Ride, Ripping, Reflect, Breaking the speed limit on one wheel
Friday after work I felt good enough to get my 10 mile ride in. The knee that I hurt running on Wednesday didn’t seem to mind the physics of cycling much. My pace was on par with recent rides. The rest of the weekend my knee still felt sketchy and the lower right quadrant back pain was a near constant shadow.
On Saturday mornings one of my tasks is washing the bedding. Almost without fail Elsa likes to try to sabotage these plans by jumping onto the middle of the bed and staying there, despite my efforts to strip the bed. It’s almost like a fun game for her at this point. She looks so cute it’s hard to get angry with her for doing it.
When I went around and did the weeding on Saturday I also had my machete in hand. It was used to assist in cutting out things that were killed from the extreme cold. The biggest thing that got cut down were the half dozen banana trees. There are a lot of other things that took damage that I did not pull, giving them a chance to see if they recover. I also got more of the left over stuff that Cindy used cleaned up. There are still a few things I need to redeploy, curb or throw out.
I did a Costco run on Saturday. The place was absolutely packed. Even so checkout was probably less than 10 minutes, they definitely do whatever they can to keep that river of humanity flowing as quickly as possible.
Over the weekend I started reading the first volume of the blog exports my dad has been giving me for years. I have read them sparingly but never completely. This book covers 2002 and 2003 which is incredibly 20 years ago at this point. As I read some of the entries I found myself cringing at certain points. Things I put out there then I would never do nowadays, my thought patterns have definitely matured since that point of time. I guess that’s hard to avoid over the span of two decades. I think back then I thought it was somehow cool to be harsh and mean. I don’t view it as cool anymore. It is interesting to have that time of my life brought back into focus. For example back then I was very into invading Iraq and criticized anyone that thought otherwise. Of course it turned out the big lie fooled a lot of people, myself included. We will see if I can make it all the way through volume 1 without being overwhelmed by embarrassment or shame.
On Sunday I took Elsa to the park again. There were a couple soccer games going on so there were a decent amount of people present. Elsa was driving me nuts, pulling like a bull, for no apparent reason. We cut the walk shorter than I would have liked. I just wish I could get her to calm down in these situations but there is nothing I do or say that seems to help.
I took my V12 out for a top speed run, something I have never done on this wheel. Taking a one wheeled balancing device to speeds over 40MPH is nerve wracking for sure. I did gear up fully for the ride but if I would go down at these speeds bad things will happen, regardless. I did four runs, topping out at 41.3 MPH on the last one, the second fastest speed I have done on any wheel. Despite the V12 being a smaller 16 inch wheel it still felt stable at these very high speeds. The speed limit on these side streets is 30MPH so I technically was speeding.
The rest of my Sunday was pretty chill, I watched some Olympics, some HBO Max, edited video and had Cindy stop by to pick up her mail and a few other items. It was the first time I saw her in person in a long time. It felt strange for it to feel strange, if you know what I mean.