Windy, Blustery, And I Got Dropped, But It Was A Good Ride.
I got up at 5.30 this morning. Still dark, but 2 days a week I go on an early morning bike ride. We get started at 6 and it’s cold too. Last week it was below zero and I (and everyone) froze.
We have shoe booties but our toes still froze. I had my warmest jacket on zipped right up and I had everything I owned on to keep warm. My body was warm but wow did I have frozen fingers and toes.
But if you ignored that it was a good ride.
This morning wasn’t like that. It wasn’t really cold but it was windy. Really windy, and so it was a tough ride. I got dropped because I couldn’t stay with them. Luckily some others dropped as well.
But of course I’m riding to get fit. And I enjoy it. But overall my main goal is to get fit so if you have to ride as hard as you can to stay on that has to help with keeping fit doesn’t it? There’s no point in riding if you don’t have to ride hard.
The get fit program is working I hope. I’m getting in 3 or 4 rides a week so hopefully that is enough. If I get fitter hopefully I can keep on the back when it’s another hard ride.
I need to get fitter but I think I’m getting there.
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Everyone Needs To Have A Boat.
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I have a small boat. Just a simple aluminum boat, about 11 or 12 feet long. Its got its own trailer so I can tow it, I don’t need to put it on the roof of the car.
I took my family away last week. It was school holidays so everyone had the time off. We decided that we didn’t want to stay at home for the whole holidays so we decided to get away for a few days. 4 days actually, which was nice. It was great though it as raining and there was a really strong wind when we left, though that all went away after a few hours. And then the sun came out and it was really nice.
The resort was nice. I chose it because it had lots of things for kids to do. Kids always need to be occupied, so if you go somewhere where there arent any kids facilities then youve got a problem. Bored kids.
There really isn’t anything worse than bored kids to kill a holiday. They get really grumpy and annoy me and as I like to read a book it’s no fun being hassled by bored kids all the time.
But no bored kids last weekend. There was this huge plastic thingy that they could jump on and they spent hours jumping up and down on that. How they can be so entertained with something as simple as that is beyond me but they loved it, so they were happy.
And in the games room there was something that the kids loved too, a massive tv that had a kids movie showing every night so they just sat in there all the time in the evenings.
And it’s amazing how something like a simple swimming pool can keep kids entertained for hours and hours. I can swim for a little while then I get bored.
But back to the boat. I took it for a couple of reasons. Firstly because I wanted the boat along with us, but also because I wanted to take the kids bikes with us too, and I cant get 2 bikes into the car. But there’s no problems getting 2 kids bikes into the boat. There’s stacks of room.
So we ended up doing a couple of days out in the boat. One along a local river, just puttering around looking at the scenery, a nice picnic on the bank of the river, some swimming for the kids, and a nice shady spot for us to sit after lunch and read our books.
And we did a day on the lake near us too. I bought one of those tyer tube thingies that you pull behind the boat and pulled the kids around the lake on that. They loved it and wouldn’t get off. If you have kids and love water you’ve got to have a boat.
So a boat is a huge bonus. Use it to take the bikes and have the kids entertained along the way. I’m really glad I took the boat.
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The Weekend Is Over It Was Great.
It’s all done, the weekend I mean. And was it a great weekend or what? I loved it, though getting up quite so early was a little taxing. Way too early for me.
It was really early, but I had something to get up for so it wasn’t so bad. But even so getting up when it’s still dark doesn’t do it for me. At 5 in the morning it feels like it’s about midnight. There’s not even any birds.
I picked up my friend and we got started. He had a lot of gear to load into the car and we took longer to get going than I thought was a good idea. Because we were meeting some other cars there and the meeting was at 9am, so we had to get started and get there on time.
And what can you do about weather? Raining. And for the last few months it’s been so great, warm clear weather, just my luck that when I go away it’s raining. Really annoying.
We had to drive to the place where we were camping. It was raining all the way but by the time we got to stop and get out it had pretty much stopped raining, luckily. That was good as I don’t like putting a tent up in the rain, and everything gets wet trying to get it all into the tent.
And most annoyingly when we were driving there seemed to be all sorts of new speed limits to annoy me.
But overall a good weekend. I got a couple of fish so I had fish to eat for dinner. What a treat. I’m looking forward to the next one.
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I’ts Not Just Cows It’s Birds Too
Ive already said how much I like living in the country.
But one of the good things about the country is the birds. (I just love birds).
Out here there are just so many birds. Dozens and dozens of birds. It must be because they like the trees around me because theres always birds and they sit in the branches of the trees and pick off the pods with their beaks and hold them in their claws and eat them one by one slowly.
Although I do like birds they do make a mess of my trees. When they break off a small branch to eat the pods they drop it on the ground and it looks like a battlefield under my trees, bits of branch everywhere. Just everywhere.
They’re parrots, and parrots have strong beaks so they can do all this. But on the positive side they have great colors and they look great. I get them sitting around the veranda that goes around my house, they sit on the railings and look at me inside. And I love to see them there so I sit really still and watch them. If I sit still they don’t go away.
There’s damage to the trees like I said but it’s still great having them around and I love it. I could shoo them away when they start damaging the trees and then I wouldn’t have the damage but I’d rather let them come and sit on my veranda. If I shoo them away they might leave for good.
That’s why I love the country, things like parrots. And other animals too. You don’t get parrots in the city and that’s sad, there’s not enough trees and too many people. Far too many people. Nothing for the parrots to eat and people to scare them away.
And as I say I like all animals not just birds. Animals are so great to have around, as good as birds. I love them all.
I think it’s good for you having animals and birds around. It’s nature and nature is important. It’s like life for everything else around us. So give me the birds and animals around me and I love being around nature. Ha. I’ve just had one of those parrots perch on the veranda right in front of me right now.
I’m not interested in going back to live in the city. There’s so many things that I love about it out here, not just animals and birds.
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Cows Just Have To Be The Best Animals.
I like cows. Theyre so big yet theyre so gentle. In all the time Ive had cows Ive never had a bad moment with them. They arent aggressive at all and they are even tame enough so that my kids can pat them a little, though they dont like being patted too much, they tend to pull back when you pat them. Just pull back a little thats all.
Now of course it’s winter coming now and the grass is short and won’t grow much and so there isn’t a lot of it for the cows to eat you have to feed them hay. I plenty of hay. And that’s the time to pat them.
Now if you’re feeding your hay to your cows then that’s the time to pat them, but it’s also a bit of a drain. You have to feed them every day, without fail. Even if it’s raining you have to feed the cows their hay. If you don’t they starve for the day.
I feed them myself. I like my holidays though so when you go away you have to have something to do so that the cows are fed. I do this.
I have a number of different fields fenced off. I have a total of 4 fenced off. And if I have lots of grass in some then I shut the gate to that one so the grass doesn’t get eaten and keep it there, then when I go away I’ve got a great field with lots of grass. I can open the gate and let the cows in there for a week or so and I’ve got my cows fed while I’m away.
And the cows aren’t silly, they know that there’s grass in there somewhere when they look through the gate so once I open the gate they’re right in there as fast as they can.
And then I come back from the holiday and my cows are happy. And I take them out of the grass paddock and put them back in the main paddock.
I feed my cows right after breakfast. They know when I’m going to feed them and they’re right there sitting in front of the shed in the mornings when I come out to feed them. They get their hay right in front of the shed. Usually 1 1/2 bales of hay for them. But on a cold day I give them 2 bales.
I gave them 2 bales of hay this morning as it was cold. But it’s getting warmer soon and the grass is getting longer, it’s growing. And that’s good because my hay is getting short, I have a shed for hay and it’s pretty empty.
My cows are happy now.
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Yeah. I Got To Go On Holidays.
Yeah, I get to go away this weekend. Im really looking forward to it.
Its with a friend. My family couldn’t come along this weekend so I get to go away with a friend. My family would love to come, but they all have some ballet thingy to go to and they’re stuck going to that.
We are planning to camp. I have a great tent, canvas, water proof, big enough to be comfortable and its forecast to rain, so I may need all of that. I hope it doesnt rain because rain isnt what you need when you go camping.
I don’t like getting up early, I resist it when I can, but we have to go at 6 am Friday. It’s a 3 hour trip to where we are meeting up with some others, and we meet at 9.
As much as I hate to get up early if you’re looking forward to something you just get up and go anyway, so it’s not so much of a problem.
Unfortunately my car is pretty old and I’ve got all my fingers and toes crossed hoping it makes it up there ok. It’s done 540,000 miles so it’ done a lot of work, but it goes fine.
I broke my old fishing rod a while ago and I bought a new one this morning because I plan to do some fishing on Saturday. Saturday is planned to be a free day and so I’m off fishing. And so I needed a new rod.
I made a fishing rod many years ago. I bought a fiberglass blank and all the other gear and made it totally myself and I was pretty pleased with that. That was the rod I broke the other day and I was really disappointed.
Ive used that fishing rod for a lot of years now, and it was a sad day when I broke it. I dont even know how I broke it, I was just walking through the trees and suddenly I noticed the tip of the rod broken off hanging in its own. Boy was I pissed.
It wasn’t as if it was worth a lot of money. It was just the sentimental value to me because I made it myself and I’d broken it. So today I went to a fishing gear shop and bought a new one.
And I couldn’t believe. 25 bucks for a new fishing rod. They certainly aren’t expensive now to buy. But the new one isn’t the one I made. I’d rather my old one than a new one.
I suppose theyre all made in China now, thats why theyre so cheap. Hope it lasts. So thats my weekend coming up. I hope I get a few fish and it doesnt rain too much. Ill write about it soon.
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You’ve Got To Do Something To Keep Fit. I Cycle.
I love cycling, I really do, I just love it.
I came to cycling quite a while ago. Well no not that long ago actually, considering that Im not young. I knew I had to do something to keep fit.
Swimming never did it for me. I mean swimming is boring, really boring. You just swim up and down, up and down, up and down. For hours and hours. Actually it only feels like hours and hours, I rarely swim for more than about 20 minutes, that’s about as long as I can stand the boredom.
There’s that black line underneath you. You just go up and down the black line. Its mesmerising. Its meaningless, its so boring. I cant believe how boring it really is.
So trying swimming was a flop. It never worked for me. And to get fit you really need to do it at least 4 times a week if not 5 times a week and if you’re bored and every minute feels like an hour I just can’t do it.
And you don’t just swim for 10 minutes. You swim for a minimum of at least 30 m inutes. It seems that that is a minimum and you really should do more than 30 minutes.
So once I decided I didn’t like swimming I really had to find something else. And like swimming I found running really boring too so that was out. What to do? Then I thought about cycling.
I didnt have a bike although I used to ride to work many years ago. My old bike was up at the shed but its so rusted that its unusable. I knew I had to get another bike. And a new bike isnt cheap.
There’s a cycling club near me so I went and talked to them and found out that they were starting a new group of recreational riders and so I figured that the universe was telling me that it was time to buy a bike, that it was the perfect opportunity.
And right from the start once I joined the new cycling group I enjoyed the riding. They varied their rides and did longer and shorter ones. But I did find that the pace of riding was not right for me.
I’m not exactly young but despite that I really felt that I could ride harder than the recreational group did, that it was a good social situation but I wanted to get fit and do a workout and it was too slow for my liking. So I started riding on my own to get a faster ride in and workout more.
So after a while riding on my own I found that it was nice to ride hard but a little lonely. I was getting a workout but on my own. So I made some enquiries and found out that there was a riding group that rode out of town a few days a week that used road bikes and rode hard. It went sundays and I decided to go along.
But the bike that I had already bought was a half mountain bike and half road bike, called a hybrid, and so I had the wrong bike again. So again I had an issue with no bike that would do the job, but by then I knew I really liked riding to I bought a road bike and joined the Sunday group. They ride pretty fast and sometimes I keep up, occasionally I don’t keep up.
But of course its a hard workout, exactly what I need.
So that’s my cycling career. I love it, I ride 4 times a week and I’m getting fitter.
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I Live In The Country And I Love It Here.
I’m lucky enough to live in the country and I just love living here. I’ve lived out here for a few years now, more than I care to remember actually. And I grew up in the city but I wouldn’t really want to go back there any more.
And there’s so much out here in the country that you’ll never see living in the city. Here’s an example of my own. Cycling. I love to cycle and it keeps me fit which is so important. But it’s great for so many other reasons. It gets me outdoors to places that are so great to be in.
I ride past so many wonderful things. I love to see cows in the fields and I see sheep and other animals as well. I even have my own cows and they give me calves which is great too.
Having cows and calves around grounds me. It makes me love nature, it makes me see the cycles of life.
Its summer right now and its hot. We’ve had some really hot days lately. Now of course if I lived in the city it would still be hot. But here I see the cycle of the seasons so well. I feel more at one with the seasons and with nature now. I see the grass wilt and die when summer comes, I see the grass regrow and get green again for winter. It see snow, I see drought, I see rain.
All the leaves turn such great colors, and they fall off and they look so good all on the ground around the base of the tree, and the trees drop seeds and new baby trees start to grow underneath them. I get to see the old and the young, all cycling.
Nature cycles just like me, and I love to watch it all happening right through the year.
Maybe if I lived in the city I’d have a little garden, maybe even no garden. And I might not even have a tree. Maybe all I’d have is some concrete in my back yard and no more, except a BBQ perhaps.
And I may not even see the changing of the seasons might I?
Personally I think it’s sterile in the city and of course that’s just my view, not everyone thinks that.
Of course my family lives in the city and they love it. My brother is a doctor and hes single, so he likes the social life of the city. Theres things to do there that hes into, and it suits him. But the city is not for me.
Its a shame that I spent so many years of my life there and wasted them. No thats not fair, they werent wasted of course, I lived my life and that was what I did. But now that Ive found the country I prefer it here. Maybe I should talk to my brother and suggest he moves out here. Ive never even suggested it, but the he gets out to my place and hes seen it here before, if he wanted to move then Ill be hed have thought about it before.
I’m a country lad now. The country for me any day.
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What An Absolutely Stunning Day
Days like today are just a delight. A real delight. It’s just perfect for what I like, warm but not hot which is great because I don’t like it hot. And there’s no wind and it’s just, well, perfect. I’ve been for a drive and I’ve enjoyed the view. There’s cows that look at me as I drive past and I see happy people walking.
But whilst I’ve decided that it’s a great day you may not. Maybe in fact you’ve decided that it’s a terrible day. Perhaps you’ve had something nasty happen to you today, maybe something really terrible. Your day just isn’t working out so that’s how it’s going for you.
But it’s different for you than it is for me. It’s entirely subjective and that’s why it may be wonderful for me and terrible for you. My day is the best ever, yours is the worst.
What is it that makes it a great day for me but is really not the best day for someone else? Why is it that I see the sunshine and the cows in the fields and the happy people? Why is it that you may not see these?
Maybe you see terrible things in the day, all bad, darkness. The best day for me is the worst day for you.
But you might see the horrors, you might see the all the bad things, you might see the darkness. My great day is your worst.
Even if we have the exact same day you see it differently to me. Lets say we both go for that drive together. We both see the happy people, we both see the sunshine, we both see the cows, but we still have a different experience of the day. Because our minds filter what we see through the experiences of the past. Perhaps you don’t even see the cows and the sunshine
Even if you have the same experience as I do you may well see it totally differently, depending on how its filtered by your mind. You might drive through the same countryside as I do. You might see the sun, the cows, the kids and so on, but your mind may not even register them.
Your mind might just be seeing the downside to everything. And that’s because your mind filters everything according to past experience. What has happened to you in the past is all recorded in your mind and it tempers every future experience. So even though you’re seeing the same sun, cows and kids as I am seeing your past experiences are different from mine and so your mind uses the past to filter what you’re seeing now.
Pretty silly hey?
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I Really Love To Write. Do You?
I really enjoy writing, though I’m not at all convinced that I’m much good at it. I have been into writing for many years, in fact I remember when I was really young and in primary school I wrote stories one after another. I wrote them then gave them to my teacher who read them all. I suspect he got a little bored with it all. I can’t believe I wrote so many stories when I was young.
I went to university when I got older but I made a mistake. I studied what I thought would be good to get a job. But when I should have done was to study what I liked, writing. If I had it all again I’d study writing and see how far I got, though maybe it wouldn’t be too far.
It’s an interesting question about whether I could ever have become good enough at writing to make a living from it. Who knows. But if I had the chance then I should have tried, after all if you don’t try you never know if you can really do it. I should have tried.
I’m quite convinced writing is a skill that can be learned. Of course not everyone can learn it because there’s other important things as well. For example I think it’s essential that you love to do it. That’s like anything. If you don’t love it you’re unlikely to keep at it long enough to learn the skill.
If you really love it then you’ll take the time you need to take to develop it till you’re good at it. It really will take time but I’m sure it can be done. You need to work on it every day but if you love doing it then that’s no problem. Every day is fine.
So this is where I plan to write. It’s my website, probably no one will read it but me, but who cares. I don’t care about that, I’m not writing it because I want someone to read it, I’m writing it because I like writing it. So if you’re reading it then you might be my first reader, after me. Thanks for visiting.
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