Today I had one of those rides where everything goes perfectly. First of all, today has been the coldest it’s been since I first got here. It was a cool 70 degrees with overcast skies, which meant today has been the first day I haven’t overheated. Even though I’ve been down here for three weeks now, I’m still not used to 85 and 90 degree temps yet, considering I came from 50 to 60 degree days up in Eugene. So the weather today felt great.
I rode out to the base of Mt. Lemmon, filled my bottles at the McDonald’s, and rode up into the clouds to Windy Ridge, 14 miles up. My legs felt great, easily pushing 260 to 320 watts without any fatigue. I ate my first bite of food at two hours, and shortly after turned around back down the mountain. The descent went by quickly and I rode back to the outskirts of town to the McDonald’s for another water refill. From there, I headed back to the mountain, and rode up at a quick pace, getting to the 18 mile post with ease. I figured 32 miles of climbing and about 10,000 feet of elevation was good for the day, and sped back down the mountain and got home with only having to yell at and flip off one driver the entire day.
I came home to find all my homemade ice packs lying in the sink with their insides leaking out, some already just empty, wet zip lock bags. A note on top of the pile of bags in the sink read, “salt ice packs=huge fucking mess in the freezer” with a frowny face. After making a small test bag filled with salt water a few days ago, I went to the store, bought a thing of salt and a box of zip lock bags. I should have bought the real zip locks instead of the cheap store brand, but I saved a buck doing so. My second error was not paying attention to the failed test bag I had made. It worked well for a day, but then started leaking and I had to throw it away. For some reason, I figured bigger bags would mean less leaking. Wrong.
The bags leaked and filled the freezer with 2 inches of salt water, which one of my roommates (TJ) kindly cleaned up for me. But the mess doesn’t end there. While I was making the bags yesterday, I laid them out on the counter. They were already leaking at this point, so I quickly put them in the freezer to start freezing and therefor stop leaking. Those few minutes of counter leakage were enough to cover the counter tops with huge, white salt crystals. I keep wiping them off with water, but the salt won’t go away. And it’s not just the one counter I set the bags on, it’s ALL of the counters. I think the salt crystal disease outbreak spread to the other counters due to “Used Sponge Transfer,” or UST. UST not only causes the spreading of salt crystal disease, but can also be attributed to many other Counter Top Dysfunctions (CTD’s) . Such as: hot sauce saturation, which gives everything a hint of hot sauce because the sponge used to clean the dishes was saturated with hot sauce that spilled everywhere on the counter. (Maybe not a bad thing, actually). Another CTD caused by UST is dog hair infestation. The sponge drops onto the floor, gets a healthy dose of dog hair, among other things, and the dishes and counter tops start resembling shag carpeting. The list goes on and on. Well, no. That’s about it. Other than bacteria being spread everywhere.
My next ice pack creation will be much cleaner and easier to manage. And what keeps things cleaner than a baby diaper? Fill a baby diaper with water, fold it up, and put it in a zip lock bag. I found out about this idea on Instructables, which is a cool website that has tons of ideas on how to make things you don’t need.
KENNETT PETERSON 