Gusty Chicken Dinner

Hitcher has a new best friend in the form of our neighbor's cat, Lily. She comes over into the yard and the two of them play. It is the cutest thing to see this tiny cat playing with our 50 pound dog.


We've had a couple beautiful days lately.

We headed south to Boise for the Chicken Dinner road race yesterday. It was another opportunity for me to race with my teammates - Sarah Barber, Sarah Brown, and Jeanne Rumps. The 1/2/3 women were grouped in with the cat 3 men and the masters men, and the race started up a decent climb. Ted and I arrived too late for a warm-up, miscalculting how much time we would have, so we started with cold legs. Not so great for a race starting on a climb. Thankfully, there was a horrible headwind of 30mph up the first climb, keeping the pack together. Without a warm-up, Ted and I both got popped when the winds turned into crosswinds at the top of the climb. I was stuck out of the draft and was not warmed up enough to maintain contact. Ted fared slightly better, but still was popped long before he should have been.

All four of the Bob's girls were separated on the course, so we were unable to help each other. Sarah Barber was the furthest up the road, riding some of the time with Ted. I ended up solo for almost all of the next two laps, which was brutal in the wind. I definitely did get a good workout.

Ted turned around part-way into the third (of four) laps, and joined me. We decided to call it a day and headed home. With the wind as it was, it took the winning 1/2 man almost 3.5 hours to do 65 miles, and for our field, the winners finished 56 miles in about 3 hours! Needless to say, I don't think many would say that yesterday's race was exactly fun, but at least it was sunny and warm!

It ended up being a fun weekend. We stayed with Sarah and Brian Barber, and they fixed us a fantastic dinner. It was great to get to know Sarah a little better. The sun and warm temperatures made the drives pleasant, so overall it was a good weekend.

We did witness one very troubling thing yesterday afternoon as we were leaving Nampa. We saw a car pull over by a wildlife preserve, dumping something over the fence. As we got closer, we could see that the man had dumped two small dogs. We continued driving and came upon the car at the next intersection, so we jotted down the license plate number. Ted was irate and walked up to the man's window, telling him we knew what he had done and it was inexcusable. He offered some lame excuse of how the dogs weren't his, and eventually said he would go back to get the dogs. Ted said he did show some remorse, but I don't buy it. He did head back to the preserve, as did we. If the dogs were there, we were going to take them to a shelter, but they were nowhere to be seen, as was the car. I'm sure he probably did pick up the dogs. He also probably drove to some other remote street where he could dump them.

I called and reported the whole thing to the Nampa sheriff this morning, so hopefully they'll at least look into it. With Hitcher being a dog that was potentially dumped, it disgusts me to see someone doing such a thing. Horrible person.