A good ride

YAY!!! Our first significant ride of the year. About 40F and partly sunny and dry enough roads.
B. and I rode 20 miles...a great reasonable warm-up start to the year. I am out of shape, and the 20 miles today felt more like 30 miles felt to me last Fall. It's my respiratory stamina that's gotten out of shape, but happily my leg muscles seem just fine still from last year. Good ol' quads.

It felt so good to be riding my bike in the sun. Saw and heard a pair of bluebirds, a caterpiller crossing the road, big flocks of redwing blackbirds coming back from their winter down south and making a huge racket...
Ponds are still frozen over, snow piles still hanging on here and there.

Then I actually cleaned my bike when we got home. A good start to prepare for Spring.
I feel tired, a little sore, and all stretched out but in a good way.

More snow....

Well, winter has not let up much around here yet. Here is the view from my window yesterday, and today we got another 3-4" of snow. I don't think it even reached 25F today.But I accomplished some good things anyway- finished an artwork for a local benefit auction to raise money to construct a skateboard park for our town's youth, gave a mountain dulcimer lesson, and finished the project I started yesterday of refurbishing an old dulcimer with new tuning pegs, new strings, cleaning/oiling it, and making a new strap for it.