The Week in Review
Last weekend, Dan left me two messages that he was indeed coming over for a Saturday morning ride. I didn't pick up either message. Fiddled the early-morning away doing who-knows-what, then finally got my stuff together and was literally heading out the door when Dan arrived, in what was clearly cycling gear. We did ride: up Oakville, which my Garmin asserts is a nearly 700-foot elevation gain in just over a mile, then over Veeder, and back home, totaling about 35 miles. Good stuff. The traditional polluting of air followed, in the name of baking bread in the homemade backyard earthen oven. First two loaves: a little charred. Second two: better. All eaten, all enjoyed. And did you know the oak coals (still working on that first dismembered wine barrel) removed from the oven can serve as excellent coals for the grilling of London broil in the Weber? I lie not.

Sunday, Niko and I endured the heat together -- lots of heat lately, as is the case everywhere in the Northern Hemisphere, it appears. Wait -- Moscow rainy and cold. Worse, my persistentoothachece was at its agony-inducing peak. Pain in the jaw, the eye, the temple, the horror, oh the horror. (This in addition to the tooth itself being extremely sensitive to cold.) I had to lie down for a while. But a strange thing happened. After a bike ride in the evening, Niko took a bath and I a shower and when I got out of the shower, the aches were almost entirely gone. Just for a day, but I took it.

There were more workouts -- couple of easy runs and one with some intervals, six miles with four 2:50 half-miles snuck in there, for kicks. Peter and I rode up Wild Horse Road, another steep climb, and did it twice just to make sure that stupid hill was crystal clear on the fact that we had kicked its ass. There was another ride up Veeder, the easier way, from Redwood, with Laura J visiting Napa from Chicago. And of course the usual flapping around in the bath water that is HealthQuest's pool during hot weather. Four swims in all.

That's how today ended, or at least, that was the last halfway interesting thing that happened today -- a swim, as the sun set. Why the late swim? Long story, but a key part of it all was that at 4 p.m. I had presented myself at the office of Dr. Raymond Scott DDS, MS, for the purpose of getting the roots to my No. 3 tooth (second molar on the upper right) excavated, filled and sealed. I'd had another root canal not long ago, but not on a molar and not in a situation in which the tooth was hurting terribly badly. So Dr. Scott drills into the matter and finds the inflammation in two of the four roots is a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being worst. What this meant, presently, was that the anesthetic he'd shot my gums up with wasn't really reaching all the tissue, and that's why I was experiencing piercing pain the likes of which would have had the most dedicated, virgin-eyeing Islamofascists terrorist spilling the beans completely to his freedom-loving American captors. Dr. Scott did what he could to minimize the pain by bathing the area in what I gathered was a topical anesthetic and by and by we got through it, the work was done and five hours later I feel just fine.

Must go to bed soon. Tomorrow morning I need to run, but I also need to watch Our Man Floyd in the time trial. What a Tour. Then it's down to San Jose for Mom & Dad's 50th Wedding Anniversary Celebration. Woo-hoo!