Last week’s list:

• Resume daily push ups.
  • Failure. I think I might take this off the list for now.
• Rearrange furniture in craft room and den of slack
  • Failure, we really need a rainy day for this and thankfully we didn’t get one of those this weeked. I’ll leave this on the list for the upcoming week as it currently looks like rain on Saturday.
• Finish Find Your Fade
  • Success!
• Establish leftover yardage amounts from yarn used for find your fade
  • This is also done. Bonus, I had to have Mr. Ink help me with the math, weighing the skeins in grams and figuring out what that would equal in meters using the amounts listed in the entry for this yarn in the yarn database on Rav. I am not so math minded, so for me this was kind of a big deal.
• Work on Big Waffle, get into next color at least
  • I did this, worked my way into the next color and that’s about it. I then moved on to a couple different projects.
• Spin a little
  • More than a little, I spent most of the weekend spinning, you’ll have to see those updates below.
• Ride Bike Every Day!
  • Did this too, and there are stories.
• Work on something from the master list of house projects
  • My master list house project work was to move plants out of the veggie garden and rehome them elsewhere. There are a couple tulips left, but I want to see what they look like before I rehome them.
• Commute to work by bike one time this week
  • Did not manage this one. It seemed like such a good idea, but on the days I actually could do this, it was 33F in the morning, and I just…couldn’t bring myself to do that.

Spinning:

I did a whole bunch of spinning this week, bringing my current batt project far further along. I finished the singles.

They were a pleasure to spin, and they are both smooth and chunky, and definitely luxurious. I did also begin plying, while hanging out on the patio in weather in the high 70s.

I am more happy than I thought I would be with this 3 ply, the yarn has a ton of depth, in addition to it’s chunky bits. Far more color than I imagined seems to be making an appearance. I got this large bobbin finished, but didn’t get an opportunity to start another bobbin. It should be done in the very near future, if not tonight.

Biking:

There’s quite a lot to talk about for both Friday and Sunday’s rides. Saturday’s ride was just a simple one around the block, as between gardening and going to the botanical gardens, we’d already been on our feet all day.

On Friday, Miss Butterfly and I drove to a local park, then hopped on our bikes to ride to another bigger park. There were pokemon there she wanted to get, so we knew it would be a slower roll around the park, with numerous stops. It was getting pretty late as we wrapped up our trip, and she was about to get one last pokemon when it happened. I heard what sounded like a gunshot, and then the hiss of high pressure air leaving my tire. My fatbike got an epic flat. It scared Miss Butterfly quite a bit, and as she turned around she said she could see sticks on the trail flying to the sides, so large was the hole to release air pressure.

Quite frankly, there’s no turning back from that kind of flat. I could have tried to fix it, but first of all, I didn’t have my supplies as I knew this to be a short trip, and the likelihood of being able to do so anyhow is pretty slim with as large a burst as it was. In fact, I didn’t even look at it. I phoned Mr. Ink, but I knew I wasn’t going to catch up with him, he’d have been out gardening. And then I started walking, pushing my bike. Miss Butterfly wasn’t too upset, she entertained herself by riding slowly and doing tricks on her bike. We got home far later than anticipated, but in the end no harm done.

Once in the car, we hit every single red light on the way home, further annoying me. I got home, took the bikes off the car, and put my fat bike away without even bothering to look at the flat. Of course, Miss Butterfly headed right out to Mr. Ink to tattle about it, telling him he’d better watch out, I was annoyed! This was really only half true. I was annoyed, but I wasn’t taking it out on my family!

Saturday morning I took a look at the tire. I had a larger than half inch gash in the tire itself, and the tube was looking terrible as well. I didn’t have a spare tube for that bike, so I pulled out my patch kit. Unfortunately, the glue on it was dried and unusable. We will patch both the tire and the tube, as fat bike tires are ridiculously expensive. I’ll keep the patched tube as a spare, as a good friend of mine had a spare fat bike tube from her bike which she just converted to tubeless tires. I should be up and running on the fat bike again shortly.

Next Up, Sunday’s ride. We had planned to ride as a family from our house to meet up with a small group of cyclists for a family friendly jaunt around town. We decided to ride to a restaurant first to have lunch. We left the house, headed down our long hill, and got on our trail. Now, I am sure I’ve mentioned it before but in case it’s been forgotten, I hate snakes. REALLY hate them. And, I recognize them very quickly. Mr. Ink was pretty far ahead of Miss Butterfly and me when I looked at what was in the road and yelled “SNAKE!” By this time, Mr. Ink had already gotten past it. Miss Butterfly and I came to a screeching halt far away from the large bull snake over the trail.

Mr. Ink tried to get it to move along, but in true bull snake bad attitude form, it decided to do it’s impressive impression of a rattlesnake instead, coiling up, hissing, rattling its tail, and acting like it was going to strike Mr. Ink. In fact, soon it had him fooled, even though in our area of the country, rattlers are very rare. Other cyclists passed by as well, not noticing what we were stopped for and it was rather comical to watch them startle and their bike shake and swerve as they came right up on a coiled snake. In the end, Miss Butterfly and I walked through the grass, giving that thing a really WIDE berth. Mr. Ink wanted to take a photo, but thankfully he hadn’t brought his camera.

After that rather shudder worthy encounter, we had quite a nice day. Miss Butterfly saw a ground hog, and we got quite close to geese on the trail, and she decided she enjoyed seeing wildlife by bike. We had lunch, we met up with friends and Miss Butterfly participated in her first ever group ride. She followed our fearless leader very nicely, staying a couple feet away from the leader’s back tire the entire time. She was an extremely consistent rider. We did some trails, some road riding with a bike lane, and even a little road riding without a bike lane and she didn’t get too upset about any of it.

We’d gotten a bit ahead of our group so we stopped to see a fun cement art installation and she wanted a photo. This is about 2/3 of our way through our ride. We ended up with over 17 miles yesterday, a personal record for Miss Butterfly. She got home with sore legs and couldn’t wait to make herself a large smoothie. We are all slightly burned today, and have that residual next day hunger from a nice long hilly bike ride. (I had to get up at 4:30 a.m. to have food, as I couldn’t sleep through my hunger!)

All in all, a great family oriented weekend. I’ve got photos, just a few, from the botanical garden as well. It’s a bit of a problem going there, as we always find new plants that we want to add to our own garden.

List for this week:

• Ride Bike Every Day
• Finish Lintilla shawl
• Finish brown batt plying project
• Work on some corespun yarn
• 3 repeats of Lighter Than Perfume shawl
• Work on something off the master house list.
• Rearrange furniture in craft room and den of slack (Weather permitting)
• Get Miss Butterfly a haircut!