Grounded: gravel, gauze, and self-deprecation...

Excited that the grandparents were going to watch the children overnight, C and I quickly planned a ride together.  Though they are the greatest joy of my life, the kids are also so young that they can also be an impediment to riding.  Someone's got to watch them, of course.  But, it is going to pass, and all too quickly, so I will never complain that they need me.

I wanted to try a maintained trail of some kind so I could get the hang of the shifting on the new bike.  My husband had sold his cx bike when we moved back down to civilization but a quick tire swap on one of his road bikes and he was trail-ready.

Ready to roll

They say you never forget how to ride a bike and that's sort-of true, but it had been seven years since my last ride and it did feel a bit strange, if euphoric.

I had a huge smile on my face after the small, muddy descent and the few branches I rode over though I was later jokingly admonished for doing so with no patch kit on board.  Ha.  Oh, well.  I felt like a kid again, exactly what I wanted in the first place.

Bellatrix in her natural habitat

I was getting the hang of the shifting on this new bike and even enjoying the surroundings.  C pulled up beside me and then it all gets a bit squirrelly.  I've still got no idea how or why it happened, but down I went.  I do remember the fall in slow-motion, like all good tumbles.

Trixie was fine.  That's the first thing we checked.  I knew I was banged-up but okay.  We washed off the blood and some of the sand with water from the water bottles and kept going.  "It doesn't even hurt," I noted, somewhat surprised.

Haha, oops...

A mile down the road I stopped.  We were at a road-crossing and I realized it was going to be a long haul from there on out.  I was still bleeding and the adrenaline was wearing off making it obvious that I had actually hurt my shoulder and should probably ice that.  We bagged the ride and headed back.  I was disappointed (understatement).

Of course it was worth it.  I only sprained my shoulder and I the road rash healed pretty quickly.  I have mad nursing skills from my husband's old spills.  I have a very physical job and I spent the week doing my eight-hour shifts one-handed.  That was probably the worst of it right there.

Cool sling

I'd like to regale you with tales of all my subsequent cx adventures, but I am still working weeknights (when the local group rides go off) and my husband is in serious training for a pretty big goal so he hits the roads for hours and hours at a time.  I'm super impressed by his determination.

So if anyone wants to take an enthusiastic newb out on the trails, I promise to be smiling the whole time and to always laugh at my own foolishness.  I mean, that's kind of me in a bizarro nutshell: equal parts stubborn grit, childlike enthusiasm, and extra hearty servings of self-deprecation.  I don't know any other way to be.  Let's play!!

Don't "George Lucas" your blog!!

I'm on this whole don't overthink things kick.  Trying, anyway.  So, my blog postings are usually written all at once and then, pretty hastily, published.  Just get it done!  While I sit around (aka run myself ragged with my odd working shifts and the kids) and wait for something else to write about, sometimes I think about prior postings.

Oh, man.  I really should have used this picture instead of that one.  

You know, that was a weird phrase.  It never seemed right, let's try again.

Should I add a follow-up to that one about the thing I wrote about that one time?

Most times I do sneak back and edit.  Hey, why not?  It's my weird little world and I build and destroy as I see fit. 

My husband caught me tinkering and shook his head.  "You don't want to 'George Lucas' it," he said, "people don't like that."  Actually, I think he said that people hate it.  Hate it?!  Hmm...

I asked him for an explanation of 'George Lucasing', so here you go:

<<<<<<<<<<<<zzzztttttttttt>>>>>>>>>>>>

We now interrupt this broadcast…

Greetings fellow readers of this blog.  A recent blog post by my lovely wife was nearly altered after the fact until I told her not to George Lucas it.  As she is not the lifelong Star Wars aficionado that I am, she was not as familiar with that concept as say the folks in The People v. George Lucas (as an example).   Twenty years ago, George Lucas re-released the OG Star Wars Trilogy.  As Randall says in Clerks 2, “there is only one return of and it’s of the Jedi, not the king.”  The fanfare surrounding the Special Editions as they came to be known was that it would be the first since 1983 that these flicks would be seen in theaters.  The other big news was that a scene filmed with a human stand-in aka a proxy for Jabba the Hutt would be re-inserted and a CG Jabba would be used.  It was big news and we were all excited for it.  And then we weren’t.

It became apparent that George had decided to change things up that weren’t needed.  The two most egregious issues were Greedo shooting first and missing at point blank range and the dance sequence in Jedi.  Han Solo is a drug smuggler when we meet in A New Hope.  Greedo is a low level bounty hunter and not a successful one at that sent to bring Solo alive or dead to Jabba.  Shenanigans ensue and Han walks away.  George wanted to soften Han, hence him shooting Greedo was now a response.

I won’t even discuss that shitty dance sequence in Jabba’s palace.  Or the “NOOOoooooo” that Vader now shouts as he tosses Emperor Palpatine down the reactor shaft in Jedi…

There were some good changes, Cloud City was altered and opened to show it as more spacious and open to the air.  The X-Wings leaving Yavin and flying to the Death Star.  Hell, even the inclusion of Hayden Christiansen as a force ghost at the end of Jedi was a nice touch.  But then there were things that weren't changed or fixed, like when Han comes out of carbonite still looks cheap and the computer graphics in the first flick.  Ugh.

So long story short, George Lucasing is when you change something creative after the fact and regardless of how many good changes, all it takes is two egregious bad decisions to ruin it all.

"No one is even going to notice," I waved him off, "nobody is going to read them twice, anyway."

As I write this to you, I am sitting on a photo I plan to add to my last blog post because I found it, and it's better than the one I used.  What's the harm in that?

I'm just going to think of these digital ramblings as living documents.  If I wait for perfection, nothing will ever happen.  Like now, I'm going to hit "publish" and be done with it.  Unless I think of something...

In the end, whether I edit or I don't, I think we all know:  Han shot first.