Scapegoats!

Hi Everyone,
After such an overwhelming response to our last blog post (mostly in person or through email because apparently no one wants to comment on our post) we decided it would be unjust for us to withhold our musings from you this week.
I have entitled this post "Scapegoats!" this week because some sad things happened. And they all had to do with goats. Kind of.
Yesterday was such a nice Saturday. Saturday + good weather = danger. Heidi and I decided that we would go for a bike ride. We haven't ridden our bikes for a while (it has been winter), and that sounded pretty fun. So while Heidi was coming home from the library I went ahead and got out the bikes from the little storage area out back. It's not really much of a storage area, but it is a couple of pipes standing up with some fiberglass roofing over where everything was already protected by a tree. Anyway, as I was moving Heidi's bike to the front of the apartment, I noticed that her back tire didn't have a tube in it. I thought that was kind of weird and had the idea that someone had maybe stolen the tube (if you ask me, that sounds like a lot of work for a $5 tube you could get at Wal-mart). Then I thought we probably had taken it apart and forgotten it, which happens sometimes when you take things apart. At least if your name is Craig. So I got that out front then called Heidi to let her know that her tube was missing.
As we were talking, Heidi pulls up in the car. Heidi has a pretty nice bike. It hurt her deeply to have to keep it outside for the winter. Also, she really notices little things about it. As she pulled up I saw a concerned look on her face as she reported to me that that wasn't her back tire! So I wasn't too far off with the whole stealing the tube thing, but I still missed it a little bit. Who steals a bike tire and replaces it with your own? I thought it was pretty weird. And Heidi was a little upset. We were able to find the other tire on the person who stole the tire's bike. It was a little more worn in from the experience of probably having been used all winter. We think it was our neighbors, but we're not sure. That's part of the reason why the title for today is "Scapegoats!" because when you can't find someone to blame, blame the people that you don't know or understand very well, right? Also, our neighbor is the only person I have seen riding her bike in the middle of winter. So we took back the wheel that they had stolen from us and put it back on Heidi's bike and I threw their wheel on the roof of the aforementioned bike shelter. I know, I know, you had no idea of the extent of my wrath. It sounds a lot more hard core than it is, throwing their tire on the roof, because I can comfortable reach the top of the roof without going on my tippytoes.

Well, after we got that all worked out, it was time to burn a little frustration by going on a bike ride. We got our helmets on and started for the mountains.

We had gone about a block and a half when I saw a little abandoned lot. What better place to start off an awesome mountain biking adventure than a little warm up in a 10' by 10' lot? (it was really a little bigger than that, but still) We started riding in there on the little bumps and dirt hills and then started going back to the sidewalk. Has anyone heard of a goathead before? They had those kinds of plants in California and they would sometimes give us flat tires because they are really really ridiculously sharp. Well, we noticed that there were about a hundred of those puppies in each of our tires. On the mission, I had put this slimy stuff in my front and back tire tubes that would plug a little hole in my tubes in case I ran into the occasional goathead. The slime has worked well for a long time, but the hundreds of little thorns were too much. It was neat to see all of the blue gooey stuff hiss out of the tire when I pulled out the goatheads. That, mixed with the red gooey stuff that was coming out of my fingers made it an extremely entertaining and colorful show! So we spent the rest of our bike ride pulling out the hundreds of goatheads and pushing our bikes back to our house. Except we left Heidi's bike at a friend's house, so it wouldn't get halfway stolen again. In our picture is a reenactment of Heidi pulling out some of the goatheads. It's not very accurate, thought because she is pretending to pull them out of my bike. And it's by our bike storage area. You can even see the result of our rage from the "switched wheel fiasco" there on the roof.
Goatheads. Goes nicely with the title, right?
Oh, I forgot to tell you all about the cool thing that Heidi and I made the other day. We put a USB thumb drive into a travel-sized toothpaste tube. I know you're all jealous!
Well, Heidi and I are both doing well! We're getting close to the end of the semester (or at least I keep trying to tell myself that the end of the semester is getting close). We hope you're all doing great!

-Craig