I'm Back

You see, the thing about new year’s resolutions...bear with me here, I know it’s not new year’s…unless of course you’re reading this long after I wrote it…which you might be, I suppose…let me start again.

You see, the thing about resolutions is that 83.12% of them don’t get kept.¹ (I can hear someone now: What? Footnotes in a blog? Really? I don’t do footnotes.²) So that will be last foot note in this blog.³

This is precisely what happened to my recent resolution to ride more. It didn’t get kept. Well, not until today. I got up bright and early…well, early anyway. It was a little chilly out, so I put on my snazzy new Seyboro Cyclist vest.

It’s not new.

I put on my snazzy-

It’s not-

What?

It’s not new. You’ve have that vest since the summer.

Okay, so technically it’s not new, but this is the first time I’ve worn it on a ride, so it’s kind of like new. I hadn’t been on the road more than a minute when I decided that the vest had been a good idea.

It was a little windy. The windy season here is from January to December, so of course it was a little windy.

There were a lot of dogs out this morning, but since they were all behind fences, I was not trouble. That said some things to me as I passed that sounded rather rude, but I’ll let that go.

I also encountered some road kill. First was a raccoon. Then I spotted a container of McDonald’s french fries. While the raccoon (not that I subjected it to a close inspection you understand) appeared to be intact, the french fries had clearly met with a car. I also spotted a grapefruit. The grapefruit actually didn’t look so much like road kill as it did someone waiting for a bus. It was just sitting at the side of the road minding it’s own business. I had an image of a truck full of grapefruit pulling by and this one hopping on board.

It was a strange morning.

I passed a small cemetery which was being mowed. There was a gray truck sitting there with an empty trailer behind it. A man on a riding mower was circling the graves.

Now, I know that somebody has to mow graveyard’s but it still struck me as a little creepy. I wondered if odd things ever happened to him. Ten seconds after I passed the graveyard, what appeared to be the same truck with riding mower now on the back of the trailer, sped past me.

Not that it’s possible, of course. I’m just telling you what I saw.

I passed a group of people setting up a yard sale. Well, it was more of a portable flea market in a parking lot. One woman was leaning up against her SUV watching everyone else work. The she saw me. Her head slowly turned to follow me as I rode past, as if she had never seen anything like me before and was trying to figure out what I was. I have seen exactly the same look on the face of a curious cow.

This is not intended as an insult to the woman who may, for all I know, be quite personable. She just had that same look on her face.

Everyone was still asleep when I left, and everyone was still asleep when I got back home. I think it’s going to be a quiet morning.

See you on the road.

Notes :

1. The accuracy of this statistic may be somewhat doubtful in view of the fact that I simply made it up.
2. Neither do I.
3. Except for this one.
4. This is the Will Cuppy Memorial Footnote. If you’ve never read Will Cuppy’s work, then you don’t know what you’ve been missing. Of course, if you don’t know what you’ve been missing, it probably doesn’t trouble you much. Oh, what the heck, look him up anyway. You’ll thank me later.