spring, sprang, sprung

It's somatic.

Sure, the weather change is huge, and this week we seem to have turned a corner in the conditions outside. No need to wear a jacket when walking the dog, turn down the thermostat, no need for extra covers in bed. I could hear water percolating into the ground in the back yard last night. It felt like the right time to ride the bike to work this morning. No problem, until I got to the mile-long hill on County Line Road going west against the wind, for which my heart and lungs were not prepared.

I made it, of course, by crawling up the hill in low gear, not to push the envelope too much, and now I'm lamenting my aerobic condition. It's lamentable. Solid Stan reassures me that I'll be fine after a couple more bike rides, easy for him to say. And he's right, of course. I'll make an effort to ride more regularly to get the systems - cardiovascular, neuromuscular, psychoskeletal - in better working order.

I also found it hard to get down to work right away. Like the archaic definition of exercise, riding stirred up something that doesn't want to examine spreadsheets, check items in lists, cut and paste bookmaps. Something that would rather listen to rock and roll, look at trees, take a walk on the wild side. Then, geek that I am, I had to look at Merriam-Webster's word of the day and find the quote from Henry IV:

"...your health; the which, if you give o'er to stormy passion, must perforce decay."

They say it's going to rain later today, another reason not to ride a bike to work on impulse.

It did rain, two or three times in fact, waves of a storm system sweeping across central Swingstate to soak the ground and swell the streams and send flood warnings to several counties. Then it stopped and I rode the bike home just before dark, no problem, mostly downhill and not directly against the wind. Denouement, anticlimax.

Then the weekend, and the genie is definitely out of the bottle. There are tree branches to trim and the first generation of weeds to pull, general clean-up chores in the yard. Since nothing is ever simple, the former involved taking down an electrical wire strung from the house to the garage, giving rise to ideas (uh-oh!) to reconfigure the wiring around a pergola on the patio. Are we getting grandiose yet?

Watch basketball, be disappointed in Kansas and North Carolina but reassured that the Buckeyes are for real. Watch "Spiderman 2" and hatch a plan to string ropes across treetops, hang a swing from a stout limb, use gravity and tenacity to simulate flight. Okay, I guess we're getting grandiose now. But a swing would be nice.

And a new rear wheel for the bike wouldn't hurt either. The old one hasn't been truly round for aeons, and I think it would make a difference. One or two bike rides later, and Stan was right, I can already feel the difference in my legs and back muscles, a little more taut, like a spring.