Archive for May, 2009

Well.  I thought it was about time I did some catching up.  A Lot has happened since my last post.  One being I got a NEW JOB!  I decided it was time to move on from my job as being a receptionist to being an official GRAPHIC DESIGNER.  As of two months ago I started working for a company called Mathur Media Group as a graphic designer!  It has been a great experience for me and lots of fun.  I work for a marketing agency and I get to create mostly ads for the local paper for about 10-15 different clients!  It keeps me very busy!  At first I was a little nervous and not sure if I would be able to be successful but over the last month I have started to feel more comfortable and confident in my abilities as a designer.  It has been a great experience to get out of the classroom and experience designing for real clients and printers….it has been interesting to see some of the differences from the classroom to the working world.  One of the hardest to get use to has been in the classroom everything is my idea….I get to choose the look, color, fonts, photos, copy……everything is my idea and I can create anything that I want.  In the working world…..it is the clients ideas…and somehow I have to figure out how to create what the client wants and in a way that looks halfway decent.  It is fun though, alot better than answering the phone all day….I have to say I don’t miss that one bit!

Today after a long day of work I decided to again take a detour on my ride home to tack on some more miles toward my goal of 500 miles. I decided to go on a path that follows the Arkansas river south of downtown Wichita. I found that the path is very nice in downtown Wichita, which I already knew, but that the minute you leave downtown, it becomes a bumpy ride. It was tolerable enough to continue on, and would be fine with a mountain bike, but on my road bike, I felt every bump, big or small.

I stopped once for a drink and saw a friend of the family who I stopped to talk to for a bit. I managed to fall over in front of him when I did not get my foot un-clipped in time. My ride on the way home seemed to go a bit slower, and I managed to hit every single red light once I got back down town, and even managed to fall over one more time. So all in all it was a bumpy ride.

Ride Number: 4
Ride Time: 42:59 (min:sec) numbers
Distance: 9.87 miles
Average Speed: 13.8 mph
Max Speed: 22 mph

Overall Distance: 22.67 miles

Well after last nights chain incident I decided to take it easy with a quick ride on my way home. I wouldn’t call this anything special, a whole 2.88 miles, but every bit counts. I did bring my chain tool and some others with me this time. I had planned on taking a longer ride but the weather wasn’t the greatest and I had an appointment to get to.

Ride Number: 3
Ride Time: ? (min:sec)ll numbers
Distance: 2.88 miles
Average Speed: ? mph
Max Speed: ? mph

Overall Distance: 12.8 miles

After all the fun of my first ride… I decided that it was time to do a major tune up on my bicycle. With work, school and weather the tune up took several months to happen. I finally started working on the bike yesterday. The rear derailleur was totally out of alignment causing it to lag when changing gears on my first ride. After spending a while trying to tune it without luck, I decided I would clean and re-grease all the parts and see if it helped. After getting everything back together it was still having a hard time, it would shift to the lower gears but would not come back to the high, something was keeping tension in the cable. I bought a new cable only to find out it was the housing, which after cleaning the old cable and lubing it, worked fine.

Finally after all the tuning I was confident that everything was ready to go. Kristen and I went out for a leisure ride around 8:30pm. We went to the Keeper of the Plains on the river, looked around for a bit and decided to head back home since it looked like it would rain. I only got about 20 feet when my chain came off. I got it back on and went another 20 feet when the chain locked up in the front derailleur. I got off the bike and took a look only to find that one of the links came undone and had bent causing it to jam. Lucky for me I had purchased a chain tool to easily fix it. Unfortunately my wife had to ride back to the house by herself to get it for me. After she came back and I took out the bad link I was able to continue on without further problems.

Ride Number: 2
Ride Time: ? (min:sec) I will say 30 min for my overall numbers
Distance: 4.11 miles
Average Speed: ? mph ~ sidewalks : )
Max Speed: ? mph

Overall Distance: 9.92 miles