Jumbled Post Because I Can't Sleep

I guess I'm nervous about tomorrow's stage, so I can't sleep. I'm going to throw up some pictures from the today, and then try to go back to bed.

First we have this cute little scene from the kitchen in our host house this morning:

Yes, that's two, count'em TWO Roombas. Our hosts have a lot of floor space, so two robotic vacuum cleaners are much me effective than one. I find it slightly unsettling, but also extremely awesome that we, as a culture, have gotten accustomed to little disc shaped robots who mill around our houses in search of stray crumbs, awesome because I love robots, and unsettling because the two robots eventually found eachother:

And then they decided to chase Lang around the kitchen:

Now getting chased by a cute little Roomba isn't that scary, but look at what's coming to a military near you: 

Now as I've said before, I'm a firmly believe that robots (or cyborgs) will one day rule the world, but when I turned on my computer this morning I really didn't expect to see what our soon-to-be conquerers are going to look like! Just imagine that thing with a machine gun mounted on it -- or worse yet, the torso of Arnold Schwarzenneger holding a machine gun! Snakes alive that'd be a scary robot!

Now then, enough about robots, more about racing! Things went ok. I had a fine race, but all in all, I think this year's version of the Redlands crit was fairly easy: the Fly V boys set hard tempo for an hour and fifteen minutes, and then UHC went really really fucking fast the last six laps. You can read all about it at the usual sources. I remember a few spectacular crashes [one in particular stands out: as we're entering a corner, some guy started turning, but the guy behind him wasn't ready and sort of T-boned the turning rider's rear wheel. This spun the first guy about 30 degrees to the left, but didn't knock him down -- he stayed upright but retained his momentum, only now he was pointed in a near-perpendicular direction to the rest of the racers. He flew across the entire road, from curb to curb, cutting off like ten guys (almost myself included), before high-siding it pretty hard. That's all I saw, although I heard plenty of resulting carnage], lots of single-file riding, and as mentioned before, a very fast finish. 

There were lots of flats and blowouts today. We've been avoiding most of the punctures because we're all on our brand new Vittoria's, but even our Vittoria's aren't good enough to stop this: 

Here's Soren (our only rider who didn't lose time today), and Joe, investigating the cause of the flat: 

 

And finally, here's some more of the guys chilling out post-race:



Ok, I think I'm ready to give sleep another try. Tomorrow should be a real Slobberknocker.