SpokEasy

June 2020

I Feel Gypped

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I feel gypped this morning. And disgruntled, like the fellow shown here. Last night, the forecast was for T-storms this morning. Rats, I thought. That doesn\’t sound good for my ride. Rain is one thing; lightning is something else again. When I got up today, it was overcast; but not raining, and I didn\’t hear any thunder. I decided to ride, but in the park. Then I wouldn\’t be too far from home if things did get bad. I was a little short of the park when I saw a faint flash of light. Then I heard a grumble of distant thunder. Great, I thought. I hope that keeps its distance. I started my first circuit of the park. As I rode around, there were several more flashes of light; brighter than the first. The thunder was a little closer. I decided it was the better part of wisdom to head for home. As it turned out, I could have stayed out longer! It didn\’t start to rain until I\’d been home a half-hour or so. So far, the lightning hasn\’t gotten close. I might have gotten soaking wet, but I can survive that. There have been other times when I feel cheated, too. Sometimes the forecast is for bad conditions, so I don\’t ride; and then nothing happens. The upside to that is that I have some time to do things at home. Even so, when it happens, I feel gypped.

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Bad Brakes

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Bad brakes can lead to bad breaks, right? Like broken arms or legs or collarbones, when  bad brakes can\’t stop you in time. I sure don\’t want to  join the \”bad break club\”. Lately it seemed to me that the hybrid\’s brakes hadn\’t been catching very well. Then, yesterday, I had to run a quick errand over lunch time. I got caught in the rain, and those brake pads did almost nothing! That was scary. Relying on putting a foot down to help myself stop is rather hard on my knee, and a busted knee won\’t help me train for Tour de Cure. I thought I would have to take the bike in to the shop for new brake pads. Then I remembered something. Rim brakes don\’t work as well if they\’re dirty and gritty. Add wetness, and dirt and grit are made, if anything, worse. It had been quite a while since I had cleaned the hybrid\’s wheel rims. So I hooked the bike into the trainer… Why the trainer? If I don\’t do that, turning the back wheel is rather a problem. I don\’t have a bicycle repair stand; but fastening the hybrid\’s rear wheel into the trainer lets the bike stay up without the kickstand. Then I can turn the wheel freely as I clean the rims. After I finished tending to those rims, I unhooked the bike from the trainer. I tested  the brakes by rolling the bicycle a few feet and then grabbing the brake levers. The brakes worked MUCH better! If cleanliness is next to godliness, clean wheel rims are next to safety.

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Weather Watch IV

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Weather Watch IV! I hope this will be the last, too. Tropical Storm Cristobal seems to be largely past us, although further rainfall is almost certain. The wind is still quite strong, too. If there was heavy rain overnight, I didn\’t hear it. Since work-from-home began, I\’m sleeping better. Not that I\’m complaining about that. I need it; and have needed it for many years. Guess I\’ll have to set up the trainer later. There\’s no point in starting right now, because at 8:00 I have to start work. Incidentally, although I do very little ironing, I have an ironing board. It isn\’t bad keyboard-height-wise as a working surface! It looks like I\’ll be able to go for a ride tomorrow morning. =) Weather Watch IV will be over. After two days of inactivity, I\’ll just have to restrain myself from any force work. I don\’t need to replace weather watches with watching the clock in the ER while icing a busted knee!  

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Weather Watch III

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Weather Watch III finds me relieved that I had resigned myself to not riding today. It\’s raining. According to two weather sites I checked, the wind is from the Northeast, 21-27 mph. Riding against that would be a terrible struggle. Add rain, and I\’d hardly be able to see. A tropical storm warning isn\’t the only weather alert in effect. We\’ve got a flood warning as well. Heavy rain is expected, and many streets in this city are prone to easy flooding. I\’ve been fortunate; the street where I live hasn\’t flooded once in all the years I\’ve been here. Car owners who must park their vehicles on the street are worried about their cars getting flooded. Normally, parking on the neutral ground is a no-no; but at times like this that rule is relaxed. The neutral ground is a little bit higher than the street on either side. At least I don\’t have a car, so I needn\’t worry about that. My bicycles are safe indoors. If I get too antsy from lack of physical activity, I can always hook a bicycle into the trainer and pedal for a while. I can read, or listen to music on my iPod. So maybe Weather Watch III isn\’t all bad.

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Midyear Resolutions

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Midyear resolutions are as good as New Year\’s resolutions, aren\’t they? They needn\’t be the same as those made on January 1, either. Take me and my repeated trips to the salvage store. The make-your-own-grab-bag deal is a strong draw. So is my eagerness to see what I\’ll find; the store doesn\’t always have the same stuff. Yesterday morning I made a trip there, using all three carrying modes. Even though I\’ve been saying for months that I must stop bringing home canned stuff, I got more! It makes me ask myself what I\’ll have to do to get myself to STOP IT! I have plenty of non-perishable food. I have far more candy than I\’ll ever need. I\’m glad it\’s stuff I can keep in the fridge, where it\’s out of immediate sight. I also have plenty of stuff I can use as ride food. Another reason it\’s hard for me to stop hitting the salvage store is that I\’ve come to enjoy the ride involved. Round trip is a little under 10 miles, which is a nice little distance. How, then, can I keep midyear resolutions to stay away from the salvage store? Getting fresh produce only would be one way; I have to admit that what the salvage store has doesn\’t always look like it\’s very good. I often buy little or no canned stuff at other stores because I already have plenty. I don\’t need to buy candy and other snacks from other stores. I have lots of them from the salvage store. Another way would be to sleep late on Saturdays, and not go to any store at all. Or I could do a 10-mile ride on the road bike on Saturday morning. That might be the best of all!

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Weather Watch II

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I bring you Weather Watch II! We\’ve been under a tropical storm warning since yesterday evening. It made me uneasy about going anywhere at all. Yet staying indoors all the time drives me crazy, weather watch II or not. At 8 am there were a lot of clouds, but the sun was peeping out sometimes. I decided to make a trip to the drug store. Someone had asked me to get some things, and I wanted some Diet Cokes. After that mini-excursion, I got to work on my web site. I want to do all I can with it before Cristobal comes along, possible knocking out the power. My Internet access relies on electricity. Since late morning I\’ve also been running both my window units. I want to cool this place as much as possible in case of a power outage. The first flurry of rain came around 9:30 am. It didn\’t last long. As the morning went on, there were further bursts of rain. In between them, the sun showed itself now and then. Around 11:30 am, I got hungry. I ate some lunch, and shortly past noon decided to go for a spin on the hybrid. I knew that I might get rained on; but I also knew that it\’s unlikely that I\’ll get to go out tomorrow. Better to get in a bit of riding while I could! Sure enough, a fine sprinkle began before I got to the park. This continued on and off. The wind got quite strong on and off, too. I made just one round of the park, then decided it might be best to go back home. For a few minutes it rained quite hard; if it was going to turn nasty, I wanted to be indoors. I reached home with a mere 4.28 miles on the Cateye. Those few miles didn\’t do much more than get my legs warmed up. But at least I got outdoors.      

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Pack Mule

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Pack Mule A pack mule is what I felt like this morning. Many a time I’ve made an excursion to the salvage store with bike trunk and trailer; or with trunk and panniers. Today, for the first time, I used all three. I wanted to see how I would do with that load. Fortunately the wind wasn’t bad on the way home. I actually felt like I was pedaling more strongly than usual. When I arrived at home and got off the bike, though, my legs felt rubbery enough that I went staggering! And what all did I get? A make-your-own-grab-bag, naturally. I even found two FitCrunch Bars there! I got yet more canned goods. Alas, I also bought cut-rate, past-season Valentine and Easter candy. Most of it is chocolate, so it’s in the fridge. I had hoped to find paper towels. If the store had any, I missed them. Not that I need more of them; getting a pack was to be part of this pack mule experiment. I was going to put anything big and  bulky in the trailer. How did I manage to get to the store today, Friday? I’ve been watching the weather, along with everybody on or near the Gulf coast. Cristobal is out there, and we could start feeling some impact from him as early as tomorrow morning. We’re under tropical storm warning already. But the forecast for today was for calm winds very early; and later in the morning, wind under 8 mph. That’s much easier to deal with than winds of 10-15 mph, big load or not. So I took some vacation hours this morning; got my grocery shopping done; and also visited the bank to get a roll of quarters. Weather permitting, I might ride to the regular store tomorrow to get some bananas. But nothing like today’s load. I’m not a pack mule, you know.

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Cravings

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Oh, cravings! Who among us does not suffer from cravings? I\’ve had a craving for sweets since I was a very young child. I guess I got that from my grandmother. She loved sweets, too. Now that I have pre-diabetes, I\’m working to control my desire for candy, ice cream, and such stuff. Shameful to state, I still nibble at the goodies more than I should. My desires aren\’t limited to the sugary stuff, either. Chinese food is another. The local Chinese restaurant closed before the end of March, thanks to COVID-19. On June 1st, they opened again; take-out and evening delivery only. Yesterday after I clocked out of work, I trotted over there and got take-out: the Mandarin Chicken Combination Plate, all white meat. (The all white meat costs a little more, but I like it much better). It would have been much faster to ride, but fitting a take-out dinner box into a bike trunk is a bit tricky. The little container of gravy (for the chicken) might have fallen over, and leaked all over the place. What a mess that would have been to clean up. My dinner was a bit cooler than I would have liked by the time I had walked home, but that had an upside. I didn\’t scorch my gums just behind my upper incisors by chomping down on a too-hot egg roll! There was another upside as well. As soon as I walked into the kitchen with my food, I got out two pint-size food containers; and split my dinner into three. Well, the chicken and fried rice parts, anyway. I didn\’t want to cut up the egg roll because the filling would have fallen out. Thus I\’ve gotten three meals for $12. That\’s pretty hard to beat. But now that the restaurant is open, my cravings for Chinese food will be much harder to control!

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Weather Watch

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It\’s weather watch time already, and hurricane season has barely begun! Yesterday afternoon I learned about Tropical Storm Cristobal. Cristobal\’s eventual track is still uncertain; but last night it looked like he\’s making a beeline for us. I actually hope he travels fast. I figure that, the faster he goes, the less time he\’ll have to strengthen. Thanks to my many trips to the salvage store, I have quite an abundance of non-perishable foods to use in case a storm does hit. Yesterday evening after supper I made a special trip to Walgreen\’s® to get a couple of jugs of drinking water. I\’m not going to wait until it\’s certain that Cristobal will land here to get them; by then it will be too late. Unfortunately Cristobal\’s effects might keep me from the excursion I was planning for Saturday: a trip to (yes, AGAIN!) the salvage store using all three means of carrying stuff. Trips using trunk and panniers are the most common. I\’ve also used trunk and trailer. But never before had I used all three on one trip. I was going to try it out this time, so I can blog about it. I\’d like to get one or two lightweight but bulky items so I\’m not too dragged down, but I want to get an idea of how the hybrid will handle under such a load. And, incidentally, me. Until then, I\’ll have to keep the weather watch going. I don\’t want to be caught off-guard by a torrential downpour on the way back from the store.

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Won\’t-Power!

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Won\’t-power, we hear, is just as important as will-power. Maybe even more so. We read about will-power in articles about weight loss/dieting; smoking cessation; and more. When I was diagnosed with pre-diabetes three months ago, I had a lot of candy on hand; most of it from the grab-bag bins in the salvage store. Much of it was bars such as Twix, Snickers, and so on. What was I to do with all that candy? I couldn\’t bear to throw it in the trash. I didn\’t think it would be good manners to offer past-best-by-date candy to others. To complicate matters, it was Easter-candy season. Elmer\’s doesn\’t seem to be around \”egg-cept\” at Easter; so I had to get some while I could. And here is where won\’t power comes in. After the diagnosis, I immediately began working to eat more healthful snacks: raw carrots, dry-roasted nuts, and such. I left the sweets in the fridge (where they won\’t melt). I do my best not to think about them. The bag of candy bars is on the bottom shelf, where it\’s less visible when I open the fridge door. After about three months my resolve seemed to weaken. Maybe I was trying to be too stringent with myself; but I had to bring myself back to heel. I have to keep reminding myself that I don\’t want full-blown Diabetes Type II. Back to carrots and hummus for snacks! So much for diet/health/pre-diabetes and won\’t-power. Is there any won\’t-power involved in cycling? I should think so! On a tough climb: I won\’t give up! Fighting  stiff headwind: I won\’t let this wind beat me! I\’ll bet Grand Tour riders have to have a lot of won\’t-power!  

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