A Steppenwolf Christmas

Morning weigh-in: 184.5#, 16.5% BF

 

I suspect that I'm fully hydrated for a change, since that body fat number looks about right -- that is, it's not what I want, but at least the BF is accurate.

 

In case anyone was wondering: Kraftwerk Thanksgiving. I'm gonna miss Achewood, if I don't already...

 

Map Fun: One thing I've wanted to do with my Garmin is put a map of the Sals trail system on it, one that I could then follow on my rides. (Not that I need it, but it would be cool to follow along, and it might come in handy as something I could give to others.) The Garmin has one big drawback though: trails are added via GPX files, but there's no way to just take a file containing the entire trail system, and just copy it into the unit, and have that be all you need to work with -- each individual trail segment (and there may be over a hundred) must be loaded into the map one by one, turned on so it shows on the map, and color chosen for that segment, the whole process done over and over using that clunky 2-button-and-a-joystick interface.

 

Once loaded, the Garmin mapping info is stored in somewhere other than the original GPX file. (GPX doesn't normally store color but it can handle extensions; this shouldn't have been too hard.) Something like that -- having the Garmin's map info in the same file as the trail data -- would have been useful, because then the file, with all its hard-won map info, could be copied for someone else to use, or moved off the unit and reinstalled later -- but nope.

 

So OK, using a trail network, as produced by GRASS or TopoFusion, is impractical.

 

The next thing I tried was from a "How-To" I found online: trace over the trail network using Google Earth, doubling back or tracing over the same segments as required to make the trail system one huge single loop. Save and convert to GPX and plop it into the Garmin, and you can get the whole trail system onto the map with one iteration of the installation process.

 

This worked well, apart from the one-time tedium of re-tracing the trails, and had only one disadvantage: the entire trail system must all be the same color. This would usually be no big deal, except that the Sals trail system is composed of color-coded subsystems, and I wanted each trail on my map to have the same color as the trail blazes you'd find in the woods.

 

The compromise I came up with was to do the "retrace in Google Maps" thing for each subsystem, then load (and assign colors to) each individually. This worked out reasonably well -- it wasn't the one-shot setup I wanted, but it was a lot better than the alternatives I found so far. I tried these on Saturday's ride, and they looked and worked great.

 

Last night was the gym, and tonight is a towpath ride, to be followed by Taco Tuesday.

 

Pierogi Fest, The Kraftwerk Mardi Gras

There will be no morning weigh-in today: too many pierogis were consumed yesterday for any mens sana in corpus sano step-on-scale soul searching this AM...

 

We had a good time though. Anne and a few ladies from her knitting crowd decided they needed something to get through the last of the winter, and that something was -- pierogis! A five course meal, with pierogis in every recipe: Deb brought bacon-wrapped pierogi appetizers, Amy brought chicken-pierogi soup, Anne made pierogi lasagna, Liz had a bunch with various traditional and non-traditional stuffings, Donna had pierogis and string beans, and for dessert we had Anne's homemade pierogis with fruit filling, plus Donna's apple-pierogi pie. (The rest of us just brought our hungry but lazy asses.) That, and the last of our keg of "Hanseatic Doldrums" Baltic Porter, and it was a long fun dinner party -- and strangely enough, despite the heavy, filling qualities in every bite, there were almost no leftovers.

 

We tried to come up with a theme (Mardi Gras sort of came and went), with appropriate music and dress code for the party (the dress-up part was also DOA, thank goodness -- everyone wore what they always wear). The first musical iteration was polka, which was a disaster, then we tried "techno, like they listen to in Europe," but I didn't know any techno so I told Pandora I liked Kraftwerk, and let Pandora pick the music. It worked, pretty much.

 

(Speaking of music: I downloaded some songs from the Dum Dum Girls and listened to them on the way in to work this morning. Nice.)

 

Maybe it had something to do with what was in my belly when I went to bed, but I had the craziest and most fun post-Apocalyptic dream ever. Most of it faded when the alarm went off, but it was a sort of mix of Steve Austin / Mad Max kind of thing, in a world where the Federal Government had sort of merged the NBA and senior housing. I was a refugee, possibly via time capsule / escape pod (Polaroids of my previous life all around me in the dust, when they found me unconscious), and my tape-recorded debriefing, at a dusty outdoor basketball court, hoops mounted on palm trees etc, slowly morphed into a narrative of a visit to (and guitar jam with) a bunch of dolphins swimming in what looked like a brightly-lit, subterranean reactor core. I was saying the words "even unto the Gravity Well" when the alarm went off.

 

Saturday was pretty nice too: we went to Easton and hooked up with my HS buddy Mike and his family, in town to visit the Crayola Factory, and we had lunch together at Pearly Baker's, which gets a substantial clientele from Crayola, with kid's menu to accommodate. Mike's kids were adorable, but I think he was monitoring them very closely for signs of "long day meltdown," and took off before any anticipated crash. Shopping, home, a quick Sals ride -- remember them? -- and then we went to Spanky's "I'm tired of winter" party. Awesome, and warm enough that we could hang outside. Spring's coming.

 

Friday -- maybe by next week I'll say something about First Friday, if I remember. Tonight is the gym, and one week from yesterday is Daylight Savings Time.

 

One-Brew Tuesday

Morning weigh-in: 184.5#, 15% BF

 

Weights are still high, but since I dropped a half pound after Two Brew And Tacos Tuesday, I thought I'd take the win and record it here.

 

Busy night last night, lots of running around: straight to the gym from work (where I added legs for the first time in a while), then walked over to Eskandalo for a haircut (calling my niece for a birthday greeting on the walk over), then home to change, then finally walked over Brew Works to meet up with the post-knitting crew. Normally I get the tacos (a Tuesday bargain at 3 for $3.00), and I did last night as well, but I skipped the sour cream and guacamole, and instead of two beers I only had one, so between the leg workout and the evening's belt-tightening...

 

I don't know what's up for tonight, maybe a run with Anne.

 

Transitions

Morning weigh-in: 185#, 15% BF

 

Happy Birthday to my God-daughter, my beautiful niece Olivia!

 

Much done, nothing said for a week... The weekend before last was probably our last hurrah on the skis, with trips to Jim Thorpe (icy but OK conditions) and the Poconos (nice snow); on Sunday and Tuesday we ran outside. Thursday I did an indoor trainer class at Cutter's Bike Shop, then Friday I got out for a bit of icy towpath riding (and finished in daylight). Saturday was windy so we did some chores and housecleaning (dinner party that night, it had to happen anyway), but on Sunday Anne and I did a short morning run, and then an awesome afternoon bike ride. Nothing crazy, about 20 miles through Wassergas and Williams Township, and it was chilly when we weren't moving, and it was still a bit breezy, but with that ride it finally felt like spring was coming. (Of course, Sunday night through today has been more cold and more snow, which raised Anne's hopes for one last play-in-the-snow storm, but even this feels like a last hurrah.)

 

I Need A New Toy: On Saturday night we had some friends over for dinner, and to test our new Baltic Porter, "Hanseatic Doldrums," and among the guests were a few from the biking crowd. Talk drifted to training, and GPS and HRM, and, for the women in the room, privacy issues with web-based training analysis.

 

(I use Garmin Connect and MapMyRide, and I do keep my GPS data private for the most part, especially if the ride starts/finishes at home, but I make the data for my "away rides" publicly available (it's only fair: I search among other public tracks to learn new trails), and I'm comfortable with even the ones marked "private" being stored online. Then again, I own a mirror, and I know have less to worry about, in terms of someone studying my habits and training routes for purposes of sexual assault, than do some others in the conversation.)

 

Anyway, the conversation turned to privacy settings on training websites, then to methods of just keeping the data local and using analysis software on your home machine -- I believe I actually blushed when I realized I didn't have any training analysis software on my machine -- unless you count TopoFusion, and I don't because it's more like mapping software --  and I didn't even know if any was available on Linux.

 

Not to worry, I found a bunch online, and last night I fixed my lack by downloading SportsTracker. It looks pretty decent, I think I'll be giving it a try over the next few weeks to see how it compares to the online ones, and maybe grab some more for comparison purposes. Strangely enough, the SportsTracker mapping uses OpenStreetMap, which actually shows a lot of my local singletrack -- bonus!

 

Now all I need to do is get out there and ride, and run, and hit the gym, and get back into yoga, and also find time for my previous obsession/acquisition, GnuCash. Did I mention I picked up a guitar chord reference book, one I used as a kid?

 

Tonight is the gym, followed by a haircut, followed by Two Brew Tuesday at Brew Works.

 

A Week In Review

Morning weigh-in (Tuesday): 184.5#, 15% BF

Morning weigh-in (Wednesday): 185.5#, 14% BF

Morning weigh-in (Thursday): 183.5#, 14% BF

 

OK, so I didn't hit the trainer Monday night... what I did do, besides laundry and similar activities (I actually got a lot done, things I'd blown off over the weekend) was upload a bunch of photos from the Superbowl of Chili. Check them out, I took pictures of a lot of contestants this year.

 

I did get around to hitting the trainer on Tuesday night though, and got in a short sharp interval workout -- 10 minutes warmup, then 3 intervals of 1 hard, high cadence minute with 2 minutes spinning rest between, and cool down for a total of 25 minutes. It was fairly intense, but definitely not a fat-burner, and since I followed it with Taco Night, things looked pretty bad by Wednesday morning.

 

One worse thing yesterday morning: I was fooling with photos Tuesday night, moving pictures from my phone to my laptop, and F-Spot (my photo program) crashed. When I went to continue using it the next morning, before work, it started up with an error message saying it couldn't find the database file -- and then it came up blank. The photos themselves were all safe on my hard drive, but all the user-supplied metadata (things like photo descriptions, and tags for date, location, event, etc) were gone; this represented a loss of thousands of hours of labeling work, and was in fact more likely to be irreplaceable than not. Gaaaa! No time to deal, I was late for work already.

 

Needless to say, it was a loooong day at work with that hanging over my head, but when I got home I quickly found the photo database in an incorrect directory (thank Google for the clues I needed); I put it back in its correct location and started F-Spot, and all was well. I also backed up the database, crossed my fingers, and dumped all the remaining photos from my phone. Stay tuned, if I see any good stuff I'll post them it Flickr along with all everything else.

 

I saw recently that the latest Ubuntu distribution dropped F-Spot in favor some other photo software, and at the time I was suitably outraged, but I've become a lot less attached to F-Spot over the last two days.

 

Dinner last night was leftover shepherd's pie, and then Anne and I went for a walk around the West Bethlehem neighborhood. Our route was a slightly shorter version of our 5k run; we did about 2 miles and I think Anne was scoping out the terrain for snowy sidewalks and general runnability. We got home a little before 10:00; if we'd been out a little longer we probably would have heard this. Poor fsckers.

A Day Of Atonement And Rededication

Morning weigh-in: 184.5#, 14% BF

 

Great time at the Superbowl of Chili yesterday (more here), with Eric, Doug and Lori, and Anne, and Brian there in spirit; unfortunately the weather's been so bad lately we canceled any pre-chili workout -- yesterday was probably nice enough for a short road ride, but the decision had been made during Saturday's freezing rain storm -- and the guilt showed on the scale this morning.  It's been a rest week for me anyway, which could probably be noted on the scale as well, but today starts week one of my "second base month:" tonight is on the trainer (with "power intervals" ie "put it in the highest gear and pedal slowly"), tomorrow is back to the gym, Wednesday is more trainer work, Thursday is a rest (we're seeing Gasland in Allentown), and Friday through Sunday will be either road rides or skiing, depending on conditions.  Well that's the plan as it stands now anyway, before I actually start...

 

Speaking of tightening my belt, I downloaded GNUCash the other day and decided to get my finances in order -- no urgency or danger, it's just something I need to do.  I'm learning how to use it (no big deal so far), and I'm finding -- as I found playing with mapping and GPS, and playing with population growth rates, and video editing, and etc etc etc -- that the tool is nowhere near as important as the content.  I'm the guy who stopped balancing my checkbook after they invented ATM's though, so learning to pay attention and stay on top of my spending documentation (especially the cash-only stuff) may be a bit of a learning curve.

 

 

Awww -- Rain, Man!

Well, that's two winter storms in a row: we get a bit of snow but mostly what falls is rain, or even freezing rain. We got slammed Tuesday night and into Wednesday with ice, and we woke up to rain and near-freezing temperatures -- and in the words of long-time reader Greg (in the context of MTB racing), "I'd rather it be 25 and snowing than 35 and raining." Amen to that!

Tomorrow is the Superbowl of Chili, and I think we'll be doing directly there instead of our usual pre-chili outdoor workout fun.

So anyway, instead of doing anything outside today, I'm playing on the computer, posting more scanned photos and Browsing Around The Online... seems like something's hanging up in the intertubes though, several sites are down or very slow. Ping returns "packet filtered" errors, traceroute says "no reply" partway through the "route" (?); sure I wish I knew what these things meant but it was fun pushing the buttons. Meantime, it looks like maybe some intermediate connection is either down or slow -- savvis.net is a common factor -- or something is blocking something, and that something might be an ad company since many of the websites that are hanging have ads in them. Or maybe it's the ice storm? Or something on my machine?

Black Toe Shuffle

Good weekend, and now I'm doing some post-breakfast blogging from the basement of the Haymarket Cafe.  Anne's browsing at the local bookstore, and Doug and Lori just left, maybe to do some window shopping in town but essentially heading home.  We were all so beat from the previous two days of skiing that even snowshoeing sounded too strenuous and we're done.

Irony #1: We were going to take my car because of the 4-wheel drive and the extra room, but I had some sudden repairs that needed making -- windshield wiper broke, and one headlight blew out, the day before we left -- and since we had to dig out of the snowstorm before leaving, I tried to get my car worked on.  Snowstorm, garage is understaffed, no point in waiting for them to get to my car so we took Anne's.  Fast forward about an hour into the drive, and I get a call: the car is done and I can pick it up any time...

Irony #2: Driving for another hour or so, I get another call.  This time it's Nestors, and my XC ski boots, ordered weeks before, then recalled, then re-ordered -- the boots were supposed to be in early last week, but I was forced to pack my old boots (which cause my toenails to bruise and turn black) because the new ones never arrived -- well, they just arrived, and I could pick them up any time...

We had an awesome time on the trails though.  On Friday we hit a place called Northfield XC Ski Center, which is really a power company's hydroelectric pumped-storage reservoir, but they do a good job, moonlighting as a park.  The trails were for the most part fairly tame, but aerobically strenuous; we did about 6 miles over three or four hours of skiing (actual moving time was 1:25).  Dinner and drinks that night, and we met Ben and his girlfriend in town, but we were all so tired that the night ended early.

Yesterday we hit a place called Stump Sprouts XC Ski Center.  This place was a bit smaller, and a bit more rustic (ie less an afterthought at an industrial site than a real farm-and-forest location), more real, and more technical: we only got in about four miles in the same amount of time, but had a lot more thrills on their twisty rolling trails -- ascents! descents! turns! crashes!  Good times were had.  We were a little more spry afterward, and had a lighter dinner that night, and that  meant that last night was more of a nightlife blowout than Thursday or Friday.  Ben and and a bunch of his friends, the local brewpub, a late night, maybe that was the real reason this morning was a bit rough?

Snowman, O Snowman!

Hit the gym last night, then went home and scanned a bunch more photos, so stay tuned for another 30 or so to be posted to Flickr tonight. (By the way, I've been getting a real kick out of using my laptop like a toy lately, playing tunes and scanning photos and checking Facebook every few minutes, it seemed like a different world from how I usually play with the machine.) Last night was also Two Brew And Tacos Tuesday; I met Anne, who had come directly from visiting her mom, at Brew Works around 9:00, but we were a little too late to hang with the post-knitting crowd (or to get the food specials), so we shared some nachos and a few beers and called it a night.

 

Tonight I'll probably spend a little time on the trainer, maybe do some laundry and pack, since we're going on a mini-vacation with Doug and Lori this weekend. We're heading up to the Berkshires to do some XC skiing, and we're also going to check out some of the Northampton night life. Should be good, if we can get out of town: the snow is falling pretty hard right now, and should continue through tomorrow morning. I think we may want to avoid the coast, which is where things are going to get hit hardest...

Uncle Wiggily

Morning weigh-in: 182#, 12% BF (OK, whatever)

 

A quiet weekend without Anne: I stayed in Friday night: I was planning to see Trouble City All Stars at the Funhouse, but several hours of scanning photos and an hour of tempo on the trainer, along with the prospect of walking around in the bitter cold just to stand in a smoky room, totally put me out of the mood. Decision: early bedtime.

 

Saturday morning I met Doug and Lori for some XC skiing at Jacobsburg. It was brutally cold out, almost noon before temperatures even reached the teens, but we were huffing and puffing and steaming along soon enough -- I don't think I've ever been cold on the XC skis, no matter what the weather. Conditions were about as good as it gets, with the cold keeping the snow just right and the bright sun shining down; foot traffic made for some ugly skiing near the trailhead but further out our only predecessors were fellow skiers. Parts of Jacobsburg, where I normally would be bored to tears while riding, were actually so awesome I thought "people would pay do this..." Sunday morning I tried the same at Sals, but the hills were too steep and the turns too tight for my ability level, and I was forced to end after about an hour; the best part of the day turned out to be skiing in someone else's tracks around the baseball field.

 

In between was Saturday Night. I went out to see Geerbox, a friend's band, play at a local sports bar. The place (Mezza Luna i allentown) was nice despite the wall-to-wall wide screen TV's, and they had some decent beer on tap, and the band was good despite the singer's sore throat, but the music (the DJ between sets), and the clientele, was pure Classic Rock Without The Hard Stuff: uniformly white and middle-aged, and with that certain suburban decrepitude, all that I'd escaped by being who I am instead... Good people watching though, out on the dance floor.

 

Happy Anniversary! The first mac was introduced on this date in 1984. Here's something about the part I was most impressed with at the time... It was just a year ago that I threw out all my old "Inside Macintosh" books, when I was emptying out the apartment, and I still have my original 128k Mac, in storage like a forlorn little toaster.

Doc Melhorn Continues His Ascent To Heaven

I'm not going anywhere near a scale for a few days, but wow that was one tasty meal list night!  We (me, Anne, Deb, Donna, and Emily) did the Black Forest Deli's 5-course Russian dinner, something they do every Thursday night.  Things started with a bunch of appetizers -- mostly things like chicken salad, beet salad, little servings of potatoes, fried liver, smoked trout, and the like -- then continued with two kinds of pierogi, borscht, and two kinds of chicken for the main course; things finished with blintzes stuffed with farmer's cheese.  We were worried by the time appetizers were over, and stuffed & working hard to finish by the end of the main course, but we all found room for that dessert...

 

The whole evening was fun, a good time with great company, and then we parted company;  Anne and I were close enough to walk, and the snow was just starting to fall, a perfect end to the night.  Until... we were almost home when I got a text: Doug & Lori were at Brew Works if we wanted to join them, so we continued past the house and on to Main Street. Awesome, and then more awesome!  Anne had the "Aggressive," the latest hoppy offering, and I sampled the new "Insidious," a strong porter much like the one we just brewed, then after that and some conversation we called it a night.  We got home around 11:00.

 

Beautiful morning ride in today, and the second day in a row I drove into the sunrise while listening to Godspeed You! Black Emperor.  New snow (great except for not-very-bright drivers in town), pink and orange clouds, all glory and solar towers and "The Gathering Storm" playing full blast as I blasted over the hills on I-78.  It kind of reminded me of my drives to Slatyfork; I would put that song on as I drove west from Harrisonburg VA, over the mountain into West Virginia. If people drove to Heaven like Doc Melhorn, that's the road they would take and the song they'd hear.

Backslider

Morning weigh-in: 182.5#, 12.5% BF

 

Ate at home last night, then hit the gym for an upper body workout, then went home and ate dinner again, before meeting Anne at BW. And that's how you do it! Tonight we're hitting the Black Forest Deli for a traditional Russian multi-course dinner. It'll be good, but I don't think those numbers will improve. Tomorrow night, and possibly Saturday morning, will be spent XC skiing.

 

This Way Lies Madness

I finally found my winter computer project, and it's taken over my life: I have started the process of scanning all my old photos and putting them on Flickr.  So far I have my old Prague trip photos uploaded, and I just finished photos through June 1992, a total of over a hundred photos uploaded.  That, on top of the 115 photos I uploaded from my phone, means that there has been a lot of activity on my Flickr account, with a lot more to come...

 

The scanning process has been slow going though: for each photo I must remove it from the album (where they all are sort of stuck, after twenty or so years, to the semi-sticky backing page), read & record the caption off the back, and actually perform the scan -- this takes about 10-15 minutes for each set of four photos on an album page.  Then, after I have one roll done, or one event's worth of shots, I import the bunch to F-Spot (my laptop's photo software), adding tag information, and from there I upload the photos to Flickr.  Once the bunch is in Flickr I give each photo a title and caption based on the information off the back (and what I remember about that shot from when I took it), which takes another couple of minutes.  Meantime, each part of this process has just enough downtime (scanning, waiting for uploads to complete) to let the process drag and my attention wander, but not quite enough to allow any real multitasking.

 

Sunday we brewed a batch of Baltic Porter, another process with a lot of downtime, as liquids heat up and cool down, and while that was happening I did my first batch (the Prague pictures); I'd say that took me about six hours, including beermaking breaks, to get through about forty photos.  I got home from work Monday and scanned a bunch more, then yesterday I stayed home from work, and did another 40 or so and uploaded my next batch -- six hours total for 53 photos.  I am just past the halfway mark on my first photo album; I probably have over a thousand -- maybe two thousand -- photos left to do, and at my current rate it'll take me more than one winter to finish.  Sigh...

 

Anyway, enjoy the photos, and stay tuned for more!

 

I haven't been getting as much physical activity lately, though Anne and I did get in a good moonlight XC ski along the Monocacy last week, and Doug and I went skiing at Mauch Chunk Lake Park on Saturday -- we started on bikes but switched after finding the sledding a little too rough in the snow.  I also had a little downtime last night, after finishing the photos and before I went to meet the ladies for Two Brew Tuesday, so I hopped on the trainer for a quick workout; I only lasted about 10 minutes, I thought I was going to go mad from boredom.

 

Tonight is the gym, then maybe more scanning, though no uploading. I've been restless with the computer lately, fiddling with preferences/settings, looking around for cool software to download (got some website composer programs, and a few new "screen candy" utilities).  Maps bore me right now, though I am working on one for Michaux, maybe it's time for me to start tackling video...

 

AnneFamiliaPalooza

Morning weigh-in (Monday): 182#, 14.5% BF

Morning weigh-in (Tuesday): 181#, 12% BF

 

I was less than motivated to hit the trail last night, so I busted out the trainer and did a 45 minute tempo workout in the basement -- cranking the pedals and cranking the tunes, I was still bored out of my mind. But: thirty solid minutes at my aerobic threshold, and that part felt pretty good. Tonight it'll be either the towpath or maybe Sals (which I hear is in great shape right now), followed by Taco Night at Brew Works.

 

Sunday was Anne's family's Christmas get-together, aptly named [Anne's surname]palooza -- her mom, four of her five siblings and their families including children and grandkids, the ages ranges from about 2 months, through grade school, teens and college, twenty- and thirty something, and up into the 60's and 70's. Anne and I went with Emmi, got there around 2 and were immediately absorbed into the mayhem. Dinner, kids running around, moms and grandmothers sharing baby duties, not one but two gift exchanges -- when we finally got home I was both exhausted and (almost) too wound up to sleep, and apparently I'd done my share of damage at the dinner table... Thus ends this year's Christmas season, and the time has come to start working it all off.

 

By the way, more snow is forecast for the next day or so. I have a playdate, with Anne's friend Lois, to do some downhill skiing on Friday, maybe we'll all get in some cross-country before then?

 

Gilead's Precipice

Morning weigh-in (Thursday): 180.0#, 13.5% BF
Morning weigh-in (Sunday): 178#, 14.5% BF

 

One more towpath half-ride, followed by one beer at Brew Works, equals one half pound of weight loss... I hit the towpath again Wednesday night, this time remembering to wear booties over my shoes -- I swear this'll be the year I get winter shoes -- and taking a hit of Proventil before heading out. I'm not sure if the Proventil helped on the ride, I was wheezing and coughing on-and-off for big parts of the ride (other parts I was totally fine lung-wise, though still afflicted with a runny nose), but after I got home and settled down I felt great, like I'd blown out whatever was the problem.

 

For those who asked: The Iguana's original cassette probably didn't last beyond 1992, and was replaced/upgraded several times by the shop before I ever learned how to do those kinds of things. Currently the bike has a fairly new wheelset with a 7-speed cassette in back, removable by the standard chain whip and cassette-remover-nut-thingy. The Iguana is now a flat-pedals cruiser, suitable for townie bike commuting; I was on the Turner last night.

 

Some Internetty Things: Looks like Titus Andronicus had a bit of a personnel change,  and everyone's taking turns, giving Ross Douthat his well-deserved wedgies -- some more than once. That provided a few giggles last week, which is better than what I think this week will bring.

Movie Night: Anne and I saw "True Grit" Thursday night. It was awesome, I highly recommend it. Afterwards we went for dinner at Brew Works, which is why there was no Friday weigh-in...

Friday was snowy, and the drive in was slow -- slower and worse than I thought the relatively mild conditions warranted -- but things were fine by the afternoon and I got in a short Sals ride after work. Conditions were really good, it was cold enough that the snow stayed dry and powdery, squeaking as I rode over it. We were supposed to do Anne's family Christmas visit yesterday, but the snow moved things to today so I hit the gym pretty hard: full body including legs, maxxing out the weights, first time in months I did that. Our free afternoon meant that we were cleared for going to the VMB party last night, but I think my workout (and the snowy bike commuting to/from) took me into nap-becomes-bedtime land a little early. Today we do the Christmas thing; we're leaving in a  few minutes.

That Was Easy

Morning weigh-in (Tuesday): 176.5#, 13% BF

Morning weigh-in (Wednesday): 180.5#, 13.5% BF

 

Skip a lunch, go for a ride, and I was almost halfway to my goal! Too bad it was mostly suppression weight, but it is good to see the numbers drop even if they do bounce back. Damn you, Two-Brew Tuesday!

 

I got in a short towpath ride on the Monday night: maybe 13.5 miles, out and back to the Bethlehem Boat Club in just over an hour. Kind of easy pace, high cadence, it felt really good except for cold feet. Tonight should be a longer version of the same.

 

I felt pretty good on the ride, but I'm not sure how things will work tonight: last night and today I've had a lot of wheezing and postnasal drip problems. (I just stopped taking the decongestant/expectorants I was using, though not the antihistamine, and withdrawal was like I'd had 3 cups of coffee before I went to bed, plus some late-night nose & chest issues.) I'm hoping things work out.

 

More Resolutions, A Partial List (places I want to ride this year):

 

Jim Thorpe

Camelback

Tamaqua -- Bungalow Park, Burma Rd

R.B. Winter

Michaux

State College

Blue Marsh

French Creek

Wissahickon

Ringwood

Mahlon-Dickerson

Allamuchy/Kittatinny

Round Valley

Allaire

Harthshorne/Huber

Kingdom Trails VT

Stowe/Middlebury VT

White Clay, DE

Frederick/Gambrill MD

Patapsco MD

Slatyfork WV

Brevard NC

 

This doesn't count races, or road rides, o-or...

 

Day One: A New Clear Dawn

Morning weigh-in: 180.5#, 14% BF

 

Back at work, and things are going smoothly. I saw the sun rise on the way in this morning (with a beautiful solar tower shooting up from behind the trees), for the first time in... it felt like quite a while, but I'm guessing it's only been two weeks. It really wasn't quite the difficult morning I expected it to be, though I did forget my money and my wallet when I dashed out the door -- d'oh! No lunch today.

 

New Year's Festivities New Year's Eve was a pretty full day, starting early with Anne getting the pork & sauerkraut cooking. I ran in the PeepsFest 5k with Lori P, and also Eric & Kris who did their own pace, while Anne, Emmi & Doug did the walk, then we checked out the PeepsFest tent with Liz. Home, nap, and then it was time to party -- we (Anne, Emmi & I) had a "70's Theme Mystery Dinner Party" (sort of like a cross between the game "Clue" and a mini-play around the dinner table) with Liz and a friend of hers, Sally & Joe, and Deb and Donna. Way fun, but we were too tired for Phase 2 at the Dropping of the Peep downtown; we just watched the fireworks from the porch and went to bed. The next day was Judy's open house. Anne and I stopped by for a few hours, saw a big bunch of the old gang, then we stopped in at Porters on the way home, which was surprisingly busy, and saw some more of the old gang. Should auld acquaintance lang syne etc...

 

Tonight I'm hitting the towpath, ride one of training week one.

 

Just Putting It Out There

These aren't necessarily resolutions, but...

Lose Weight: I am currently 180 pounds, and I want to be 170 pounds by April. I think that's pretty doable, so it's on the list. My real goal is low 160's by June, but first things first.

Train and Race: I've already put together a training regimen, or at least the bare bones of one  (I have plenty of time to flesh things out), but I do want to get back on the bike for real this year. I plan on doing at least a few local races too: Michaux, maybe some from the MASS and H2H series, and of course my nemesis -- the Wilderness 101.


Blog More: Last year I only had 92 posts, my worst year since 2003 when I was first starting out. Since I'll probably be posting weights, hopefully I'll come up with something to say more frequently than last year.

So here you have it! We shall see what happens.

Post-Christmas Wrap-Up

My little vacation is starting to wind down, and I'm starting to see myself back at work soon, which might not be the greatest thing but I'm starting to be ready.

Some Christmas Loot: I got a new compass, some GPS bike mounts and an ANT wireless receiver that attaches to an ipod (from my uncle), a sweater and a few knick-knacks from my mom, new panniers from Anne, and the rest of my presents were books:

Kraken by China Miéville
A Guide To "The Crying of Lot 49" by J. Kerry Grant
A Guide to "V" by J. Kerry Grant
Positively 4th Street by David Hajdu
Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz
Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks and Big Pharma Flacks by Ben Goldacre
The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them by Elif Batuman
Old Man Drinks: Recipes, Advice, and Barstool Wisdom by Robert Schnackenberg
Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will by David Foster Wallace

Basically I am reading all of them at the same time, but Confederates in the Attic really grabbed me and I'm almost done -- I would have finished if Kraken didn't grab me harder, like Dragon-Tattoo-hard, and take over my reading...

In Other Lists: I've still been sick, recovering too slowly for my tastes -- especially for someone who's supposed to be on vacation! -- but I did manage to go on a couple of towpath rides, a morning ski session at Blue, a Sals ride, some cross-country skiing along the towpath, and a bit of nightlife.

Today I'll hit the trails, then spend the day reading. Happy Holidays!

Fight Or Flight, Or Something Better

Well, here I am, listening to "Safe as Milk" in memory of Captain Beefheart, waiting for my leftover pizza to warm up. We (me, Anne & Emmi) hit Kula Yoga in Nazareth last night, to take a class taught by our friend Scott. Really cool, and I think we all found it fairly strenuous -- I'm not sure what Emmi's situation is, but Anne and I are somewhat experienced yoga practitioners who have, er, not practiced in a while... (We went for pizza with Scott afterward.)

I think that may be part of my latest problems, by the way - not the pizza, the lack of yoga. The body has like two basic modes, one calm and one based on "fight or flight," and yoga is at least partly an attempt to get body & mind into the calm mode. My recent health issues -- one recent cold does not a trend or tendency make, but still there's that breathing thing, and the skin thing, and my blood pressure was up at the doctor's office though it might have been the decongestants... -- seem to fall in the "caused by stress" category, and have trended upward as my yoga practice has waned.

I know my personality suffers if I skip too much yoga (like now), and here's a sign that maybe my health is suffering too. Better find a way again, and make time for yoga.

Meantime, I tried a towpath ride yesterday. I've been so sick lately that I haven't missed being outside, and had no desire to do anything strenuous, so I took it as a good sign that I at least wanted to go riding yesterday. When I got out there though, my fur-lined lungs had other ideas and I only rode for about 20 minutes. Anne should be home soon, and we'll try another ride in a bit. The way it usually works, by the time I can really ride again I should be jonesing for activity.

When I Was Young I Was The King Of Carrot Flowers

Morning weigh-in: 180.5#, 14.5% BF

 

Speaking of Neutral Milk Hotel, I once did see a bunch of two-headed boys in jars, in some low-rent museum in Russia. (I sang along with "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea" on the way into work this morning.) I'm feeling much better, thank youvery much; I had a good night's sleep last night, and I think the meds, especially the antibiotics, are doing their job.

 

What Else I Did On My Day Off: I got a few emails from Amazon saying my recent orders didn't process, because my credit card wasn't authorizing. Uh oh... I thought I forgot to pay a bill or something, but I checked online and all was well, so I called them. Turns out, some unknown entity tried to process a $0.01 transaction over the Internet using my card (and an incorrect expiration date), and the credit card company blocked it, locked my account, and tried to notify me via my old land line. Oops! Better update my contact info... Everything should be OK now, I'm happy, Amazon's happy, and I am now up to my ears in fraud protection add-ons.

 

Emmi's home, probably at her dad's now but we'll see her tonight, and Ben -- Happy Birthday, Ben! -- should also be back soon. There's snow on the ground, it must be Christmas Time.

 

Amoxocillin, Garliczilla

Morning weigh-in: 180#, 15.5% BF

 

Well, it's an ill wind that doesn't at least knock a few pounds off the scale...

 

I am officially sick, took off yesterday and went to the doctor. She gave me antibiotics, an asthma inhaler (sigh, but I do need it) and a couple of homeopathic remedies and food supplements -- ie some pills that make me stink of garlic -- as well as some advice for relieving the symptoms. So, instead of doing the Two Brew Tuesday thing, I spent last night alternating between glasses of water and cups of fresh ginger tea, waiting for the antibiotics to kick in. I feel better today, but then I always feel better during the day, and last night was pretty rough eve with my new regimen, which admittedly didn't start until almost 8:00 PM.

 

I yesterday playing with the computer again (Skype works fine now, as does Ekiga, though I have no one to call with either one), waiting for the doctor, reading a bit, and napping, and then I followed all that with an early bedtime. Tonight I'll be crashing early again, I can tell. Hopefully I'll feel better by the weekend...

 

Apres Le Deluge

Morning weigh-in: 182#, 14.5% BF

 

I have a pretty decent head cold, with sinus and chest issues, probably the first one for this year. (Anne has been fighting a similar cold, but it seems to have lodged in her ears, which is its own brand of not-fun.) Daytime is reasonably OK -- except I have no wind, and no physical energy -- and every day I think I've turned the corner, but every night it's the same all-night coughing fit. Needless to say, sleeping has been difficult.

 

Woke up to the sound of rain, so I spent most of yesterday watching movies, playing with the computer, or reading in bed -- the rest of the day I just wasted...

 

Reading: I just finished two books: Bike Snob by uh, the Bike Snob, and Dirty Life: On Farming, Food and Love by Kristin Kimball. I probably wouldn't have thought of this if I hadn't read them together, but in some ways they're like two sides of the same coin, two different views of recent trends. I'm not sure everyone would agree with me on that, even if they both mention hipsters and New York life, and both get into the thing itself rather than the trend of the thing, but they had one other thing in common: they were both very good.

 

Watching: Saw Amadeus again, haven't seen it in years. Great movie, but I think this falls somewhere on the "power of narrative" side of things, fitting Mozart and his circle into some kind of Procrustean "tortured genius and the little men who held him back" trope. (I looked up both Mozart and Salieri the other day, and just started counting the misrepresentations.) We also watched The Glory Of My Father last night, which was recommended by a friend but -- sorry Lori! -- just didn't seem to be able to engage either of us. Books won this weekend's cage match.

 

Computing: My mom threw a birthday party for my brother Chris yesterday. Neither of us were up for the trip though, so I called and begged off, but happened to mention that "maybe we could Skype later." This sounded agreeable to Mom, so later in the day, I fired up Skype and -- found it didn't work. Somehow over the past few upgrades/changes/whatever I'd broken it; worse, I managed to knock out my laptop's webcam. I spent a good portion of last night -- no point in sleeping if you can't lay down without drowning -- messing around, Googling device driver issues and reinstalling software; I knocked out my sound and got it back, and I did get the webcam to work again, but Skype still eludes me.

 

Exercising: Nope, except a towpath ride on Saturday with Anne. Almost two hours to go sixteen miles, and we were both exhausted long before it was over. I was thinking of hitting the gym tonight, but a rest day is a better idea so I'll probably do some chores around the house, maybe wrestle the computer again.

 

Downtimer

Had the day off, blowing through some vacation time, use-it-or-lose-it mode before the end of the year. Unfortunately I spent the day sick: am right on the cusp of coming down with a cold, that was what all that asthma etc really was, the start of whatever it was that came to a head yesterday. Tons of Emergen-C with vitamin D, and Mucinex-D, and I should be ok in a couple of days but in the meantime I've been totally wiped out. Anne was fighting something the other day, and may be about to get what I have -- she had a rough night. Luckily, we did pretty much nothing all day. (We did get out for a short ride though, just over to the Wegman's for groceries. Only ride of the week for me.)

The Boy Who Kicked Over The Hornet's Nest: All this Julian Assange Swedish eye-spy WikiLeaks brew-ha-ha reminds me of... something...

Barely Ahead Of My Time: Looks like Pychon's Inherent Vice might be made into a movie. Good thing I just finished it.

Squaring The Circle

Morning weigh-in: 182.5#, 14% BF

 

So it's been another week between posts; it seems my logorrhea well has run dry...

 

Things here are back to normal: Thanksgiving is over, Ben and Emmi (and their friends) are back at school, and we didn't really have all that much planned for this past weekend. (Anne had a few things on her plate but I got to waste the time as stupidly as I could figure how -- playing with the computer.) But last weekend...

 

Thanksgiving Shenanigans: Emmi & Ben had Thanksgiving dinner with their dad's family, and since Friday was Anne's big family get together -- and my family was scattered for the holiday -- we had steak. Awesome! Anne spent the day deboning the poultry for Saturday's turducken party, and cut her finger working on the last bone of the last bird. Not so awesome... We spent Friday in Jim Thorpe doing the Thanksgiving thing, then Saturday we did the annual Turkey Trot 5k in the morning (brrrr!) and spent the day preparing for the Turducken Party, which was a real blowout, a major success.

 

Sunday after the party I got up a bit late, but I did get down to Montgomeryville, and finally got Anne's new car stereo installed, then spent the afternoon hiking Sals with Dave.

 

I haven't been doing too much riding lately -- going out tonight, but still. I did a towpath ride with Doug on Monday, and a short road ride Friday, and basically that's it since the asthma incident. I got out again yesterday for another Sals hike, another mapping expedition, but other than that my only exercise lately has been at my new gym.

 

Celebrate This Dirty Life!

Yes it's that time of year again:

"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

(Retrieved from "http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species_(1859)/Chapter_XIV")

Sorry about the recent lack of posting. I've been super-busy at work the past few weeks, and home life has been pretty hectic as well. Next up is another long weekend...

Oh, the Embarrassment #1: My droid has been having problems recently with the headphone jack -- something I use at least twice every day -- and the problems were just getting worse and worse. I read online of a bunch of other people having the same problem, and when the jack finally died last week I went in to the Verizon store, ready for whatever battle was necessary to get my phone working again. The guy took it in the back and came out a minute later saying, "It's fixed. The connection was filled with hair and dirt and lint, and I sprayed it with compressed air to clean it out." Ewwww! -- but it works fine now. My phone spends a lot of time in my pocket, which might not be a good idea but I think it's common; I wonder if all those other droid jack problems have the same source.

Reading: I read a book excerpt in the US Airways in-flight magazine, and it was so good it prompted me to buy the book -- that was a first. The book is The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food and Love by Kiristin Kimball, the story about how she gave up the city for farm life. Pretty good so far, but I made the mistake of picking up The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest, and now I can't put it down. I guess I'll finish them both eventually.

Oh, the Embarrassment #2: Anne's car stereo is crapping out, so I decided to get her a new one for her birthday (this was the same day I got my phone fixed). I went over to the nearby stereo store, the only one I know, and drove into their parking lot -- only to find they were out of business. I called Eric, who once worked there, and he said "So glad you noticed, it's been closed for about three years now!" On Eric's advice I got the stereo at a place in Montgomeryville, and they'll be installing it Sunday.

Listening: Many thanks for all the music advice. I downloaded maybe a half dozen albums, most notable so far being the latest from the New Pornographers and the Black Keys, and one by Rachid Taha that wasn't from this year but was new to me. Mucho recommendo!

A Quick GRASS HOWTO: I finally broke down and purchased a whole bunch of data from the Lehigh County GIS Bureau. It was $150 for the whole kitchen sink, but what I was really after were property boundaries, and I got them so it was worth it. The data is in ArcGIS "shapefile" format, but GRASS should be able to handle it so...

Fire up GRASS in my current map, from the menu: "File->Import vector map->Multiple formats using OGR" (ie the v.import.ogr command), and -- error: there is no location/projection data associated with the shapefiles that OGR can find. For each shapefile there's an associated *.PRJ file in the data, and inside the *.PRJ file is the projection data that I need, but how do I use that?

Here's how: use v.in.ogr like before, pick a shapefile and import it, but check the button on the "Options" tab to create a new location for the shapefile. (That location will have no projection data associated with it.) Next you close GRASS and re-open it in the new location, then "Config->Manage projections->Config->Manage projections" (ie the g.proj command), on the "Input" tab choose the PRJ file as the "ASCII file containing a WKT projection description" and on the "Create/Edit" tab check the button to create new projection files. Press "Run" and you should be good -- the shapefile is no in its own location wiht the proper projection information. That's one way to do it!

UPDATE: Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Broccoli At Breakfast

Well, here I am at Kripalu, and I may be the only person in history to have gained weight here... One thing I was worried about is whether there would be food here for me, but it turns out that the food is awesome, and there's plenty that I can eat. All very healthy stuff too, it reminded me of eating at home -- except, for some reason, I've never had steamed veggies at breakfast before, not even leftovers, and I've been chowing down on them (among many other things) here every morning.

Other than that, I can't say that I've really immersed myself into the scene here. We arrived Friday afternoon (after riding the nearby trails), ate dinner, and I went to a seminar on "positional therapy" while Anne went to her workshop; I took an early morning yoga class yesterday, then rode all day and hit the sauna; and today we leave, but I will hit the gym they have, and maybe the sauna, while Anne's in her final class. I'm glad I did that yoga class, going to Kripalu and not doing any yoga would be hard to explain back home... The place is yoga-centric, not surprising since it is in fact a yoga-as-religion retreat, but even if yoga were taken out of the picture, looking at the place as, say, a spa, I've hardly dipped my feet into the amenities, though I do think Anne is getting her money's worth from that class. (She actually had homework.)

Our room is in a building called "the annex," very cool, euro and eco at the same time, all concrete and blond wood. Wireless, funky bathroom, really neat decor. There's saunas and whirlpools, a weight room, and body work (i.e. massage) of all kinds, and, though it seems experimental and against their better judgment, there's a coffee shop, which is where I am now. My experience of yoga-as-nice-start-to-a-weekend-morning usually includes post-yoga cafe downtime, and there at the coffee shop I would usually see at least a few of my classmates; judging by the sudden morning crush, that sort of demographic is well-represented here. (A-and speaking of demographics: there's probably 10 women for every guy here, at least among the guests -- it sounds like paradise, but I do get that "onion in a petunia patch" feeling of being out of place. Being here gives me a good idea of what it might be like as a girl into mountain biking.)

My biggest block here, in terms of my not getting to enjoy all the facilities and classes available here, is the same problem I have with hiking: whenever it's a good day for a hike it's a better day for a bike ride, and I'd usually rather be biking. (Tough life, huh?) I might have a unique opportunity with this trip to Kripalu, even though I'm pretty sure I'll be coming back, but that also goes for the local trails -- the weather and trail conditions are probably as good as they get, and it's just too nice to not be outside. I think it's time for a hike...

A Quick Music Troll, er, Poll

I was just wondering what other people think is the best album released this year.

 

I'd pretty much agree with anyone who gives top honors to Arcade Fire's The Suburbs, as I think it's the best that I've I heard so far (based strictly on the merits), but my vote goes to Titus Andronicus's The Monitor, for its more personal resonances -- the Civil War, New Jersey, moving to Boston and moving back, Billy Bragg...

 

The floor's open. Anybody? Bueller?

 

You Know Who Else Came Home To Roost? Hitler, That's Who!

The crows didn't bring it with them I'm sure, but it all did come back at the same time: my skin is raw and itchy again, and to top it off my ankle started to hurt the other day... I suspect that both are related to flying around (sitting in cramped quarters for hours), and clambering around inside boilers (and being exposed to whatever is in there, like itchy insulation etc), which is what the rest of last week looked like.

Pretty good trip though, business- and engineering-wise it worked out fine, and the traveling was uneventful except for a baggage snafu right at the end -- but they delivered my bag the next day, on the porch by about 8:00 AM.

This Friday I had off, and we slept in (as best we could, with baggage guys knocking on the door), then just hung out at home. This was our first weekend with (mostly) nothing on the agenda, so aside from some chores & errands our time was our own. Anne got some apple butter started, I got a pot roast going, and we bottled the yarrow beer (2 gallons, about 20 bottles) & kegged the porter (5 gallons). We went to Brew Works after dinner, but we only stayed for one; on the way home was when my ankle started hurting -- Anne noticed I was limping too.

Saturday was more of the same, though our kitchen scene this time was us getting ready for a dinner party. We started the day with a run, which quickly devolved into a walk as my ankle started complaining, did some stuff around the house, and then got things ready for dinner -- we had Scott S over, plus Mark & Melinda, some old friends of Anne & Scott who'd relocated back into the area, and their kids -- the bunch of them were all neighbors together, once upon a time in Nazareth. Salad, squash soup, spicy sesame noodles (spaghetti for the kids), bread and apple butter, and a whole bunch of desserts. Very fun.

Today Anne and I went on a nice long road ride, which felt a lot longer because it was a breezy (OK, windy) day. No ankle problems, thank goodness. It was beautiful out despite the wind: a perfect, brisk, sunny fall day.

Aggro World

Morning weigh-in: 181.5#, 13.5% BF

Writing this in Lehigh Valley International Airport...

Went out riding the towpath last night with Anne. A mellow ride, and we were going to keep it relatively short because the weather was so cold -- 40 degrees, maybe a bit less, in a few months we'll be out in shorts if it gets up to 40 but we were freezing at first -- but as we got into the groove and warmed up a little we decided to push our turnaround a little further down the trail. Unfortunately, when we got a little past Freemansburg we started hearing gunshots across the river.  (There's a gun range over there somewhere, but this wasn't that.) We didn't feel like getting popped by the local yahoos, discretion was the better part of valor so we turned around, cut our ride short anyway. Still, about 12 miles in just about an hour, not bad for a Monday night, and the first requiring both lights and riding tights... Lots of critters out and about, besides us and the yahoos: we saw a bunch of deer, one very decrepit-looking fisherman, and a mangy skunk that I almost ran into before we spotted it.

This past weekend was the big Halloween blow-out, though we wimped out on a few events: I got home Friday totally whooped, and we (me, Anne, Deb, Donna) didn't feel like trying to catch up to the CAT Halloween ride (ride starts at 5:00? with a movie about sprawl? WTF?) so we blew it off in favor of feeding the Trick-or-Treaters and our usual Friday night at Brew works. Saw the usual crew there, as well as Doug & Lori who did do the ride and caught up with us afterwards. Lotsa fun with various halloween costume props, including some goofy teeth, and a rather pornographic version of fake nose & glasses, which turned out to be very popular.

Saturday we did some morning running around, then hooked up with the big VMB Halloween/Birthday ride, birthday because Jason's turning 30 in a few days so we had to celebrate. Great ride, there were probably about 30 people on the ride, some in costume, and there were the usual misadventures (mechanical breakdowns, crashes, some peeps getting lost) associated with a big group ride. Totally a fun stupid day in the woods.

That night the VMB festivities continued with a party at Greg's house. More crazy fun: two sixtels tapped, a fire going in the fire pit, and a whole bunch of crazy bikers. Anne and I came as an "Oktoberfest" style German couple, she as "Hansel" and me as a huge big-titted beer maid. (My costume's boobs were actually booze containers,  which we filled with beer and which unfortunately exploded from the carbonation on the drive over, spraying all over the inside of Anne's car.) It was a sight to see, but it was also uncomfortable (in more ways than one) so I took it off after we made our entrance.

We only stuck around for a few hours, eat, drink, dance, schmooze, then home relatively early. Sunday was Bethlehem's Halloween parade, preceded by a the first annual Halloween 5k. Anne went as a chicken, Donna & her friend ditto the  chicken thing (there were a surprising number of chickens running), I ran in my kilt, and Lori went as a cupcake. Great fun, and our time was 28:30, not bad for hungover and in costume...

How the other half lives: It was kind of surprising, to me anyway, the reaction I got with the beer maid costume: I got a lot of attention, which I expected, and a lot of laughs, but some of my friends became very aggressive at the sight of those tits, manhandling them and so on, and getting almost belligerent when I showed up a little later in my usual clothes. Very weird, and it was weirder still when I was walking around in my kilt, which sounds like I'd been feminized this weekend or something, but the kilt's pretty bad-ass -- Doug said "if that was any manlier it would have spikes," -- one old guy in the crowd started yelling to me "hey you're very brave!" He reminded me of like a dog or something, excited and not knowing whether it'll bite you, lick you or chase the stick... Boy named Sue, thought I'd have to get into a fight with an old man --the guy saw something outside his little world, and just had to force his way into it.

Anyway, I'm out of here for a few days, off to Texas (after voting, of course), back by the weekend. This coming weekend will be the first in a while without any running around. Plane's boarding soon, outta here.

Once Burned, Twice Shy

Good time at the gym last night, I did a full body workout including legs. I didn't feel particularly strong or energetic, but still I fairly flew through the workout. The lower reps & higher weights are starting to pay off, and my strength seems to be coming back, though my fitness (despite the running) is still in the middle of its annual Fall meltdown. (Time to set up the trainer in the basement?)

 

I met Anne at Porters after that, grabbed dinner and BS'ed with a few friends we bumped into there. Ribeye steak sandwich, Founder's Breakfast Stout, some good conversation, and we were home by 11:30, not too bad.

 

More crows on the way in this morning, and like yesterday, another major backup on the highway -- this time I saw all the brake lights in the distance and got off at the next exit. Even if it took longer I didn't care,  I didn't feel like sitting in traffic again, and when I got to my usual exit I got a glimpse of the interstate looking like a parking lot, so I think my gamble paid off.

 

Tonight is the CAT Halloween ride.

Return Of The Son Of Corvus Redux

Today marks -- for me -- the official return of the crows to Bethlehem. They flock by the millions along the Lehigh, from about now through maybe January. I've been expecting them, and I'd heard from Deb and Anne that they were already back, and I even saw a few crows flying around yesterday, but it was on my drive in this morning that I saw (and heard) them in full force for the first time this year, in the trees along the riverbank. Just in time for Halloween!

 

Eldritch: It was foggy this morning, fairly creepy with the now-mostly-bare trees dripping in the dark, and the crows calling (almost) invisibly in the misty early morning, and there I was listening to The Hazards Of Love on the way in, with an image in my mind of waking in the night, and seeing your dead children, the ones you murdered, standing around your bed, singing.

 

What else: Got my kilt last night. Utilikilts "Workman" model, chocolate (ie brown) colorway. I put it on, it looked good and felt really comfortable, and I was tired so I blew off yoga and worked on the laptop in my new kilt. Did a little playing with my new winter project, some old work-related program involving FORTRAN, which is kind of painful but fun in a sort of archaeological way, and upgraded the system (again).

 

Doug and Lori came over later, and we adjusted the brakes on his new cyclocross bike. Cantilever brakes, they needed to be set toe-in, but the job wasn't nearly as difficult/frustrating as we were expecting, and we got to hang out for a while afterward with beer and popcorn.

 

I ran in the kilt this morning -- it's the base for what I'll be wearing in Sunday's Halloween 5k, so it had better be comfortable running gear (and it was). Tonight I'll be hitting the gym, and will follow that with a stop at Porter's.

 

D'Oh!

Morning weigh-in: 181.5#, 13.5% BF

 

Well, I was going to go to yoga last night, but the weather looked like it would hold out and I decided to do a towpath ride, and so that rain the blew in around 6:00 last  night was basically my fault. No ride, oh well, instead I did a little more reading (Gibson's new Zero History -- verdict so far: meh), downloaded a bunch of old J. Geils Band, and uploaded my pictures from Take A Kid Mountain Biking Day. Dinner was more chili.

 

Takes One To Know One: Nice takedown of Richard "You Don't Need Math -- I'm An Idiot And I Have A Great Job!" Cohen. Schmuck.

 

Ran this morning, going to the gym tonight. I may skip Two Brew Tuesday, gotta watch my figure.

 

Overused And Subdued

It was another good, but another hectic, weekend...

 

I had off on Friday, so Anne and I hit the Allentown Farmer's Market (which is sort of like a PA Dutch version of the original Englishtown auction building, the one that burned down years ago, and the place is always good for people watching), then we used the rest of the day to brew beer -- that is to say, she brewed beer and I occasionally washed something or helped with the heavy lifting. There's a lot of downtime involved, waiting for water to heat up or cool down, so I got in a trip to the hardware store, picked up one more missing piece for our infrastructure  -- our new heat exchanger coil hooks up to an outdoor hose connection, so I got an adapter from the kitchen tap to the coil, and now we can cool the boiled wort in minutes without lifting it off the stove -- and I also got a haircut. (Hair and beard are much shorter than usual, but I've been informed by a reliable source -- the one that counts -- that it looks good.)

 

Friday night was the monthly Heels on Wheels ride and pub crawl. Smaller crowd than usual, maybe the smallest since the beginning, and I was the only guy. We started at the Brew Works, rode over to The Bookstore but couldn't get in, hit Your Welcome and JP McGrady's (a beer in each and a little Led Zeppelin on the jukebox), then we finished the night with a late dinner back at Brew Works.

 

Saturday was Philly with the Porter's Pub bus trip. I got a crock pot of chili going, and we got in a couple of other errands in the morning, then we were out the door around noon, and made the bus in time this time. There were a few people on the trip that I knew at least partly (Larry, his brother and sister-in-law), but it was mostly strangers. We had no set itinerary, just a map with some suggestions near Rittenhouse Square, and we were all basically on our own, but when we arrived we basically all poured off the bus and into the nearest/first place on the list -- The Black Sheep. Awesome place, very much like a traditional Irish pub, or at least my idea of one, and they had Chimay on tap...

 

One and done, then we went with Larry over to Nodding Head Brew Pub. Another awesome place, in a very different way: it was almost like a scene from one of my dreams of Easton or whatever, or maybe something from the Matrix like when they were climbing around "inside the wet wall," and their beer was excellent. Everyone else was at a place next door, and that's where K-Jo caught up with everyone, so we stopped in and said hi -- but we were hungry, so Anne and I went and got some serious comfort food at The Good Dog, and then we went a little further afield, a little sightseeing  on South Street. We caught up with the crew at the famous Monk's Cafe, and then it was time to head home. Back at Porters at a pretty decent hour, maybe 10:30 and the place was jumping, but we just went home.

 

(Every place we went, was great, especially Nodding Head and the Black Sheep, and they're all high on my list for a return trip.)

 

Sunday was more puttering around the house, working on the bikes, occasionally checking on the chili and listening to the plop-plop of the beer brewing as the CO2 escaped through the little water seals; Anne also made sauerkraut, so we now have one more thing bubbling away in the kitchen. We took off around 2:00 and rode Jacobsburg, which was really nice, despite the presence of a whole lot of horses, and their droppings. The place was packed, we actually got the last parking space in the main lot, but other than the equestrians, and maybe one or two other bikers, we had the trails pretty much to ourselves. Ten miles, mellow pace, and it really was beautiful out there.

 

We had some people over to help us eat chili, the usual crew (Debbie, Donna, Liz). Everyone seemed a little tired, and we just sort of hung out and BS'ed. Next weekend is another hectic blowout, then I think everyone is going to want to lay low until the holidays.

Recording The Cramdown

Morning weigh-in: 180.5#, 14.5% BF

 

A month or so ago I'd have been shocked by those numbers, but now (even though I really don't have anything else to say) I'm happy enough that I had to get them on record, before the coming weekend weight gain...

 

What's up? Blessed are the people whose annals are tiresome... Earlier in the week I decided to get a kilt (a friend was helping to sell them at Celtic Fest, but that had long since come and gone before I made up my mind), and on Tuesday I ordered one; it should be here in a week or so, definitely in time for the Halloween 5k. In other news, I upgraded my computer last night, Ubuntu 9.whatever, so now I'm only like a year behind. Things seemed to go pretty smoothly, what little I got to see of the new stuff this morning.

 

Meltdown I guess I was tired from Sunday's ride, and then Monday morning's run, because I thought I was going to keel over in Monday night's yoga class. My legs started trembling in one standing pose, and they never stopped until we were almost finished. It was kind of freaky -- for a while I didn't think I'd be able to walk out of there, let alone drive home... I took Tuesday as a rest day, then rode an easy towpath ride last night (even so, I was tired), went to bed early, and this morning was another run. Tonight is the gym, and we'll see if I feel better than last week.

Two Weekends

Morning weigh-in: 182#, 14.5% BF

OK, a little catch-up...

We went up to Northampton the weekend before last to visit Ben. We watched him run the Hartford Marathon on Saturday morning, and hung out Friday and (especially) Saturday nights with him and his friends, and Sunday morning -- after a nice run, our only real exercise for the weekend -- was coffee shop and bookstore time, split between Northampton and Amherst. It was a lot of fun seen Ben and his friends (including one we met in St Petersburg, small world), and the weekend was a really nice mini-vacation.

Last week was mostly rainy, like the week before, and we mostly continued to catch up with unfinished business left over from our Moab trip; mostly this meant getting the bikes back up and running. (Until our ride yesterday, I hadn't been on a mountain bike since we came home from Moab, and I think the weigh-in kind of reflects that...)

My parents visited us on Saturday. So... Friday night was kind of quiet, maybe a little housework before we went out, then on Saturday morning Anne got up early and ran some shopping errands (basically, we'd bought a quarter of a cow, and she had to go pick up the meat) while I did some final straightening in the house and yard. My parents arrived about noon, and then we all went up to Mauch Chunk Lake Park (picking up Anne's mom along the way) to walk around and check out the fall foliage. Things seem to be running a little late, colors have not quite peaked yet but it still was beautiful there, with a cloudless blue sky and enough breeze to keep the temperature brisk. We walked down along the lake towards the gun club, then came back and went to dinner outside of town.

Some friends had a party, and we stopped in later in the evening, but they have five cats and a dog -- I only knew about the dog -- and we had to cut our visit short.

Early to bed, late to rise, and then we went back up to Jim Thorpe, this time to ride the American Standard. That's one of my favorite rides in JT, and Anne loves it too, so we had a good old time riding in the autumn-bright woods, at least until we ran out of steam and took the jeep road back. We ran into an old friend (Liz), in the parking lot with her husband and the local ride crew, and we talked with them for a little while before heading home. Taco dinner, nightcap at Brew Works, and the weekend was complete.

Ran this morning, hitting yoga tonight.

Another Week Down

Morning weigh-in (Wednesday): 179.5#, 13.5% BF

Morning weigh-in (Thursday): 180.5#, 13.5% BF

 

Good yoga class yesterday, and a bit tougher than I've become used to -- I did a "mixed level" class at The Yoga Loft, which had an emphasis, last night at least, on standing poses and preparation for headstands, and I was sweating and breathing hard before it was over. I think that for now, and despite the distance, I'll be sticking with Easton Yoga where things feel more familiar (and I have an already-paid-for unlimited class pass), but it was nice to expand my horizons a bit. I should try to hit the more vigorous classes more often; last night felt good.

 

Speaking of expanding my horizons, I'm looking at going back to school. Nothing major, I just want to take an online course or two in Geographic Information Systems, plus a refresher course in math, maybe some statistics, and eventually maybe a little biology or whatever -- I don't have a field of study, and I probably will not be working towards any degree or certificate or anything like that, I just want to bone up on areas that interest me, and see where that leads. Penn State has an interesting online program for GIS; that's where I'll probably end up.

 

Listening: I downloaded some Van Morrison (Astral Weeks, Moondance) last night, and listened to Astral Weeks on the way in to work this morning. I normally run the Droid on "shuffle" but I've been on an album kick lately: I listened to Titus Andronicus's The Monitor the other day while retrieving the bikes (in other news, our bikes are back from Moab, but not yet built), and listened to Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane, Over The Sea on the ride in yesterday.

 

Tonight is the gym, then we're heading up to visit Ben for the weekend. Tomorrow night is a symposium on Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, then on Saturday Ben's running in the Hartford Marathon. I think Sunday is Book Store and Coffee Shop Time...

 

The Rundown

Morning weigh-in: 180.5#, 15% BF

 

Rough night at yoga last night: I was tired and a little headachey, but I went anyway, and the headache just got worse and worse. Meanwhile, I started getting leg cramps in a lot of the positions... Shavasana couldn't come soon enough, and I think I might have fallen asleep -- complete with snoring -- before the end.

 

The whole ride home I was debating whether to eat something or just go straight to bed (I was not hungry at all). Luckily Anne made a pumpkin-potato soup, and I had a bowl of it, and that -- plus a little restorative web-browsing -- seemed to revive me: I still went to bed early, but I felt a lot better after eating than I had before. I was supposed to go for a run this morning, and I woke up this morning feeling great, but we hit the snooze button anyway and blew off our scheduled morning run, "because of the rain."

 

(Hmmmm... leg cramps, headaches, fatigue, symptoms that go away after eating right -- dehydrated? -- low electrolytes? -- vitamin D issues, again? I've definitely been letting the nutrition slide lately, but I didn't realize it had become that bad.)

 

Got more pics and some video on Sunday, from the VMB's Take A Kid Mountain Biking Day, that I'll be posting in the next few days, stay tuned.

 

Tonight is the gym, followed by Taco Night.

Reality Bites

Morning weigh-in (Monday): 181#, 14.5% BF

Morning weigh-in (Tuesday): 180#, 14.5% BF

 

Oh well, back at work, second day back since the vacation. It was an awesome time though: a little more than a week away, five rides and a hike, plus the usual sightseeing, nightlife etc. I took a boatload of photos, and all the keepers (133 pictures by my count) are now uploaded, so go check them out!

 

(I also took some video, but it needs a little massaging and may run too long for flickr, so -- after I learn how -- I'll edit the video & then probably put it on YouTube or something. Stay tuned.)

 

Things here are fairly busy: I pumped out a lot of stuff, drawings and calculations, things for internal review etc, in the days before I left, and it's all coming back. I was only gone for four work days, but right now I'm running around answering questions, catching up with design changes, reviewing comments and making revisions. Busy is good...

Rest Day

We rode (most of the way) up to Hurrah Pass on Monday, then yesterday Anne and I rode up from town and did the Slickrock Trail, and in the afternoon hiked out to Delicate Arch in the national park. Today was supposed to be an on-and-off rainy day, so while the rest of the crew decided to take their chances, we took the day off. Reading, going into town for breakfast and some shopping/sightseeing, now we're hanging out at the condo. (I am watching the heavy clouds pass by over the cliffs as I write this.) Some rain blew through, I'm sure those guys are OK but I think we made the right choice.

The vacation is starting to wind down. We have tomorrow (Porcupine Rim), then maybe a ride on Friday before it all comes to an end.

I've been posting photos every day, don't forget to check them out. I now have over 5000 photos on Flickr, 92 of them (so far) from this trip.

One Day Down

Whew! Tough day, between the sun, and heat, and sand, and climbing, and the altitude (only 4600 feet, but still something us sea-level types could really feel).

We rode the Sovereign Trail, a new section to the west of the main part of the trail system. I'm not sure if recent (hot and dry) conditions made things sandy, or if this area is normally like that but it was definitely sandy. Tough going, like trying to ride at the beach or in snow. Beautiful day though, cloudless and blue sky, the usual amazing desert scenery...

Tomorrow I think Anne and I will do an "us" day. It was fun riding with the crew today, but I think we might want to keep it mellower than they do, so we'll probably do Hurrah Pass -- skipping the (likely sandy) bottom section.

Almost Ready To Start

Well, here we are in beautiful Moab, Utah, sitting around the upstairs porch and drinking coffee, waiting for the day to start.

The trip here was fairly uneventful, even if it made for a long day: up at 3:00 AM, we flew out of Newark and arrived in Salt Lake City around 10:00 local time, and followed that with a nice looooong drive -- maybe 4 hours but it felt like forever. Settled in at the condo, retrieved the bikes, got some dinner and we totally crashed by 9:00.

Now comes breakfast. Anne is making pancakes, which I hope doesn't become a trend but she says she likes to cook so... We should be done and ready to ride by 9:00 -- we're hitting the Sovereign Trail.

Lost Weekend

Morning weigh-in: 179#, 14% BF (not so good...)

 

Here's something I can't say every day: I did a nice run this morning with Anne. Not far, maybe 2.5 miles but it felt really good, especially since the last time I did a real run (ie not counting that Hash thing) was back in April.

 

One friend, on the local bike club forum, has a signature file that reads "every day you don't ride is another day you will never ride." Which usually just sounds like another version of "meh, trite but true," but to me it's the epitaph for last weekend: except for Friday night's "Heels on Wheels" ride, I was pretty much immobile the entire weekend, and it came back to bite me...

 

Friday was my computer-obsession day, then came Friday night's ride. The Heels on Wheels crew was the biggest group yet, maybe 10 girls in skirts & heels, plus a few auxiliary dudes, and we hit a bunch of places, on the north and south sides of the river, before making it home.

 

Saturday was another wasted day, or rather a recovery day, all headachey and spent (again) in front of the laptop, while Anne baked a cake -- she was making it for Judy's surprise birthday party that night, which made things very awkward when Judy called, saying she was in the neighborhood and would be stopping by. We scrambled, hid the partially-assembled cake (and icing, and sundry other incriminating cake-baking-type things) in the bedroom, and I don't think she ever knew, though we were practically choking on our laughter. That night was her party, and though I was a bit subdued -- and did not partake of any alcoholic cheer -- it was another fun night.

 

Maybe I could have gone riding on Sunday, but when I woke up it was pouring, and Anne was doing one leg (of the relay race) in the local marathon -- I met her at the end of her leg, then we went to the finish line in Easton to cheer her team on, and then we (me, Anne, and her teammates Liz, Kris & Tony) grabbed brunch at Porters. Some shopping, some reading, some napping, and the day was over. So much couch-potato living, and in the end I felt like warmed-over shit, all lethargic and sleepy.

 

I went to yoga last night, first time in like forever, and it felt great. Tonight is the gym, tomorrow night will probably be a towpath ride on the singlespeed. I feel like I have to get back in the game.

 

Geekout On A Sunny Day

I've been using GRASS for about two years now, mostly playing around with maps of Sals.  I have the trail network mapped out pretty well at this point, and recently figured out how to use GPX files of trail networks in my Garmin, having them them show up on the map like any other road, so naturally I wanted to do that with my Sals map on GRASS...

In the past I have been able to get the GRASS trails saved as GPX files, but the process involved jumping through a lot of hoops - I had to convert my data from the coordinate system I'm using on my personal map, to the standard one used by GPS units, then output that to a GPX file as output, converting from GRASS's internal format along the way. (There is actually a command in GRASS that would do all of this in a single step, but it never worked. Doh!)

Two nights ago I was messing with my map yet again, and wanted to generate a newer GPX file, and I got so totally frustrated by all the hoop-jumping and broken commands I couldn't think of anything else. Today's my Friday off, so as soon as I got up this morning I opened up the file for the offending command (a shell script called "v.out.gpsbabel"), took it apart and found the problem.

Turns out that the script massages the data by piping it through some sed commands, and this script, like so many scripts before it, had foundered on the rock of regular expressions. Two minutes figuring out what was supposed to happen, a schnipsel here and there, and now the thing works like a charm! I played with it for a while, but I only really had a half-minute task for it to do, and it was a bit anticlimactic after all that work.

I tapped the keyboard listlessly for a while, trying to recapture my fading high, then went out for a haircut. Now I'm hanging with Anne in a new (to me) coffee shop on New Street. (Anne wouldn't care, she's "blogging" old-school with pen and paper, but our regular coffee-shop hangout has had a lot of wireless problems lately, so we've been branching out.)

Another geeky discovery: I was clicking idly through phone's settings, and found that the Droid supports tethering, so I can access the Internet with the laptop, without needing a wi-fi connection. Sweet! -- but it's another anticlimax, because the wi-fi here at The Wise Bean is pretty decent. And so's the coffee...

Back To Work

Well, Labor Day is behind us, though due to the vagaries of our "every other Friday off" system this is actually a three-day week for me, it's not quite the end of vacation season... The weekend was spent with the usual biking hijinks (Big Pocono on Friday, Jacobsburg on Saturday, and a circumnavigation of South Mountain on the road bikes on Sunday), plus a few picnics and other end-of-summer activities.

 

Fun With Maps #1: For its monthly meetings, the VMB rotates through small list of venues, and the question always arises: which one is the most convenient -- in other words, which is closest, or easiest to get to -- for the majority of our membership? (We have members in  Raubsville and Bucks County, Emmaus and Macungie, Tamaqua, Stroudsburg, and the Slate Belt, and even a few in western New Jersey, as well as the Allentown, Bethlehem and Easton areas.) I don't have information on member addresses, but I do know where the different venues are, and I thought that, as a good first approximation, I could find the most centrally located of the venues by comparing driving times (as given by Google Maps driving directions) from each one to the others: the one with least total driving time to all the others would be the most centrally located.

 

I have about 10 venues in my dry run, which -- counting "point A to point B" and "point B to point A" as separate cases (drive times can differ in each direction), but ignoring "point A to point A" -- that gives 90 different sets of directions to work through. This looks like a job for automation, and luckily I found a way to do it. I wrote a pretty simplistic script the other day, to get the data from Google and look for drive times, but I don't have all the bugs worked out: there is no error checking, so if the mapping request hits a snag it just bombs. I should have the thing finalized in a few days though. From what preliminary results I did get, I suspect that the Bethlehem venues are going to remain the most viable meeting places.

 

Noted In Passing #1: Happy 110th Birthday, Galveston Hurricane!

 

Fun With Maps #2: Anne and I did a short Jacobsburg ride a week ago Thursday, hitting mostly the boring parts, doubletrack through grassy fields and the like, and were talking about the other parts of the park. Anne said that she and Donna had been exploring, but hadn't found their way over to the good parts, and she had found the official park trail map a bit inadequate...

 

That night I went onto Garmin Connect and grabbed a bunch of GPX tracks from Jacobsburg rides, mine and others, and then fired up TopoFusion. I fed in all the tracks, then ran TopoFusion's "make network" analysis -- this is the feature that made TF worth getting for me -- which analyzed them and reduced them to a single trail network. Plopped the new network into Google Earth, superimposed the official Jacobsburg trail (found online), and hit "Print," and we now have our own trail map!

 

So, this Friday we rode Jacobsburg again, with a little more time available to explore, though we forgot the new (printed) map -- Anne wanted to see what she could navigate from memory, so it was OK. I'd loaded a GPX of the trail network onto my Garmin, and I'd also uploaded a version of it onto Google Maps, and I wanted to experiment, compare and contrast, navigating with both Droid and Garmin...

 

The Garmin was a disappointment -- you couldn't see the trail network, just each separate trail in the network (like, one at a time), and it was more "navigate this trail" than "show the trail on the map." The Google Maps trail was beautiful -- much better looking than on the regular computer, where the network is spread among multiple pages instead of showing up all on one page -- and came in handy several times for illustrating where we were. We did everything in the park, except the grassy doubletrack...

 

Noted In Passing #2: Happy 36th Anniversary, Nixon Pardon!

 

Fun With Maps #3: In terms of the Garmin, it was back to the drawing board, which in this case meant back to Garmin to upgrade my firmware, and since they don't support Linux, that meant downloading their special software (with proprietary drivers) onto Anne's Mac, and going through the upgrade process from there. Things worked out just fine, despite the extra hoops I had to jump through; now I have the latest system on my 705, and that does support showing tracks on the map (you still have to work with them one at a time if there are a bunch on the GPX file). I experimented with this tonight -- I generated a GPX of the Sals trails from my GRASS database, and will added that as well as the Jacobsburg map. It's all I ever really wanted, that I didn't already have, from the 705, at least for now...

 

Passed, Not Noticed: It was just about 10 years ago that I had my worst bike crash ever. The actual date was August 11, 2000, when I crashed avoiding someone making a sudden left turn in front of me. Concussion, lacerations, coma, I spent the next 3 days in the hospital, and back in July I thought for sure that I would definitely remember the anniversary. Nope.

 

By blog doesn't go back that far, but here's what I wrote five years ago.

 

 

Back To School

The local kids, not me... seems weird, they're all going back a lot earlier these days, not just locally and not just college kids. "Better them than me," I say, as I sit in my office...

 

It was a great weekend for biking: Thursday night at Jacobsburg, Friday on the American Standard in Jim Thorpe, Saturday at Jordan, and Sunday, which was supposed to be a long-ish road ride, but we got to Emmaus, had some iced coffee, thought better about it -- tired, hot, we had guests coming over later --  and headed home.

 

The Jim Thorpe ride was especially good. Just me and Anne; we did a big chunk of the American Standard including the "roller coaster" stuff, then (my mistake) we made a wrong turn, which brought us to a shortcut out, so we bailed. Still, pretty impressive ride, about 11 miles or so, ride stats can be found here. (I don't know why, but I keep going back to this ride in my mind; it's like: here was one of my life's high points that I didn't quite realize at the time.) Got some pictures, mostly of unusual mushrooms, but also one or two of me at the eponymous urinal -- don't worry, not those kinds of pictures, I didn't use the thing -- so stay tuned...

 

Tonight is going to be Sals, also with Anne.

 

Reading: Anne's been on a real Margaret Atwood kick lately, and just finished (among others) The Year of the Flood, which she loved and highly recommends. Rather than starting with that one though, I took on Oryx and Crake, a sort of prequel to The Year of the Flood. I can't put it down.

 

Listening: Back in 1983 or so I was working at the local drugstore as a stock clerk and delivery boy, and on my drug runs I would listen to the same Yes cassette over and over, and over, driving around in my AMC Pacer. The other day I downloaded that very album, and drove home yesterday jamming to "Yours Is No Disgrace" like it was 1983 all over again. (Other recent downloads include Oasis and the White Stripes, so there's at least a little temporal bandwidth in my nostalgia kick.)

 

 Not much else going on. Yesterday was a rest day; I did some some drycleaning/laundry/lawnmower catch-up, and we had an awesome steak dinner at home. I'd been messing with the Turner's suspension settings lately (on coach Jon's advice), and last night I did some playing around, practicing my corners out in the street for a while.