AIDS Lifecycle Team ALCAholics

It’s my 3rd time riding AIDS Lifecycle and I’m once again riding with TEAM ALCAholics.
In case you didn’t know: it probably looks like we’ve misspelled Alcoholics, but the team is actually named after the the commonly used acronym for AIDS Life Cycle. Our slogan is “we keep coming back” and I think now that I’m in my 3rd year, I do definitely consider myself an ALCAholic. I’m proud to be in an all-inclusive team with such a diverse group of people. AIDS Lifecycle calls its community the “love bubble” and this team is my personal love bubble in the ALC love bubble.

I’m especially excited that, this year, there are more women that have already joined our team. Their strength and stamina inspire me and makes me want to get even stronger to be able to keep up with them! Here’s a photo of the first team ride I’ve joined where the women outnumbered the men. It was beautiful day to climb Hawk Hill.

Resurrection

My, how time flies! The last time I posted to this blog was just over 2 years ago when I started training for my FIRST AIDS LifeCycle. The last couple of years have been extremely busy and I’ve been largely absent to so many. So, as I work to resurrect this blog, I thought you might want a quick recap of what I’ve been up to:

Halfway done riding my bike from San Francisco to Los Angeles on ALC 2017

Speaking of AIDS Lifecycle, I’ve just started training for my 3rd one happening in June! AIDS Lifecycle is a 7-Day, 545-mile bicycle ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles whose mission is to support the life-saving work provided by the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and the Los Angeles LGBT Center.  While most of my weekends between now and June will be dedicated to building up my strength and endurance for that week, I am also asking for your support in raising funds for these 2 incredible organizations. It’s probably a lot of what I’ll be writing most about between now and June so I’ll keep this blurb about it short and for now just leave the links to my fundraising page here 🙂

Off the bike, I’ve been working on building Champaign, the app that’s helping marketers grow their audiences through social. This past year this meant serving clients, building a team to focus on app development and working through all of the small details around getting the app launched – things like planning, resourcing, workflow, interfaces, logic, interactions, data, analytics, legal, testing, marketing, and funding. WHEW! It’s a ton of work with a bunch of long days and nights and I’m excited about how far we’ve come and where we’ll be by the end of this year. In fact, I’ll be using the app to broadcast this blog post, so if you’ve landed here a few months after this blog post was written, congratulations! you’ve already experienced the results of Champaign!

The rest of my time is spent catching up on errands, occasionally sharing a meal with a few friends and doing my best to stay awake when I can finally spend a little bit of time with McKay… but his shoulder is soooo cozy and by then I am also already soooo sleepy.

For the most part, my craft space (physical and mental) has been dormant – a few storage boxes and the walking space is currently hosting my drying rack where I hang bike clothing (their delicate fabrics last longer when they hang dry), but I have really been enjoying putting my creativity to work in other areas so I’m excited to start sharing some of that here, too.