Winter ride with my new Nutcase!

Well, I got to have the outside ride to try out my new helmet sooner than I thought I would!  There's the temperature at the end of my one-hour 10.83 mile ride tonight.

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Now I will admit starting out at the beginning of the ride, I would most definitely have agreed with that assessment of the temperature, but I was shocked that that's what it still was claiming to be at the end of my ride.  I would have guessed it was easily 15 degrees colder than that. But then again, I had that sweaty-chill thing going on.  Plus, the last mile of my one hour of riding was straight into a less than balmy west wind. That was a long stretch. :)

One of the places I regularly pass on my normal route is a farm with elk.  Tonight, they were right up at the fence beside the road, so I could not resist stopping and taking a few pictures, even though that meant taking off my two pair of gloves and digging my phone out of the zippered and then velcroed case that it sleeps in while I ride. I figured by the time I got through that whole process they would have scampered away, especially since my phone was belting out Def Lepperd at a high volume, but they stood right there patiently the whole time it took me to secure my phone into camera mode.

And here is my Nutcase debut. Take that as you may. :)

And yes, I think it is MUCH less round and martian-shaped.  I like it. And that's all that matters. 

And speaking of my gloves..... here's a cool idea I picked up from some other biking blog.  Military-issue trigger finger mittens.  I wear a pair of gloves underneath them and then pull these huge wool things on over the gloves.  They can be worn as a regular (though admittedly extremely oversized) mitten, but they also have the "trigger finger" that you can put your index finger into to enable you to still have dexterity to shift.  Perfect!  I had considered the lobster-style cycling glove, but this option was infinitely cheaper.  A pair of those lobster-claw gloves run about $30-$40.  I scored FOUR pair of these military issue gloves off Ebay for $12 total for ALL of them, including shipping. 

Yeah, the cheap-ass in me gives that two trigger-fingers up.

I was wiggling my index fingers to demonstrate the extra finger spaces,
but he caught me in down wiggle. 
Darn husband.  What are we going to do with him?