Of all the funny things that happen to your body as you age, the inability to control flatulence may be the least mentioned (at least in polite circles, of which this is not one).  You youngsters may want to avert your eyes lest you be scarred for life because it only gets worse from here. 

I wonder sometimes if I could effectively rejoin the workforce as a serious, middle management, paradigm of conservative values, leader and motivator, office manager all the while emitting audible puffs of rose-petal fragranced farts.  (Seriously, even Mike tells me that mine don't stink.  Do you think he's being perfectly truthful, or does he have some undetected ulterior motive?)

Another bodily function that doesn't live up to expectations is bladder control.  In my youth, I could ignore the demands of my bladder almost indefinitely.  Once I flew all the way to Hawaii, after two cocktails, without a trip to the claustrophobic cubicle that passes for a restroom in coach class.  Why, you ask, would one subject themselves to possible kidney damage by deferring such an essential bodily function?  That's another story but suffice it to say, I didn't want my fellow passengers to speculate as to why I was making the trip down the isle.  Yes, I was completely self absorbed.

And then there are the more sinister ways in which our bodies betray us.  Our lovely breasts, the tender mounds of fat tissue so delectably topped with nipples so enticing, harbor insubordinate cells; cells that have an agenda completely contrary to the seductive and nourishing original purposes of our titties. 

Breast cancer.  There I've said the words out loud.  When my dear friend announced to the clerk in the prosthetic boutique that she had BREAST CANCER and needed to select a post op camisole, it felt like the shock wave of a bomb blast.  Never mind that we had already faced the idea of the mutilation that was to come.  Saying the words to a shop clerk, as if we were dropping off the car for an oil change, felt like walking past the smoking crater left by an IED.   

I could tell you how amazing it is to see your friend make hard choices, how stoically she bears the trauma to her body, how courageously her family gathers at her bedside, but nothing I can tell you will prepare you for when it comes into your life and happens to your friend. 

I read an essay written by Tony Snow about his thoughts when he was diagnosed with colon cancer.  (see the link below)  I didn't always agree with Tony on political issues but I always admired his intelligence.  Evidently, he was a man of strong religious conviction, which I am not, but we had similar thoughts on the effects of catastrophic illness on the human spirit.  In essence he said that life-threatening struggles enable us to live our lives most intensely.  Our purpose on earth, our relationships, and our faith in what lies beyond our sight, all come into high definition clarity when we face our own mortality.  And face it, we all think of our own mortality when someone we know is struck by misfortune, as selfish as that sounds. 

 http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2007/july/25.30.html  

So, you know I've been doing volunteer work at the senior center which is about 200 yards down the street from my house.  It gives me the social contacts and sense of purpose my life has lacked since I lost my job as an office administrator and took up organic gardening.  As soon as the Senior Coordinator discovered my talents (breathing and able to navigate on a computer) she put me to work.

Once a week I assist with a digital camera class, teaching seniors to download pictures from their cameras to their computers and other related tasks.  Most of our students need help with the basics so we try to have one assistant for every one or two students. 

The woman teaching the class is a middle aged woman, impeccably coiffed and attired.  She's not stuffy but she is very proper and professional (unlike me).  She was showing this elderly gentleman how to edit his photos on Shutterfly.com.  She likes their photo editing program because it has a "thinning" feature that she finds useful. 

Shutterfly automatically accesses your "Pictures" files on your computer and displays them on the screen.  Whoo boy, you can see where this is going, can't you?  So while she's explaining the various editing features to said elderly gentleman a photo pops up on the screen of said elderly gentleman sporting Viagra induced wood.  I'll leave it to your imagination the discomfiture of the gentleman.  The teacher tried to calmly explain to  him how to exit that photo while averting her eyes.  Eventually, he managed to close that window and she soothed him saying "No problem...none of my business, etc." 

Trying to maintain a sense of normalcy, she proceeded coaching him as if nothing had happened.  But, as luck wood would have it, Shutterfly runs a snapshot slide show in the upper corner of the screen and soon she was treated to a sequence of photos from the same file.  Of course the old dude was so flustered he couldn't even figure out how to stop the slide show so she had to take control of his joystick mouse pad and terminate the show.

I think we may have lost a student.  Or maybe not

It's 3:00 in the afternoon and I'm sitting in front of the TV with a bag of potato chips.  I had every intention of mowing the lawns and working on the VHP interviews, but the TV whispered to me every time I walked past it. 

First thing this morning I couldn't help but notice the glow of the orange "recording" light on the DVR but I forced myself to go for a three mile walk with my next door neighbor.  (I prefer to run but she is carrying a little bit more weight than I am and finds walking to be more comfortable.)  Then, since I was already hot and sweaty glowing, I found the discipline to mow the back lawn. 

I was looking for an excuse to quit when Mom asked if I would take her shopping for a new Lazy Boy recliner.  It's so rare that she wants to go anywhere or buy anything that I happily agreed.  But first, she wanted a hair cut.  No problem, I don't mind cutting her hair if she doesn't mind looking like an orphan.  I do worry that I'll be reported for elder abuse when strangers learn that it was me who did that to her but she refuses to allow a hair dresser to do it.

We bought the first chair she tried and $700.00 later we were headed back towards home.  The freeway onramp was backed up so I decided to take Redlands Blvd. which took us past Kool Cactus Cafe, where they serve the best squash tacos and grapefruitade in town (actually it's the only squash tacos and grapefruitade in town).  Mom surprised me by agreeing to have a taco too.  Normally she refuses to eat anywhere but at home.

Are you starting to get the impression that my mom is a bit eccentric?  You would be right.

After a quick stop at the bank and Trader Joes, we hightailed it for home, just in time for Mom to watch Judge Judy, her favorite TV show. 

At last I picked up the remote and settled in for Versus' three and a half hours of Tour de France coverage.  I napped intermittently, waking for the amplified commercials and dozing off again by the time the race coverage resumed.  Today was the team time trial stage and, like the Oscar award ceremony, they start with the lesser teams and work their way up to the teams that everyone is watching. 

The course was exceedingly technical and, as Lance had predicted, there was carnage.  Thankfully, I slept through much of it because it involved some of the teams that went off early on.  Subsequent teams learned from the mistakes of others and managed to find new places to wreck.  One poor fellow even caught a wheel on a straight section and went down at about 30 miles per hour, barely escaping being run over by his teammate who was on his rear wheel.  Another team decided to branch off into mountain biking on a particularly tight curve.  That didn't work out so well for them as there was a small ditch that their rigid road bike frames used to buck them off.  It looked like a garage sale but nobody was injured.

Englishjules' lad, Mark Cavendish, dragged his team over the finishing line, hardly able to rein himself in enough that his teammates could hang on to his slipstream. 

Team Astana did what every Lance Armstrong fan hoped they would do.  They put the pedal down and won the stage.  No, not just WON the stage, they made up forty seconds on the team that was in first place and are now tied for first place.  Cancellara retains the yellow jersey by a fraction of a second.  He's goin' down!

This has got to be the most exciting Tour I have ever seen.  In part it's because Lance is back and everyone is curious to see if he can come back after a four year hiatus.  But that's not all.  There's the personal competition between the Astana riders, Armstrong, Contador, Leipheimer, all of who are legitimate contenders for the win in Paris.  Nobody knows yet who will be supporting whom by the time they come down from the mountains.  And there's the Columbia dream team and a couple of other teams who will take advantage of every mistake or mishap that befalls Astana.

If I haven't whetted your curiosity about cycling just a tiny bit, then I've failed to convey the exciting complexity of the sport.  I know of no other team sport that places such high value on intelligence and maturity.  Maybe that's why I like to watch it.

The most exciting event is cycling is on again, the Tour de France, and making it all the more riveting is our man Lance Armstrong is back in the race.  It looks like the yellow jersey may not go to Lance this year but I'm betting his team will will win.

Today's stage was brilliantly won by Englishjule's countryman, Mark Cavendish, whose teammates positioned him perfectly for a spectacular sprint to the finish.  If you get a chance to watch it on Versus, it's worth the effort.  Every finish is exciting but this one felt so good because of the shear genius and perfect execution of the game plan.  Cavendish gave credit for the stage win to his teammates saying, "When George Hincapie and Mike Rogers go, I have no choice but to go with them." (I paraphrased from memory) And if you see the finish, you will know he was telling the truth.  Of course, when you see the finish from overhead, you can clearly see that after Cavendish came around to play his role, he was pulling away from the rest of the sprinters with every pedal stroke.  I tell you, it brought tears to my eyes; it was BRILLIANT!

Two things I love:  A good bad joke and a good smart joke. 

Now there's a huge difference between a good bad joke and a just plain bad joke.  A good bad joke is similar to a good smart joke in that you have to think about it for just a second (or longer in my case) to get why it's funny and in fact, that's what makes it funny.  For instance the "____ walks into a bar" genre:  A horse walks into a bar and the bartender says, "Why the long face?" and Two guys walk into a bar; the third one ducks.  Two examples of good bad jokes, or groaners as I call them because my friends always groan when I tell them.  They're probably more fun to tell than to hear, because the listener feels just slightly off balance as his brain sorts it out while the teller is grinning idiotically as he waits for his audience to get it.

Then there's the good smart joke that makes the listener feel smart when (or if) he gets it.  The bad part of a smart joke is if you tell it in mixed company (ie blondes and others) and some of them just never get it.  In fact the good smart joke may derive some of its humor from the discomfiture of those who don't get it and have to pretend that they do.  That may put it in the Mean Spirited category and I don't like those jokes at all.  So, the trick is to tell the smart jokes to people who will at least get it when you explain it to them.

Descartes walks into a bar and orders a drink.  A short while later the bartender says, "Will you have another?"  Descartes replies, "I think not." and poof, he disappears.

Ya get it?  I admit, I didn't immediately but as my friends were ruminating on it, their clues illuminated it for me.  Mike mused that Descartes was a philosopher and mathematician which led me to "I think therefore I am" a phrase I had learned in grade school from another joke.  (I stink therefore I am)  Ha ha!  I felt smart even though I didn't previously know what Descartes was famous for or who had coined that familiar phrase. 

It's a clever joke that can make an ignorant person feel educated.

I started work on the Veterans History Project today at the local Senior Center (www.loc.gov/vets).   I'd gone over there to volunteer to help those less knowledgeable souls with the center's computers.  I know, it's hard to imagine anyone less knowledgeable than I am but there actually are a few.  They are mostly over eighty but, God love'em, they're willing to try. 

It's interesting teaching seniors how to navigate on a computer.  You need to give them only the barest minimum of instruction because they can't remember more than one or two things at a sitting.  To that end, the other guy who gives instruction there, has taught them to always double click the mouse because they can't remember when it takes one click and when it takes two.  He figures if they always use two clicks it does no harm and they only have to remember one thing.  Indeed, it works most of the time.

So anyway, when the senior director got wind of my talents (the fact that I was breathing and unemployed was talent enough) she turned the whole thing over to me.  My mission is to interview and record the stories of veterans and teach others to conduct interviews.  When the interviews are completed they will be sent to the Library of Congress where they will collect dust in perpetuity.

I conducted my first interview this afternoon with a WWII bomber pilot.  He is 87 and still has an amazing memory for the details.  We both had so much fun!  He was telling me of his flight home after Germany surrendered when he suddenly asked me to turn off the camera for a moment.  In all seriousness he asked me how he should describe the two young Red Cross women in Greenland who were making a little (or probably a lot) of extra money by "entertaining" the troops who stopped on the island on their way home.  Sixty-four years after the fact, this gentleman was concerned about propriety.  He neither wanted to record anything that would tarnish the reputation of the Red Cross nor say anything that might identify the two entrepreneurial girls. 

From the twinkle in his eyes I could tell there were many interesting tales that would never make it to the Library of Congress.  I suggested that a separate interview might cover some of the more intimate skirmishes.

I think I've finally found something that I love doing, now if I could only find a way to get someone to pay me to do it, I could quit pretending to look for work. 

Normally everyone meets at my house for our Sunday rides but today I felt obligated to reciprocate and do a ride in their terrain.  Don has been eager to show us the new singletracks he has carved in the Oak Glen area of Yucaipa so we decided to meet at the new Stater Bros. on Bryant and ride from there.  Geoff and Rita live only a mile from there so they rode from home.  I pulled the front wheel off my bike and slipped it into the back seat of the Lexus and drove up.

Yucaipa is probably 1000 feet higher than where we normally ride and will occasionally get a little bit of snow in the winter.  Spring lasts a little longer up there and I was pleasantly surprised at how many wild flowers were still blooming.  The mustard weed was waist high and there were places where the bushes encroached on the trail and clutched at our handlebars.  I was reminded of the Wait-a-bit bush in The Gods Must Be Crazy as I wrestled my bike out of their clinging branches.  Thankfully, the poison oak was easily avoided.

Geoff is actually riding on a very nice trail even though it looks like he's in the bush.

Don's trails were surprisingly well compacted and fun to ride in both directions.  Poor Rita and Geoff suffered on the climb because they had gone for an 11 mile hike yesterday.  They complained very little, though I could tell they were both working harder than was comfortable.  I enjoyed every minute of the ride.

This is Don, our ride leader and trail blazer.

Don and I rode the trail where Roland wrecked.  We stopped at the rock that had been his undoing and tried to visualize what could have gone wrong.  Even though the drop off wasn't that bad, neither of us opted to ride it.  Whether out of fear or respect or both, it just didn't seem like the thing to do.

The nature conservancy has kindly placed a picnic table in the shade of a dead tree and we took advantage of it.  An abandoned ranch building broods over the valley in the background.

Geoff and Rita are seated on the table, I'm standing next to Rita.

In this picture Rita rides up the flower lined trail.

And Don generously rode ahead to snap a shot of me.

It's still hard to believe it's the middle of June and the weather is cool enough to ride in the valley.  Last year this time we were having 100 plus degree weather for weeks.

We (Sally, Don, Guy and me) set off on a somber note having talked about Roland's accident before we hit the trail.  Don says Roland's alert and can communicate minimally.  He can't talk as he is still on the ventilator.

I set a gentle warm up pace as we headed up hill.  Mike was ambivalent about riding today because he has a sore knee so he said for us to go ahead, he would catch up.  When he hadn't caught us by the time we got to Edgewild I called him to see if he was coming.  He had ridden only a mile or so before his knee demanded to be taken home and put in the recliner.

As we started up Windmill canyon I spotted a lone horsewoman in the distance, riding at a brisk trot in our direction.  When it became apparent that she was coming up the same trail we were on, we stopped at a wide spot in the trail and waited to allow her to pass.  Her mount was wary and paused to take our measure when he spotted us, but was soon calmed by our normal voices and passed quietly.  He was in splendid condition and eagerly cantered on up the trail.

A couple of hundred yards farther the trail drops down a steep embankment into a ditch and then rises half again as far up the other side.  We could see the skillful rider slow her mount, circle him once to prepare him for the descent, and then she disappeared down the bank. 

Since Don, who was behind me hadn't ridden this trail before, I cautioned him to leave some space between us because the trail into the ditch is very steep and loose and it requires some speed to make it up the other side.  Just as I was ready to drop into the ditch I noticed the equestrienne and a mountain biker on the other side.  They shouted to beware because there was a snake just off the trail at the top of the climb out of the ditch.  By this time we could clearly hear the staccato of his rattle but from this distance, couldn't tell exactly where he was. 

After some deliberation and conference with the biker on the other side, I decided it was probably safe enough to go through if I went REALLY FAST.  I clipped into my pedals and plunged over the edge, braking only slightly at the top and then building up speed into the ditch.  As momentum carried me up the other side the whirring rattle grew alarmingly louder.  Gravity clawed at my good friend momentum as I approached his hiding spot.  My leg scraped the brush on the far side of the trail as I gave as wide a berth as possible.  He was not calmed one iota by my consideration.

Once safely past, I stopped to try to see exactly where he was, and how big he was, to make sure my friends, who were preparing to follow me, would be out of striking distance.  I peered under the dense brush from a couple of angles but never could spot him. 

Sally came down next.  I shouted encouragement as she came, "Go, go, go!" I exclaimed, which she heard as "NO, no, no".  So she stopped in the bottom of the ditch which meant that she had to push her bike up the bank and walk past the hidden viper.  Thankfully, he was content to stay hidden and hurl his angry warning at us.  Don and Guy soon followed and we continued on our way with the new biker, Curtis, in tow.

Curtis rode to the top of Judy's with us and then turned off to head home.  We stopped to put on our protective arm and leg covers for the short but always thrilling descent down Yikes!.  Neither Guy nor Don had ever ridden Yikes! before so they insisted that I lead the way and Sally, who was feeling under the weather, chose to bring up the rear.

The traction has deteriorated substantially as the decomposed granite has dried out which only makes this trail all the more exhilarating.  Or maybe that's accelerating.  Remembering that last time I had built up more speed than was ideal for negotiating the sharp twists and drop offs, I focused on applying more front brake this time.  More front braking requires a little more aggressive position on the bike, meaning more weight on the front wheel, which means greater potential for going over the bars if something goes catastrophically wrong.  As luck would have it, nothing went wrong.  At the bottom I challenged the group to name another trail in California that was more fun.  No one could think of one on the spot.

We saw one more Viper on the way home.  A bright, candy-apple red one was parked at the turnout on Highway 38.  We circled it, admiring its sleek lines and chrome rims.  Its proud owner said there were 35 more of them coming up the road in about 15 minutes.  We were tempted to wait to see the Viper parade but the downhill singletrack beckoned, a pleasure we couldn't defer. 

My job search continues with renewed vigor since the State of California is now requiring me to document my efforts.  I've had several interviews this week. 

The first one looked promising until they showed me my desk.

The guy on the right is quitting due to some internal injuries he suffered when someone thoughtlessly announced that there were fresh doughnuts in the break room. 

The second one entailed relocation and learning to speak English with a foreign accent.

And the third one, well, it looks like I may have a shot at it as I have many years of shit handling experience.

It offers no medical insurance but I am allowed to take the stuff home for the garden.

Wish me luck!   

Again, Xanga isn't notifying me when my subscriptions post.  At least this time I noticed and went to the sites of the people that I know post regularly.  I sure hope it starts working again because it's a nuisance to have to go look at my site to see who has posted.