Hooray Hooray

Because I forgot to do that earlier in the month.

The mother who lives here is spending most of the day with her child and with her mother.  That seems pretty nice.

This left me with ample time for riding my bicycle.  Ample time but opportunity as considered from the vantage point of this morning seemed quite unlikely.  It rained overnight, not all night but with considerable intensity on at least one instance of a half hour or so.  The morning radar weather showed one of those green and red blobs surging towards us from Iowa and stated the probability of precipitation during the afternoon hours to be 50 percent.  50 percent.  That's usually pretty daunting.  But as I watched the red started to veer towards the east and the green broke into two parts and at about 1pm it seemed likely that the two parts would miss where I live, one going west and one going with the red to the east.

I always felt like I was dodging raindrops but it worked out and there was even a short stretch late in the ride where it felt pretty nice.

The temperature reached, or nearly reached 20C which means I went out without leg covering for only the second time this year.  Yes indeed, I wore shorts.

Too bad TMWLH wasn't around to get a photo.  Those pasty white Minnesota winter cured things sticking out of the bottom of my bicycle gear, also known as legs, scared even me.  But I am bicyclist (hear me roar) and I could still find the line where my shorts go, the teensiest, tiniest remnant of last summer's tan.

Here's an observation:  At this time of the season a rest day is certainly welcome but two days in a row off is a very bad thing.  Yesterday I was totally wasted by my ride.  Today?  Amazingly enough I feel pretty good.  Fitness is so fleeting that that second day off takes too much out of the nearly empty tank.  I'm still building fitness here, I need the work.

Here's another thing:  Today my reconnaissance of the weather channel before I set out alerted me to fairly light winds from the north and west.  I set out to ride in that direction and within a short time discovered something that I don't recall happening before.  The winds were fairly light but very definitely from the south and east.  The weather channel was reporting wind direction only the 180 degrees off from what I discovered.  I got a bit of a ways to the north before I realized what the true wind direction was (I felt WAY too strong) but after riding all the way around a block over there (to gauge the wind from all four directions) I turned around and rode mostly over towards the big city south of where I live.

I won't be riding down into the big city much until there is significant improvement to the pavement situation at dead man's curve.  But to discover that pothole minefield I had to ride down into the Saint Anthony Park neighborhood.  I came across this.  There's lots and lots of information there.

OK, to start with they have bagged up leaves.  They have a bunch of oak trees in that yard, the variety of oaks (is it white oaks?) that don't drop their leaves until late winter.  So those people have had a busy spring clean up.  Then some of that stuff seems to be wood chips intended for use in the spring landscaping.  Then there is the no parking Monday because of street sweeping (I won't be riding over there tomorrow).  Then there is the no parking except by permit 8 to 8 Monday through Friday.  Too close to the farm campus, students are NOT welcome to park in the neighborhood.  And lastly there is the intriguing (to me) information that that is a night plow route on that side of the street.  What does that mean?

And plenty of wet patches in the curb and in the yard waste further out in the street to confirm that I may have been lucky to dodge serious precipitation.

There's ALWAYS a lot of information here.

Did you all know that the street past the cows is a one way?

Look at that sky, I KNOW I was pretty lucky to get in a ride today.

Happy Mothers' Day.