What the heck is going on?: June 2014

Hmmmmmmmm... What is the most productive use of my time today.... Seeing how I am midish way through a pretty major home renovation I ask myself this most days..... should I start to tare out that wall, studd in the new closet, relocate the kitchen plumbing, remove/move electrical, start laying new wood floor, relocate lighting, build new cabinet doors, refinish cabinets, etc, etc, etc. I know.... I'll clean off the deck first because it is getting cluttered with building trash, kitchen sink, wood, old cabinet doors...etc. While carrying said cabinet doors to back of truck I thought... "these are pretty crappy doors... but this is good quality plywood (12 ply birch, no core voids)".... the mind ran wild and after a couple hours of work, none of which was productive toward home renovation.... VOILA

8 inch radius

A little jig saw action

A bunch of screws

First test bend.... Turned out pretty darn good!

To preface this post: This post was composed entirely on my phone while waiting for hours in San Jose’s International airport, while waiting on a 1:30 AM flight home…. I might have been delirious but after reading over the post (written on the notepad of my phone) I have decided to fix nothing and publish as is… enjoy any errors you might find and my late night red eye babbling.

Crappy bikes

Man... There are a ton of CRAPPY bikes in Costa Rica. Well, I'll take that back here are a ton of decent frames with crap parts all over them. All the bike shops.... If you want to call them that, sell bright shiny new frames... Name brand frames... Think big box, Trek, Giant, Cannondale, etc. But then they cover them up with junk parts. ALL bikes (except the few actually nicely built modern road bikes) have front suspension and ALL of these suspension forks are.... Ready for it.... RST???????? I went to a few shops to further investigate and what I found was very subpar shops with a back stock of no lie 200 brand new RST forks on the shelves????? In different colors of course. The end purpose of the bike does not seem to matter they all had suspension forks. Turns out even the "nice" mountain bikes were actually just being used by the Ticos’ (the general name that native Costa Ricans go by) commuters (I guess the suspension is for all the huge pot holes). I saw tons of dudes fully kitted out just cruising on the highway on their "nice mountain bike". The first night in San Jose we were at this place that had their version a Sports Center playing and they were showing a Costa Rican National Championship Mtn Bike race. Maybe all the riders were just pissed about their RST shocks and their Acera derailleurs because the riders were terrible. Don't get me wrong, I am sure most of them would beat the pants off me in a road race or any other endurance heavy, timed event, but these dudes couldn't cross a creek! I'm not talkin’ that manky entrance, a bit too deep, a bit too long with an almost impossible exit creek, I am talkin’ a little piddly nothing creek... Some would have called it refreshing. All the dudes in the race dismounted and carried.... It was embarrassing to watch but after two weeks in the country and TRYING to find mountain biking… ZERO LUCK and seeing where they ride… ON THE HIGHWAY it’s clear.... These dudes need to come to the Southeast USA for a training sesh.... Oh yeah, we surfed the Caribbean, ate coconuts, drank crappy beer, drank ONE good beer, peered into the crater of two active volcanoes, avoided about a bazillion auto accidents, almost killed 5000 dudes on motorcycles, ate more beans and rice and plantains than I care to think about, and got stranded at one international shopping mall.