There's Nothing You Can Do That Can't Be Done

I started feeling better by last Friday. I hadn't been running and hadn't ridden my bike except for commuter rides for 10 days, so John and I both bowed out of the Pigman Sprint Triathlon. It was the first time since 2012 that we missed it. They are going to apply about 40 bucks of our entrance fee, so we didn't lose the whole thing...

So, we decided to ride bikes to Shorts for dinner and a beer, to see how it felt for either of us. It felt pretty damn good. Then a couple of friends of ours texted to see if they could stop by. They just got back from Peru and we wanted to hear about their trip, and they wanted to come by and get some of my extra seedlings of organic tomatoes and basil. We sat on the back porch and had a great talk.

On Saturday morning, Stinky texted me and asked if we could ride bikes to the Farmer's market together. Hell yes! It's one of my favorite things to do.

Check this out. I wish they had someone reading gigantic books at the Farmer's Market when my girls were younger. They would have loved that.

We had a nice breakfast and then wandered around. We saw my friend Harriet, who owns the restaurant Leaf. I hadn't seen her in forever. I also got asparagus and strawberries. So good.

When I got home it was time to get down to business. John got the steamer out and started to prep the kitchen.

Archie was extremely helpful. He lounged around and got into everything and needed to take a nap, but wouldn't because...What if all of this moving of things resulted in treats?

Because we were pretty sure that we were dealing with asbestos, we masked up (nothing is better than wearing a respirator when you have a cold), kicked Archie out and got to work. It took us about 4 hours. At one point we had to refill the steamer thingy, so I went out and mowed the backyard. I'm much better at outdoor chores than indoor. We finished scraping the popcorn off. Yea! We still have many patches to spackle and sand and then we have to prime and paint it and put in the new ceiling fans, and then we can start on the walls and put new tile on the floor, and, and, and...

On Sunday morning John and I ate every single strawberry I bought at the Farmer's Market the day before. If you only had regular store strawberries, I think your mouth would explode the first time you tasted the deliciousness of a real garden berry.

I obsessed over my gardens for a bit and then John and I went for my first road ride in 10 days. We decided to ride out to Solon to see if I could handle the hills. We are signed up to do TOMROV this coming weekend and it is 106 miles with 6,000 feet of climbing on Saturday and 90 miles with 4,000 feet of climbing on Sunday. I just wanted to make sure I could deal with it. The ride was fun and beautiful, we didn't go incredibly fast and the hills were more of a challenge than they usually are, but I think I'll be okay for TOMROV.

We ran into (not literally) one of our teammates on the way there. He was waiting for his friend, and they met us at Big Grove. Our friend, Burne was at a motorcycle hill climb in Anamosa, and he met us when that was over. We had a great talk about our upcoming bicycling plans and then John and I rode home to our popcornless kitchen ceiling. Aaaahhhh!