Journal Entry

Dear Diary:

What a week's it's been. Started the week by riding outside four days in a row. 33 degrees on the week's first ride while up in Door County, warming up each day and ending with a lovely 64 degrees on the fourth ride in which Russ and Barry joined me for a glorious 40 miles in, around, through and over the Holy Hill area. It's a little early in the year for tough climbing but it felt so good to work up an honest sweat - thanks to the warm temps.

The next day work responsibilities required that I make a quick trip to Minneapolis. Boy, do the leg's get stiff and sore if they're stuck in a car for 5 hours the day after a tough ride! The long drive up gave me an opportunity to take this picture of some rock formations in the Wisconsin Dell's area;



And right then a semi swerved into my lane and I realized that I should be paying more attention to my driving.



A night at the hotel gave me an opportunity to see An Inconvenient Truth, that Al Gore movie. Three things jumped out at me Dear Diary, and this is what they were;

1) Every world ending cataclysm that our former Vice President portrayed was done by taking each possible outcome into the worst case scenario, to the Nth degree. Like this; if this goes bad and this goes bad and this goes bad and this goes bad and this goes even worse, well then, we're going to be in a world of hurt. The trouble with this method of portraying possible outcomes is that the viewer fatigues of worst case scenarios. Plus, how likely is it that every event will transpire in the worst possible way at every turn with respect to the environment? And it makes Gore look like an alarmist doom-sayer instead of a thoughtful individual.

2) There was a 20 minute stretch in the middle of the movie that was designed as a mini-biography of Al Gore. It portrayed him as coming from a simple and honest farming background (The inconvenient truth is that he was a coddled rich kid whose father was a rich and powerful Senator. All the photos of Gore as a child were on the family farm yet he only spent 6-8 weeks per summer on that farm. The rest of his childhood was spent hobnobbing with the rich and powerful at private schools in Washington, D.C. Owning a huge estate farm does not make you a farmer. Gore is a Washington insider if there ever was one.). The director also took the opportunity to show the 2000 election as having been stolen from Gore. Now, why did I find the bio odd? Because the movie is supposed to be an important film regarding climate change - why the claptrap and sympathy for Gore?

3) Included were numerous scenes of Gore flying around in private jets and being chauffeured in Mercedes sedans. There's Gore looking out the window of his private jet at the shrinking Amazon. There's Gore in the back of a Mercedes looking at temperature charts on his Apple laptop. Each scene included a close up of Gore shaking his head with the concern of a man who has the entire weight of global warming on his shoulders. A heavy sigh to signify that while the rest of us are not intelligent enough to understand the growing crisis, at least he is. And if you wondered why the Apple laptop got so much screen time it's because Gore serves on Apple's board.

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Arriving home late in the week and after missing a couple of days of riding I joined The Boss for a coffee run early Saturday. The temperatures had dropped again and it was 19 degrees out when we hit the road. We need all the miles that we can get so that we're in reasonable shape for the Texas cycling trip that's coming up later this week. During the ride I forgot that I was wearing a balaclava (that face-mask thing) and when I put the water bottle up to my lips to take a sip the bottle froze to the mask. That Dear Diary, is cold!

Before heading out to Texas Hill Country I need to go to Seattle to handle some more work responsibilities. In fact, I'm writing this at 34,000 feet on my journey west. It's the first time that a post has been done away from home base. This will serve as a dry run since I plan to make numerous entries during the Texas cycling trip. I hope that the laptop is up to the challenge. Well of course it is. It's an Apple!

To prove that I'm writing this en-route take a look at the video below of the take-off from Milwaukee. After seeing the shadow of our plane climbing up you'll see Lake Michigan to the east, then a turn west.

VIDEO OF TAKE OFF

Is it a violation of rules to use a small video camera on an airplane? Oh Dear Diary, I hope that no one alerts the Federal Aviation Administration.