Doe-eyed and Dangerous…
June 22nd, 2007
Cute little things aren’t they? Don’t be fooled… we have bears, mountain lions, rattlers, and don’t forget the most fearsome creature… the human… but none are so dangerous as the deer. Why? Well, at least none of these others make a habit of jumping in front of you on the highway. Deer on the other hand are thick and plentiful around here, and few of them have any conciousness of roads and cars at all.
Shiva and I were driving home the other evening, and… you guessed it… we (I) hit a deer. Or maybe the deer hit us. At any rate my first indication that something was wrong was when Shiva took a sharp inbreath… and a millisecond later something streaked across from the left and went thud on the front right corner. We almost missed colliding. I checked the rearview mirror and the deer was making good progress in the direction it had come from, but the right hip was in bad shape. Nothing we could do.
As bad as the deer are here, they are nothing like the kangaroos in the Australian outback. Most of the drivers there have huge bars mounted on the front of their vehicles, like this:
The interesting thing is that our truck, after surviving without a scratch for 20 years, has now been munched on the right front corner 3 times in the last 8 months. That seems like a strange coincidence… but I sure am glad I never got it completely fixed!
About the land we were looking at… We hooked up with a great realtor (Frank Reed) who helped us find out some more information. It looks like most of the other wells in the area had to go down to 800ft or so and even then they got feeble flow. The one closest to the property went down 1,000 ft and got a lot of flow. Being the poor folk we are, this is rather discouraging. We are looking at $20k just for a well when we figured $10k would be enough. We are checking on the possiblility of doing a wellshare… but this is rarely done in this neighborhood because when you are building a million dollar house, the cost of having your own well is trivial… so why go halves with your neighbor? It looks like the guy with the 1,000ft well has it down in the valley only 200ft from where we wanted to build, so that one would be convenient for us. We are also checking on easements and things.
I’m starting to suspect (again) that I’ve had some weird overtraining syndrome going on since before Gila. A couple of weeks ago I thought I was getting over it… but now I’m getting worse. I haven’t been riding that much and haven’t done any high intensity intervals at all, but now I’m getting sick again when I ride. I’ve done several rides in the 50-55 mile range, but none longer. 55 miles didn’t use to be long at all, but ever since Gila (and actually during) I start to fall apart after 35-40miles. My legs turn to rubber, I ache all over, my head is foggy and throbbing and it feels like I’m missing some important chemicals in there. Seems like the bonk… but since I’m eating and drinking and not going that hard, I should be able to ride *all day* without that happening. But it does… everytime. I really don’t have a clue what to do about it… just hoping it gets better.
On a brighter note, some people in town have put together a TT race on Tues nights just a few miles from our house… and it is a blast! I love having some competitive motivation to go out and ride hard once in awhile. Thank you Klaus and Karen Zoeller and your son and daughter for putting this on! It is an out and back course on Airport road… about 10 miles total. The first half is usually very fast being downhill with a tailwind… and the last half is where the suffering happens. But somehow it seems like it was fun anyway…
