An Aussie geek stuck in Texas

[tag]Houston[/tag][tag]AFL[/tag]The details for the Australian Rules Football at Memorial Park in Houston are:

What: Houston Australian Rules Football fans & enthusiasts getting together to kick a footy around and maybe have a game with the goal to start getting a feel of whether there is sufficient demand to start a Houston based team. BBQ qill be catered for but drinks are BYO.
When: 11:00am April 8th
Where: Memorial Park, Houston

Please leave a comment to this post if you plan on attending so numbers can be guaged appropriately, you can also join the Yahoo Group for Houston Footy.

This weekend brings the first serious training ride for the MS150 on my new road bike so it is going to be interesting as I have only done very limited on it so far and this ride will be 38 miles!

If anyone else out there is riding the MS150 and are looking for a team then you should look at joining Team Chevron, as a reader of my blog you qualify as a friend and hence qualify to join the team through me, I think the team fee is $20 and with that you get a jersey plus all the team support stuff so it is well worth it.

Now that is going to be one hell of a good fight!

If only I wasn’t investing so much in cycling right now, I’d be camping out on Ticketmaster to get tickets. Oh well I will just have to settle with watching the PPV live at my local watering hole!

Who to barrack for though?

This afternoon I set out on a search for my very first road bike with a limit of $1500 with tax and of course what happened to that limit? Well that would be the Specialized Bicycle Roubaix Elite Triple, isn’t that a sweet looking bike.

I have to wait until Tuesday though for it to be built and then fitted for me but damn everything that can be carbon on it is all except for the cranks, which is no big deal as it adds only a tiny bit of weight and saves a lot of money, the bike is seriously light as a feather. I’m happy I went above my set limit though as I ended up with a much nicer bike than what I would have otherwise and it wasn’t that much more anyway.

It is 27 speed or 9 speed as they say in the biz apparently and has a Shimano 105/Ultegra componentry so it is sweet all around, even the seat post is carbon for crying out loud!

I bought the bike from my local bike shop and by local bike shop I literally mean local, this bike shop is in the back of a house just two blocks away from my apartment and until a co-worker told me about it last week I had no idea it was there! But damn was it a good find, it is one of the best bike stores I have been in, they have everything there! Sure the range of bikes they have in stock isn’t huge but they still have plenty and you can’t beat the kind of service you get there, they know bikes so tell them roughly what you are after and then they just point out the perfect bike for you, they don’t beat around the bush at all.

The store is Daniel Boone Cycles and I highly recommend the store if you are in the market for anything bicycle related in Houston!

As a Christmas present to myself I finally got myself a new bike, a Giant Yukon 2005. It had the best components within my price range and felt better than the other bike I tried so it just had to come home with me!

Why a mountain bike when I am training for the MS 150 you ask? Well I am a mountain biker at heart and can’t afford a decent road bike right now so I thought I would get the MTB now, train on it and then sometime prior to the MS 150 I would also get a road bike so I would be competitive on the road but still have my MTB when I want to go off road.

Let me tell you though all of my bikes are now being kept inside without any exceptions as I have just had too many of my bikes stolen in the past, the last was chained to a second floor balcony and for that to get stolen is a real worry!

As a Christmas present to Megan and myself I bought tickets to the Dallas Stars v. Detroit Redwings game in Dallas a couple of days after Christmas. We were third row close to center ice & the Stars bench, which was great but the hockey game pretty much sucked.

It wasn’t because the Stars got a beating, it was just a very poorly played game of hockey. It may still be the holiday season but those guys are professionals and get paid big bucks to perform so that is no excuse!

The announcer and the crowd sucked as well, there wasn’t a single Stars chant, which is just sad! The announcer didn’t even announce power plays nor did they announce when a team returned to full strength so there was no “… and they still suck!”, WTF is up with that?

I am going to have to take Megan to a minor league Houston Aeros game so she can see some real hockey as that display last night was just pathetic!

Seeing how my girlfriend is driving though I thought I would try moblogging on my Treo using the Xiino browser as the WP Admin interface is actually usable in it unlike the mess that Blazer displays.

Lucchese 2000 Black Cherry Kangaroo Western