Shifty

I rode my new/old gearie again, this time at Sweetwater. Having (and using) a bail-out gear or two (or twenty) is a surefire cure for singlespeed smugness. Veelz thinks I've had some more geared-bike Kool-Aid. Maybe I have, maybe I haven't. I do wonder, if I were to leave for Flagstaff tomorrow morning, would I bring the singlespeed or the other one? I'd like to prove to myself that I'm a stronger rider than I was when I lived there in college, but I'm not going to drive all the way up there to push my SS up Mt. Elden. Whatever - it's nice to have options.

But first things first - we still need to be a two-car household before I can take our current pickup to a shop to get its myriad mechanical problems addressed. Maybe then BeanSS and I can bug out of here with less of a chance of coming home early in a tow truck. I've known this for a while and yet I ride my bicycle to work day after day, never bothering to look for this supposedly necessary second vehicle.

To be fair, free time has been in short supply lately. I took one of our dogs to a veterinary cardiologist in Gilbert (for a great big false alarm - whew!), returned to the office the next morning and promptly worked 10 days straight. A few more unplanned-for things went down at home and now it's right back to work, facing an enormous backlog at that. I'd feel a bit put off by being stuck in the Old Pueblo but mountain biking at high altitude during Monsoon season - which often features massive lightning storms - is a bit of a high-risk behavior anyway. Maybe being trapped here with the heat and humidity isn't so bad. No it is bad, but I just can't do anything about it right now.

Another thing about which I can talk but do nothing is the weather, which at this very moment, is bringing microbursts of rain and, more importantly, computer-ruining power outages and surges. And with that sentence, it is time to leave the Web and shut this thing down.