Typical Sunday in Acton, Maine

I was bored. That is I was bored and looking for something new to poke my nose into. But.......earlier.....

I had been spanked properly by Jim-Jim, Keith and Chris yesterday morning on an off road ride that was supposed to be a "take it easy" ride. It ended up anything but.

I have lived in this town called Acton, Maine for many years. Closing in on half my life now. No, make that almost exactly half my life now. Wow! Time flies when you don't pay attention.

I have ridden every road and probably every trail many times. You would think I would not conveniently forget that a "take it easy" ride is not possible. Acton is not flat. Mostly it is either going uphill or downhill. Today we seemed determined to only go on the uphill trails. If we had some down strokes, I missed them. Must have been while I was trying to reinsert my lungs from that last grind in granny up that last 90 degree hill.

So I came home with all the piss and vinegar pumped out. My planned yard man to the masses day was shot in the butt. I collapsed into the blue over stuff and I think I may have moved a muscle in the next two hours but I am not sure. It was the cramps in my quads that got my attention about 4 in the afternoon.

Cramps so vicious, I immediately suspected my wife of sneaky behaviour while I sat passed out in the blue over stuff. She had not said much about my slacker ways following my earlier assurances that after my morning of frolick and fun, I would be the dutiful nose to the grindstone hubby toiling with dirty and cut hands in the fields outside. She might have made her point by injecting something just to have a chuckle watching me stiff leg it around while beating my legs in a frenzy to make the pain go away. Of course she was not at fault. But the fantasy of blaming someone else for my own stupidity is a constant flirtation. Just another typical Sunday here on Sam Page Road.

Whenever I get cramps, I remember the words of cycling wisdom I always forget, and the cramps remind me of in their unkind way.......Hydrate or die.

I never drink enough and I pay dearly when a hard effort has been stupidly undertaken. And as usual, I promise myself that next time, I will drink enough.

It's getting old, this trying to fool myself. I never drink enough. And yet I will promise to drink more the next time. One of those cycles I never seem to be able to get out of. I should just resign myself to a post ride life of mind numbing cramps and suck it up like a man.

A shower helped. More fluids would later help in the future. But my evening was locked in. Muscle twitching and involuntary cussin when a muscle would contract was the story of my post ride agony at home.

Between the moments of muscular discomfort, I visited some web sites I have not visited much recently. Sites I have linked on my blog, but once linked, visited rarely.

I careened through several and then Did You Know caught my attention. Yesterday's cutting and timely daily piece was about Resources, natural and otherwise. They explained about renewable resources. They mentioned Non-renewable resources. They pointed out that every country has some resource that helps them interact in the world wide economy. Seems every country has something to trade. Something dug, grown or just found at the dump that can be used to secure hard currency for the masses at home.

At the end of the narrative, they provided an alphabetical list of every country and what resource it has to trade. Some countries seemed to have more than their fair share of real top tier resources. Some had very few, but they were the big ones. But most it seemed had at least fish or guano to trade. Very few were without resources.

I looked through the list a third time. I came to the Isle of Man and next to their title in the column marked "Natural Resources" was the word "none". Maybe it was my recent depletion of electrolytes and energy stuff inside my guts combined with 27 years of being considered just slightly higher on the food chain than a slug by my lovely wife. But somehow, that word "none" seemed so appropriate nestled in the Natural Resource column next to the Isle Of Man.

Let's just say I could relate. I felt a connection from my sorry empty self to their sorry empty island. And then my legs went into panic contraction mode and the connection was abruptly broken.