Two crummy weeks of no commuting...My mother needed help moving and hauling loads of rubble, and the realtor suddenly had a whole lineup of people to show the house to (floor-scrubbin' time) and my frikkin' shifter busted, and several bits of my 1985 car fell apart and had to be run in to the mechanic, for a total repair cost of nearly the price of my bike.

Today I finally got to ride again! The new shifters are great. they are also Gripshifts, but with shorter handles so that they aren;t so easy to shift automatically. One oddity--on my previous pair, the gear numbers were printed on the static part of the shifter, and in these ones they;re printed on the moving part...took me a while to figure out why the numbers seemed to be in reverse order, but my hands kept shifting right anyway, When I wasn't looking at the shifters, anyway.

Anyhow, it was a great ride...raced a thunderstorm in (it passed on my left.) At one point, I heard someone screaming repeatedly, and a dog barking like crazy...I turned around and went back up the hill to see if something was wrong, but it was just a couple of farmers and their dogs herding the cows up to the barn for milking.

I'm sore and stiff from the two weeks of couch-potating...gotta ride more!