The Short and Long of It
Hello all. All four of you, I think. I’m finally posting again after a long layoff post–Florida. It got busy right away as the semester started, and I am just now seeing some daylight.
The Great Cycle Challenge
As I related previously, my good friend and former employer Mike McIntyre helped me move the last of my furniture into my apartment before I left for Florida. He told me about his participation in the GCC to raise money for Childhood Cancer Research. I gave him a donation on his web page at https://greatcyclechallenge.ca/Riders/MichaelMcIntyre1, then I joined his team. I’ve been riding as much as this fat old geezer can (me, not Mike LOL!), and currently I have logged 90.6 miles and raised $125.88 for the cause. I am proud to say I rank 13,268th nationally, 619th in Pennsylvania, and 2nd on our team only to Mike himself! My own page is https://greatcyclechallenge.com/Riders/RexSaffer. If you are able and so inclined, please make a donation on my page to support this important cause. Thanks to Everett and Cheryl for their generous donations.
The Long
So the Long of It is that this morning, Mike and I and one of his other geezer friends made a 20–mile ride along the Chester Valley Trail, one of this nation’s finest walking and cycling trails. I fared well and was not left in the dust more than once or twice. Fall has fell here in SE Pennsylvania, and the air was crisp and cool in bright sunshine. Oh what a beautiful moooooorning! Oh what a beautiful daaaaaaay! It gave me a wonderful feeeeeeeeeeeling, like everything’s going my way. And these days, it is.
The Short
But my narrative here is about yesterday afternoon/evening’s ride, i.e., The Short of It. A little context is necessary.
Recently, a group of bridge fanatics has taken over a failed Duplicate Bridge Club in King of Prussia and reopened it as a non–profit member–owned club. You can find us at https://bridgewebs.com/kop. I am pretty heavily involved in volunteer work for the Club in a couple of capacities, one of which is IT Guru and WebMaster. Yesterday I went to the Club early in the morning, did some support work, then played in the game at 12 Noon. My partner Mark Cohen and I tied for first in our section. But afterwards there was some more work needed on the ancient, obsolete desktop computer that we use to run the games. I am trying to migrate everything to a more modern donated laptop, but it is slow going.
Before leaving for the Club in the morning, I had loaded up my bicycle on the rear rack on my SUV, a Subaru Forrester what a fine car indeed, and I was going to do this little job on the computer after the game and then go for a ride on the Schuykill River Trail beginning in Conshohocken, up to Valley Forge, and back again. It would have been one of these 20 mile, two hour rides, nothing unusual. Except that the even more ancient, more obsolete wireless mouse on the desktop computer was acting up, in fact has been for days. I finally could take no more and headed for Staples for a new wireless mouse and keyboard.
So nothing weird so far, got them and came back to the Club and started the installation, which promptly hung and froze the computer. I restarted it a couple of times but it would no longer boot at all. I tried another keyboard and mouse, no luck, then I DROVE HOME and got my own wireless keyboard and mouse and went back and had more of the same luck, namely none. Then I realized that the interrupted installation had corrupted the keyboard driver on the computer. FYI, Windows desktop machines will not boot at all without a working keyboard hooked up. So I thought, no actually I yelled, “Well #%$*&! now what?!?”. Luckily the cleaning ladies had just left and there was no one to tsk tsk over my potty mouth.
Finally I realized that no wireless keyboard was going to work. So I drove back to Staples and got an old–timey WIRED keyboard and mouse and brought those back, plugged them in, and everything started up fine and returned to normal operation. Success! Kind of. Because now it is 6:30 PM yes this whole escapade chewed up about THREE HOURS for what should have been a 30 minute job. But that is the nature of this kind of thing, at least from time to time.
So now my whole afternoon is shot and there is not enough time or daylight left for my ride. Still, I drove over to Conshohocken, less than 10 minutes from the Club, and I parked at the Trailhead. I had some new equipment to install, a nice little watch for the handlebars, a blinking rear red light, and such. It was intended just as a little runthrough for the next time I go there, just to figure out where to park and so on.
Twilight was deepening rapidly, so I thought I would ride one mile down the trail and back again just to see how everything rode and felt. But twilight was deepening rapidly, did I say that?, and the trail is sometime open to the sky with enough light to see the trail surface even so late, but sometime completely covered over by the tree canopy and dark, dark, dark. You know, there is dark, then there is black–cat–eating–a–dead–crow–in–a–coal–mine–at–midnight–dark. That dark. I could not see the road surface at all and was praying not to run over some branch or something and go tumbling head over handlebars.
Of course the one piece of equipment I do not have yet is a headlight. Actually I do have one but it is ancient and obsolete and the battery is dead and I lost the charger and I should have replaced it but of course I did not. So I turned around and rode back in even more deepening twilight, and by the Grace of DOG I made it back to my car unscathed. I loaded everything back up and drove home, then I got online and immediately ordered a replacement light on Amazon Prime. It’s coming tomorrow to one of those Lockbox places at a local 7–11, and I finally will be tricked out to ride and look cool doing it, because I also ordered this jersey which will also come tomorrow:
So that is the Short and the Long of It.
All the best,
From Broomall, PA at 6 PM on Saturday, September 25,
Rex
