Finally cool enough to enjoy

Those of us that live in SoCal have been living through a heat wave for the past two weeks so when I saw the high in Anaheim would only be 86F on Sunday I decided to do a night ride at the beach.

It was only 78F at 7pm in Yorba Linda so I jumped onto my bicycle and gleefully rode towards the beach into a gentle onshore flow. The sun set thirty minutes later and the temperature dropped to about 70 pretty quickly. Lovely.

Because it was so cool (64F at the beach), I decided to ride along the beach path to the end and eat at Jack-in-the-Box. The beach trail was quieter that normal, possibly because it was Sunday, and possibly because it was cool. Someone was letting off fireworks at the beach. Better there than in the tinder dry forest.

I ate meat at Jack-in-the-Box because there aren't veggie options and I needed more than just fries. Turning back South on the beach trail I had a tailwind and the trail had cleared out so I was riding along at 18-20 mph with a full belly, very happy. Even when I turned inland I still had a 5mph tailwind so I finished 61 miles in 4:22 elapsed. Not bad considering for eight miles of that I was constrained to 10mph.

Next weekend looks horrific. Why does the weather always get more extreme on the weekends?

Killer ride

 Normally "killer ride" would be a good thing but yesterday was painful. Amber and I decided to do the Sam Woo loop which involves riding from Anaheim to Dana Point, then Irvine, Huntington Beach, and back to Anaheim. As it never goes more than 15 miles inland it's normally a good route for a warm day but yesterday was extremely hot. It was still 85 when we finished the ride at 5pm. It must have been close to 90 in the mid-afternoon in Irvine - well outside my comfort zone. A brutal ride, not made any better by the fact I was still getting over a cold.

Oh well - I survived and I'm stronger now.

Unrelated to cycling, I've been reading about a huge controversy in Scotland about end-of-year exam grades. All exams were cancelled because of COVID-19 so the exam board tried to guess the exam results from teacher evaluations and in-course test results. Many students received grades that were lower than their teachers had recommended so there has been understandable outrage. Some people are asserting that the results were affected by the location of the school, with the grades of students in poorer locations being downgraded more often. 

So here's an image of a protester's sign I pulled from the BBC website. Can you see the irony?

Obviously, if you are claiming your exam results should be better, you shouldn't use the noun form "effect" where you should have used the verb form "affect". I have to wonder if this is why the BBC chose to use this image. The Brits can get fussy about grammar.

So, new app, "GrammarCheckMySign"?