Exhausting weekends

I've recently decided that my weekends were too restful, and I needed to really start over-exerting myself. So I've had a variety of weekend activities over the past few weeks (since we got back from vacation). Last weekend was digging out the backyard slope for a retaining wall (we're slowly trying to get our backyard to not be a dust/mud bath), and hiking out to Ben Weston. This weekend it was dive class Saturday morning, more digging for the retaining wall Saturday afternoon, bike maintenance this morning, cleaning the house in the afternoon, and more bike maintenance.

The dive class was pretty fun. The waterfront officer at WMSC occasionally offers an open water (basic) dive class. This go 'round I decided to sign up. (Of course, then we went on vacation and I missed half the classes.) Having finally got my physical, I was allowed in the water this weekend, but I had to stay at the surface since my blood work isn't done yet. I'm not exactly sure what they might see in the blood work that would suggest imminent danger that wasn't apparent in the EKG or chest x-ray, but whatever. So we learned how to examine and handle an air tank, how to attach it to a BC (that's buoyancy controller), how to attach the regulator and test it and how to inflate and deflate the BC. Curiously, when you're diving and you have all that gear on, you still need weights to actually achieve negative buoyancy in the water, so we got weight belts and trundled down to the water. We learned how to gear up, how to enter the water, how to breathe through the regulator (all pretty basic stuff, yeah?). Then we got into some of the basic emergency stuff: what do you do if your regulator falls (or is pulled) out of your mouth, how do you clear your mask of water, what do you do if you lose your mask, and finally what to do if you run out of air. The other person in my group then got to practice all this at a depth of about 10 feet, but I had to stay at the surface. :( All that took about 4 hours, so it was lunchtime when I returned to the house.

Having "wasted" the morning, I thought I should work on one of my house jobs in the afternoon. I attempted to finish the kitty cage - this will go on top of the shed, with an entrance from the bathroom window so our indoor kitties can enjoy the outside. This was a no go because the shop at the lab was locked, and I couldn't find any scrap 2x4s. So I returned home thwarted. This meant I had to go back to work on the retaining wall. Sigh. Nothing like digging in the brick-hard clay to make you appreciate a desk job. I did manage to get the last of the digging done, though, and I moved all the stones we have (about 1/3 of what we need) into the yard and build part of the wall. Even unfinished, we can see how much better the yard will look with it.

The Sunday bike maintenance was prompted by my troubles with my front derailleur. I ended up breaking out my new bike tools (thank you Hobbes and Calvin), and pulling and cleaning the chains from my bike, Sweetie's bike and an old bike of Hobbes' that Calvin is inheriting. Calvin's bike has been sitting for a while, so it needed some work. I swapped the seat with Calvin's current bike because this one was cracked and didn't hold its angle. Then I had to try to loosen up one of the pedals - not sure we have a permanent solution there; we may need new pedals. And then I removed the cable to the front brake since one of the connectors was bent. This bike has the pedal-backwards friction braking, so the hand brakes are redundant. Now it was time to tackle the derailleur. I watched a few videos on YouTube before I started to increase the chance I was doing this correctly and then got to work. After fiddling around with it for about an hour and a half, I can now get the bike to go into low gear (which it wasn't doing before) and into middle gear, but it can't quite get into high gear. I'm not sure what the problem is. Could it be related to chain stretching? Maybe I need a new chain.

Tomorrow: work! A day to rest. (Actually I have a grant that's due, so I'll spend the day collecting paperwork and editing the proposal. Sigh.)