Thought I’d post a little update for the masses. Yes, I’m talking to you! Not much going on here lately. Things appear to be all falling in place for our trip to Washington next week. We’ve got the hotel, we’ve got folks lined up to watch the kiddoes. I am giving a talk at the ring ceremony which I’m still working on, but all in all we look to be in good shape.

My EFC trip that was scheduled for the week after (the 26th) has been postponed indefinitely due to the wimping out of my friend that was supposed to go with me. So I’m still looking to figure out when to do that.

Still been riding my bike in my undying quest to visit every street in Madeira. I’ve now finished 7 of the 10 routes – only 3 more to go. I feel like I’m getting a bit better especially on the hills, but my speed is slower than the earlier routes. One problem that I’ve been having is an excessive amount of hills. The problem is all the side streets. The main streets are more or less flat (with occasional gradiation). But a lot of the side-streets / subdivisions are up hills from the main roads. Which sucks for 2 reasons.

• I usually have to turn to get up there, which means I can’t get a good head of steam – one exception was last night when I zoomed down Ken Arbre up Rollaway Road which got me a good ways up the hill.
• And more annoyingly, I can’t really benefit from the downhill, because I usually have to be riding the brakes to make sure I can stop at the main road (i.e. so cars don’t kill me)

In any case, I’m not sure what I’m going to do next – I hope to be finished sometime next week before our trip. I did copy a map and draw a 2 mile circle around my house – one thought was to ride on every road within the circle and then just keep expanding it as I go. Another thought was every street in the 45243 zip code, or just draw some set of arbitrary boundaries (like US-50, the Little Miami, OH-126 and Kenwood/Plainville). It would be neat to ride my bike to and/or from work too – that’s about 14 miles.