Sweaty and Sore

After a week of sitting on my butt and stuffing my pie-hole, I finally got a chance to go for a ride this morning. Naturally, after yesterday's experiment in sleep deprivation, I over-slept and didn't get out on the road until 8:30am. which means I was out in 80-degree temps and full sun after a week off. I did manage to keep the time to less than an hour for somewhere between nine and ten miles. I need to clock my current route (or get an odometer for my bike) to get the exact mileage, but at worst I was still over the 9mph mark, which isn't bad after a week of feasting on Koegel meat products and sitting. Sitting in the car. Sitting on the plane. Sitting on various couches. Sitting at dining room tables. Sitting in restaurants. No wonder we're the fattest nation in human history; it wasn't even possible to get any real exercise. Most of the week, I was tired and barely able to move. Even my brain wasn't working right most of the time. I feel 100% better after a single ride even if I have Jello-legs and my shirt is dripping with sweat.

Speaking of my brain not working, I thought I was starting to hallucinate shortly after I started riding. Every time I put my head down, I caught a whiff of Mexican and would flash back to when I worked in the kitchen at Chi-Chi's back in 1982. (For those who don't ride, not a lot of mental work goes into piloting a bicycle, which leaves the mind free to wander a fair bit. Add in the endorphin rush from the physical exertion and things can get a little weird.) I was starting to seriously consider that I was finally goin' completely 'round the bend when I remembered that I had dripped some queso dip on myself last night while sitting on the couch without a shirt on. So I'm not crazy after all. Yet.

Anyway.

Michigan is still leading the way to a de-industrialized future. The freeways continue to disintegrate in spite of massive maintenance projects everywhere we went. Even the runways at Metro airport reminded us of driving down a washboard road. The northern portion of the lower peninsula was worse than the southern third or so, but it was all bad. Because we've been away for a while, we had to jump off I-75 at Bristol Road for a real, honest-to-gods Coney dog at Capital Coney Island, then head around the corner down South Saginaw to Edmonds Dairy Queen, still the best Dairy Queen we've found anywhere in the U.S. Rather than back-track, we headed up I-475 for a tour of Flint. The only positive thing I can say is that it never takes Mama Gaia long to erase the works of men. Even heavily contaminated industrial areas are going to scrub and many of the former residential areas have progressed to broad-leaf forest. In any case, it was depressing to see what has become of my home town, as it always is whenever we go back. Fortunately, we spent most of our time in rural areas of the state that never "progressed" all that far and so haven't changed much now that it's all falling apart.

Well, I need to unpack, sort and sift the foot-high pile of credit card offers for the few things we care about, catch up on my internet reading, schedule a carpet cleaning (free once a year), arrange for a light fixture to be installed on the living room fan, call about a couple possible jobs, blah, blah blah.

Later.