I’d like to report that we took advantage of all this amazingly lovely weather to get in a nice long bike ride, but that would be lying. Despite having the best of intentions for doing more, we only did 10 miles today, by meandering around the back roads in an attempt to search out the house that a friend is building back there. We eventually found it, and marveled at how big it is. I was tempted to go wandering through since now that it’s been framed we’d be able to get a better sense of what it will look like, but it’s set back too far from the road to get there without getting muddy, or worse yet, exposing the bike tires to the evils that lurk in the fields of the Sacramento valley (puncture thorns, which are *nasty*) so we settled for just admiring from a distance and then pedaled our way back home.

In our defense the reason we couldn’t really do much more than the ten miles was because most of the day was either busy or windy. This morning we headed for Davis, where we indulged in cornmeal waffles with pecan butter and successfully avoided going to the Farmer’s market and buying anything. We had a little bit of time to kill so we meandered around Borders, making up for the not buying of produce by the purchasing of books instead. And then we drove to Woodland because the woman who has been cutting Richard’s hair moved there a few years back and she is good enough that he – and lots of other people – basically keep following her no matter where she goes. I am a recent convert, since before we were married, if I needed my hair trimmed I would usually break down and go to whatever place happened to be close, open, and allowed drop-ins. Plus I have gotten pretty good at trimming and layering my own bangs. However, this time I wanted to get something different. As much as I like having long hair, my hair has other ideas, and once it hits a certain length, about an inch or two below my shoulders, a little switch gets flipped in its DNA and the rest turns into one huge and ratty mess of split ends. So since I was there to get a trim anyway I decided to give it a whirl and asked her for ideas. As I had hoped, she immediately suggested something and since I was in a mood for change I agreed. She got busy with the scissors and the hacking of huge chunks of hair, which fell around my feet and drew all manner of comments about just how much of a hair cut I was actually getting.

So now I have a new hair cut. I’m missing over half a foot of hair and instead of being halfway down my back, now it brushes just over my shoulders when I turn my head. Instead of being all one length there are long layers all over that have magically given my boring, poker-straight hair some actual shape and body and – what is even more amazing about it – all without benefit of styling products or a curling iron. I adore my new cute hairstyle, and not just because I think it might actually make me look younger. All the crunchy split ends are gone and I look in the mirror and actually feel almost pretty. I should obviously have let her have her way with my head sooner.

On the way home from getting all our hair hacked off we were starting to get hungry. So we decided to stop by Plainfield Station, which I have declared to be the very best burger joint in Yolo County. It is this little hole-in-the-wall bar that is pretty much in the middle of nowhere since it’s surrounded by nothing more than farms, but they make the very best burgers ever. We both got cheeseburgers and I was glad I got the small one because I could barely finish. These burgers are divine. They are big and thick and greasy and messy and the cheese oozes out and gets all over the fingers and oh, they are divine. I do not even want to attempt to calculate the number of Points in those cheeseburgers and I do not care. They were more than worth the splurge.

The last few days my life has been all about exercise, and very little else. I am sensing a growing trend here and I’m not exactly sure it’s a good thing. Not, mind you, that exercise is bad. It’s just that I am facing the knowledge that I am going to have to do this kind of thing for the rest of my life and really, where is the fun in that? Sloth is always much more fun than exercise. Sloth with Girl Scout cookies is even better.

After church Sunday I went riding with my dad again, only this time Richard came along as well. We rode over to my parents’ house to pick him up and then meandered all over town discovering parks and streets I hadn’t even realized existed. Once we dropped him off again I was still feeling in the mood to ride and Richard didn’t have any pressing homework assignments that meant he had to get home right away, so we headed down some of the back roads, up over the freeway and off through the orchards and then back home. Overall, it was a 17 mile ride, but unlike Saturday I was not completely exhausted when we got home. Okay, that is not entirely true. Parts of me were very sore and tired and very glad to be done with the biking for the day, because apparently there is just no bike seat in the world squishy enough, nor is there a pair of bike shorts with enough padding to protect my tail bone. Ow, ow, ow.

Yesterday we got up early and headed off to the gym, where I was able to do the whole workout the trainer had come up for me without wimping out and dropping to lower weights. And by the way I suppose I should mention that I’ve left Curves and joined a gym with Richard. I really liked Curves and it worked so nicely into my schedule to go work out at lunchtime, but in January I started noticing that all the machines were getting too easy. Since they’re all resistance machines it’s not like I could increase the weight to make it more challenging. Plus the new gym has treadmills and elliptical walkers and ski machines and all manner of other complicated equipment that makes me feel clueless, so after almost a year at Curves, what better reason to switch.

I’ve been going to the new gym now for…hmmm…exactly one week, and so far it’s okay. I cannot say that I really enjoy it because the truth is that, since it is exercise, and stinky sweaty exercise at that, the best I will ever manage is a resigned tolerance. I am never going to be one of those people who actively looks forward to going to the gym, especially since I sweat buckets the minute I start moving around, so I end up looking and feeling like the monster from the swamp by the end of the hour or so I spend in there. Luckily everyone else there is our age or older (at least the regulars who get there at 6am like we do – wince) and they have a tendency to spend their time there looking pretty tired and sweaty too so I figure I fit right in.

If heaving weights around for an hour in the morning wasn’t enough fun for one day, last night was the first practice for the season for the Master’s Synchronized Swimming team in Sacramento. I’ve been doing my best to talk myself into going to the practice, and only the guilt over the fact that they actually moved the practice from Wednesday to Monday nights just to accommodate my schedule made me go last night.

It was nice to swim though, even if my calves did spend all last night not speaking to me in as loudly painful a way as possible due to all the eggbeaters I was doing. I need to buy goggles and I need to buy a swim cap and I need to resign myself to reeking of chlorine for the next 24 hours after each practice, but it was fun and I didn’t hurt myself and the best part is that in the pool it doesn’t matter if I’m sweating, which is, sadly, one of the main reasons I have always preferred swimming to any other type of exercise. It was so fun that I am ignoring the fact that I spent last night with my right ear clogged entirely by pool water and am already looking forward to next Monday when I can clog it back up again. Yay!

This morning was more biking, but this time it served a dual purpose. Richard and I have been trying to find ways to be more environmentally sustainable (hence the order for the Prius, which may arrive sometime in my lifetime, or so the theory goes). We’d pondered alternate ways of getting to work, but the bus is extremely inconvenient, plus more expensive than driving. Carpooling seemed out of the question because we work on opposite ends of Sacramento and there usually tends to be lots of traffic in between. However, my boss cleverly pointed out that Richard could drop me off with my bike at Raley Field, and I could pedal through Old Sacramento and then down into Discovery Park and make it to my office in only a few miles, without putting him too much out of his way. So today we gave it a try, and it actually worked out quite well. I figure we can do this two days a week, which saves us two round trips to Sacramento with the cars, and plus it has the added bonus of giving me about 15 miles per week to add to the slowly growing total for the year.

Twice now in the past week I have found myself out in the backyard, either meandering through the bark-covered edges or climbing around in the flowerbed. The reason for these backyard activities? Weeding. I have been weeding.

Someone please smack me upside the head and make this go away, okay? I am not going to become one of those people who are obsessed with their yard. The sole reason we pay a wonderful gardener to come out and mow and trim and yes, weed, is because both of us truly hate gardening. And yet now that the backyard is starting to look more like a yard and less like a big prickly wasteland, I have found myself out there more often, pulling weeds.

I am trying to rationalize the need to weed the flowerbed with the fact that the little flowers we put in are so small and pathetic that I need to make sure the weeds do not overwhelm them. But what rationalization can I offer for crunching around in the bark while I was on the phone this morning with my parents, bending over far too many times to count to yank up weeds? The only one I can come up with is that they just look so…icky. I want our backyard to be beautiful and pristine, full of flowers and trees and things that were planted there on purpose instead of creeping in and setting up roots without an invitation.

Weeding. Shudder. How the mighty do fall. Or something.

In other news, spring has arrived in the Sacramento valley with a vengeance. Everything’s in bloom, temperatures are rising, and by all that is holy, if it is in the low 80’s this early in the year, just how hellishly hot is it going to be this summer?

One plus has been that the sun is coming up earlier, which means that when we go biking at 5:30 in the morning we can actually see where we are going. Tuesday morning it was light enough that we could see the rabbits fleeing through the empty field as we passed them – three of them bounding along in random patterns in what was probably some pathetic attempt to confuse us by making us unable to figure out just where they were going. Not, mind you, that we were really all that much of a threat, seeing as how we were on bikes and no where near enough to even consider trying to do anything to them. But we are talking about rabbits, after all – an animal that has never been known for having any sort of brainpower whatsoever.

We didn’t go biking on Thursday because I had to get to the office extra early to make far too many phone calls to a whole plethora of architects in New York. But today Richard was off at a library commissioner’s conference of some kind or another down in San Jose, so I decided I’d better take advantage of having an entire day with nothing to do, and I went out and did ten miles. I had originally had great plans for doing up to twenty today but there was a rather strong and steady wind roaring in from the north that I decided I just wasn’t in the mood to fight with. In my defense, an email from the Davis Bike Club later in the afternoon detailing alternate routes for a ride, due to the wind, suggested I wasn’t the only one feeling particularly wimpy.

The rest of the day I have been blissfully lazy. I sat and read several chapters of a book about knitting that was written in the 60’s – an era when they still referred to shop girls and when people were apparently willing to wear entire outfits made from yarn and not just sweaters or vests. I also did a lot of sleeping because all this getting up early and going to bed late has finally caught up with me.

And now we are off to a play – Guys and Dolls, I believe – and there will be pie afterwards and tomorrow there will be singing and playing of the recorder that may, quite possibly, involve the opening sequence to Stairway to Heaven, and possibly more biking. But whatever else it holds, tomorrow will definitely not involve weeding. I will be strong. Oh yes. I *will* persevere.

I may have already noted at some point in this journal that I am hopelessly clueless when it comes to anything artistic that has to do with color and texture and planning and figure out where things should go. However. If some kind and wonderful person provides any kind of blueprint at all for me to start with, suddenly I am filled with confidence and even a very little knowledge of how to figure out arty sort of things, and I will happily muck about with the blueprint until it might not exactly look like what it was supposed to look like in the first place, but it will be something that I am much happier with.

The latest example of this mucking with perfectly-fine-as-they-were plans has been mainly in the realm of our slowly evolving backyard. Granted, we are sticking fairly closely to the general theme of the plans our friend’s mom very generously drew up for us (in colored pencil and with sheets of details, no less!), but as we put in each section, the temptation to make changes to the rest just gets stronger and stronger. And right now, I think we’re about ninety percent convinced we are not going to expand the porch as planned. Instead, we are going to take out the existing steps (which were always rather temporary anyway) and replace them with much wider and longer steps to provide more sitting area for family Fourth of July fireworks-watching parties, and instead of filling up half the (now non-expanded) porch with a hot tub, we are going to enclose the far end with a few sheets of lattice board and then plant some kind of climbing thing in the ground in front of the lattice so it can do its best to grow strong and tall and try – much like the poppies in front of the house – to take over the yard.

To that end I have been suddenly struck with the need to figure out exactly *what* the climbing/creeping thing should be. Star jasmine grows exceedingly well in this area, but star jasmine is everywhere. And I do mean everywhere. So while I like star jasmine (and in fact we already have some star jasmine which is very slowly taking over the side of the front yard in as messy a way as it can), I would really prefer to add some variety.

Currently the front-runner is Some Kind of Rose. After all, we already have the old fashioned climbing roses that cover the arbor gate (and serve as a perfect hiding place for the little sparrow nest – which, by the way, I am watching anxiously in hopes that the sparrow mom will return and lay more eggs so we can peer at her little fuzzy-headed babies and squeal in glee again this summer, just like last summer). But I am not actually a huge fan of roses as a whole, since they seem to be such a terribly fussy sort of plant. Whenever the subject of roses comes up the conversation inevitably veers into a discussion of pruning, and I am so not all about the high maintenance plants. However, I have been finding different types of roses – old fashioned varieties that look less like fussy multi-petaled roses and more like flattened flowers in all shades of lovely pinks, that might work quite well in the role of the Thing that Climbs. Also, some of these roses-that-don’t-look-like-roses produce big fat rose hips that, according to all the sites I’ve visited, can be made into jelly. Yes! More jelly! And it is this jelly possibility that is making me think maybe I can handle just one more fussy, high maintenance plant in our back yard.

In about five years, when I am drowning in a sea of pomegranates and peaches and apples and possibly rose hips, I give you all permission to remind me, in great detail, of how much I was looking forward to spending hours each summer canning fruit and making jelly. Now, however, I can maintain my blissful optimism and get all excited about adding one more thing to our yard that can be boiled and mixed with sugar and put into jars with pretty labels and shiny tops.

Maybe. After all there is still the pesky little issue that things with flowers = things swarming with bees and we are already up to our eyeballs in paper wasps and big fat flack bumblebees each summer as it is so I am not entirely sure if I want to bring buzzy little things with sharp and allergen-laden rear ends that much closer to yet another entrance to our house. But….jelly! Does jelly outweigh the threat of bees? Oh, this landscaping thing keeps getting far more complicated then it should!

Winding yarn is, I am discovering, an extremely tedious task; especially when the yarn comes in a huge skein and manages to get more than a little bit tangled between when it was purchased and when it comes time to convert it into a nice, neat ball. Friday night I zipped off to craft night with my tote bag stuffed with all the completed pieces of my sweater so far, fully intending to work on sewing those pieces together, and maybe even doing a little work on the sleeves. Instead I sat at the table and wound yarn; or rather, I sat at the table and spent short bursts of time winding yarn in between longer periods of time spent untangling it.

My knitting-enabling friend very nicely let me take her winding contraption home with me. It’s really nothing more than a little thing which clips to the edge of a table and has four extendable arms around which you can drape the skein, but it’s much more convenient than either making someone sit there with their arms outstretched holding the skein for an hour or two on end, or else trying to do it from an untidy heap on your lap. So since I had it with me, I was stupid and ended up staying awake until nearly 2am yesterday morning finishing up the first skein and getting hopelessly entabled in the second.

She also let me borrow a few more books, including one that is chock full of patterns for Aran-style knitting, which is the type where the pattern is in the texture and is not done with more than one color. In between snarling at the tangled mess that is my newly acquired stash of pretty, pretty yarn, I flipped through the pages and oohed and aahed and ignored that little voice in my head that insisted that I really do not want to dive into another project requiring complicated cabling, really I don’t. I am sure I will most likely regret it when I start the next sweater and am faced with far more complicated instructions than ‘knit 2, purl 4, knit 2’ and so on, but hey, at least it will be pretty. Assuming, of course, that I can untangle all my yarn enough to actually *knit* with it.

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It has been a truly lovely weekend, even with the frustration of winding yarn that refuses to untangle. The weather decided to finally stop with the grey and gloomy and sprung a bit of early spring on us, to the point that yesterday and today it was warm enough to open the windows and let in the sun, and this afternoon we even broke down and put on shorts. The cats have been quite happy to have open windows again, taking no time at all to crowd onto the sills, noses pressed to the screens and whiskers twitching wildly with the excitement of all the new smells. Plus, with all the new plants in the backyard there are new things to watch and smell – including all the birds who have been delighted at the fact that our small spate of gardening Thursday night uncovered all manner of bugs and worms to eat.

I’d fully intended to try to get a bike ride in yesterday afternoon but instead ended up coming home from getting our taxes done (we’re getting a refund – phew!) and curled up in bed with an ice pack and large quantities of ibuprofin until my head decided that it would give up and make the migraine go away. So this afternoon, since Richard had a meeting after church and wasn’t going to be available anyway, I poked at my dad until he agreed to go riding with me (it didn’t take much poking). After lunch we each headed to our respective houses to change and then I rode over to meet him and we meandered around town for about five miles, with only one brief detour to check out the newest housing development being constructed on the other side of town. With those five miles plus the ride to and from my parents house, I managed to rack up another ten miles toward the 1000 mile goal – not as much as I might have liked to accomplish this weekend, but better than no miles at all.

Remember that raised flower bed we built last summer out of a few tons of rocks, then filled with a few tons of dirt, then surrounded by another ton of paving stones? Well after half a year of growing nothing more than a bumper crop of some rather determined weeds (thanks in no small part to the impressive storms we’ve had lately), last night we finally filled it with actual flowers.

A few months ago we ordered a pre-planned garden set from High Country Gardens, which specializes in plants that do well in drought-prone areas, and they were finally delivered today. The instant I got home I tore open the box and carefully plucked out a few dozen plastic bagged pots, and then Richard and I went outside with large mixing spoons (because we are a garden trowel deficient household), and in an extremely quick rush of laying out all the little pots and consulting the sheet of info on how big and wide each of them will get and trying to remember which was which and getting very confused, we somehow managed to get all of them planted before it was too dark outside to see what we were doing.

You can see the collection we planted here (it’s the one on the top of the page – the ‘Hot and Sunny’ collection). Of course, currently it looks less like the colorful perfusion of foliage you see in the picture on their website and more like a few random dots of sad and pathetic half-wilted weeds scattered in some vague semblance of order in a flower bed too big for such itty bitty patches of green. But if all goes as planned, in a few months those teeny little half-wilted plants will fill that huge raised flower bed we spent so much time building with lots and lots of beautiful flowers.

Last night I wasn’t in the mood to do anything productive. All I wanted to do was eat dinner and sit in front of the TV and watch something mindless. Unfortunately we didn’t have any DVD’s of Star Trek: Next Generation episodes left to watch (the next batch isn’t scheduled to arrive until later in the week) so we were reduced to flipping through the channels looking for a relatively non-offensive sitcom.

Anyway, as we sat there eating our dinner and staring slack-jawed at the TV I saw a commercial that made me sit up and take notice. New radio station in Sacramento. A new *oldies* radio station. Those oldies it plays? Would be music from the 80’s.

Way to smack me upside the head with the ‘old’ stick, people. The music I grew up with is now classified as ‘oldies’. Ouch.

I did, of course, immediately tune one of the buttons on my car radio to that station this morning as soon as I got in, and then spent the entire drive to work belting out songs I still apparently know by heart even though I haven’t heard some of them in over ten years. Because while I may be old, nothing says I actually have to *act* it.

As an aside, last night for dinner we decided to give the new low carb, low fat pizza from Papa Murphy’s a try. I am not normally a fan of thin crust pizzas, but one learns to do a lot of compromising in the name of counting one’s Points.

Surprisingly, it was quite good, and didn’t taste all that much different than their regular pizza, even for having half the amount of cheese and a crispy sliver of crust. I think we’ll definitely be eating that again. Although maybe next time I’ll load my half with extra veggies, just to make it feel more like the bulkier pizza I’m used to.

A few weeks ago our choir director noted that the minister had asked for the choir to sing a special song this coming Sunday, to go with her sermon. He gave us the choice between this song we’d never heard versus one that is lovely, but extremely difficult to sing. Naturally, the choir chose the one we’ve never heard, because we are nothing if not prone to music-related insanity.

We got the choral part of the song last Thursday, and then some of who are more insane than others (one of those would be me) volunteered to do the solos, all still without having actually heard the whole song. It was only after this all happened that he gave us poor soloists the sheet music, and accompanying mp3’s, and we all realized just what the heck we had gotten ourselves into.

If you have access to someone with the latest Sting CD, go borrow it from them. Then listen to “Dead Man’s Rope”. It sounds deceptively easy, doesn’t it, until you realize that how impossible the rhythm is to follow. The only saving grace is that all the solo work is, well, solo, so if we didn’t stick exactly to the rhythms or notes written we would be okay.

We drove down to Richard’s parents Thursday night so we would be there early enough for the wedding rehearsal this morning without having to fight the Bay area traffic, but we got a later start because I insisted on going to choir practice first, if only to have a chance to actually sing the song at least once all the way through.

It was painful. We were all struggling, and by the end of the night the pool of soloists had dwindled to just three of us. I burned the song onto a CD and subjected Richard to far too many repetitions of it as we drove to San Jose and back over the course of the last few days, trying desperately to figure out just how to get my notes, and how to rewrite the phrases in my head so they fit into my vocal range.

This morning during practice it finally clicked for me and for the other two soloists. When we sang it in church I think we amazed them. It’s a different type of music than we normally do, but somehow, today, it worked.

I know that there is no possible way to get a recording of the songs we did for the Robert Burns dinner, even though I would love to at least have gotten a chance to hear how we really sounded (because it’s very different being one of the singers than being one of the audience). Someone did record the song this morning in church. I only hope it sounds as good when I hear it again as it felt when we sang.

The rehearsal went as all wedding rehearsals do. We milled around in a small and slightly confused group until the wedding coordinator ordered us to our various spots (she came by her nickname of ‘the wedding Nazi’ honestly, although I’m not so sure she would have found the same humor in the moniker as the rest of us). The flower girl freaked at the accumulation of strangers, combined with being in a huge and strange place, and refused to rehearse. My mom (the ‘official officiate who will be officiating at the wedding’ – title courtesy of the perky woman who was the site coordinator) slapped sticky notes with hastily scribbled reminders all over the ceremony in her little notebook. We bridesmaids did our best to take things as non-seriously as possible and skipped down the aisle during the second practice round. In other words, everything went as expected for a wedding rehearsal – especially one early in the morning when not everyone had had their coffee first.

Afterwards people trickled back to Richard’s parents’ house over the next few hours for the rehearsal lunch until the house was full of wedding party members and their respective families. There was talking and there was eating and there was mingling for hours and hours.

There was non-wedding stuff during the rehearsal lunch as well. Richard and I got to drive his aunt’s shiny new red Prius – which is just like the one we want to get (well, either red or blue), and fell even further in like with the car. The entire family took turns entertaining Richard’s cousin’s little girl (that would be his first cousin once removed, for those of you who actually comprehend that part of the family tree concept), and she, in turn, charmed every single one of us until we would all have cheerfully done anything just to get her to laugh once more. She’s a fairy-like child, with one of those little pixie faces and a mop of red curls and we all agreed she would not look at all out of place sporting wings and taking part in a Midsummer Night’s Dream.

At one point Richard’s mom and I drove over to the Almost Twin’s house, so I could see their newest cats (they have huge cats – the type that are almost wildcat – huge ears and long, lean bodies, and they slink with wildcat grace. Such a distinct difference than our motley crew of mix-breed pound kitties. But lovely as they are, I prefer our cats to theirs). Later that night a smaller group of us piled into a car and had a late dinner at a Japanese restaurant. For doing nothing more strenuous than mingling for hours with family and friends, it was an exhausting day.

Yesterday all we had to do was get to the site and rehearse. Today started far earlier. I pretty much insisted that we stop by Starbucks on the way to the site because I needed coffee and food, in that order, and Richard was feeling the same way. We retired to our respective rooms – bridesmaids and brides in a little conference room on one side of the hall and the groomsmen and usher on the other side. It didn’t take us long to get dressed so we had plenty of time to keep the Almost Twin calm and peer out the windows at all the arriving guests. There was a brief exodus to the front of the club to take pictures and then it was back to the room to pace and wait and check each other’s lipstick for the umpteenth time before it was time.

It was a lovely wedding, as all weddings are. No one slipped on the tile floor. The flower girl forgot to drop her petals until she reached the front and then remembered, flinging them with great concentration onto the floor in front of her because we’d told her how happy the bride would be to have the floor made so pretty. During the ceremony I could see one of the groomsmen turning a bit red in the face from trying not to cry and the groom himself was sweating nervously. The flowers were beautiful and the arboretum provided the perfect backdrop. One of the screens fell during the ceremony, but it happened so quickly after the wedding kiss that it gave us all something to tease them about later.

There was applause and then there were more pictures. There was food and dancing. There was sun directly in the eyes of all of us sitting at the head table, until we all abandoned our assigned seating and took over empty chairs at other tables with less of a glare. There was cake and hugs and noisy laughter and little girls holding hands spinning as fast as they could go so their skirts would swirl in great circles around them, and then there were hugs and kisses and good-byes, and welcomes to the family.

And it was perfect, as all weddings are perfect. But it was especially perfect because it was theirs.

When Richard and I left Benthic Creatures last year, I went straight to a fulltime job (which I still have, and still like quite a bit) while he went back into the temp pool for the university and was immediately placed in a technical position, wrangling databases and coordinating development. A few weeks ago the department finally got approval for funding to hire for the position he’s been doing, and there was extremely strong encouragement from all of his coworkers to apply.

Friday morning they finally told him he got the job. After nearly a year of temping, he’s back to permanent status. To say that we are both relieved is putting it mildly. And the main reason we’ve been hoping for this is that now he finally will have benefits of his own.

It’s not that we’ve been without benefits – we’ve both been covered by the insurance provided by my employer – but the insurance provider is one of the worst either of us has ever had to deal with. It’s not so much a problem for me since I’m relatively healthy, and usually only have to go see a doctor for that yearly exam that all women love so much. But for Richard, with his asthma and allergies and everything that goes along with them, the type and extent of the health insurance makes a huge difference. So – color me heaving a huge sigh of relief.

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We started the day this morning by shrugging on our biking clothes and going out for a 6 mile ride. It was raining lightly and it’s still mostly dark outside at the time we were riding, and we had to ride into the wind on the way home, and the water from the rain kept dripping in my eyes and running into my ears (Cold! Cold!). But it actually felt good to ride again, if only because it meant that we’re both finally recovered from this winter’s batch of illness and ready to start racking up the miles to reach that 1000-mile goal.

Then I got to go do something that I’ve always really dreaded in the past. I got to go to the dentist to get some cavities filled. This is because I have horrible teeth, made worse by years of braces when I was younger, and they get cavities if you even think about decay in their presence.

This time, however, wasn’t bad at all. For one thing, the dentist asked if I wanted to try without the Novocain, which took me completely by surprise because it had never even been an option anywhere else. But as he pointed out, they were shallow cavities, nowhere near the roots. So I figured why not, and they were the quickest and least intrusive cavities I’ve ever had filled.

Of course, as I discovered later in the day, there is one benefit to Novocain. The numb feeling in your jaw reminds you you’ve had cavities, so you do not accidentally try to chew on that side of the mouth later and get a sudden and rather painful reminder. But all it took was one bite of my sandwich to let me know that chewing needed to be more carefully planned, and all was fine.