1001 Miles Today

The weather didn't look too favorable for riding the bicycle later in the day so I got in a quick early right this morning (windy though! at about 25 mph from the south). And I did break 1000 miles on the way in as the odometer is reading 1001 and 64 hours of riding time for the year. Feels kinda good.

I must admit I stayed up pretty late last night though as I started working on the Gateway laptop downstairs, installing Windows XP's SP3 update. Of course, once you start down some roads you have to keep going and this was no exception. I finally wrapped it up (successfully) at about 2:30 this morning. Now both PC's and the Mac virtual machine are running SP3 and none seem to be having any problems.

Huge flooding problems all over eastern Iowa as they say here in Cedar Rapids that it's much worse than even the flood of 1993. The NBC affiliate, KWWL channel 7, was even off the air for some time this morning so they may have pretty severe problems at their studio up in Waterloo. I know many people in Cedar Falls are not able to leave their houses because of local road flooding, even if they don't have water in their homes.

Right now, the creeks are still risin' and 1-3 inches of rain is forecast for the next several days with a break coming by the weekend.

Good news on the RAGBRAI front ... I got my rider's packet in the mail. I should have about 1500 miles in by the start of the ride. It will be fun and it will be interesting to see how things play out as far as getting a place to stay on a day by day basis. I think I'll replace the chain and tires on the bike about a week before the ride, but shouldn't need much in the way of maintenance beyond that as this bike is just over a year old and I keep it pretty well maintained. Checked at the bike shop and they seem to be too busy to take a look at it without keeping it for two weeks (not gonna happen!).

Finally, I should mention my just completed trip to Florida where I visited with Larry's mom and stepdad (Wanda and Sam) and played golf last Friday, Saturday and Sunday. It was great fun and they were gracious hosts. Have to do that again when it's a bit colder up here in Iowa. Sure is dry down in the Orlando area, though. Those folks really need rain ... now if there was only a way for us to export some of the Iowa excess ...

Later ...