The season of softening

[Joy Beeson]

13 November 2021

The weather predicted for today has been postponed until Tuesday.

I try to be hard core about riding every Saturday even after the
closing of the farmer's markets leaves me no place to go, but the
predicted high is 39F (4C), the wind sock is standing straight out
(but Weather Underground says it will drop from over seventeen miles
an hour now to about five over the course of the day), it's overcast,
and there will be showers.

Getting wet in freezing temperatures can kill you. And the first
symptom is getting too stupid to know that you are in danger.

It will be fit to ride on Tuesday, if I can think of a place to go,
but I fear that it will be January before I can start working my way
up to another trip to Spring Creek.

***

I killed the last bag of dry cereal at breakfast. Now I have a goal
for Tuesday: I can go to Aldi and buy Cinnamon Toast Crunch. It will
be easy to make a long ride out of it because the direct route crosses
30 at a notorious intersection.

Coming by way of Pet Smart isn't in the cards, because cat food is
heavy and it will be at least a week and a half before my new pannier
gets here. He said "about two weeks" when I ordered it on the tenth.

It was canned goods that broke the attachments off my old pannier; I
should post that issue of the Banner here. I re-attached the pannier
with bungee cords, and reserve it for my windbreaker and other light
stuff. I was rather surprised that it's easy take stuff out and put
stuff in without unhooking the criss-crossing bungees. I took a
picture of the re-attached pannier and posted it at
http://wlweather.net/LETTERS/2021BANN/BUNGEEh4.JPG . The orange thing
is a scarf draped over the handlebars, and the black thing on the
floor is actually brown: a Kroger curb-service bag containing the
insulation I pulled out of the damaged pannier. I hope that Kroger's
"reusable" bags fit my new pannier as well as they fit the old one. I
didn't look over the clerk's shoulder, but presume that he found the
same basket he'd found before.

A 1.5M version of the same picture:
http://wlweather.net/LETTERS/2021BANN/BUNGEE04.JPG



--
Joy Beeson, U.S.A., mostly central Hoosier,
some Northern Indiana, Upstate New York, Florida, and Hawaii
joy beeson at centurylink dot net http://wlweather.net/PAGEJOY/
The above message is a Usenet post.

[Joy Beeson]

On Sat, 13 Nov 2021 22:19:50 -0500, Joy Beeson
<jbe...@invalid.net.invalid> wrote:

> I fear that it will be January before I can start working my way
> up to another trip to Spring Creek.

Definitely January. I went on a teensy little ten-mile ride today,
and found that I had to get off and walk halfway up the slope from
US 30 to CR 300 N.

I've long since given up hope of getting strong enough to ride up
McElroy Hill on the other side of 30, but I've never before had to
walk up Silveus Crossing.

And because I had to run at 3:00 to be sure of getting home before
5:00, I didn't have time to ask for and read the manuals of the three
washing machines I'm considering. Perhaps I can find them online
somewhere.

--
Joy Beeson