Positively Glorious!

I haven’t been blogging lately. It’s just too busy here to maintain a steady schedule as I had been before Hydrasi took over my waking hours. I took a new part-time job, for a great deal less money, in order to have a bit more of my soul and a lot more time to focus on building Hydrasi over this next year. As it turns out, I’ve been working nearly full time anyway.

Normally this would be a bad thing, but my work is very close to what I’m doing with Hydrasi, so it’s actually quite good. There isn’t that conceptual break that I usually have going to work on something completely different in my #afterhours, which makes it easier to keep up the steam. I’m actually making fairly good progress, and am on track to make the very agressive deadlines I’ve set for the companies prototype launch of Overture.¹

And then there’s family, the most important being my lovely Jessica, who’s taking the Lamb’s Share, sadly. Trying to balance that family time with building a company while having a nearly 40 hour a week job is bordering on the impossible. It’s a constant struggle for both of us. Me needing to work at times she doesn’t want to, and then needing to spend time with her at times that she’s okay with me working. I’ve always lived on Indian Time, so going straight to “Corporate America Based On The Old Protestant Work Ethic” time is not comfortable, whatever side of the knife edge I’m on.

Last weekend, Jessie’s brother and his fiance came to visit for a long weekend and it was great. My work was pretty much put on the back burner (except for short periods where everyone was just napping, reading, etc. I grabbed my Mac and read about Scala programming language and the Lift web framework). For the most part, we spent the weekend visiting restaurants and breweries as we showed them what a great place we live in. Jessie’s brother Mike is a super beer afficianado who can’t get “big” name beers like Deschutes Brewery and very small named ones like Double Mountain and Elliot Glacier back in his native North Carolina.

We drank a lot of beer.

After Mike and Sarah left on Sunday evening, I figured that I’d be back to focusing on working every day, Hydrasi every night, and balancing my family life every minute.

But then I was reminded of my favorite sporting event of the entire year.

Yeah, I’m a cyclist, and Le Tour is the penultimate for those like me.

And this is looking like one of the strongest, most exciting Tours in years, with teams like Garmin-Slipstream and Columbia-HTC doing some simply amazing riding for the US, teams like the Danish Saxo Bank‘s Fabio Cancellara holding on to the yellow jersey early on and strongly.

And teams like Team Astana… with Alberto Contador and– returning from retirement to try to claim victory #8– Lance Armstrong.

So much for balance.

I’m riveted. Team time trials today had me sweating and on the edge of my seat. Garmin-Slipstream raced a 39 km trial to come in second (46:47) almost the whole thing with only 5 men! For those who don’t know, a team is 9 men strong, and the clock doesn’t stop until the 5th man crosses the finish line. Teams usually save their strongest riders for the end and let the sprinters and others lead and take the front (and the wind) and drop off. For Garmin-Slipstream to run so strongly for so long, needing every man to stay! It was just amazing.

And then there was Saxo-Bank, with Cancellara holding the yellow Jersey. They rode strong, but Team Astana, pulled to blistering speeds by Lance’s determination to win an 8th title, dominated them to take first place in the trial by mere 10ths of a second!

Let me say that again: They took first place by tenths of a second! Team Astana winning the trial meant that Lance wore the Yellow Jersey and was the leader of the Tour once again.

But it wasn’t so, because the individual times reigned supreme, and Fabio Cancellara beat Lance Armstrong by mere hundredths of a second!

Mere hundredths of a second!

It just doesn’t give me any chance to breath. It brings me right back to my high school days when I was racing for money on a beat-up old bike I bought for $150… and winning. It brings me right back to those glory days when Greg LeMond became the first American to win Le Tour. It brings be back to those days when anything could happen.

And anything can. There’s a lot of talk about contention on Team Astana, questions about a rift between Contador and Armstrong. Questions about whether Armstrong can take #8.

This just may be the most exciting Tour for me in years- maybe even since high school. Sure, the years of Armstrong taking one after another were fabulous, but they were also limiting. I remember thinking he was amazing, but also that he was overshadowing.

This year, things are different. Armstrong has Team Astana pumped– as strong as a freight train and as fast as a jet fighter… but there are a great many amazing riders on wheels that are challenging the king.

This year, Armstrong himself might be overshadowed.

1. If I told you that my soft deadline is July 13th, would you think that I’m crazy? I am… I’ll make the hard deadline of August 1st though, I’m sure [↩]