Stevie's blog

By this time of year, some days it's almost too hot to run so in addition to biking on the road, I get a few workouts by going into the woods.  For a few of us, recreational riding on dirt trails leads to amateur racing.  If you're not a off-road rider and have seen pictures or video of an off-road race, you might wonder why someone would do such a crazy, painful-looking thing.  Because it's fun!

Animal Planet time!

Unbeknownst to the rest of the US, some of us in the central-eastern area are up to our eyeballs in cicadas.  Cicadas are grasshopper-sized bugs measuring about 1-1/2 to 2" long.  Every so many years, they crawl out of the ground and swarm around.  They're sometimes mistakenly called locusts but the're not the same.  The larvae of these things burrow at the bases of trees and come out like clockwork at regular intervals depending on what "brood" they are.

I hate it when I regret a decision I've made.  Most bad decisions I have been able to live with - I tell myself there's nothing I can do about it now.  Learn from it, live with it, and go on.

But there is one decisions that I had made in my past that continues to still haunt me.  There was this girl I gave up right after my senior year in high school.  She had it all - pretty, understanding, sweet.  She was my first real love.  Everyone wanted her and I was the one that had her.  I found a picture of her today when I was cleaning up an area in the basement for my wife's new "office" and I've been in a remorseful, melancholy funk all morning over it.

A few people here who have stumbled across some of my posts know that I run and I'm sure some wonder why someone would do something crazy like that. Running is fun, keeps my weight down, keeps my energy up, the associated heart-rate gets me high, and I like being outside.

I wasn't athletic growing up - I was a band geek. In high school, I was on the track team for approximately two weeks. They talked me into joining because they needed someone else to run cross-country. Two other guys and I ran a nearby golf course after school every day. We had an established training routine - warm up, stretch, start running, stop at the green on the 3rd hole, smoke a joint, and then run the remaining 15 holes. It was killing me! I didn't see how those guys could run so fast. I couldn't run that fast just jumping into this cold, much less running while stoned. So I quit.

Some of you know I'm opinionated and I like to hear myself talk.  What's better than a GUG blog?  Haha!  So... I'll try to keep it light.  Probably write about my hobbies - running injuries, bicycle wrecks, guitar/music, maybe a little computer stuff.

For my first blog, I'm linking to a picture I took this morning from my upper deck.  The back of my house overlooks a small valley holding a wooded creek and a tobacco field.  I haven't decided how to landscape my backyard yet, so it's still a "blank canvas".