Hired on New Year’s Day

But first some important facts about animals:

1) The difference between mules, donkeys, jack asses, and burros is enormous. The main thing to remember is that a mule is the largest, strongest, and smartest of them all, even bettering the horse. Being a mix between a donkey and a horse, the mule outpaces both its parents across the board in intelligence, stamina, and will power, giving insight into the real advantages of human mixed breeding. I for one hate getting sun burned. Mixed breeding would take care of that. Just imagine: a human crossed with an alligator. Yeah pretty sick. No sun-burning, plus an even bigger advantage would be that the person/alligator (a ‘humigator,’ if you will) would never have to buy alligator leather to have a nice pair of cowboy boots. Think of the savings.
2) We’ve discovered about 8.7 million species on earth, though it’s estimated that at least another 90% have yet to be discovered. Some estimates put the total number of current living species on earth at an astounding 100 million.
3) Right now (present day) fewer than 1% of the earth’s species throughout its entire history exist. And less than 1% of past species have a fossil record. That means there could have been around 1 billion species throughout history, possibly even more. With these kinds of odds, I find it very hard to believe that a half sea-lion/half mountain goat never existed. Imagine a 900-pound sea-lion, but with long, thin goat legs and hooves and big arching horns atop its streamlined head. Just think of how well adapted this “sea-goat” would have been to both land and sea. It would have had no equal, and likely been the top predator in both of its habitats. It’s horns would have fended off great white sharks while its menacing sea lion bellow would have warded off all but the meanest grizzly bears. Swift in the water for catching fish and at complete ease on the perilous sides of icy cliffs high in the Himalayas, the sea-goat could have been mother nature’s finest achievement. I doubt it went extinct, and instead further developed its sea-lion brain to rival even our own intelligence. It would have likely begun an agriculture-based society, fought wars, landed on the moon, fought more wars, invented the internet, fought more wars, polluted the planet, fought more wars, begun incorporating cyborg technology into it’s body for longevity and to fight off obesity from mackerel over-consumption, fought more wars, and eventually abandoned its physical body completely for light-speed, weightless thought waves better suited to travel throughout the galaxy in its quest for knowledge, for as the sea-goat knows, knowledge is the only ends to a mean.
4) I got a job working at Ras Kassa’s, an Ethiopian restaurant on 30th st.
5) It’s 64 degrees today in Boulder, wise guru coach Sam Johnson, so I’m sorry for not resting today but I gotta take adavantage of this weather and go crush a 5 hour ride.
6) Okay, now that it’s three days later I’ll get back to whatever this blog post was about. I probably won’t finish it for another two days though so I’ll have to go back again and change the beginning of this sentence a third time.

I found the new job pretty quickly. I went in for an interview at the Ethiopian restaurant in the morning, got hired, and began working that night. I’d bought a super fancy shiny collared shirt the day before in order to show up looking spiffy for our team meeting next weekend, and decided to wear the shirt with a pair of black slacks for the interview (my jeans were missing). My normal routine is to show up for an interview looking like crap, that way if I happen to get hired for some reason my employers don’t have any expectations of me and the only place to go, in their minds’, is up. I think this strategy, though honest, is the wrong direction to go, because the owner who hired me even COMPLIMENTED me on my fancy shirt. I was hired immediately.

The woman who owns the restaurant is extremely nice. She’s always telling me to eat as much food as I want so I’ll be healthy and strong. Of course this makes having a caloric deficit difficult, but I’ve held strong so far and limited myself to a mere 1-3 plates of food per night. It’s hard to not eat like 17,000 calories a shift, since the food in the kitchen is delicious, smells delicious, is super healthy, and the pre-made stuff sits in warmers, just asking you to serve yourself up a big plate of red lentils, yellow lentils, green lentils, potatoes and beats, sweat potatoes, collared greens, injera bread, and lamb. What I’ve begun doing is basically just riding until 4pm, showering, downing a quick recovery smoothie, and rushing off to get to work at 4:30 to eat my post-ride meal at the restaurant. It’s all great tasting stuff and I’m happy to finally be serving healthy food to people instead of cheesecake and popcorn.

The riding the past week or two has been fantastic up until today. It’s been sunny every day and we got a nice warm spell in there too. I was riding at 9,000 ft in short sleeves!! Today it all went to shit and I ended a five hour ride in a snowstorm riding a flat tire for the last two miles. The legs and lungs are feeling strong though, despite this being the end of four weeks of hard riding. Time for a rest week pretty soon.

And, last but not least, I’ve begun a new Performance Board. It’s not completed yet, but I’ll show you guys a picture of it. I need to start writing down good training quotes on it and sketch some pictures of Thomas and other power animals, but it’s coming along nicely. Rules will be explained later. Feel free to compete with me. I’ll be posting updates weekly up at in the “Page” bar at the top of the blog. Here it is:

Rules and stipulations to date: