2/8 and 2/15 Delivery Reports

I'm happy to report that I made the audience laugh a couple or three times during my speech at my nuclear-physicist dad's funeral. One of the times was after the part about how during his stargazing with us kids, his lessons to us included everything about the nuclear reactions going on inside the stars. I bungled the word "nuclear" about three times, then finally said it correctly, and then said, "At least I'm not as bad as Bush." The full text of the speech (written largely by my sisters but with last-minute editing by me - the exact opposite of how the obituary, on the other hand, had been written) can be found in the "Robert Thompson Frost" Guestbook at the funeral-home website, www.chadwickmckinney.com

I used a bike again on a small part of the 2/8 and 2/15 deliveries. On both 2/8 and 2/15, I arrived in Clarks Summit from the south rather than from the north, due to all of the renewed yo-yoing to Philadelphia that I've been doing ever since getting the news in the late evening of 2/6 that my dad had slipped on the ice and had a stroke. And when I visit Philadelphia under _any_ circumstances and don't have time to _go_ by bike, the next best thing for keeping my sanity is to at least have my bike _along_.

This meant that the bike that I used on the 2/8 and 2/15 deliveries wasn't the devoted-to-newspaper-delivery bike that I'd recently been boasting about fixing up, but rather, my "real"-cycling bike, i.e. the dropped-handlebars one that I do most of my cycling miles with. That's always the one that I have along on my trips to Philadelphia, because it's better for distance. Even the pansy, remote-start rides that I take down there (when I "cheated" by, as usual lately, not starting from Lenoxville) are longer than the one-or-two-block ones that I do for segments of the paper route.

This also meant that I had to contend with toe clips and the lack of a kickstand, which made the at-almost-every-house dismountings very tricky, just like with the time in September that I used this bike. It looks like I might wind up using this particular bike as opposed to the other one, more often than I'd planned (due to the need for my mom to be visited more often now and hence, more of a tendency by me to whimsically bomb the rest of the way down to Philadelphia while I'm at it after finishing the delivery, as long as I'm as far south as Clarks Summit), and therefore, I hope to get around to removing the toe clips and installing a kickstand (thereby making this bike very much like the devoted-to-newspaper-delivery bike) in time for this Sunday.

sk