Note: There are no pictures this week.

Nothing particularly special happened this week. I’m close to finishing the computer upgrades at CASA. There’s more work to do, but maybe not a whole lot. I won’t mind if I run dry there. I work 4 hours a day, 2 days a week. I get a stipend, but the first two hours of my stipend goes towards paying for the mileage and parking. I had a meeting with the tech support company at Habitat. They agreed with my overall plan, but disagreed with my proposed implementation. Their solution is technically better and also more expensive. It’s not likely to happen at Habitat. There are other things I can do for them, so I’ll re-focus my energies there.

I’m still doing PT twice a week, which take an amazingly large chunk out of the week.

Not much happened on the bike. My bike is in the shop getting its handle bars raised. They ordered the wrong part. The process of ordering and receiving a part takes at least 2 days. I hope to get the bike back Monday or Tuesday. I’ve been riding my backup bike, but it’s not set up for longer rides. In addition, it has turned amazingly cold here. We had a freeze warning last night.

Fortunately, the entertainment rolls on. We had a SOCA party yesterday. Today, we are going to a BSO concert.

Next week we’re having an adventure. Danita and I will leave for North Carolina Friday, returning Monday. We plan to head over to the Charlotte area and knock on doors and see if anybody will let us visit with their children. I have an idea we’ll be successful with the first door we knock on. Danita’s dad is coming with us. He has a friend in Charlotte just 20 minutes from Jul’s house. Bud’s coming to our house Thursday for dinner and staying overnight. The trip should be quite different with a 3rd person in the car.

That’s in for this week. I’m not likely to write next week. But I just might have some pictures to share when I do finally write again. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

Note: There are no pictures this week.

I did this season’s first metric century ride today. I rode 65 miles, climbing 5000 feet. That’s a little over 100 KM, or a metric century. The weather was perfect, but it turns out my body is a little less than perfect. I’m having real trouble reaching my handle bars. I’m going to have to find some way to get a more relaxed fit. The best thing about the ride was that The Snowball Stand was open. They didn’t have any ice cream today, but that’s not what I typically get at The Snowball Stand. However, I’m glad I asked. While I was standing there waiting for them to make my snowball, I overheard a mother ask her young daughter whether she wanted a snowball or ice cream. I knew where this was going, and warned her. I was fast enough that the girl didn’t have time to set her mind on ice cream, so all ended well.

I had a busy week. I had PT Monday and Wednesday, followed by a ride. (Actually, the continuation of the ride, since I rode my bike to PT.) I had work Thursday and Friday. I even had work on Saturday! Because computers at CASA were dying as I was trying to issue new ones, I had to issue several laptops before they were ready. Now that things are ready, we had 4 laptops that were issued and needed to be updated. It takes half a day to update them. People need to use their computers at work. So I came in Saturday morning to do the updates.

I think I mentioned before that our community association asked if I would mind being on an IT committee. I said that was fine with me. This week, I was asked to attend the board meeting. It’s certainly not everyday that I am summoned to appear before the board. I was joking with Danita that if they kick me out of the neighborhood, she can have the house. I don’t know what they think this IT committee is, but I’m pretty certain it’s not going to include attending board meetings every month.

That’s it for this week. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

Sue is one of the researchers that works in Danita’s research group. Don is Sue’s husband. (Does this make Don some kind of a brother-in-law through work?) This information is relevant because Don got excited about my trip to Maine. They invited us over to their house for dinner so he could pump me for information. Somehow it came out that Don tried to do a one-day ride on the Blue Ridge Parkway and found it very, very hard. In fact, he didn’t make it to his destination. He flagged down a pickup truck and hitched a ride to where he was staying. The next day, he had a local point out a shorter road going back. That sounded like a challenge to me. We kept egging each other on about riding the Blue Ridge. Finally, we decided to ride the parkway from Ashland, NC to Front Royal, VA (where it ends). After we get to Front Royal, we will ride on to Harper’s Ferry, WV. From there, I will ride home. Don might have Sue pick him up in Harper’s Ferry.

We need places to stay. Don can’t camp. I don’t want to carry the weight of camping gear in the mountains. We definitely do not want to ride into town, because that means riding down the side of a mountain, then riding back up the next morning. Mountains tend to be 2500 feet or so above civilization. Fortunately, there are enough places either on the parkway or just off the parkway that we can do the ride. These tend to be mountain vacation resorts. Monday, we made our hotel reservations for the entire trip, except for two places that aren’t open yet. This means every day is already planned out. We will ride the prescribed miles no matter the weather.

Blue Ridge Parkway

You can see a map of the trip here. (Click the picture to make it larger.) Notice that we will climb a total of 53,000 feet. That’s 10 miles! This in spite of the fact that Front Royal is 3,000 feet lower in elevation than is Ashland. The blue rectangles mark our hotels. We are planning shorter days where we can. (There are only so many hotels on the Blue Ridge Parkway). We will do the 500 mile ride in 2 weeks (July 12 – 26).

My bike training is just beginning. The weather has stayed stubbornly cool, with highs between 40 and 50 degrees. Yesterday, we had our first warm day, with a high of 62. It was my first ride this season with short sleeves and short pants. There was lots of skin to slather with sun block. It felt great. I even managed to work up a drop of sweat near the end of the ride — my first drop of sweat for the season! It was back to cool weather today, but next week we might get temperatures in the 70s. If the weather stays good, it won’t take long to build my distance and hill-climbing capacity. I’m champing at the bit, because there’s no doubt I will have to be in better shape than I was last year.

There’s not a lot of other news for us. We’re going to a concert at the Engineering Club tomorrow. The Engineering Club was once a very elegant house in Mount Vernon — the very fashionable neighborhood in downtown Baltimore (near Baltimore’s George Washington Monument). We’ll be hearing the Concert Artists of Baltimore perform. They’re playing some music that most folks don’t hear very often. It’s not exactly Beethoven, but it should be a fun concert.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.