Ready! Aim! Ride!

We had some fun Tuesday night with one of our sponsors, Angela of Deschutes Brewery, in Old Town Tempe. Quite a few too many Mirror Mirror (9% alchohol) and Abyss (11%) [pints meant that I didn't get nearly enough done Wednesday. Thankfully I finished it all today. Finished the headset installation with the retrofitted brakes and new bar end shifters. Repaired and installed the front rack. Tuned the disc brake rotors. Packed bags. Tore down the bike and boxed it for train shipment. Packed Cirque gear in the van and changed the oil. Whew! I'll miss Rae terribly and whenever we start talking about the trip we move quickly from excitement to tears. I'm sure you all know I'm the luckiest man on earth. Train to Florida tomorrow night! Yeehaw! Ready! Aim! Ride!

Should I be worried?

It's just a few more days til I get on a train to see my sister and niece in Florida. Preparation for the trip has been going well and the list of remaining things to do is dwindling. The van's in as good a state of repair as it's ever been - though I still need to find out why the temperature gage isn't working and re-center the steering wheel (both too easy to worry about). We've finalized our Cirque preparations: food list, camp list, gear list, ... check, check, check. We had a nice outdoor training /refresh session on jumaring, aiding, and rescue recently. Gear is all sorted and ready to be packed into the van. Permits have been applied for. I'm so psyched that everyone in the house is getting tired of my whoops of delight. But they're excited, too. We all re-read the Fifty Classics description of the Lotus Flower Tower and look at pictures of the Cirque - all day long. Super psyched!

Unfortunately, I still don't have my bike together. I decided to change the handlebar set-up to something that will be a lot more comfortable for my damaged wrist but there've been a few complications. The handlebars and stem sizes don't match and the shim hasn't shown up yet and I managed to break a bolt in the stem, which I'll hopefully extract and re-tap today. I also feel like it'd be good to re-inforce the bottom of the trailer. Its sidewalls disintegrated in the AZ heat last year and I'm worried that the bottom will during the trip. I'm thinking of screwing on some leftover showerboard as a skid plate - sounds cool, huh?!

On the food front, we tricked Quinn into cooking last night while we watched Butler get whooped by UConn in the worst championship performance I've ever seen. She made some super-yummy pasta and banana bread. I'd made chocolate chip cookies in the morning and plan to try a bold new recipe today: oatmeal scotchie cheesecake cookie bars!

"Earful of Beerfools"

-A day in the life of Monkey Business Mayhem-

There are two very distinct yet equally annoying reasons why I wear earplugs at work. For the last five months while living in Southern Arizona, the rock-climbing guide work hasn't quite been paying the bills, much less helped to save for an international climbing excursion. For supplemental income I've been going down to Tucson to work for Nimbus Brewing Company and Taphouse.

Which brings me to earplug reason number one; Upon walking into the factory-sized storage and bottling section of Nimbus, one is often greeted by the obstreperous blaring of Ranchero music. As Chewy(Hesus) and Franky(Francisco) grease the bottling machine, the music seems to grease their joints as they move along and sing to the beats of tuba and accordion.

Earplug reason number two; The greasy, aforementioned machine -- yeah, it needs grease. It hails from a soda bottling line circa 1956. Without grease, it wails high-pitched sound waves worse than fingernails on a chalkboard. And although the bottling machine is incessantly screaching at us, it seems to be providing something of a tutorial as well. For someone as mechanically disinclined as myself, it's been a great learning process; watching a machine fly apart, get creatively repaired, and then fly apart once again in a new and interesting way. It eventually puts out the cases and pallets of beer before they go off to the distributor. As rewarding as it is to crack a cold one after a hard day of work, I venture to say that drinking your work is even more rewarding.

When the Ranchera has become too much and the bottling ends, I remove the earplugs and strike up conversations with employees and patrons. Part-time street musicians, part-time vagabonds, full-time drinkers, and just about everything in-between. More days than not, in chatting with folks there, I think to myself, "is this a dream or am I truly hearing these words? I was recently sharing travel stories with a nutty Cajun, and out of his mouth came, "...Oh yeah, I remember the worst sunburn of my life. My buddy rented an island in Belize for a month. One afternoon I was laying in the sand of the foot-deep water for hours, rolling on thirty-seven hits of ecstasy and looking up to the sky when I felt claws all over my chest. I looked down to see a whole string of land crabs were crawling right over me. One of them had a can of Guinness Sausages and it wouldn't let me have them." -and so on and so forth, preposterous storytelling from desert rats and eccentrics.

As stimulating as the sounds at Nimbus can be, they leave me yearning for the crisp sounds waiting for us amongst alpine plateaus and massive granite towers.