It came. My Ascent bike trainer. So now instead of roaming the streets and bikeways of Madison, I can sit in my basement and crank away. Talk about your mixed blessing. Still, it seems the realistic way to go -- it's hard to find blocks of time away, but there are always half-hours in the gloom. Besides, 40 minutes of hard treadmill walking -- at a 4% grade -- plus a half-hour of spinning is a pretty good workout, to judge by the sweat and my legs. And I get a cool gym-type setup, with even a couple couches to collapse upon And the Wii machine is pleased with my slow but steady loss of weight.
Besides, I've taken to watching early episodes of Gunsmoke, which bring back shadowy memories of my childhood, undefined recollections, and the definite memory of having to get ready for bed as the closing theme song played. Good to see Matt and Kitty and Chester, all in their young primes, and good ol' Doc Adams, cranky even then If I can't go back in time, or even hold it still, at least I can try to reconstruct some that's gone by. One thing I had forgotten, or never realized -- there's a lot of gunplay in every episode, and someone always bites the dust, silently and complacently, no blood, no whining, no moans. Just nice clean dead. That reminds me of the Breaking Away movie, in the sense that the riders there showed no sign of strain or effort, just smoothly rolling along, or crashing and getting up again, all glory and no pain.
And as long as I'm into lousy seques, awhile back I talked about "quiet competencies," the ability to do unspectacular but necessary things. Today I replaced the flush valve in the basement toilet, a project that had been on my to-do list for God knows how long. A bit of a challenge, but manageable and now its done and I feel damned good about it.
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