Pedaling Away

I'm making good progress on this latest Big Urgent Project at work, but it sounds like the deadline of next Monday is no-kidding serious as my boss asked for people to stay late after work tomorrow to contribute manpower to all the grunt work that needs to be put in. So it looks like that's what I'll be up to tomorrow night. Ah, well.

I'm also getting smarter about biking, I notice. In addition to stretching before I head out in the morning, I'm getting used to using my lower gears. When going up a hill, I can tell when my legs get too tired to keep going at the current gear, and then I downshift. It works pretty well. There are few hills I can't tackle in first gear. I used to be in a mental state where I felt I had to be working when biking, pushing hard at the pedals, but now I settle for pedaling fast, which is obviously a better aerobic workout.

I'm also getting used to running errands on my bike, taking off my bag fairly quickly and easily. I leave my frame pump and water bottle (which is just a plastic container of bottled water I didn't throw out) on the bike, figuring who's gonna bother stealing those?

Maybe sometime this summer I can take a class and learn how to change my tires, since i failed so miserably at figuring it out on my own.

On the ride home, I stopped off at the house my friend Mike and his SO Sara just bought. It's a nice place, albeit with a rather wacky interior layout. Like, the stairs to the second floor are along the rear wall of the house, so it's hard to look from the living room into their rather nice back yard. But all-in-all it seems like a nice place. We'll see how it holds up once they move in with their three dogs! Right now they're still painting and fixing things up.

1. Cardinals slugger Mark McGwire is having one of the five best seasons for a hitter in history.
2. 20-year-old Cubs rookie Kerry Wood struck out 20 batters to tie the Major League record (held by Roger Clemens, who's done it twice).
3. Yankees pitcher David "the living hamburger" Wells threw a perfect game, an event which is one of the rarest in baseball (along with a player hitting four home runs in one game, and a fielder turning an unassisted triple play).
4. Arizona manager Buck Showalter ordered his pitcher to intentionally walk Giants slugger Barry Bonds with the bases loaded and an 8-6 lead. It was the first time since 1944 this trick had been tried, and it worked, as the Diamondbacks held on for an 8-7 victory.
5. The New York Yankees are on a mission from God. Since losing their first 5 games of the season, they are 44-8, which is the best 52-game span in history (or so I'm told). The second-place Red Sox, currently leading the AL Wild Card race, are a whopping ten games back.
6. As I write this, the Cubs are riding a 9-game winning streak. So are the Giants. The Angels have an 8-game winning streak. The Yankees have a 7-game winning streak.

But hey, they can't all be winners, right?

Michael Rawdon (Contact)