And how was your weekend? Mine was lovely. (I hope yours was even better!) Let me show you.
On Friday, I swam a mile, a nice cool 1,650 yards.
Somewhere around 500 yards or so my arms finally decide they want to make the many revolutions required to complete the swim. I say arms because there’s precious little for my feet to do. Oh, I try to kick, but it doesn’t come automatically. I have to tell my feet to do the fluttering, splashing thing. And then, soon after, they stop. I’m probably a few thousand miles away from them doing their one job in the pool without conscious thought. Maybe I should do kick drills.
I think about that, but somewhere around that 500 yard mark my mind goes away and it’s just breathing and counting and turning, and 500 yards turns into 1,300 or so.
It’s satisfying, to count up those lap numbers — if I can keep count while I try, in vain, to remind myself to kick.
I had a nice ride Friday afternoon, too. I turned right out of the neighborhood, rode on down to the stop sign and, instead of going straight or turning left, as I normally do, I turned right. Because, somewhere down that road about five miles, there is a four-exit roundabout and I suddenly wondered, Where does the other exit go?
So I went down there to see where that road went. Part of the way down I thought I knew where it would take me, but I was wrong. Also, I wasn’t too wild about the road. I probably won’t use it too often. Five miles later it dropped me off in town, and I spent the next 10 or so miles just noodling around through the countryside. I took this one near the end of my bike ride.
I got back in just before it got dark, making my lovely bride happy, because that meant we could eat dinner at a reasonable hour, and not dictated by pedaling away in the quiet of a late summer evening.
On Saturday, we were enjoying a nice early evening outside, and when we looked to the east, we saw …
I don’t think phone cameras do a good job of capturing rainbows, but this was a spectacular rainbow. And then it became a double rainbow.
It hung there for more than 20 minutes, long enough for two planes to fly toward it, or through it. I wondered if they could see it up there. Rainbows are a question of timing and positioning, perspective, then.
We know they saw it in the city. On what was, I suppose, a slow news weekend, this was a big doing in the paper and noted on local TV.
Also, we got a double rainbow out of the deal. This is a panorama.
(Click to embiggen.)
This was, I am sure, one of the best, if not the best, rainbow experiences I can recall. It looked like it touched down just on the other side of the neighborhood. I haven’t heard about anyone finding the gold, though maybe they’re wisely keeping that quiet.
The Yankee and I enjoyed a nice ride yesterday. We did a variant of one of her favorite local routes, and then tired from some big workouts, I dropped her off at home and pedaled on.
Around 30 miles into the ride, I saw this masterpiece of modern art.
For the next 10 miles, so all the way home, I wondered how you fix that. Surely, there must be enough slack in the lines to allow them to move the busted pole out of the way while they installed another one right next to the old stump. You can think of a lot of ways that the linemen might address that problem in that half hour or so. I bet they do it with good cheer. After all, you finally must assume they’ve handled something like this before, probably many times. There is surely a procedure. No doubt they have a contingency. And I’m sure it will be repaired this week, if it isn’t already back up to spec today.
And while I was thinking of all of that, my shadow had a pretty good ride.
Sure, he looks like he has good form, my shadow, but he never has to pull any actual weight on these rides.
