Monday May 30, 2005 was a beautiful day from a weather perspective.  A few days ago all the weather forecasters were predicting a rainy holiday weekend.  It turned out to be a fantastic weekend, almost too dry, it would have been nice to actually get a little rain.   

The day before, Sunday May 29, 2005 I did not ride my bike, but I did get my exercise.  I worked like a dog helping plant some new bushes and flowers in the front of my Mom and Dad’s house in Royal Oak.  For Mother’s Day us kids told my Mom that we would pick a day and all come over to work together doing some new landscaping in the front yard.  Well Sunday turned out to be the day and all kidding aside Barry and I worked very hard.  Amanda chipped in with a good effort as well and she also made a crucial run to the local Seven Eleven for Slurpies about three quarters of the way through.  Carol was an excellent supervisor and she manned the hose watering all the new plantings.  Brian and Melissa both had to work real jobs so they couldn’t be there.  Diane also had to work until 2:00 pm so she didn’t show up with Max until we were almost done.  Max went to the new Star Wars movie with a friend and Jonathan was up north with his second family of Bob, Cathy and Mark.  So I drove over by myself and Barry and I did most of the work.  I almost forgot to mention my brother Tom.  Even though he is a big shot at Chrysler he told us he had to work and wouldn’t be able to join us.  Thanks for the help Tom, just kidding I understand the importance of making a few thousand more Chrysler minivans on a Sunday to store in various lots around the city, you can never have too many minivans collecting dust in storage with over a 100 days of new vehicle inventory.   All the hard work was worthwhile, the landscaping turned out great.  Check out this link for pictures we took during this event. 

Back to the bike ride stories.  On Monday Diane and Max went up to Adams to play tennis.  I figured this was a good excuse to ride my bike to the tennis courts to watch them play.  It is a short ride up to Adams, so while I was watching them play for a couple minutes I decided to ride around the schools, both Adams and Van Hoosen to get a little exercise myself.  Before I took off on the first of many laps around the schools which turned out to be just a little over one mile round trip, I noticed that Max appeared to be smoking Diane in tennis.  The lap around the school is actually a nice little training route, you get some up hill and a little downhill.  I ended up doing five laps total, stopping each time to watch a little tennis in between.   

The football/soccer field at Adams is completely torn up.  The grass is gone and currently is covered by what appears to be sand.  Adams High School is getting a new artificial field surface installed in time for the next school year.  I have recently gotten a new part time job working for the construction company that is installing the new field.  So in addition to riding my bicycle I am now operating some heavy land moving equipment on the weekends with the construction company.  See the pictures below of me in one of my new rigs.  This part job my not last too long, one thing you may know about me is I have never been real good at driving my car in reverse, I sometimes have trouble going in a straight line.  Well, my first day on the new job and I was driving my new yellow land mover when I had to go in reverse to smooth out a pile of dirt.  As luck would have it I got off track a little and missed the pile of dirt and I plowed right into one of the turnstiles at the entrance and completely flattened it to the ground.  The foreman was quite upset.  I said to him, look on the bright side at least there wasn’t anyone in the turnstile when I turned it into a pancake.  They haven’t officially fired me, but I haven’t received a phone call requesting me to come back.  Oh well, the way I see it the less time moving dirt the more time for bike rides.  If you haven't already checked out the pictures see this link. 

The ride up to watch tennis and the laps around school turned out to be a nice little ride.  Following are the statistics from this ride.   The total distance was 7.6 miles, 11.0 mph average speed, 20.5 max speed for a total time on bike of 41 minutes.  
David Lindquist