first ride on studded tires

i love waiting on the cable guy. they say between 9-11a, which means 1130. but, this wait is worth it. high-def tv. we don't watch a lot of tv here in casa de la whit, but it'll be nice to have it pimpin' when we do (pats + playoffs + hd = yeah, yeah!).

the first wk of solid training went well, until saturday. now that andy is keeping a blog i don't have to re-tell the tale... but man, i was smoked! woke-up, cruised to tom's in nh, snagged a new set of nokian studded tires (thanks tom, awesome riding with ya!), raced home, mounted them, rode for 80' on the road to begin breaking 'em in, legs felt heavy then but just thought it was the studs... about 15mins into the trail ride i knew the legs were in trouble. pedal. pedal. pedal. had to keep reminding myself to keep 'em turning over, Andy's back constantly getting smaller and smaller. we were out for about 3 1/2 hours in the snow and ice of the north shore, but andy's gps only registered 142' of wheel spin time. thing is, tom and i never really stopped for more than a moment. andy may have had 80+' of stop time, but we didn't - he was on fire! in hiking boots and flat pedals no less - and after running 10miles that morning. i slept from 9p till 9a on sunday, totally wasted from the first wk of hard efforts. missed the Pats game (who cares, though, it wasn't in HD!). was also good to ride w/tom merril on sat. that dude is tough. not too many folks ride the lines as well as he did first time out on the north shore.

oil heat. it's so arcane. shouldn't complain becuase there are many places in the world w/o enough of the black gold, but here it's hurting my wallet. the oil company claims they never received my form locking-in $2.19/gallon and now i'm paying $2.53. that's really rotten. prices went-up, so they claim to lose my form locking-in the price... don't know what's worse, heating our homes with oil, spitting junk into the atmosphere, or getting dinked in the process. guess it's a double-dink.