A Good Idea at the Time

After the race, I enjoyed a rocking bbq dinner and a few pints of the good stuff. The schwag raffle was pretty crazy, with 4 or 5 frames and complete bikes raffled off, as well as a ton of other stuff. Jeremy scored some Surly singlespeed hubs, while I won a pair of size large freeride shorts. After the raffle, they just flung tons of random bike goodies into the crowd, including everything from grips to bottles to lube to chains to CO2 kits to sandals. That’s right, CO2 kits and chains… Plenty of cursing thrown about as people risked bodily injury trying to catch a chain or other heavy object flying through the air at rapid speed. After the excitement of the schwag toss, we helped Ross finish packing all the stuff back up, and laughed at his apparent inability to perform the simple task of mixing warm pedialyte with chilled saline before adding drink mix and then diluting it with water but not forgetting to have the sliced apples in the plastic cups and the potatoes in the paper ones and the pills in the tray organized by color and then size… COLOR AND THEN SIZE, Damnit Ross, can’t you do anything right?

For whatever reason, we decided to head on back to Knoxville that night. The drive itself was uneventful, and we made it back to Jeremy’s house around 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning. I would rate the tiredness level as “deathly.” After a quick shower to rinse the half inch of dust and grime off of my entire body, I settled down on the couch to get some well deserved sleep.

That’s where the story should end. But with less than an hour of sleep down, Jeremy’s cell phone alarm goes off. It turns out that the days are cyclical, and 5:00 am comes around again. I can’t even describe the level of disorientation involved in trying to find that damn phone to get it to stop making noise. Five minutes later, I finally find it in the kitchen under some papers, and get it to shut the hell up. I get back to bed and immediately fall asleep. However, at 6:00 am, Jeremy’s dog, Boogie, decides that he needs to whine…extremely loud. Boogie fails to respond to me yelling from the couch for him to “stop whining.” “Go to sleep dog” and “shut the hell up” are met with an equal amount of success. After guessing he probably needs to go to the bathroom, I yell at Jeremy and Abby in the next room. “Jeremy.” “Abby.” “Boogie.” “Bathroom.” … No response. After 2 more repeats of this, I hear:

Jeremy: “Did you hear something?”
Abby: “Is that Dave?”
Jeremy: “Is he talking?”
Abby: “I think he said Boogie.”
Jeremy: “Eh… I’ll deal with it in the morning.”
*silence*
Boogie: “WHINE,WHINE,WHINE”
Dave: “…SIGH…”