Mar 9 - awaiting fork

How can a bike fork shipped from West Virginia on Friday take a week to get here ? I don't know. I had assumed that the fork would arrive one day after the shipment that was sent Thursday ... NOT. Anyway, it now looks like it will be Thursday or Friday that I'll receive the new fork so the new bike is not yet ...

I did not go for that planned short ride yesterday, opting instead to putter around here. I added some drippers to the watering system, cleaned my bike -- soon to be known as my Brevet Bike -- prowled around the yard treating ant hill etc. etc.

Sandy, on the other hand, was much more productive. She had an appointment at the acupuncturist -- which is helping her neck pain, by the way, and tripped over to Bed, Bath and Beyond returning a pillow and picking up a kitchen scale for up north and some little bowls.

The pillow is a bit of a funny story. She always travels with her pillow, finding the typical hotel pillows too firm for a comfortable sleep. When she went to the west coast with Marda (west coast of Florida) she forgot her pillow. Had I been driving, we would have had to return ... but in this case she stopped and bought a pillow. It turned out that the hotel had suitable pillows so she didn't use this one ... so it's going back.

After she got home we took Abby to the dog beach. It was close to low tide so we did not have to wade around the point. Abby doesn't care though, she loves walking in the water, swimming if necessary, rolling on the ground accumulating sand in her fur ... she's on leash the whole time but it's a long leash, one of those 25 footers. Where we come back to the parking lot they have a concrete pad with two faucets and hoses that are for washing dogs, feet, legs, whatever. Abby gets hosed down at that point and then we hang around for a bit letting her drip so she's ok to get in the car.

I'm continuing to explore ways to improve the Brevet Bike setup. I ordered a rack for the back that is a) 1/2 the price of the seatpost-mount rack that I use now and b) 1/2 the weight and c) has double the weight bearing capacity. I don't want to carry more weight, but it's stronger because it will mount on the frame. Now that I'm looking at that bike as the permanent setup for these long rides, it's time to make it better. The seatpost rack marks the seatpost, making me worry about creating a point of fracture, and can swing from side to side if not tightened. Also, I think that I can setup the frame-mount rack lower to the wheel, lowering the center of gravity. Less and lower weights are good things. The rack for the Brevet Bike will probably arrive before the fork for the new bike so I'll be tinkering with that later in the week too.

Angelika arrives today. Sandy will head out around 9am and pick her up at the Orlando airport. I'll go out for a bike ride so she will be back here before me. Looking at the weather forecast, tomorrow will probably be a good day for a boat ride.

That's it for now.