Up early for down time

A Monday not spent at work is a wonderful thing; staying home Tuesday through Friday is better yet. I'm still in the first part of my three week winter reprieve from being a government biocrat, and I'm enjoying it immensely.

Our new dog appears to be oriented to photoperiod. He's up at first light expecting to be fed and let out to do his business. Once I'm awake for that, I'm pretty much up for the day. This is fine right now, being so close to the winter solstice, but I hope he's over it by summer, when the sun comes up at 4:15am or so. At any rate, following a bit of play time, Clayton heads back to bed to await BeanSS' later rising, leaving me with the run of the house.

I suppose I could have filled up the feeders and sat out front with my coffee and binoculars, enjoying the sunrise and whatever winter migrants might be about, but with the air temperature at just about 40°, I opted to stay indoors. Yeah, 40° isn't freezing cold by a long shot, but this follows on having made an informed decision in early 2004 that I would henceforth genuinely dislike and therefore consciously avoid being cold.

So here I sit at my monitor in my office/den/midden, comfortably warm, surrounded by books, outdoor gear (Who keeps snowshoes inside? Who needs snowshoes in Tucson?), and best of all, framed photos to inspire me. I can look over at a shot of BeanSS descending a moonscape trail at Upper Bidwell Park in Chico and wish I was there, or at least riding something similarly rocky around here. The photo of me resting after a short, but oxygen-sucking climb on the Mud Lake Trail near Silver Lake, also in NorCal, reminds me that while I still lack any sort of altitude adaptation, I very much miss riding in forested terrain. There's also a depression-era photo of my father at ca. 11 years of age, beaming from the saddle of his Monark Silver King, one foot on the running board of a mid-1930s Willy's 77 sedan. There are photos of our first two beloved pets, both now passed; the canary yellow 1973 VW Beetle we had as newlyweds; and an inexplicable one from college showing me shooting my compound bow at the NAU backwoods archery range.

I wandered around the web, checked out Craigslist for bike crap, peeked at a couple of clycling-related blogs and forums, and then decided to bore you with this stream of consciousness drivel. I suppose that by the act of admitting the utter uselessness of this post, I must have recognized that I need to get off my arse and do something with my day. Back to scanning the photographs - there's one I took while riding some possibly off-limits slickrock at Lake Powell - yeah, OK, riding a bike looks like fun, and it might get me out of having to lift weights later on.

Now if it would just warm up a bit more...