lovely weather, but little time on wheels

Despite the lovely weather this weekend, I haven't put a lot of miles on the bikes.

After riding to work most days this week (drove one day to fetch my repair stand so that I could fix the Strada's shift cable issue), I wasn't able to take advantage of the pretty weekend as a rider.

Not full advantage, anyway.

Jenn and I decided to have an assortment of family and hangers-on over for dinner Saturday, so we had to go grocery shopping as part of the preparations. We took her Peugeot and my Raleigh, as I keep the trailer connected to the brown bike most of the time. Sure enough, the trailer was loaded by the time we had made the three or four stops to complete our list of stuff, and sure enough, I needed to go out again for more stuff later. We might have put four miles on the bikes in the course of our trip, but I doubt it. The second trip out was good for between two and three miles, even with the stiff headwinds coming home.

The dinner went well, but seating ten folks for dinner (including Jenn and myself) meant using just about every plate in the house, along with almost all the flatware (well, there are the extra dozen teaspoons that we didn't use), and a sizable stack of mixing bowls, serving dishes, and whatever else got used in the process. It took two dishwasher-loads to get most of the stuff cleaned this morning.

We did, however, get our act together in time to go on the 2:00 PM club ride out of Heine Brothers' Coffee (well, the lot behind the office building across Staebler Avenue from Heine Brothers' shop). We took the tandem, as Bill and Kate haven't seemed in too big a hurry to get it back.

It was good to get out on the bike. After the club ride, we took our commuter rigs out to look at a house that is for sale (open house Sunday...), just to see how the place looked.

The house had some neat features, due to recent remodeling efforts, but it was still a late-sixties split-foyer, meaning that to get from the bedroom to the laundry room one has to navigate narrow stairs AND a mid-stairway landing at the front door (or the added-in rear stairway), and any entrance to the house involved stairs. Another feature of late-sixties/early seventies home-building I dislike is a frequent lack of overhang. No soffit, especially on a hip-roof house, and the roof won't ventilate well, shortening shingle life by orders of magnitude and making the house much hotter in summer. The overhang of a deeper soffit also helps the siding last longer.

No matter, as we were merely curious--we aren't looking to move any time soon (unless one of us were to actually buy a Powerball ticket and that ticket actually win, and "you can't lose if you don't play!").