Robins and Applications

On St. Patrick's day I saw my first robin in the neighborhood, high up in a tree. (A bird watcher at work told me that some robins do stay here over the winter. To see them you have to go to parks or woodlands. After all they have to eat.) Over the next couple of days I saw more of them, this time foraging on the ground. Yes, I can finally see the ground, but it's still in the low 40's. It's still a little too cold for me to ride, and I'm getting desperate. I haven't ridden all month. I complain that biking has a 8 month season in Michigan, but this year it's been true. Wait, stop complaining. I did see robins, today really is the first day of spring, opening day is 11 days away and Easter is this Sunday. Never mind the winter storm that is predicted for tomorrow. You have to live in the moment.

I got another packet of applications for about 70 people. This brings us to rider number 791. (So much for our 700 rider cutoff. Do you see why we don't have a wait list?) I'll be mailing out the confirmation letters over the weekend. There will be more cancellations than applications from here on out.

I notice in the comments that people looking for people who are going to cancel so that they can replace them. If you do this, please let us know. We still need you to sign the waiver to be straight with our insurance. If you do take over another's registration, you have until June 1 to change the meals and bus rides on it, until April 1 to get a jersey. The only thing you can't do is add somebody extra to the registration.

Caught up as winter fades

I finished processing and mailed out the confirmation letter for the 717th person on this year's PALM on Wednesday. If you mailed us an application and haven't gotten either a confirmation letter, your application back with regrets, or a call from us saying your application has an error, something is wrong. (We still have applications for about 70 people that were incomplete or had errors. ) It looks like I am finally caught up.

Take a good look at your confirmation letters to be sure that I got everything straight. I checked everything, but I was pretty rushed and wasn't at my best. Be sure I got you emergency contact information, t shirt sizes, bus rides and meals right. These are things I could have messed up that wouldn't get caught by my program.

I'm happy to report that the snow on my lawn is almost all melted and all the debris left during the winter is visible. Friday was the first day I was able to run without worrying about ice. Instead I had to watch out for mud. Our bikes are out of the shop and are ready. And even though there is not a speck of green to be seen, Saturday was the seed distribution day for the Garden Resource Program here and now I have seeds for radishes, lettuce, beets, turnips, peas, carrots, green beans and more. I'm not sure how far I can dig in the ground before I hit frozen dirt, but I'm ready.