Anyways, it’s Sunday where the real action came about.  After a perfect blue sky day Saturday the skies opened up and dumped 6-10 inches of heavy wet snow all over northern Vermont.  Trapps did a great job packing it down and grooming it so it was hardly noticeable when we got there, aside from some tricky waxing.  But that heavy new stuff has a capacity for suction.  I had forgotten about this until about 1k into the race, as I was double poling across a flat.  Then my memory was jogged by a sound almost exactly matching the sound made at 0:23 of this song.  My handle, still attached to my hand, had lost it’s pole.  A bunch of things raced through my head.  First, I tried to use it anyways, like a phantom limb.  That didn’t work.  Then I figured I’d just hang onto the handle, because as any rollerskier knows, a good handle and fresh strap is worth its weight in gold.  Or at least, worth at least 30 dollars.  Then I realized I would probably want to put a different pole in that hand at some point, given there was 14k left and my poles almost always help me ski faster.  So I ditched it.  The next thing I realized was that I was in the most isolated part of the course and I had the biggest hill coming up quick.  I needed a pole asap.  Fortunately a parent was down at the bottom of the hill and I yelled for a pole.  He got ready to hand me one when I yelled “left hand!”  He started to look and see which was left and which was right, but then I realized it might be too late so I yelled “Either side-doesn’t matter!”  He threw it out in front of me as I passed him, I fumbled it once and caught it.  It was the wrong side, but it was also the right length.  I skied up the hill holding on hard, and things were ok.  On the ensuing downhill, I realized this pole strap wasn’t going to work for me and I’d need another one at some point.  As I came to the top of the next hill, at 3k, I yelled to the crowd at the corner I needed a left pole.  I gave them plenty of warning and Will Sweetser was there with a pole.  Pole number 3.  I grabbed it, took one look at the pink tape on the top, and realized this wasn’t going to work either.  At 6’1″, I need a pretty long pole.  And usually long poles don’t have pink tape.  My suspicions were confirmed as soon as I tried to use this thing.  It was 140 cm at most.  I used it for a few awkward strides before seeing another group of coaches and yelling for a left hand pole once again.  I was getting pretty good at that by this point.  A coach came out of the crowd with a pole, stuck it in front of me, and said “It’s a 160, left side.”  That was music to my ears.  I strapped this thing on and knew pole number 4 was going to be just right.  I skied out the rest of the race with this pole, even though people offered me poles for the next 7k.  I considered switching at times because I thought I’d have a chance at hitting double digits if I tried, but decided against it.

Now I thought that once I got the last pole I was done with the fiasco, but I was wrong.  Upon finishing, I realized I had taken poles from folks I didn’t know and traded them poles of other people I didn’t know.  Plus, I didn’t even know where my own pole was, or who’s pole I finished with.  That took some serious figuring, but with the help of the announcer I got everything sorted, and each pole was returned to it’s owner.

Days like this remind me of how much help people are willing to give when a little thing goes wrong.  So thank you: the Bowdoin parent for the first pole, Zoe Erdman for the short pole, Will Sweetser for giving me the pole, Tim Weston for the last pole, Will O’Brien for finding my pole, Pete Davis (announcer) for helping me find the owners, Tim Reynolds for helping me find Zoe Erdman, Tim Whiton for helping me find the Bowdoin parent, Marc Gilbertson for offering me his poles to cool down with, and any of the other folks who offered their poles after I had found a fit.

Let me set it up for you in 4 parts that had to come together all at the right moment, like a perfect storm:

So as you should know by now, it gets dark here early in the day.  That means when we ski twice, we skin once in the light and once in the dark.  It’s actually kind of cool because it’s all lit up so it’s a new feeling to ski like that.  But that’s not the point.  Well today we went skating in the afternoon, and it was full on dark out.  And they just groomed and lit a 10k loop that was finally in great shape after a little more snow last night.  That’s part number 1.

So when we skied I did two loops of the 3.8k thats been open since we got here.  Roughly, I’d say I’ve skied this loop 50 times.  Not that I’m complaining about great skiing at this time of year, but it does get a little boring.  Then I was looking for adventure and I knew they had opened this loop and I hadn’t skied it yet.  So at the turnoff I just went for it.  And I was off.  There’s part 2.

Muonio is a pretty sweet place right now and there’s big races coming up and the world cup opens not far away.  Because of this a lot of national teams are hanging around, including, as of yesterday, the German team.  That’s number 3.

Part 4 is simple.  I drank a lot of water yesterday and today and had soup for lunch and didn’t pee before leaving the house to ski.

So when you put all that together, you have a beautiful, lit, 10k loop which I am skiing on because I’m bored of the 3.8k.  At the same time, you’ve got superstars like Axel (yeah, I’d say it’s first name basis after the intimate moment I shared with him) skiing around all over the place, like this exact 10k loop.  Finally, I needed to pee.  Badly.  So I’m cruising along, looking for a good stopping point.  So far, I’d skied about 2-3k and seen nobody, so I wasn’t worried about getting spotted.  I picked the top of a big hill and stopped, pulled over right under a streetlamp, and started doing my thang.  Well just as I started, I looked down the track that I was basically standing on, and there’s a person there.  Shoot.  Too late now.  Wouldn’t be my first time getting caught yellow handed.  Well as this guy comes up I get a better view and realize he’s a German, and he’s pretty good.  Doesn’t matter much, it’s still a guy who’s seeing me pee right?  Wrong.  I start to realize that he’s real tall and has this look of pain in his eyes like he just gets routinely outsprinted by Northug.  Actually, I couldn’t see that.  But I did recognize him.  As I was squinting at him I think I started to turn towards him (as I would later realize from my yellow trail) which seems, in retrospect, like a bad idea.  Woops.  But he definitely saw me.  Fully lit up, almost in his tracks, taking a pee.  And that was it.  My brush with fame, my 15 seconds, my moment in the spotlight.

*This may never happen.  In fact, it almost definitely won’t.

Basically, I’m not much of an artist.  There was a time in high school when I took a full month of sculpture to make an 8 foot long trophy case lock (see picture) model out of cardboard that had moving parts and everything and I got an A+ in that class and on that specific project but really since then I haven’t made much of anything in the art department.  Until now.

I guess it started last year when I made a piece of artwork by cutting out a page of a magazine and extra-bluing it to a carboard back and hanging it up in the kitchen, but this year, I’ve been on a tear.

My first major undertaking started when Pepa told me I wasn’t allowed to have a carpet in my room, because I was allergic to it.  I debated that, but not to Pepa, because I didn’t want to get yelled at anymore.  So I took the carpet out of my room, and my room immediately was no fun to live in.  I’ll quote a great man when I say “that rug really tied the room together.”  But there was a silver lining.  Pepa told me that I could do whatever else I wanted to my floor, like paint in the design of the carpet.  Interesting, I thought, but too complicated.  Maybe another design would be better.  Maybe something simpler.  Maybe something more…patriotic.  And so the next 10 days were spent clearing out my room, buying paint and supplies, sleeping in an open closet, and carefully painting 13 stripes and 50 stars onto my floor.  Enjoy.

Then I took a break from my artistic career to focus on other things.  But as with any true artist, my work called me back.  This time it was through the medium of my fledgling business, lobsterjoke.  You see, we needed to refresh the whole thing.  It just wasn’t working for us, from the $15 shirts to the block print to the basic website.  We needed an update, and that needed to start with printing our own stuff.  So I looked into it, and it turns out screenprinting is not that hard, it just takes a while.  Well, I’ve got time, so this was for me.  It also cost some money to get into it, but since I plan to sell millions of shirts, it’d be ok to spend some.  So I bought in and figured it out.  It’s a pretty cool process, a little frustrating, but pretty fun overall.  And the final products are pretty sweet.  I made a couple screens to make 1 shirt and when that worked out, I went ahead and got the rest of the supplies for enough to make 5 shirts and I also bought 40 red shirts to print on.  So I’m now printing shirts and that’s been pretty cool too, and they’re coming out pretty well.  So well, in fact, that I’d put these things up against that cardboard trophy case lock as my best artwork yet.  Here’s a picture of some of the screens I made and the finished products (or at least the backs).

So I know this is a little long and rambling.  And maybe you know that’s my style.  But let me sum this one up for you (for anyone going back to school and trying to write papers about me) in a couple bullet points:

1. I have almost no history with art.

2. I spent 10 days sleeping in a closet on an air mattress so that my floor could be an exact replica of the american flag.

3. The new lobsterjoke shirts are totally awesome, and they’re just $10.  And I need to sell a lot of them now because I spent maybe too much learning how to screenprint.  So go to lobsterjoke.com, pick a shirt, and email me at lobsterjoke@gmail.com.

Questions? Want to volunteer?  email craftsburygrp@gmail.com.

Drips coming off my helmet after literally every pole stroke as I rollerski.

Falling asleep while sweating.

Swimming workouts.

Dehydration and sunburns (not for me, for other people.  Don’t worry Mom and Dad-I used my sunscreen).

Trying to do workouts before breakfast and after dinner only to find it’s no nicer even then.

Running out of ice cubes by 9am every morning.

Taking a cold shower and not making it back to my room before the dripping water turns to sweat.

Eating salad for dinner because it’s too hot to eat anything else.

Taking a kayak out to the middle of the lake so I could flip it, climb on top, and dive deep, where the cold water lives.

Hearing someone announce, every day, that tomorrow is supposed to be the worst of it.

Wishing we weren’t a green team so we could get an air conditioner.

Bellyflops in the lake before and after every meal and workout.

And finally:

Watching Sister Act with Pat (who was sleeping in the basement) late at night hoping my room would be habitable by the end (it wasn’t).

So, enjoy the heat and sun.  Or don’t.  I’m trying to enjoy it, because in 3 and a half months I’m going to be in Finland, where they have neither.

But let’s say that we can take vacations, and this is it.  In the month of April, we spread out all over New England or the west (Tim) or Europe(Pepa) doing a bunch of different things with a bunch of different people.  I think I speak for everyone when I say its nice and it was needed.

I’ve spent the time at home in Concord, Mass.

I’ve been catching up with one of my good buddies who’s spent the year at home waiting to deploy to China for PeaceCorps.  He’s also spent that time training for an MMA fight on May 28th at Mohegan Sun.  Gives me a different outlook on what I do and how intense racing really is.  At least in skiing everyone ends up conscious.

I’ve been running, biking, and lifting at all my old spots, which has been great.  It turns out that some of the best trails I’ve ever run are right here in Eastern Mass.  Who knew?

All that’s been nice, but mostly I’ve been working on my golf game.  I get into golf so fast its crazy.  I come home and play one round and all of a sudden I’m watching non-major golf tournaments with no big names.  I’m hitting the driving range and putting green every day.  Today I even went out and played 9 holes by myself, playing two separate balls so I could play twice as much.  I’m not sure what it is about golf I like so much.  I’m definitely not good, so that’s not it.  Golf isn’t similar to skiing, so that’s not it either.  I like playing with my family, but I like playing alone too, so that’s not it either.  I think it’s because golf is so different from skiing it give me a break.  I like how every time you play, you know exactly how good you are and you can compare that to the best.  That’s like racing at nationals every day (but never having to fly to Alaska).  I like that it’s always the same, day in and day out.  Ski training changes so much day to day it’s sometimes hard to know what to do that day.  But with golf, you just play.  It’s so simple.  I like how you can have some shots in every round that feel so good you just wish you could do that a few more times and then you could play on the tour.  I also like how the guy who finishes last at a crappy event on the PGA tour still gets $11,000.  That’s unbelievable.

Mostly though, I just like outdriving my brother.

This year I’ve been really trying to grow some more facial hair but it turns out that its really hard, not matter how hard you push, how much you water your upper lip, and how much Chia paste you rub on your cheeks.  It just doesn’t help.  And when people tell you the more you shave the thicker it gets, they’re lying.  That doesn’t even make sense.

So a couple weeks ago I decided it was time to rev the engines and really see where I was.  Now I think I could grow a pretty nasty neckbeard, and I might be able to pull of a soulpatch, but the only thing I really wanted was a mustache.  Unfortuantely for me, the hair on my lip is the lightest part.  That didn’t stop me though, and for the past few weeks I’ve been letting it grow.  And I think I speak for everyone when I say, I’m looking pretty good.

Before I really get into the details of what I’m lookin at here, I want to make it clear what I was going for.  There’s a lot of different types of mustaches.  I can think of 6:

1: The Fu-Manchu.  This is a bunch of wispy strands, growing on the upper lip that are so long they hang around the mouth down to the chin.  Popular asian style.

2: The American Fu-Manchu aka the Hulk Hogan.  This is a full dense mustache on the upper lip and down to the chin, but hair actually grows down to the chin, it isn’t hanging.

3: The Adolf.  Not popular.

4: The Pushbroom.  Full dense ‘stache on the upper lip only.  Commonly trimmed at the bottom.  Popular in the 80s and perfected by Tom Selleck in “Three Men and a Baby.”

5: The English Colonial.  Thick sideburns down to the jaw and into a mustache.  Basically all facial hair except the beard is shaved off.

6: The Pedro.  From Napoleon Dynamite.  This is a thin, wispy, failed attempt at a mustache.  Popularized by overgrown 8th graders everywhere.

So with this in mind, I was aiming for English Colonial.  But I knew it wasn’t in the cards for me.  One day I’ll nail it, but for now, I had to work with the ingredients I have.  And I don’t have sideburns.  So I settled for the pushbroom.  It’s pretty classic and I thought I might be able to pull it off.  With our big trip to the midwest coming up, I started not shaving for a week (which is normal) and then the night before we left, I shaved everything but the stache.  I was pleasantly surpised.  I could see it, in the right light, standing 2 feet from the mirror.  So that’s like 4 feet in real life, in the right light.  I’m still pushing hard and trying to keep it going, but here’s what I’ve found.  A good stache seems to have two main components: density and length.  I’ve got length, I think.  I don’t have the density though, and that part is hard to change.  I think I’ll keep trying though.  Eventually I’ll get the few hairs I have long enough to fold them over and make it look like more hairs.  Then I’ll be really all set.  Or maybe I’ll just set myself up with rogaine or something.  I heard that stuff can do wonders.

I’ll try to get a picture up soon, if my camera can capture it, in the right light.  or maybe if you see me you’ll be able to see it yourself.  If you’re within 6 feet.  In the right light.

Because of the high stakes nature of the rock-paper-scissors (RPS) battles (losing means you have to drive, say, to the center, which is a total of 4 miles.  Woof.) we’ve really gotten into trying to figure out the other person’s game so that we can guarantee victory and not end up in the driver’s seat.  But that takes a lot of work.

All this RPS reminds me of the things I’ve heard in the past about the game.  I heard there’s a professional sort of circuit.  I heard they have different moves.  And I wondered if its all true.  Here’s what I found:

First, there is money to be won in RPS.  A dude named Tim Conrad won 7 g’s playing RPS by throwing alternating rocks and paper while his adversary (and, in an interesting twist, best friend, Tom Butkin) continued to throw rocks.

Second, they’ve got moves.  Pro-RPS is a best-of-3 match where a tie counts as a round.  So that means if both players throw rock twice, then there’s a paper to rock, the player who threw the paper wins the round and the hole match.  So that means in every round there’s three throws that you’ll use.  Many pros preselect the moves.  A three-throw set is called a gambit.  And there’s only 27 of these.  Some have names, some don’t.

At this point, I think it’d be a good idea for me to get a handle on all the gambits so that I can outplay my teammates.  I found a few on worldrps.com, and those are the following with my thoughts:

RRR-Avalanche-makes sense, it’s a lot of rocks

PPP-Bureaucrat-same thing, but all about the paper

PSR-Crescendo-don’t get this

RSP-Denouement-don’t even know what this means

RPP-Fistfull o’ Dollars-should be self-explanatory

PSS-Paper Dolls-you cut the paper, then you cut it again!

PSP-Paper Sandwich-it seems like the scissors are in the sandwich?

SSS-Toolbox-I don’t keep scissors in my toolbox, but this is good enough.

So what about the others?  Here’s the full list:  Included is what I came up with, some replacements for some old ones, some of the ones above, and some I can’t think of anything good for.  I’m warning you, some are pretty poor quality.

RRR-avalanche (above)

RRP-”The U2″-they rock twice, then they get their paper.

RRS-”Takeover”-Knife to fistfight?  From Takeover by Jay-Z?  Not really?

RPR

RPP-”fistfull o’ dollars.”  I love this.  From above.

RPS-”the namesake”

RSR-”Garage band”-all they do is rock and cut (class).

RSP

RSS-”the feeds”-rss feeds, get it?

PRR

PRP-”knuckle sandwich” this is one of my favorites

PRS

PPR-”the paperweight”-first you put down the papers, then you put the rock on top.

PPP-”Bureaucrat” from above

PPS-”paper chaser” Start with papers and then finish with something to mix it up.  In honor of T.I.

PSP-I’m thinking PSP should be “PSP” or “Playstation”

PSS-paper dolls from above

SRR-”cutting rocks”-do with this what you will.

SRP-”The Goldmine”-you cut the rock to get your paper.

SRS

SPR

SPP-”Arts n Crafts”-a pair of scissors and lots of paper.

SPS

SSR-”The Miner”-they cut and cut at that rock.

SSP-”fiskars” Because someone makes paper off making scissors.

SSS-toolbox from above

So that leaves us with RPR, RSP, PRR, PRS, SRS, SPR, and SPS left to do.  I can’t think of anything anymore.  But if you can get anything, it’d be helpful.  Let us know and I’ll put it up if it’s good.  Also, please replace any of mine.

And yeah, I guess I do think this is a good use of my time.