I guess that crashing your bike is one way to get a week off work. I’m sure that there are easier ways but I’m trying to turn a frown upside down. Aiva and I went to the Chemist to buy bandages, gauze, tape and disinfectant (all the usual New Years Eve party supplies). While the doctor was explaining how to change the dressings on my road rashes Aiva passed out. I’m not kidding. Needless to say, she’s not a nurse. I had hoped that Aiva would be able to change my dressings for me (2x day) but after the fainting incident I was a little wary not to mention that she was feeling sick and snotty. I had a terrible night and only managed about an hour of sleep as I had the maximum recommended dosage of Codeine. Aiva however, was vomiting in the bathroom all night. That’s right, time to play:

"Who Can Be More Miserable?"

Craig - 3 major road rash points (still oozing), bruised ribs, bruised arm, limping like a zombie, injured wrist and a smashed camera. Required a crutch, tetanus shot, x-ray, bandages, antibiotics and enough Codeine to sedate an angry Rhino.

Aiva – Pharyngitis (really awful sore throat), infected tonsils and sinuses, vomiting throughout the night, random fainting, zero energy, has to put up with me. Required to be horizontal, throat lozenges, antihistamines, nasal spray and enough antibiotics to kill every living organism on Earth.

I’m calling it a draw. Mainly because Aiva is in bed trying to sleep (I can hear her hacking up at least one lung) and I feel bad starting an argument just for entertainment.

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The Christmas season had many highlights but this year the ‘corkscrew’ took out top honours. Craig was very excited to come to Adelaide for Christmas and to get some training rides in for the Tour Down Under. I managed to organize a peloton of 10 riders to challenge the Adelaide hills and the corkscrew. The corkscrew is a ride in Adelaide that twists and turns it’s way up through the hills at a punishing steep gradient. It is a pleasant ride for those who enjoy full body suffering.

It’s ride day and we have ten starters - by the time we reached the top, the corkscrew has claimed one. Craig finishes strong and is pumped - finishing just off the podium in fourth place. Just to make the top without stopping is an achievement. From there the ride is long from over, we now have to climb to the highest point in Adelaide – Mt Lofty. It is a continuous push until a well-deserved coffee at the top. A little caffeine rush is just what you need for the lightning quick and sweeping downhill ride home.

Someone slams down his coffee and we are off. Just enough time to grab today’s paper and shove it down our tops – it is summer but combining the altitude of Mt. Lofty and 70kph speeds coming down can cause the wind to bite for the first few kms. The start of the ride is magical - if you were to throw down a piece of cooked spaghetti that is exactly what the road looks like. The peloton of nine begins to split. Corner after corner the pace quickens. I can feel Craig hot on my back wheel. We hit a rare straight part of the road and Craig races by me. I glance at my speedometer and I am doing 60kms, I jump onto his back wheel and pedal like a madman just to try and hold on. Up comes a sharp right hand corner and we lean hard to take it – I ease off, Craig accelerates. Within a blink of an eye he loses his traction and the bike shoots out from under him. He is down on the asphalt but still gaining speed. The sound is metal grinding; the smell is a mix of lycra melting and barbeque. I pull on my brakes – Craig is still sliding, luckily the road ends and a gravel edge starts. It wipes off a bit of speed but is still does not stop him. Luckily, his skin finally slows him down and he comes to rest with his feet still clipped in to the pedals and wheels pointing to the sky.

I immediately pull Craig out of the way to inspect the damage to the bike – he has loaned it to me to ride when he is not in Adelaide. Thankfully, the bike is fine as Craig managed to cushion its fall. It is still 15 kms home - Craig jumps back on the bike and we race home to a scrub brush and beer before the adrenalin wears off.

It was the best roadie stack I have seen and I give it a 10 out of 10. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

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It's official. I'm scared of spiders. I have always had a strong dislike for the arachnid family as a whole but moving to Australia has really solidified my feelings. In Sydney a huge amount of spiders are poisonous which would account for the decreasing dog population. Most Aussies can tell you if a spider is poisonous after a cursory glance. I however, have not witnessed all the different varieties of Aussie spiders nor do I want to take the time to start identifying them at close range.

After work the other day I was getting changed when Aiva shouted from the kitchen "Did you see the spider?" I was frozen in place mid-change, shirtless with my belt and top button of my pants undone. After surveying my current location I began to make my way downstairs like a seasoned espionage ninja commando. I didn't hear Aiva screaming in agony therefore she was either fine or already dead so I continued my methodical search and destroy mission into the kitchen.

I could see the spider on the sliding door blinds from 20 feet away and it was the largest one that I had ever seen in person. Aiva informed me that the spider was a "Huntsman" commonly known as the Australian Tarantula (you can imagine how happy I was about that nickname). She was keen to just pound it to death (with my sandal) while I had a more conservative if slightly more complicated approach. It went as follows:

1. Continue to tiptoe and whisper until the mission is complete.
2. Construct a cardboard box and cover the hole in the bottom with the water bill.
3. From across the room, slide the open box along the kitchen floor (like curling) so that it comes to a stop against the blinds, below the spider.
4. Find a long handled broom and padfoot towards the spider with your arm at full extension.
5. Ignore Aiva's laughing and mocking while smiling as she takes photos (maintain eyes contact with the spider).
6. With lightning speed, use the broom to knock the spider down into the box and fold the lid shut.
7. Open the blinds and the sliding door and proceed to hoof the box into the backyard.
8. Close and lock the sliding door.
9. Wait for the praise to come flooding in and silently prepare the comeback "No big deal, just doing my job as a man" speech.
10. Keep waiting.
    

Aiva made constant reminders along the way that Huntsman spiders are not poisonous so it’s no big deal. After doing a little research, I found out that while not poisonous their bites can "cause prolonged pain, inflammation, headache, vomiting and heart palpitations". No big deal indeed.

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There have been a few interesting people in the news these days and I have spent a lot of lunches reading about them. Truly fascinating people...

Stephen Hawking - The living definition of "Mind Over Matter". Hawking is largely considered the most intelligent person of his generation and has been a leading voice in theoretical physics for decades. He is confined to his wheelchair due to Lou Gehrig's Disease and is almost completely paralyzed. Last month, Hawking accepted the position of research chair at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. His story is truly a fascinating one.

Warren Buffet - Buffet is not your normal richest man in the world, if there is such a thing. He has become very vocal recently during both the US election and the current credit crisis. His speeches are mesmerizing and he exudes a genuineness that cannot be faked. Sure he is a cut-throat businessman but he has a logical mind that the public should not ignore. Buffet's ideas to straighten out the American economy have fallen on deaf ears and predictably, so has his idea that the rich should pay more taxes.

Mordechai Vanunu - The ongoing nuclear support by the US towards Israel is under the false pretenses that Israel is still a non-nuclear power. However, Israel's nuclear capabilities were proven many years ago by Vanunu who was a former nuclear technician. He spent almost twenty years in prison for being the whistle blower. This continuing ruse of not being a nuclear power is tolerated for no other reason than money. Under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and several US laws, America would not be able to provide Israel with any nuclear related items or military weapons if it ever openly admitted to having nukes. Israel is the number one buyer of American made weapons and billions of dollars are at stake. With elevating hostilities between Iran and Israel the UN may want to address the estimated 300 Israeli nuclear warheads. With Ahmadinejad's verbal sparring and Israeli first strike tendencies, I see disaster in the making.

Jørn Oberg Utzon - Utzon was the architect that designed the Sydney Opera House. His design was inspired by the act of peeling an orange. He wanted all the external "shells" to equal a perfect sphere. After a laundry list of setbacks during construction he finally resigned before it was completed and left the country, returning to his native Denmark. 2003 finally saw Utzon recognized with an honorary doctorate by the University of Sydney for his work. He died two weeks ago at the age of 90.

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Historically, there have been many ways to test an individuals overall fitness level. Currently, it is generally accepted the VO2 max testing is the most accurate. It measures the maximum amount of oxygen the body can transport and utilize. It requires rigorous testing and only works if you have a lab set up in the spare bedroom. Lactate Clearance testing is another promising indicator of fitness. It measures the amount of work and athlete can do before lactate levels increase (lactate causes muscles to cramp up and shut down). Needless to say, not the most fun test out there. Lastly, the simple and widely panned Body Mass Index that does not take into account the "type" of person.

I have a more simple test that doesn't require a lab or blood work can be administered faster the takes for me to tell you how. I call it The Tanline Test. It's quite easy really. If you have a truly vicious tanline it generally means that you were exercising in unrelenting weather conditions for a long period of time. Chances are the worse the tanline, the more time you have spent training. Sure this isn't an exact science and there are doping techniques to skew the results (spray tans, solariums, passing out in a hammock, etc) but for the most part I think it works.

Just think about it for a moment. Olympic cross country skiers always have a brutal tanline between the sunglasses and the toque. Professional rock climbers have awful ones too between shades and a bandana. Those crazy guys that paddle across the ocean have them all over. Tour De France champions, Everest explorers, ultra-marathon runners...they all have embarrassing tanlines.

While I'm not nearly in any of those categories, I can definitely say that I'm training hard. Oh, and yes, it stings like a mutha.

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It seems like I have been cycling nonstop for the last month. I get home from work and get on the wind trainer for about an hour and watch an episode of "Dexter" on my laptop at the same time. I just finished Season 2 so I'm going to have to find a new DVD boxset because now I fully understand why gyms are always busier when Oprah is on.

On the weekends I get to pick a direction and go for a ride. I've been trying to do hills on the weekends because obviously the stationary bike doesn't quite cut it in that department. Last weekend I rode south back through Royal National Park because it was a beautiful sunny day and last time I went there I got poured on. So naturally, as soon as I started riding the clouds came in and I got rained on. I guess that's why they call it a rainforest.

I was trying to ride to a place called Bundeena but somehow I ended up 40km south and quite out of the way. I worked out great though because I was riding on newly paved, traffic free, quiet roads through heavy rainforest. It was really quite peaceful and the only sounds were the birds and my pedals turning over. I ended up at a small coastal community called Coalcliff and rode with fantastic ocean views over my left shoulder for over an hour. There is a new bridge that really is quite something to ride on. There wasn't any traffic so I decided to take the video below that really doesn't do it justice but you get the idea. I would really like to ride seaside again on a clear, sunny day but it seems like that is a tall order. Because of the wet, some of those cliff side descents would have been a lot more fun to race down without my tires sliding or my brake pads smoking.

Next weekend I'm going to go north and ride a few big hills that I was on when I first landed in Australia and see how my fitness stacks up. It could either go very well or very poorly and I wouldn't surprised by either. I have needle sharp pain in both my knees from time to time and historically that meant that I'm getting close to race shape. When the knees start to hurt when I do anything except ride then I know I'm ready...backwards I know but that's just the way it works.

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I find it hard to believe that I didn't think of this option myself. Especially considering that I've been racking my brain over how to unplug a drain without having to use a plunger or a plumbing snake. As previously mentioned, Aiva wanted us to handle this situation on our own without calling a plumber. She managed to take plumbing to a whole new level and surpass even my highest expectations.

The other day we tried a bottle of Drano which didn't work therefore all my ideas had been exhausted but Aiva stayed with it and came up with an even better plan. Three times better in fact. Yep, you guessed it. There are now three bottles of Drano running through our pipes. Where one bottle failed, three bottles succeeded. The genius was in the simplicity.

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I'm sure that I will never be a grease monkey, handyman or power tool kind of guy. I'm happy to pay people to do the job they are good at. Why would I do a crappy job when a professional is easily available? Case and point - dry walling. I'm fully capable of drywalling a room but I don't do a quality job and I'm certainly not efficient (sorry Karl). I also leave huge gaps between the boards that need to be filled in with bucket loads of mud...man, I hate mudding too. The point is, hiring someone to do a job properly and quickly is a small price to pay for me not becoming a swearing sweaty mess of dissatisfaction.

That lengthy introduction leads me to the currently plugged drain in my shower. Normally I would put a cup of Drano down the pipe and call it a day but after a whole bottle of the poisonous stuff and a colourful amount of swearing the drain is still blocked. Thus, any shower lasting longer than approximately 17 seconds results in standing in water up to your ankles.

Aiva has taken the stance that this is an issue we are capable of tackling without calling a plumber. I've had a long and mostly successful history of avoiding manual labour so unplugging a drain required a little recon. Recon equalled me sitting in bed at 10:30PM on wikipedia looking up information on plumbing snakes. This new found knowledge made me significantly less enthused about making plumbing a part time hobby.

I can hardly wait until I am on the train after work, in a suit, with a plunger in one hand and a plumbing snake in the other. It's a good look for me, I'll blend right in with the trendy kids.

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