Tuesday I needed a break so I packed up some clothes, some food, and the bike and headed for my sailboat. It's an old 1968 Pearson Wanderer 30' and really rugged built. She is really pretty to look at and I have tried to keep her in good shape. I don't have the bank acounts that some folks have so I have to do all the work on her myself.
As soon as I was all settled in on the boat the storm warnings started coming in on the weather radio so I just hunkered down. I spent the rest of the day reading (Clive Cussler) and hanging out at marina. For those of you that don't hang out in marinas they are like little towns. Everyone knows who you are and all about your boat and your life. We sit around drink coffee and talk about trips we have taken and trips we would like to take. We also talk about our wives and families. As the day closes we usually switch to beer...
After a good nights sleep on the boat I woke to a beautiful sunrise and rowing teams practicing behind my boat. Wow some of those folks really are in shape. I started feeling a little guilty with all these people out there doing their body good and I am sitting there drinking my second cup of coffee. Ok put on bike duds and go get the bike out of the truck and go.
The city where the marina is is very enlightened being close to Cornell and Ithaca.They decided that the city should build bike and walking paths. Sounds like a good idea but I don't think they really had ridden on a bike before. There is one part of the path that goes from near the marina to a loop of about five miles through the woods and around a park. I decided five miles was not enough so I went the other way on the path. It was also a nice ride going through some trees and going to the farmers market. When I get to the farmers market I come to a sign that says future home of bike path and it just ends. Hmm good planning. I know there is a bike path across the canal so I play in search of. I end up riding along the railroad in giant gravel that I am sure will pop my tires any second. After cutting behind some businesses I come out on one of the busiest streets in town. I am thinking oh well how bad can it be...yikes it was scary. As I was crossing the bridge with no where to hang to the right a lady starts crowd me and I am trying to make eye contact with her. Well it is a little hard to make eye contact with someone curling their eyelashes while driving..jeeze what a dummy. The rest of the ride went well and I got my ten miles in without getting killed.
For some reason I am not feeling it today but I need to keep moving and get a ride in as there are less than 30 days left before Tour de Cure in Watkins Glenn NY...
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Monday, July 25, 2011
Ok we are getting closer to where I am now
As spring approached I decided that i was going to do some stuff and have some fun this summer. As soon as I possibly could I had my boat launched and started sailing. I still wanted more fun stuff and less working on my house and mowing the yard. At some point I saw my old friend Harold who's blog Wayward Son was on Face book. He really caught my attention. his descriptions of his life as a locomotive engineer and his long distance bicycling really caught my attention. No I have no desire to be a locomotive engineer but the stories are really interesting. The part about bicycling really caught my interest.
Then it hit me...I have a bicycle somewhere down in the basement, in fact if memory serves me there are three. Well I will just pull my old Peugeot Evasion out and start riding...It was a pretty funny experience. Did you know that when you add air to 15 year old bike tires all sorts of cracks show up and if you are dumb enough to try and ride on them they will sort of explode..Lesson one always keep good tires on your bike. Did you also know that keeping your bike in a dirty garage or basement will really gum up the derailleurs, so much that when you go on your first ride (after putting on new tires and tubes) that when you pedal backwards the chain will fall off....
After putting the chain on for the second time I thought I was ready for the Tour de France. So I got about 1.5 miles down the road and could hardly catch my breath. Why is this so hard? My answer was I am 62 years old, fat, and out of shape (round is a shape). I really needed to change all that so I set about riding a little bit farther each day. After I got up to about 5 miles a day Harold tells me I should join his team on the Tour de Cure. I was thinking that maybe Harold had taken too many century rides and suffered some kind of damage from dehydration. So I checked out the Tour de Cure and found that although they had some really crazy rides 100, 65, 35 miles they had one loop that was ten miles. I was half way there riding 5 miles a day so I signed up and decided I better kick it up as I only had forty days to be ready. It was really surprised how quickly the miles racked up. The first time I did 12 miles I thought I was Lance Armstrong and then a couple of real bike riders blew by me so fast that I thought I had stopped. Since that day I have been riding at least seven miles every day and two or three times a week I do 14. It's still hard but getting easier. Of course where I live is very hilly and I live at the top of the hill, the last few miles is always up hill.
I am still signed up to do the ten miler as I know 35 is way too much but it gives me something to work to. Did I mention that the 35 miler gains a couple thousand feet elevation in the first ten miles.
Ok we are sort of caught up to date so I can update the blog every once in a while.
Is it possible to be retired at 59 and not go crazy
To get this started I will tell you a little about myself. I worked at colleges and universities for most of my career in the IT field. In the early days I worked for Ithaca College managing the telephone system. From there I moved to the University of Rochester and was their cable-plant designer. My last job was Cornell university where I started as a cable-plant engineer then managed the phone system. I then moved to managing the cable-plant engineers. My last and most interesting job was wireless network engineer. Its probably a lot of blah blah blah if you aren't in that field but it paid the bills and put some money in my retirement account.
In the spring of 2009 Cornell was getting cash strapped so they were looking for ways to cut costs without looking like the bad guy and laying off a few hundred people. They offered a buyout to anyone that had been there 10 or more years. Hmm I had just been there eleven years. They gave us a years salary, health benefits to age 65, three years added to our retirement, and paid for all unused vacation. Ok I am in just to good to pass up. So now what??
I have a 30 foot sailboat, a 35 foot motor home, a big yard to maintain, and an old farmhouse that always needs fixing, that should keep me busy.
As I retired in June I spent much of the first summer on the boat, did some yard work, and tried to set up a schedule that filled my days. Geeze I never knew I would have to look for things to do. I tried to keep in touch with guys from work but they were too busy trying not to get fired by Cornell.
The first winter was awful, although I do some ham radio in the winter it was not enough. I think I was driving my wife crazy cause she was still working.
By the second year I was starting to get the hang of it and had a new group of friends at the marina and sailed and hung all summer.
In August my good friend Tom asked if I would go on his boat with another guy from Ithaca NY to the Bahamas. Well it took about 5 minutes to answer, yep I was going. Then I remembered I was married and maybe I should talk to my wife about being gone for 6 months on a sailing adventure. You can see the adventure on my other blog A Trip South. If you read the bog you can see that I got tired of sleeping in a space the size of a coffin and freezing my but off and not eating much so I jumped off in Melbourne Florida. The upside of the trip other than the experience was I lost about forty pounds. My IT days had left me tipping the scales at about 317 pounds (how did that happen)
So now it's winter in upstate NY and I am getting antsy again. My daughter managed a low income apartment complex and both of the maintenance guys had quit ( this should have been a warning). I said sure I will jump in and do maintenance how hard can it be. Well the fixing stuff was a breeze..but no one told me that maintenance guys shoveled, plowed, and salted snow. Wow, for an old fat IT guy that was sure a wake up call. Finally after it snowed for 18 straight days of my three months of employment I said ok I am done...
Somehow I made it through the rest of the winter without going stir crazy.
Spring brought new hope that I would keep busy enough to really start enjoying my retirement more.
In the spring of 2009 Cornell was getting cash strapped so they were looking for ways to cut costs without looking like the bad guy and laying off a few hundred people. They offered a buyout to anyone that had been there 10 or more years. Hmm I had just been there eleven years. They gave us a years salary, health benefits to age 65, three years added to our retirement, and paid for all unused vacation. Ok I am in just to good to pass up. So now what??
I have a 30 foot sailboat, a 35 foot motor home, a big yard to maintain, and an old farmhouse that always needs fixing, that should keep me busy.
As I retired in June I spent much of the first summer on the boat, did some yard work, and tried to set up a schedule that filled my days. Geeze I never knew I would have to look for things to do. I tried to keep in touch with guys from work but they were too busy trying not to get fired by Cornell.
The first winter was awful, although I do some ham radio in the winter it was not enough. I think I was driving my wife crazy cause she was still working.
By the second year I was starting to get the hang of it and had a new group of friends at the marina and sailed and hung all summer.
In August my good friend Tom asked if I would go on his boat with another guy from Ithaca NY to the Bahamas. Well it took about 5 minutes to answer, yep I was going. Then I remembered I was married and maybe I should talk to my wife about being gone for 6 months on a sailing adventure. You can see the adventure on my other blog A Trip South. If you read the bog you can see that I got tired of sleeping in a space the size of a coffin and freezing my but off and not eating much so I jumped off in Melbourne Florida. The upside of the trip other than the experience was I lost about forty pounds. My IT days had left me tipping the scales at about 317 pounds (how did that happen)
So now it's winter in upstate NY and I am getting antsy again. My daughter managed a low income apartment complex and both of the maintenance guys had quit ( this should have been a warning). I said sure I will jump in and do maintenance how hard can it be. Well the fixing stuff was a breeze..but no one told me that maintenance guys shoveled, plowed, and salted snow. Wow, for an old fat IT guy that was sure a wake up call. Finally after it snowed for 18 straight days of my three months of employment I said ok I am done...
Somehow I made it through the rest of the winter without going stir crazy.
Spring brought new hope that I would keep busy enough to really start enjoying my retirement more.
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