Not About Cycling At All (Mostly)

I figured that since I'm not riding right now, it might be worth talking a bit about what I do when I'm not on the bike. Unfortunately, it's probably even more boring than what I do when I *am* on my bike, and because this is a bike blog, there's little to interest anyone other than myself.

Let's see: what do I do when I'm not on my bike... Hm.

Well, I work. I'm in software, though that's not particularly where I hope to be for the rest of my life. I wrangle a full-time quality assurance analysis position with a bank and a number of consulting gigs that involve various web programming projects. I've noticed that there are quite a few web geeks who are also pretty serious cyclists. (Okay, some of us are web geeks and cyclists, but rarely serious about anything: that's me.)

I also sing. If you drop by Saint Andrew's Episcopal in Louisville on any given Sunday, I'll probably be there, and I'm easy to spot. I'll be the only guy in the alto section. I'm a counter-tenor, which basically means I'm a guy who can sing 'high voice' parts. My range covers most of the standard tenor tessitura, the whole of the standard alto tessitura, and a significant portion of the soprano tessitura. A couple of years out of the choirloft, coupled with a couple of serious respiratory illnesses, have poked some 'holes' in my voice at the points known as 'passagio,' where one passes from one register to another. I'm working on smoothing those out again.

Like most choristers in Anglican churches, I'm an Anglican — which is to say I'm a member of the Episcopal Church in the United States, which is part of the world-wide Anglican communion.

My bicycles carry me to work, choir rehearsals, church services, and back again.

I also write music — specifically choral settings of sacred texts — and spend unreasonable amounts of time reading the internet. The latter of these isn't so much something I 'do' as something I fall into when I'm trying to do something else :) Neither of these pursuits involves bicycles in any real way, though perhaps I should consider writing a mass for choir and spoke wrench? Or, maybe, "O True My Wheels" sounds like a good theme for a hymn...

I have a great family, wonderful friends, and a charming and kind romantic interest who shares (if not quite as intently) my border-collie-esque fixation on bicycles. At present, between us, we own something like nine bikes. One is a tandem. This means that if we wanted to, we could take my entire immediate family and most of my friends out for a ride. All at once. And no one would have to ride on the handlebars.

I always feel a little awkward talking about the people in my life in blog entries. It's not that I have anything to hide — just that I don't want to step on anyone's toes. At least one of them has mentioned that he doesn't mind being blogged about, so he will probably show up from time to time.

My other interests include horsemanship (as you probably already know), cats, dogs, turtles and tortoises, reading, writing, movies, and stuffing my face (which at least ties into bicycles semi-directly). I also like to glean random information and go places. Just about anywhere will do. Dancing is also good, but (like cycling) I'm not doing much of that right now.

I also occasionally convince myself that I would like to know how to fix cars, but in fact I just want to know how to diagnose car problems. Small engines, on the other hand, I do like to fix, when I can.

I'm looking forward to getting back on my bike, but trying to be patient. My dear PT Guy thinks I'm looking at a good 6 weeks of healing time to get my leg back to truly normal, though he says I should be able to start riding short distances once it no longer hurts. Since it's still hurting, I'm guessing that won't be, for example, this afternoon :)