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Mid-life crisis?
My latest kick these days is getting rid of stuff. The junk accumulation phase of my life is over, and it’s time to downsize. My new best friends are the recycle bin, the dump, the paper shredder, eBay, and the Salvation Army. I’d like the house to eventually be neat and organized. I’d like us…
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Grind.
I slogged up Ilchester Rd. again today. It went a little more smoothly than last time. Hill-climbing rule no. 1: If you know you’re going to need the granny gear, shift into it while still seated, before it gets too hard to pedal. If you wait ’till you’re standing up, your derailleur will pick that…
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Rite of Passage
School has started, both at UMBC and in the surrounding counties. That means more traffic to deal with, particularly during my morning rides. The first week is always the worst, after which things start to improve as people fall into a routine. I’m not crazy about this time of year, but it does have one…
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Final Summer Fling
It’s the last week of summer vacation for Howard and Baltimore counties, with students returning to school on Monday 8/30. That means this is the last week I get to enjoy relatively light traffic on my morning rides, before the roads get clogged with buses and other school traffic. This week I’m enjoying a few…
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Dog Days
Yet another morning riding in the August soup. The beginning of the week was hot-and-sunny soup, and the past 2 days have been damp-and-cloudy soup with the requisite messy storms mixed in. I biked to work 4 days out of 5, shrewdly taking off on Tuesday, which was the hottest day of the week. This…
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July finally over
Well.. a truly miserable July, the hottest in recent memory, is finally over. Let’s see what August has in store. I finished July up with roughly 15 rides. I say “roughly” because I’ve gotten kinda lazy with keeping ride stats lately, and sort of forgot to record any of my rides after July 14. So…
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Heat Wave
So we’ve hit one of the two times of year (the other being the dead of winter) where you really have to be hard-core to be out on the bike. This afternoon I should easily break my record for hottest ride home. It was already close to 90 when I rode in this morning, and…
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Solstice
Happy Solstice. I’m writing this around 1 hour before solar noon, which is supposedly when the Sun will be at its highest point in the sky of the year. Hard to believe the kids are still in school, but we have Snowmageddon to blame for that. June hasn’t been the greatest month in the world…
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6000 miles
We’ve got ourselves some good old-fashioned Mid-Atlantic summer weather this week. My morning ride was a nice, sweaty, humid 81°. High of 89 later today, with (you guessed it) thunderstorms predicted for late afternoon and evening. I tend to take shorter rides in this kind of weather, and today was no exception. Yesterday afternoon I…
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BtWD – Late Start
I didn’t get out of the house until 9:15 this morning, but fulfilled my obligation to ride to work on Bike-to-Work Day. By the time I left, it was around 70 degrees out. I rode down Lawyers Hill Rd, through the park, out River Rd to Frederick Rd, up Oella Ave, up the #9 Trolley…