The years 2009-2012 were the peak of my endurance cycling career. I've ridden since then, but never with the same laser focused dedication to absolutely piling the miles on. During those years, I seldom missed dedicating both weekend days to riding solo or with my cycling club, or both. From mid-February until the first week of November, I also rode three or four days after work in progressively longer distances as the days grew longer. In 2011, I averaged 30 miles a day for the entire year, accumulating nearly 11K miles on my bike. It was loads of fun, although a bit obsessive and selfish. Balance is better, but that is a lecture for another time.

On Veterans Day (November 11th in the US), It was my habit to organize a 100-mile ride since many members of the local cycling community are military connected and most folks get the day off. I'd make announcements at group rides for a couple of weeks, post it to our website and make a flier to hang at the local bike shop.. The typical attendance at one of these rides would be about 20 people. There was no fee. Riders were expected to bring their supplies and money to refuel at convenience stores. We didn't have any organized support. If someone's bike broke down, or if they were unable to continue due to fatigue or injury, we'd figure something out. Someone's spouse would get a phone call and some vague directions is what I'm saying. That rarely happened, though. People were pretty good at not overestimating their abilities and if someone started having a bad day, usually someone would volunteer to ride with them at a slower pace so they could finish the ride. It wasn't a race or a competition.

Although there's always a rotating cast of characters in a transient community like ours, I generally knew everyone in the club. We also had plenty of people who were in the local triathlon club who rode and trained with us. Some of them I only knew by reputation. One of them I'd seen on social media. My online observations informed me that she was a partner in big accounting firm, took European vacations and had been a young parent like me. She was one of the founders of the triathlon club and a current officer. She'd been one of the first people in the area to complete a competitive Ironman triathlon, meaning that she went to race, not just to finish. Likewise, she had a reputation for being supremely fit and very competitive.

1. Swim: 2.4 miles (3.86 kilometers)
2. Bike: 112 miles (180.25 kilometers)
3. Run: 26.2 miles (42.20 kilometers, a full marathon)

As was my habit, I was early to the ride. When I got there, a car I didn't recognize was in the parking lot and a diminutive lady in cycling kit was pumping up the tires on her carbon fiber road bike. It was her, the triathlon woman. I went over and introduced myself, Johnny Cask style—"Hello, I'm Lou Plummer." Although there were no other men in the community named Lou, most people called me by my full name for some reason, so that's what I used when I met new folks. I asked her if her name was Carol, mentioning offhandedly that I'd seen her on social media. I did not want to give off stalker vibes.

I'll be honest. She fascinated me. How could someone that small and compact be so damn powerful? Plus she, like me, had several grandchildren. With all the pit stops and a mid-ride meal, the riders made a full day of it. I spent a good portion of the time chatting with my new friend, riding beside her in a double pace line and taking my turns at the front of the group at her side. Since I was also the ride organizer and thus the de facto leader, I also had to shout out directions for every turn and keep tabs on all the riders, especially the ones attempting the 100-mile distance for the first time.

I'd picked out a well-know local burger joint as our lunch stop. She and I sat together. It was only later that I discovered that she didn't eat bread or cookies because of dietary restrictions. After all was said and done at the end of the day, I knew that I wanted to be friends with this lady. She and I felt the same way about training and health. We had similar priorities, and we liked riding our bikes for really, really long distances. Over the next four months, we rode together every chance we had, including one epic holiday weekend where we accumulated almost 300 miles together along with an Army friend of ours.

I was a very social, very talkative, outwardly enthusiastic guy. She was generally quiet, reserved and tended to look at me oddly whenever I'd crack one too many jokes. That would cause me to shut up for about 30 seconds — her plan, I guess. A lot of endurance sports can involve what is known as type two fun. That's an activity that is only enjoyable after the fact. While participating in type two fun, people tend to suffer. We had some of that, riding in winds that were so brutal that neither of us could go faster than 10mph, when under ideal conditions we could maintain 20mph for hours on end. I was a large guy for a cyclist. I outweighed the heaviest professionals by a good 30 pounds. I do not like to climb hills, not on a bike, not on foot, not in any fashion. As I have mentioned, she is small and in possession of phenomenal athletic ability. She got to be excellent at patiently waiting for me whenever we faced elevation changes.

Anyway, I'll cut to the chase. One hundred and twelve days after our first ride, I confessed to her that my feelings for her had grown into something more than just those one has for a riding buddy. Well, come to find out, she felt the same way. Within a week, we became partners and have been together ever since. I still hate to climb hills.

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I think I have reached the stage where i no longer have to do anything to relax. It's become status quo for me. I rarely have to deal with anyone who brings tension to my life these days. If someone starts to do that, I can easily elect to find an alternative source of humanity. Luckily, I'm not related to anyone who stresses me out. I generally wake up in a good mood and wait for the day to get even better.

The pre-dawn hours are some of the best of any day. It's quiet. Coffee tastes better than than it does at any other time. I can spend a leisurely amount of time going through the ritual I've developed. The first thing I do is open my journal and do a quick once-over of the stuff that gets automatically imported there. Then I review "on this day." I've been using the same app, Day One, for 11 years, so I have plenty to look back over. Today's interesting entries were from 2020 when I wrote quite a bot about how weird it was during the early days of the pandemic, when grocery store shelves were empty and people were panic buying. After my journal, I move on to do the same thing with my photographs, which are liberally sprinkled with photos of my grandkids at all different ages. Only after doing all that, do I take a look at the daily fire hose of WTF, also known as the headlines. As horrible as things are, I am doing a good job of depersonalizing it.

I'm a believer in creating happy spaces. My little home office is pleasantly lit. Everything is suitably comfortable. I can listen to music if I feel like it or watch something, which I rarely do, but can if it suits me. I always have a tasty beverage on hand. I may have to work on making my workspace a little less relaxing because taking a nap with my laptop has become a new pastime. How delightful to be able to just surrender to every urge to get 40 winks. I keep meaning to start using an essential oil diffuser that I used to keep running all the time for just a little more feng shui.

I have a great view from my window. I'll be moving my bird feeders to where I can see them better. My house borders on a stretch of woodlands. My neighborhood was built in the 60s, and we have many established, mature trees around. I see all kinds of wildlife, from squirrels, to rabbits, raccoons, and opossums, as well as a long list of birds: cardinals, wrens, house finches, titmice, blue jays, catbirds, chickadees, goldfinches, owls, red tail hawks, crows, sparrows, robins, orioles and more.

During my earlier years, I didn't always have the money to have a smoothly working climate control system. I spent too may years relying on expensive space heaters and window units. Not now buddy. I can adjust the temperature to whatever I want right from my phone or computer. It's such a luxury. My high school years were spent in a 100-year-old farmhouse with no air conditioning and heat from a wood stove. I survived just fine, but, man, I love these new fangled devices.

My days are spent now working on projects that interest me. I read what I want to read. My biggest energy consumption is finding ways to be creative, not trying to calm people frustrated by technology that isn't acting as it should. I haven't had to reset anyone's password in over a month. A professional lifetime where every day was a confrontation with things that didn't work has been supplanted by my lovingly tended little home tech environment where just about everything that happens to predictable and expected. That's the life for me.

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The title of this blog post is aspirational. One of my goals in life is to make up for my shortcomings as a father by being the best grandfather I can be. I also tried to be the best Dad I could be, but I feel more prepared at this stage in my life to succeed than I did in my younger days. One of the primary benefits of having been a teenage parent was the head start it gave me on becoming a grandfather. The oldest of my grandchildren will turn 20 this year, while the youngest two are just in kindergarten. There are 13 of them all together. It plays hell at Christmastime, not that I do much of the shopping. Wonder Woman handles that. About all I do is bring the packages in from the porch and accept hugs from the kiddos after they open them.

I've got several of the kids on my mind today. I've been assembling the gear for a weekend camping trip with five of them, ranging from five-year old Evie to 14-year-old Aiden. Despite the threat of a cold night on Saturday, we have gathered our tents, sleeping bags, flashlights and cooking gear to head for Jones Lake State Park for the weekend. I've gotten everyone's favorite camping food, s'mores fixings and a massive charger for all their electronics. Harper, my aspiring TikTok superstar, will surely be making videos while hanging out with her cousins in the woods. Wonder Woman will be in charge, of course. We got them all fishing poles last fall, so that's definitely going to be on their itinerary.

My other kindergarten grandchild is James. He lives a couple of hours away. He's eight years younger than his sister. He'd been with the same group of kids in pre-school for several years but unfortunately, none of them ended up going to the same elementary school he attends. It threw him for a loop and this hasn't been an easy year for him because of it. It really breaks my heart to see him struggling with the social aspect of the school experience so early. He's a bright boy, so the academic part of the experience is going OK, I just want him to make some friends to enrich the experience. Thankfully, his folks aren't planning on moving, so he will have the stability to get to know his classmates as time goes on.

One of my other grandsons, Connor, is a high-school junior. He has an illness called Friedreich's Ataxia that affects his mobility. He drives a car with hand controls and uses a motorized wheelchair at school. Furthermore, he can walk some, but his illness makes it difficult. With the destruction of the Department of Education by the fascists in Washington, coupled with the undercover attack on the disabled as part of diversity, equity and inclusion programs, we do not know what is going to happen to the services he gets. To make it all even more infuriating, his Dad, our son-in-law, is a 100% disabled vet from injuries sustained in an IED explosion in Afghanistan. We don't know what's going to happen with his Veteran's Administration healthcare and services, either. My anger at the Republicans who wave flags and enable this bullshit is very, very personal. Whatever happens, Wonder Woman and I will be there for them.

I'm glad I have all of these people to love. I may not be the world's best Granddad yet, but I will continue to work toward being that man.

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When I bought my first computer in 1993, an IBM PS1 Consultant, 486/33SX, it had a 140 MB hard drive. I kept the computer for three years, and although I added a CD-ROM, sound card and extra RAM, I never increased the amount of storage. A quick check of the computer I use today, an M2 MacBook Air reveals that I have 78 apps that take up more storage by themselves than I had available on that first computer. My camera, a Canon 6D takes photos so large that six of them would have filled the hard drive of that first computer.

I still have documents I created on that machine. In fact, I have a great many things I wrote and preserved from the 1990s, including digital photos from the expensive Kodak camera that belonged to my job. Many of the documents were written in Microsoft Works, a productivity suite it stopped selling 16 years ago. There was never a Mac version of it. At some point, I had to jump through some hoops to recover the information from those files using a document interpreter. These days, I save everything I write as plain text so that I don't ever face that problem again. I did not save everything I wrote from that era, but I was able to use The Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive to recover numerous web pages from my first blog.

When Napster was popular, you could download almost any song you could think of just by searching for it. I accumulated all 500 of the Rolling Stones top albums that way. While I was still living that pirate life, a short time actually, I also collected the full discographies of several prolific artists and groups and that's why I have 25+ albums (each) by Neil Young, Van Morrison, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, and Bob Dylan.

In setting up my new home office recently, I rounded up the embarrassingly large collection of hard drives I'd accumulated over the years: 7 portable 1 TB drives, 2 portable 2 TB drives, 2 powered external 1 TB drives, 5 internal 1 TB drives and 2 powered external 3 TB hard drives. That's 24 TB of storage added to the 5 TB that I have available on the computers I use daily. The drives contained various collections of software, photos, music, podcasts, movies, TV shows, hard drive back-ups and documents collected over the past 30+ years.

I recently added over a thousand more files to keep up with when I downloaded our entire Amazon Kindle and Audible collections. We had over 500 books in each of those. My challenge is to consolidate all of that information, removing duplicates as I go along. My goal is to have a local copy, a copy kept offsite but readily available and a copy in the cloud. A lot of this information is only important to me. My kids will probably preserve the photos and may avail themselves of some music, but who will want an archive of decades of my writing? If you ask them, they'd most likely says yes, but it is a lot of work to maintain so many files and like all 21st century people, their collections of digital data are growing too.

My decision to create a home lab made things even more complicated since now I have three computers to maintain and a fluctuating number of virtual machines. This means I have a half dozen large USB thumb drives with operating system installations on them. Yay! More data! Having high-speed Internet also allows me to suck information off the internet at an outrageous rate. I can download dozens of GB of data in a morning if I feel like it, and of course, I often feel like it. I don't know for sure, but I suspect there may be a diagnosis associated with my personality type.

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