One more before the end of the month...

I felt bad leaving the month of May with only two posts (even though that's twice as many as the month of April saw!), so I thought I'd better just write something on here - just because.

We've had a pretty busy month at our house, but not with anything specific.  We're still trying to clean and organize the house and this past weekend I finally cleaned out all the stuff from "my side" of the bedroom that had been piled there since we had our new closets installed!  It's finally almost looking like a bedroom again when you walk into the room...

We've also been trying to get ready for Fatty's 100 Miles of Nowhere bike ride.  We're going to be riding it on Friday this week - only three days away! - at Memorial Park.  We'll be doing 85 laps around the 1.18-mile picnic loop starting immediately after we drop the kids off for their last day of school.

So, in preparation for this event, we've gone to Memorial Park for the last two Fridays in a row to ride as much as we could in about an hour and a half.  And "as much as we could" turned out to be only 25 miles.  And I was in severe pain.  My butt just isn't used to riding for long periods of time on my road bike saddle.  Yowch!

We're headed to Memorial Park for "date night" again tonight to get in some more riding... not that it's going to make much difference at this point other than to cement in my mind how painful the actual ride is going to be on Friday.

The good thing is that with this 100 Miles of Nowhere event, everyone gets to declare themselves the "winner" of their category.  Which reminds me, I need to come up with my category before the ride on Friday!  Hmmm...

8 years is a long time

So, it turns out that 8 years is a long time to not have ridden your bike for "speed".

The husband and I used to ride our bikes obsessively every weekend at least 40 miles each day (otherwise we didn't think it justified loading the bikes up on the car and driving out to the countryside) and ride three to four nights per week at the Memorial Park Picnic Loop.  And on those nights we would average 20 miles/hour.  People used to draft off of us as long as they could stay with us, but when we got tired of having "wheel-suckers", we would put the hammer down, ramp it up, and just leave them in our dust.  *sigh*  Those were the days...

Last night (date night!), in preparation for Fatty's 100 Miles of Nowhere, we loaded up the road bikes and headed off to Memorial Park to get a taste for how painful this ride is truly going to be.  And on a scale of 1 to 10, I'd say I'm going to be at about a 7.  (Reserving 10 for something like passing a kidney stone or having a ruptured abdominal cyst or something like that - both of which I've heard were excruciating.  I'd say that natural childbirth was about an 8.  So, not quite as bad as that.  But close.)

Anyway...  We attempted to ride fast enough to make forward progress, but not fast enough that we didn't feel we would be able to sustain the effort for 100 miles.  I think we failed at the latter goal.  There's no way I'm going to be able to keep the pace that we were going and we were only going about 17.5 miles per hour.  And that was pushing it.  Oh, the pain that we are in for!!!

In other news, 8 days is also a long time.  I'm trying to see if I lose fat any faster by not drinking alcohol.  It's been about 8 days since I've had any alcohol.  I'm surprised my system hasn't gone into complete shock.  But the jury is still out regarding whether or not my middle is getting any thinner, so I'm beginning to wonder if it's worth it...  ;)

Ding, dong!

The husband was awake at "ding" and I was awake at "dong".  It was a couple of weeks ago on a Saturday morning at 2am and our doorbell was ringing.  What the?...

It would be strange for someone to be ringing our doorbell at 2:00 in the morning, but what made it a little frightening was that our front gate was locked, which meant that whoever was ringing our doorbell actually climbed over our fence to walk up the stairs to our 2nd floor front door to ring the doorbell!

We were completely baffled by what to do in this situation.  We didn't want to go out to the hallway where the person at the front door would be able to see us, but we can't see the front door from our bedroom, so we couldn't see who in the world this was.

We spent a couple of minutes looking around, pacing, and then eventually wondering if we really did hear the doorbell in the first place.  Then...  *Ding, dong!*  They pushed it again!

Finally, when we didn't answer the door, the person went back down the stairs - to where we could see this late-night visitor - stood at the bottom of the stairs for a minute, then climbed over our fence and started pacing around in front of the house.  He looked nice enough - not a homeless person or anything like that - probably a person who just left one of the bars down the street.

But we called the cops, anyway!  The police showed up about 20 minutes later, well after he had finally walked off down the street.  But, we kept vigil at the window for awhile longer, making sure he didn't come back.  And while we were looking out, we saw another police car drive by, shining their spotlight at our front gate.  That made us feel a little better.

It took a little while to get back to sleep, but we've managed to avoid any additional late-night disturbances so far.

And other than that, apparently nothing interesting and blog-worthy has been going on!  ...except that I turned 40 a couple of weeks ago.  But we'll just keep that a secret amongst ourselves, mmmm-kay?  ;)