We rode around the city yesterday morning. The Yankee was doing another brick, a training exercise designed to simulate an upcoming duathlon. She swam and biked. I don’t swim in laps, so I waited until she was done and followed her around town.

It was warm, but still morning, so the air was filled with this crisp feeling of not-too-warm which, really, is just the way we internalize the I-hope-it-doesn’t-get-too-hot feeling.

We rode the city’s bypass and then cruised around the outside of the airport, by a new church that is going up and then that long, last, slow, supple hill before home. Just as we pulled into the neighborhood I reached this on my odometer:

That’s for the season. I’m a few hundred miles behind where I want to be. But I’ll catch up.

Sunday afternoon I got out for an afternoon, heat of the day ride.

“Couldn’t you have ridden later?” my lovely bride asked. I think she was concerned about my health and well being in the way that people that care about you have. It was sweet, but halting. Is this really sensible?

Well, yes. Because, you see, I was gassed the other day when I went out for a ride on the first real warm day of the season. And that shouldn’t be happening to me. There are plenty of times when I don’t have the legs or the form or the fitness. I’ll accept those shortcomings as physiology or just the bad day of a bad cyclist. But I live in heat and humidity. This stuff shouldn’t bother me like it did that day, and so, yes, I will ride in the heat, because that can be overcome.

Also I drink a lot of fluids.

So I rode in 96-degree temperatures on Sunday, and I was pleased with that. When the mercury really spikes, I’ll be riding then, too. But you have to survive the 90s first.

My gloves, as of today, now have 2,100 miles on them:

I wonder what the lifespan of gloves should be. These feel like they are getting up there in age.

Watched Austin City Limits tonight. Usually, when I catch it, I’ll have it on as background noise to feel good about my thin appreciation of the arts. “Musicians I’m not entirely familiar with!” Sometimes, though, you get good pop tunes. And sometimes there’s a bit of international flavor:

Watch Mumford & Sons / Flogging Molly on PBS. See more from Austin City Limits.

Flogging Molly played the second set. Their second or third song they started like this: “This next song celebrates the life of over 100,000 Irish people shipped to Barbados as slaves. Let’s dance in their honor.”

Well, yeah, naturally.

I trimmed the hedges today. Some of them. It was the high point of the day’s heat, and so naturally I was outside sculpting away and fussing with garbage bags full of leaf leavings. I trimmed and cleaned a dozen. That’s not half the property.

The back and the side will just have to wait. There’s only so much you can feel like doing in one day.

A few doors down someone had their lawn guys hard at work. They wrapped up whatever they were doing as I struggled along, thinking, I’d hire someone to do it, but there are no artisan hedge trimmers in town.

And you need an artist for this job. We’re not doing sculptures, mind you, but there’s a lot going on. On one side they have to stay below a retaining wall. In the flower bed they have to be kept just so, seeing that they don’t dominate the roses and hydrangeas. The flowering shrubs need to be worked in such a way as to leave the flowers still showing vibrantly.

The two bushes that frame the garage present special problems. One is over a perennial flower bed and trying to remove clipped leaves from the ground there would be madness. The other one needs an extra curve to accommodate the side mirror of the car as it enters and exits the garage. The two shrubs that stand sentry at the end of the drive need to be kept close, allowing for a good turning radius. One of those is swallowing up the mailbox. I’d let it grow over and frame the thing, but I doubt the nice lady who delivers our bills and junk mail would approve. There are another series of shrubs that conceal all the utility boxes, and that sits on the property line. I want to help my neighbor, but not cut back his shrubs so much that he dislikes my efforts.

And that doesn’t get us around the side where someone, at some point, thought “You know, shrubs of varying sizes. That’s what this long wall needs.”

I’d like to meet that person. I’d like to shake their hand and tell them how wrong they were about that.

Anyone watch Sherlock? I finished the second series last night and I’m trying to figure out the big season-ending cliffhanger. Want to help? Here’s the entire final segment, including the brilliant work of Andrew Scott who treats Moriarty like a manic personality with great results:

Watch Sherlock: The Reichenbach Fall on PBS. See more from Masterpiece.

Good stuff, no?

The Guardian is writing about it, quoting the writer that everyone is missing a big clue. They are writing quite a bit about it. There are hundreds of fan theories.

Someone taped a thoughtful six minute video detailing the Holmes conspiracy:

That’s not the only one of those such videos, by the way, but that one is particular well thought out. The truck with the garbage bags is key. I’ve watched this scene three or four times now — it is especially tense and moving — and the last of it in slow motion a bit too. That truck seems almost like a continuity error, though.

Time warp: Old Auburn football pictures from The Anniston Star can be found here. There are lots of great images form the 70s, 80s and early 90s in there.