bleckblog: musings of a community college english teacher

Today is an odd day. It's garbage day for the neighborhood, so I put out our garabe can, yard waste (chock full of leaves from the garden left over from the winter) and our recycling of newspaper, pop and tin cans, milk jugs and the like. Well, this morning, the recycling bin was gone, old newspapers, old magazines, old pop and soup cans, old milk jugs (flattened of course, as were most of the cans), all gone. Not a trace. Rachel, my wife, thinks it could be someone snooping for identity theft stuff, but there shouldn't be anything of that sort in there. It just made for a weird start of the day to head out to walk the dogs and see it gone.

I'm picking Tobias up early from school today so we can spend some time together. We are going to Wild Walls, an indoor climbing gym to do at least one climb each on the wall. They have a first timer deal where you pay five bucks for a climb. While that will probably be fun, today is also the day that hopeful riders in RAMROD, Ride Around Mt. Rainier in One Day, find out if they are in the ride. The ride is popular, and only 800 riders are allowed, so riders are chosen via a lottery, and today I should get an email on that. I've been riding/training as if I'll get in the ride, but since it isn't until the last Thursday of July, I have a ways to go, both in time and training. (If you want, you can read my article on training for the ride in our local paper, The Spokane Spokesman-Review: Bike Riders Gearing Up for RAMROD. You have to register, but it's free.) Yesterday's ride was just over 30 miles, on my road bike (Look KG 381 with Dura-Ace). It was windy, but a nice ride. RAMROD has about 10,000 feet of climbing over 154 miles and my standard 30 mile ride, which I did yesterday, has about 2800 feet of climbing, though not in the long stretches that RAMROD does. But for this time of year, having dropped nearly 15 pounds since Christmas, and being that I'll be 47 on April 19, I'm feeling fit.