{"id":573893412,"date":"2021-07-26T21:27:57","date_gmt":"2021-07-27T01:27:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/?p=573893412"},"modified":"2023-05-13T01:49:09","modified_gmt":"2023-05-13T05:49:09","slug":"welcome-to-the-last-week-of-july","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/blog\/2021\/07\/26\/welcome-to-the-last-week-of-july\/","title":{"rendered":"Welcome to the last week of July"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Let&#8217;s jump right into the big Monday feature. Mondays are better with pets, after all. So here&#8217;s a nice series of Phoebe doing her modeling thing on the stairs. <\/p>\n<p>She looks up, giving you coy. <\/p>\n<p><center><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/photo\/july21\/july38.jpg\"><\/center><\/p>\n<p>She looks down, giving you introspection.<\/p>\n<p><center><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/photo\/july21\/july39.jpg\"><\/center><\/p>\n<p>And that&#8217;s all you get, she says.<\/p>\n<p><center><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/photo\/july21\/july40.jpg\"><\/center><\/p>\n<p>Poseidon sometimes jumps on the TV stand. He&#8217;ll look at the TV for a moment. He&#8217;ll walk around it. Once in a while he stands on his back legs and tries to poke his head over the top. He&#8217;s long and tall, but you can only just see part of his face. He&#8217;s big and strong enough that it makes you nervous. <\/p>\n<p>But then he uses feline grace and does this.<\/p>\n<p><center><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/photo\/july21\/july41.jpg\"><\/center><\/p>\n<p>For whatever reason, he likes bike races. (Yes, this little series is a few weeks old now. I&#8217;ve been saving it.) This isn&#8217;t the first time that he&#8217;s been interested in road racing.<\/p>\n<p><center><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/photo\/july21\/july42.jpg\"><\/center><\/p>\n<p>He sits with me to watch them too.<\/p>\n<p><center><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/photo\/july21\/july43.jpg\"><\/center><\/p>\n<p>Yes, he&#8217;s sitting in my lap and watching the Tour there.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking of bikes &#8230; <\/p>\n<p><center><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/blog\/banners\/bannerbloomingtonbike.jpg\"><\/center><\/p>\n<p>My front derailleur froze. This is only a problem if you want to swap from the big ring to the little ring. It happened over the winter, probably because I get sweaty during indoor riding and it fused.<\/p>\n<p>I had a springtime tuneup, an annual rite of passage for most road bikes. That required new cables and the purchase and installation of a Fisher-Price replacement derailleur. (It looks like the real thing; it does nothing.) Still didn&#8217;t work. Soon after, there was another trip to the shop, where the mechanic tinkered, but ultimately did not fix the problem. <\/p>\n<p>So a third trip to the bike shop, where the mechanic, one of the few who doesn&#8217;t actually want to work on things, I&#8217;ve decided, fixed it again. After he destroyed the new cable he put on a few weeks ago.<\/p>\n<p>I learned on Saturday&#8217;s 30-miler that, after all of this, the front derailleur works precisely a third of the time.<\/p>\n<p><center><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/photo\/july21\/july37.jpg\"><\/center><\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s a great way to keep the spirits up on a bike ride.<\/p>\n<p>I need a new bike shop. <\/p>\n<p>The rest of the weekend was normal. There was the routine Chick-fil-A lunch, an evening chat with friends and, of course, the Olympics. My lovely bride is a world-renowned Olympic scholar. We watch a lot of sports. Over the next two weeks here you can pretty much assume that almost every moment not specifically accounted for is sleep, or Olympics. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Let&#8217;s jump right into the big Monday feature. Mondays are better with pets, after all. So here&#8217;s a nice series of Phoebe doing her modeling thing on the stairs. She looks up, giving you coy. She looks down, giving you introspection. And that&#8217;s all you get, she says. Poseidon sometimes jumps on the TV stand. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40,3,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-573893412","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cycling","category-monday","category-photo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573893412","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=573893412"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573893412\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":573895775,"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573893412\/revisions\/573895775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=573893412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=573893412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=573893412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}