Just For The Record

Morning weigh-in (Friday): 194.5#, 16% BF

Just thought I'd get that registered, since it's the first time in months that I've been below 195 pounds.

There might have been a bit of weight suppression in there: I skipped the ride Wednesday night, but got one in on Thursday, a short towpath ride that felt like I was bonking or something. Got home and ate dinner, which consisted of a baked potato and some cookies, no wonder my weight was down. This morning was a mile run followed by breakfast, before I had a chance for an official weigh-in, and that's just as well, because yesterday was chores and errands followed by a night out -- I was probably fully unsuppressed by the time I went to bed.

Today is a beautiful day, and I am enjoying it for now by playing with the computer (I got a book on WordPress and am playing with my other site); in a few minutes I'll be going out to do a bit of yard work.

I Swear I've Been Good!

Morning weigh-in: 199#, 11.5% BF

Except for maybe last night's dinner, a Rueben with hot wings at Brew Works...

RIP Steve Schmidt: That was the painful, stressful thing I couldn't talk about last week. He'd been sick for a while, we knew that, but it turned out to be much worse than we realized, and he passed on Saturday morning. There's a lot to be said about Steve, and his place in our lives as well as his role in the Lehigh Valley cycling community, but it'll have to wait. This past week has been a bit difficult.

Meantime, we hosted some people overnight Saturday for that climate change conference, and that was surprisingly smooth and pleasant -- I'd been stressing about this since we made the decision to host, but the two young women who stayed over were pleasant and charming (and unobtrusive), and in the end I have no regrets about it at all.

Any, it rained all day Saturday do we did some morning yoga and weights, and I did a short ride on the Turner yesterday. The trails? Soon, but not yet. (Roads are fine, but I was on the Turner with high hopes.)

For The Record

Morning weigh-in: 197.5#, 11% BF

Just checking in to post those weights. I had some discouraging weigh-ins during that little hiatus, and also started eating breakfast in the morning (not the cause of my weight problems, but instead a step in the right direction) and I like to weigh myself under the same conditions every time, ie before eating breakfast, thus I was conveniently unable to do any official weigh-ins.

Those bad weights were in the 199#-200# range, by the way, nothing more serious than they had been, but discouraging after I started to try to keep track and cut down... Since the last post though, we signed up for a 10K+ running race and have been training, or "training," intermittently ever since; I've also started to do some light lifting and calisthenics at home too, which I think actually does more for weight loss than even the harder kinds of cardio.

There's a lot to write right now, bad and sad news -- we're fine, but that's not true for big chunks of our world, more on this when I can say more -- and much that's good as well, but all that news will have to wait for another day.

Except this: we decided to go to Denmark this summer; we'll be traveling with our friends Donna and John. Donna has friends there and visits every so often, and we decided to go along and see what this Nordic Socialism and Bicycling scene is all about.

Also this: we've been thinking of doing that "Warm Showers" thing, sort of a noncommercial AirBnB for cyclists. This weekend we're giving it a dry run, not with "Warm Showers" per se, but we've offered a place to sleep for some people in town for the Climate Change conference at Lehigh.

Keep Those Caissons Rolling, Oh Yeah

Morning weigh-in (Thursday): 191.5#, 16% BF
Morning weigh-in (Friday): 191.5#, 16% BF

First week of running down: four runs for a total of nine miles, with just better than a 12- minute average overall. Fifteen weeks to go...

Next up is the bike: my new brakes came in, so I dropped off the Turner at Cutters yesterday to get them installed. (My refurbished brake is not ready yet, so it'll go directly onto the singlespeed when the time comes.) We did a towpath ride this afternoon, Anne on her mountain bike and me on the 29'er (with flat pedals), first ride in a while. I need to get the road bike up to snuff too, but that's not as urgent, and doesn't involve much more than clean/lube/adjust.

I also dropped off my XC skis at the nearby ski store for repairs; I expect I'll be getting new bindings, and they should be ready before the end of next week.

On the computer front, it doesn't look like I'll be able to add Squeeze Server to my new NAS, so I ordered a Raspberry Pi which I'll set up for music server duties, plus whatever other things I may come up with.

What Did I Use To Write About?

Morning weigh-in: 192.5#, 15% BF


Posting something two days in a row, and I have run out of things to say... Got up this morning and did an abbreviated dumbbell workout, went to work, came home and ran two miles. Tomorrow is yoga in the morning, then another 2 mile run in the evening.


The biking should be going strong again soon: I just ordered new Hope brakes for my mountain bike, and before then I should have my old brakes back and refurbished -- maybe I'll put them directly on the singlespeed (currently sans front brakes, after I cannibalized them for the Turner and then wore them out), and start the season with a few weeks of high-cadence towpath spinning.


The rest of my life? Work is crazy busy, but the new mattress makes for easy sleeping -- in fact, I think it's bedtime. Good night!

Got A New Toy

The Setup: My laptop runs Ubuntu Linux, which has an automatic update feature, part of what's known as the "package manager" for installing/updating/removing software. It's usually very handy, but the other day it was running and couldn't finish what it was doing: most of the updated packages did just fine, but one was listed as "broken," and there were bunch of error messages, which didn't resolve when I followed the instructions for fixing it, and didn't resolve by just leaving the thing alone, letting the next automatic maybe fix it for me (I initially suspected that the updated package itself, as it was sent to me, was what was corrupt).

So the next update didn't help, and I took a harder look at the error message. Basically it said that there was a problem with a perl script (technically, a perl "module") needed in some way or other. I don't know much about perl, and I didn't know that the package manager system even used perl, but some googling of what looked like  important parts of the error message (mainly a problem with something called a "bareword") led me to forums where others were asking about similar messages in various contexts; these discussions led me to believe that the perl script in question had been corrupted.

So, the next step was to find the script on my laptop and open it -- gedit couldn't open the file, which might indicate a problem, but emacs handled it fine, though it showed a bunch of non-printing characters here and there -- and then search the internet for the same file. I compared the two: the non-printing characters weren't supposed to be in there, so I fixed my file to look like what I found online. I ran the package manager again, and the offending package installed just fine...

But how and why did that perl script get corrupted? I hadn't messed with it, and couldn't figure why something would poop gibberish into the middle of the file unless the disk itself was starting to go bad. Uh, oh.

To make matters worse, the package in question was an iupdate of the kernel, the little program that makes the rest of the computer work. What if my fix didn't solve the problem but only masked it; if the update failed without saying so and the kernel somehow became corrupt, rebooting could break my system. I couldn't let my computer shut down until I figured out what to do if things went wrong.

An Interlude: Anne's back has been slowly getting better since she pulled a muscle a few weeks ago, but she currently prefers to sit on an exercise ball because it less uncomfortable than regular chairs. I was home yesterday by myself, playing around with the weights, when I saw the exercise ball over by the dining room table and decided that I should add it to my routine... I started doing crunches on the ball and I heard a sudden  crunch-pop sound -- I'd pushed the ball up against some knitting needles and put a hole in it! Great, I just broke Anne's only chair.

Out I went to the local sporting goods store, where I got a replacement ball. No big deal, but the stores next door were a Best Buy and a Staples, and I thought well, while I'm here...

The New Toy: I went into Staples, determined to get some form of backup system for my laptop's drive. Big external drive, tape drive, whatever. I did some looking around, and some discreet Internet research while in the Mass Storage Aisle, and decided to get a Seagate Central NAS. Three terabytes of storage, wifi connection and provision for multiple users, and it was said to be fine with Linux; my only remaining question was how it would work with the Squeezebox. I go up to the help desk with the empty box ("display container only, ask for assistance") where they couldn't answer my question but assured me that returning it would be OK if things didn't work out. Then they go to get me one, and -- they don't have any in. Oops!

Oh well, I go next door into Best Buy (where I bumped into a co-worker, who was having trouble returning a broken phone -- let's hope it's not foreshadowing) and purchase the 2-terabyte model sitting on the shelf.

Epilogue: There's not much to tell -- installation basically meant turning the device on and plugging it into the router, configuration was done using a web browser interface and it was beyond simple; and backing up my laptop was really easy using luckyBackup and an ssh connection, though it seemed to take forever. (I'm not sure how fast things are supposed to be, but 125 gigabytes took about 14 hours.)
The only downside so far other than the speed -- if that's even a problem -- is the poor integration with the Squeezebox Touch. I think I can live with that for now, and may solve it by installing squeezeserver on the NAS, if its brain can handle the extra load.

I also made myself a rescue disk, and when all my pieces were in place, system backed up and disk where I could reach it, I crossed my fingers and rebooted. That was about an hour ago, and it was a total anticlimax: everything was fine.

Doug and I were talking a week or so ago about smartphones and tablets, and the thrill -- for a little while -- of getting a new app to play with, how it's almost like a sugar buzz. The last two days were like that for me; it was as exciting as my first thumb drive.

Four Books

By the way, Merry Christmas everybody!

Also by the way, I've been posting lots of pictures to Flickr. I don't think I'll make my goal of getting my photos up to date by the New Year, but I suspect I'll be done with our Ireland photos by the time I go back to work on the 6th. Enjoy! And stay tuned for more...

I've been trying to teach myself a few now computer skills lately, and my main teaching resource has been O'Reilly Publishing. I got myself Learning Java about a month ago, and have been working my way through it, then the other day I got myself Learning MySQL, then my mom & dad got me Learning Python (freakin' huge book) as well as Learning PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, & CSS.

I think I'll be busy at my laptop for the next several months at least...

Three Books

Another day, another book report, but first: It's a rainy day here, but I got up full of pep anyway, resolved to do, among other things some laundry, some yoga and weights, and some dusting & vacuuming -- the vacuum, busted for a few weeks, just got fixed and the general dust/dirt is enough that even I noticed (that's bad).

Anyway... jumped out of bed, tossed in some laundry and got the coffee going, and then Anne, washing some spinach for breakfast, noticed that the water coming out of the tap was brown. Brown! Blech. She called the water department, and they said there was a water main break that they were trying to locate & fix; in the meantime we shouldn't drink or cook with the tap water (not that we would have...). OK, throw out the coffee and tea, start over with some stored water from the basement, and get on with our day, resolving to redo the laundry when the water's fixed.

Some recent reads, in the order I read them:

The Twilight of the Elites, by Chris Hayes
The Victory Lab, by Sasha Issenberg
The Signal and the Noise, by Nate Silver

The first two were sort of recommended by various political blogs; I knew that the likewise blog-celebrated Nate Silver had a book out and bought it without any additional recommendation when I saw it (at Penn Books, during our last foray into Philly).

Long story short: the first was meh, the second maybe even meh-minus, but The Signal and the Noise was (or is -- I'm not finished yet) awesome.

I got Twilight of the Elites (subtitle: "America After Meritocracy") maybe a year ago, expecting to read about the problems caused by our current power structure and how it maintains itself. That's pretty much what the book delivered: problems such as baseball scandals and the housing bubble are analyzed in terms of what happened, who screwed up and why, and who did or didn't get held accountable; the main premise is that our "meritocracy" -- or as I'd rather put it, our "so-called meritocracy" since some of the supposedly meritorious things are really just class markers or the result of unexamined privilege -- leads to an elite that is overly competitive (too ambitious, too envious of the next level of success), prone to cheat (since incentives are based on measurable "performance," which can be gamed), and convinced that they are truly the elite since they won their positions based on "performance." He further points out that existing power structures use their positions to work the system in favor of their own members (think private day-care undermining the level playing field of education), which I guess gets back to my point about privilege.

So far I'm with author (though the problem as he puts it looks more like an example of what's wrong with Management by Objectives than anything else), but somewhere in there he seemed to lose focus, and the second half of the book really lost my interest; I had to push to finish it. Too bad really, because the end of the book had some prescriptions for fixing things, including the idea that more equality would help a meritocracy work as it should -- though my own feeling was that meritocracy itself is fundamentally flawed.

Anyway, I finished the book, which is more than I can say for The Victory Lab. This was the story of how the Obama campaign used new concepts from Big Data (automated polls and constant monitoring of the electorate's mood, microtargeting, etc) and an emphasis on evidence in campaign decisions. All well and good, but my expectations was that it would be about the data and tools, and it turned out to be about the people involved, which consultant came up with what insight that led to the idea of microtargeting in some other campaign etc, with only the vaguest idea of what the actual methods were -- just a few Time Magazine-level examples and oversimplifications, like "algorithms" being defined, essentially, as weighted averages. (Poor old Time Magazine used to hit a nerve all the time with me whenever they had an article touching on something I knew anything about: their descriptions and explanations were so plausibly written, but were oversimplified to the point that their meaning was the opposite of whatever the case really was in the thing they were explaining. Drove me nuts.)

The author also had a maddening habit of introducing new actors into the story, then going through long digressive backstories on the new guy's history and CV. The constant jumping back and forth broke up what should have been the straightforward flow of the narrative, and it also eventually became hard to keep track of all the characters involved, both of which made a fuzzy story even fuzzier -- once again, the author couldn't maintain focus.

I got most of the way through before I started skimming, and finally just managed to "finish" the book by plowing through the last few pages in a row. I guess The Victory Lab would make a good read if you're interested in the Obama campaigns themselves and especially the personalities involved, but that's not my cup of tea, and it wasn't what I was looking for in this book.

Luckily I saved the best for last: I picked up The Signal and the Noise on a whim, and before I was done with the introduction I was hooked. Nate Silver is a very smart, personable guy, with a good grasp of the concepts he's writing about, so it's not a surprise that he could write clearly on his subject -- if poor writing is a sign of poor thinking, the converse is probably also true -- but even above that, he's an accomplished and engaging writer.

The book itself is about predictions and forecasts, why so many go wrong and why some don't (to paraphrase the book jacket), and he breaks the book down into two main parts, the first being a description of the problem (bad predictions) over several chapters, and the second part looking at a way to improve the situation (Bayesian statistics). The problem chapters are case studies of political punditry, baseball -- two subjects in which the author really made a name for himself -- weather forecasting and earthquake forecasting, and so on, all totally fascinating. The start of the Bayesian part is where I am now, and it looks to be at least as good.

I can say that I see the appeal of the first two books, and I can see them being enjoyed by the right personality, but The Signal and the Noise is the one that gets my wholehearted recommendation. Take my advice and read it.

(By the way, I finished Bleeding Edge, and I have to say I'm glad I did.)

Tuesday Snow

So the Sunday snow morphed into a "wintry mix" as expected. I drove in yesterday and the roads were pretty icy, especially the side streets, but things got a lot better as the temperature climbed and the mess turned to plain rain and wet roads. My carpool buddy asked if I wanted to drive today, since we were expecting more snow -- a real snowstorm this time even if accumulation wouldn't be much -- and I was fine with that, I prefer my own car, and my own driving, to his in this weather. But then...

We both started smelling a car burning oil on the way home. I thought it was the car ahead of me, then some other car ahead of me, but no, it was me. Got home, checked the oil, and there was none. Uh oh...  Googling gave me a bad case of car-hypochondria, and I took today off to bring it in to the shop.

Just got the the estimate. Basically everything I was worried about came true: Subaru's do tend to develop oil leaks over time, and mine got pretty much all the ones my old Outback had (rear main seal, oil pump, head gasket), except all at once instead of happening over a period of years. Bottom line: $2500. Ouch! I'll take the hit this time, the rest of the car seems OK, but I guess I'll have to start thinking about a replacement sooner than I expected.

The snowfall had slowed a bit, but now it looks like it's picking up again. Sure wish I had a car that would drive through this stuff right now...

Sunday Snowfall

Hanging out at home, watching a really light snow fall. It's not expected to last though -- this stuff is supposed to morph into a "wintry mix" (ie sleet and freezing rain) sometime this afternoon. Oh well, maybe they'll be wrong.

So last time I checked in (other than my two two clean-out-the-closet posts prior to this one), I was working through a bunch of books, and since then I of course bought a few more...

We went into Philly with our friends Donna and John last weekend, meeting them at the White Dog Café for lunch, and then hitting Penn Books, which is just around the corner, before checking into our hotel. Anne got a bunch of books, but I limited myself to three: Bleeding Edge, Thomas Pynchon's latest, Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise, and World War Z. So even though I finished that giant book of SF short stories (also purchased at Penn Books, by the way), I am behind the eight-ball once again, at least in terms of my reading.

(The rest of the weekend: Nodding Head Brewpub and Local 44 on Saturday night, and Sunday brunch at Sabrina's before hitting the Philladelphia Art Museum.)

This weekend we stayed pretty local: we tried Aria, that new Afghan restaurant in Allentown, with Doug & Lori and Scott S on Friday, then met Sally & Joe last night at Black & Blue. Errands and chores in the mornings, naps in the afternoons...

Think I'll go out and stand in the flurry fall, which sadly looks like it's already ending.

Another Blast From The Past

This, like the preceding genealogy photoblog, is an orphaned post I found on Blogger from last year; it was originally titled "And So This Is Christmas Eve." It's obviously unfinished, and I was going to toss it but I liked the turducken photos.

Well, it's getting a bit quieter here, though the bread is still a-baking and the table is still covered with food. We're down to Emmi and Ben: Jaime left for Pittsburgh the day after the ""end of the world" party, and Amanda just took off for Washington about an hour or so ago. So we're now just winding down to a silent night...

Me and the Turducken

The turducken came out great by the way. Here's a shot of the turkey getting stuffing, with the duck waiting in the wings, so to speak, and one of the chicken still waiting in the brine:

We got a huge new pan to cook it in, one that just barely fit in our oven, and the turducken barely fit in the pan. Here it is before cooking, with my head for comparison -- we estimated we had about 35 pounds of meat and stuffing to cook.

Turkey Getting Stuffing

Brining the Chicken

The final result was beautiful.

The Finished Turducken

Turducken: A Cross Section

Anne and I had started the cooking and other preparations the day or so before, with a firing of the oven to do some slow cooked ribs, and of course going to the Allentown Farmer's Market to get the ribs, turkey, duck, chicken, and other supplies... Anne boned all three birds and we put them in brine to soak overnight, got the ingredients ready to make stuffing, and by the time we put the ribs in the oven it was past 1:00 AM. At 6:00 AM we got up, did the stuffing and Anne sewed the birds back together, and the birds went in the oven maybe around 9:00.

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...

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.

 

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.