My dog is currently eating a large piece of raw sweet potato.
Very, very loudly.
manintheboat, this afternoon: "I should know enough to not send a man and a dog to clean up a bunch of blood." When a large piece of buffalo steak thawed in the fridge, it leaked extensively, and I figured Lily was going to deal with the stuff from nose-level down, while I dealt with the stuff above that. Don't assume.

I went out riding today. Huuuuge wind from the west, so I tore along east out to Brighton on a modified Toxic Waste Ride, maybe 60km or thereabouts.

At one point, there was a coyote sitting beside the road, just watching cars (and me) go by.

At some point in the middle of nowhere, north of the old airport and deep in an industrial district -- like, the only things nearby were huge parking lots filled with semi truck trailers and a couple fenced yards filled with rusting Caterpillar Tractor parts -- what to my wandering eye should appear but a couple with shaved heads, well, uh, coupling. More or less right beside the road. Usually those sorts of shenanigans only go on in more populated areas: we were a couple km from the nearest house or reasonable place to stay. Generally speaking, this is a sign that Spring is upon us. It was an odd place to be overtaken by the hornies, is all I'm saying. It was probably an extreme version of our general Colorado fall habit, where, come late September, every good weekend is met by an onslaught of people desperate to get in one last good weekend outside before The Coming Of Winter. And, then, the next weekend, same thing. Two months later, we're all exhausted because we've been desperately running around like maniacs every weekend. Exhausting.

There's one bit where the old route used to be on the road, but they've put in a path a half-dozen meters to one side. People who have been riding that way for a while still use the road (in part because if you're on the path, cars don't see you and then they run you down at intersections, one of several reasons why bike paths that aren't well-separated are so much more dangerous than riding on the road in traffic. John Forester estimated 10,000 times more dangerous, while other less biased people like the NTSB have claimed more like 100 times more dangerous.) My route led me across a park and onto the path, which I took intending to move over to the road at one of the points where they converge, so I'm powering through flocks of geese (yelling HONK! HONK! because I think it's funny) and gulls and their accumulated fewmets and I look over at the road beside me. There are three dudes on really sheik bikes, aero bars, aero wheels, slick matching lycra jerseys, drafting along like a freight train. Cool: maybe I can catch up with them and draft them for a bit. Then more geese to dodge, some kids, back into an open area, I look over, and I'm still right beside them. Hm, interesting. So we got to the stoplight, which was red, and all conglomerated, and since I don't have a shy bone anywhere in my body I started trying to talk to them, mentioned the coyote (didn't mention the people scrogging, since these were total strangers, and I only tell stuff like that to people I kind of know... well, except for the half of you I don't know, but hey, my journal's marked adult concepts so at least you know what you're in for.) The guys were having none of it. They answered only in monosyllables, "yeah" and "huh." I thought . o O (okay, fine, be that way) so when the cross-light turned yellow I clipped in, balanced at a dead stop, and took off just as the light turned green, like my butt was on fire (a phrase I picked up from sistawendy , as she used to say about Her Puppiness.) Cranked it up to 35k into the headwind, since we were now on the homeward track, put my elbows on the hoods for the Pete Penseyres version of aero handlebars, cranked the speed up a bit more, and left all three of them behind, with their nice fancy expensive lah-di-dah bikes. Posers.

Somewhere in the middle of Speer, I saw a guy headed the other way on a black fixie. He looked like Lyle Lovett, all in black, black bike, and he was surfing: wind at his back, standing up on his bike, one foot on the saddle and the other on the handlebars, arms outstretched to catch as much wind as possible, zooming along in the other direction. It was a very cool Bad Idea In Action.

Here's something I like about Colorado. We have mostly cloudless days almost every day, but right as the sun goes down and the temperature drops, all the clouds suddenly show up, clustered along the mountains to the west, for Yet Another Beautiful Sunset.

ziz and his lady dropped off an enormous spice cake. That was all we ate the whole morning. manintheboat made something fabulous for dinner. Day made of awesome: it just needed to be about twice as long.