After a great ride in the woods on Monday morning, Monday night brought some long overdue rain to mid-Michigan. The cool temperatures, dark clouds and knowledge that I had nowhere to be Tuesday morning made it real easy to sleep in and be no use to anyone. I like easy, so that’s what I did, and it felt damn good.
Wifey had to got into work this morning to make sure some sort of legal, shmegal software worked properly for her .gov people. She was also expecting a FedEx package at home containing a new work credit card for her upcoming trip our nation’s capital on Sunday. Since she couldn’t be in two places at one time, I had to lay around and wait for Mr. FedEx Man.
After working all day at the shop on Thursday, my plan for Friday was to get in some miles on the Boone. Sadly, that didn’t happen. Instead it pissed down Old Testament-esque rains all morning and the rest of the day was filled with FINALLY getting a permanent crown put on one of my teeth and dealing with a backed up main drain which resulted in plumbers in the house to snake it. The only highlight was celebrating Wifey’s 44th birthday.
Thursday was a day off the bike and a day in the bike shop to earn some cash money. The shop was fairly busy and I found myself building up another Weehoo (Weee Hoooo!!). Thankfully I only f’ed up a few things along the way–way better than the last Weehoo build which took me forever due to a parts issue. The rest of my work day was spent getting my balls busted by Napper and Terry, unpacking and checking in inventory, and pimping bikes to folks; including a couple of Mennonite kids that I initially helped out a couple of weeks back.
The last time these two kids were in, they were with their mom looking and test riding. This time the three of them returned with dad in tow, and after his approval they left the happy owners of two new bikes. The boy in particular was stoked with his X-Caliber. Of course I wept a little bit when he wanted a kickstand installed. I waited until they left before I buried my tear filled eyes and chubby cheeks in my dirty palms.
The weekend ended up being pretty crap for riding; it pissed down a hard rain all day Saturday, and Sunday was sunny, but windier than hell. Wifey got home around 1 PM from Pennsylvania and I had plenty of time to ride, but has absolutely NO desire to ride in the chilly June wind (yes, I said chilly and June in the same sentence, welcome to Michigan).
After spending 8.5 hours with my ass puckered on Wednesday, waiting to screw something up on my first day at the shop, I slept like a baby last night* : a six-foot one, 200+ pound, shaved legged, beer bellied, Morrissey haired, love handled, bike riding, wanker-like baby. Despite that lengthy, yet still abbreviated, list of my handicaps, it still managed to feel great.
I knew after Thursday’s 45 mile ride that the following days–especially the balls of the weekend– would feature less miles due to family commitments and forecasted rain. However that is not to say that the weekend sucked.
This week has been kind of crap, and not just because last week was so freaking awesome! It’s been crap because of the weather (snow, seriously?), not riding outside thus far, annoying, dirt bag student neighbors (who will hopefully be leaving when the semester ends), poor sleep, and varying degrees of self-inflicted, random acts of stupidity from me (of which there were many).
On the brighter side of the week: no one died (yet), I haven’t gained the weight–which I’ve been working hard to lose over the past two weeks–back (yet), Wifey hasn’t left me (yet), B-Man doesn’t hate me (yet), and my various Trek bikes (how did that happen??) were not part of the galaxy wide skewer recall (yet).
Today’s post is yet another post that falls into the lengthy Soiled Chamois sub-category of The Weather is Crap & I Didn’t Ride, But I Wanted to Post Something. Usually these posts end up being about food, crap photos, beer, or people that race bikes way better than me (in that they still race them). However today I figured I would post something that someone out there could actually use. Something that I was going to post over the weekend but got all caught up in the joy of my beer the moment and forgot. It’s to do with the Boone 5’s tire clearance when using a WTB Nano 40 tire (my tire of choice).
As they predicted things have been windy and rainy so far this week, so after one of my biggest weeks of riding in some time and a day off the bike on Monday I was back inside spinning and going nowhere in the Stankment today. Since there is little to no interest (from me or you) in a post about riding the stationary trainer, I figured I would post something else of little to no interest– my ongoing dabbles back into shooting photos with film. In particular with the new to me Olympus [mju II], also known as the Stylus Epic.
