Around 1pm today, I took off with my bike and drove up to Enterprise to go for a ride. When I got out of the car in Enterprise around 2pm or so, the wind was blowing quite a bit. I was a tad worried. Little did I realize that it was a tail wind riding out of Enterprise on the way to Beryl. I thought it was coming from the North West. Either way the ride up to Beryl was quite a nice one. The roads were well maintained, zero potholes, and flat.. very flat.
Here is the ride that I took. After I turned around up at the top by the railroad I realized why it was so fun. The tail wind. Now, coming back I was going straight into a head wind. Painful. It took forever to get back to the Beryl Junction, where I took my rest at the Elementary School. After 10-15 minutes of rest and a cliffshot, I realized that there were 11 more miles to go.. and it would be a painful 11.
Anyway, it was slow going. Finally my quad’s freezed up around mile 5 and I couldn’t pedal without searing pain. Then the same for my calves. ugh. I ended up walking a little bit, until it was soo painful I couldn’t. I just sat on my bike on the side of the road for a few minutes until the swelling went down. Walked a little more, and then some guy stopped and offered me a ride for the final 5 miles or so.
So yeah, fun ride. Half of it was, anyway. I did about 42 miles or so myself. It felt like I also bonked (lack of nutrition). Also got a nice burn on my right bicep. Good stuff.
I don’t know how many times I stay up late and watch Letterman (yes, in HD.. see last post). But last night was one of those nights where I sat through most of it. The best part of the night were the stupid pet tricks. After they rolled out the pee-resistant rug, Dave brought out “Theresa Carden” from Buffalo, NY and her bearded collie of 6 years, Roswell.
I was expecting one of those stupid pet tricks where a dog does something mildly funny, however, I was in for a surprise. The trick was that there were 10 frisbees thrown around the rug and the dog was supposed to stack them in his mouth as he picked each one up. Ideally, he’d have 10 frisbees in his mouth at the end. Unfortunately, this was not the case last night. Roswell started to get two frisbees going but, I guess, got stage freight. Stopped picking up the frisbees, twirled around his owner on his leash, then eventually just dropped the frisbees in front of Dave. Finally, he had enough of it and started for the side of the stage on his own. The owner couldn’t seem to make him stop, so eventually she got pulled along with him. It was quite the hoot. I couldn’t stop laughing. I’m not sure if you have to had ’seen it’ to laugh. Or if it was just late and the pending sleep was setting in, but, this was good stuff. I tried to find a video posting of the thing, but was unable to 
Anyway, if you find yourself on Letterman with your dog doing a stupid pet trick.. make sure that your dog is used to a band playing, and plenty of lights and people looking and clapping while he’s supposed to be doing his trick. Nothing more silly than flying into NYC to have your dog make you look like a fool on national TV. However, I think it might be amplified in HD.
Since I have written many-a-time about the lack of the available Over-The-Air (OTA) HD channels in St. George, I thought it might please those few readers of mine that there is now another channel broadcasting in HiDef. ABC channel 4 came online just a few short weeks ago. It’s not ‘true-HD’, but they’re upconverting the signal, however, it’ll do.. for now.
I’ve been bugging Cody @ Skyview Technologies who has the ‘in’ with those that bring HD to the area about the subject quite a bit. He mentioned only recently that Fox13 should be getting here shortly. In fact, it’s already being broadcast from West Mountain (a really big mountain West of Ivins/St. George that has a ton of antennas on it) into St. George. I tried to pick it up for the season finale of “24″, but failed to get signal. So it should be a sure fire thing that it’ll be installed before Prison Break returns to Fox this fall. Good thing too.
For those of you that haven’t experienced the blissful heaven that is what we call HD, you are truly missing out. Go buy yourself a HiDef TV and if you already have one, get an antenna so you can get these OTA channels for free. Speaking of free, that’s one of my big drawbacks to the Dish/DirecTV packages. I can not get the local HD channels alone. I have to get a $29.99/month package to have the ability to get the HD channel package. Oh and then I have to get the HD receiver which is more. But oh yeah, I’m into this DVR thing, so I like to record stuff while I’m away for later viewing pleasure. More $. Ugh. So, I’m living with my appointment HD-TV for now. Rumor has it, I can build me a MythTV box to pull the HD OTA streams, but that may be a project for another day.
More posts later…
