Transportation

I hopped on the bike yesterday, not for training, and not even necessarily for fun, but for transportation. I dropped off the S4 at Cantech Automotive for a new battery, new brake fluid and rear pads, rear diff oil check, and a NYS inspection. Cantech looks like a doctor's office, except the patients are cars. You could eat off the shop floor, and with Ferraris and Lamborghinis frequently arriving there for service, it's easy to trust that they know what they're doing. I can't wait to see the bill, which will likely look like it came from a doctor's office as well, except without insurance covering anything.

After dropping off the baby, I pulled my bike out of the back and took off for home. My saddle was creaking up a storm, and that spot of pain on my right sit bone came on after about ten miles. I need a new saddle, new shorts, or a new sit bone, or possibly a combination of those. On the way home, a section of road stretched out before me that was dead flat and straight as an arrow. I put it in the 53x15 and stood, winding it up slowly. I dropped it into the 14, then 13, then 12, still standing. I pushed on, then sat down and cruised at 32mph for about twenty seconds before my guts started to remind me of two things. One was that I haven't done many miles and even fewer with any intensity whatsoever. The second was that I had only very recently eaten a tuna sandwich for lunch. Urp.

My speed dropped and I swallowed a few times to make sure the tuna stayed down, then recovered and just cruised the rest of the way home, enjoying being outside in the 92 degree heat and thinking about having been alive for 36 years.

Yup, yesterday was my birthday and a reminder of the relentless march of time. I like it low-key on my birthday, and after my ride home, I just spent a little time in the garden pulling weeds then sat down to a simple dinner and presents (!) with Sue. Here's where things got interesting.

Sue is an expert gift-wrapper, and always ties what seem like kevlar-reinforced ribbons around boxes. Getting into a gift is always an exercise in finding tools sharp enough for the task. I made a comment about the green and white ribbon around the box she handed me.

"Your high school colors," Sue noted.

"Actually," I said, "my high school colors were green and gold. Green and white were the colors at Binghamton University."

I then launched into a story about the mascots at Binghamton. When I attended, you see, the teams were the Binghamton Colonials, and the mascot was a traditional revolutionary war era figure. Shortly after I graduated, they changed the mascot to be a bearcat. They publicized the qualities of the fierce and mythical bearcat. My friend and classmate, Bill, pointed out that the bearcat is not a mythical beast at all, but a real live creature, fairly small in size, that eats mainly fruit. Hardly the thing for a mascot viciously eating up opposing teams. We had generally thought the bearcat was ridiculous, and that the traditional colonial had more class. Related to the university's image, they had replaced the name "SUNY Binghamton" as we knew it with "Binghamton University" and the new name never sounded right to us.

So I finally wrapped up my monologue and continued opening the box, which turned out to contain four separately wrapped items. The first was a book that looks very interesting. As I picked up the next item, Sue said, "You might laugh pretty hard when you see this."

It was a t-shirt. I held it up and read the front:

Binghamton
University
Bearcats

D'Oh!

The next two items were a hoodie reading "Binghamton University" and a pair of gym shorts with "Binghamton University" and a bearcat pawprint on the leg. Double d'oh!

So I am now all set for Binghamton Bearcat clothing, and now I just have to figure out how to extract my paw from my mouth.