Not in the same way. No running log, no daily posts. Nothing coherent necessarily.

The text alone for the entries runs to 2.5 M of ASCII. Each day I clean the junk comments and trackbacks away, leave some more content on a disk at our ISP, spend time writing stuff down that'll be forgotten soon, perhaps post a picture relatives and friends can look at once or twice.

Many of you have added your comments to entries. Thanks for those, and thanks for reading along.

It's time to take a break.

They just blew up a building with thousands of rats standing by, ready to eat whole animals and people in a sudden frenzy. A guy got stuck in the explosion. He was going back for his white rat.

Now he's coming out of the building with a few smudges. (That's it, the people who've been trying to get me to wear my helmet and my seatbelt are lying. If he can survive that explosion, the least I can do is survive a head on collision on the autoroute or falling off my bike and having a truck run over my head.)

Aha! They're panning out to show a few rat survivors, starting a litter in a bale of hay atop some apartment downtown. The scary music is playing...

Saturday I replaced the SPD pedals on the mountain bike. The new pedals grip the cleats better. I tried an exercise suggested in one of the articles Andy found. The exercise consists of putting the bike in an easy gear and using only one leg to pedal. Very strange. I'm definitely not making perfectly smooth circles yet. There's sort of a whoosh on the downstroke and nothing on parts of the upstroke.

Unfortunately, the castle was such a ruin that we couldn't get close.

Things went fine until Diane fell over and skinned her hand. After that I had to carry her on my shoulders.

Still, they all enjoyed it a lot. Spring is definitely here.

She still had trouble reading the menu last night at the restaurant, but it didn't seem related to vision.

This year I've noticed many leaves with holes or brown spots. Mom said it looks like a fungus. It's also on other leaves, like the ivy Nath has out back. Hope it doesn't eat up the nice plants.

Since we had them fried in beurre d'escargot (butter with parsley and garlic) last time, and since we couldn't get any the other day from the local Cambodian restaurant, we had them batter fried today.

It turns out they're better with parsley and garlic. Frog legs do not have a strong flavor. Breaded and fried, they were too bland.

This heart rate is artificially high, though perhaps not by a lot. I saw the monitor giving strange readings (202, 199, etc.) at the outset of the ride.

Worked some of the time on maintaining a high cadence in an attempt to get smoother. My form starts to deteriorate at cadences higher than 120. That, and my weak legs, no doubt explain why I'm not a power rider. The fastest I could sprint down the hill outside Goncelin was 74.3 kph (46.2 mph). Track riders do better than that on the flats.

Today at lunch, Tim explained to his grandmother he needed her to gather 50 fat grasshoppers per child. (We have not yet prayed for a plague of locusts, and are not sure where we're going to get 150 fat grasshoppers this time of year.) He's planning to use sewing thread to tie a grasshopper at a time to each pole. The frogs will go after the fat grasshoppers, and as they do, the children will be able to scoop them into the plastic bags.

Next they'll transfer the frogs to three plastic pop bottles Tim has clipped for the occasion. He says the bottles will be too tall for the frogs to jump out, but that I'll nevertheless have to take a large bucket with a lid to hold the overflow as the bottles are filled with frogs.

Emma hadn't gone to the lake. She asked me what size the frogs were. She'd been talking to Tim, and had gotten the impression each frog was about the size of a basketball.

Both were convinced I should prepare by buying a large aquarium and filling it with the sort of things frogs would like to have around. Sticks and water and lilypads and so forth. They'll be angry and suspect me of stalling when they get home for their snack.

Today the verdict was that she does in fact need glasses for the classroom and for reading, but that she's only a bit nearsighted with slight astigmatism. Nothing that would force her to wear glasses all the time.

On the way back from the appointment, she was happy to know she wouldn't have to wear her glasses all the time, but she was already sulking. I asked her why. She said she'd looked at the prescription and was going to have to have round glasses, because the drawing on the prescription sheet was round. Her idea was that the eye doctor would prescribe the particular pair of glasses Emma needed. (The guy we saw was no doubt inadequately fashion conscious in Emma's eyes.)

I explained to my incredulous daughter that all the eye doctor was doing in his office was determining how the lenses needed to be ground so as to improve her vision and make it easier for her to read and see things far away. She was sure she wouldn't be able to get the square glasses she wanted. I'm not sure she believed me.

She also didn't believe me when I agreed to discuss with her mom whether she can get blond highlights next time she goes to the hairdresser. The world's a rough place when you're 7 years old.

I'm finding it difficult to deal with tired, wooden legs and the feeling that I cannot get going. My right shin hurt when I finished, too. Not a good sign.

Maybe I need to bite the bullet and quit running or cycling hard for a whole week. Perhaps I could compensate by working upper body muscles instead. Trouble is I'd be sore after one good session.