Happy Easter!

Up and down. Christ is risen, thank God, which means I can end my Lenten devotion of not procrastinating. For the next fifty days, it’s nothing but unrepentant laziness!

Ahem. You see, that’s the problem with taking on a more nebulous form of self-improvement than giving up chocolate. With chocolate, you give it up, you eat it at Easter, you move on. With procrastination you really can’t start doing it again.

Today’s Harris-Roubaix was a big bust. I had a lousy start, in which I grossly underestimated how hard most people would ride off in order to get onto the gravel first, but that didn’t really cost me anything: nobody broke away early. But then on the second lap (I think) onto the gravel, somebody bumped my rear wheel on the very problematic transition to the gravel (it was virtually a dead stop for mid-pack riders and back). No harm no foul, but then on the gravel my bike felt like I had the rear brake applied. It took two stops to figure it out: my rear wheel got cocked sideways and was rubbing the frame. The stops and the fix cost me so much time I could barely see the bunch, and was never in touch. I chased for a couple of laps, picked up a few other dropped riders, and then abandoned when all hope was gone.

If I can take any courage from this, the gravel was fun to ride, and I learned a few things, and I was having a lot better day than the elite female rider I caught up to who had a flat which led to a gear mechanical. She should have been a contender, instead she was done.

And then there was the Cat 5 regular who, after abandoning near the start-finish for unknown reasons, threw his bike down in disgust. Dude! Don’t take it out on the bike! No matter how bad your race was, or who took you out, this is Cat 5 racing. Keep cool.

So the agenda for today is to finish the shed. I’ve been taking pictures, so more of that soon. I’ll have a lot of photos to download, everything from construction documentation to dog pictures to artsy flower shots.

And what is it about flowers, anyways? Perhaps it’s just Spring, but they seem irresistible for digital photography. I think it’s that web images have a luminous characteristic like slide film that makes colourful subjects in full light much more impressive than they would be as prints. Same goes for sunsets.