I am pleased to announce that I did, in fact, manage to ride my bike to work this morning. It is Bike, Walk, and Wheel Week in Columbia, and I am taking part like a good little citizen. I have been thinking about doing this for several weeks, but I did not actually get around to dealing with my bicycle until last night. (It was a busy weekend!) I got home last night and did a good job cleaning up the garage so I was able to actually get to my bicycle and the bicycle pump and my collection of chains & locks, all of which were required. It was my goal to bike every day this week, but I can’t bike on Wednesdays because trivia would keep me out past dark (and I don’t want to bike home on the trail in the dark, for very good reasons), and then I skipped yesterday due to exhaustion. So if I bike two days this week, that will be excellent. And if I bike three days this week, I will be amazed at myself.
Hell, I’m amazed I got myself in gear and biked today. I was a big sweaty mess when I got in this morning, made worse because I had on a backpack. Every other bike rider in town has a milk crate strapped to their back wheel. Maybe I should join that crowd.
It was a great weekend, if exhausting. I went out with my trivia team on Friday night and we had a pretty good time. I was home earlier than I expected, so I went ahead with the plan of going to Kansas City for the day on Saturday. I got there around lunchtime, and Tracy and I went to the Blue Nile at the River Market for Ethiopian food. It was pretty good. We spent the afternoon driving out north of the city along Highway 45 up past Parkville to Leavenworth, then up from Leavenworth to Atchison on Route 73, which is designated a scenic route (and totally deserves that designation- it is such a pretty drive), and then back to Kansas City through Weston (where I lived as a kid) with a stop at the Metro North Mall. I didn’t want to shop at Metro North, which is good, because that mall has really taken a turn for death. So many shuttered stores! The only open anchor store was Macy’s, which was doing good business. The rest of the mall was nearly closed. But we went there so that I could see if it still had the hot air balloons floating in the center of the place. It did! It was very different from the last time I was there (which was probably in the mid-1990s), but I was glad to see the balloons. I’m sure they won’t be there forever.
Tracy got bad news about her car, so she decided to drive it back to Columbia on Saturday to take it to a mechanic here (it’s a long story), but before we left (much, much later than I intended to leave), we went to dinner at Viet Nam Cafe near the KU Med Center. It was great! I have wanted to try that place for a long time, so I was glad we made time to go on Saturday, even if we were late getting back to Columbia.
I got up on Sunday early to help out with the Earth Day festival. Mostly I stood at a road barricade and directed people to use alternate routes or let them through if they were setting up a booth for the event. But I didn’t really get to see much of the festival- when my shift was over, I went to my grandparents’ church to see my grandmother get a surprise lifetime achievement honor from the Presbyterian Women group. I was too tired after all of that to go back and walk around the festival, especially as it is a pretty popular event and there were tons of people there by mid-afternoon.
I was pretty tired on Sunday evening and didn’t get much done. My house is a bit of a wreck right now, and I am going to try to keep myself free for the evenings this week so that I can catch up. I have a lot of stuff I want to do before I leave for my trip, which is coming up so fast! It’s just four weeks away now. I know that seems like a long time, but I fill up my evenings and weekends quickly. I finished consolidating my iTunes libraries yesterday and started working on some computer maintenance stuff last night- mostly just compressing old files and making additional backups of everything. I like to have it all organized, and I’ll feel better about bringing things with me if I have plenty of backups at home.
I got a shoutout on the Missouri River Communities Network website for the Clean Up Columbia event. I love being referred to as “the lone brave volunteer”.
New music! I have been listening to a lot of Old Crow Medicine Show and Split Lip Rayfield this spring. I just got an album from the Carolina Chocolate Drops (listened to it once and immediately bought their other albums used through Amazon- they’re wonderful!) and that banjo album by Steve Martin. Good stuff!
Truth: you are rather awesome with all the things you do.