Apr 14 - flexibility is key

Did I go riding yesterday ? -- nooooo ... with Orlando (and Disney) under a Tornado watch, huge storm clouds rolling in, prudence took over and I did other things. At one point it rained so hard that we had over an inch of water running down our street. It wouldn't have been pretty.

The weather prediction for the next few days is great though, which begs the question -- why are we leaving so soon ? Are we anxious to get up north for the cold wet weather up there ? I guess if it weren't for biking, it would be six of one / half dozen of the other, since the weather will be on the upswing ... but perhaps we could have planned on leaving a few weeks later. I'll bet that we stay longer last year. Even Sandy isn't keen on leaving.

So ... with good weather for the weekend the Gainesville 600k should be great. Hopefully the winds won't be as bad as at the 400k, but we'll take what comes. Today too, I'll take what comes and it already looks like a beautiful day. I'm going to go biking today and we've bumped out boat ride to tomorrow. Friday will be organizing for Gainesville and doing some packing prep, since I don't want to spend Monday rushing around.

As I mentioned the other day, the Gainesville route is programmed into the bike GPS now and hopefully it won't change. Jim has warned us that there were areas on the route that were underwater as of last weekend and he might have to make last minute changes ... but we'll deal with that as it happens. I've got my helmet light now so I'll be able to see the cue sheet.

I bought the Petzl Tikka that Judith is using. It's similar to the headlamp that David gave me the Christmas before last, but perhaps a little better suited to helmet use. It takes 3 AAA's and will operate for 120 hours on low power. My Licktons's order arrived last night with some chains to go in my spare parts bin and a compact crank. I do not know if I'll need all the chains before the end of the summer but they won't go to waste. I finally broke down and bought a compact crank. I may install it before leaving here or I may leave that until I'm up north. Either way that will give me more gears for the uphills but less top end if the wind is behind me or I'm going downhill. I'll be doing more spinning !

So ... with the weather in the tank, I puttered around on the computer yesterday, checking off one item on my list -- printing out some blank checks. In a couple of working stints I pruned the mangroves that were between 6' and 10' tall and raked up the worst of the stuff on the ground and added it all to the pile at the road. I found out by querying Stephanie Wolfe at the Marine Discovery Center that I'm allowed to trim 10' or shorter mangroves down to 6' -- no lower than 6' and if they are higher than 10' I have to get a permit and probably bring in a licensed person. There are three or four tall mangroves that I might tackle on that basis at some point, but for now I'm content with the look. The raking was easy but moving the stuff to the road was not. It necessitated grabbing armfuls of crap and carrying that to the road. I have a new tarp here that I might have used ... but it seemed a shame to muck it up.

Norm and Patti showed up around 6pm and we had some snacks here along with a glass of wine and then went over to the restaurant in the Publix mall. We had an excellent meal -- mostly -- I had a Paella full of shellfish; Norm had yucca encrusted halibut; Sandy had some other halibut dish with a mango chutney and Patti had fish tacos. She was disappointed in the tacos because they did not have enough fish. Patti and Norm split PEI mussels for an appetizer; I had an excellent gazpacho, Sandy had a salad. The gazpacho was just as I remember the gazpacho that I have made from a recipe from Leonas ... I'll have to make that again. It's best done when tomatoes are in season, obviously, so it's a mid to late summer thing.

That's about it. My back is a little sore from the work outside but that's par for the course. I did some organizing this morning of stuff for the trip north, sorting out bike spares that I want to bring with me, along with other stuff on the shelves in the garage that is coming. I also replaced the cigarette lighter plug on the plug-in cooler. It was giving me some problems with not making good contact with the socket, or coming loose during a trip, so I had bought a new plug from Radio Shack a couple of months ago. It's now installed and working. We're ready to go ... not.

Oh -- as we were getting ready for Norm and Patti's arrival, Doris Guymon called with some computer questions. She's got a sluggish laptop that I did a little cleanup on last year that has gotten worse. I recommended that she reinstall Windows from scratch from whatever CD's she got from Dell when she bought the thing. There have been so many packages installed and uninstalled that it's a mess. She wanted to know if she should buy Norton SystemWorks, whether that might solve her problems ... no, it would probably make them worse -- I recommended uninstalling Norton completely and downloading and installing the AVG free anti-virus. Her son John's Dell PC has similar problems -- time for a clean start.

That's it for now.