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Day’s Verse:
Dear friends, do you think you’ll get anywhere in this if you learn all the right words but never do anything? Does merely talking about faith indicate that a person really has it? For instance, you come upon an old friend dressed in rags and half-starved and say, “Good morning, friend! Be clothed in Christ! Be filled with the Holy Spirit!” and walk off without providing so much as a coat or a cup of soup—where does that get you? Isn’t it obvious that God-talk without God-acts is outrageous nonsense?
James 2:14-17
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Please help me raise money for the MS Bike Tour Cape Cod Getaway. Donate today on my MS Participant page.
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I only ended up riding 50 miles this weekend, all on Saturday. Sunday was 63°F, heavy “rain mist”-ing, and windy. Forty more miles home from church in that just didn’t sound fun, so I skipped it. This June has been the drizzliest many New Englanders can remember — something like 17 of the last 20 days have had rain, and not the usual summer thunderstorm-type rain, either. I’m OK with 60°F and drizzly, although it’s a little difficult to dress for. Saturday, however, was one of the three non-rainy days we’ve had lately, so I hurried and left early while it was still sunny.

I rode up to Lake Shirley, where I trespassed a little bit to sit on somebody’s stairs to their dock (the stairs, incidentally, were right on the road). I relaxed there for a while:

This is a pretty typical pond view that I see all the time on my rides various places:

Massachusetts seems to have been almost entirely swamp before people started messing with things here. They’ve filled in enough of the swamp to put houses on, but every time you turn around there are sloughs, vernal pools, ponds, puddles, mud-holes, and of course mosquitoes breeding in all of those. It’s nice as long as you keep moving, but the instant you stop, you get swarmed and practically sucked dry in no time flat.

I took the ARRT on the way out and back, and on the way home managed to remember to take a picture of a serious obstruction on the trail:

I expect it will take a long time to get it removed, since this is just a bike path and not a road. Also in the time it took me to take that picture — about 30 seconds — I got two mosquito bites. Just more evidence for my Massachusetts-is-secretly-a-swamp theory.