My afternoon meetings were canceled. It was a slow-moving Friday, then. And that’s just fine! I disposed of some balloons that had lost their helium. (Helium atoms are small enough to leak through the balloon and escape. Now you’ve learned something today.)
Someone buys balloons for a few of the opening week festivities and, is it just me or do they deflate faster these days? Anyway, the balloons get moved around from space to space for this reception and that welcome and so on, until they’re just rolling around on the floor. Someone has to deal with them, and I went to graduate school, so it may as well be me.
I use scissors to put a small slit in the base of each balloon so the air can escape and to avoid a lot of popping sounds. No need to cause a panic, I’m already causing a mess. Those ribbons go everywhere when you’re cutting them free of the weighted base, in this case another balloon filled with sand.
But that was only the fourth or fifth most exciting thing that happened today. There was also watching the work at the nearby Poplars Building. The cleanup continues, today starring a few excavators moving rubble from here to there. You can just see them in between the trees.
Perhaps next week they’ll get back to scraping down the building. The point of this exercise is to see the progress of the destructive process, after all.
Then again, there’s rain in the forecast for the first part of the week.
I rode my bike to work, as I have been doing these last several weeks. But that’s taken the place of normal bike rides, for the most part. And also I’m carrying my bag, and riding through the city and it’s just not the same. So I decided to ride this evening. But, I figured, instead of starting at the house I could use campus as my jumping off point, and ride to the other side of town, which is rare.
So here’s my shadow selfie tapping out the miles on one of the only flat roads around for miles.
I’d laid out this route on a map and then mostly followed it from memory. It was a lumpy route.
Also on that flat section, I found a nice optical illusion. This road parallels the interstate, and there’s little more than a jersey barrier with glare shields separating the two roads. At about 25 miles per hour the shadows started going the wrong direction.
About 20 miles in, and starting the evening turn back to campus I ran across this sign. Normally, taking pictures of signs is a waste of time, and they’re never a good photograph, but knowing I had a few climbs ahead of me, it gave me a little chuckle.
It isn’t a barn by bike, but a bin by bike fits the bill. I’m assuming this corn will be going in there before long. (I set out on this long ride with no fuel and only one water bottle and, yes, at one point some of those cornfields seemed like a good idea. (That would have been a bad idea.))
There is a fire station out on this route that has a water fountain in the parking lot. They’ve even labeled it “water for bikers.” Pretty thoughtful of them. And I took advantage of that handy resource coming and going. There’s a big hill by that station, and since I went by it twice that means I went down the hill and up the hill. I don’t know if I’ve ever been down it before, but I did so with some hesitancy because who knows how it will go. It fit with the theme of most of the ride and I seemed a bit cautious and unsure of everything. When I came back that way I was just four seconds off my fastest ever ascent of that hill. Fast for me, then, slow by every other possible metric.
In between the hills, though, you do get some flat stuff. This is in some little valley that would probably be otherwise unremarkable, but for the angle of the sun as I was passing through.
I got back to town, and to campus, after a two-hour ride. Then I had to put my backpack back on my shoulders, now heavier than normal.
It was after 7 p.m. by then, of course, and the flow of traffic was all different, so the most amusing thing happened. I did the whole commute — across campus, through two neighborhoods and a huge commercial district, and then back into my neighborhood without having to take my foot out of the pedals. That was a goal I devised and said out loud just two weeks ago. Speak it into existence, as they say. That really works!
I want to win the lottery.
