Le Tour starts again in twelve minutes and it's currently 4:48 am! I love the Alps! Today's stage features two HC mountains at 33.5 km and 83.5 km after the start, so things will hit hard and fast. Three other mountains still loom after these - a Cat 2 and two Cat 1's. The stage is fairly long 204.5 km and goes from Bourg d'Oisans to Le Grand-Bournand. Yellow is still firmly on the back of Chris Froome who increased his time lead over Alberto Contador yesterday to more than five minutes in one of the most exciting stages I can ever remember watching over my many years of watching Le Tour.
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| Look at the turquoise points. There are 21 of them. Each one is a switchback, so at each of those points the riders on Le Alpe d'Huez must turn to go the opposite direction. The mountain is daunting, and yesterday the riders went up this beast - TWICE! |
The funeral home offered the family the opportunity to put up to 50 slides onto a photo CD that would play during the wake. This is a definite improvement over memorial props available when his mother and brother died in 2004 and vastly improved over the complete lack of any audio or visual equipment available at the Denver funeral home I used for my parents' services. So my DH spent hours and hours going through more than 2000 slides that his father had taken from the mid-1940's on to the late 1990's and finally culled them through to get 50 really nice ones that showed a progression - a history as it were - of his father's life. It was very hard for him, lots of memories and lots of tears - but I actually think this project was really good for him to go through.
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| Photography has come such a long way in 150 years. Now we take photos with our phones. Modern portability, increased accuracy, and ease of use is allowing us to photograph everything. We're now a video generation. |
It's HOT. The store has been comfortable because I have the A/C turned on there for the comfort of our customers. But I don't have A/C at home and it's an oven. The lower levels aren't bad - they are semi or totally underground. But the upper levels - the kitchen, living room and bedrooms - are like mini-ovens. So baking my chicken breast for my dinners wasn't something I was looking forward to. I decided to cook this morning when the house was at least minimally cooler, so at 3:30 am I put the rub on my chicken breasts and placed the pan into the oven. I just wrapped them and put them into the fridge and it's 5:00 am. It was hot, but at least a bit less than it will be by tonight.
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| I love my baked chicken breasts - low calorie and great taste. A total win-win. |
Because I've been working all week I've had to envelope my Wednesday errands into odd times and days. But with the baking (above) and cleaning my grapes and cherries for the week early this morning, I'm finally caught up with my usual Wednesday schedule. Now if I could just get some writing in....
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| The winner of Stage 18 - the double Le Alpe d'Huez stage was Christophe Riblon, a Frenchman riding for AG2R. It's the first stage win by a Frenchman this year in the 100th Le Tour de France. |
Chickie phoned me yesterday morning during Le Tour to talk. She misses me (and I miss her too). For years we've watched Le Tour together and talked about each stage and rider, but with her in Montana on vacation and me working for her, conversations have been minimal. It was a lot of fun to hear from her and catch up a bit with how her trip is going and how things are going here. We talked for a while watching Le Tour together from two different states. Not as good as face-to-face, but better than nothing.
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| Life is a roller coaster, you just hang on for the ride. |
If nothing else, it's been an eventful week. Can I say that I'd like a life with a bit less event and a bit more boredom? But if my life was totally boring and nothing happened, I'd be unemployed, broke, and would have nothing to write about in my blog or to pull over into my fiction. I guess roller coaster lives are the Powers gifts to authors. Happy Friday, everyone!
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