4,000 x 15

Computers are great at doing the same thing again and again. It’s usually when you make a change that things go wrong. With the expiration of Daylight Saving Time last night, my company needed to update the time on the mainframe manually. And falling back to Central Standard Time appeared to create an extra hour during which we could perform additional maintenance without affecting the 6 a.m. up time we promise our customers. In the end, we gave back that hour and then lost almost two more. First, the system didn’t come down cleanly at the start of the maintenance window. Later, the system didn’t come back up cleanly. It was ugly. I console myself with the knowledge that I didn’t cause the problems and that my efforts reduced the duration and severity of the outage. But those efforts were fatiguing, and I didn’t have enough free time in an almost 12-hour shift to get a decent meal.

So, I came into today a lot tired and a little pissed off. Maybe it would have been smarter to go directly to bed. But daylight is even more precious now and I didn’t want to risk sleeping through all of today’s, so I stayed up and got my bike ride done. By itself, it was nothing special: I covered 20 miles in 83 minutes. I was just riding, not really training. But with those 20 miles I surpassed 4,000 miles for the 15th consecutive season. Oh, and I completed another Garmin Connect badge. That was a good way to put a bad night behind me.

Tomorrow should be warmer but the winds should be much higher, so it could be a big day for yard work. Suddenly, my next trip to Pennsylvania is only a week away and I have a long To Do list on which cycling is a maybe and not a must.