The new bike arrived today! It's sick light and covered in bling, courtesy of Sports Garage:
I guess this means I am now a member of "The Tribe," as Yeti owners like to refer to themselves. :) I haven't named this bike yet; I need to ride it a few times and see what its personality is like.
Yeti the company is based in Golden, which is cool. That means that both of my mountain bikes are from Colorado companies (even if the actual frames are made in Taiwan). Here's the Yeti headbadge:
And here's a peek at the lovely new XTR derailleur and wheels:
I would like to publicly thank my sponsor, the Joseph R. Caivano Foundation, for his immense generosity and his patience in listening to me freak out about my financial situation. I dedicate this racing season to him!
Another great thing about today is the weather. The snow that was predicted never showed, so I got to ride outside -- yahoo! I didn't even care that it was windy. I can't even describe how great it feels to be on the bike and outdoors again. Being injured and trapped inside for so long made me feel half dead.
A lot of what I love about riding outside is just noticing things. A lake I passed had ducks out exploring the half-melted surface:
There was also a guy standing by the bike path with an SLR camera and an enormous lens, probably a 600mm, photographing prairie dogs, of all things. I almost stopped and said, "Wow, that's a really big lens," like dumb people always say to me, just to irritate the hell out of him, but decided to spare him at the last minute. It's bad enough he was taking pictures of rodents in really bad light.
More good news: the Maverick folks have decided to use me for their ads! I'm very excited. I go in for a photo and video shoot next week, so I need to get a haircut and run through some possible things to say besides "My Maverick is, like, way cool, dude." Actually, they're wanting me to paint a picture of myself as a maverick, too, and then explain why the Maverick bike and I are a perfect marriage. I need to put some more thought into this and try to make it really compelling. They already liked what I wrote, but I want to show up with several options in my head, ready to say in a compact "sound bite" kind of way. They sent me a sample of the print ad:
Thank god I'm too broke to get into motorcycling, because this would probably tempt me.
I don't get the comment about how the bike would piss some people off. That doesn't make any sense. Unless he's referring to other bike makers, who might get mad they didn't think of such a beautiful way to solve the problems inherent in suspension design.
Update on the Karen Rodarte story: We're in a substantial dilemma about her family's status in this country. They're illegals, as you might have guessed, but they've begged us not to print that, obviously. But the trouble is, if we do that, we're leaving out an important fact, and we ARE journalists, after all. Now, we could just let readers figure that tidbit out for themselves (it's pretty obvious, since the family has no access to medical care), but then so could the INS or anyone else in a position to deport them. They MUST be aware of the risk in talking to us, I would hope...but maybe they're not clear on how public this story will really be. So, I've taken a break from shooting any more photos, because this story could very well get axed altogether if we can't figure out a way to deal with this. Obviously, I would feel tremendous guilt if they got kicked out of this country because of us, when they desperately need to be here for Karen's treatment. I mean, I have my own conflicing feelings about illegal immigration, but this family is already here, and Karen is highly unlikely to get what she needs in Mexico.
In the meantime, I really need to get on the ball with doing an audio slideshow about SOMETHING. Folks in the newsroom have definitely noticed that Mark and Josh are the only shooters tinkering with multimedia so far.
Speaking of work, I won second place in the Colorado Associated Press Editors and Reporters contest for Portrait/Personality with this picture:
I've just started entering contests again this year. I've always found them kind of meaningless, especially in Colorado, where there just aren't a lot of newspapers. There's only about four papers in our circulation category. The next category up is even more lame: The Denver Post, the Rocky Mountain News, and the Colorado Springs Gazette. And I'd be willing to put money on the fact that the Gazette's circulation has fallen below 100,000 Sundays, which would actually put them in our category. And then the Rocky and the Post are owned by the same people anyway, so....what's the point? ;)
But one thing that was cool is that CAPER made a Best in Show category this year, and Todd Heisler from the Rocky won with this amazing photo:
(Sorry it's so small; I nabbed it from their website.) It's from a story about the soldiers whose job it is to deliver the bad news to families. Go here to see the whole package, which is an incredible example of great journalism and use of multimedia. http://denver.rockymountainnews.com/news/finalSalute/
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