Goodbye and good riddance, 2013!

   It's a little bit late, but there, I said it. Farewell to the most challenging year of my life thus far, even though it could have been worse. Yes, there were some very good times, and so many valuable lessons learned, but so much time was spent making lemonade from all those dang lemons that I'm going to need a whole lot of vodka to be able to finish it all off... heh heh. Moving on!

   Even though the new year began in exactly the same way the old one ended--in bed at my parents' house with an ice pack on my head, recovering from an overzealous walk with my mom--it still feels like I'm finally going to get a fresh start. Never mind that I'm still spending 2-3 days a week icing my head and resting, and still haven't ridden other than 5 minutes on the trainer now and then. I'm just getting more positive energy from something somewhere and it's helping me pull myself together a little bit. Physical therapy has been helpful, especially the craniosacral sessions, though progress is slow and tension in my neck and upper back have made it hard to sleep the past few nights. It's just weird how my neck is feeling worse and worse lately after things seemed to be improving so well for a while last month. I'll get on a roll of doing my PT exercises a few days in a row and then feel horrible again for a few days, stopping all momentum and going back to moping around the house.

      In the continued absence of lots of exercise and playing outdoors I have been making an attempt at getting back into music, picking up the bass again and trying to remember everything I had down before, following at least couple of years of sheepishly ignoring the instrument. Also continuing my quest to figure out the 5-string old time banjo even though it turns my brain inside out--it sounds so cool to play it right! I'm hoping to get back into jamming with friends, meeting with a group of musical women at a friends house weekly, and getting Kit to pull out the accordion to play along. It would be fun to get some tunes down well enough to play at an open mic night sometime.

   As for the awesomeness to come: we're moving to the new house in South Lake Tahoe in March, into a whole new area to explore. Raising chickens, rabbits, and planting a real vegetable garden. I doubt I'll be able to grow enough to live off of but it would be nice to have more of the things we like to eat all the time. Now I'm waiting for the seed catalog to arrive in the mail so I can start planning things out. 

   I'm completely switching from a focus on downhill racing to enduro; something I've been considering for a couple of years but wanting to get "just one more season" of DH in, to see if I can compete at a World Cup level. Now I'm totally over it...for the time being. I'm going to miss DH quite a bit and the totally cool people I've met at the races, but I'm REALLY excited to get back into a more endurance-oriented racing format and have some fun with it. I don't have a race calendar sorted out yet, but am hoping to start racing in June with the California Enduro Series and go from there. Depending on how that goes I may try to do a few North American Enduro Tour races but we'll have to wait and see. 

   Fortuitously, I'm going to have a super rad new bike from Ellsworth to ride this season and I am SO excited for this!! That revelation came about something like this via text message: 

Lindsay: What do you think about riding an Ellsworth bike this season?

Me: Really? Me? Ummm...YES!!! 

Yeah, that was about it. I'll admit that at the moment I would ride a Walmart bike if I could, I am just so sick of not riding, but the Ellsworth is probably going to be a better choice in the end. Shine founder and team manager Lindsay Beth Currier is the nor-cal rep for Ellsworth now and I am so happy for her! I'd explored a few other options last fall, sent out resumes, and had only heard back from one company actually interested in sponsoring a 28 year old with a habit of landing on her head, so I am still beside myself having been presented with this opportunity. I just hope I can live up to everyone's expectations and keep it rubber side down at all times!

  To top it all off I have a job interview on the south shore this week--for a health coach position. I figure while I'm making so many changes I should try to see if I can make a career out of being all healthy and stuff. It's at least worth a shot, not like I have anything better to do with my life right now. From the bottom one can only go up, right?

Here's a parting shot, a recent sunset from the deck of our house in Incline: