leading, and me gamely puffing along behind. Randy also provided me with the heart-stopper moment of the day. While going over the 16th St. bridge he was riding no-hands and hit a pothole and veered right into the bridge guardrail. Somehow he managed to straight-arm the guardrail and snap himself back upright, but I had visions of him getting splattered all over the road.

The rest of the checkpoints were uneventful, and it was a nice tour of the city, going from the "historic" adult Garden Theater on the North Side up to the beautiful campus of CMU, and everywhere in between. I guess our route wasn't the most efficient, because there wasn't anyone there to give us paper slips at the last two checkpoints, so we just headed to the finish, which was in "South Oakland":http://www.soufoaklin.com/.

The finish was at someone's "house". I use quotes around "house" because it was a "house" only in the sense that it had a door, walls and a roof. Inside it was the most disgusting thing I'd ever seen. "Utilitarian" would be way, way too kind. There was a half-assembled bike on the living room floor. That was the only furniture. The back porch had about 5 trashbags full of empty "PBR":http://www.pabstville.20m.com/ cans. The stove was beyond description, which is why I took "a picture":http://feralboy.textamerica.com/?r=565503. I braved a trip inside to get us some "victory" "beer":http://feralboy.textamerica.com/?r=565499. The "victory" was in that we didn't come in last in any of our particular categories: fixie, regular, or out-of-towner. (BTW, pounding a beer as a water substitute is a Bad Thing(tm))

Yesterday Brian, Jen, "Seb":http://ankle-biter.net/anklebiter/ and I went bouldering at Pioneer. It's not my favorite place to climb, but the weather was so beautiful for a change that it didn't matter at all. Didn't do anything exceptional, save for a cool V5 cave problem that involves doing a _long_ throw to a small crimp edge and pulling off of that, pretty much one-handed. I was feeling the effects of the race still, so a pretty low-energy day. Stopped at Sheetz on the way home (MTO, baby!), and then settled in to watch Sopranos and Deadwood. I'm still not convinced about Deadwood... the characters are really starting to develop, but I don't know if the underlying story is going to be enough to hold my interest.

And finally, I slept like utter poo last night. I think the "stress":http://feralboy.com/log/archives/000978/ of last week finally caught up with me, and I had fun sinus issues Saturday night and all day Sunday that finally turned into a cold last night that kept me up most of the night. Argh. I can't wait for spring to be here for good. Every year I have sniffles pretty much from October through April, but I'm hoping that the clear Boulder air will do me good. Oh, I have news on that, too... but that's for another update.

fn1. If you want to see some alleycat footage, check out "this guy's site":http://www.digave.com/videos/. Of particular interest are the "drinking and riding" and "NYC" videos. The NYC one especially is some of the scariest footage you'd ever want to see.