Anne and I rode 32 miles today. There was a MS-150 training ride, but we would have had to drive to do that ride and that just seemed like too much trouble. The Bicycle Fun Club had a ride too, but it started at Meramec College and we would have had to drive to that one too. Except that Anne noticed the telltale pink arrows and dots in Maplewood, during Saturday’s coffee crawl.

So we biked down to Maplewood and picked up the route there. We followed it through Webster and then Kirkwood. It was the return leg of the bike ride. In Kirkwood we reversed directions and caught the outbound leg at the Grant’s Trail trailhead. We followed Grant’s Trail to its terminus and then started working our way back home. We rejoined the bike route briefly on the Christy Greenway. We passed by Bevo Mills on our way to Tower Grove Park.

We stopped for lunch at Sweetie Pie’s, located at the intersection of Tower Grove and Manchester Avenues. Sweetie Pie’s specializes in Mississippi style cooking and lots of it. It was doing a land office business with the Sunday after church crowd. Sweetie Pie’s served up lots and lots of good comfort food. With full stomachs, we managed to crawl home. Next time we will do takeout.

Returning home, we found that someone had parked their SUV in front of our driveway, blocking it completely. I was all for calling the cops then, but Anne’s council was patience. I listened to her and waited. An hour later the SUV was still there and the hour of my appointment at the Apple Store was fast approaching, so I called. The dispatcher took my information and asked if I wanted the vehicle just ticketed or towed. She dispatched an officer who soon showed up at our front door. He asked the ticket or tow question again and I held with ticket. He said the vehicle was not local, and then he asked if there were any gatherings going on. I told him about the open house for the house that is for sale up the street and he started walking that way. Minutes later a woman came down the block and moved the offending vehicle. She didn’t get a ticket, which is fine by me. I got the use of my car and made my appointment on time. I would call that a win-win situation, wouldn’t you?

My iPhone has been giving me trouble for a few weeks now. It didn’t seem to be able to hold a charge for very long and even though the battery still claimed charge, the device would crash. This started to occur near the end of the day and began to progress inexorably earlier in the day. Sunday morning, it would only hold a charge for 15 minutes, so I made my appointment for five o’clock. To make a long story short, I got a new iPhone, for free, even though mine was 28 days out of warranty. As I left Janet at the Genius Bar, I left happy, just as happy as if I had left a regular bar after having had a double, a double genius.