Get the Poison (ivy) Out

It's been what, three weeks since the Maine Mayhem!? I didn't mention it earlier but I picked up poison ivy from that race. That wicked fun race. Mid course the trail takes you, meandering, through a delish poison ivy patch. They keep it trimmed back so I don't think I ever touched it myself but I'm so allergic that if other people touch it and transfer the oils to trees, bushes etc and then I touch that I get it. And sure 'nuff, I got it.

I've had poison ivy so bad through the years that I need to have it pretty bad for it to really affect me so this year it wasn't too bad, just itchy little bumps scattered all over my body (including perilously close to my man bits). Things seem to finally be clearing up but I'm guessing that it'll come raging back since I spied bits of it around this past weekend's race course. Poison Ivy, the scourge of the planet!

Poison ivy lined probably 25% of the Rump-ass course.

A couple things that I failed to mention the days leading up to the race. We were supposed to camp near the race venue Saturday night but ma nature gave us the high hard one in the form of torrential rain, thunder & lighting and nugget sized hail so we decided to stay within the comfy confines of our home and drive to the race on Sunday. And it's a good thing we did. Saturday, mid afternoon a raging storm blew through and about .2 seconds before the torrential rains started there was a deafening CRACK! and our power went out. We didn't know it at the time but lighting had struck somewhere between our house and the road blowing our transformer sky high. So, instead of being able to relax with the fam I instead worried about the $100's of dollars worth of food in the fridge (including recently purchased omaha steaks) and moving about 4 cord of wood so that Central Maine Power could get to our pole if need be.

This is a dramatic recreation of the transformer.

Once that was done, Marcy and B were already in bed and I still had all sorts of nervous energy to burn off while I waited to hear back from CMP. What to do, what to do? Well, it just so happens that I had been growing my leg hair out enough so that I could wax so I donned a helmet light, wipped out my Nads and got to work.

I would love to say that waxing your legs by lamp light was an effective and romantic use of my time but when I woke up in the morning and was able to assess the situation I looked more like this:

than this:

It seems that 800 lumens is perfectly adequate to ride at full speed at night but not bright enough to wax your manly legs. Who knew?