Bicycling

Title Block

Finally feel like writing something, but I can’t think of title…

We drove the Miata to work on Thursday because we *could* ride home with the top down. But we didn’t drive it today even though it was warmer than yesterday. We rode the tandem.

I found a fool proof method on how to get your wife to agree to let you buy a new computer: While she is in the middle of shuffling the contents around in the kitchen cabinets (for who knows what reason other than to confuse me) just walk in and ask if you can spend $425. Well, that and the fact that I have been moaning about it’s slowness for a couple years (it was purchased just shy of 9 years ago.)

Like the plethora of fragrance commercials that show up on TV before Christmas, you can tell it is January because of all the ads for diet plans and gym memberships.

Which leads us to: “A gym is not designed to make you feel instantly better about yourself. If a gym wanted to make you feel instantly better about yourself, it would be a bar.” which is Rule #1 for Conquering the Gym, go read the other 26.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Tran?si?tions since 10/24/08: 1098

124,000 Footsteps

I know it was nowhere near that many, but sometimes it feels like that when you are walking in circles, kicking over leaves, looking for and not finding a cache.

We set out this morning with a list of the 13 geocaches left in the 47 cache Risk Series. Those were all that were loaded in the GPSr so we couldn’t get distracted by other near by hides. We were out for 9 hours, walked almost 4 miles, drove almost 150 miles and found 8. There were 3 DNFs and 2 we couldn’t even attempt. One, the final cache, World Domination, we were lacking 3 numbers in the coordinates. Those 3 numbers would be found inside the other cache titled, Capture The Flag. We couldn’t find that one because its coordinates were wholly located inside a random cache in the series and it must be one of the three we couldn’t find today. Maybe next weekend…

Yesterday was a car-less day as we rode the tandem to work and when we got home we just stayed inside for the rest of the evening. The temperature Friday morning was anywhere between 35 and 38 depending on which weather source you believed. Whichever one it was we know it was down right cold bike riding in. The only thing that got really cold were our hands, which prompted a stop at a bike store in Augusta to buy some winter cycling gloves.

The Emperor passed through the 124,000 mile mark not long after leaving the garage for our trip this morning.

Started down, went up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Tran?si?tions since 10/24/08: 1092

Car Free Sunday

We slept in a little this morning and then got on the tandem for a bike ride before the weather got stinking hot. We rode a long looping 15 miles before ending up at the west side DD for our usual. By the time we were done we had gone 22 miles and change. After parking the bike and closing the garage door, neither of us ventured outside again.

We watched the last 2 episodes of Season Eight of Law & Order: The Mother Ship on a DVD from Netflix with lunch. This disc was the end in two different ways, first, it marks our return to one DVD out at a time from Netflix and secondly, Season 8 is the last of L&O seasons of the 20 that is available for rental (except for inexplicably, season fourteen.) The afternoon was spent watching the FRS beat the CWS on TBS. And tonight, well, when do you think I’m writing this.

Aiken Railroad Depot

This morning we did our monthly 1/8 Century Ride (12.5 miles) on the tandem around Aiken to pay our bills. It would be more like a Sixteenth Century if we did it in the shortest way possible, but we added a few miles by looping around to the east and coming into downtown on Park Avenue passing right by the Aiken Railroad Depot.

I Got Nothing

We rode our separate bikes over the DD on the west side of town for breakfast. We drove the Miata out to do a little grocery shopping and then we drove the Sonata to North Augusta for a BBQ lunch.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Tran?si?tions since 10/24/08: 1022

Plated

As I was parking the tandem in the garage when we got home from work today I could hear the slightly muted beep of the answering machine. It was salesman Jerry letting us know that the Sonata’s South Carolina license plate was in and we could come get it whenever we wanted. Well, we wanted it now, so we changed clothes and headed over to Augusta.

The above picture does not show spiffy new SC plate because it was taken last weekend at Tignall Cemetery somewhere in Georgia where we DNF’d a cache. I ran it through an infrared plugin and then added the car’s color back in.

Friday The Thirteenth

In honor of today’s date, when it was time to pay for our weekly groceries at Kroger’s, we had the option of three different very short check out lines and we chose number thirteen.

I’m not going to create a separate page for the mods done to the Sonata like I did for the Miata, because the second and quite possibly last mod for it arrived in the mail from South Korea today. The first was tinting the windows and this one is a home market badge that goes on the right side of the trunk to balance out the Sonata one on the left. It reads F24GDi. The 24 stands for the 2.4 liter engine, I googled to find out that the GDi stands for Gasoline Direct injection, but the F I have no idea about. Four cylinders maybe?

We rode the bus (AKA the tandem) to work today and nary a single black cat crossed our path.