Grade This

My weekend begins today!  What's in store?  Yard work, of course.  And most likely a ride on the bike.
I hit the 60 mile marker yesterday on my 100 mile challenge.  I rode and completed the CBTT (Charlie Baker Time Trial) in Concord, Mass.  I was pleased because this ride has some hills.  Hills are good, they build strength and grow muscle in your legs.  The higher the grade of the hill the more power you expend.  What is grade, you ask... well, if you have 1000 feet of road and the end point is 90 feet higher than start point, you have 9% grade.  In "The Body on the Lawn," Eli remarks how the grade up to Margaret Stanley's estate is a 9% grade.  When the Tour de France goes through the Alps or the Pyrenees the grades are as high as 24%... that's almost like riding up a ladder.  The steepest hill I had yesterday riding the CBTT was 6.5%.  I took a snap of that ride when I was finished so I could show you what those hills look like.

The hills are the green bit

And, of course, the Idiot Jerk in the White House Tweeted out his ugly racism yesterday.  Approximately 89% of the Republican Party agree with his handling of the immigration crisis.  They are a slowly shrinking minority group, a fact to which they completely oblivious.  They are white, aging men and white rural communities with a small minority presence.  They are the white class of Americans who feel entitled:  they want to buy as much shit as they possibly can with low payment, interest free loans.

And now an amusing customer story.  He had bought three vinyl mini-blinds and was attempting to adjust the length.  We will cut the width down, but length?  That the customer's responsibility.  It's a timely process.  Well this customer was having problems.  He didn't understand you need to take the extra string and thread it through the holes in the bottom rail, tie them together, cut off the excess, and replace the plastic plug.  "I have all this extra string," he kept saying.  So, I repeated the process.  His response?  "If I can't figure this out, do you have a support team you can send out?"...   ...   ...  He must have thought we had a blind Geek Squad... or, well, a Geek Squad for blinds.  We don't.  I apologized and told we don't provide that kind of service and recommended he call the 800 number on the instruction sheet.