1.
Woah! 
Dude! 
I've got new glasses!
2. Hey, guess what?…I've got a BLOWTORCH!!!
It was part of my haul of treasure from last weekend. The treasure was mostly found on Saturday, during the usual afternoon urban exploration ride, where we dumpster dove around many scrapyards and industrial sites in the West Bottoms. The blowtorch and the big mallet and the tiny damper came from the same site. Everyone found really good crap there.
3. You'll notice that among my haul of looooot, there is a trophy. There is a trophy because I won at a Frank Tuesday race. Here is their more modern site. Anyhow, they held a “Pirate Race,” which turned out to be a night-time cyclocross race, and thanks to the whims of the weather, it was a nighttime cyclocross race in a pounding rainstorm. I accidentally competed in my first-ever cyclocross race that night. It was kind of an underground thing…I'd gone out expecting a “normal” urban alleycat, but the organizer led us to the dregs of a demolished building/construction site and told us to follow the paper plates with the duct-tape arrows on them. The route went through a gigantic mud puddle, up a rocky hill, across a footbridge, down the stairs from the end of the bridge to the riverside, along the riverbank to the railroad tracks, across the tracks, over the remains of a loading dock which survived after its building had been demolished, along an abandoned street under an overpass, up the hillside the overpass passes over, through a parking lot back to the mud pit.
Because I was expecting something more paved, I rode my ancient Schwinn, but the old beast represents pretty well in mud and on the ballast alongside ralroad tracks. I dumped it going up the hill once, and got a shit-ton of weeds wrapped around the gear cluster at one point, but otherwise managed to keep it upright and in motion the whole time, except for when I was carrying it down stairs or over the remains of a loading dock which was one of the obstacles on the course. Goddamn is that bike heavy, too!
Anyhow, the way I happened to win was not the normal way, of being faster than everyone else, but was by way of having crossed the line when Mike called time up. That was how that race's victory was decided. Odd but true. And now I am the proud owner of a little plastic trophy with “Arrrr!” written on it in Sharpie. It really freakin' rocks.
Zeke did a great write-up of the event He even has some pictures of the event Sadly, I was the only person who tried to dress in any way piratey, and I kinda really failed at that, myself. I had a kind of slutty tavern-wench thing going, but it wasn't very successful. I looked kind of pudgy and awkard. Bleh.