Bodies of water revisited

OK, before anyone gets too critical, let's review the bicycle LOG.

Friday: "Water would FREEZE in bottle."

Saturday: "Sunny but never 40."

Sunday: "Sunday"

So there you have it, three days without a ride. Note on the last of the three: I am gradually adopting standard retired person attitudes about the weekends. There are so many people who have jobs who are out there SO desperately trying to get some task or recreational activity or some other such thing done that it just seems wrong to interfere. I mean, Sunday is just too Sunday for a guy who can ride in the middle of the day any of the other days of the week. I didn't ride.

I did ride yesterday but did not blog, a rare event. Yesterday was warm enough to ride but featured a powerful southeast wind. I rode but that wind totally wasted me. A common pattern for me is that I don't have a picture as the ride nears an end and I spend a little extra effort at the end finding a photo. Yesterday the wind so thoroughly defeated me that I spent the last couple of miles with a death grip on the handlebars, afraid to get off because I wasn't sure if I would be able to stand up well enough to get back on the bicycle. I was afraid that I might have to call Laura to come and get me and even though I once did purchase a bicycle from her I just wasn't sure that that one purchase put me in line for that level of customer service, particularly at this distance from her shop. So instead of a photo I struggled on home and immediately went to lie down. *sigh* This is going to be just a little bit harder each and every year.

Here's another point, if you want to average 25 miles per ride over the course of the season then at some point probably pretty early in the season you have to start riding at least 25 miles. That was today's accomplishment. I took the full northern tour, out to Snail Lake, Highway 96, Sucker Lake, Lake Vadnais, all of those familiar places. The wind was blowing from the north and each time I reached the south shore of one of those lakes I rediscovered the truth of something that was recently commented here. The wind blowing across an ice covered lake is COLD.

I took a couple of pictures out at Vadnais but there was another one of those egregious cases of "user error" and have nothing to actually share.

However, I believe I have solved this mystery:If your answer is "snow melt" you are living somewhere else. The snow has been completely gone for over a week. If you think "rain", wrong again, no rain here for at least that same period of time. If you said "Cliff's house", well, technically you are correct but Cliff's house is not a mystery. The mystery is why is there water in the street?

Once long ago I had to go to the county courthouse to check on the status of some document or another that was being recorded against our property, I think it was a mortgage assignment. Note to TOPWLH: Remember when we had a mortgage? While I was at the courthouse I took the opportunity to review quite a few of the relevant documents relating to our house, including the plat of survey of our subdivision. The plat showed blocks and lots and some other pertinent details, the most unusual of which is that at the far end of what is now our street there was depicted on the plat a wetland.

What you see in that photo is that wetland. There was some fill added when the houses were built but ground water doesn't know anything about houses. The ground water hydrology still requires that the water travel, hydrology term here, down head. This spring the ground water is asserting its occasional role as surface water, seeping up through the yards and through cracks in the street and then pooling up.

Wetland.

In major bicycling news, shortly after I got home I had to run to the window to get a picture of this guy:The street in front of my house has been swept. It is another function of being retired that there are all of these things that I used to notice when I got home from work that I now actually see occur. Today I saw the street sweepers.