post the seventy-fourth, 2013

just one look at schwinny, and you can tell it's old. when i met my current life partner, he already had schwinny, so that must be... hmm... well, let's just leave it at "old", 'kay?

old schwinny

when we lived in the apartment, we hung clothes on schwinny in unabashed cliché. when we moved from there to here, decartes brought his pal sweetness to help with the heavy lifting. somewhere i have a snapshot of decartes and sweetness riding side-by-side, each with two feet on one pedal and two hands on one handlebar and one silly grin on each painfully youthful face. um... yeah. those knuckleheads were not much help with the moving.

when we got here (from there), we put schwinny upstairs--in what was labeled on the blueprints "formal dining room"-- along with the ping pong table and that old console television with the hand-me-down game system plugged in. (to mistake us for the formal dining room types would be a mistake.) i used to get up every morning and ride for about 30 minutes, get the ol' metabolism going. most days i managed to also get a real workout, but those 30 minutes were a guarantee against a zero.

bring a book.

later, we moved schwinny downstairs and over time, i quit riding. i don't even remember when i quit or why -- alls i know is that i must have quit at some point because we were considering giving schwinny away when, in 2009, i stress-fractured my ankle and ol' schwinny became my bestest pal. i rode a lot that summer but of course, when i was healthy again, i did what healthy people do, and healthy people generally don't ride a decades-old stationary bike in their basement. no, that sort of behaviour is the purview of the unhealthy, and that, dear readers, is precisely why today, i took my tendinitis and my nook to the basement for two solid hours of couple-time with schwinny.

you people can keep your fancy computerized whatnots. ol' schwinny's just fine with me.

i can confidently say that good housekeeping got this one right.