Upside Downside

Well...on the upside, the bike is still under warranty, so a nice engineering type is going to come along and hit it with hammers on my behalf, free, gratis and for nothing. On the downside, they won't be coming until June.
On the upside, the reason they won't be here till June is because I'm running about the place like the proverbial blue-backsided fly from now till then. On the downside, that means my next two weigh-ins will be shifted out of their usual Tuesday place. In fact, I think I'm going to be in places with scales that don't go up as high as I need for the next two Tuesdays...so we're about to enter a bit of a vale of mystery, without any biking potential.
Ahem...On the upside, next week, I'm going to be in a place with a home treadmill, so I can replace biking with rapid walking.

On the way, way, downside, that's because we're going back to the States on an impromptu visit.
Now don't get me wrong - I love the States. I mean, love it. I love its history, I love what it is, what it can be, and I love the people we stay with - Lori is d's oldest, coolest friend. She's the most natural "Mom" I know - engaged, interested in other people, caring to a fault, with enough cracking wise to stop short of sainthood. Her husband Dominic is a Real Man, in the kind of way that Welsh Valleys Men would be, if only they had guns. We absolutely, categorically shouldn't get on, because on the surface, we have less than zero in common. But over the years, we've found plenty of common ground in smartassery, in man-banter, in areas of comedy (some of which, in my New-Mannishness, I'd forgotten it was OK to laugh at), and in being the men in the lives of our women. I always come away from a week with Dominic feeling like my balls have grown three sizes and my chest has gotten thick with werewolf-fur - the guy kind of oozes testosterone, hunts deer, fishes, is a big sports fan...like I said, on any normal scale, we have zero in common. But it kinda works.

So it's not that I have anything against dropping everything and going to hang out in the States for a week. It's more a case of the reason we're going that makes it suck all kinds of ass. d's mom is 92, frail, diabetic and gangrenous. She's been living at a healthcare centre for years now, and she's going downhill like an avalanche. We usually go over to the States in a ridiculously snowy February to Western New York (Seriously people - you get that much snow, it's a memo from Mother Nature - you're not welcome there, move to freakin' Florida!), because her birthday's in February. Last time we went over, we were sort of summoned by her doctors, cos she was in real trouble, but they treated her in hospital, and made her stable, and we left in a more confident mood. Now, she's being shifted to a palliative care regime, with everything that implies. So we've hijacked a plane this Saturday (s'OK, they've mugged us in return!), and we come back the following Saturday. As if that wasn't mad enough, we get home Saturday, and at Bleary o'clock on Monday morning, I disappear to Croatia for three days...I forget the reason, I think it's allegedly work-related...
Hence the dislocation of weigh-ins, and the June engineering visit.

So...are we having fun yet?

Blood was a whopping 7.8 this morning, though, with one thing and another, that was significantly after breakfast. Don't care, too much to do...

PS - ohhh yeah. Normally, we go in February. I've never seen Western New York when they're not exporting snow to the Inuits. Now d says I'll see it in (cough, cough) "Springtime." She claims there'll be no snow...
Yeah...
Right...