Randomonium

A Stroopwafel sample. Stroopwafel......riiiiiight.

Okay, if you are having trouble with the title today, let me take a moment to explain. The days where I have no direction or theme for the post I write get tagged as "randomonium" posts. Yes......the word does not exist.

Officially.

 Big deal. That never stopped me from making up words before. In fact, when I was a jeweler, my boss and I had so many made up words in our vocabulary, (that no one else understood), that my former boss' wife recently told me that it was like listening to a married couple speak a foreign language.

But I digress......

Anyway, as I have already said somewhere, I have been sick of late. The annual January sickness, or so it would seem. I have noted that since I have been going back through the old blog posts for the "Minus Ten Review" posts I usually put up on Saturdays. This time it seems to be a double whammy of flu and head cold. Thankfully I seem to be on the upswing, and I have been very careful to get plenty of rest. Lots of fluids too, and the good kinds even! Water, apple cider vinegar, orange juice, and a bit of coffee here and there.

A bit more progress in cleaning up has been accomplished since I can't be out riding.

That means I have not been riding at all. Oh..... I sneak in a bit of a ride at work when I am there by riding around the showroom floor. But mainly, it has been a dry spell, and I have not liked that one bit.

That said, there are two things that I can point to as sort of silver linings in the black cloud of no riding, as it were. One is that I have been able to make a lot of headway in clearing up the shop in the basement that I typical refer to here as "The Lab".

I saw a recent post by some hot shot blogger, (Hi Dicky!), that said he had a box of stuff he needed to get rid of.

One box! pffffft!

I bet I have a pick-up load, easy. I do not mean to brag, and I am not exaggerating the pile I have. In fact, it is a downright shameful thing to have been sitting on all this junk all these years, but I have declared war on boxes of "stuff", and even cans of stuff, and tool boxes of stuff, and...well......you get the idea. I won't even get into the four foot high pile of tires I moved out to the garage for now. Oh......I should say that there are actually two piles that high! 

When warmer weather finally occurs and I can manage to plan the 26 missions my Big Dummy will have to fly to carry out its part in this war, then I will be moving this stuff down to the local bike collective. Some of it is metal scrap, some is just getting the boot outta here. But anyway..... Point is that progress is being made and I have a plan to get free from the piles of stuff that has collected over 20 odd years.

The snow is almost gone, what we have is rotten, and it is covered in ice anyway.

The other silver lining I spoke of earlier is that since I have not been able to ride the weather has gone to crap. The Winter snow has been rotted by rains, higher temperatures, and ice. Even the two Iowa fat bike races scheduled for this weekend are cancelled, and last weekend's event was a scary, sketchy ice rutted affair, or so I've heard.

So, I couldn't ride, I wouldn't ride, even if I could ride, which I cannot. Too sick still. Getting better by the day, but I am not wanting to prolong this so I am doggedly sticking to my guns. I feel like a complete slug and way out of shape, but what are ya gonna do? Besides, as I have said, it seems every January starts out this way, why shouldn't this one. 

Huzzah!

So, in better news I have a ride to, and a room for, the Dirty Kanza 200. If nothing else, I will be doing a long, tour-ish ride of the surrounding gravel roads near Emporia with an eye to not going anywhere close to the DK200 course. That will all get determined later. Of course, there still is the outlier of my having an obligation to RidingGravel.com, so that ride may be different than I envision now, or it may not happen at all. Stay tuned.......