Being Thankful

Don't want to get too earnest here, but do I have a lot to be grateful for -- don't worry, there won't be a list! Sometimes though, it's good to just register in your mind how good you have it...

Remembrance Of Skills Past

I didn't really have a reason to do this, but I decided to see if I could get that program to run on my SDF shell account. It shouldn't be too hard, SDF is pretty similar to my home computer, but since my program makes use of the Mini-XML library (non-standard,  and not installed on SDF), I would have to find a way to get that installed -- without administrator rights, and without messing with any part of the SDF system outside my account's little turf. This also shouldn't be difficult, I'd done similar things before, but I just didn't remember how.

Here's how: In my home directory I made my own "bin" and "lib" directories, then I downloaded and unpacked the compressed mini-xml files, and then did the configure/make process with my home directory as target. That got the new libraries installed in my "lib" directory.

The next step was to download my program code and make the file. No problem, though I changed my Makefile to know about my lib directory.

The final step -- the one I forgot, and the one that took a while to find with a Google search, since most instructions assume you have root access and are doing things in the standard way -- is to set the library search path to check my personal lib directory as well as the others:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/my/home/directory/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

(I also put that in my profile and exported it.)

Anyway, it worked like a charm, and now I can play with my program anywhere I can access SDF -- like my phone, thanks to ConnectBot and much to Anne's chagrin while we were out last night...

(Hopefully, if I need to remember how to do something like this again in 10 years or so, or if someone else looks for a solution to the same problem, this will come in handy.)

The Book Of Lists

Here's a list of the books I'm reading:

The World Until Yesterday, by Jared Daimond
The Victory Lab, by Sasha Issenberg
Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson
The Year's Best Science Fiction (30th Edition), ed by Gardner Duzois

On deck:

Thirteen, by Richard K. Morgan (a loan, so I better get it finished)
The Game of Thrones series (also  a loan)

Recent Music:

Lately I've been downloading music I hear on Radio Paradise, so recent acquisitions include Younger Brother, Alt-J, VAST, and Beth Orton.

This is in addition to recent efforts to round out my collection: the B-52's, Radiohead, Negativland, Big Star, Midnight Oil, and the Stereo MC's.

Also: Australia's Triple-J brought me to Seth Sentry and Art vs. Science.

Reviews of all the above to follow, eventually. Maybe.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Cafe Redux

Back again at The Joint,  waiting for Anne to get here from the library. Let's see...

I applied to Northampton Area Community College yesterday, and went this morning to the "Open House" at their main campus. My plan, or maybe rather aspiration, is to get some new skills -- we're talking mainly programming and applications development here -- so I can be ready to change careers if I need to; my first order of business was to have been learning Java, but after looking at the course catalogs I think I might want to take a few other courses as well, like databases, client-side scripting (ie Javascript), and server-side scripting (PHP), which are all parts of their "web applications" program.

Unfortunately, at the Open House I found out that the Java course is not available in the spring semester, the other courses will be be available but not at night, and the only one in the program available online -- thus the only one I can take next semester -- is the "intro" course, which I  was thinking of trying to get exempted from having to take...

All is not lost however: I talked to the Computer Info professor, and the intro course doesn't sound too bad, and covers a bunch of stuff I think I'll be interested in, and needing, so I might take that in the spring, as well as an introductory accounting course (just because, and also because it's online).

Meantime, we went into Philly yesterday afternoon. We stopped in at the Penn bookstore, then met Ben at the White Dog for a late lunch. Afterward we hit a few other bookstores that Ben knew about, and also visited Jaime at the coffee shop where she works. All in all, a good way to spend a rainy day.

Coffeeshop Ramblings

I'm sitting in "The Joint," a somewhat new coffee place in Bethlehem, opened by friends, and local restaurateurs, Bill and Tabitha. It isn't all that new anymore, but I got out of the habit of hanging in cafes after I left Easton, and when Wired closed I really lost the habit, so this isn't my usual Saturday routine -- let's call it, if not quite "new to me," then "outside my usual third-space options." Anne probably eats lunch here once a week though, and I can see why: I just got a sandwich, and it was excellent.

Blogging Will Be Somewhat Light Last Quarter My usual habit for years was to blog during lunch at work, usually just a few short paragraphs a day, but trying for every day. They eventually blocked blogs at work, and blogger.com, but I found a way to email posts from my Gmail account, and so the lunchtime posts continued, more or less, for quite a bit longer. Within the past few months, though, they started blocking Gmail as well at work... I guess if there were a will there'd be a way, but my blogging interest has waned, and so I haven't done much to find alternatives.

What's (Been) Up: Well, Anne and I spent much of the post-Ireland summer training, and we ran the VIA Half-Marathon in early September. I came in around 2:30, and Anne beat me by about 15 minutes. Once again, something I had a great deal of trepidation about, but when it was over I was glad I did it -- I may even do another one, but not for a while. One bad side-effect was that the biking suffered during the training period: I just didn't feel like going out for rides in the afternoon/evening after getting up and running 5 miles extra-early in the morning. Luckily, my cardio didn't suffer, though my technical skills sure did.

After the run I made a push to get my bike mojo back, doing a number of MTB rides in Jim Thorpe and other places, and having some fun watching the change of seasons from inside the forest.

Also: Just before the half-marathon, Anne and I got in one pretty big bike ride, a cycling tour to Philadelphia. Our original goal was Rehobeth Beach, but we had such a miserable time in the NJ towns south of Trenton (creepy and depressing, weirdly impoverished, no places to eat, skeevy motels, and on and on), and we realized on the second night that we'd have just enough time to cross the state, touch our destination and come back through the misery zone, that we changed plans and went to Philly. Great idea (though the ride through Camden was hot and unpleasant), and we spent two nights there, avoiding some rainy days and visiting with Ben & Jaime. The home trip was a bit tough, about 70 miles in one day (remember, we were fully loaded with touring stuff, clothes and camping gear etc), with hills. I was glad to be home!

'Puter Time: Remember that program from work that I was trying to understand? Well, the biggest problems with it were that it was written to accept data from punched cards -- no lie, it's that old, and the data formatting was never updated -- so the input format was cramped to the point of obscurity to fit in 80-character chunks, and major parts of the program were huge hodge-podges of nested IF blocks and GOTO statements mainly to parse that data, so I decided to look into rewriting these parts (in the original FORTRAN), and that eventually snowballed into rewriting the whole thing in C, taking XML data as input and producing output similar to the original program, but in a somewhat improved format. That's been going on for months, maybe for the whole past year, and lately I've gotten to the point several times where it was mostly done, except for maybe a bit of tweaking here and there... Well today I basically realized that it was done, it worked exactly right and did everything that the original program did, and more. (I added other connections, like our newer weld styles, and organized the program so that other new styles could be added easily, an impossible task with the old program.)

So now that I have it, what am I going to do with it? Not much! I've tried the program with a bunch of example projects, as well as some test cases (to see how well it handles bad data), and I'll probably play with it at home, using actual real world examples from work, but that's about it. I realized that I don't want to show it to anyone at work, because to show it -- show the code, that is; I don't think the program would run as-is on the machines at work -- is to basically give it away, and I think it'd be pretty hard to get them to pay me for this thing I did in my spare time. (I'm fine doing it for nothing, as long as I consider it an at-home professional development learning experience, but if it's to be used in a production environment I'd expect to be renumerated.) I'm also sure that the actual programming could be a lot better, and despite what I said about completeness, it's really not ready for prime time -- it matches the core FORTRAN  program, but there's no user interface, and no database lookup of material properties, things that we have at work thanks to a sort of "wrapper" program that prepares jobs for and runs the core program. Maybe that can be something I can work on now.

Meantime, I'm hanging out here, about to get my next cup of coffee. I'm on my own for the weekend, as Anne is off with her sisters and sister-in-law at a knitting convention. I went out last night with Doug & Lori, and Scott S; we went to Black & Blue, and had so much fun I think I might stay in tonight. I'll probably try to get in a ride somewhere tomorrow, as well as some autumnal yard work -- did I mention that Anne and I just built a shed? Well, she built it, but I helped...

My First Race...

...was the 1992 God's Country Classic, near Coudersport in Potter County, Pennsylvania.

I was pretty into riding by that point, even though I'd only started that spring, and my friend Mike and I decided we wanted to try a race. I have no idea how we picked this one, or even found out about it -- racing was popular at the time, even if we didn't know much about it, and there were tons of races closer to home, but this was the one we found and did. My guess is that Mike saw something about this one, maybe an advertisement somewhere, and it piqued his interest.

Flashback to a few weeks before the race: I spent a lot of time riding the towpath that summer, and a few other, similar places, and I was fitter and stronger, after a summer of rising and losing weight, than I had ever been before -- but that was a low bar, and I also didn't know much about "real mountain biking," as in what I'd now call singletrack, or more technical terrain and how to handle it. So what I d was sign up for something called the "CAM Fat Tire Rally," put on by Cycle Across Maryland, ie CAM, which I think is now defunct but they used to run charity rides across Maryland (get it?) to fund helmets for inner-city kids; this was their first offroad event, and it was held at Patapsco State Park.

Me at the CAM Fat Tire Rally, 1992

 

I actually got there a little early, and ended up helping with minor setup, mixing the energy drink jugs etc, then as things got started I met a few people to hang out with -- they all called me "Jersey" after seeing my license plate -- checked out some workshops on safety/etiquette/nutrition/technique/trail maintenance/etc, then went out with the "beginner" ride.

That was pretty cool, but it seemed a bit basic to me. After lunch -- tuna sandwiches, and a speech about what CAM does, which included a homily on MTB helmet safety -- I hooked up with the "intermediate" afternoon group ride, and was pushed beyond my skill and fitness level, almost losing my lunch before letting myself get dropped. All in all a good day, and I remember being exhausted on the drive home.

That was mid-September. In mid October -- Friday night of the weekend of October 10th, to be exact -- Mike and I drove up in his van, camped out with everyone else in the fields around "Potato City Airport," and on Saturday morning we went down to register.

Me at the God's Country MTB Classic, 1992

The guy who took our registration forms was in one of those "broken neck brace" halo thingies, which gave me a few qualms, and I also remember looking around during the racer's meeting at the fancy bikes -- I'd seen my first full-suspension bike at the Fat Tire Rally, but now I saw more of them, as well as plenty of suspension forks -- I was riding my fully rigid Giant Iguana with toe straps, and wearing sneakers, tube socks, really-old-school baggies, my lucky Jaegermeister tee shirt and a windbreaker, plus helmet and gloves. I thought I looked obviously out of place, and remember checking out some guy's disk wheels and feeling really clueless and inadequate...

Finally the race started, and started with the only section of actual trail on the course, about 50 yards long and complete with mud puddles and one rider already down, I mean face down in a mud puddle, with a pool of blood spreading through the water from his face while other riders were crouching and saying "You OK? You OK?" - yikes! I started thinking harder about that guy with the broken-neck halo at registration...

The rest of the course was actually pretty easy, jeep/snowmobile trails, and somewhat wider than doubletrack -- it was pretty much the towpath with elevation changes and turns. I started feeling better and more  confident (though the long climbs were tough), and at the halfway point we came to the "mandatory" stream crossing -- there was a bridge right next to where we crossed, and course officials making sure no one used it -- and I went through the stream without a problem just behind Disk Wheel Guy, who hit the water and was immediately swept away by the current. Bonus!

Immediately after the stream crossing was the biggest hill on the course, and I ended up walking, but I felt OK, and took the opportunity to carb up with my damp, rock-hard Snyders of Hanover pretzels. The rest of the ride was pretty much more of the same, climb and descend on wide dirt roads, and finally there was the finish line: my final time, something I couldn't tell you for almost any other race, was 3:03:01. Twenty-five miles or so, and about 3000 feet of climbing according to the advertisements, and I'd done it.

Mike finished about an hour later -- he told me actually took a nap on the course at one point, he was so whooped -- then we went back to our campsite and exchanged vainglorious tales with the guys in the next tents, whose names, strangely enough, were Donald and Kevin. The next day we hit the road for home, and we were so stoked we decided to do the race at Allaire State Park, practically in our backyards compared to Potter County, in November.

Epilogue: Mike and I raced Allaire together, but he didn't go with me again to God's Country; I went the next year and finished in 2:45, and the year after that I did it in 1:45. My last time there was when I went with Brian in maybe 1998 or so, after the race start/finish had moved from "Potato City," whatever that even was, to Lyman Run State Park. My time was about 1:40.

How/Why Did I Start Mountain Biking?

Morning weigh-in: 188.5, 12.5% BF

 

My right calf was really sore after Tuesday's run, so yesterday was a rest day: after work I got a little further along on that big program I was writing -- remember that? I almost forgot what it was I was doing -- then I took a nap, and then Anne and I installed the bedroom air conditioner -- the hot weather finally broke us, and last night was our best night's sleep in probably a month... This morning was a 4 mile run, and tonight I may do the towpath.

 

Here Is My Story: I saw several interesting questions recently on the Mountain Bike Review Forums, with some cool answers in reply, so I thought I'd play along here... The first two questions were: when and how did you get into mountain biking, and what was your first race?

 

I started bicycling in March of 1992. I'd been living in Easton for a bit over a year at that point, and working in my "career" job, my first job after college, since 1990. I'd never been active, and I became less so in college, and even less so after I moved out on my own and started working, but I never thought of myself as "out of shape," even when I was pretty much shaped like the Pillsbury Dough Boy. Until one day...

 

I was on a site visit with my 65-year-old boss, out to a power plant that had just come offline a few days before, so it was still pretty warm. I had to climb inside some enclosed space to take some measurements, up and down ladders and through crawlspaces etc, and I was pretty hot and exhausted when I was done. I was sort of fantasizing that my boss would be waiting with a soda and a "good job" when I got out, but when I did get out I found that he'd been swinging around the furnace, hundreds of feet up, in a bosun's chair -- a job that was, if anything, more strenuous than anything I'd been doing. I realized then that it was me and not the activity, and my lack of fitness was actually becoming a threat to my health, to say nothing of being an impediment to my work.

 

So that's the set-up. While I was worrying about all that I noticed my upstairs neighbors going out on bike rides, and I asked them what it was all about. Steve and Jane were a few years older than me (we're talking 32 years old to my 28), and were somewhat like yuppie mentors, and it came out that they liked to ride the local bike paths on their hybrid bikes. They had an extra one, and one day they invited me on a ride... I remember it was probably early March, I was wearing jeans and we rode out to the locktender's house on the north side of the Lehigh bike paths, and I remember keeping up, and even sort of sprinting on the small hills back up to Southside, and I thought "This is fun! I can do this!"

 

I borrowed that bike a few more times, then I decided that I needed my own bike, so I went to Genesis, the main bike store in Easton. Steve and Jane told me to get a hybrid, since you really didn't need more than that to ride the bike paths, but while I was in the store I started looking at the "real" mountain bikes, and how they seemed so much more sturdy and well made than the hybrids, and I finally settled on my first bike, a 1992 Giant Iguana, which I still have, and which I rode just this Sunday.

 

That spring and summer I rode and rode and rode, starting with Steve and Jane but eventually farther afield and without them, on all the bike paths near Easton, and along the Delaware Towpath to Reigelsville, and the Lehigh Towpath to just before Freemansburg -- the Lehigh Towpath was a very different thing back then, being mostly what I later learned was called "singletrack," and it was probably a good thing I had a real mountain bike. In the early spring I found out about the migrating Canada geese (and I still remember a dream I had -- in color -- involving the geese), and I saw more and more of the slow unfolding of the natural world all around me as I rode.

 

I lost 30 pounds that summer: I went from 185 pounds to 155, it completely changed the way I looked, and after that I was hooked.

 

Next up: my first mountain bike race.

Monthly Diary Entry Sez

Morning weigh-in: 189#, 12.5% BF

 

The weigh-ins are back, at least for as long as there's good news...

 

Did a short ride last night, about 15 miles on the towpath (to the new boat launch and back), didn't go nuts with dinner, and did a three mile run this morning. There may be some suppression weight loss in there, but it's better than the opposite -- like Sunday morning, after our party and a weekend of chores instead of exercise, when the scale said I was 192 pounds.

 

Party: Yes we had our "wedding party" this past Saturday, mostly in the afternoon though I don't think the last guests left until after midnight. We spent Thursday, and Friday, and Saturday morning getting ready -- this included gardening, mowing and straightening up the house, hitting the Allentown Farmer's Market for meat on Friday, getting more wood for the oven, firing it up Friday evening, and getting up before dawn on Saturday to get a huge amount of ribs, pork shanks and brisket slow-cooking for later. We also had a keg of homebrew, a case each of cider and blueberry ale, the fixings for mint juleps and gin-and-tonics, and the usual soft drinks plus well over 200 pounds of ice. Add 60 guests or so, stir, and it was quite a bash.

 

Training: Needless to say, in all this prep-and-party, and also with all the brutally hot weather we've had, last week was a bit light on the exercise, but otherwise the training is going well: we're up to Week 4 of a 12-week training regimen to prepare for the VIA Half Marathon, and I think I'm starting to see results: last night I was riding faster than usual, with less percieved effort, and this morning's run was a bit faster than other recent runs. (I'm not worried about speed, as long as walkers don't pass me in the half-marathon I'll be fine. My big goal is to have the endurance I'll need -- I've ridden hard for 15 hours straight, but this race is triple my longest run.) Anyway, tonight is probably another towpath ride if the thunderstorms hold off.

 

Re-Re-Re-Thinking

OK, here's the situation...

 

A few weeks ago a friend asked me about the kind of GPS / heart rate monitor I was using, and I sent him a fairly long email about my choice of the Garmin Edge 705, its suitability for biking but not for other things (I think he's looking for something to use with running), and why I went with the 705 rather than the newer Edge 800. My reason: "I went with the 705 because its data files are basically XML while the 800 uses binary files."

 

What that means is that the 705 produces output that is basically alphanumeric text, readable/editable by any text editor or word processor. Granted, the text is a bit hard to follow, but the basic idea is just a version of extensible markup language, like:

 

<SomeTag>

    <SomeSubTag>

        here's the data

    </SomeSubTag>

    <SomeOtherSubTag>

        here's more data

    </SomeOtherSubTag>

</SomeTag>

 

It's structured almost like an outline, except instead of numbers and letters for headings and subheadings, there are named "tags" like <Track> and <HeartRateBPM> and <Location>. A little bit of patience and you can find your way around most XML-based files, and there are also may programs and tools that recognize XML and can work with it as structured data.

 

By contrast, the (binary) file created by the Edge 800 is something that isn't in any human-readable format: it's just a bunch of ones and zeroes, meant to be read and understood only by specially designed programs. (Other examples of binary files would be things like image files, or MP3 music files.) In other words, I couldn't just fire up a word processor and look at my ride data, and -- more to the point -- I couldn't put together my own simple programs to find or extract data from the files, at least not easily.

 

This decision, to go with the text-using 705 rather than the binary-file 800, was one I made a few years ago, when I needed to replace an earlier Edge 705 that I'd lost on a ride. Partly it was because I would be getting an exact replacement of what I'd already had, but my main reasoning was ideological, as in "Information wants to be free!" I wanted to see my data without anyone's help.

 

After writing my friend though, I got to thinking about my decision, and realized that my reasoning really didn't carry much weight: after one or two experiments, I almost never actually looked inside my data files, or analyzed them with my own home-made programs. I would upload my ride data to the Garmin site, or use standard training software like everybody else. Being able to "look under the hood" of my data files was a nice option, but I no longer had the desire, or need, to actually do it.

 

Until...

 

Anne and I did a road ride a week ago on Saturday, and for some reason the Garmin website wouldn't recognize the data, and neither did any of the training software. Uh-oh. I Googled the problem and found out that sometimes the Edge 705 doesn't correctly record certain pieces of data, and so one of individual data records was screwed up and the file was "corrupt." The solution is easy: just remove the offending record -- you'd lose one second or so of ride data, but otherwise the file would be as good as new. I opened up the file in Emacs, found and removed the offending record, and things worked fine from then on. So OK, maybe it is useful! -- though it would be even more useful if the 705 didn't create corrupt files.

 

Since I've had the "new" Edge 705 for a few years now, and since I also have a spare, after someone found and returned the one I'd lost, the question was mostly academic, but we did a ride yesterday in Jim Thorpe on some rocky, overgrown trails (we did Green Blaze), and my Garmin popped out of its mount somewhere along the way. When I noticed it was gone I considered going back to look for it, but it could have been anywhere, under rocks or in the brush, at any point along a 10 mile section of trail, so forget it man, it's gone. So, now I'm down to the spare GPS and a handlebar mount that I no longer trust -- and the Edge 800, and the even newer Edge 810, both have a better mount -- and binary file be damned, I think it's time for an upgrade, especially since they stopped making the 705.

 

"Chi Wên Tzu used to think thrice before acting. The Master hearing of it said, Twice is quite enough." -- The Analects

That's All In The Past Now

Busy weekend, mostly errands and chores and such like, playing catch-up from being on vacation:

 

I had off Friday, which was spent shopping for food and other things (ie getting propane for the grill at Lowe's), doing laundry and cleaning the house etc; since we had the grill working again we grilled sausages and veggies for dinner, then hit The Mint with Doug and Lori. Saturday was lawn and garden stuff, followed by a medium-level road bike ride (30 miles or so, about two hours -- the GPS data file was corrupt so I couldn't document it) and dinner at Black & Blue, where we told Larry & Kelly-Jo about being married... Sunday was a brewing day, which meant a lot of downtime, so Anne spent some more time in the garden while I organized our vacation and wedding pictures, and Debbie came over later in the afternoon with her bike -- I cleaned it and lubed it and generally gave it some TLC while they pulled weeds. We did some grilled chicken for dinner, then ended the weekend with a trip to Brew Works.

 

Uh, Wedding? Yes that's right, Anne and I got married. (We did it secretly back on April 19th to avoid the fuss and commotion of a conventional wedding, then when we were in Ireland we picked up wedding bands so the secret is now out.) It was a simple but very sweet ceremony: Anne's sister and her husband were our witnesses, and a good friend of hers officiated (we got married in Philadelphia at the Federal Courthouse, where her friend is a judge), and after that we celebrated with an evening in Philly. Not much more to tell about the event but it was nice. Pictures to follow...

 

Yikes! Anne talked me into running a half-marathon with her in September. We have about 10 weeks to train, and our first training run was this morning. Pretty easy so far, 2 miles at a very slow pace, but that's likely to change soon enough.

Clare Days, Ennis Nights

On the train again, heading for Dublin and our last night in Ireland. I've had a great time, but last night I dreamed of leprechauns and I'm really starting to miss home.

Ennis turned out to be nicer than my first impression. The town is walkably small, with the town center, a commercial district in among medieval streets and lanes, being only a few blocks long and wide - this was not a tourist district, though there were plenty of pubs and restaurants, but the place where locals (probably including people from the nearby countryside) conducted their business. Downtown is where we rented our next bikes - clunkers again, unfortunately - and where we'd begin and end every day, with breakfast from a bakery and dinner in a pub.

During the day we'd ride our clunkers out into the Clare countryside. We had two days: our first day was an exploration of my maternal roots, going from Ennis to Killmihel on the tiniest roads I've ever seen, then on to Milltown Malbay on even smaller roads. We had lunch in Milltown Malbay, then returned to Ennis via a road crossing called The Hand, actually the mailing address of distant relatives even now. (There is no one and nothing there except a road marker, and I wasn't looking people up anyway.)

That was about 54 miles, and our second day was much less ambitious: we rode out to an unusual, rocky terrain called The Burren, and did a loop through the national park there. We took our time, stopped at a few archeological features, and took lots of pictures.

Evenings, which started and sometimes ended in daylight since the sun doesn't set until after 10:00, were spent checking the local "trad" music scene. We would grab dinner in a pub, and some musicians would wander in and start playing, our we'd find some bunch of people playing in the back of some bar. The music was uniformly good, and a lot like the stuff we'd heard in Dingle, but there was a political edge to Ennis that we didn't find elsewhere. It seems kind of silly to hear an Irish version of "We Shall Overcome," until you see newsprints on the walls from the 1916 uprising, and the statues of O'Connor and De Valera in the town squares...

And So This Is Ennis

A nice-enough town, and a nice central location for the last day-rides of our trip, but it's not a big town, or a tourist or college town, and after Dingle it seems a bit lackluster...

Luckily we stayed an extra day in Dingle. After all my bragging about how easy it was to navigate the bus/train lines, we came up hard against an unexpected setback: the June "bank holiday." Anne heard people talking about it and was curious, looked it up and found we had no public transportation out of Dingle on Monday (this was Friday might). So, we re-finagled our lodging arrangements, and made today our travel day.

More Dingle Daze: We got in two more rides in Dingle, one a climb up Conor Pass - like Blue Mountain, only on a tiny goat-path of a road, with two-way traffic, and since there are no trees you can see everything you have to climb - then back to town, and the other a ride through the interior of the peninsula, stopping at an ancient "oratory," or monastic chapel, made of corbelled stone, then doing our Slae Head loop in the opposite direction, and stopping again at the little tea shop overlooking the Blasket Islands for tea and scones.

In between those rides was a sort of wet and drizzly day, so we did a hike, which actually took us partway back up to Conor Pass before heading off into sheep country.

The Night Life: Most evenings we would walk around Dingle town, maybe going into a pub to catch some music - real Irish music is more like folk, and much better than the crap I was expecting, and the best place to catch it was Tommy O'Sullivan's - or to grab a bite and a pint. (A pint of what, you ask? We had our obligatory pints of Guiness, which truly is better over here, but we also sampled a few beers from several craft brewers on the peninsula, and our go-to drink actually turned out to be Bulmers Cider. One freaky night we got a bottle of wine with seafood. Me, seafood, wine, this place is full of surprises...) Once or twice we stayed out a bit later, and one night we had a lovely conversation about genealogy - the guy was researching his relatives who'd emigrated  to the US, who knew they did that? - with a couple from Galway.

Last night was another awesome meal, but the crowds, which had grown huge, were now thinning, you could see that the bank holiday was winding down.
We left town this morning, on the 7:15 bus to Tralee.

It took us until 1:30 (and it took us three transfers traveling by train, including one transfer we almost missed), but now we're ensconced in The Rowan Tree, an awesome hostel in the middle of town. We got some lunch, walked most of the town (it didn't take long), and now we're almost done with our laundry and itching to hit the local scene. Tomorrow we ride to my mother's ancestral homeland.

An Daingean

We've been on the Dingle Peninsula, staying in the town of Dingle (An Daingean), since Thursday afternoon; yesterday was our first full day and our first bike ride.

(I have to say, this idea of taking public transportation, then using bikes for day trips, has worked out well. The rail infrastructure is really well done, and it was nice to sit and watch the landscape roll by. The only part we couldn't do by train, Tralee to Dingle, was a bus ride and the perfect opportunity for some serious people-watching. The whole thing was one big, fun adventure - I'm really surprised more tourists don't travel this way.)

The biker part: we rented some tourist/touring bikes for several days, better than our Carlow bikes but not by much, and yesterday we rode out around the end of the peninsula. We rode out to a place called Slea Head, then around the north side and back in a loop (called the Slea Head Loop, appropriately enough).

It was beautiful, in fact it was almost silly how beautiful it was. The sky, and the water to our left, and the landscape to our right, were all constantly changing, and each bend in the road revealed another breathtaking vista more beautiful than the last. We stopped twice to explore some ancient ruins, and twice for tea or snacks, and a whole bunch of times just to look around.

The ride was about 33 easy miles, and took us a total of maybe five hours. We got back in time to pick up our laundry at the cleaner, grab yet another amazing dinner (the food here in Ireland is very good), and catch a folk concert - I was surprised by how much I liked this - in an abandoned church. Afterward we stopped in a few pubs on the way back to our B&B, and caught several more amazing musicians. Our latest night out so far, but completely worth it.

Bunclody

We are leaving Carlow now, taking an early train to Dublin as the first leg of our trip to the town of Dingle - our first Irish Rail experience giving us the confidence to try the rail transfers and a bus ride, rather than renting a car...

Our trip yesterday was by bike. We couldn't find any rentals anywhere in Carlow, but a small bike store basically loaned us two second-hand childrens mountain bikes, and off we went to Bunclody, a town about 20 miles away (via the tiny, and busy, main road) which was my father's paternal grandfather's birthplace.

The ride was uneventful, though Anne kept having to readjust her slipping seatpost, and the town itself was very pretty. (It's hard to believe anyone would ever want to leave, until you factor in the starvation and political oppression.) We spent an hour or so exploring, got some lunch, and ride back to Carlow.

Once "home," we hit a pub whose owners may have been related to my great-grandmother (Byrne is a common enough name, especially here), toasted our adventure with some cider, then showered, got some dinner, and hit another pub for some Guiness while we helped the locals watch the England-Ireland soccer matchup. We left after a while, walking outside to a beautiful evening sky - the sun was just setting, though it was already almost 10:00. It was light out when we went to bed, but we had an early start planned.

When we awoke (just before 6:00) the sun was already high up and shining brightly in a cloudless blue sky. I have a sunburn from yesterday - this place is much sunnier than I expected.

Carlow Town

We got up a bit early this morning and, after breakfast and a final walk through Saint Stephen's Green, we checked out of out hotel and took a taxi to the train station. About one hour later by intercity rail, and here we are in Carlow (pop 20,000), with the approximately half mile walk from the station,  to our hotel in the center of town, giving us our first feel for the place.

Carlow is not your typical tourist town: about an hour by rail southwest of Dublin, it had a bit of a boom as a bedroom community in the Celtic Tiger days, it's a bustling enough town with plenty of nice old buildings, and there are a number of amenities but they're mostly for home use. There's a few pubs, and at least one B&B, so we're good.

We're in Carlow mostly for genealogical reasons. My father's paternal grandmother was from a village, now absorbed by the town, called Graigecullen - it's basically what's on the west bank of the River Barrow, which divides Carlow. No looking up graves or relatives, I just want to walk where she once walked. We did that this afternoon, walking along the riverbank, and tomorrow we'll bike the 20 miles to Bunclody, the village where my father's grandfather was born.

Dublin Days

Day two in Dublin - it's 9:30 here and we just got back from breakfast, and are about to do some more tourist things: buy an umbrella and a cheap local phone, visit the distillery...

We arrived yesterday morning, got through some fairly laid-back customs and took a bus into town, then walked over to our hotel, which is on the edge of a party-tourist-commercial zone (Temple Bar, Grafton Street), near Trinity College. It was still too early to check in, but they us leave our bags, and we went out and got some breakfast - we both got mini-versions of the Complete Irish Breakfast, which was awesome, even including the sausage items we we advised to avoid (black pudding etc).

After breakfast we went exploring. It was a beautiful day. We walked around town,  checked out Trinity College and saw the Book of Kells exhibit, strolled up and down Grafton Street, visited a pub for some real Guinness (definitely better here), and then went back to our hotel and took a nap. Out to a brewpub for dinner - I didn't realize they had brewpubs here, thought it was Guinness/Smithwicks or nothing, but these guys were awesome - then back for another "nap" that lasted until morning.

Today we awoke to what I think is more "traditional" Irish weather: it's a bit cool and a light rain is falling. We just got back from breakfast as I said, and soon we'll be heading out for some sightseeing, including a visit to the Jameson distillery.

Failte FAIL

We are now in Terminal E, on the "good" side of Security at Logan Airport, waiting with boarding passes in hand for our rescheduled flight, six hours from now and 24 later than what we were supposed to catch...

We got to Philly, and then Boston uneventfully, the only snag being that we couldn't get our boarding phases in Philly for our second flight. No biggie, or so they told us, but then when we got here we had to go to the Aer Lingus booth for the boarding passes, and there we were told (with an hour to go before our flight) that "the flight was closed." They probably hadn't even started boarding yet!

No amount of argument got us, or the other people there, on our flight, no hotel vouchers or apology, or even an explanation that didn't change from minute to minute; it was all we could do to get on this flight. Fuckers - they probably overbooked, gave our seats away, and wouldn't admit it.

So it was off to rooms at the nearby Airport Hilton, and dinner and drinks at the hotel bar with a very drunk woman sitting next to us, telling us her life story. This morning we got up and did some breakfast & sightseeing in Boston's North End, before getting here good and goddamn early and ready for a fight at the Aer Lingus counter.

Well, things went a little better this time, and all we lost - I'm counting my chickens before they hatch - was one day in Dublin.

Hard Boiled Language

We listened to a "book on tape" while traveling to and from Knoxville. I'd never done this before -- it had never occured to me to do something like this, and after this experiment I'm not sure I'll do it again -- but Anne knew people who did this all the time and wanted to try it, and she'd picked one up from the library for our ride.

 

The book was Phantom, a Norwegian detective novel by Jo Nesbø, and the ninth and latest in the "Detective Harry Hole" series (though we knew nothing of any of this before listening). It was riveting, and exhausting -- driving twelve hours each way through heavy rain, trying to concentrate on both the road and the story -- and it lasted for the entire trip down and back, the Sunday drive to Jim Thorpe and back, and an hour or two at home Sunday night. (I though I was going to die on the way down when, after several hours and several CD's -- there were 13 of them, but I didn't know that until later -- Anne puts in the next CD and the narrator said "Part Two...")

 

The story was a classic hard-boiled crime drama: former detective Harry Hole, back from Hong Kong after several years away, is in Oslo to help clear the son of his ex-girlfriend of a drug-related murder he may or may not have committed (she was the one great love of his life, and the boy, now a junkie, was once his surrogate son). This investigation drags him into Oslo's seamy drug underworld, and onto a collision course with the Russian mob, with brief forays into government and police corruption, including possible double-agents among his ex-colleagues. Plenty of violence, some doomed romance, and enough plot twists to keep the suspense level pretty high for more than twenty four hours. Two thumbs up!

 

There was one weird thing though: it was a translation of course, with a British actor doing the narration. He would do the mobster voices in a heavy Russian accent, but otherwise it was impeccable British English. Until... personal and place names were still in Norwegian, and the narrator would do those with near-perfect (to my untrained ear) Norwegian pronunciation. After a while I was hearing those Norwegian names in my sleep -- I woke up this morning with the word "Trondheim," with rolling "R" and a dead stop between sylables, as my morning earworm. Was it even in the book?

 

This was the same thing that happened to me as I researched Ireland.  I managed to drive Anne crazy with my constant joke of an Irish brogue, but in truth the sounds and cadences of the diifferent place names started to get to me, and the words started to show up in my dreams. A lilting language, dancing quick...

 

Parting gift: here's a neat website of one American expat's experiences and insights, living in the Netherlands, Spain and Ireland.

Ten Years

Happy Mother's Day!

Today is also an anniversary of sorts: it's the tenth anniversary of my first blog post. It seems so long ago now, but that's only because it is... Anne and I have been together for more than five years now, and it seems like just yesterday in comparison, though in truth that point is closer in time to that first blog post than this one. Time is a funny thing, and time perceptions in our memory are probably logarithmic...

Knoxville: That's where we were this week. Travel day Wednesday and Friday, and Thursday in town for Emmi's commencement ceremony - she graduated last summer, and her official "cap and gown" walk down the aisle rolled over to this year. Beautiful day, and we had a great time hanging in K'ville, going to the commencement and having dinner with her old advisers afterward. Exhausting, rainy drives before and afterward though, and we spent most of a rainy day yesterday just recuperating.

It's a beautiful day today, and we're going up to Jim Thorpe, for a Mother's Day celebration with Anne's family.

I Tell Them About My Weekend But Nobody Gets A-Skeered

Well, the weekend -- what did we do Friday night? Anne was up in Ithaca for the day, and when I got home I got in a pretty solid towpath ride, then did a little recreational programming until she got home, we managed a short night at the Brew Works after that. Pretty crowded as I recall, it took us a while to get seats at the bar. I finally got to try their "15th Anniversary" double-wit, which was -- as I'd been told -- better than expected; still not my cup of tea or mug of beer but at least I can say I tried it.

 

Saturday was a beautiful sunny day, but it was also chores and errands day. We both had tons of laundry, so we took turns with the washing machine -- it ran continuously for about 7 hours, and Anne did a bunch of gardening while I worked on the bikes, and the washing accumulated on the lines... We also did a Wegman's run, and later we hit the PPRAC fundraising party in Allentown: full house at the West End Youth Center, standing room only (almost), plenty of food, good beer, two bands, and a bunch of old friends and PPRAC comrades... We hung out there for a while, then stopped by Caruso's, a new -- new to me, at least -- place just up the street, with John & Donna. Pretty nice place too, good beer choices and a nicer atmosphere than many Allentown venues, though when we left, around 11:00 or so, it looked like they were getting ready to close. Quiet, unassuming, boring to troublemakers: is that what it takes to be a "nice place" in my book these days?

 

Sunday was another perfect day. Anne did a run, and I got in an abbreviated Sals ride in the morning, then we went up to Jim Thorpe for her Mom's birthday. We took her out to dinner, along with Anne's sister & her husband, at the restaurant at Penn's Peak. A nice day, and then we came home and read -- we were in bed by 9:00.

 

Right now Ben and Jaime are home, passing through on the way from Florida to Massachusetts by way of Emmi's place in North Carolina. They arrived yesterday; I'm not sure how long they'll be around, but we'll all be having dinner tonight with my old work/bike/yoga friend Scott, so we'll have a full house at least for another day or so.

 

Reading: I picked up some "Portable Voltaire" reader in Philly the other day, and I'm working through that, as well as that collection of Cthulhu-inspired short horror stories (which I picked up in that same bookstore, several months ago), and the latest from Mark Leyner: The Sugar-Frosted Nutsack.

 

Listening: For some reason I went on a Negativland binge the other day on E-Music, and that led me to get a few King Missile songs too. I'm pretty sure that I'm the only one in the house that likes them.

 

A Shining Star For You To Call Wormwood

Happy Chernobyl Disaster Anniversary! Of course, that means it's time to revisit the Kid -- Of -- Speeeeed!!!!!

 

(Just as an aside, "Chernobyl" is supposedly Ukranian for "wormwood," or close enough, which brings to mind Revelations 8:10-11:

 

And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven,

burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters;

And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood;

and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter. -- KJV

 

Wormwood is also the most famous ingredient in "real" absinthe, which I once drank in Russia. It's what's supposed to make absinthe so potent and dangerous, but I suspect it was the 60% ABV.)

 

Meantime, work's been really busy, and this whole week has been a blur. Our Sunday ride last week (towpath to Easton & back, and across the Minsi trail Bridge to the new Greenway for the Earth Day celebrations) was great, but ended in my chain literally exploding -- it broke into multiple pieces, it was totally unfixable, and we ended up walking the last little bit home. I picked up a new chain Monday night, but there were planes to catch and bills to pay, yadda yadda, and I didn't put it on until last night. Tonight we'll see if I did it right...

 

The Goose And The Hawk

Did a morning run along the canal with Anne, where we saw several families of geese, complete with goslings. The geese get aggressive when they're nesting, but we were all just sort of tolerating each other there on the canal, some sideways looks but mostly "don't mess with me and I won't mess with you"... until one set of parents started with the aggressive displays (opening up their wings, hissing, bobbing their heads) while we were still quite far away. One kept up the display while the other herded the babies into the water and sheltered them against her body, and then we saw the real reason for their behavior: a huge hawk glided over and landed on a tree branch just across the canal from the geese.

We didn't stick around to see the drama, but on our return leg we saw what looked like the whole family swimming along, so the hawk must have left empty-handed.

By the way, we spent Friday and yesterday in Philly with Anne's sister and her husband, sightseeing and window shopping. Drinks at Nodding Head, Tapas at the mid-town Continental, breakfast at the Reading Terminal Market, lunch at the White Dog...

We just had an awesome breakfast, which included dandelion greens and wild onions from the yard, and now we're about to go on a mountain bike ride. It's spring, and it's beautiful out.

Happy Earth Day!