Nov 18 - gardening and riding

I'll let you guess who was doing what ...

I felt a LOT better yesterday. Other than my butt feeling a little more sensitive than usual the rest of my body felt like I'd never been away from riding.

As I sit here with my coffee half-consumed I'm trying to remember what else I did (and what I'm going to write about)! Well, I copied some more DVDs, but I already noted that yesterday. I just started copying another. I finished up a bunch of paperwork, packaging up two EZPASS tags to be returned, signed and mailed a FEMA flood insurance notification (that's what happens when you live in hurricane country !), and just generally kept myself busy at the computer until around 11am.

I've been busy shopping too -- my kind of shopping -- let me think about all the orders that I've placed on the internet in the last couple of days:

-- spark plugs for the two boats and the two ATCs. Can you believe that the spark plugs that cost $14.95 up north go for $5.95 down here ? and this is straight from NGK at MSRP ?? The $6.95 plugs go for $2.95 ... sparkplugs.com

-- a replacement coffee carafe ... amazon.com

-- an external housing and SATA disk to carry back and forth between here and up north, from Newegg (this was my "big" item approaching $100)

-- some of the gels that I consume on the bike -- $16.95 from vigorousliving.com vs $27.95 from PerformanceBike

-- a couple of firewire cables from cablesnmore at $2.95 vs $14.94 (or more) in the store. Actually I had a problem with this order because they have a minimum of $10 so I had to get 4 cables. I was too hasty though because I'll probably need another SATA cable and could have used that to get the total order up to $10

-- and of course it's not shopping, but my vehicle license renewals that I mentioned the other day.

Far and away the vehicle license renewals were the most expensive. Perhaps I have too many vehicles ! It's worth noting that Amex seems more sensitive to strange charges these days -- whether they have simply tightened their fraud screen or whether it's due to the fraud on Sandy's card from August, I've had two occasions now where I've had to call them to ok a charge. The first was a while ago -- forget what it was now -- but the second was on the vehicle license renewals. Now who, I ask, would renew vehicle licenses with a stolen card ??

When I'm planning on riding I have lunch between 10:30 and 11:00, give it time to settle and then head out. Yesterday I left around 11:15 and was back just after 4pm -- a typical 5 hour ride. Very windy, but a consistent NW wind, which makes for a great ride -- struggle on the way out, fly on the way back.

Before dinner we watched another of my Dad's videos -- this one from Dec 88 - Apr 89. Part-way through I grabbed a piece of paper and made notes otherwise I would never remember everything. It started out with Christmas -- Arlene, Uncle Vic & Mildred, Dolores Robinson. Later on Jack Robinson and daughter Karen were on bicycles. My cousin Ron, now deceased, and his wife Nancy and kids -- wow, I was just corresponding with my cousin Sue, his sister, wondering whether he would show up -- anyway, their appearance was more of a photograph than an ongoing video. Then the show moved to our place in Mississauga with me (yes me!), Stef, Mom, Sandy, Meghan, Sara & Philip. Meghan was the star of this video being less than one year old and just starting to experience the walker. The video then moved up to the cottage -- I guess that Jeffrey and Stef went up with Philip and this segment, and the video, ended with Philip driving away in his white Honda Accord, license AGFA 60 (he worked for AGFA). There was still some fast-forwarding on this video -- shots of a balloon, an airplane, a neighbor's kid ... but not as much forwarding as in yesterday's video.

Dinner -- tilefish, sweet potatoes and peas plus a salad. Sandy's comment was that she gets better vegetables in Sudbury than here ... but of course if she drove 1.25 hours here to Orlando she would get good vegetables here too (like she drives 1.25 hours to Sudbury) -- sometimes the produce on sale locally is marginal. It's easy to forget that New Smyrna Beach is a town of about 35,000 people. Daytona is about the same size. Neither place has any industry and neither the small resident population or the tourists create demand for a Whole Foods, for instance.

So that's about it. As usual when I started out writing today I was not sure what I had to say but I ended up writing a few paragraphs and boring you again !

Time for breakfast ... Abby has already eaten.