Our county is having a spike in Covid numbers and as such, indoor dining at restaurants will be shut down yet again until the numbers improve. I feel so bad for all of these business owners. We went to the pub up the street for one last indoor meal. They have a lot of outdoor tables but it's in the 40s now and it's too large of an area to use the patio heaters. It was really sad. They had removed most of the tables and there were only 3 servers working.

I'm getting a nice feel for the new mountain bike (traded the Fuse in for a Chisel). It's so much lighter and easier to maneuver. The LBS owner built me up a set of very nice wheels and is going to try to sell the stock wheels for store credit.

Steve is on a kick to replace our smoke detectors with better units. Ugh, what a project...

Our department had a Teams meeting today. At the end I made my official retirement announcement. It was no surprise but it felt good to state my intentions in front of all of my coworkers, rather than just talk about it in casual conversation.

Weather is crazy right now -- it was in the mid 70s with crazy wind most of the day and then around 4 pm a big scary dark front moved through and dumped rain on the area, then things cooled off to more seasonal temps.

Had a great gravel ride with friends today --- we started at Mike's house near Milton. It's a little over an hour's drive but it's a bit like stepping back in time. He rehabbed a farmhouse that had been in his family for 3 generations. His son lives there now, taking college classes online.

We've been on this route before but Mike pointed out a couple of interesting things this time --- the best was a spring bubbling out of the side of a bluff. In one spot someone had tapped the spring with a pipe and water collected in a mossy, wooden trough under this. Mike actually refilled his water bottle from this spring, as he apparently does frequently. I would be afraid to do this but whatever. The spring also reappeared slightly further up the road at the mouth of a small cave/grotto in the side of the bluff. There was a clearing in the woods with a picnic table, as if someone had set up a park.

Learned that some of the poor people who lives in the nearby town of Pearl use this spring as their source of drinking water. Like I said...it's only an hour away but it's a little like stepping back in time.

I worked in the morning, after riding, and then kind of hung around until my sister's grocery order was ready for pickup. She lives in Chandlerville, which is about 45 miles as the crow flies from our house. Because there's no good interstate or similar road to get there, it takes about an hour to drive there. Her order wasn't ready until 3, so by the time I got to Mary's place it was dusk, and completely dark when I made it home.