One more Sunday up bright and early, missing most of the final day of the Tour de France to join the shop ride over at our usual Virginia Beach retailer. I arrived on site with enough time to give a Team Type 1 water bottle and set of team cards a good home with Matt-with-two-"t's", the type 1 rider who wore his 2011 Tour de Cure fundraising jersey last Sunday. It's always good to find swag a good home... and then there was also the surprised-and-very-happy look on Matt's face when I delivered the goods. Then again, several of the regulars thought we were heading home Sunday, rather than today -- so the surprise may have been as much that of me showing up, ready to ride, than anything else.

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Don't go swimming right after eating lest you drown. -- Advice to schoolchildren, circa 1970.

When our gradeschool teachers started teaching us the basics of physiology, they taught us that blood brought oxygen and nutrients to our brains, our digestive systems (simplified to "stomachs"), and our limbs, and that these three systems were constantly battling for better allocation of resources.

According to our teachers, our brains always won out because they had to control the rest of our bodies.

Our legs came second, for survival reasons. The concepts of "adrenaline rush" and "fight or flight" were simplified to our grade level.

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4:30 AM. Up at what seems like an ungodly hour, usual for this sort of event. What's making it harder than normal is the congestion dripping from my nasal passages into my throat that kept me tossing and turning through the all-too-short sleep period that happens when your Other Half first gets home from his work shift at midnight. On top of that, I seem to have strained my left arm so that my thumb and pinky are half numb as is a stretch along the upper arm just above the elbow. My right hand is going numb as I type -- can I trust the "99" that my Freestyle Lite just read out? Considering that for some odd reason, the scale is reading four pounds more than it did just before I turned in for the night (and I've neither eaten or drunk a thing during that interval), my skepticism does not seem unfounded. (READ MORE)

Rather than the bell lap at a local bike race, one is the number of days until my second-ever Tour de Cure ride. 

The good news is, I have my bib and helmet number, my VIP wristband, and I've been able to up my goal twice: I'm now aiming for $900.

The bad news is, I may have come down with that same sinus infection that put The Other Half out of commission all of last week. I'm hoping it's just a reaction to a whole lot of insect bites which have not been behaving in a typical (for me) fashion, but the effect has been a systemic histamine reaction rather than something that's site-specific: I'm dealing with the whole running nose, watery eye, swollen face and extremities thing.

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Sunday, The Other Half needed rest, so I headed off to the Bound Brook Criterium -- part of the Tour of Somerville series of bicycle races -- on my Flintmobile Flintstonecycle Specialized Dolce ("the courtesy of [my] two feet", natch) to cheer on Team Type 1 - sanofi-aventis. (READ MORE)

As a fan of Team Type 1 - sanofi-aventis and a Red Rider training for my second Tour de Cure, Memorial Day weekend is the weekend to show my colors and come out to cheer on the team that is (or should be) close to the hearts and minds of everyone with diabetes: it's the one weekend each year that I can be certain the team will be "in town", the weekend it races in title sponsor Sanofi-Aventis' Tour of Somerville series, which takes place within cycling distance of my home. (READ MORE)