March Madness in the Rock, Baybee!!

March 21st, 2008

The only thing better than taking a day off work to watch the NCAA men’s college basketball tournament (also referred to as “March Madness”) is taking a day off work to watch the tournament LIVE in person!! It’s a dream come true. In approximately 2 hours, I will be attending what will be the start of an all day session of March Madness at Alltel Arena in North Little Rock. Four 1st round basketball games, with my alma mater (U. Texas @ Austin, the 2nd seed in the South) playing Austin Peay in the 2nd game! And then the winners on Sunday.

Those of you who know me know how much I LOVE The Tourney ™, and the chance to see it live plus support MY school is totally a dream come true. I was a huge doofus and didn’t get any tickets when they were available a year ago. Luckily, one of my co-workers had a friend of a friend who couldn’t go and were selling their tickets, and I totally lucked out. Even better, they were nice enough to sell them to me for face value!

Yesterday was a practice day for all the teams which was free to the public. I attended the session where Texas was practicing and got to scope out our seats in advance.

We’re WAAAY up there, but it’s still not too bad. Definitely look for us on TV!! (Section 202, Row 11, 2nd to last row!)


And here’s the view from the seats:


Jen will be going with me to session 1 (St. Marys vs Miami (FL) and UT vs. Austin Peay), a friend from church will be going to the 2nd session (Miss St vs Oregon and Memphis vs UT-Arlington). A co-worker of mine will be going with me to Sunday’s session which will pit the winners of today’s games against each other.

T-minus an hour or so to go before we leave! It’s gonna be an awesome day!!

New addition to the family!

December 18th, 2007

Everyone, please say hi to our new puppy, “She-Who-Is-Yet-To-Be-Named”.

She’s a 12-week old Siberian Husky/Shar-Pei mix. We officially adopted her on Saturday, December 15th from Arkansas Southern Dog Rescue. Ariel & I went to the Petco in N. Little Rock to do some Christmas shopping for the cats and took her home with us instead! Yep, you read that right. We got our cats a DOG for Christmas!!

Apparently she was abandoned about 4 weeks ago at the Petco in N. Little Rock. A family came in with their kids and the puppy, left her in the women’s restroom, and left the store. One of the employees heard her crying, found her, and called the rescue organization. She’s been staying in a foster home ever since and had been given a temporary name of “Holly”. She is sweet and cute as can be, and MJ has already sort of befriended her.

We haven’t come up with a name for her yet - still looking for ideas! So far the list includes: Akala, Akasha, Cinnamon, Cassia (a relative of the cinnamon plant, pronounced Kasha), Arwen, Lyra, and Keesha. Ginger has also been a widely suggested name.

More pics of the darling sweet pup can be found on my Flickr page!

Raid the Rock 2007 - more photos

October 31st, 2007

Due to the generosity of my friends, they have given me permission to host the photos they took during Raid the Rock 2007.  I sure appreciate and am grateful for the time and effort they spent in capturing priceless memories of the race for all of us.

Raid the Rock 2007 Collection

Raid the Rock 2007 - some photos

October 30th, 2007

Some photos of us can be seen on the 614Photography site - a professional photographer that was hired to shoot the race.

614Photography RtR photos

Click on the link where it says “Click here to order”, select Raid the Rock, and click “View Pictures”. We show up in Frames 26-27 on page 1, and Frames 473-497 on page 12 & 13.
I have a ton of other photos taken by various family & friends - once I get permission to post those, I will.

Also - we did finish officially in 5th place, just a little over an hour behind the 3rd place team, Bikes Plus, who have won several Raid the Rocks in the past. And to our delight & utter surprise, I found out yesterday that we qualified to race at the National Championship should we choose to attend. Unfortunately, Nationals is this Friday, and not only will we have recovered enough to race then (it’s a 18-30 hour race), but we don’t have the funds to cover the $900/team entry fee. Still, it means something that we qualified!

More tomorrow…

Raid the Rock 2007 - initial thoughts

October 28th, 2007

Another year has come and gone since the last Raid the Rock that I participated in.  During that time, especially in the last several months, I’ve been training hard for Raid the Rock 2007, in hopes of actually competing this year instead of just “participating.”  My team this year was comprised of Tina (who I raced with last year), Rex (another adventure racer from work who has been very successful in previous RtRs), and myself.

The race started at 5am inside a future gated community, which basically turned out to be a big plot of farmland a private owner gave permission to use.  The first leg was a ROGAINE section (which stands for Rugged Outdoor Group Activity Involving Navigation and Endurance), in which we would have to find 14 checkpoints (CPs) in any order that we wanted.  These points were already plotted on the first of two maps we were given.  We were also given the option of using any mode of transport we wanted (i.e. walking or biking).  We also had a 10am cutoff that we had to meet in order to race under “official” status. 

The short of it is, we managed to find all 14 CPs without much trouble, only made a few minor mistakes, and made it back to the transition area just after 9am.  We had to trek through ankle deep irrigated fields, bushwack through hilly terrain, search for CPs in the dark & fog, and slog our way through numerous muddy, wet trails.  Coming into the transition area, we were told that we were in 5th place overall, out of 20 or so teams in our “Premier” division!  We were very pleased!

We then received the map for the remaining course, although the points were already plotted on the first map we received for the next leg - canoeing.  Before we jumped in the canoes, we made the decision to plot all the points now, while we were still somewhat fresh, instead of waiting until we had completed the canoeing section.

I plotted the points while Rex and Tina got ready, and then Rex double checked the points while I got ready.  We left and got the canoes, followed closely by two other teams which came in while we were plotting.  The canoeing section was tough - having to paddle down Palarm Creek which was a sinuous, debris infested, stillwater stream.  We had to navigate around logs, branches, low-hanging brush/trees.  From Palarm Creek, we paddled to the Arkansas River and picked up the first three CPs located on a series of three islands.  We then headed back towards the shore and had to paddle down a slough (pronounced “slew”).

This portion entailed us paddling along even murkier water, and having to portage the canoe up and over several road crossings.  This meant having to get out of the canoe into the nasty stinky muddy water, shoving the canoe up and over a steep 15-ft bank, and then getting back in the canoes to paddle further.  The last 40 minutes or so was spent paddling through thick vegetation which made the going even tougher.  Overall we spent 3 hours on the canoeing section, which seemed long to me, but I found out later was about par for all the teams.  The two teams that were behind us?  Well, they passed us during the canoeing leg, although I don’t think we finished that far behind them at the next transition.

We made it to the transition with sore arms and legs, ready to get on our bikes to complete the last leg.  We were also glad to have plotted the points earlier, as we were even more tired and worn out at this point.  This transition area was located in a future development of Maumelle, my hometown.  In fact, we were probably only a couple of miles from my house.  So we did have a slight advantage with me being from this area.

After studying the map to determine the best route, we set off for the next checkpoint.  Since a lot of Maumelle is under development and the roads weren’t all on the maps, it took a while to orient ourselves and make sure we were headed in the right direction, at least for the first CP which I was a little unsure where it was located.  Fortunately, we ended up finding it without too much trouble, and then we were off.  I knew the locations of the next several points like the back of my hand, and we rode through the town I know so well.  After picking up the last “urban” point at the new softball complex, we ended up riding through a lot of backwoods ATV trails.  We didn’t have much problem with this section, mostly just making sure we were traveling in roughly the right direction and following the trails.  There were some steep climbs, and A LOT of muddy trails/stream crossings, but nothing we weren’t used to.  The “highlight” of this leg was having to wade through a chest-deep stream (White Oak Bayou) carrying our bikes.

Eventually we returned to “civilization” and picked up a point at the LR Big Dam Bridge.  We had one more checkpoint to get before heading to the finish, and this was located at this huge cliffs on the North Little Rock River Trail.  From the race instructions, we figured we would be rappeling here, but we were unsure how high up we would be.  We had passed two or three more teams during the biking section, and as far as we knew, they were still behind us.  We sped as quickly as we could to the rappel, hoping to make it there before any other teams did.

The rappel was awesome, although we had to hike to the top of a 150-ft cliff.  This was the same trail we had to carry our bikes up last year.  We were pretty weary at this point, but we managed to get ourselves to the top.  Coming off the cliffs was pretty awesome, and it was definitely the longest rappel I’ve done.

I was even more surprised when I got to the bottom of the cliffs since I was met there by Jen and several other friends who witnessed my rappel.  :)

We were fortunate that we got there when we did because several teams showed up just as we were coming down, and we knew that it would take them a while to complete the rappel.

We rode off towards the finish down the River Trail, a mere 3-miles away at the NLR Boathouse knowing that we had little chance of being passed at this point.   Feeling good about our day, although very tired, we crossed the finish approximately 11 hrs & 45 minutes after we started, just shy of 5pm.  We were met by our support crew, friends, and family.  Handing the passport to the race officials with ALL the checkpoints punched, we learned that we had finished unofficially in 5th place!!  Later we learned that the 1st place team - Lab Rats, had finished 2 hours ahead of us, and the 3rd place team, had only finished about an hour ahead of us.  I don’t think we really could’ve raced any faster than we did, so I was very pleased.  It was also the first race I’ve ever finished under official status (i.e. having met all the time cutoffs and having found all the CPs), and the first one I finished while it was still light out. I even had the chance to go home and shower and change before coming back for the awards dinner.

I know that this race was made even better with the awesome teammates and support crew that we had.  Tina did a great job pacing off distances during our ROGAINE, and is a MONSTER on the mountain bike.  Rex impressed me time and time again with his sense of location and leading us to CPs, as well as manhandling canoes during our portages.  Tina’s husband and Rex’s wife did an excellent job with support, having taking care of anything we needed done.  It was definitely a team effort, and I can’t say how proud I am of everyone.

Photos on Flickr now…

April 11th, 2007

I’m not back by any means, but just wanted to let y’all know that I’ve started a Flickr account where I’ll be posting photos. Recently updated it with some photos from Petit Jean State Park, a sunset one from Little Rock, and photos of a new electric bass I got.

Adinar’s Flickr Photo Sharing

Hasta la vista…for now

January 28th, 2007

If you haven’t noticed, it’s been a while…

Anyway, just wanted to say that I’m taking a break indefinitely.

Boring ‘ol wallpaper?

December 15th, 2006

Bring new life to your computer desktop here!

Interfacelift.com

Some awesome, awesome wallpapers!!

O Holy Night

December 13th, 2006

The 12/4 episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (NBC) featured musicians benefiting from The Tipitina’s Foundation.  They did an awesome jazzy rendition of “O Holy Night” as a tribute to the City of New Orleans.

Download for free here (right click - save as):  O Holy Night - Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip

Raid the Rock ‘03

November 21st, 2006

After 3 long years in the making, I finally finished the race report for Raid the Rock 2003 & posted it in the archives. If you care to re-live every moment of that race from my perspective, you’re welcome to do so!

Raid the Rock 2003 Race Report