Dead Calm: I don’t seem to be able to get motivated to do much of anything these days. Read, write, travel, troll the web for post fodder -- just can’t find any enthusiasm for it. Instead, I have been cleaning bathrooms and doing laundry and such. Life on the edge.

A group of my friends is trying to get me to start training for a 100 mile bike race (a "century") around Lake Tahoe in June. It's called America's Most Beautiful Ride. It's certainly appealing; I'm sure it would be a lot of fun, but they are all doing it as part of Team-in-Training, a fairly prominent group that collects pledges for Leukemia and Lymphoma research. Apparently the deal is that if you raise $3800 in pledges Team-in-Training covers your hotel room and ships your bike out west and does a few other sorts of things. My problem is that there is no way I could raise $3800. Most of the people I would ask would be the other ones I was training with so that's out. My company has a donation matching policy, but it only covers things educational, community and cultural charities, not diseases (weird). A shame because if they matched it, I would have just paid half myself and been done with it. So I don’t know what to do. The ride is appealing; I could do my own training and make my own arrangements, I suppose, but that doesn't seem like it's in the spirit of the thing.