so so so...

today we made a decision! we are leaving on april 20th!

been riding the sojourn, trying to break 'er in. it's fucking sweet! so many gears, which get more and more amazing as i slowly learn how to utilize them more and more.

been planning and thinking about our gear and budget a lot, although we still have a LOT to do, including calling some wwoof hosts and asking if we can stay on their farms! whhhhhich i am going to start as soon as i finish this blog post. paul is working on making some panniers out of leather. yea... ambitious. need to switch this desktop computer for a laptop we can take with us. plus a gazillion other things i won't bother typing out, because i already have some serious "TO DO" lists going.

alright, that's it for now. to the PHONE! wish me luck - calling people is pretty much my least favorite activity.

a little league of their own mighty giant ducks... um.. sandlot!

i was sitting on a milk crate in the very back of the kitchen at good earth today, eating a tuna sandwich, when this courier i've never met or seen before came all the way into the back and asked "are you kelsey?"
"yes...?"
"i heard you might be interested in playing girls' bike polo."
"yea... maybe"
"we play tuesdays and saturdays, you should come."



i didn't ask why HE was inviting me to GIRLS polo and instead thought about how much it felt like a set-up from a movie. like the rag-tag protaga-team has to recruit similarly rag-tag outsiders who do things like work at shitty jobs, eat tuna sandwiches and hide their amazing talent.

mind-numbed.

holy shit. i just spent over an hour going through a box of all the notes i collected during my time in junior high & high school. i've been meaning to look through it for a while and select a few gems to keep, but it had been pretty daunting. my head is spinning with a zillion inside jokes, long forgotten tifs, and relentless crushes. everybody was SO crazy.

i found a letter i wrote "to myself" dated June 19, 1998. here's a few funny lines:

"i am in 8C this year. i played ringette in dewberry this year. i have a lot of friends although i don't see why, i am just a big dork"
"i spend a lot of time on time on the internet, a great deal of it spent researching marilyn manson. this band perplexes me, to my parents discouragement. me and my parents aren't getting along right now"

"i have no idea what my occupational goals are but i'm pretty sure it will have something to do with language arts (english). i enjoy tv and i think my job might have something to do with advertisement (like tv commercials). although i enjoy tv i know it is mostly crap. it's people telling you how to act, think, what to buy and what you need to be what they want you to be."

well, i'm over marilyn manson and i don't play ringette anymore, but everything else is pretty much still the same.



in other news, me and my parents aren't getting along right now. haha. seriously though. i called them yesterday to ask about storage of some of my stuff while i am riding my bike from farm to farm across the country. they are having trouble with this concept. oh well.

thankfully it's not still 1998. thankfully i am an adult. thankfully none of my friends are still jesus-freaks.

polo

i finally got to use the polo mallet we made in the summer!

paul is presenting me with a crazy supper! i must go! there are mini eggs on the plate! okbye!

a stitch in time...

do you have certain dangerous or intense situations that you enact in your head and try to imagine what you would actually do if the situation entered the realm of reality?? well, as i've tried to imagine so many times, today my chain broke as i was headed down centre street. "so this is what it would be like. it's actually happening. wow".
luckily for me, it was at 4:30 am and there were no cars around me! and also my chain somehow folded up in such a way while staying attached to the frame, that it acted as an emergency brake scraping on the pavement enough to slow me down. i imagine that sparks were flying, but there were no witnesses to corroborate this.
i hobby-horsed down to the bottom of the hill using my shoe on the back tire to slow down this time.

lesson learned: keep your chain in good shape, use the "chain checker" tool once in a while.



what else... finished hermosa's bike a few days ago and she took me and paul out for deeeeelicious sushi as a thank you yesterday. i need to get a picture of this thing, it's a bright green "jr 5" apollo. it's so small! it has 24" wheels! it fits her perfectly though; i'm so happy it worked out.

ahh, looks like lots of people updated their blogs in the past few days, time for some readin'!

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

getting nervous and hyped!!!!
i have started emailing farms trying to put together some kind of schedule for our wwoofing trip. even within alberta so many look amazing and interesting, but they just aren't on the route :( just working this out my head right now, i guess it'll end up being like 15 farms (about 4 months, one week at each farm, maybe more maybe less at some, maybe we should go to shambala!!).

yup... life is pretty great, good routine (here's the current one: go to work, go to bike shop, meet paul at bike shop, invite whichever friend we run into to come for supper with us, smoke doobies, come home, sync my ipod full of podcasts for tomorrow & fall asleep).

focus: save money, tie up loose ends (bank shit, storage), hang outs.

podcasting

hey friends,
not many people i know seem to be into podcasts, but i found one in particular that i really really like.

it's called freedomain radio.

Topics range from politics to philosophy to science to economics to relationships to atheism - and how to achieve real freedom in your life today. Passionate, articulate, funny and irreverent, Freedomain Radio shines a bold light on old topics, and invents a few new ones to boot!

i've only listened to a few, and they were mostly about theories and concepts about life in a stateless society. just very interesting and easy to listen to. he's in canada too so it's extra relevant.

more bike shit!

last night paul and i spent maybe an hour on the path near eau claire nearing 2 in the AM, effing around on our bikes, and i am very happy to report (brag) that i can finally put my "nuts" to the handlebars and skid. i also learned a less geeky way to mount my fixie. trackstanding and to a greater degree riding backwards still elude me.

also big news, i made my first ebay purchase ever! i got a leather cardiff seat. annnnnd my second ebay purchase ever is going to be a biggie. i need a touring bike for the trip so... meet the raleigh sojourn:



can you believe it comes with the rack, seat, frame pump, and the fenders. for $800!

do you realize?

this song always makes me cry in a good way and feel better.

i <3 cunspircy th33ri3s

i was looking for some information about censoring the internet, when i came across a story on with the headline "Obama Information Czar Outlined Plan For Government To Infiltrate Conspiracy Groups". i downloaded the paper written by cass sunstein. it was written in 2008 and is called "Conspiracy Theories".

the whole thing is crazy, but here is one paragraph from pg. 14.

What can government do about conspiracy theories? Among the things it can do, what should it do? We can readily imagine a series of possible responses. (1) Government might ban conspiracy theorizing. (2) Government might impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories. (3) Government might itself engage in counterspeech, marshaling arguments to discredit conspiracy theories. (4) Government might formally hire credible private parties to engage in counterspeech. (5) Government might engage in informal communication with such parties, encouraging them to help. Each instrument has a distinctive set of potential effects, or costs and benefits, and each will have a place under imaginable conditions. However, our main policy idea is that government should engage in cognitive infiltration of the groups that produce conspiracy theories, which involves a mix of (3), (4) and (5).

taxing conspiracy theories?!??! infiltrating groups?! geeeezuz.

here's the link to the abstract and where you can download it:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1084585

the paper is does talk about the proposed "infiltration" and claims it wouldn't be secretive and all affiliations would be made known. and this isn't actual policy or anything, just an article written for the Journal of Political Philosophy. but still... fucked up. but so are a million other things taking place right now. terrorism, terrorism, terrorism (apparently books are banned on flights to the US, if you have an unlucky name, good luck at the airport, sucka , try not to have a seizure around any cops or you might get tazed, bro)

oh well, what can you do...

so, i've had a shitty week and i'm taking refuge in planning our B(ike).C. trip. one part of that is figuring out what to do with all the stuff we have collected. let me know if you want to take any of my worldly possessions. maybe i'll put a list of books and records and movies and crystals and other shit up in a bit.

i'm also hyped up and respectfully nervous about our weekend plans - ayahuasca! i'll let ya'll know how it goes. phew.

love and silliness,
kelsey

ps - THE CIA KILLED JFK!!!