I actually accomplished a very big pile of things this weekend. Friday night’s visit to Lynchburg to watch Shakespeare under the stars – Love’s Labor’s Lost – with the eldest was a nice trip; the show was well done for a small production, and the location, Jefferson’s Poplar Forest, is a gorgeous historical site I definitely want to spend some time exploring for it’s own sake one day soon, and I got to spend time with the kid, and see a couple of her friends that I like (HI, SARAH JANE!)

Saturday I managed another ten miles on the trail in the morning, followed by some grocery shopping and a nice visit to the local farmer’s market for my weekly veggie hook-up from Jerry the farmer. I also knocked out a bunch of laundry, cleaned the toilet, fixed my bass jack (and felt like an electronics god afterward) and motivated the rest of the family to do some real cleaning up. It felt good. We closed out the day making an appearance at a dear friend’s birthday party (at the apartment that was still kind of dressed for the recent bachelorette party; the wedding is in August); socialization was had, Cards Against Humanity was played, and laughs were shared. I’m sure the party got a little more off-the-hook after the old folks like Colleen and I left, as is good and proper. We did bring Mary back a left over bachelorette party cupcake covered with penises; it was funny.

Sunday started again with a nice ride on the trail; another ten miles down, hitting eighty for the week; I’m getting closer to picking my Capital Trail weekend, as I think I’m almost there in terms of condition and endurance. I hit the trail earlier than usual (trying to avoid the humidity), and had a somewhat strange experience – the dog walkers out with their Starbucks kinda looked at me like I was “fitness guy”, which I totally don’t feel (especially since I got lapped by some other guy while doing one of my fifteen milers last week), though I was reminded by my wife and friends on social media that I might, just perhaps, be fitness guy, since I’m out there riding all the time on my well-maintained bike with disc brakes and all, wearing the shorts and the helmet, and knocking out four minute miles on dirt. I dunno.

Otherwise, I did some more laundry, made some Hawaiian-style chicken (“Hawaiian” because it had pineapple in the bbq sauce), made my electronic door locks on the car work again by changing the battery in my key fob (and learning a few valuable tidbits about coin cell batteries in the process), and thanks to Colleen’s doing some sorting of storage boxes from upstairs, hooking up an old VCR (and finding cables to do so to my modern, HDMI-based system) so we could watch the VHS tape we found of a dance recital featuring Mary, age five.

That’s actually a nice lead-in to what we’re looking toward this week; it’s dance recital time once again, which becomes big dad time; I’ve been doing some minor sound editing leading up to the performance the last couple of weeks, but I’ll likely be working sound and setting things up all week to some extent. The work week shouldn’t be too onerous; I actually got some good news late last week about some folks wanting to maybe fund some of the things I want to accomplish but have bureaucracy getting in the way, and need to work that bureaucracy even further (since my boss is away in training for the whole damned month) in order to make this good stuff happen, which will be tough, given that although what I want to do lines up perfectly with the bureaucracy’s stated goals, involves all sorts of complications designed to keep me from working in these sorts of efficiencies because of all kids of weird power plays built into the system. Damnit.

Oh well, I can hope the rain holds off (it’s not doing such a good job as I type this) so I can ride off the stress as the week progresses.