I hope they love dandelions.

Dearest Blog Reader

I hope that this finds you doing well. I am fine. The world that I live in is a bit upside down.  We have been sitting here all day waiting for the big snow. The day started out promising. Waking up, the snow had started by 8:00 a.m. and by time for church we had a couple of inches on the ground. I was of two minds with this development. I am getting stronger every weekend with my training for the big ride. The one thing that I am having trouble with is the fatigue from the activity. Riding 50 to 75 miles in a day makes me sleepy. I wanted to ride today but was doing the secret happy dance on the inside. I secretly planning a snowy afternoon nap. Low and behold, two hours later the promised snow was delayed and the earlier accumulations had melted. So I got up and put on my riding cloths and road 26 miles, with 25 mile an hour winds. I didn’t ride very quickly for most of it. However, the miles are over and here I am.

I am sitting in front of a screen typing away as the snow starts in earnest. It is hard to believe that 6 Sunday’s from today I will be writing the first blog after the 1^st day of riding. Looking further into the future, ten Sunday’s from today, Grace will be married 24 hours. The die has been cast. The wedding has become this huge event at the end of spring that our lives have been pointed towards for a while now. The Sharritt’s, those intrepid do it yourselfers, have taken on a list of tasks in the hopes of trading work for money.

The first was freeing the wedding meadow from the thorny clutches of the honey locust trees. Eight weeks worth of cutting, cussing, and dragging cleared out the area surrounding the ancient oak tree in the meadow down over the hill. It will be beautiful. April showers and warmer weather will bring greener pastures. I will get out the new rotary mower and start manicuring the acre and a half along with the adjacent acre parking lot. There are three thorn tree piles that must be ruthlessly dealt with. I will show them the fires of hell and drive the prickly demons scratching and clawing into the very bowels of the pit.

In September, we began another fool’s errand. Larkspur was one of our favorite early summer flowers when we farmed. The 2 foot spikes of lavender, pinks, blue, or white are striking flowers. They are fairly easy to grow when you know the secret handshake. Don’t worry. I am going to share it with you. That way you will be tempted to go out and save hundreds of dollars for your daughter’s wedding. I know. I will put it out on PinInterest. The secret is to plant the larkspur in the fall, let it germinate and watch it grow on in the spring. June 1 is a bit ambitious. June 15^th is a pretty easy goal for these beautiful flowers. But who knows? Last year’s 80 degree days in March would have been perfect.

So last August, we bought a lot of seed. The seed takes 6 weeks of cold temperatures to encourage germination. So I threw them into the fridge with the hope of a mid September sowing. The rains had returned by then and I planted 8 rows of Larkspur in a little garden we have right off the back of the house.

Larkspur takes a lot of patience and faith. It will sit there nearly 3 weeks before it germinates. In order to improve our chances of success, a second planting in needed. Fall and cold weather was on the way. The second planting had to be made two weeks later before the first had even germinated. Successive planting, is the best chance for success in farming. Low and behold a week after the second planting the first planting decided to make its appearance. Two weeks later, the second planting emerged lush and green. That was great. All that had to be done then was wait.

Wait we did. Late October, November, December, January, all passed without undue frigid weather. The snow cover from time to time was helpful. February 2^nd dawned cloudy and gray providing the faint hope delivered by the shorthaired brown rodent oracle from Punxsutawney. An early spring was proclaimed and hope sprang within our bosoms. Why do we put such faith in our oracles? We all know that the overgrown rat could not and cannot predict the meteorological epochs of our time. However, over and over those six weeks, I believed that spring was just around the corner. The weather would turn, the larkspur would break dormancy and the race would be on for June 1^st. Now insult upon injury, we have snow on the 25^th day of March. At this rate, the daffodils and tulips will not have bloomed by June 1^st.

So stay tuned, it will be a race to the finish. We have a couple of tricks up our sleeves. There may still be time to get the larkspur blooming by June 1^st.  And if not, it reminds us that the wedding is not the marriage. Marriage is a series of hopes and dreams. Plans made and followed; some successful; others not so much. Most of all marriage is a series of successful compromises.

Hope they love dandelions.

 

Take care,

Roger

The Chicken Crossed the Road?

Dearest Blog Reader;

I hope that this finds you doing well. It leaves my typing fingers a little sore. I upped the training rides for the Cover Indiana ride this past week. 50 miles at a 15 mph clip a week ago Saturday; 75 miles yesterday at only 14 miles per hour, plus assorted 15 milers after work. I have no idea if that is good or not; if I will be able to complete six consecutive 60 mile rides. It does give me pause.  The poet in me thinks that the first down stroke on that Sunday morning in May will be the hardest. The realist in me says “are you crazy? The 10,000^th through the 10,000,000^th will be much harder.” In the end, I am pretty sure that I will be better off if I don’t take both of them with me. I choose either the poet or the realist and stop dithering.

The 75 mile trip is just a little longer than the longest leg of the Cover Indiana tour. It has been very cool to have this big goal for the 1^st week of May. It is what got me out yesterday; the sky was gray and overcast. In places on my ride, the clouds came down to the ground and I was riding in the fog and light mist. It is a goal that convinced me to wonder “where do you go for 75 miles?” It is a goal that delighted me to find that you can go from my door to my daughter’s door in 76 miles. So I went the extra mile to catch up with Grace, eat a wonderful pasta lunch and an get the opportunity to warm up as my body cooled down. It is a goal where I confused March 16^th low 40 degree weather with May 6^th 68 degree weather, so I did not wear enough warm weather gear and felt like an ice cube the last 10 miles with the 14 mph wind cutting through me.

While my legs were pretty tired at the end of both rides, I am more concerned about how I am going to hold my head up out over my handlebars for the 360 miles this May. You wouldn’t think that it would be a huge challenge. I don’t have a freakishly large head. I manage to walk around all day long without propping my head up. I don’t have to take 5 minute breaks every hour to lay my head on a pillow or let my chin slump to my chest. I have had pretty good luck at keeping my head erect all day long. However, it appears that different forces are exerted on the noodle when leaning forward on a bike for 3.5 or 5.5 hours while riding the back roads of central Indiana.

My fifty miler did give me a certain amount of confidence that I can make the entire route in six weeks. Actually, it was not the 50 miles. It was the 32 mile mark. I had been following the same route as previous rides. In the past, at the 32 mile mark, I would have been getting to the end of my rope. I couldn’t go any further. However, last week, I felt really good at 32 miles. Hope is at the end of the tunnel. I was confident that I will survive the first day of the six day journey.

The confidence that was garnered at the 32 mile mark was lost at the 73 mile mark yesterday. I was three miles from home. The best I could muster on my bike with a 14 mile 41 degree cross wind was a paltry 12 miles per hour. I was coming up on the 500 S – SR 9 cross road. I had to stop; look both ways; do the story problem. If a semi-truck leaves that spot 300 yards away at 55 mph and the tired biker leaves his spot at 2 mph, will they meet? Thankfully, I was so tired that the truck was past before I could write out the answer. In that moment, I wondered how and doubted that I was going to make it those last three miles. How am I going to make it 360 miles in May? So the chicken crossed the road; trudged on home, changed out of its bike shoes and slowly put one foot in front of another into the house; goal accomplished.

My other training is going fantastic. I am currently sustaining a pint a day ice cream habit; no problem at all. My head is not getting heavy. My legs are feeling good. My spoon hand is getting fit and toned. I am so ready, to eat the ice cream that you are bringing to meet me on the road. I am ready, to spend and evening with you and yours on an early May evening with the flowers and future of summer opening up to us. I am ready to write every evening about all of those things you want me to write.

I hope that your training is going well.

Take care,

Roger

Epic times?

Dearest Blog Reader.

That was an epic week. I hope that yours was also, but if not, I am prepared to let you live vicariously through me.

Monday night the town of Ingalls declared their intentions in public forum to annex our farm. In one fell swoop, the Sharritt family 197 acres will nearly double the town size.  Annexation is probably one of the least democratic functions of government. Over the last fifty years of my life I have not wanted to be part of a town or any organized living arrangement. I have specifically eschewed such kind of arrangements. I have always felt that what’s mine is mine and yours is yours. Live your life any way you want. Paint your house any color you want. Hang your clothes on the cloths line in the back yard. Let your dog run off the leash. Don’t pick up your dog’s poop. Build a big shed out back and never quite get around to putting shingles over the tar paper finally resorting to covering it with blue tarp.

I do not care. Just don’t annex me. I don’t need your foundation protection services (volunteer fire service). I can provide my own animal control. I have 197 acres. I don’t need your parks and recreational services. I have consistently held these views. If I would have been able to vote in Ingalls elections, I would have been a one issue voter. With this democratic influence, the board would have represented this kind of sane thinking. But no, it is filled with people who want to protect their own property values by making you do things with your property rather than make improvements to their own property. So in more than 30 days but less than 60 days, they will vote. Then I can run for town council. I think that I will ban shingles on all new construction.

Wednesday night, I woke up in the middle of the night. Distraught, beside myself, I had a recurring dream about peanut butter cookies. Peanut Butter cookie dreams for me are code for all things which are arbitrary bull crap and since it is arbitrary it is patently unfair and wrong. It is a bed rock of my existence. If you are a long time reader, you may remember “Where does it say that” from February 2012. Suffice it to say the annexation on Monday and a situation at work on Tuesday comingled and clawed their way up through my subconscious so that eyes bolted open. Sitting straight up in bed, I silently said "That's arbitrary bull crap", slid out of bed, padded into the man cave, turned on the mother hen, and proceeded to self-administer 2 hours of counseling by working through all that bothered my and reciting the serenity prayer repeated. Thankfully, it was good counsel, sleep came and my advice, when implemented in the light of day, made things better. Although, the ancestral lands will be annexed in a couple of months.

Friday came, Bev and I committed to supporting her sister and family by going to the viewing for her mother-in-law. The viewing was in Corydon (yes, Indiana’s first state capital). We took off in the late afternoon on Friday, enjoyed watching the blue Herons south of Columbus. Iconically, they looked like the bombers over England as they flew overhead in their V-formations against the gray backdrop of a low, clouded, Indiana sky.

Then a few miles from Scotsburg, a thump, the yellow low tire light confirmed that we had a flat. Bev and I did great. We jumped out, identified the offending tire. We positioned the car for maximum protection against the truck vortexes as they zoomed past. We popped the trunk and with a few Indy 500 moves were back on the road within 15 minutes. Thankfully, we were within 3 miles of an exit that had a Walmart with a service center. So 45 minutes later, (an hour from the pop), after extensive sociologic study of the denizens of Walmart on a Friday night in rural southern Indiana, we were back on our way.

Certainly, we were still worried about arriving so late but we had gone that far and we did have cookies that needed to be delivered. As we wound our way through downtown Corydon, cataloging the names of nut trees on street signs, we turned at the corner of Chestnut and knew that we had arrived and everything was okay. It was a sign from the Almighty. Off to the right, the Butt Drugs sign shown brightly in the dark wet street. What 13 year old doesn’t draw comfort and inspiration for any thing butt? Butt Drugs in a 13 year old mind is magic. There are so many things that can be done with it. Trust me, some boring weekend, You Said What, Roger? will go about plumbing these depths so to speak. For now I leave you with the Youtube video of their commercial.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYYdF0zcuSI

After spending an hour with people who love one another and loved their mother and are comfortable in their own skin, we recognized the sign of being blessed by their welcoming warmth and kindness.

Saturday brought a groggy awakening to the social event of the late winter. Beverly, she of gifted hospitality, had invited 20 friends over to make wedding pennants for Grace’s wedding. This thousand word picture should explain the magic that occurred. 1225 feet of pennant covers our house now and portends a season of celebration as Grace’s and Chris’ wedding approaches. Bev’s example has inspired me so much. I think I will invite my guy friends over and we will make an outhouse out in the wedding meadow by lashing thorn tree trunks together in a privacy enclosure. Even bears like to poop in the woods in rustic style.

 

 

Finally, the path to the Cover Indiana ride continues to unfold in training rides. I traversed 70 miles last weekend and 80 miles this weekend. You too can exercise your giving by going to the website that follows and click on the donation button. Take a few moments to think about what you want your sponsored leg ($60) blog to be about.

 

http://www.hfhcoverindiana.org/

Butt drugs is all mine. You will have to exercise your imagination a little harder to conger up your own epic topic.

Take care.

 

Roger