Remodeling

Monday they started tearing my kitchen apart.  Literally. We have started down that long dark road of renovation.  These things never go quite as planned, nor under budget.  After ripping out one wall I was glad to see that other than some old termite damage there wasn't any evidence of rotten wood.  There were surprises, of course.  When we took out an old cypress pantry that had clearly been added to the kitchen a very long time ago, we found a sheet of newspaper from 1940 on top of it.  The house dates from 1920, so I guess it took 20 years for the first remodeling job. There are all sorts of other little surprises, such as walls that don't line up with each other. We are hoping to salvage the original pine floor, which was hidden under three strata of renovations.  First, there was sheet linoleum glued to the original floor. 

On top of that was that particle board stuff, and glued on top of that was the rubber or vinyl tile that we've been living with for the past twenty-five years.  Since the relatively porous particle board was sandwiched between two basically waterproof layers, and since you knew water was going to find its way into it, I wasn't too surprised to find a fair amount of mold growing in there.  Anyway, I'm sure there will be more surprises to come.

So this morning the sky was cloudy and there was rain slowly approaching the city.  After missing so many miles last week, I was in no mood to throw in the towel too quickly today, so I aired up the tires on the rain bike, put on my old shoes with the old Look cleats on them, and headed off for the levee in the thick 65-degree morning air.  It had been raining for much of the night and the streets were damp which resulted in a fairly deserted bike path.  Without a speedometer I felt a little lost, and was running a little late, but I got in a good 22 miles anyway.  It's looking like the rest of the week should be fairly nice with mild temperatures and low chances of rain.

On the new bike front, I'm waiting for a couple of things to arrive before starting to build up the Bianchi, and just picked up a pair of Mavic wheels from Dwight so I will be able to leave my regular training wheels on the Orbea. 

I had my final collarbone followup appointment at TISM this afternoon. Although I have been feeling rather frustrated with the rate at which things have been healing, Dr. Savoie seemed pleased with the x-rays and commented that the callus looked good.  He said I was basically good to go and that it would probably be the better part of a year before everything was fully, totally healed.