Viva le Tour!

Disclaimer: This post contains a spoiler: the ending of Stage 5 of le Tour de France. So if you're following, read this after you watch le Tour on the Versus Channel tonight at 8pm for their prime time extended evening coverage.






I'm not sure what LiveBlogging really is, but I'm going to consider this post a LiveBlog because I'm blogging about something I am doing right now. Stage 5 of le Tour de France is currently happening. The main group was split into three groups by some wicked crosswinds along the coast of southern France. Currently the riders have 25.6km to go to Pepignon.

If you haven't heard yet, I'll tell you: Lance Armstrong has come out of retirement to compete in professional cycling this year. He is on team Astana of Kazahkstan.

Last year Astana was the team of Vinakourav, the rider we all thought was going to win last year's tour. At least, I was cheering him on. The other rider I cheered on was Michael Rasmussin of Denmark. Both riders were ejected from the Tour for doping.

This year, with Lance back in the race, le Tour has a new face and a cleaner reputation.

Now for the exciting stuff!! Yesterday was the Team Time Trial. The Tour hasn't had a TTT stage since the last time Lance was in the Tour in 2005. Yesterday Team Astana kicked ass in the TTT, beating Team Garmin (with American and hottie Tyler Farrar) by 18 seconds and beating Team Saxobank (with hottie and current maillot jaune rider Fabian Cancellara) by 40 seconds!!

So Lance Armstrong, Alberto Contador (2007 Tour champion), Levi Leipheimer (American and third place winner in the last couple years), Andreas Kloden (rider extraordinaire) and a few other strong riders stood on the podium to claim their TTT win in Stage 4!

Before the stage began Lance was 40 seconds behind the Maillot Jaune (which is French for the Yellow Jersey). The Maillot Jaune is worn by the rider who leads the race with the best overall time. It was nearly impossible for Lance to gain time over Fabian Cancellara (who is possibly the best looking man ever). But! Team Astana has all the allstars and they sprinted the 40km like a scalded cat, and Lance is now 00:00:00 seconds behind the maillot jaune!!! (by a few tenths of a second Cancellara still holds the maillot jaune with a zero time advantage).

The stage that is happening now is very exciting as well. It is a mostly flat stage so the sprinters on the teams will be in their glory.

Team Columbia Highroad has Mark Cavendish, 24 years old, and also a major hottie. He is the fastest man in the world on a bike, and he is expected to win. So although Team Columbia is not a threat for the maillot jaune, they are currently leading the Peleton in a chase to catch the 6 riders who attacked in the first 15km and are the current Leaders.

After Mark Cavendish, Big Tom Boonen of Team QuickStep is watching the moves of Cav. He is considered a second in speed only to Cavendish, and there are disputes about that as well. Also, American Tyler Farrar is in his first Tour this year and is in the competition for fastest biker as well.

Going by looks, I would say that Big Tom wins. But Cavendish is devilishly goodlooking and Farrar is also pretty to look at.

The point is: You should be watching the Tour every day so that you can drool over these guys like I am. Also, it inspires le Tour fans to go riding themselves.

Jessica Rabbit and I participated in a Metric Century ride this past Sunday. We were riders in the Delaware Doublecross, and we burned about 2200 calories (possibly more because we were bookin' it at 19mph for the last hour of the ride). It was a lot of fun and there were brownies and peanut butter cookies at a few of the rest stops the White Clay Bicycle Club set up for us.

So watch le Tour! Ride a bike! And we can hang out!

If you start riding, log your rides on www.mapmyride.com and also friend me so we can be either Teammates or Rivals! lol.


Lovey,

LWoJ

Pictures: Bum photo is Big Tom. Biking photo is Lance Armstrong. Girls kissing photo is Cancellara. Head on photo is Mark Cavendish. Argyle jersey with glasses on head photo is Tyler Farrar.

Speaking of Live Blogging: Thomas Voeckler of France on Team Bbox Telecom just won the Stage. Totally surprising, but no one could catch the Lead riders, and he just sprinted ahead to the finish!! Voeckler is a well known rider in the Tour, and he came out of nowhere in the last 3miles to go. Way to go Voeckler! But too bad for the big sprinters like Cavendish and Big Tom. Tsk tsk tsk.

Like the Travelocity Gnome.... but Las Llaves en Miami.

Joel's Keys took a fantastic trip to Miami the other week...we wanted to share with you all the crazy and wild things they did. Joel's Keys let effing LOOSE!

04:00:00 Joel's Keys: Empty SEPTA car en route to PHL Airport. Sooo excited!!

08:30:00 Joel's Keys: Bienvenidos a Miami!! Checkin' out those palms!

12:30:00 Joel's Keys: FT. Laudy, beaches! Eyein' that storm on the horizon.

13:00:00 Joel's Keys: Smokin' a cig after a long day en la playa.

22:00:00 Joel's Keys at the dyke bar.

10:30:00 Joel's Keys eating Huevos Rancheros... South Beach, the morning after.

11:30:00 Joel's Keys shopping off the hangover.

12:45:00 Joel's Keys seeing the sights.

21:00:00 Joel's Keys gettin' crunk at the arcade they call Dirty Blondes. And Leah's O-face...wait, what?

Much later.... maybe 3am, maybe 5am Joel's Keys with the hott young THANGS!

Joel's Keys did it all. To see where Joel's Keys go next, visit www.joelskeys.com See y'all in the next HOT SPOT destination! ;)

Signed,
Jessica Rabbit
Leah, wife of Jacob

Father's Day Run Down

Happy Father's Day!

My sister refuses to use sugar packets (or sweetener packets) that aren't yellow.

My mother chastised my sister for stirring her coffee without holding the spoon like a pencil. She then demonstrated for my sister the proper way to stir coffee. My sister then corrected my mother, telling her that she was stirring tea, and therefore, my mother's assessment was irrelevant.

Fox News gets there White House correspondence via Obama's Twitter account. Which is sadder? Obama letting us know information about Iran by tweeting? Or the media considering Twitter newsworthy?

My father declared this morning: "First! The coffee we make today will be vanilla flavored. Second! I am staying in pajamas until 9p.m. Well, actually maybe 9a.m. because by the time 9p.m. comes around, I will be going to bed so there really isn't a point to declaring my pajama state finished until I wake up tomorrow."

There are dark clouds closing in on Lancaster, but the sun is shining on the west part of the house. I am drinking orange juice, and blogging at the kitchen table.

I am currently jobless, and I am going to the beach for two weeks in about two weeks. Ha!

Check this out:

Aaaah!! Bird attack in my backyard!

Okay, so I am currently sweaty, red in the face, and wearing grass-stained sneakers. Although I am always a classy, bougie lady in DC, while in the Lanc I am a grass-mowing, flannel-wearing, construction-man-attracting Lancastrian Woman. hahahaha. Well, perhaps not...

The past few weeks, except the one during which I went cruising down Sistrunk Blvd in Ft. Laudy looking for hookers, I have been out in my yard doing everything from mowing to trimming to weed pulling to pulling large shrubs (including the roots) out of the ground by hooking a chain from the back of my Isuzu Trooper to the shrub and then replanting it in the backyard so my mother and father can see it as they enjoy their coffee on our back porch in the mornings.

To the back of our house there is a line of pine trees three times the height of our house, which are good to have because I don't have to do any yardwork involving those. However, to the other side (the much longer side) there is a long row of forsythia which are more than ten feet high and wickedly overgrown. My mother's idea of a dream yard is one in which no one can see her so if the mood struck her someday, she could sit naked on our back porch and no one would even know.

But it's my job to do the yardwork because no one else knows how to do anything here, so the forsythia needs trimming and I got to it!

I trimmed the sides and the bottom, making sure the bottom was slightly less trimmed because they live longer that way (don't ask me why). Then, I got out the old rickety step ladder that scares the shit out of me because when you step on it, it sways wickedly.

But! It's the only way to trim the fly away branches at the top! So I was on the ladder, with the electric hedge trimmers, which are plugged in and BAD things happen if you don't pay attention and you accidentally cut the cord. Ouch and sparks!

But today the ouch was not because of cutting the electric cord. I, in my haste to get the hedges trimmed before five, trimmed into a bird's nest!!!!!!

The little gray tailed something or other Bird darted out and screeched at me and then began plunging toward me, flying back up and then plunging toward me again. I screamed and jumped off the ladder, throwing the hedge trimmers down on the ground and I ran back into the garage!

I waited a few minutes before emerging from my safety grotto (haha). But when I came out again, the bird swooped toward me again, and I ran back into the garage and then into the basement, up the stairs, and into the kitchen to sit down and calm down for a minute. Those birds, man! They are determined to have eggs!! Jeez Louise!

Now, I don't really know what to do, except wait for a while and then start trimming down the other end first and then avoid the bird's nest for a couple days. I don't want to hurt it... we love birds here. We have birds nests all over, but the hedges are just getting out of hand.

Oh yea, I forgot to mention that there is a lot of construction going on along the road in front of my house. When I ran and screamed as the bird attacked, a bunch of the construction men turned around and laughed like I was Jeff Foxworthy or the Cable Guy (I think that's who people around here laugh at).

I also thought this was appropriate because of those BlackBirds in ?California? that are attacking people in the city's financial district.

Outtie!

-Leah

xoxo

Apparently Summers are Difficult.

One would think that, without a job and without classes, I would be blogging it up! But no... apparently occupation is the mother of blogging.

I will preface my first graduate post by saying: The summer will be slow. And... continue:

Things Adults Talk About, in no specific order:

1. EZPass

2. Aches and Pains

3. Sales and How Much Things Cost

4. Diseases (compliments TMcD)

5. How Lost Our (as in you and me, not the Adults) Generation Is (compliments TMcD)

6. Charlie Horses (IDK about this one... K suggested. haha)

7. The pleasantries of giving business to one company over another, and in conjunction...

8. The criticisms of businesses who do not deserve receiving business.

9. The way things (like well water and septic tanks) work.

10. What is the best way to kick children out of homes when the children are approaching 30.

11. The pros and cons of croquette vs. horse shoes

12. Which dressing is best for pasta salad, and a chronology of dressings used prior to the current pasta salad dressing.

13. Cell phones. Cell service. Hand-held technological devices, and how they can't figure them out but they can't remember how they got on without them.

14. Hitchhiking.

15. The best highways to use.

16. Tolls.


Did I miss anything?

Ducks Graduate. And some Non-sequiturs.

Well, today is the end of an era. As my dad would say as he quotes the great Sam Clemens, "I've been through some horrible things in my life, some of which actually happened." I'm not sure if the shaking in my body is from my nerves or from all the vodka redbulls I had last night.

Probably the latter, if we consider both the affects of alcohol and taurine versus my baseline behavior in other milestone events.

At my high school graduation, I couldn't get out of there faster. So done. So ready to move on. In HS Graduation I was sitting next to this girl who is the eleventh of thirteen brothers and sisters, and she started crying. At first I thought, "Ya, I guess it would be sad, esp having to leave a large family like that." Then all the rest of the girls and a few guys in my row also started crying.

Then I immediately thought, "Oh, wow. I'm so glad to be getting out of here. No more Deer Hunter games at the pool hall. No more Tractor Day. No more watching my friends chug a gallon of milk, throw it up, and then the next friend try and see if they can do it, before of course throwing up themselves... all while Homecoming is going on."

But now, looking back at what I originally thought about the girl next to me crying, I still think my subsequent thought reaction was appropriate, but I would like to qualify my reaction to the first girl:

It doesn't matter how large your family is for this liminal space to seem so... unliminal. haha. I don't really know what I'm saying anymore... I think my hangover is starting to set in.

Last night, as I went downstairs to pick up my order of hot wings from Pizza Movers (it was the only place open at 3:40am) I started imitating E.T.

Eliot. Eliot, be good. (good rhymes with food in this instance, in case you forgot how E.T. speaks)

So cool, man. The end of his finger lights up.

Also... another thing I thought of while writing this post: when I (and many others) abbreviate the words like "esp" or "idk" or "nvm" there really is no way to say those 'words' literally. Isn't that interesting? We've moved from a world in which words and the idea they signify are difficult to separate in our minds into a world in which that separation is almost irrelevant. It's like... we don't even need the aural signifier for communication anymore. kk ttyl cya. Those aren't words. They're ideas.... weirrrrrd.

Alright, I'm taking a Gummy Vite and rolling some topical caffeine under my eyeballs. Woo. Woo. Woo.

Yea College!

Lovey,

Leah.

P.S. Just so you know on what I look upon as writing this morning: a room with no visible floor, and a lot of paint chips all over the place. Don't tell maintenance or housing, but Keren and I had to sand and paint parts of our wall... oops. We didn't know her dad's industrial tape would be so.... industrial. (Btw, you can totally still tell that the wall is effed up.)

Infomercial-->Slap Rap?

COLOUR.

SHARKSPEARE

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Pifdylli y thregbatter rehn burther cohyn rhuet wheurityn. Ohng yurhknut shuftergurgurgwherner y purhehrnumorit. Quoricthirth iourthyier shoullet. Pifdylli y thregbatter rehn qherourourellesly y zhycamera zigot zygote?

Bluhr quibster ashcanter fohlgerum tridental.

Vuhnsternbergur!

:)

Enh...rhemun opticlytia (shurgs shulders).

(Twelve hours later...)


What I think I mean to say: I'm having difficulty expressing myself verbally.

Physical gesture to express how Ducks is feeling:

Lying on floor of living room. Forehead to carpet. Waving arms at sides like the making of a Snow Angel.

Lolling tongue outside of mouth. Dropping chin to neck, and looking upwards into Purgatory.

Erm... I don't really know what else (shurgs shulders).

Vuhnsternburger!