Tag Archives: Working Through It

Tuesday Trippin’ February 7

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Training

We’ve had some good rides, getting better too. Today I was actually warm enough to want to take off a layer. I think we’ll be riding at the same level soon, but it won’t last long. Russ will pass me by. That’s fine, he’s the stronger rider when we’re both riding regularly. We’ll soon both be out of winter level riding mode and shortly after that will be riding out target 200 miles a week. We won’t be so concerned about getting those miles consolidated into just two rides until the project funds. Health wise, more shorter rides are good. Two hundred-mile rides is for making the project/rest of our lives work. Fantasy Island, we’d live in the middle and spread the rides across more days.

Planning and Prep

We’re doing our best to rebound from the getting laid off curve ball. Russ and I had opposite reactions and coping mechanisms. We were both oversaturated with one thing after another, but I wanted to move into hyperdrive on the project and have it submitted before his last check. He did a lot, but he also needed some time to regroup. We’ve been moving through the transition together and trying to balance short term, long term, project and non-project goals. It’s been real, but I think we’re moving into a good spot. It will make more sense to talk about some of the things we’ve been working on when they are ready.

The Sale

For some time I’ve been planning the sale of stock that was originally intended to be listed in our Etsy Store, handmade, vintage and antiques. This week I worked in the basement a lot separating things that I still want to list from things that increases in shipping cost have made undesirable to sell online. I’m rechecking market prices on the items I’m packing for the trip to the driveway. Handling the boxes dries my hands even more than doing dishes!

Originally, I was hoping to make enough to advertise the Kickstarter Funding Campaign. Then a lot of other things happened. A modest goal of $5K would require selling 1000 items at $5 each. My target sale price would be half of recent Ebay sold prices without shipping. I have plenty of stock and that represents about a 75% discount over what ordering on line would cost, but that’s still pretty ambitious in the greater Atlanta market. If I have too much left over afterward, I’ll head off to some flea market on the first feasible weekend.

We’ll see. We also have some big ticket items in storage, like a vintage St Charles kitchen that we paid to salvage ourselves from a tear down. It is really special. A guy drove from Kentucky to get just one piece of it. Selling that alone could meet some significant goals and we’d like to get out of the storage unit. Whether you adopt Marie Kondo’s pre or post children philosophy, it seems crazy to keep things you have to pay to store. But, adding to that, the storage facility was sold to a company that likes to raise rent often and now it’s nearly double what we paid when we signed the contract.

So, there are a few different ways the sale could fund one or more of the unexpected expenses that have hit recently and we might even eliminate a storage rental fee. Worst case, it forces me into better organization.

So there’s our week. See you on the trail, and have a glorious day!

Tuesday Trippin’ January 17

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The hits keep coming. The car died. I’ll get to find out sometime tomorrow if it is worse than a dead battery, and Ill get a second opinion on that 5K of work that the dealer recommended too.

If you ask me now how things were going to work out, I wouldn’t know how to answer, or even what to base my guess on.

We got more riding together this week than we have had in some time. That felt good, and helps to deal with stress but that wasn’t as much for me as I was getting a month ago.

We went out to the area between Coots Lake Trailhead and Paulding Forest to test signal strength. Ting was better than AT&T, but both were limited. I’ll probably put the images of the readings up next week.

I have no idea if our submission task list will be complete in a useful time frame. This week has been mostly more of the same as last week, but with continued intense frustration over wanting to be upbeat and positive, but not having bigger progress to report here.

Until next week, have a glorious day, and we’ll see you on the trail.

Training Tuesday December 8

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It’s always fun to see the seasonal changes to these guys.

I wasn’t eager to get on the trail this ride though. Years back I was seeking marriage counseling. I said to the counselor “He says I’m thin skinned, but it doesn’t feel that way. I don’t really know how big these things actually are…” She opened her arms wide like those little figurines that say “I love you this much” and said “Huge, they’re huge.”. She told me that I needed to start feeling things, and to stop trying to think them away. Even after it was apparent that she thought my skin was too thick, it still took me quite some time to give up and move on. Life is a lot better now. But still, life deals you huge things to try to manage, even if all the people you choose to have in your life are kind and ernest.

I have so much to be grateful for and I’m very aware of that, but I’ve had a couple of weeks where “The hurrier I go, the behinder I get” is just one of the things riding me and I see that counselor in my mind with her hands stretched out wide. It’s been draining and I’ve been waiting for the big boohoo. There’s nothing like needing a cry that won’t quite come. It’s like you can’t even get that right. The day before yesterday one thing after another piled up, and I wanted to scream. Not that figure of speech “I wanted to scream”, but that “Please let me hold it in, or go someplace where no innocent bystanders will have to hear it” desperation. I managed to get out of the house to run some errands and breathe without any screams or tears.

The next day, yesterday, I got to ride, but I wanted a nap. I wanted to curl up in a blanket and think about nothing, then wake up hours (or days) later and have something warm to drink while thinking about nothing difficult. But, instead, I drove out to the trail and started to peddle. It took me half an hour to warm my muscles up enough to feel like I belonged anywhere other than bed. Just at that moment, right when I realized that I was feeling glad that I worked through it, I came up on a transmission line easement. Frequently the power lines in this easement buzz, but there was no noise this time. There were several birds in the grass beside the trail. They were Goldfinches, about a dozen of them I think. Did you know “The collective noun for a group of Goldfinches is a ‘charm’.”? I didn’t know that until I was looking it up to know how to write about them just now. I startled this charm of Goldfinches, and they flew away from me. But, flying away from me on the path was also flying in the same direction I was cycling, so for several yards, they were flying with me. I was charmed, and I had settled enough to appreciate it thoroughly. And, I thought, “That’s it. That’s what I want to capture for people. Those moments where something beautiful shows itself can be pretty far apart sometimes, but if the camera is always going, there will be a collection of them when I’m done.

I needed it. It felt like a watershed ride. My calm was back. The ride was at just the place in my riding schedule where if I had stayed home for that nap, it would have been so easy to slip back into fewer miles, and then slide on down to even fewer. But, what I did instead was go out and work through it, and while I was there, I found a beautiful reminder of the reason I was out there in the first place.