Nothing But Crickets

I know it's been way too long since I've posted here. I'm probably just talking to myself. Wait, what else is new? :)

But I gotta get this rolling again for summer, when I'll actually have a life.

In the meantime, I've had two consecutive back injuries that have kept me off the bike since my ruined trip to Fruita in October. I won't even try to describe how frustrating and depressing this has been , since nobody likes a whiner. But I will say that I've been spending WAY too much time here:


The lovely Boulder Center for Sports Medicine, where I have been contemplating life's meaning while strapped into this medieval device:


Traction is strangely relaxing. You get a harness strapped around your chest (woe to the girls with the big boobs) and another around your hips, and then the machine pulls the two apart. Ahhhhh.

Also slowing down my life (for what -- eight weeks??) was this:


So let's just hope that the rest of the mountain bikers around here have screwed up their training as much as I have. ;)

Since I've been down for the count, I've been trying to write that book on photojournalism. I've spent many hours looking at this:


The writing process has been really enjoyable, actually. It's made me reconnect to some of the deep-seated reasons that I became a photojournalist -- just in time to attend "the sky is falling" meetings about the dire straits of the journalism industry. Yay. You kids in journalism school make a run for the business school while you still can.

So my life has felt like a kind of "Groundhog Day": Get up. Go to work. Try not to fall on ass in Daily Camera parking lot. Go to physical therapy. Form a close and personal relationship with Advil and the floor of my apartment. Abuse caffeine while working on book. Go to bed, get up, start over. Drag friends out whenever possible, but discover that people are seriously hunkered down with NetFlix. Ponder subscribing to NexFlix. Remember the torture of watching "Failure to Launch" (which has a hilarious "mountain biking" scene that made me almost regurgitate my popcorn) and go back to working on book. Space out in endless fantasies of travel, mountain biking, and good-looking men. Realize I'm still here and sigh in disgust. Repeat.

I did take some time for fun, though, most recently by going to the Boulder Mountainbike Alliance black tie fundraiser. Some local celebs showed up: Jeremy Horgan-Kobelski and his wife Heather Irmiger:


Giro d'Italia winner Andy Hampsten and University Bicycles owner Doug Emerson:


And as for me, I pulled out my 1940s-era dress and accessorized with the usual hardware:



It was also an opportunity to wear the necklace my mom gave me and actually buy cute hair gadgets, something this tomboy hasn't done since middle school.



The other freakin' fabulous thing is that the cold weather finally headed out to the East Coast for a change. Today my coworker Josh and I did assignments on foot to bare our bumpy white flesh to the sun:


We wandered around together for a few minutes, since we're usually never able to do that; Josh oogled the co-eds out on their afternoon run while I got jealous watching people ride by on their bikes. Everyone looked ecstatically happy to be out in the warmth.

But I heard it's going to snow again this weekend. Sigh..... and repeat.