Bike Path (JPB)

For those of you wondering about the most important part of Marlene's post (the bike ride part, for those of you wondering about which part you are to be wondering), I did 45 km on the bike path yesterday, and could've done more. It's a pretty extensive network. The downside is that those 45 kms were done at an avg speed of 20 kmh. There are A LOT of stop signs, road crossings, "drafting" behind pedestrians, making sure people reel in their dogs, etc. The good news is that I think it will be a really easy way to get out of town on the bike with minimal traffic hassle. Plus I have a really bad habit of burning matches fighting through traffic and stuff in town, so that by the time I get to the "real" riding, I've gone too hard instead of warming up. In addition to the coyote we saw today (we're 100% certain it was, in fact, NOT some geese), I saw 2 deer yesterday. There are also a lot of ducks (mallards) that have a bad habit of taking mid-afternoon naps directly on the bike path. Unfortunately, they don't wake up if you quack at them when you ride by. Fortunately, other users of the bike trail are likely to be highly amused by a grown man in tights, quacking as he rides his bike.

Well my days as the house husband have gone pretty well. The rear derailleur on Marlene's commuter bike is stonewalling me though. Grrr.... We'll do battle again tomorrow though. If I can't get it worked out, I may give up and go get a conversion kit to turn the thing into a fixie, which without the rear derailleur really working, that's kinda what it is anyway. I've also been watching the Giro d'Italia on the internet. I have Italian TV with British radio coverage, although listening to the Italian announcers is pretty fun too. Everything in Italian sounds like an argument, and they end everything with the letter 'A,' like, "italian-stuff-italian-stuff-italian-stuff-Mark-A-Cavendish-A-
italian-stuff-italian-stuff-Quick-A-Step-A-italian-stuff-italian-stuff"

The vegetable garden is doing well. I figure we'll get our first round of chiles (serranos) in about 2 weeks. Anaheims will take a bit longer. We also now have our first tomato flower, so tomates aren't too far behind. I already harvested a bunch of herbs to put in the lamb kebabs I made yesterday (ground lamb, salt, mint, parsley, cilantro... all fresh...except maybe the salt depending on your definition of the word 'fresh'). Morning glories and sunflowers are both coming through the surface, so once they really get cracking it'll help with better backyard fence privacy. The flower box in the front yard started with an awesome bang, but they're taking a little prettiness intermission right now (read: oh crap! I hope they're not dying!). We also have a patch of lavender in the front that's starting to come up. Considering that our town is full of rosemary and lavender hedges, I'm not too worried about the lavender.

A lot of folks have been asking me about my job interview too. It went really well. I could see myself working with this company, and it would allow me to stay in the geology field for a little bit longer. They have flexible work options and such, so that's really good. They called me today, and I'm supposed to expect to hear back from them by the end of this week. We'll see. We're also going camping this weekend to Mendocino county. Should be fun. We'll be making new friends with some of the folks Marlene works with. Welp. That's about it. It's nice to be back on the bike lots. I've been 3 days in a row now. I'll be out again tomorrow, then it'll probably be time to call roto-rooter again, to see if they can come take care of our roots in the sewer problem. (BLAST!). I've also been studying up on investment options for 401K. Anyone who refuses to use the 'R' word for our economy is insane. Every single stock option is down a fair amount for this year. Some of them are already down in Q1 of this year the same amount as the worst years in their record, but I'm no economist (I decided to study a real science, although Ross, the physicist, may beg to differ). Maybe someone should send me a stimulus check, I don't think anyone would argue with that...