What's up Doc?

Wazzup! Times are tough troops, night has fallen across the land and belts are tightening even as we all deal with our own personal losses and remaining challenges. I'm reminded of an old Disney short where a broke Mickey and Goofy serve up a single bean in wafer-thin slices... In a mere month though we will have our shortest day of the year and then start gaining precious daylight minute by minute. Snow will coat the mountains deep and silent and at least in the SSSS (Steamboat Springs Single Speeders) cell of bIKE cLUB the wheels will be in motion, plans will be laid out in meticulous detail on the back of a cocktail napkin that will subsequently be left at the bar only to founder found remembrances and hastily executed, much less meticulously detailed trips of the sort you are perhaps familiar with. Just to wet your whistle I'll say that the SSWC will be held in Durango in 09 on the 6-9th of August (August Invitational planning? Done!) and the Laramie Enduro Aug 1. Such planning can wait though and for the next 30 days until the solstice the SSSS will heal old wounds, regroup, plant seeds, sharpen knives, load bb guns, write letters, bake prodigious amounts of pie, cook soup, read and of course work on our Manifestoe as we wait to spring like panthers into 2009! I urge you Footsoldiery to do likewise, gather your chi into the shape of a diamond, clear your calendar and avoid wallowing in the depths of despair, unless of course you are racing cross in which case please shower after wallowing. Will there be a 12/20 in 2008? Does the Pope shit in the woods? Will someone talk his wifely domestic partner into accompanying him on Tickler V: the Wrath of Khan on the Sat after Thanksgiving? We're gonna make like a sheepherd and head out! These are the old wounds I'm talking about, wounds you can't ignore but must constantly pick at like crows, or lance like the festering pustules they have become! Tickler V 11/29/08. Don't be there! Instead leech you own boil whatever it may be, clear the slate, wipe clean the scoreboard and prepare for greatness in 09!