Tuesday, November 27, 2012

thanksgiving mischief

Well Thanksgiving has come and gone, my Christmas tree is already up, I've made a Christmas play list on iTunes and the shopping for presents has begun. What's that got to do with riding? Nothing really but I feel as if that's all that's been going on in my hood, not much riding at all.

Melinda's been off the bike due to a procedure she had a week ago and my lower back has been a mess so I'm pretty much taking this time as time to try and get all healed up and stuff. I've been plagued with back pain for a couple of months now and I'm afraid it means I'm in serious need to make some changes in my life style. It sucks yes but at least this isn't happening during the peak of the warm weather riding season.



Whether I like it or not I made the decision to put gears back on the FROG, I don't like it and I don't think it's the cause behind my pain but I realize it's definitely not good for getting better. Will I ever go back to one effing gear? I don't know right now, hopefully yes but it won't be anytime soon. Right now even riding gears hurts, basically anything that puts stress on my back hurts.

I'm officially taking the rest of this week off the bike and seeing how I feel this weekend. What I am doing is anything that doesn't bother my back. So far that's been hiking, yoga, push ups & pull ups. I can still stay in shape and get in a good workout without pain so I'm feeling positive.


Thanksgiving, my entire family made the trek into NE TN and we had a good time hanging out, eating too much and shooting guns.








 My Dad has started quite the gun collection and he brought them all in for our annual Thanksgiving turkey shoot. No turkeys were harmed in this event, no animals were harmed. There was one certain dog that almost got shot accidentally when we didn't realize he had gone into the tall grass behind the target area.



Our victims? About 4 to 5 cases of cheap, brightly colored soda and some random aging furniture we found in my brother in law's shed.



We shot all kinds of guns from .22 rifles, .38 pistols an SKS and a few other big pistols.



It took some prodding but I finally got Melinda to join us this year. She would only shoot the .22 rifle but she was pretty good at it.
 I would have hated to be one of the neighbors while this was all going down. I seriously hope we didn't ruin any Thanksgiving dinners or post turkey naps.






Oops I almost forgot, I did take Ocho on his first trail ride yesterday. I was anxious to see how well my mechanic skills are coming along when I put the gears back on the FROG so I took it and Ocho out to Warriors for a test run and some much needed puppy exercise. How did he do? Terrible, but that's to be expected, he's never seen me on a bike other than the back yard and he's only 6 months old. It was a short ride, less than 3 miles with a long swim break halfway through at the lake. As long as I stayed in front of him everything was good but put him out front and the hound in him slows down every 50 feet to see what that smell was.

Hopefully I'll have riding stories to tell after this weekend, fingers crossed.


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