A Sure Sign of Fall

Another sure sign of Fall. It’s clean-up day around here. Of course, others might just call this routine housekeeping, but I married a bike racer, and vice-versa, and neither of us get particularly excited about vacuuming and cleaning and those sorts of things.
The Giro ride was nice, kind of a repeat of yesterday but a bit faster. I hung around afterward talking with a "new" rider with a nifty LeMond Carbon. I noticed during the ride that he looked quite at home on his bike – stable, strong and safe – and I wondered aloud to Robin if he might be visiting from out of town, since I didn’t recognize him. Robin immediately rode up to him and asked him his name (which as usual I immediately forgot). Turns out he’s been doing a lot of riding with the triathlete group, and decided to give our ride a try today, since he’s thinking about riding the Rocktoberfest race next weekend. It will be his first race. He looks like he has a lot of natural talent, and I’d like to see him continue racing with us next year.
After visiting with a couple of The Wife’s sisters (one is in town from Houston) last night over dinner, which involved both the consumption of much wine and the inhalation of much nasty cigarette smoke, The Wife, owing at least partially to the combined effects of alcohol and anoxia, invited them over for dinner at our place tonight. I was already struggling to keep my eyes open, what with the nonstop conversation about who did what to whom – typical girl talk, I guess – and was just too wasted to come up with a viable alternative.
Well, as usual, when I returned from the Giro ride this morning, one thing led to another and before I knew what hit me I was down on my hands and knees cleaning the front porch floor. Eventually, hedges were trimmed, plants were planted, floors were vacuumed, etc. You get the picture. So the place looks a little more clean and organized than usual today, which is nice.
I had originally been planning to work on the old Triumph GT-6 (yes mine is that color. no, it doesn't look this good!) that is rusting away in my garage, to install some new carburetter bits and see if I could get it started. As it turned out, it was really too hot to be working under that tin roof anyway today – it got up to at least 90F, and even now around 5 p.m. it’s still 89. Oh well, "best laid plans . . ."