Whew. I Need A Break.
After two whole days of riding, each with slightly less than an hour of saddle time, I took a day off.
Was the dramatic uptick in volume too much for my fragile system?
Nope, I was just too busy to ride. The youngest had a day off from school and the arranged childcare fell through. So, instead of going to work and adding to my brain tumor, I took the day off to spend with my buddy.
We went to Costco to buy large quantities of things Americans seem to need in bulk. Unlike most trips to Costco with the wife, I had time to leisurely browse the aisles. Check out the specs on a generator or whatever. It's rare I get to do that sort of thing.
Then we were off to the boat supply store. I have a cheap canoe that hasn't seen water in the ten years I've owned it, other than what falls from the sky. I'm not much of a water person, especially the "fall in and you die from hypothermia" variety we have up here. However, boat stores generally have really good electrical wiring stuff. By really good, I mean really expensive. Still, if you want a low failure rate, you have to pay through the nose. My days of doing projects on the cheap and wasting time later troubleshooting substandard components are pretty much over. Pay once, hurt once. We browsed the marine-grade stuff for a while, then drove over to a specialty electrical shop.
I love spending time in these places. Rows of small yellow bins full of really neat pieces and parts. Racks of high-grade cable and wire-management devices. Not a whole lot of strategic product placement. You just have to wander down each aisle and see what wonders are contained within. I usually come out both richer and poorer from such encounters. Richer in grand schemes and designs, and poorer in financial resources. Crap, they aren't cheap.
Through all of these stimulating stops, my son stayed remarkably content. For him, that's saying something. Maybe he was responding to his Dad's sense of calm. Not being rushed through the fun stuff or being forced to endure the trivial (e.g. stuff I'm not interested in) does a lot for the flow of my chi. I'm not really sure what a "chi" is, but mine seems to get an extra-strength laxative hit from cruising through bike shops and hardware stores.
It was a "Dad and his bestest buddy" day. As my older children become more and more independent, I recognize that these sorts of days won't be around forever. At a certain point, they just move on with their lives. Hopefully when the youngest does, he'll have fond memories of his father getting all giggly about circuit breakers.
That's worth taking a day off for.
Was the dramatic uptick in volume too much for my fragile system?
Nope, I was just too busy to ride. The youngest had a day off from school and the arranged childcare fell through. So, instead of going to work and adding to my brain tumor, I took the day off to spend with my buddy.
We went to Costco to buy large quantities of things Americans seem to need in bulk. Unlike most trips to Costco with the wife, I had time to leisurely browse the aisles. Check out the specs on a generator or whatever. It's rare I get to do that sort of thing.
Then we were off to the boat supply store. I have a cheap canoe that hasn't seen water in the ten years I've owned it, other than what falls from the sky. I'm not much of a water person, especially the "fall in and you die from hypothermia" variety we have up here. However, boat stores generally have really good electrical wiring stuff. By really good, I mean really expensive. Still, if you want a low failure rate, you have to pay through the nose. My days of doing projects on the cheap and wasting time later troubleshooting substandard components are pretty much over. Pay once, hurt once. We browsed the marine-grade stuff for a while, then drove over to a specialty electrical shop.
I love spending time in these places. Rows of small yellow bins full of really neat pieces and parts. Racks of high-grade cable and wire-management devices. Not a whole lot of strategic product placement. You just have to wander down each aisle and see what wonders are contained within. I usually come out both richer and poorer from such encounters. Richer in grand schemes and designs, and poorer in financial resources. Crap, they aren't cheap.
Through all of these stimulating stops, my son stayed remarkably content. For him, that's saying something. Maybe he was responding to his Dad's sense of calm. Not being rushed through the fun stuff or being forced to endure the trivial (e.g. stuff I'm not interested in) does a lot for the flow of my chi. I'm not really sure what a "chi" is, but mine seems to get an extra-strength laxative hit from cruising through bike shops and hardware stores.
It was a "Dad and his bestest buddy" day. As my older children become more and more independent, I recognize that these sorts of days won't be around forever. At a certain point, they just move on with their lives. Hopefully when the youngest does, he'll have fond memories of his father getting all giggly about circuit breakers.
That's worth taking a day off for.
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