Last Thursday, wow, quite a few days ago, nice ride with Todd & Kevin (kid, not the pilot). Nothing fast, except when the road didn’t tilt up too much so I could hang on the wheels in front of me. Didn’t even come close to breaking 30 on the ride up Kings through the park, but somehow that didn’t seem like such a terrible thing. Sadly, this would be my last real ride for a while, because Sunday I would be flying to Wisconsin for a series of biz meetings & seminars at Trek.

Friday morning it was time for my now-monthly blood test, but not before first trying, and somehow succeeding, to order an iPhone X during the first ordering window. It took a few tries, bombing out several minutes after each attempt, before I game up at 12:40am and went to bed (ordering started at exactly 12:00am, and the initial window that came up shortly thereafter said I had just a 3 minute wait before it would be my turn, but when it was my turn, it did the hourglass thing for 10 minutes before I gave up and tried again… did the same sort of thing). But I did, before taking my shower, set it up to try again. And what do you know, I couldn’t get to sleep so I check my phone and, at 1:01am, it let me order one. In theory it will arrive sometime between November 3rd and 11th. What a dork.

Friday morning, without as much sleep as I would have liked, it was off to the vampires for the latest blood test, as well as coffee at Sheri’s Java Shack. Almost makes it worthwhile! Becky and Kevin always accompany me for good luck; in the early weeks, they came with me to make sure I wouldn’t chicken out. Thankfully my fear of having blood drawn no longer causes my veins to collapse! And this time the good luck seems to have worked because I had my best blood test since my diagnosis last May! Platelets have come down to 505k (they’d been as high as 1.2 million; normal is 400k), RDW showed smaller difference between largest and smallest blood cells (a good thing) and overall things just plain looked good.

Sunday it was off to Wisconsin. Uneventful flights (although the inflight entertainment system went out for about half an hour, making me wonder if I’d get to finish watching Wonder Woman or not) and one of the worst excuses for a $13 hamburger EVER in the Chicago airport. The place was called Santa Monica something-or-other and I think the hamburger probably had been made in Santa Monica… the day before.

Today? A lengthy series of 7 different business speakers and guess what? They were amazing! Trek paced things just right, with enough time in-between that it never dragged like I feared it might. Keynote address by John Burke, President of Trek, followed by various people telling us how we could be more relevant to our customers and more efficient for a better bottom line. After having to close our Los Altos store due to bottom line issues, this was good stuff to hear!

More meetings tomorrow, which means… yes, I’m still in Wisconsin, missing yet another day of riding. Looking forward to being home late Wednesday. –Mike–