Early June Updates: Knees, the Pond, and the Bicycles

This morning I am reclined on our green banana leather sofa, a gentle and warm breeze blowing through the living room, with my left leg wrapped in a wide gauze bandage; a reenactment of Abbey's post-surgery pose. My knee repair this morning was much quicker than Abbey's: I checked in at 7:15, was wheeled into the surgery room an hour later, woke up around 9:00, and was home by 10:00. Much quicker and much less painful.

I thought I should take advantage of my limited mobility and a day off work to bring the scaqabout journal up to date.  At last posting, about 20 days ago, Abbey was a month post-surgery and doing well. Now she's seven weeks post-surgery and seems nearly fully recovered. There's still a little bruising on the back of her knee, but she's walking just fine and has been back on her bicycle a few times -- I'll cover that below. She's pretty much pain-free, although with a day of walking or too many miles on a bike, she starts to feel a little pain.

The pond. So our new rental house has a pond. Who wants a pond? When we moved in it was still frozen over, but it thawed shortly thereafter. At that point it had an ugly, orange and white goldfish, which was maybe six inches in length. Shortly thereafter, the goldfish disappeared; must have become someone's lunch. There's a big slab of stone not far under water surface. The owners put the slab in to give the fish a place to hide, but the slab also serves as a convenient fishing perch for hungry predators. Amos was very interested in the fish once he saw it, but it's unlikely that he was the culprit.

The most noticeable thing about our pond was the odor, so we decided a spring cleaning was in order. On Memorial Day we pumped it mostly dry, holding the water in a couple of big trash barrels while we scooped out inches of muck from the bottom. We also cleaned out the pump and reorganized the irises. Now the pond is looking pretty nice. The water is clear, the pump is running, and the sulfide odor seems to be gone.

Of course, we have also noticed that the other critters enjoying the pond are mosquitoes. If you lie on your belly and peer into the water you can see the larvae squiggling and wiggling about. For mosquito control, we picked up a bunch of baby fathead minnows. It'll be a few weeks before they'll be big enough to eat the mosquitoes, but once they are, they should provide some good natural mosquito control. And I hope they'll be harder for the predators to catch than big slow goldfish. Next we need to get some floating plants to help slow the algal growth.

So that's the pond.

Next I'd like to give an update on our bicycling activities. As I noted last blog, with all the knee trouble and relocation activity, our cycling season has gotten off to a rough start. But with the OK from Abbey's PT to resume riding -- on the road, mostly, with flat pedals (rather than 'clipless' or SPDs) -- we got the bikes out for a test ride over Memorial Day Weekend. We rode straight to the nearest mountain bike park!

Our new house is right beside Cherry Creek Reservoir State Park, which has a great selection of gravel and paved trails. Our neighborhood also has lots of roads with nice wide bike lanes -- I really think it's going to be nice place to be for running and biking once the knee repairs are done. So we pulled out the mountain bike fleet and hit the trail. Well, first we took to the roads to the park. Click here to link to the Garmin log for Abbey's first ride post-surgery. In accordance with the doctor's orders, once we hit bike park, Abbey found a bench in the shade and waited while Quinn and I rode the trails. Mostly.

It was fun ride. Here are some pics of the adventure:

 OK. That's enough for this post, but it's just occurred to that we have another ride to post. I will see if I can get that one up today while I'm still somewhat mobility-limited.