After a pretty solid two weeks of rain, including heavy rains the whole weekend before, the weather finally turned nice this weekend. That basically meant spending the whole weekend doing yardwork. Friday I mowed the lawn for first time. Unusually late and the grass had gotten quite tall. Saturday it was weeding the edges of the driveway and putting vinegar on the cracks of the patio to kill the weeds. Sunday it was weeding under the hedges and in the flowerbeds. Meanwhile Jeannie wanted to start barbecue season, but or old grill was rusted, so we had to buy a new one. She spent the better part of Sunday putting it together.
Our Nordic Track exercise machine broke one day last week, and it turns out they don’t make them anymore, but you can get replacement parts on the internet. Meanwhile I relying on biking as my main form of cardio exercise, so it’s good that we have a spell of nice weather ahead this week. I wanted to take a ride Sunday morning and test out our new bike rack, but Jeannie wimped out at the last minute. I thought then I’d go for a ride on my own later in the day, but by the time I was done with the weeding I was pretty tired and my legs hurt, so it was just as well. I did go for a ride today, and it was quite nice. Hope to get a ride in every day this week.
Friday night often tends to be movie or TV night at our house, as we have time to relax but are often tired at the end of the work week and don’t always feel like going out, or maybe just go out to dinner then come home. However, despite the plethora of streaming options there’s actually a dearth of good shows to watch. The last few weeks I’ve been getting into Nova, the classic PBS show. Lots of cool stuff about the James Web Space Telescope, saving Venice for sinking into the sea, renovating Notre Dame cathedral, and lots about fossils, ice age megafauna and dinosaurs, and how they can reconstruct stories of long-extinct creatures from bones in the dirt. One in particular suggested they may have found a site where the fossilized creatures were killed the day the meteor hit the earth to end the Cretaceous, caught in a flood caused by the shockwave thousands of miles away. They have episodes from past seasons, and I remember as a kid seeing the episode where the theory that the dinosaurs were killed by a meteor impact was first advance. I wonder if I can work my way back far enough to find it.
But last Friday I decided to watch a documentary about recently pass folk singer Gordon Lightfoot, who to me is one of my all time despite not being the any of the genres I listen deeply to nowadays. He seemed to be on the radio when I was a kid, and they played alot of his songs at the ice rink at hockey practice. Somehow his songs had a big impact on me. This led me to a bunch of other music documentaries including one about guitar shredder Randy Rhoads and another about the great vocalist Ronnie James Dio, another one of musical heroes. So now I have this mashup of 70’s folk ballads and 80’s post Black Sabbath heavy metal stuck in my head. Strangely, it’s not a bad combination.