Wind Was Blowing, Time Stood Still

This morning, I asked Archie if he would please trade places with me today. He could go to work and do the adulting and I would stay home and hang-out on the couch and do the catting. I took his snores and fat old man wheezing as a no. Damn it!

 So, since I HAD to go to work today, at least I had a lovely evening last night to make up for it. I rode my bike to Apres after work and met John. It was a lovely evening for a ride, and riding to a date is like two great tastes in one candy bar.

We got the veggie fondue that had bread and tempura carrots and asparagus to stick in the lovely melted cheese. We also got escargot and some lobster bisque soup. Everything was amazing and wonderful.

Because it was Happy Hour, we got buy one, get one half off on cocktails. So, we tried a couple. There was one made with carrot juice and walnut liqueur, among other things. The bartender told us it was the healthiest cocktail they made. It was also really, really good. When we got home, we watched an HBO documentary about Billie Jean King. It looks like I owe her a HUGE thank-you for all the work she did trying to get equality for women athletes. I remember what it was like when I was a kid trying to run track and getting made fun of for wanting to do sports like a guy and the football coach not wanting us to use the weight room because we were girls and we would ruin them somehow and some guys in my school used to tell me, the muscles in my legs were gross and made me look like a dude. I'm glad things have changed, but we still have a long way to go.

Anyway, I had a lovely night and it is definitely getting me though this rainy, incredibly busy workday Friday.

Geese in Flight and Dogs That Bite

Oh, kids. It's been a rough month for me. October always has been, for whatever reason. This year I've been plagued with  a new job at my office that has been confusing and not at all what I was hired for originally, migraines and a cold and just last weekend I crashed in my race on Saturday and bruised my butt so badly that I couldn't run until yesterday. See? Cyclocross can literally be a pain in the ass...

Because of all of the really bad things that have happened to me in my life, I know that these are really just  annoyances and not tragedies and I am as lucky as a girl can be..But just because I'm tired of being cranky, I have been trying to read as many novels as possible for escape, and tonight I planned a special date after work for John and myself at Apres. I'm sure tapas and cocktails will make everything all better, right?

And now for something completely different...I know this has nothing to do with the rest of my post, but my daughter told me that one of the old school,  male science teachers scheduled a field trip during finals week and it conflicted with her test. He called to bully her into changing the date of her final. Since it was the only day she could have it, and hers is a class required for students to graduate, she refused. The science teacher then went to the principal and told him that Coadster sure was assertive for a girl and wondered if she had been in the military. The principal sided with Coadster and they worked out a solution, but seriously? Are we still in the 1950's? Ugh. I suppose the good thing about all of this, is that I tried so hard to raise my girls to be assertive and strong-willed, and mostly they used it against me when they were younger. It's nice to see it working against someone else and FOR Coadster. Way to assertively adult, daughter!

And the Miles Upon Miles Keep Fallin' From the Sky

So, here's a cool thing that I won at my race last Saturday. It's a little wallet thing made from a bike innertube. I'm assuming it's waterproof, but even if it's not, it's pretty cool, huh?

I love it when Run for the Schools goes past our house once a year.

So, still this week I am having cold systems. Le sigh. I haven't had a migraine since Friday, so that's something...

On Sunday I slept in until 7:30'ish for the first time in about a month. It was lovely. We had to get ready to meet our friend Todd at a few locations to see if we can get some more local cyclocross races going in town next year. Todd is one of the best CX course makers - and when I say best, I mean cruelest. he loves to make the hills ridiculously high and everything else incredibly technical. It worried me a little about how excited he got when we showed him the areas we were considering for new races..Because it means those races could be really, really tough.

After we met Todd, we went downtown to meet a few friends for a Sunday fun day social ride to Kalona. It's one of my favorite routes. The hills are rolling, the little gravel there is, is more like easy to ride dirt, and the Amish farms are gorgeous.

We always do "no drop" rides, so we stop and regroup if anyone falls behind. That way we never have to worry if someone crashed or had a mechanical and is stuck on the side of the road somewhere.

See what I mean about the scenery?

Our friend Susie met us at the Brew Pub. She had gone back to Mexico to visit her family after 14 years of being away and she just got back. It was lovely to see her...As always.

It was the first weekend day in a month that we didn't have a race in another town. We were supposed to be getting stuff done around our house, but our house chores will always be there and this incredible weather will be very short lived, I'm sure. Like I always do, I looked at it like, if I died tomorrow, would I be upset that I didn't get the popcorn ceiling replaced in my kitchen, or would I be more unhappy that I didn't take advantage of a beautiful, bucolic day on my bike? I think we all know the answer to that.

Oh, Oh, Oh. It's Magic, You Know.

This weekend I was finally able to race again. I wasn't 100% better, but I was willing to give it a go. We had our race at a vineyard in Madrid, Iowa. It was a technical course with lots of tight turns and some ridiculously large and soft gravel to try and ride and turn on.

John did really well in his race. He got 2nd and the winner was a crazy fast guy from the Denver, Colorado.

My race was weird. I was still a little sick and hadn't trained at all in the last 2 weeks. Plus, I don't know if I had the wrong tread on my tires or if it was operator error or what, but I kept sliding out like crazy on almost every turn. Errrrgggghhhh! The weird part, is that I did really well. The woman who always beats me, wasn't anywhere close to me and only one woman out of both the master's categories beat me and she was in the younger category. I'm still not sure how that happened.

I had the best start ever. In cyclocross races, you usually start in a wide straightaway, and at some point you make a tight'ish turn on the course. Everyone sprints as hard as possible (Not my strong suit) to be the first person through that turn, so you don't stuck behind the bottleneck of riders that usually happens. Being the first person through the turn is called, "getting the hole shot". I have never been fast enough to get the hole shot...Before Saturday.

Thanks for the photo, Kim Pierce.

Of course, once I got through first, I had no idea how to pace myself. Normally, I try to hang onto whoever is in front of me and hope for the best. Once I was in the lead, I had no idea of my pace. Was I going too hard so that I would die in a lap or two, or was I going too slowly, so that the whole race would soon all be whizzing past me? No one caught me for the first part of the course. The 35+ woman got me at the 2nd set of barriers.  Not long after that I had my first crash. I went down hard and said a bad word, very, very loudly. Oops!

I hit my butt and my shoulder really hard and broke my left shifter. It took me a bit of time to get up and back on my bike, and only one person passed me. Whew! I battled that wonderful woman the whole race. I slowed down after I crashed on a turn for the second time and slid-out multiple times after that. I really think that the woman I battled could easily have beaten me, but she is in it for fun and stopped quickly for a beer hand-up once and never fought me when I passed her. She claims she could only hang on by sucking my wheel, but I think she was just being nice.

Anyway, she was in the younger category and it wouldn't have affected my place in the oldest lady category either way. By the end of the race, I was 2nd overall for both master's categories and 1st for the 45+ women's category.

 I was happy to be done, happy to have won and happy that John was going to a bachelor party that night, so I had the whole house to myself, with only the cats to annoy me. I coughed and sneezed and was exhausted, but I hope that my cold will be completely gone by next week and I can figure out the tread issues on my tires.

Oh, and You Come Crash Into Me, Baby

 Well it's Friday and here I am without any cat photos...

Instead, I want to celebrate the 5th anniversary of John getting hit by an F-150 pick-up truck while riding his bicycle...Or really, his recovery from that.

He had gone to Lone Tree to visit his dad's and his grandparent's graves and was heading back to Iowa City when an older man dropped something on the floor of his pick-up and bent to retrieve it while driving 55 MPH. When he sat up, he found John on his windshield, at which time he braked hard and John went flying into the ditch. John said he yelled the F word really loudly and worried that it would be the last word he ever said. I told him that it would at least be appropriate to the situation.

John got Chris Horner to sign his back brace at Jingle Cross in 2010. Who else can say that?

We were supposed to go on a date that night. John called me from the emergency room in the afternoon and told me he had to cancel. I asked why and he told me about the truck crashing into him. I asked him if his mom was with him and he said he had told her not to come. At that time, he thought he only had a broken leg. I asked him if he wanted me to meet him. He hesitated and then said he'd probably be okay by himself. Since I had been in that weird horse and buggy accident in 1992, I knew how scary and lonely an ER room could be by yourself, so I took his hesitation as a yes.

I showed up and the woman at the front desk asked me if I was married to John. In my head, I laughed to myself and thought, "Well, we've been dating for about 3 weeks now, so...we're practically married. Right?" To the woman, I said no, but that I was his girlfriend. She let me in and I helped John get some pain meds finally. After all the CT scans and x-rays, it turned out that he had a burst fracture in his lower spine and a broken bone in one of his legs. He said when he was in the ambulance, the EMT guy gave him his helmet and told him to check it out. It didn't have a scratch on it. John was so lucky that he didn't hit his head.

John had a spinal fusion surgery and his doctor told him he didn't think John would be able to run again. Since John was fastidious about doing his PT, he was able to spin on a bike trainer a couple months after the surgery and did his first bike race after the crash at Kent Park at the end of March. Also, he not only still runs, he does a crazy 25K trail race every Spring. They say that cats have nine lives. If that's true, I hope humans get at least that many, because John is already down one. Here's to the first 5 years of John's second life. May there be many, many more.

Every Picture Tells a Story, Don't It?

Okay. So, remember when I said last month that I was SURE I'd get around to finishing my painting this month? Apparently, I wasn't lying. I had been trying to think of a way to paint this photo I took of my daughter when she was about 8 years old. She was so annoyed that I wanted to take photos in a stinky old laundromat, and so she is full of the kind of attitude most people have when in a laundromat. I actually love this shot.

When trying to paint it, I didn't want any kind of direct representation. I wanted to combine some different elements of the kind of art she liked when she was younger - cartoons and pop art. So, I finally decided to paint a background and then use ink and paper to make the cartoon image and affix it to the painting. Luckily, one of the guys on my bike racing team is the manager at Dick Blick and helped me figure out the best way to stick the image to the canvass. We had a great talk about how to do it at a mountain bike race this Summer. It isn't exactly how I imagined it in my head (nothing I paint ever is), but I'm happy with it.

I have a few ideas for other paintings, but I may never get to all of the house projects I wanted to do this month. My high school English teacher used to always say, "You always make time for the things you love". Apparently, I don't love house projects...

So Wild and Free. So Far From Me.

I made the troll grumpy by trying to take away his beer.

What a weekend, what a weekend... We took Friday off and headed to Madison, Wisconsin around 11'ish. It was a beautiful day.

We decided to stop in Mt Horeb and get lunch and a beer at the Grumpy Troll. Sadly, the pizza place didn't open until 4, but we got nice sandwiches and fish tacos and the beer was very nice too. I love October, because everyone's seasonal beer is an Oktoberfest brew and I love those.

We got into Madison around 3. We had an Air BnB place there and paid very little money for it. This was our view. Nice, huh? Since neither one of us was feeling 100% yet, we took a little nap before we headed out.

Our race was located at the Trek headquarters. We got pint glasses with the race logo on it and they were giving away lots of  swag and free frites. Yum!

My plan was to preride the course and see how I felt and then decide whether I would try to race this weekend or not. Oh, holy hell! The course was crazy tough and technical. just rode it VERY slowly once and I was wrecked. I was willing to keep an open mind, but it was  pretty unlikely that I'd be able to race, at least on Saturday.

I went back to the parking lot and talked to my friend, Linda while John finished riding the course. We found the name of a great pizza place that was only two blocks from where we were staying and headed to Salvatore's. The food was amazing. At one point we realized we were sitting next to the light switches and we joked with the waitress that I was going to turn the lights on and off really quickly and make it like a strobe light. The waitress looked at us blankly and then laughed. When she walked away, John said she was probably too young to even know what a strobe light was...

 I woke-up the next morning with a migraine. It was my 3rd one in a week. Oy! Taking migraine meds can be dangerous and even taking them once in a week, can make me pretty weak. There was on way I could race...Or even ride around on the course, for that matter. I sat in the car and read my book while John prerode. He was well enough to race and did a great job. He still wasn't at the top of his game, but he did well on such a tough course.  On Sunday, he was a little spent form still being sick and racing the day before, but I was amazed at how well he did under those conditions.

 I got to see most of the Iowa people race over the weekend. The Iowa women kicked some serious butt. I get a little excited and probably cheer too loudly, but I am always so impressed with my women friends who race. What can I say?

 I always love the heckling that goes on during CX races. My favorite from this weekend came during the Single Speed race. The guy in the photo above was closing the gap with the first place guy, and one of the guys with a megaphone said, "Watch out! The guy from Def Leppard is catching you!"

 Some other fun heckles during the single speed race:

"You know the coolest thing about a single speed bike?....Nothing"

"Single Speed - a HUGE excuse to go really, really slow."

I also love that CX races are so family friendly. Along with a free keg of beer, there was poster board and markers for the kids to make signs. Drunken kids making signs, is always fun. I also love that this photo is of a baby beating his mom with a cowbell. So sweet.

So, once again. I was sad that I couldn't race, but I had one hell of a fun weekend anyway.

Ooooh, You're the Best Friend That I Ever Had.

Well, kids, it's been an interesting week. I'm not sure if I'm quite over my cold yet or not. I went to test it out this morning and ran a little over to miles at a leisurely pace. Mostly, I did a lot of leaf crunching. My favorite.

The week wasn't all sickly and sad and snotty. On Wednesday, John and I decided to go to the Rec Services Building and sit in the steam room to try and get stuff moving out of our lungs. I think I may still have had a bit of a fever, though, because I couldn't handle the heat and therefore had to get out of the steam room. I tried the sauna and it was a little much for me too.

Before we left for the gym, my girls were converging at my house to head to Woodpecker Trail for a hike together in the amazing weather. I told them to meet us at Shorts afterward for dinner and a beer. If there was one thing I could have hoped for my girls, was that they would be good friends as adults and look out for each other, and decide to take hikes in the woods together. Okay, if there was one thing I could have hoped for my girls, it would have really been two things...Those three things I just mentioned. Anyway, I'm happy it came to fruition.

We are all set and ready to head back to Madison for the Trek CXC Cup. We registered long before I got sick and got a cute AirBnB place for next to nothing. I have no idea if I'll be able to race or not. We'll see how I feel. According to Heidi, it's a nail biter.

If You Believed They Put a Man on the Moon

Me and my family in Papago Park in 1969, I'm guessing.

I started reading "The Glass Castle" at my daughter's behest. She thought it would remind me of my own upbringing, and while my childhood up until I was 10 was very unconventional, it wasn't nearly as crazy or as dangerous as Jeannette Walls'. In honor of reading that book, and the fact that I'm still celebrating my 10th year of blogging, I am reposting something I wrote about 8 years ago.

Okay, I'm just going to post this fiction-y-er-ish thing. Most of the events happened, but I was too young to remember them, so I made myself and my brother older in this and sometimes used accounts of what other people told me, and sometimes remembered bits and then just made shit up. Hopefully, you won't find it too long to read during lunch and your breaks at work. Here it is:

1969

Tonight is a big deal. My dad keeps telling us, “Kids, remember this. This is a very big deal.” My brother rolls his eyes and walks into his room. I stay in the living room so I can be where everyone else is. I’m afraid to miss it. It is a very big deal.

My mom has set up the card table so she can put all the food she made on it. My grandma and my Uncle Jack and my Aunt Lynn are coming over. My Aunt Lynn is divorced and everyone says it in a whisper like it’s secret and we can’t say it around her because it might make her feel bad. Her daughter is a year older than my brother. She will never play with me. After they get here, my cousin goes off with my brother and they shoot things with their slingshots. I don’t even try to tag along because I know they will start shooting at me.

My mom touches or winks at me every time she comes out of the kitchen with potato salad, or Jell-o or bread or devilled eggs. My dad likes very dark bread and brown mustard, so we always have to have it, but my mom doesn’t make me eat it or I’ll throw up. He also eats peanuts in the shell and all of our ashtrays are full of empty shells. There’s almost no room for cigarettes or ashes.

Once the whole family arrives, my dad and my Uncle Jack talk about politics and everyone tries to get them to change the subject because they don’t agree. There is so much cigarette smoke everywhere that my eyes burn.

Nobody is walking on the moon yet. They are all just watching the news, which I’m not allowed to watch because when they have the war on the news, I get scared. I once heard a ticking clock and thought it was a bomb and ran out of my parent’s room screaming. So, I’m not allowed to watch the news.

I finally get so bored, that I go into my bedroom and play with my wedding paper dolls. There is a bride and a groom and you can change their outfits for the wedding and later for the honeymoon. I hear a thunk. I know that my brother and my cousin have hit my window with a rock. I think I might tell on them, but the grown-ups are loud and drinking beer and I don’t like the way they act.

My mother comes in my room to wake me up. I fell asleep and now the groom’s tuxedo wedding outfit is stuck to my face. She picks me up and carries me into the living room. I sit on her lap to watch the man walk on the moon. Everyone is quiet and serious, but I watch my dad instead of the guy on the screen because I’ve never seen him like that before. He is staring like he usually does, but this time he seems happy – like he’s far away from our cramped and smoky living room.

I am Tired, I am Weary

Heidi doesn't mind when I am sick AT ALL.

My cold got the WAY better of me these last few days.  I woke-up on Monday feeling kind of crappy. John told me I should stay home and I told him that Mondays were bad days to miss at my office...Then I felt so dizzy I could barely stand and said I would call in and stay home. I stayed home again today and started feeling a little better in the afternoon.

I suppose if I HAVE to be sick, I should focus on the positive. So, here is a list of the good things about having a cold.

1. I am normally too hyper to sit around much, but when I'm sick, I am able to, say...Read an entire 500 some page novel in 2 days and start another one.

2. I get to create my couch world where I camp out with my Kleenex, a book, the TV remote, and some hot tea and water. I like to think of it as the adult version of the blanket fort.

3. I am limited to, but also have no excuse but to just lie around, read books, blow my nose, watch ridiculous amounts of House Hunters episodes and sleep...But most importantly, I'm way too sick to clean anything.

4. I get to spend TWO WHOLE DAYS away from work during the week.

5. I finally get to whine back to the cats, so they know what it feels like.

6. It's feed a cold and starve a fever and guess which one I have?

7. My beautiful boyfriend brings me take-out from Oyama, because what's better for a sick person than Miso soup and Wasabi to burn out a cold? The sushi is just the receptacle, I swear.

8. This afternoon when I started to feel a little better, I had to make sure I could be functional enough to go to work, so I made myself sit up for a couple of hours and FINALLY got to work on my cartoon drawing for the painting I've been trying to finish for months now. The cats are sweet enough to work as security against the evil and terrifying birds and chipmunks and bunnies and squirrels that lurk in our backyard. Regular Gargoyles, those two.

We'll see how tomorrow goes. I may forgo riding my bike to work, in case I still don't have the energy. I'm sure the cats will miss me....

That Bullsh*t is Bullsh*t. It Just Goes by Different Names

So, remember how  in my last blog I said I wasn't sure if John or I were going to be too sick to do the races we signed up for? Well, we went anyway. Two of our women teammates and another woman we know from Iowa City showed up too. Yea!

I figured, what the hell. I like the courses and I love the women who race in Wisconsin. For the most part, they aren't all overly competitive and threatened by faster racers or snobby to slower racers. They are generally friendly and introduce themselves and are happy that we are there. I also love most of the women who race masters. Like one of the women said when someone commented on all the funky socks we were wearing, "Yeah. We're old enough not to take racing or ourselves too seriously." Amen to that, sister.

Here is me at the start already wiping snot. Such class. Such elegance. Such grace...

 So, if you want to get a sense of just how bad your cold really is I have some tips for you. First, get to the race just a little bit late, so you only have time to ride one lap. During the lap, your legs will feel like jello. No, they will feel like leaded jello. (I'm sure it's a thing) You will tell yourself you are just old and need to warm-up. You will be lying to yourself. The race will start and you will be in a fog. You will have trouble putting your feet on your pedals and you will not have much strength on the nice paved, gradual uphill. You will come to the turn with three women still behind you. "Not bad for being sick," you will think as they all quickly pass you. Damn.

You will try the only steep uphill, that wouldn't normally be a problem, but now, in your brain fog, you forget about your gears or a decent pace and you just say, screw it, get off your bike and walk part of the way up. You glance behind you to see if the cat 4 women, who started 30 seconds after you, are catching-up. Not yet. You hop back on your bike and by the time you reach where all the people are, the 4's are catching you. The announcer comments on your awesome socks (thank-you) and says he thinks you are the leader of the 4's. You shake your head and think, "No. I got dropped by the masters and am getting overtaken by the beginners and waiting for the juniors to drop me too. Sigh". You feel like someone has lassoed your bike and is pulling you backward as half the cat 4's fly past you. Your eyes and nose are running and if anyone could see you up-close they would think your face was as nicely glazed as a doughnut (EW!). You start to feel a little down and then you tell yourself to shut it. You notice that even while you feel so crappy, you are still trying to figure out which lines to take up the hill, how to pump on the downhill with the big bumps and then just ahead, you see the really nice woman who introduced herself to you at the start and said this was her first CX race in 4 years. She is dying. You feel badly, but you pass her anyway and think, "Hey, at least I'm not last." Hell, you'll take what you can get at this point. You finally finish the race. Your beautiful boyfriend is waiting for you with water and your jacket and he tells you what a stud you are. You know he's lying, but you appreciate the hell out of him for saying it anyway. So, that's how you know how sick you are...And by you, I mean me.

John was still too sick to race as well. Since we had some time to kill before we met my family for dinner at 5, and there was some kind of big football game  going on between Iowa and Wisconsin, we stopped for appetizers and a beer at Great Dane in Fitchburg. You may not know this, but I can be a bit on the loud and obnoxious side (yeah, shut-up) and because of that, other obnoxious people at bars seem to want to be my new best friend. We met a guy like that yesterday. He was actually pretty amusing. He made us try his cheese covered, gravied fries. He then set about showing us and the bar, just exactly how much cheese there was on his food. Lovely.

We were both exhausted and had some more time to kill, so we pulled the car over next to a park and took a nap. While John was looking at Google Maps for the restaurant, he commented on the fact that it was right across the street from the mustard museum. OMGEEEEE!

I love cheesy, kitschy, Americana crap. All of it. John is very patient and is nice enough to tag along to play at the 1950's putt-putt golf course, the largest assortment of pinball machines or whatever else weird shit I drag him to. He was not surprised that I wanted to see it, and I'm sure he was just relieved that it wasn't the world's largest ball of twine...Which I still want to see.

John imitating the creepy mustard lady behind him.

  The Mustard Museum used to be in Mt Horeb and moved to Middleton for some reason. It was closing in 8 minutes, so I didn't have time to read the blah,blah,blah about it.

There were lovely samples and videos and can you believe people actually get paid to work at the mustard museum? I bet you never find that on a survey: Please mark your occupation - hospital worker, office clerk, law enforcement, mustard museum worker...

Be honest, have you ever met anyone who gave out wedding mustard?

After we left the museum , we had a wonderful evening of Cajun style food and drinks with my family. It was one full day.

I know there are more single-minded people out there who would be bummed-out the rest of the day after having such an embarrassingly bad race, disgusting cold and knowing they wouldn't get to do the other race they paid for the next day. Lucky for me, I like to look at my life as one cheesy, kitschy, ridiculous adventure. One that doesn't always go my way, but takes me places that make me laugh and one in which I am most assuredly wearing awesome socks.

But Where Are the Cats? There Ought to be Cats.

Now that it's cooler out, Archie makes one hell of a fat, furry, orange blanket when I read.

It's Friday and the weather is immaculate on this beautiful October day. Both John and I have had mild colds, so we'll see what kind of races, if any, we have.

We're supposed to race in the Madison, Wisconsin area on Saturday and then De Kalb on Sunday. Hopefully, we'll get to have dinner with my brother and one of my sisters who live in Madison. Of course, Iowa plays Wisconsin that day, so we'll probably stay far away from the University. I guess we're having ourselves some first world, Midwestern, Fall, problems this weekend, aren't we?

Ba De Ya, Say Do You Remember. Ba De Ya, Dancing in September.

Wellllll, how do you like that? It's October already. September was a transition month for me. I went from longer road rides, to shorter, more intense off-road and trainer rides to get ready for cyclcross season...And I raced almost every weekend this month.

So, here are my monthly stats -

Running - 60.63 miles

Cycling - 458 miles

Trainer work-outs - 2 @ 1/2 hour a piece.

Swims - none

Races - 7 - 1 gravel time trial, 1 duathlon and 5 cyclocross races.

Organized touring rides - 1 - the Culinary Ride.

Number of different bikes ridden: 5 of my 6.

 Books read: 6 - "The Jungle Book" by Rudyard Kipling, "Shirley", by Susan Scarf Merrell, "The Haunting of Hill House", by Shirley Jackson, "Tigerman", by Nick Harkaway, "An Untamed State", by Roxane Gay, and "A Hologram for the King", by Dave Eggers.

Paintings or Drawings started or finished: Zero. I am planning to make that a priority in October.

House projects started or finished: Zero. Again, I'll try to make that a priority in October too.

Towns we traveled to for races: 4 - The Amanas, Pella, Cedar Falls and Des Moines.

So, how was your September? What things didn't you get around to that you're SURE you'll start on in October?