I found a live streaming site for the Giro d’Italia and spent this morning watching my monitor, the penultimate stage up and over some crazy climbs high. I don’t usually miss my TV, but it would have been nice to watch today’s stage in a proper fashion. That little Venezuelan dude, Rujano, is a freak. 5′3″ of uphill havoc. Funny tough, the Vewnezuelan pro team that was racing down at the Vuelta a Cuba, while exceedingly friendly and talented, was clearly playing with marked cards, if you know what I’m saying. The morning of the hardest stage, when it had been announced there would be the race’s first drug test at the end of the day, two of the Venezuelans pulled DNS. All the other guys, who’d been holding ALL of the race jerseys going into that day, subsequently lost them all. One guy I spoke with, who’d raced the Tour de l’Avenir the year before, said the first week of the Cuba race was the fastest he’d ever been in. “This is not possible,” he said. I’m just saying…

Nice shot here of A. Olson at the Vuelta a Cuba. Thought this was a funny shot, AO’s bike is worth more than these guys will make combined in their lives and they probably have no idea. They’re just psyched to have the beater rig next to AO’s.

Stitches came out of the knee yesterday and I got on the trainer and took 10 pedal strokes. They all hurt, but I bet it’ll be better today.

Who cares if it’s been raining for the past two weeks straight (seriously), when you get a baby like this in the mail your spirits rise. This is my old Steelman Eurocross rerigged with singlespeed dropouts and a Team HUP paintjob. Spectrum Powder Works out in Colorado did the paint and it’s incredible. I opted for the SS dropouts after I ripped the derailleur hanger off the frame at ‘cross nats in December. That race would have been perfect for a SS, you ran half the course anyway and my chain skipped from the first lap on because of the gnarly mud. I imagine that once this rig is all built it’ll probably weigh in under 17lbs.

Just got a flash for my Canonet QL19 ($15) and it’s hilarious - no adjustments at all, only a power button. Total Brady Bunch camera. On the other end of the spectrum I received my new Treo 650 SmartPhone. It is amazing and will likely take me eons to figure out, but it was a great deal - free - so what are you going to do. This is for my man Zak: I get the stitches taken out of my knee tomorrow and Sideways sucks.

Four days into post-surgery and I’m off the crutches and off the vicodin. Pretty good. Okay, the knee doesn’t look very good, what with atrophy and some weird swelling, but considering someone jabbed two over-size knitting needles in their five days ago, I can’t be too bummed. It’s getting better so fast, really lifts the spirits.

Found out I may have scored another mag cover, should know in a day or two. It’s nice when that happens out of stock. I can’t wait to get out there and do some more stock stuff before RAAM. My man Mark McC (Colavita Sutter Home) won Tour of CT on Sunday. That guy is so smart on the bike, rides only as hard as he has to. You can watch him in a race and think he’s totally out of it and then the next thing you know he’s raising his hands at the finish line. Amazing.

Quicky DVD Review: K and I watched Sideways the other night. What a piece of crap. A totally overrated and extremely mediocre movie. Run-of-the-mill buddy movie plot line, with some wine thrown in to make it hip. I find it hard to believe so many people thought so much of it. How?

Okay, it may look like something bad, but it isn’t. This is my knee, 24 hrs after surgery. Disregarding the big blood spot (not to mention the ridiculously atrophied quad), the knee came through yesterday really well. Once they got in there they found that while my medial miniscus was indeed torn, it was not what was causing my issues, so they left alone. The culprit was a huge plica on the medial side of my patella. It was basically a big flap of extra tissue sticking out from under the kneecap, aggravating everything in the area. So snip, snip. All gone.

The knee’s a bit sore today, but nothing a strategic vicodin can’t handle. The doc said I might be able to get on the trainer by the end of the week.

Bummed I’m missing the Tour of Connect-the-dots this weekend. Colaviat Sutter Home guys are down there and I haven’t seen them since training camp. Also, MTB studs G. Kabush and T. Wells are racing too, would have been nice to get some shots of them on the road. Got toally swamped with stock requests towards the end of the week. Can’t complain about that though.

Just messing around with PhotoShop over here.

Had a great shoot Tuesday, hiked up to the top of Cardigan Mtn down in Canaan and shot some portrait-type stuff of a guy who started an innovative outdoor equipment company down in southern NH. We met early in the AM, hiked up and the shooting was killer. Then set up the strobes in the woods and that turned out well too. Hiking down didn’t feel too good on the knee, but everything turned out well. It was one of the cooler shoots I’ve done in a long time, the company is insanely unique and the owner an incredibly interesting person. I’d like to do more work with them in the future as they seem like and up-and-coming group with a great spirit.

I’m calling tomorrow “Knee-Day”. Not sure what time I go under, but I met with the surgeon yesterday and I have a lot of confidence in him (he fixed my smashed up hand back in ‘93). I can hardly wait…right.

I mowed the lawn on Monday and it looks sweet.

It all started Friday night. We were at this local gathering and ran into a friend of ours we hadn’t seen in a few years. he’s a doc at the hospital and had moved out west for a spell but moved back and we hadn’t seen him since. So we were talking to him and he was talking about this awesome cycling trip he took to Europe last summer and I mentioned I wasn’t riding because of my knee. The next thing he tells he’s not riding either because he just had open heart surgery three weeks ago to replace his aortic valve. That was a conversation stopper. made me feel kind of lame to be complaining about a sore knee.

That led me to the bright idea as follows: Since my knee’s already hooped (and I know what’s wrong with it), how much could it hurt it to go for a ride on Saturday? Answer: a lot, as it turns out. I had a nice 75 minute ride, felt totally out of shape but enjoyed it all the same. I then tried to ride the trainer on Sunday and lasted 5 minutes. Total agony. Walking even got harder as the day went on. Today it was even worse, walking was a painful chore. Not good for someone whose job demands a good amount of mobility. So after an e-mail to my doc I got a call, “Can you take surgery on Friday?”

Gulp. “Yeah, I guess.” It meant cancelling a job this weekend for VN, which really sucked, but I had no option, my knee is hosed and I can’t pretend it’s not. The sooner I get it taken care of the sooner I’ll be back in fighting form and the sooner I’ll stop boring people talking about it.

On the work side, had a decent meeting with the art director of a big regional outdoor company. He seemed up to his eyeballs in work, they usually are, so we’ll see how it plays out in the future as far as getting more work with them. Saw that Tom Danielson dropped out of the Giro today. Bummer. I met him two years ago at the top of Mt Washington when I coevring it for VN and he is a genuinely nice guy. I’d like to see him do well. Guess what’s wrong with him? You got it: sore knee.

Mystery solved, sort of. Found out today from my doc that my right knee has a “complex tear” of the miniscus (I forget which). So that’s pretty shitty news, but I guess I expected something like it. Now I have to get under the scope and get it cleaned out. Then I can get back to riding and enjoying summer. The unlucky bit is that this all goes down coming into my busiest time of the year and what I do requires maximal physical mobility. We’ll see….

The stock stuff is going really well right now, getting images out there on a regular basis which really helps the bottom line and for putting my name in front of editors. Trying to squeeze as many stock shoots in right now as possible.

Shot my first roll with the Canonet, just some family B&W with TMax 400, I’ll get them in to the lab tomorrow. The rangefinder bit is a challenge for an AF slave like myself.

Mulitply that sound by 30 minutes and that’s pretty much your MRI experience. Hit the tube last night after dinner, not much to tell other than it was loud and boring. But, I got to listen to some music while I was in there, Frances the Mute, and that made it bearable. I’ll likely find out tomorrow how things look in that knee.

Took this on Saturday morning, playing around with some rear curtain syncing on the Pocket Wizards and 550EX flashes. OK, but nothing too great, probably needed another flash to make it really work.

Just got my plans for the end of June straight. I’m shooting the Race Across America as the official shooter. It should be insane and fun, in (hopefully) equal measures. Nine days of driving and shooting from San Diego to New jersey. I haven’t done a cross country road trip since ‘94, so it seems like a good idea. Remind me about that on day 6 of the trip.

After cutting stuff down all day Saturday I had to face the inevitable: what to do with all the stuff now that it was on the ground. Since it was supposed to rain all day there was only one real option: burn it. Had two sweet bonfires in our lower yard, just storming. One of them is still going this morning.

Listened to this on the iPod all weekend and, man, is it incredible: Frances the Mute. I bought the album last week and cannot believe how good the music is, then yesterday TMV was profiled on the front page of the Globe arts section. I’m not much for labels, these guys are supposedly at the forefront of the “Prog” movement, so drop your preconceptions and listen to this album.

A week of meetings, processing, and some writing, but the biggy is getting the knee sorted. It isn’t getting any better. Bought one of these off e-bay yesterday, looking forward to messing around with it. One cool camera, old skool

Shot some stock running images yesterday. Spent a bit of time stumbling around looking for places to shoot, only to realize that until the leaves come out around here most places look pretty shitty. But the model I was shooting, Abbie, was great to work with. Freidn of a friend, she’s a super cool woman and apparently a really good distance runner. the bummer is she lives in Wisconsin so I won’t get to shoot her again until later this summer. But I’ll look forward to that for sure.

So with cycling off the table as far as weekend activities, I engaged in the next best thing: chainsawing. Busted out the Husqvarna and cut some stuff down. We live on nearly 20 acres, there’s always something that needs sawing. I dropped a 40 ft hemlock right behind the house and it got caught up in a maple tree right next to it. It was close enough to where we park the cars that I really wanted to get it down lest it should fall in the middle of the night and whack the Subarus. So i spent the next couple hours rigging up every Rube Goldberg system to drag the hemlock free of the maple. I finally dragged it down with the car and some rope, but not before I skulked up to the hardware store and got laughed at by the guys up there. Man, I really miss riding my bike…