The weather this weekend ended up being absolutely beautiful in spite of less-than-ideal forecasts late last week. And, since my locked-in appointment for Saturday afternoon ended up getting bumped a few days, I went ahead with my cycling plans.

Saturday morning I rose early and drove out to mile marker 0 of the Capital Trail at the Jamestown Settlement in Williamsburg, mounted the bike, and started riding west shortly after 9am. My plan was to do 40 miles, but as I rode right past marker 20 and didn’t notice until I hit the Charles City government complex, I ended up doing 42, knocking out my personal best distance record for the second time in a week. I did the whole thing in just under three hours, just in time to stow the equipment in the car then walk 100 yards over to Billsburg Brewery shortly after their opening for a celebratory pint.

Sunday, which was supposed to be full of rain as well, ended up being beautiful, and I knocked out almost 18 miles on this end of the trail, which didn’t present any trouble apart from all the pollen I breathed in.

So, I’m feeling pretty good about my chances of not keeling over when I attempt the Cap2Cap 52 miler in a couple of weeks. I’m just going to keep up some sort of momentum as best I can, and get another couple of long ones (35-40ish) in ahead of the planned event on May 7. There’s a 14 mile section of the trail I haven’t ridden yet this year, so I think I’ll work on covering that ground as well as part of those longer rides.

Otherwise this weekend, we did a few errands, took care of some chores, and watched a couple of movies, and my reactions to such sort of surprised me. Saturday afternoon after my long ride, my lovely spouse and I settled and watched Thunder Force on Netflix, a not-terribly-well-reviewed superhero comedy with Melissa McCarthy that just premiered direct to the service, but damn if we didn’t enjoy the absurdity of it all, which has a pretty nice through line about the friendship of women and the potential inherent in those of us of a certain age who don’t fit particular molds, and Jason Bateman owned his supporting role, as he’s wont to do. It’s quite good for a laugh. Sunday while grabbing a few things off the grocery list, on a lark I picked up a copy of Wonder Woman 1984, and it was…all over the place, mostly because there’s a lot problematic aspects with regard to character motivation; you’d think in a movie with “Wonder Woman” in the title, she’d be front-and-center, and represent the usual heroic, optimistic characteristics we expect from the character (along with some of the complicated sexual politics Moulton Marston worked out on the pages of the early books), but in this film, she’s just one of many flawed characters in the piece, and in many cases, just as much the villain as any of the other characters. Sure, there’s a third-act hero turn, but it feels unearned. It trumpets an optimistic message in that last act, but the whole thing is really rather cynical and dark in spite of the colorful 80s palate, which shouldn’t surprise, given that this is part of the dark-and-gritty DC comics universe shepherded by Zack Snyder.

Now that I’ve gotten my almost-certainly-flawed feminist film critique out of my system, I can look forward to the week ahead. As it stands right now (but probably won’t persist), my work week looks sort of quiet, as does the personal week, apart from ensuring that the kids fall back into line after wrapping spring break, and keeping tabs on some other developments. Otherwise, I’m going to try to keep the cycling momentum up as best I can (weather is iffy again as it looks right now), and just press on through it.

It’s all we can do, really.