Yeah, I'm just gonna go ride a bike

Headstone at a local cemetery.

The weather apps seemed a bit bleak this week, but so far it has been reasonably warm and pleasant. Each day this week it has been a quick and easy decision. Guilt about not getting enough done around the house has been building, however, and the weather may not end up being the determining factor for the rest of the week.

Don't be jealous of my sweatshirt "kit." 

For today, however, the riding was splendid, and I took a rare spin down Granite Street to add a few miles. The hills are nicely spaced so momentum just pushes you up the next hill. Before and after the junkyards, it's a nicely wooded, quiet ride, and a right on Cliff Street spits you out across from the bike path parking lot.

The Pug is bullet proof, always a trusty ride.

Earlier in the week a brief cross-border raid into Millbury took me over or under three major highways for the day: I-290, I-90, and Route 146. It's nice to be able to make route adjustments on the fly. I wanted to go up Upland Street to get home with slightly less hassle than having to back under 290, but Upland is a mini-beast of a few long, kinda steep hills.

Rarely do I venture over the bridge.

A quick left onto Spofford Road cuts those hills in half. It's such a neat area over there; my iPhone ride-bys don't do the neighborhood justice. There are these huge vegetative areas that still haven't been developed, and they're just beautiful. It's surrounded by these big hills, so it reminds me if Central America or some mountainous land. Really cool.

Upland.

The true revelation, however, was after the ride when I whipped up some zucchini fritters. I envisioned a sort of burger, and it worked in that sense, but they would be just as good with some sauce on the side or maybe some caramelized onions. 

Fresh chives from the unkillable chive plant in the backyard.

Only looking at the picture do I now realize how huge that piece of salmon was.

And here's a gratuitous grilled salmon shot from the weekend. I would eat a salmon jumping out of the river, grizzly bear-style, if I could. It is my most beloved fish. It needs little to be spectacular, which is probably my biggest folly. I simply don't do too much to it. 

Routes

There were periods of time -- sometimes months, sometimes years, sometimes only weeks -- over the past 15 to 20 years during which I went to the gym.

 I largely enjoyed it, but it never seemed to stick. Typically, what started as pretty developed workouts would end up reduced to simply half an hour on the elliptical, maybe some pointless situps, and that was it.

Chalk that failure up to many things, but I always suspected boredom played a major role in my vanishing act. Having music or television to watch always helped, but it all just became dreadfully repetitive after a while. With that in mind, I decided that riding a bike might go a long way toward addressing the boredom issue as I was putting together a sort of path out of this malaise about a year-and-a-half ago.

Turns out I was spot on. The scenery, the concentration required not to get killed or injured, and the ability to stop and snap a picture of something cool have allowed me to create a routine for doing something that's good for me and enjoyable. One of the biggest advantages over watching a half-hour of closed-captioned Food Network is that I am not captive to any particular route.

There are shorter routes I take and longer ones, but among those, I tend to keep returning to a few favorites. Living in a pretty centrally-located section of the city, I enjoy ready access to a lot of different routes on my bike. One of them is the Blackstone River Bikeway.

Completed several years ago, the bikeway runs about four or five miles. It starts in Worcester and ends in Millbury. There is  a grand plan to run it from Union Station all the way to Rhode Island, but that's eons away. For now, it's a nice little spot, that's super kid-friendly.