Week's excitement

No photos so I'll try to make the prose colorful.

Boston showed some pleasant and unpleasant sides of itself this week. Tuesday night's bike ride on the trails of the Middlesex Fells reacquainted me and Stacey to trails where you're likely to hit trees and then fall on pointy rocks. Or slip on roots and fall on pointy rocks. Or slip on pointy rocks and crash into trees. But in our 40 minutes of exploration before darkness, we also found some very pleasant smooth doubletrack where I could race the dog and win. Sometimes.

On Wednesday night, I volunteered at Bikes Not Bombs down in Roxbury. It is great to get my hands dirty taking apart bikes that have been donated to the organization, and helping out neighborhood kids with their bike projects. Check out their webpage for more information on what they do - www.bikesnotbombs.org. Afterwards, I cruised down the street to Doyle's Pub where Stacey's frisbee league gathers after their Wednesday night games. As I was parking my pink and purple fixed gear with the dinosaur head on the handlebars, a neighborhood kid came up and grabbed my seat and said something about taking my bike. I held on. The kid's friend was riding a bike and told me I should really just give his friend the bike. I held on, keeping the bike between me and him. This lasted a couple of minutes, neither of us letting go of the bike, then some people came out of the pub and the kids took off. I locked up my bike with shaking hands and went inside. I am a bit surprised at myself that I didn't get scared and let him have the bike, but for some reason I didn't feel too threatened - I did't feel like he was going to swing at me or pull a weapon. If he had, I probably would have dropped the bike.

Last night Stacey and I scouted out another popular area for trail biking, the Blue Hills reservation in Milton. That too promises to provide a good selection of biking fun, though it's harder to get to from our side of town, and we had even less time to ride before dark.

Navigation around the big city, whether on foot, bike, subway, or automobile, is a constant source of amusement. It has been as exciting to get to our recreation venues as it has been to recreate once we're there.
That's all for now.