Feb 13 - before I forget

I start these blogs with the best of intentions expecting to list all the things that I / we did. Inevitably I forget some things. For instance, on the day of the messed up bicycle things, I also changed the oil in the M5. Sandy talked to Bonnie, arranging a mail delivery and finding out that she is still having many problems with her knee. She talked to Bev, arranging a trip down to Sebastian in March. Our lives are not so jam-packed that I should forget these things its just that I go off on tangents once I start typing that I forget everything else.

Have you ever seen used motor oil that's clear ? Well, that was what I got out of the M5. I change the oil once per year whether it needs it from a mileage standpoint or not ... and that sure proves that we're not driving it enough. It only has 63k miles on it -- and it will be 8 years old in May. That's a record, on the low end, for any car that I've owned. Contrast that with the X5 that has 127,000 miles on it. We got that car in November 2005 with 21,000 miles already on the clock. So ... in a little over 4 years we've put 106,000 miles on it. Heck, I just ran into the Tire Kingdom invoice from April 3rd last year when I installed new tires. At that point I had 99,731 miles.
We won't put too many miles on it between now and April but that will still be somewhere between 27,000 and 28,000 miles in the last year.

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It's morning again. I went for a ride, as planned, heading north into a slight headwind. I used the new, cheap MP3 player and it worked out well. With little wind I could hear it most of the time, depending on the direction of the wind, the traffic, etc. I'll definitely do more riding to music.

Sandy gave the front door another coat of paint while I was out. When I got back, around 4:30, I asked her if she'd been out -- fully expecting that she'd gone for a walk. She said "no, because I was stupid". Ah -- she'd painted the door before thinking about going out and then of course couldn't leave because the door was wet. It's one thing to forget to lock the door ... it's quite another to go out with the door open. Is it "break and enter" if the door is already open ? No, I guess that it's just "illegal entry".

We had some sort of snapper for dinner -- similar to the mangrove snapper that we liked so much in December. That, with sweet potatoes and green beans made supper. One of these days we'll go upscale and have haricots verts instead.

I tried something that I'd read about, taking my latest batch of yogurt, hanging it in a strainer in a large measuring cup after putting cheesecloth in the strainer -- enough to wrap around the yogurt. I took it out of the fridge this morning and found that, as advertised, all the whey had drained out of the yogurt and the resulting lump in the cheesecloth was like a soft cream cheese. Neat ... I'll have to try mixing in some flavoring like dill and chive to make a spread for our afternoon snack or on sandwiches. It's far better for you than butter ... has probably the same goodness as fat-free cream cheese, but much cheaper and of course flavored to my liking.

We had a few deliveries yesterday -- new fork, stem and handlebars for my bike -- to be installed when I'm with Aaron who has the cutting guide for the fork and the tool for installing the bearing race. If I was in a rush to get these installed I could buy the tools or go over to a local bike shop and pay a few $, but I'm in no rush.

Our coffee order was also delivered, eight pounds of green beans from Timor, Tanzania, Guatemala ... and somewhere else that I forget. We're ordering "fair trade organic" from these places and supposedly the workers are paid fairly and the beans are grown organically. All that, of course, would be hard to prove ...

Sandy exchanged emails with Barb Nute yesterday, a friend from Philadelphia who now lives in Gainesville FL during the winter and in Maine during the summer. Barb moved down here when Carter retired, to be close to her daughter. My ride next weekend is out of Gainesville. Barb proposed that we get together on the morning of my ride, before I head out. Little does she know that I start riding at 5am. I think that she'll renege on that proposal once she finds out ! Anyway, Sandy's not sure if she'll tag along this time or next. Barb sounds pretty busy on the Saturday. The current plan is that I'll do three rides out of Gainesville, so she'll have other opportunities to see Barb. They're a neat couple -- I've met them both because they also went to the Newcomers Club pot luck dinners that Sandy and I attended.

Today ... no immediate plans. I'm experimenting right now with an online site called bikeroutetoaster.com. It's doing some strange things so I'm going to try it with Firefox in Linux. Perhaps it will work better there.

Oh -- I see a pair of cardinals in the tree at the side of the yard. The male is at the top of the tree -- a tree which doesn't have leaves right now (it's winter, remember). It's actually unusual to see him out in the open like that. His red coloring exposes him to hawks looking for a meal. We have many big birds around -- large dark brown ones that are carrion birds and ospreys, of course -- we have ospreys here and osprey road up north. At one point there was an osprey in the are up north, thus the naming of our road.

That's it ...