Making connections?

Dearest blog reader

I hope this finds you doing well. I am fine. I am sitting in our love seat, under the ceiling fan, on a cool Sunday morning, one day post birthday celebration, still in the grip of long summer days, wondering if I should have a piece of red velvet cheese cake for breakfast, lunch, and dinner or just lunch and dinner. Yes, I am fine.

Thanks to all who gave me birthday wishes yesterday via the information superhighway . It gives me great satisfaction, imagining the boys down at the NSA, after reading your well wishes, kicking themselves for forgetting about my birthday.  There is always next year.  You know where I am. Get those cards in the mail early next year, you privacy encroaching hacks.

The lovely Miss Beverly got me a wonderful gift. It is a book called "Fifty Places to Bike Before You Die." I am very excited because it mean's that I will live forever. There is no way that I am going to ride in Australia, Croatia, the Netherlands, Ireland, Nova Scotia. I might make one or two, but no way fifty. I am living large.

To celebrate my 51st, I decided to go on a 51 mile bike ride. It is not on the list. The Decatur, IN bicycle club sponsors a ride called the Flat Fifty. They have actually added loops that make it possible to ride a century; 100 miles. I had thought about it. However, being disabused of the notion from a lack of training, and the first 90 degree of the summer, I chose the 50 miler which was stretched a mile in a happy coincidence with my birthday. I was a bit disappointed that all of the good training put in for Cover Indiana had gone away and there was no way I could have ridden 100 miles yesterday, but there you go.

It was very a bucolic ride through rural northeastern Indiana. If you ever go on this ride, make sure that you take some $1 bills with you as the more ambitious Amish youth will be sitting along the road with their bowl haircuts and a table of full of cookies and glasses of lemonade offering sustenance and refreshment at a very reasonable price. The cookies came with an excellent recommendation from the sales person; a tasseled haired eight year old.  I like a person who is enthusiastic about what they are selling.

It was a bit incongruous watching all of these bikes go zooming past Amish tending their gardens, cultivating with a horse, driving a horse and buggy down the road loaded down with burlap sacks of feed in a pile. What must they have thought? Riding around on that small seat, the heat beating down without a wide brimmed hat for protection, pedaling around when a horse would take you around perfectly well. It was a very interesting ride.  The most interesting thing about the ride was the ruts that had been worn in the road from the shoe shod horses pulling wagons across the Hoosier heartland at their plodding leisure.

Speaking of horses on the road, there were road apples every where. Here some poop, there some poop, everywhere some poop, poop. Old McGraber had a farm ee-eye-ee-eye-oh.

Speaking of big old piles of poop, it appears that the FBI started and stopped searching for Jimmy Hoffa again. It is astounding that he has never been found. It is a rare phenomena to come across a hide and go seek player that good. No all ye, all ye in come free for him. And to think, he is a Hoosier born and bred from Brazil, Indiana. Which is right next to Parke county which has the second highest population of Amish in Indiana. Kinda makes you wonder if the Amish Mafia might have something to do with the hide part of Jimmy's little game.

I have always found that a long bike ride helps me make connections. You should try it.

Take care.

Roger