Cycling through the Corn

Howdy, any faithful viewers that may still be around.  It's been awhile.  To bring you up to speed, I got laid off from Pfizer, enjoyed 6 months of leisure (while getting my unemployment check taxed, thank you Government) and then found a job with a large agricultural company.  In vast irony, this company is headquartered in St. Louis, but my job is in Des Moines, Iowa.  Working on robots, of course.  I moved up here, bought a house, and Bob's your uncle.  All that happened around the beginning of 2011.  Now it's nearly the end of June.

I just got back from a short ride with my new Garmin Edge 500.  Mitch the Mashor indirectly introduced me to the marvel of GPS bike computer technology, and I finally took the plunge.  It's great.  Now I can have one computer to easily move between my numerous and varied bikes, no pesky sensors or other nonsense to worry about.  It updates the speed pretty quickly...I'm not sure how they do that, being based on GPS and all.  And of course I can upload rides to Garmin Connect and ponder my pitiful performance.  All in all, based on one test ride, I give it two thumbs up.

As well, the test-mule for this ride was the mysterious Giant Defy 1.  I bought the Giant a couple of years ago, simply because it was such a gorgeous bike.  Geometry seemed good, everything seemed fine...but I never got comfortable on it.  I've decided to give it another go, because it really is a nice bike.  Put a new seat on it - the Arione Versus or whatever the newer one is.  Seems comfy so far...albeit it was a 2mile ride around the subdivision in cargo shorts.  I still think it's a nice bike, hopefully I can pin down whatever isn't "right" for me and turn it into a workhorse.  It may get upgraded from Shimano 105 (triple crank, blech) to some nice SRAM Force this winter.

So there you go.  I'm in Iowa.  It's ok.  Not the best, I still miss STL, but it's not so bad.  And the bike trails can't be beat.  Time to go cook some dinner.  Take care dear reader, if there are any left!

Life With Corn

Actually it's just a bunch of empty corn fields, as winter is just now being beat back by spring.  As a quick update, I'm up in Iowa, in my new house (closed Feb 10th, thank you) and settling in.  Job is going well, my first robot project is about to switch to production work, house is awesome (three car garage, yeah!) and the bike trails are as vast and asphalt-y as anyone could wish for.  Seriously there must be 80+ miles of interconnected, luxuriously paved trails going every which way up here.  I've even seen a few cyclists out on the roads, so it may be a popular pastime here.

Life away from my family and friends in STL has been a bit lonely, but I keep in touch and travel back down from time to time.  I'll adapt, I'm still new here.