Spring Break
By act of Congress, Daylight Savings Time came three weeks earlier this year than it used to, and for anyone like me who lives with a Seasonal Affect Disorder sufferer, this is big government looking out for the little guy, at last.
I'm off from work this week, although we're not going anywhere this year. I've got plenty of vacation time accrued, and last Friday I finished the only proposal I had to write, and I have no current projects except for a few administrative things that got put onto my plan just to make sure that no matter how much I accomplish this year in business process assessment consulting gigs, bids and proposals written, contract awards earned and solution implementation projects completed, I won't complete everything on my annual performance plan, so I won't get rated above "meets expectations," and the corporate fabric will be safe from runs and snags for another year. So on Friday I decided to take the week off. That's the way my vacations work: I work like hell to get caught up and then once every year or so if I'm humping hard all the time, I actually find myself between projects, so to speak, with nothing (but the administrivia) to do, so I announce that I'm taking a week off and go home and putz around the house, get out on some extra bike rides, read books, watch movies, take naps.
Yesterday was warm and rainy but today was warmer and sunny. I got up an hour or so later than if I'd been working, read the newspapers, and then poured an extra cup of coffee and dragged my Park workstand out to the driveway and clamped the Rivendell to it. Late morning, sunny, spring literally in the air. Winter riding has been hard on the brakes and drivetrain. I spent an hour or so disassembling and lubricating and adjusting the brakes, cleaning the chain and chainrings and sprockets and derailleurs. As long as the brakes were off the bike, dangling from the cables, I pulled the wheels and cleaned most of the frame and fork with a dry cloth, taking care not to scratch the forest green painted frame or the gold tracing that Janie had painted by hand around the points and scrolls of the Rivendell's fancy lugwork.
"She did a nice job, didn't she?"
"Yeah," I say, squatting down to work the cloth in behind the crank and chainrings, whipping my cloth with both hands like a shoeshiner across the bottom bracket.
"She's done a nice job with the boys, too."
"All of them, you mean? Not just Chance?"
"Why do you ask me that?"
"Deb," I said, hanging my cloth over the bike's top tube and standing to talk, but she was gone already, like she always is.