I have to say, it is one kind of humiliation to not be where you want to be professionally or something, or not be able to buy the house you want. No big deal really. But when you go for a bike ride with some old people and they totally smoke you and then you kind of faint, it is downright embarassing. Which is pretty much what happened to me yesterday. Maybe it isn't embarassing. Maybe I had something go wrong unrelated to the fact that old people raced past me on their bikes, maybe I just had some kind of blood disorder, like an annurism.

The story was that I was going to go for a ride with a guy who is about twice my age, and I figured that was ok, not everything had to be a test of human endurance that brought me to the very edge of having a stroke. And when I got there, it turned out he was having a sort of chest cold, plus he brought an older couple with him. So I was thinking this would be a very slow ride, where we had to stop a lot. Then we start and the old husband in the couple goes racing ahead. I kind of pity him, figuring he'd plotz any minute. Then the wife goes racing past me. And basically for 15 miles, they are going at Tour De France pace, and I struggle to keep up, until my vision starts to go dark at the edges and I feel as though I will shortly expire.

Then I came home and ate some raisins and had to lie down for a while.

On the plus side, spring, with all it's natural renewal, seems to have come, in some sense. Of course it is mostly always the same temperature out here, but there are new buds on the trees, and that is nice. But you can see spring in other ways here. The homeless seem to be more aggressive than usual, jabbering at passers by and flinging their excrement willy nilly. And my loving wife is coming up on the end of her semester, so she is now in heavy studying immersion and my contact with her is limited most nights to where I can only slide a tray under the door each night with food on it as she declaims out loud to herself about the function of the kidney, or what have you. But at least her broken clogged up vein seems to be reparing itself, so it would appear that the worst liklihood of catastrophic outcome is receeding, slowly but surely.