mountain bikes and cacti (but no collisions)

Today I went to a mountain bike course and learned, among other things, that using your front brake when you're going really slowly makes your bike handle badly. Who knew?

In other news, I was pulling a few residual prickly pear spines out of my jersey this afternoon before a friend and I headed out to the trails, and when I said that the encounter hadn't hurt much, her comment was, "Yeah, those are the time-consuming ones." It turns out that she hangs laundry near some inconveniently placed cacti, and the chollas are the kind you'd really better stay out of.