Easter Weekend

(Originally a forum post.)

Have you seen the 5 day forecast? Blimey! End-to-end sunshine!

I've got another week and a half off work, but have lost most of this one looking after the kiddies as my mother-in-law's been in hospital for emergency eye surgery. Hopefully, I'll get some riding in.

The NHS being as it is, the emergency surgery involved faffing about from Thursday to Monday; the machine breaking during the operation (after they'd knocked her out and removed the lens from her eye, but luckily before they started firing lasers at her retina!); a taxi ride to Middlesbrough (shared with some random bloke from A&E), a long wait in a cold corridor, being called a coward by a nurse for not just having a local so they could do the op faster (they were asking the people in the waiting room for volunteers to go for the local to get them done faster) and questioned as to why on earth she was going back to hospital in Darlo when she could just go home, on Tuesday; and a stay in the Memorial today while the specialist was in London. Hopefully she'll get home from her emergency surgery tomorrow, a week after being admitted!

In the odd bits of time I've had, I've stripped my commuter bike to bits. Oops. Hopefully, I'll get it reassembled in time for going to work again, otherwise I'll have to take the Inbred to work. Sweep, I may be bringing you some work... Smile

I'm hoping to get out on some local rides in the next week and a bit. On my wishlist are the bridleways out to Yarm and back, the bridleway along above the Tees from Stapleton to Croft, the bridleways from the west end of town round towards Coatham Mundeville which are potential long-ways-home, and my usual local loop up towards the Blacksmith Arms and back to see what the conditions are like at the moment. All these are potentially parts of my local uber-loop. I also want to ride to the forest and back sometime soon, to get an idea of how long it takes, so I can ride to the forest for the group rides.

I either need to fit new pads to my V brakes, or bite the bullet and fit my new/old disc brake, before I can ride any of these. I might go for the V brake option, as this needs doing before they get transplanted to the commuter anyway, and I need to keep one fully functional bike.

Wow, that turned into quite a rant. Too much white wine.