Sep 17 - look ma, no hands !

Well, I finally know why it's worthwhile to practice riding with no hands -- so you can imitate the fellow that I saw today -- one hand holding a cup of coffee and one hand holding a cigarette ... riding down the street ... he was missing his bowl of cereal, or perhaps he was heading for a drive-through ?

It was bloody hot. Usually I can wear a pair of cycling shorts for two days ... but they were thoroughly white with salt after 70 miles. Perhaps for the next ride I should start earlier than 9am. I was originally thinking that I'd do a 200k Permanent today or tomorrow but decided to leave that until next week ... good thing, since I need to get acclimatized !

I rode north, expecting the advertised ENE wind ... well, it turned out to be ESE, or perhaps SE, so I had the hard work coming home. Regardless, it was a beautiful ride up through Tomoka Park then back along the ocean. Hot or no, it was pleasant.

The tide was amazingly high. I've never seen it that high -- in fact, I had to move to the center of the road at one point in the park because the water was over part of the roadway. If that wasn't high tide, I'd hate to see how high it got ! I expect that those sections of roadway along the ICW south of here where I saw "no wake" signs on the road actually had water on them, but perhaps not.

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Sandy shopped all day. She got dog food at Petland in Port Orange; olive oil and wine at the Wine Warehouse also in Port Orange (they have a nice selection of good olive oils, how convenient !); new wine glasses for up north at Bed Bath & Beyond (Daytona); and, of course, food for dinner. Up north she grocery shops for the next few days, here she shops for that day. While at BB&B she took back a blowup bed that she'd brought up north that never held air. The wine glasses up north are all etched from the dishwasher -- one visitor handed a glass back to me because he/she thought that it was dirty. Ok, time to replace.

She found that the Wine Warehouse was a) low on stock and b) now owned by someone else. The former owners had opened up their own place ... we'll have to check that out. I expect that wine warehouse, as a collective entity, is having a hard time making a go of it in the current economic climate down here. It's a chain. We've heard the complaint before from their management that their clientele only wants to by $6-$8 bottles of wine. It's tough down here because the grocery stores, well, mainly Publix, do have a good selection in the $10 and under range, but mostly California with a little Australia, no French. We are looking for wines that usually come in the $12-$18 range. We might find, at the end of the day, that we need to find a wine store in Orlando for periodic re-supply; start ordering stuff from Moore Brothers in New York (Delaware cannot ship here); and make a more concerted effort to bring wine down with us. It's hard to believe that we are able to get a better selection and prices through Canada, but it's working out that way so far.

Abby has still not gotten to the beach, but I'm going to remedy that this morning. I'll take her over at first light and be back before Sandy goes to her 9:30 acupuncture appointment. After that we're going boat shopping ... well, browsing. I did talk to the owner of that 2003 Maxum last night and we'll see that this morning as well. Looking at boats in showrooms and lots perhaps Sandy will see something in a center console that strikes her fancy -- right now she's pretty fixated on bow riders, but mostly it's just the two of us.

To me, the advantage of the center console boats is that they tend to be easier to clean (no carpet) and there is a better selection in this part of the world. She needs to see one setup for more seating for when we have guests. The other thing about the center console boats is that they tend to have outboards, rather than inboard-outboards, with easier maintenance / replacement for motor problems etc.

I cleaned the gutters, although there wasn't much in them. More and more I'm convinced that what I need to do is replace them with something like the Rain Handler product, that spreads the runoff away from the house but doesn't have gutters per se. The gutters / evestroughs fill up with the Live Oak leaves because they weigh down the screens that I've put over them, thus holding water, thus providing breeding ground and housing for ants etc. Rain, when we get it, tends to come in huge downpours which overwhelms the gutters anyway. We don't have a basement so it's simply a matter of ensuring the the water doesn't come off the roof in a straight line downpour which would wash away fill.

I'll ponder this one for a while. Actually, I just looked at their web site again and perhaps I'll order enough to do the back of the den as a trial for installation. The back of the den and house are not the problem areas, but the den is the shortest area where I could experiment. It's a minimal investment to do that 15' section. I expect that once I start removing gutter at the front of the house I might have fascia that needs replacing too ... or at least scraping and painting ... and of course the soffit is not the greatest ... yikes.

We had snapper of some sort for dinner, along with sweet potatoes and broccoli. Sandy does the broccoli in a saute pan; the others go on the barbie. As usual ... it was good. As usual, prior to that, we watched two episodes of SG1. With Stargate Atlantis over, and Sandy never getting interested in that, we'll run out soon ... except that the new Stargate Universe is set to premiere in October. Unless there are interesting characters I don't expect that Sandy will get hooked on that one. We'll have to find something else for our 5pm-with-wine TV viewing. It's something that we only do in Florida.

That's it ...