spooky

the alarm went off at 5:15.
it shocked me into a vague level of awareness.
I groaned, deep inside my core.
I got up, because I was determined to experience another moonlight morning bike ride.

the moon hit its fullness peak on tuesday at approximately 2 in the afternoon, but yesterday morning was too cold, so I planned to ride this morning, when the temperature here in salt lake was supposed to be about 47 at ride time. reality was a little more harsh: it was closer to 41. but that is still oodles warmer than yesterday, when it was 37.
and of course these are city temperatures: I really don't want to know what the temperature is in the heart of emigration canyon.
which makes me think about a toy for my bike: I'm sure those fancy cyclometer/heart monitor/altimeter/you-name-it-ometer thingees have thermometers on them as well. so you can know just exactly how hard your heart is working on what type of an incline at what elevation with what wind speed in what temperature. did I forget anything? oh, as well as being pinpointed on a map somewhere with the GPS feature.
I am quite a distance away from that purchase. I'd have to pay myself a LOT more for each post, which would necessitate some other kind of sponsorship.
and it's just as well, because as I said, I didn't really want to know how cold it was out there anyway.
suffice to say, I came home and immediately got in the shower where I let hot water sting my chilled skin for as long as I could possibly stretch those few minutes I had before hot-chocolate and lunch-making needed to begin.
ah.
back to my moonlit ride up the canyon: it was perfect. and a little spooky.
these were the spookiest moments, made a little spookier and sillier due to my slow early-morning brain response time:

the body lying by the side of the road, which changed from "body" to "fur covered body" to "dog" to "sleeping dog" (yeah, right, on the side of the road, sure) to "dead dog" to "dead deer."

the dark, two-to-three foot high shape on a gravelled pullout near the bottom of the canyon: it looked like a statue of a skier, crouched in a tuck position, facing the road. this is at 6:45, I am coming downhill at about 29 mph, and although the moon is lighting the world it is still a time of shadowy mysterious shapes. I still have no idea what this was.

the cat who ran across the road in front of me on wasatch, whose body I nearly missed hitting and whose psyche I probably damaged as I shrieked when I saw it seconds before I (almost) ran it over. this was, of course, as I was riding without my headlight because it was just so cool, though I knew it was riskier there in a residential neighborhood than it was in the bike lane going slowly up the canyon.... I did not think the greatest risk would be from a dark and slinky feline.

the three things I ran over that remain mysteries to me.

I could have run over a porcupine, a brick or two, a branch, or an abandoned backpack for all the attention I was paying to the road this morning. how could I focus on the bike lane when that magnificent moon was up there, those thousands of stars, those wickery shadows thrown down on the asphalt, that fistful of vapory pale white that hung over the northeast peak of the canyon until it dissipated and filtered out into the rest of the dark sky?
how indeed.

I'm already checking out the overnight low, because the moon has another day or two of hanging out in that huge, glorious, luminescent state it's in.

see ya in the dark.