A bicycling tragedy

A bicycling tragedy has occured, but first, did you hear that Ullrich has been booted off the T-Mobile team? Wow. I wonder who they will pick as their main man in the future. If you ask me they were just looking for a reason to get rid of him anyway.

Back to the tragedy.

I'm not going to be able to ride RAGBRAI. I know. It's a shocker. But I think it's a good reason. My wife (she who makes and maintains the social calendar) made a boo boo and scheduled a wedding for this weekend (which is good because that fit into our schedule really well) but unfortunately we found out today that the wedding is next weekend. Her boo boo was messing up the deat, not scheduling the wedding. The same weekend I was going to ride RAGBRAI. Not good. Not good at all.

So we were running around crazy this morning trying to figure out what to do. Can we even find a sitter for next weekend? What do we do about RAGBRAI? What about my sister who was coming to visit? What about RAGBRAI? OOOOO NNNNOOOOOO I will now flush my head down the toilet.

At first I tried to convince my wife that she should have her friend move her wedding up to this weekend because it works better for us and dammit, that's all that matters. But then I remembered one of my solemn rules in life, don't screw with a woman and her wedding. At all. Even though this is my wife's friend I'm sure my wife would be more than willing to end my life on behalf of all woman for even suggesting that I change anything with her friend's wedding. It's HER WEDDING YOU IDIOT. Men do not have any say in wedding preparations, other than to say yes. So after realizing that changing the date was out our choices came down to this small list.

Ride RAGBRAI, wife skips wedding, watches kids.
Skip RAGBRAI, watch kids, wife goes to wedding.
Both go to wedding, find someone to watch kids.
Nobody does anything so we are all miserable.
Ride RAGBRAI, wife goes to wedding, kids are otherwise disposed.

In the pantheon of important things a wedding easily trumps a bike ride (even one like RAGBRAI) so sending at least my wife to the wedding was a fairly easy decision. But we weren't sure if we would both be going or just her. (Hey, if we both go it's like a mini-vacation for us. When you have kids you take what you can get. A few hours in the car with no kids talking is glorious. Plus, I lived there for 6 years and was kind of excited to see some friends.)

So we both decided to go rather than her go and me do RAGBRAI. (the thought of being kidless and wifeless is too much for me. I would spontaneously combust I think)

My in-laws stepped up and agreed to watch the boys for us so we can both go. They are also hosting 16 RAGBRAI people at their house when it passes through town on the 28th so we need to send them some major cycling love.

As they say, the best laid plans of mice and men...

FGLB