Hurry Spring – February 2022 Recap

I have had just about enough of winter. Time for some shorts weather.

Biking

I managed a decent 685 miles in February, a rebound from my lackluster January. I ride farther when I am outside (if that makes any sense). I did the equivalent of 172 miles indoors. I rode 446 miles on The Mule until it passed 64,000 miles. It is now in the good hands of the mechanics at Bikes at Vienna. The remaining 67 miles took place on my Cross Check which I hadn’t ridden in two months. My long ride was a 50-miler. It was way too hilly for my winter level of fitness (or more accurately lack of fitness).

Watching

My watching game was not so good. Jim Allison, Breakthrough is a documentary about an eccentric research scientist who won a Nobel prize for figuring out how to use T-cells to attack cancer cells. It is not an exaggeration to say that his research saved my sister-in-law’s life. I highly recommend this movie.

I also watched the last few episodes of The Book of Boba Fett. This was an incoherent snoozer. It did have (spoiler alert) Baby Yoda and Ming-Na Wen, an actress who can do no wrong in my book.

Of course, we watched way too much Olympics. I just could not get into it but my wife was gaga over the skating. It had a few tedious controversies and a frozen penis so there’s that.

And, at the end of the month, I watched dumbstruck the Russian invasion of Ukraine. God help those people.

Reading

We are nearing the close of reading season. I started with The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid. Entertaining. An old actress tells her life story to a young woman reporter. Would have been a good beach read except I wasn’t at the beach. Next up came All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. This novel has been on the bestseller list for a long time and deservedly so. It’s about two kids, one German and one French, who live through the horrors of the second World War. Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens was three books in one. The part that described the Swamp Girl, who was abandoned by her family only to learn how to survive in a North Carolina coastal marsh, was excellent. The author paints vivid word pictures of the marsh/ The murder mystery was okay. The murder trial part was meh.

Doctoring

I finally went back to my pain doctor to get another injection of steroids in my spine. It seems to have reduced the stenosis pain in my left leg. The bigger problem now is arthritis in my lower back. I’ve tried doing yoga for that with mixed results.