WWW - Wild edition

Some weeks are very tame and domestic. Others not so much. Here we go with the Wild edition of the Weekly Wednesday Wrap-up on Wednesday, if you can believe it.

• Neatnik really enjoyed Vacation Bible School last week. This one was Baobab Blast and on Thursday they brought in some wild animals for "science" class.



• Sorry, no lions, elephants, nor gazelles.



• They did get to pet a rat, a wallaby, and a hedgehog.



• Nobody was allowed to actually touch the descented skunk.



• I think all of us moms were grateful for that one.



• Thursday was also the day of torrential rain.



• I had planned to ride my bike each day while the kids were busy at VBS. I racked up mileage Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.



• During my rides, I re-read listened to some of the Dresden Files on audiobook.



• I just love my library system.



• When I awoke Thursday morning, however, the skies looked...ominous.



• Quickly, I booted up the laptop and checked the local weather. The hour-by-hour report claimed that we would experience clouds at 9am and 10am and that the rain would fall at eleven.



• Given that the driveway looked like it had already sprinkled earlier in the morning, I left the bike in the garage.



• This was a wise decision.



• So was leaving a golf umbrella under the backseat of the minivan.



• It rained and cleared off and on all day. When it wasn't raining, it might as well have been: we felt as though we could backstroke through the air.



• Our little white belt had tae kwon do that afternoon. When we left, the skies were spitting intermittent dewy droplets.



• Halfway to the tkd school, I was seriously considering turning around to go back home. I couldn't see the traffic lights in the downpour.



• No, really. Red lights looked like faint pinkish blurs until you were right on top of them and traffic was moving at a deliberate crawl, each driver attempting to retain brake function as we carefully navigated the canals which had somehow replaced the state's highway system.



• The rain resolved itself by the end of her class and by the time I returned for my own class later in the evening, the torrent was but a memory, the only evidence of its existence the continuing drainage of the low-lying zones on the highway.



• Friday dawned clear so I hoisted my bike onto the car rack before driving Neatnik to the fifth and final day of VBS.



• State law round about chez trek requires minors under the age of fourteen to wear safety helmets when bike riding. Since I am nothing if not a safety-minded individual, I wear a helmet when riding my bicycle.



• I had a fully-functional, intact bicycle helmet on Friday morning, right up until the right end of my handlebars had an upfront and intimate encounter with a 96-gallon trash can.



• If not for my helmet habit, the imprint of asphalt would have ended up on my head instead of merely pressed into my headgear.



• Not a very good look on the side of one's safety equipment.



• Even worse a look on the left side of one's head.



• Yeah.



• They say you should get right back on the horse after a fall so that you do not develop a fear of riding. Same thing applies to bicycles after taking something of a wild ride.



• Of course, an accident in which one's cranium comes close to contacting the concrete calls for quick replacement helmet procurement.



• Saturday morning, we took both my beaten up bicycle and my beaten up self to the bicycle repair shop. Between the accident-induced repair requirements and the mundane maintenance needs, we were looking at a couple of bills' investment.



• Did I mention that my trusty old Raleigh has nearly reached the legal drinking age and is heavy?



• We started shopping for new wheels.



• At another shop, we found a decent ride and a helmet which matched its paint job.



• The new bicycle is termed a hybrid; a cross between a road bike and a mountain bike. Basically, it is very much mountain bike framed but with thinner tires and not front nor rear fork suspension.

The nice young man at the shop promised to fully tune and align my new machine and have it all ready for me to pick up by the weekend.

Now all I have to do is wait for all of the various random swellings to subside and bruisings to blow over...