Arise, ye Woodbarbarians (1)

Summer in Review. Now with footnotes. (2)

Can you believe it’s been a whole summer since I threw pixels onto a screen for le Patch du Woodbury?  I know for many of you, that hasn’t been long enough. (3)   Had I realized that I would be writing a summer in review blog, I would have kept better notes. 

FEMUR

Where to begin…perhaps with the insufficient femur fracture from a bike crash?  I’d love to blame someone else, but I was tired and my foot slipped off the front of the pedal, hit the ground.  This brought the speed of the bike from 15 miles per hour to zero in an instant.  Unfortunately, my personal acceleration continued when the bike’s stopped and I went “endo”, over the bars.  (4)

I don’t crash often, but I have crashed enough to know two distinct types.  There’s the kind where you’re suddenly on the ground, not quite sure what in the world happened.(5) Then there’s the type where everything slows down and you have time to think, “This isn’t going to end well.  I wonder what a broken collarbone feels like?”

This was the latter.  Thankfully, other than the femur issue, it was largely road rash with no other broken bones.    The road rash went away, but it took a while for the leg to be diagnosed, first starting as a soft tissue injury diagnosis, then possible fracture, then wombats living in my leg, then finally, the actual diagnosis.

This wasn’t a problem, though, as apparently the treatment for almost any injury, including decapitation, is RICE:

R- Rest
I-Ice
C-Compression
E-Ennui

Let’s just say it was reaaaaalllly heavy on the ennui.  It was a long month off the bike, during which I went from a bulky guy who could ride a bike for a long time pretty well to a bulky guy who looked like he was pedaling square wheels.  

Finally back to being able to ride fairly well.  I didn’t feel up to doing the 30 mile Woodbury Days ride, but the next day, I tested myself and did a 50 mile ride.  Hindsight being 20/20, I should have tried the Woodbury Days ride.

ROAD CONSTRUCTION

Then, there’s the two month odyssey known as road and sidewalk construction.  The City hired contractors to do the work which meant that we had about a one week stretch where there was equipment parked in the area with no work being done, a flurry of roughly 2 to 3 days of prep work, more idle equipment time, about a week and a half of sidewalk work, more idle time, about two days of milling, more idle equipment time, and then maybe two days of paving.

Of course, having lived in the greater St. Louis area and watching the Fred Weber road construction company spend 3 years building a 4 mile stretch of road, this was not entirely surprising.(6)

STATE FAIR

The Great Minnesota Get Together was the next notable event in the summer.  It was my daughter’s first time to the fair and my first time in almost two decades.  We were going to go to a concert in the grandstand with my wife (7) and spend the day wandering about the fair.

Unfortunately, it happened to fall on what might have been the hottest, most humid day of the entire fair.  It was so warm that one of the Official State Fair Mascots, Fairchild, spontaneously burst into flames. (8)

How bad was it?  Other than mini-donuts, we ate no solid food during our 12 hour stay, just liquids. We even hung out in the stands of the air conditioned Coliseum for about 45 minutes, resting and reading the trivia on the scoreboard amidst the wafting smells of animal poo. (9)  Following that was about 90 minutes spent wandering the animal barns (10)

Another highlight was the MN-DOT quiz.  One of the questions was about which community had the most roundabouts.  The choices were, if I remember correctly, Minneapolis, Saint Paul, Saint Cloud, or Woodbury.   Because I’m a proud Woodbarbarian, I selected Woodbury…and was right! 

We are the roundabout champions, my friends.  We’ll keep on circling `til the end.  We are the champions, we are the champions, no time for losers…(11)

WHAT’S TO COME?

Hopefully, now that the leg is good and the weather is turning fall like, there will be more riding.  When the leaves start turning, there’s a lot of good places to ride in Woodbury and also nearby along the Mississippi.  If you’ve been riding a certain route all summer, it can suddenly seem like an explosion of colors happened…

Somehow, I am now leading a Girl Scout troop.  This can end in one of two ways:  Either a Hindenburg like failure or a scout-led coup.  In discussing it with the parents, we’ve got the over/under for the coup at 4 months.

All of these things and more… I sense a 1,000 word “Fall in Review” coming in a few months.  (That’s assuming that a whole bunch of middle school Girl Scouts haven’t stuck my head up on a pike somewhere.)

 And that’s the view from the old steel drafting table.

(1)    Title is apropos of nothing…just always wanted to write it.

(2)    Okay, so this is a superfluous one.

(3)    Yes. I’m referring to you, Joe Schlabotnik!

(4)    Curse you, physics!

(5)    http://woodbury.patch.com/groups/eric-bergs-blog/p/bp--wheeee-the-carver....

(6)    Highway 141.

(7)    Alas, she was sent away on business to the United Kingdom at the last moment.

(8)    To be honest, it might have been Fairborn.  They’re anthropomorphized gophers in carnival barker getups…can’t say I’ve spent a lot of time memorizing their differences to tell them apart.

(9)    Not entirely sure after all these years of animal shows that the smell ever goes away.

(10)  Which is approximately 89 minutes and 50 seconds too long.  We spent 15 minutes looking at chickens.  Seriously.  I have no idea why.

(11)  Had to stop there because the estate of Freddie Mercury called.