Road Woes and Joys

I was walking the pups several weeks ago when I stopped and chatted with a neighbor, Dave. We got to talking about the condition of the streets not only around our homes but of other nearby neighborhoods as well. A few years ago when Dave was president of our neighborhood association he phoned a city administrator to find out when we might see resurfacing begin in our area. Our streets are over 20 years old and in some areas they're full of patches. He was told then that we can expect our roads to be resurfaced in the next few years, which would be about now.

I phoned Chris Petree who works for the city to express my concerns about the condition of our roads and inquire about the timeline for repairs. He said what we're seeing is a flaking off of layers of a topcoating of small stones (chip-seal). He explained that as the chip-seal fails it begins to flake off and the streets erode from the top down rather than the bottom up. While there's certainly some of that going on, the issues are bigger than a flaking top layer. He mentioned that the chip-seal doesn't extend the life of the road which caused me to wonder why they do it at all?

Chris went on to say that the roads in his neighborhood are even worse and that there were no plans whatsoever for resurfacing work in our neighborhood for at least the next 5 years. He said that there are 250 miles of roads in the city and at best they can resurface only 4 to 5 miles of them per year.

I'll stop rousing the rabble now.

We've been using Netflix for several years and I have to applaud them for picking up on a mistake I made last week. I returned the wrong DVD (one of our own) in the return mailer and they caught it. They sent me an email explaining the mixup and that they'd be returning our disc to us. And they did. For an outfit that processes as many discs as they do it's impressive to know that they're able to pick up on this sort of error and fix it.

I went to bed Friday night intent on going long on the bike Saturday with a goal of 150 miles. I didn't quite make it. I got a later start than I wanted while waiting for the temp to climb enough to where I could get out without anything more than my typical warm weather stuff. It was worth the wait. A strong west wind made it tough going though as I fought to hold a 14 mph average into the steady 20+ mph invisible force.  I couldn't make a stoplight. My Edge 705 tallied 8:51 seconds of paused time in the first 31 miles of the ride. Ridiculous!  I made it as far as Winsted before turning for home via a scenic route all the while keeping an eye on the remaining daylight and trying to squeeze as much from the day as I could.

It was a good day on my bike at 140 miles.

Rachel is loving Rochester. She Skyped with us Saturday night and used the camera on her laptop to show us around her apartment. We had to laugh at the sight of 3 guys sitting in her living room with laptops on their laps. Rachel and her roommates are the only females on a floor of guys and they lack little in the way of attention from them. Rachel has always been comfortable hanging out with guys and considering that the school is 75% females she and her roommates are doing well to have more than their share of them around.