Some days are productive in the smallest ways. Maybe those are the best days. My alarm went off promptly, I ignored it for a moment, and then read my way through the morning, had a bite to eat, typed up a few things. Normal stuff. And then I worked on a shelving solution.
We need a place to put bike stuff, and so I picked up a second-hand shelf that will fit in a corner. It’s a two-piece deal, a cheap little MDF fixture that probably belongs in a bathroom. It’s going to hang in a corner in the garage. The first step was today, joining the two shelves together. I think they were designed to just sit on the floor, but one little wooden dowel isn’t going to hold it all together. So I added a second dowel. And then I joined them the old fashioned way, by screwing it all together.
The shelves are rounded, so this took ingenuity; I was immediately out of my league. But, eventually I did it. Two cheap little shelves have been joined into one piece. They’ll hold the weight of shows and elements and things.
And right about here you’re wondering if I’ll go self-deprecating or literary next. The truth is, I’m wondering, too.
To hang the shelf on the wall, I’ll make a french cleat. But I didn’t do that today, because I have the whole weekend ahead of me.
This is where I realized this wonderful little problem. How can I accurately that on two walls simultaneously. And then another, how to do it for the top and bottom shelves, as a little added security. I think I have it all figured out. It doesn’t require ingenuity, not really, but it does require some simple carpentry problem solving where I’m really deficient.
Let’s assume my solutions work. It shouldn’t take too long to make it happen. Then it’ll be on to all of my other little projects. And there are a lot of them. I’m eager to get to them. Well, most of them.
Late in the afternoon, or early this evening, or both, I set out for a little bike ride. I was thinking about how I could find new roads, and this is what I settled on. I did the reverse of one of our regular routes, the first regular route we established here, in fact. It’s a simple rectangle to the southwest. But, instead of turning right to head back home, I decided to find out what would happen if I just kept going.
What happens is you ride in the wind the whole day. Also, I pedaled my way through three-plus miles of empty roads and fields. I slid through an old neighborhood, and then crossed the interstate, which was when I realized where this road wound up. There are two truck stops and a hotel on the outskirts of a little town, and I didn’t want to be around of that today, so I doubled back. There was another promising road to check out.
So instead of turning left on the road that I knew, I turned left on a different road. It took me through four-and-a-half miles of views like this one.
Finally, it dumped me onto a road I knew, and so I took an indirect way home. It was a good ride, except for the wind. It was slow, because of the wind and also my legs. But it was pleasant. The weather was right, the traffic was non-existent, and there was a lot to see.
It was a nice, casual 34-mile ride that I finished with a smile. As I got home there was a car in the drive. Who had come to visit? We weren’t expecting company. As I got closer I realized, it was my lovely bride’s ride. She’d left it out of the garage as I worked on those shelves. So we had company, and it was us. This was a thing I said as a kid, when there was a car in the drive at my grandparents’ home, when the car belonged to us. “We’ve got company.”
Rides take you places. They bring you places. Sometimes the kid-in-you-ride takes back.
I wonder where tomorrow’s ride, and the 29 mph wind forecast, will take me.
So it was a literary allusion, in the smallest way, after all. Who could have seen that coming?
