Saturday was the official “Outside Yard Work Day” at the Jenum household. Since I’m about as far away from having a “green thumb” as you can get, I try to keep my spring planting to a bare minimum. This year, the focus is simply on the front yard – so that there is a hint of color and order to the house as people drive by. I left things really barren last year, so I’ve stepped up the visuals to include several flower urns, some flowers by the mailbox, and a general cleaning/planting within the main flowerbed in the front yard.

Saturday was also the day for The Damn Pool™ to have its cover removed and see the light of day. Normally, I am opening the pool in April – as it is generally cheaper to have the pool circulating through the filter system even in the cold weather than to deal with extra chemicals needed for later openings. But, circumstances this year never allowed for that event to happen.

There is a lot of crap in the pool, but the water is clear and should be ready for swimming in no time

Taking the cover off the pool has all the same nervous trepidation of opening a gift from a true enemy. You never know what might be lurking inside and how horrible the sight may be. With the right chemical preparation in the fall, I have rarely had any spring problems with the water quality. The pool bottom is rather dirty due to all the wonderful, creepy-crawling creatures that find their way into the pool, but the water clarity is generally good. The images above show that this year was much the same. Over the next few days, I’ll work to get the final cleaning stages complete and hopefully have a pristine pool in the back yard.

With the pool opened, yardwork accomplished, and a quick trip to the tennis courts with my daughter completed, I headed out for a brief ride to keep some base into my body. Here are the stats loaded up to the Garmin site.

I looked back into the site’s archive and saw that I had about 354 outdoor miles into the bike at this same time last year (mid-May). For this year, between the New Steed™ and the Old Steed™, I have around 623 outdoor miles. I’m glad to have such a higher pace for mileage and have been given some higher hopes of reaching my 2000 mile season this year. If I keep the steady riding schedule that I have done within the past month, 1600 more miles shouldn’t be too hard to accomplish.

This has been an ideal spring for getting plenty of miles on the bike and I am on-pace for a good year of riding

The ride itself had a few Events Of Note (EON™). I first bore witness to a large “take down” by the local Plymouth police. They must have found some type of bad guy, because they engaged over 5 squad cars to work over a single arrest. Just a typical, slow night of crime in the west surburbs. Later in the ride, I was also nearly taken out by an asshole in a BMW convertible. I was approaching a righthand turn and saw the car approaching from the opposite direction, signaling to turn left onto the same road as I was about to enter. Instead of slowing and allowing me to enter the road first (which I had the right-of-way), this guy decides to make the turn and forced me to brake hard to avoid a collision (which I would have lost). Given that we were looking eye-to-eye during this whole event, the guy realized that he was an asshole and waved apologetically. I didn’t accept the apology and glared to ensure he knew clearly that he was, in fact, an asshole in a BMW.

As I mentioned in the last post, I really do not like catching/passing cyclists on the road. The Saturday ride included another experience where I saw a rider about 1/3 of a mile up the road and slowly brought him closer. He was going a good steady pace and I noticed that I didn’t gain much on him on flatter sections, where I was holding a good 21 mph average. Most of my gains were on hills, where I could tell that he wasn’t hammering the pedals very hard and getting up and out of the saddle to crest. In my youth, I would keep a larger gear and work to slowly crank up hills. Now, instead, I gear down and keep a steady cadence that appears to be more efficient.

After about 2 miles of following, I was just about to catch him when he turned off and followed a different road from my planned route. This was actually a good thing, as I really didn’t want to interact with this guy and was instead trying to enjoy the ride without the distraction of another cyclists. But, it was not the last time I saw him, and a few turns later we were both on the same road again, only this time I was ahead. I didn’t look back while finishing the ride, though, because I was done with worrying about the position of another cyclist on the road. I wondered if he might of picked up his pace to see if he could have caught me.

I wouldn’t be surprised if he did, since I almost always do the same when I see another rider up the road.