Hello and welcome to An altitude Problem, where you blogger and her husband have just hit the couch. I had a fabulous day. Bobby, not so much, spending it cleaning the car that Andy trashed yesterday-more on that later.

I have been cleaning condos lately, since work is slow these days, making a little money, doing something while I'm doing nothing. And I have done a lot of mountain biking in the last week, fifteen to twenty miles a day, and at the moment I am feeling a bit wiped out. Thursday night was the regularly scheduled Diva's ride, and finally, after a summer of moderate biking, I did not have to kill myself to keep up. We rode "my" trails, the ones accessible from my house, so I knew exactly what to expect. It was a good evening. I did not ride on Friday because I was planning to do a long ride on Saturday, but instead, B saw online that it was free national park admissions day, so on Saturday, we loaded ourselves, and after a bit of deliberation, Andy, up and headed to Rocky Mountain National Park. It ended up being a rainy, windy day, plus we had Andy, so we drove, and did not do much hiking, then followed the crowds out of the park, through Estes Park, through Boulder and Golden, surprising ourselves by finding small, somewhat rural-ish areas that we didn't know existed. If we had to live in the Denver area... we got home late, the backseat covered with shreds of a stick we had allowed Andy to chew on, bits of rawhide, bits of paper from the to-go bag B's breakfast came in.

Today was another Diva's ride, on Keystone Mountain. Since it could not be an evening ride, it had to be squeezed in on everyone's day off. I got to ride the gondola up, then ride downhills all afternoon. We rode two loops of the 11-7 trail at the top of Keystone, then rode down on green trails, stopping and waiting for the slower ones, and then, after most of the group had gone home, another girl and I rode up again, and down again on Eye of the Tiger, a swoopy, up and down rollercoaster of a ride. And after an afternoon of riding downhill, I am exhausted. There were 8 of us girls, and although I got my butt handed to me on a few of the uphills, I did fairly well by comparison on the downhills- I attribute it to riding Keystone Mountain. There's no better way to build confidence on the downhills than to spend time in a downhill bike park. You get experience in a little of everything- ooptie-oops (mounds in the trail, usually serving a useful purpose as a water bar, that pop one's wheels off the ground), bridges, rocks, roots, tight switchbacks, turn berms, trees, ledges, as well as optional features such as long, narrow bridge features, corkscrews, and drop zones (which i do not do).

When I got home, Andy was in desperate need of a run. Since Bobby had spent the day washing, cleaning, waxing the car, Andy had a nice snack of wax and sponge, which got him locked in the house. I unloaded my bike from the jeep, put my helmet back on, and then B decided to come along, so the three of us made a four mile loop by our house, and by the time we got back, my shoulders were giant knots. As hard as I try to have good form, I just can't seem to be able to help hunching my shoulders when I ride.

And now, one of these days, I need to do domestic things. My precious hour and a half before Bobby got home night before last was taken up by two little Mormon teenagers, who I sat on the front porch with and let them attempt to proselytize me. Yes, I open the door for the Mormons and the Jehovah's Witnesses. I know what it feels like to be seen as weird for your religiosity. And these poor kids who are so painfully uncomfortable, being corralled by feel-good reasoning into knocking on doors for the greater good, selling religious agenda door-to-door, they may as well go home feeling like they have "fought the good fight". I can lend an ear, but the problem is, they asked me for my phone number so they could check on me after I had read the Book of Mormon, and, in spite of my deer in the headlights look, I gave in. So this morning I got invited to church, and who knows how many more phone calls i shall have to avoid. And my day yesterday was shot by our 300 mile ramble. And now that B has hit the couch with his laptop, I have settled in as well. I do not usually get all domestic when he is home, because it's just so darn tempting to sit and force him to make small talk, watch a show with him, make him sit on my feet to warm them up, generally annoy him. I can do housework when he is at work, but i consider it essential to our marriage to chill together.

But now, he has gotten up and started to make his own dinner. Uh-oh. Time to run.