Jan 31 - biking and skiing

What do biking and skiing have in common ? Well, they are two sports where you can be sweating upper body and have feet numb from the cold at the same time. That was yesterday's ride in spades. Cold, windy, I was so tempted to not go in the first place and then tempted to turnaround at various points ... but all I had to do was think of Aaron biking in the snow, called myself a wimp and continued on.

One of my mental excuses for making it a shorter ride, had I done that, was that I'd be out after dark. I actually got home in daylight but it was well after 5pm. I was a little late starting and then I had a flat. The flat was early in the ride, on the causeway approach. All of a sudden I was going bump, bump, bump as I rode along and looked down at my front wheel and saw an orange dot stuck to my tire. Since it wasn't flat, my mental flash was that something was simply stuck to it, but no, it was one of those round orange dots about one inch across with a nail in the center. These are used by surveyors.

I pulled off the orange plastic dot and nail and pffffftttt. Yes, I had a flat. Stuff like this can be hidden in little bits of debris on the roadside or even buried in a little sand in a crack and jump up to bite you. It didn't take long to fix the flat, in fact it was a perfect spot for the job. With a guardrail by the roadside and a guardrail two feet away by the sidewalk, I was able to hook my handlebars over the guardrail to keep my bike upright and use the two guardrails as a bench of sorts to do my tube replacement. Such luxury !

Ten miles later I pulled into the shelter of a building and exchanged open for full fingered gloves. Ten miles after that I leaned my bike against a tree and sat down on the sidewalk and put on my shoe covers. I was tempted, oh so tempted, to put on my leg warmers but knew that would slow me down even more and I wanted to get the next ten miles over with to the turnaround point, figuring that I'd be warmer once the wind was with me. Yes, I was wasn't getting any colder but I was still chilled to the bone. On the way home, with the wind, was when I was getting upper body hot with my still-numb feet.

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I'm a sucker for funny boat names. This one -- ship happens -- on a boat on a trailer going by the other day. The other one that sticks in my mind from the past is "damn boat", likely named by the spouse ...

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I caught up with Jeffrey as well as Wayne and Doris. Jeffrey and Sara have not picked a wedding date yet but October sometime seems to be floating around as a possibility. Doris is sounding better than I expected, enduring this round of chemo. I strategized with Wayne on recovering some data from a hard drive ... from his blog it sounds like that was successful. Perhaps it's time for me to do some backing-up of my own !

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I'm drawing a blank at this point. Enough for today.

Onward.