Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Summer is here!

Yippee! Summer is here! It's the Solstice, so all the little wood sprites and Earth Goddesses are running around with twigs in their hair celebrating the new season's official arrival.

Summer also means that the Tour de France is just a few weeks away. I love this goofy time of year, with all the racing and speculation and ignorant, ill-informed punditry. "No way man, Basso can't win the Tour. Armstong is coming out of retirement the night before the race and he's gonna win!" And such...

I am going to try to provide daily Tour commentary like last year, though it happens during our National Sales Meeting, so I might have to miss a post or two. Last year was great; I read or listened to the daily coverage and then applied my own spin on the events of the day, that's all. What is cool is that many folks thought I was actually at the Tour and riding in the press caravan as an actual reporter/ commentator. I had a few folks ask about how to get a press credential for the race even. Hilarious! For the record, in full disclosure- I will not be at the event. I will be reading other news reports and/ or listening to the race and then just rehashing things in my own way. That's all. No trips to France- I just don't have the budget. However, if somebody wants to pay for my trip, I am totally ready.

Summer also means, in SoCal, brown grass and dried up, dead vegetation. After 20 years out here, I still can't get used to this. In Alabama, summer means green, green, green and lots of rain. Out here it means no rain and lots of brown vegetation. Unless you water your lawn daily, it will dry up and look like hell almost instantly. San Diego, after all, is technically a semi-arid dessert. The water here is piped in, not "native". That's the price we pay for a year-round average of 72 degrees and sunny... not to rub it in (because we also have the most expensive gas and costs of living too).

Oh well, the sun is out, the air is warm (or hot) and the riding is good! I love summer.

Tim

3 comments:

Donna Tocci said...

Happy Summer and many safe, enjoyable rides to you, too, Tim.

James T said...

Today, we have highs in the mid to upper nineties in Greenville, SC. I am sure that lower Alabama is at least a few degrees warmer than here. I always like to say that I couldn't live somewhere with a constant temperature, but 72 degrees does sound pretty nice. Still, I would miss those August days with 100% humidity and a temperature very close to that mark. Sometimes those Alabama thunderstorms that come out of nowhere feel pretty good, but the air always seems even hotter after the storm.

But I am not telling you anything you don’t already know. I am sure that you miss those Alabama summers every so often while you are riding in paradise.

Yokota Fritz said...

Huh? Lance is coming out of retirement?! He'll blow the rest of them away! Then the French will all have a conniption, and that French newspaper will invent some new scandal to print about Lance, and "Race2Replace" becomes irrelevant, except they'll figure out a way to spin the latest developments, and Jan will give up again, and Basso will have somebody to challenge him, and Hincapie will have another year of sitting in Lance's shadow, and .....

Oh, it's not true? Never mind...