cranky

My wife says I've been cranky recently. I haven't noticed it, but I'm notoriously poor at noticing this stuff. It may be because I'm leaving for the Anchor House ride in ten days, and I'm worried about... oh, pretty much everything:

• Have I trained enough?
  
• Have I overtrained, and I'll burn out before the end of it?
  
• Will I piss off, or creep out, the other participants, especially my roommates?*
  
• Will it rain the whole time?

*When I first started back riding, I was calling out every car and hazard on group rides; even the ones that everybody else had just called, and I made a bit of an officious ass of myself offering to fix the items on every bike that didn't meet my exacting standards. Despite that, I was not universally shunned... but I now know what a jerk I must have appeared. I also know that, at my advanced age of pushin'-60, some of the behavior that's endearing, or at least forgiveable, among younger folks is odd, off-putting, or worse from a guy my age.

I packed up my suitcase, and it doesn't look like I'll be able to get all my clothes, my bike supplies, and my technology into one bag; I'll probably have a suitcase, another bag with bike supplies (tubes, CO2, extra chain, extra tire, short pens that fit in my seat bag...), and a disposable bag I'll carry on the bus. It will be a pain to carry so many bags.

One of the days of the ride is a "uniform" ride, where riders all wear the Anchor House jersey. I didn't buy one; they're twice the price of the solid-color jerseys I get, and nobody told me about "uniform day" when the jerseys were being ordered. I'm sure I won't be the only rider without the uniform jersey that day... but it's 2:17 am as I write this, and this is the kind of thing that keeps me up. (Common conversational exchange at my house: Jim says, "Do you think it's easy to be this crazy?", and excellent wife says, "You make it look easy.")

Another pet fear: I"m planning to do four group rides between now and the bike loading... and I'm SURE that something expensive-and-difficult-to-fix is going to happen on one of those rides.

Am I cranky? Maybe.

Of course, she's got her own trip that she's excited about, and maybe she's projecting her own agitation onto me. Or maybe we're both a bit off.