Another moody self-portrait — my favorite!  This one is a long exposure taken while I fussed over the bike last night.  I added ‘mountain dropouts,’ which take the long flat bar typical of the mountain bike and add the dropped hand position so beloved of road racers.  I’ve never really been a fan of the dropped position, even when toodling along on a road bike, so I put them in upside down!  It’s mostly for fun; I don’t know what I could possibly have been thinking when I ordered them.  Damn internet!  After putting the package in a garage a couple of weeks ago, I finally decided to simply try them.  I’ll either like them or I wouldn’t.  Better to figure it out than leave it hanging.

The spanish phrase above translates literally to, “You have to do it.”  It really means, “It has to be done,” and the implication is that you’re the one who has to suck it up.  I was talking this morning with a man working on my neighbor’s gutters and drainpipes.  I was happy to take a break from laboriously digging out dozens of vines and we took pleasure in lamenting the near constant rain that has marked the east coast for a month.  He remarked that he cleaned the gutters for my neighbor twice a year, emphasizing the importance of regular upkeep.  Studiously diffident, he hazarded that it might be time for me to clean the gutters of my own house.  He wasn’t even suggesting that I hire him; he saw me working all morning and was only looking to help me reset my priorities.  Stacking wood, digging up roots, and whatnot were all well and good, but the gutters were due for a cleaning.  When I demurred, he murmured, “arbelitos (little trees),” which were sure enough sprouting up there, a spring’s worth of maple seeds and rain.  I had a ton of reasons why I hadn’t cleaned them out and he nodded diffidently at them all.  In the end he simply remarked “Si… pero hay que hacerlo,” before turning back to his own responsibilities.

I thought about that last line all day, turning it over and over in my mind.  I put off things and often hit the gym rather than argue.  It’s difficult to quantify the cost of avoidance, and usually pretty easy to figure out how much you don’t want to do something.  Sometimes my bike rides bring me peace, but sometimes they unleash far more turmoil than I can burn off turning the cranks.  I might be better off figuring out now and then what has to get done and simply doing it.  We’ll see.  I’ve already knocked off two things today that I’ve been avoiding and all it cost me was some time and money.  Imagine a wry grin here.  I’m also going to have to bite the bullet and accept that replacing the keyboard won’t be the cheap and easy job I’d imagined.  You can see my earnest, but ultimately unsuccessful, efforts below.

these are not the fingers we should be using for pushing ribbon cable into little dark spots.