The city has been promising/threatening to sealcoat our street for over a month now. As a biker, sealcoating is a hideous process to live through. They cover the street with sticky, smelly tar and then pour tons of tiny rocks on top. Most of the rocks don't stick to the tar, so it's like living on a gravel road for weeks. We get a flyer in our mailbox every week proclaming that this is the week they're going to do it. Never mind that we told you last week was the week. We're serious now. I'm sure the people who deliver those flyers were starting to be ashamed of what they did for a living.
But anyway, they finally made good on said threat and sealcoated the street on Friday. I left for work on Friday morning and they had only done half of the street, so I was able to ride out of the neighborhood on good pavement. I was going the wrong way on the wrong side of the street to do it, but what the hell. Friday afternoon I just walked my bike up the hill.
So of course, Friday night both the kids want to ride their bikes. Trying to avoid the horror of watching them fall repeatedly into the gravel I talked them into walking our bikes up the hill and riding on the paths in the park. Great idea in theory. But, by the time they pushed their bikes all that way they didn't have much interest in riding them. So they played at the playground while I rode Chuck up and down the path. We finally left when we realized several things:
1. It was getting dark. The most obvious of the items.
2. We hadn't eaten dinner. Becoming more obvious by the minute.
3. We hadn't let Mom know we were leaving. Not obvious, but once realized it was impossible to ignore.
Saturday I trimmed the heck out of the willow trees in the front yard and piled the trailer high with branches. To make things easier, I left the trailer hooked up and parked the whole rig in the front yard. My wife took our van to go for a walk (don't say it) and daughter E wanted to ride bikes again. Since we had the whole driveway and garage at our disposal, we rode in circles or sometimes figure 8s for over an hour Saturday evening.
So, a fair amount of time on the bike this weekend, but no miles to speak of. But, if my mental figuring is correct I passed my mileage goal for the year on Friday.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
2 comments:
Six years into this and it's still sometimes weird to see myself referred to as "Mom". For a half-second I thought you meant your mom, which made no sense (because why would she care that you and the girls had gone to the park), and then I remembered, oh yeah. That's me!
They did that to my street earlier this summer, except without the courtesy of a flyer. I just discovered it one day when I tried to go for a ride. Well, I figured I would just go another way and bypass that street, but nooooo, they had to redo the streets on EVERY SIDE OF MY HOUSE. I was boxed in. AND, they'd redone 28th street, which is how I get to an awful lot of places. Grrr.
Post a Comment