In one life mix:
- One tall, dark, handsome guy
- His deep, chocolate brown eyes
- His beloved bicycle
- A bouquet of rich purple and indigo blue gladiolas sticking out of his backpack
- A smile a mile wide as he stands in the door to hand you the flowers
- A bar of organic dark chocolate mixed with ginger in the kitchen
- Him loving to see you smile
Mix gently with lots of love. Store in a glass jar forever.
I had a dream last night that a bunch of us were vacationing in some busy touristy town on the water, kind of like Martha's Vineyard. I locked Rosemary up to a bike rack with a hundred other bikes so we could wander about on foot. For some reason I didn't get back to her until the next day. I found her at the bike rack locked up with a new lock and with a cotton candy pink disk wheel on her rear end with various prices written on the disk wheel in colored markers (I couldn't tell what the prices were). I was furious so I stormed into the shop she was locked in front of and demanded to see the store's owner. A fat, middle aged slob came out and said that I had left her there for too long and now she belonged to him and he was putting all the bikes on the bike rack up for sale.
"She's not for sale!" I yelled at him. He countered that she now belonged to him and he'd do what he wanted. Incensed, I tackled him and we wrestled and tumbled all over the ground in front of his store with me yelling that Rosemary was mine and not for sale and he bellowing that she was now his.
Finally, still twisted in a heap on the ground, I reached between his pant legs and grabbed his small, squishy nuts and twisted them enough to grab his attention. "She's not...for...sale!" I yelled again. "Do you understand that?"
The fat slob, realizing the severity of his position, finally relented that I could have Rosemary back and I let go of his squishy nuts and walked off to my bike.
The end.
The bike stork dropped off a bundle of joy on my doorstep whilst I was away this week. My new 2005 red Surly CrossCheck, courtesy of my dad's hot eBay hands. He won it by $2.50!! I'm going to strip off those obnoxious stickers, have it powder coated red with gold flecks and I'll call it "Mon Petite Pomegranate." I'm stoked for CX season. Give me another shot in my rump so I can get a movin'.
A much needed indulgence after a long, stressful week. After downing half the pint I eventually shared with my Sweetie. mmmmmmm Phish Food. I love that marshmallowy goodness. Thanks to Mr. D for the pic.
I saw my doc today to go over my lab results from 2 weeks ago. I had asked her to test me for any and everything because I was still not convinced that all my fatigue was adrenal gland related. I don't work 80 hours a week, I don't have 3 kids, I don't work on Wall Street. My life is pretty stress free. So she agreed that there could be a virus behind it all and tested me for Mono, Epstein-Barr, Lyme's disease, and celiac disease.
When she opened my file she looked at me and said I had the highest levels of Epstein-Barr that she's ever seen. Then in the most serious tone I've ever heard from her she said, "You need a month of bed rest and you need to stay off that bike."
Wha??? I told her that I've been feeling really good though! I've even thought of going back out to the track to play around and to start a bit of running to get the legs ready for CX. She was totally perplexed at how I could be feeling so great with these numbers running through my blood stream. "Well, ok," she said. "If you're feeling better then you must be doing something right. Just keep taking it easy and listen to your body, but don't go overboard. If you're recovering this well you should be back in no time."
Whew. Evaded that sentence. Continued fat-and-lazy therapy plus lots of good vitamins and weekly shots of a vitamin cocktail in my rump.
So what is the EBV and how did I get it? May never know. It's a chronic, mutated form of the regular Mono virus, which I must have picked up at some point, months or years ago. When the body is put under severe duress, it wells up as the EBV. Most people are put on serious bed rest and it takes months to recover. I can't imagine what my numbers must have been like back in May when I was so fatigued it left me in tears. How I've managed to recover is a mystery. Chalk it up to mass dosages of Vitamin Z.
One theory is that I may have picked up some Mono while down at Katrina last fall, and then some sort of stress this spring made the EBV flair up. What kind of stress? Hell all I was doing was training for track. Nothing I haven't done before, but my immune system may have been compromised enough to make me this vulnerable. My doc said that in conditions like the Katrina response, the body's immune system is extremely vulnerable to infection. It happens very often in emergency personnel and the military. In fact, she said that the Gulf War Syndrome is thought to be linked to the EBV, and the Iran hostages from 1979 developed the EBV. Once they were set free and brought home they were able to make a recovery.
Now I'm not putting myself in the league of Gulf War veterans or political hostages. If I got this from doing some good in the Gulf Coast, I can live with that. Just getting the word out that it's a very common virus linked to high stress and can mask as a plethora of other ailments. Now I'm on the road to recovery and riding my bike. Lots.
Now that the CM thing has calmed down a bit I can lounge around on my bed catching up on what our Emerald City friends have been writing about the past week. Like I've emo-ed before, the support of the local cycling community has been so humbling this past week. Seeing what our friends have taken the time to write is, again, emo-ific.
- Wright Bros opened their shop as a drop-off area for witness statements and typed up a little blurb on their web site about the CM Showdown. Nice to be in the company of hot vintage bike pics on their site.
- The men of Cranked also put news about this event on their Clog. Thanks for getting the word out via your sweet mag yo. Plus y'all look so damn fine in a suit. Yo mamma would be proud.
- Bikeseattle.org had two newspieces, one with KUOW's report on the second hearing, then another about Ron "I 8> CM" Sims condemning the arrests. Too bad bikes can't vote, Ron.
- Alastair over at .83 has volunteered to put on a fundraiser race Sunday, July 30!! If I have my way, you'll be hauling around town finding witnesses, doing shots at Wright Bros (my gift to you), getting paper cuts making a thousand copies on the xerox machine, and getting your mug shot taken at the King County jail.
- And the week wouldn't be complete without a post by the coolest rocket scientist EVER.
Talked to my man tonight, who is finding some solace in the high desert safe with another extension of his family and friends. He called and it was raining heavily outside, a warm summer storm like we never have in the PNW. He walked outside so I could hear the rain better. The drops pounded the ground and sounded like a wall of water coming over my phone. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the lightning brightening up the entire sky over his head. Deep sounds of thunder rumbled a few seconds later, vying for attention from brother lightning's electric show. I told my man to sleep with his windows wide open tonight, the sounds of the clean desert rain baptising him anew.
Blah blah blah blah. Maybe it was just a slow news week around town? Or maybe people really give a shit about what happened to us? Either way I can't help but feel like a little kid who made a little stink about something and now the grown ups are all in a tizzy about things. Considering the gravity of this little stink, that's ok by me.
Charlie's managed to make a collection of the news coverage.
This is so surreal it feels like we're in the high school newspaper. Kids like us don't wind up with our pics in the city papers:
Seattle Times @ the rally
Seattle P-I @ the rally
Seattle Times photoshoot (starring Freki from FGG!!)
Best word crafting of the week, from the closing paragraph of the Stranger's article:
"Two weeks from now, (Zack)is supposed to present his University of Washington graduate thesis in mathematics. Overnight in prison, he played chess with other inmates using ripped up scraps of paper."
But nothing, NOTHING, beats having The Don of editorial cartoons, David Horsey, do a cartoon about you [insert little kid snickering at how crazy surreal this is]:
We released several troubling photographs to the press, but these are more personal ones that I'm happy to share with my own little world. Many thanks to Denny for his thoughtfulness in capturing them (and my ass). These are the very happy moments when we busted my man out of the pen, then took him to Myrtle Edwards park to bask in the evening sun and to take a salt water cleanse, per his mom's advice (of course we also heavily advised not ingesting any of the water).
Well this has been an interesting week. To put it mildly. I can only relate the intensity to the initial days of the Hurricane Katrina response when at first we had no idea what was going on, then once we did and got into full fledged response mode there was no stopping the synergetic energy of working towards a common goal. Sleep? Nope. Food? Nope. Adrenelin? Extra heavy helpings please. It was an all out assault to get information into the command post and then out to the decision makers to solve problem after disasterous problem.
So I guess I was trained pretty well to deal with this past week. In the world of ICS (Incident Command Structure), which is used by all federal agencies to respond to any event from oil spills to forest fires to terrorist attacks, people are given specific roles to complete essential tasks that provide the information and resources to get the job done. At various times during the week I couldn't help but think I was working in my own little ICS land. This week starred (in actual ICS roles, not that they knew or cared):
Incident Commander - The coordinator, the leader - Guess that was me
Legal Council - Keeps us out of trouble - David our attorney
Information Officer - Coordinates with the media - Charlie the Tireless (I want what he's on)
Safety Offcer - Ensures a safe work environment - Guess that was me again since I prevented the Seattle Times photographer from breaking his leg standing on a broken chair when he was doing Zack's photoshoot. I made him stand on a cooler instead and made sure he didn't break that either.
Volunteer Coordinator - Ropes the volunteers to do all the sharking and odd jobs - Me again
Finance Leader - Keeps tabs of the money - Lee the Faithful
The Command Post - The warroom where the IC works - That would be the idyllic home of Zack's mom out in Fall City. Ample cell reception and Internet connection allowed us the freedom to become grounded walking in the thick green grass, holding a black kitty, playing on the swingset, and nibbling on blueberries.
And there were all the other players who filled in to keep the cogs turning: Joby, Neil, Denny, Ashley, Davis, and Ilsa, plus all those who were just there providing unspoken support and love. The energy that surrounded me is the only thing that kept me going all week. It was an enormous battle, but we won it together. I can't begin to say how grateful and humbled I am by all of your support. I thought that my work at Katrina and the teamwork I enjoyed could never be duplicated, but this has come damn close, and without all the nasty disaster stuff on the side.
Ironic how this all happened over the Independence Day week, but Zack's family and I celebrated it as Interdependece Week. We couldn't have done it all without you!
