A Shining Star For You To Call Wormwood

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

The Goose And The Hawk

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

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

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

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

Happy Earth Day!

Maybe Thick Socks Are The Answer

Morning weigh-in: 191#, 14.5% BF (I'm pretty round right now, so I'd take that BF with a grain of salt.)

 

I got new shoes last week, along with two new suits, some shirts and ties etc, my annual trip to Men's Wearhouse. What can I say? I needed a new suit, but I went with Anne, and she and the salesman ganged up on me... My old "dress shoes" were pretty ratty, but they were comfortable (like an old cliche), which is not what I can say about my new ones: they're killing me, or they were until today; today I am wearing extra-thick socks, and they provide just enough extra cushioning to keep me sane. Hopefully they'll break in soon enough.

 

Nature Journal FAIL: I was all set to check out the Aurora Borealis, which was supposed to be spectacular, and visible even in Pennsylvania, on Saturday night.I put on some warm clothes and went to the top of South Mountain Park near Lehigh, where there's an open field at the top of the hill; I arrived a bit before sunset, and was eventually joined by a bunch of tweens with chaperones (think like Cub/Boy Scouts, but it was a mixed gender crowd -- a school Astronomy Club?), and some college kids, but we all were disappointed, there was nothing to see.

 

In Other News, It's April: Sunday morning I was up in Jim Thorpe. I rode the American Standard Trail, and did some exploring on the Young American, a new-ish set of additions/alternates to the main route. I was completely alone, the whole mountain was like a ghost town -- it was windy, and much colder up there than it was at home, at least at first. The trail conditions were awesome though, and despite feeling skittish (I'd been fooling with suspension shock settings, and the bike felt a bid weird), I had a really good time. Towards the end though I started feeling pretty ratty, and I was running out of steam on a lot of the climbs. One more wake-up call, bike season is here and I'm not ready.

 

Tonight I finish my taxes, right on time. I did them myself, for the first time in probably 15 years.

 

Halftime Report

So here I am today, the big Five Oh. Doesn't feel any different. I remember the hearing the adage "Forty is the old age of youth; fifty is the youth of old age," but I was told this weekend that fifty is The New Forty (or even The New Twenty according to one friend), so we'll see how it all works out.

 

I mentioned this to a few friends when the subject of milestone birthday crises came up -- "OMG you're fifty are you freaking?" -- but my big crisis year was actually when I turned 29. I always thought that my freakout had something to do with it being my last year in my twenties, one more year and it's all over etc, but looking back now I wonder if it wasn't something else: I remember at that time realizing, after years of physical inactivity, that I was fat and flabby and falling apart -- I'd been exhausted by the minor physical labor of a plant inspection not too long before, while my 70-year-old boss had breezed through it, and I bought my first bike only a month before my birthday. I suspect that there were other things in the air too, since I'd been out of school and into my new career, and independent living in a new area, for about two years; I liked these things, but I wasn't doing much with my life other than working, and I was starting to realize there was more to life and if I didn't find it before time passed I'd miss it. That's pretty much guaranteed to bring on an early "midlife crisis."

 

So anyway, my life changed over the next few years, and my thirties were much better than my twenties, and much richer, and things continued that way until about five years ago, when I met Anne and my life got richer still. And now...

 

By the way: rode last night (towpath), and may ride again tonight (Sals?) if the weather holds. Spring is definitely here.

 

After The Ball

Well the party's over, but I'm still forty-nine for one more day...

 

A good time was had by all by the way, and we had some really good eats and drinks -- we did a bunch of shopping at the Allentown Farmers Market on Friday, and started the bread oven Friday night to build some residual heat then had it going all morning Saturday, and after some amazing loaves of bread we roasted a huge piece of beef, and a leg of lamb, and some ribs. Meantime, Anne made me a huge birthday cake (four layers of chocolate, with coffee-cream-butterscotch icing). And of course, we had our sixtel of Irish Red ready to go in the backyard.

 

People started arriving just before eight, and by 9:00 or so we had a packed house.  Many friends from the biker crowd and some from other circles, and It was good to see my brother and parents too, who came out from NJ. Most people brought desserts and veggie appetizers, so we were in good shape there, otherwise it would have been a very carnivorous spread, and great fun was had when Donna broke out her cupcakes with the X-rated decorations... There was a lot of drinking and carousing, but the basic format was "dinner party," and most people took off around say 11:00 or so, with a core group staying until a bit later. We did an abbreviated cleanup after the last guests took off, and were in bed by about 1:30.

 

The next day, Anne and I got up at the crack of 11:30, had eggs over the pork and beans that were the last thing cooked (over Saturday night) in the oven, did some more cleaning up, and then hit Nockamixon for some mountain biking -- it was a beautiful day, warm and pleasant though greenup still looks a week or so away, and the trails, though not overcrowded, were definitely getting their share of use. Home after that, for leftovers (roast beef and lamb sandwiches), a quick nap -- hey I'm old now! -- and a trip to Brew Works, for the punctuation mark at the end of a great weekend.

Daffodils

Here I am on the front porch, waiting for my birthday party - my 50th birthday party - to start, just chilling, watching the flowers bloom and trying a little experiment: I'm blogging from my phone using the dedicated app.

It's a bit laborious despite Swype, and the laptop is stored away until after the party, so I'll catch you on the Flipside...

Watersleep To Firewaking

Well, we're past the Green Cusp of Springtime, though you wouldn't know it from the dusting of snow on the ground around here this morning. Like the weekend's snowfall, and also Monday's, it'll probably disappear by afternoon.

 

Yesterday was a nice enough day, but I did pretty much nothing when I got home from work -- we'd been up late Monday (I picked up Anne at the bus stop around 11:00), then again on Tuesday (the VMB meeting -- my last as secretary -- and also Taco night at Brew Works, and a big chunk of the old crew was there), so last night was a night in, and an early one at that. Hot dogs for dinner, then I spent some time cleaning a whole bunch of music from my phone that I'd become tired of, and nhen putting a whole bunch of new stuff on, including a few of those eMusic samplers I got around Christmas, and one SXSW-themed sampler I downloaded last night.

 

Speaking of SXSW: How come Musikfest isn't cool like that? That's an example of a rhetorical question.

 

Anyway, no idea what we're doing tonight, but I have tomorrow off.

Spring Is Around The Corner

At least, that's what I keep telling myself -- we are now back in a winter wonderland thanks to yesterday's freak storm. Accumulation looks to be an inch or less though, so this should disappear after a couple of warm days, if we happen to get any soon.... I drove home through the depressing weather, felt like I was skunked again in terms of riding, but when I got home I said "aw, screw it" and went out anyway. Just a towpath ride, and shorter/slower than usual because of snow resistance but it was fun and I'm glad I went. Hung out with the laptop afterward, working more on that program among other things, and then picked Anne up at the bus station when she got in.

 

Anyway, I've been posting some pictures onto Flickr, working my way a few at a time through the backlog (I 'm now into December I think). Enjoy!

 

Still Winter

Saturday morning, and I got up sort of early (for a Saturday); I did some laundry, then took off for Easton with a stop at the drycleaner on the way. Right now I'm in the Terra Cafe, the old coffee shop I used to visit, Saturday mornings back in the day -- it's  changed hands, and names, over the years, but it has remained a nice place.  I don't recognize any faces though, on either side of the counter.

I had breakfast here, and did a little web surfing, then some programming and now some blogging; I'm almost done with my second cup, and then it'll be time to take off, out into the snow. (Just flurries, for now.) My next stop is the Nurture Nature Center, where I'll hit the Easton Farmer's Market, then ensconce myself in the next coffee shop and wait for the start of the Nature Journaling class at 1:00.

Killed To Make A Lenten Holiday

Just a quick note between bites on my tuna sandwich: I managed to not burn the house down last night, but then I also forgot to eat dinner... I went out on a windy towpath ride after work, then got so absorbed in some internet genealogy -- I think I found my mom's paternal grandmother's baptism records, among other things -- that I got nothing else done. I'm now obsessing over the kettle: did I turn it off after making coffee?

We get out of work today a bit early, so I should be able to start and end tonight's ride in daylight. After that it's time to party.

Alone On Christmas

Happy Pie Day!

Got up extra early this morning and took Anne to the bus station, so she could get to Philly in time for the one train a day that goes to North Carolina. She's visiting Emmi for the weekend, coming home late Sunday, so I'm basically on my own through St Patrick's Day. Uh-oh, wonder what trouble I can get myself into...

(Actually, it's funny how boring and lonely the night life can seem when I go out alone now; some places we go are "hers," and others are "ours," and it stands to reason that I don't feel quite right going to those places by myself, but even my old pre-Anne hangouts aren't the same without her.)

I'm going to another Nature Journaling workshop in Easton this Saturday, so maybe I'll grab lunch there, and maybe breakfast as well -- just like the old days! Breakfast out, breakfast home, either way it probably won't be worthy of a photo. I'll probably keep things low key on Saturday night, even if I decide that I want my shoes puked on by a stranger I'll keep it local. Saturday afternoon: chores & maybe some home projects, and I'm hoping for a JT ride on Sunday. Tonight and tomorrow will be the towpath.

An Evening With The Laptop

Well, no yoga last night: I got home from work, sat down in front of the computer and just started typing away -- I had a few things I needed to do for the VMB, and I also wanted to start research on a biking-and-genealogical trip to Ireland, so of course what I really did was start rewriting that header calculation program. I just touched on what I needed to do there, and I did manage to get my actual tasks done, but I did also manage to use up a lot more time than necessary.

By the way and speaking of the VMB, I have decided to resign from my position as Club Secretary. I'm just not feeling it anymore, and I'd rather do other things -- like ride -- than run the club, especially since there's a new set of officers who are much more enthusiastic about, and willing to work on, club business, and I'd rather have my position filled with someone more in tune with the rest of them. Anyway, my resignation will be effective sometime in April, so I have one (or maybe two) more meetings to deal with. 

Ireland: All I really did so far was look at round-trip airfare, look into bicycle touring packages, and googled "things to do" / "bed and breakfast"  near Bunclody, one of my ancestral towns (my dad's grandfather was born there). There's not much around, but there are a few hiking opportunities and a few local pubs, plus of course a trip or two to local graveyards and historical societies or whatever. I need to do something similar for other ancestors if I can find the information, then we can put together some kind of plan.

Tonight, if the weather holds, will be the towpath. Conditions were awesome Sunday, but I don't expect to find them that way tonight, not after last night's rain.

A Noble Experiment

Two of them in fact, and both died a hard death... I was going to write more here, which hasn't really happened, and I have been avoiding what was once a daily routine,  writing a quick daily update on my lunch break -- I've been really busy (and getting busier) for more than a year now though, and lunch minutes seemed to be just a bit too compressed for blogging. But if I want to write at all, I will have to make some effort to make it happen, and make some space for it to happen, and the lunchtime moratorium will have to go.So I'm back to my noontime habit, at least for now -- as I've said often enough before, we shall see.

So what's been going on? Well, this past Saturday, Anne and I went into NYC, and met my parents and uncle Pat at the Metropolitan Museum -- we hopped the bus in southside Bethlehem, then took the subway, and finished with a walk across Central Park, which was packed with joggers and cyclists etc; we hung out on the front steps of the Met, listening to a sidewalk doo-wop group until everyone else arrived -- it was a beautiful springlike day, warm and crowded on the steps, people eating hot dogs, seemed almost a shame to go inside, until we got inside... My mom was excited to see the Matisse exhibit, and Anne especially liked an exhibit of some 17th century French painters working in Italy, but my favorite was the archaeological stuff: Greek and Roman statues, Egyptian things, all the way through Late Roman, Migration Period and Byzantine artwork and jewelry. We got home around 9:00 ate at Lehigh Pizza, and basically passed out -- it was a long day spent mostly on our feet, and we'd had a lot to process.

Sunday morning we slept in for a bit, but I eventually went for a Towpath ride. I took advantage of Daylight Savings to do a long ride, going to Easton and then continuing on the Delaware towapth all the way to Raubsville before turning around; the whole ride took about three hours, and my final distance, out and back, was around 37 miles. I'm not quite in shape right now, and I really felt it towards the end of the ride, and also all day yesterday.

Tonight we may do some yoga, then we'll be planning our summer vacations.

Sunday Night Wrap-Up

So here I am, relaxing after an awesome Sals ride, and listening to the song that made me a Democrat: Temple of the Dog's "Hunger Strike." (Well, that and a book: Carlyle's History of the French Revolution. And the '92 election.)

I'm also blogging this while using a new (to me) browser: Chrome, the one marketed as Google's browser. I'd been getting more and more frustrated with Firefox crashing all the time -- it seems to have a lot of trouble with video, though strangely not with YouTube -- and Googling the problem seems to show a lot of people asking the same questions, and getting what I consider a runaround, like: "are you using the latest version? have you tried using safe mode?" and other bullshit like that. (The questions run the gamut of technical sophistication too, from "my Firefox crashed" to "the culprit seems to be X_ShmPutImage," which is what I'm getting when I look at the crash report.)

It got so I could reliably crash Firefox by going to certain websites, mostly news sites where a video might be playing when you get there, and I finally had enough. Chrome was pathetically simple to install, and it loads my favorite sites quickly and seems to display them correctly; I'm not sure I like the bare-bones look of the browser itself but I figure I'll get used to it. Maybe there are extensions, add-ons or other eye candy that I can use to gussy up the place.

Anyway, the rest of my weekend:

Friday morning found us going over in Easton, where I picked up my car -- finally! -- and we went out to breakfast. The place we ate was a bit of an experiment, and it was decidedly meh so we're probably not going back but I'm not going to name it here... Anne took off for work, and I, after some errands, took off to go skiing at Blue Mountain. This was the first time I'd gone skiing in years, and it didn't come back immediately but it did mostly come back -- I stuck to the easier slopes, and left after about an hour and a half, when the after-school crowd started coming in.

Yesterday we were in Jim Thorpe, a family get-together at Anne's mom's house. We started with White Russians and a viewing of "The Big Lebowsky" and finished with pinochle, Anne and me vs her brother Joe and his wife.

This morning we got up, not particularly early but we went for a run before breakfast, 2.68 miles in 28 minutes, for a 10:34 average pace. For some reason I was hurting, it was a tougher run than usual for me. Some breakfast and some at-home BS (Anne had to go into the office), and I rallied in time for my ride at Sals.

Which, as I might have mentioned, was awesome. There was packed snow on the trails, but traction was surprisingly good -- which was good because I found myself really depending on good traction, just about the same time I would realize I was on an icy rock, more than once today. I wasn't riding particularly well today, the weeks of slacking have taken their toll, but the riding did not feel too difficult, and the trails, and just being in the woods, were extremely pleasant. I ran into Joe G, on foot with his dogs, talking with Rob L who was riding some fully rigid singlespeed. They were the only people I saw, though there were tracks everywhere, even relatively unused trails were covered -- I tried to take a nonstandard route, but nothing looked very out-of-the-way today.

Meanwhile, At The Writer's Workshop

Anne and I did a nature journaling  workshop today, at the Nurture Nature Center in Easton. The class was on writing about, and drawing, clouds, and was run by a very enthusiastic (and competent) woman -- she was a published author, and graphic artist, and her hobby was tornado chasing, so she had all the bases covered.

The drawing part was in the second half of the course: drawing clouds, using graphite pencils and other drawing tools, and was mostly a "how to draw" seminar. I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would, but it was definitely not my strong suit -- I was there for the words, and that was all in the first half of class. The teacher started with several examples of writing about weather, and ended with a slide show of different types of clouds and interesting things about them -- some of the photos were spectacular, almost unreal -- and in the middle we did a few writing exercises.

Here's my first exercise, a haiku:

Thunder clouds at night:

flashes in a darker dark,

a show from the porch.

This was meant to be something from our lives, some weather that we particularly remember. My example was from when I was a kid: thunderstorms would often concentrate over Freehold, a few miles southeast of our house, and sort of the direction our porch faced. It would be kind of fun to sit on the porch, dry and safe, and watch the faraway flashes. I was thinking after class that the last line was unsatisfactory, and thought it might read better as "I watch from the porch," but now I like it again the way it is.

The other writing exercise was prose, another experience of weather, in one paragraph, and this time we were supposed to make sure we engaged as many of our senses as we could. My story was from a mountain bike ride on Gauley Mountain in West Virginia, though I wrote to deliberately obscure what I was doing there (like maybe I was on a hike), got caught in a storm and almost got hit by lightning.

I was on an old dirt mountain road when the storm came in, warm rain at first but it got colder. I was up just high enough that the rain clouds were bumping the trees around me, then lowered and I was in fog, and then I started to hear the thunder. There was really nothing to do but keep going, until a loud CRACK! and flash to my right sent me scrambling over the embankment. I lay in mud and wet cow-itch, laughing at myself and my bad luck, for the next hour while I waited for the storm to pass.

Anyway, that was my Saturday. How ironic that the day started without a cloud in the sky!

Fun with CAD

I kick myself sometimes for doing this, but after a long day of engineering at work I like to relax -- by playing with engineering software at home. I recently found this program called FreeCAD, and once I got it up and running I've been having a lot of fun trying to get things done, or at least drawn, using it.

A View Of The Tee In The CAD Program

This first picture is something I slapped together pretty quickly, a reinforced forged tee like one we might use on a header. I used cylinder and cone primitives to make the tee body, another set of cylinders to cut out the inner parts, put in some critical fillets, and then sketched out the bore used it to create a shape to cut the end preps. This all seemed pretty straightforward, especially creating and combining the 3-D shape primitives.

The Tee As Seen On A Drawing

I then used the drawing creation utility to start a drawing. I got a nice side view (except that one line wouldn't show up), and added a projection. I have no idea (yet) how to add dimensions or text. The problems may be me, or it may be that FreeCAD isn't quite done yet.

What hasn't been so successful is creating bent tubes and pipes. I've been drawing the tubes in QCAD -- I've been using it for a while, and just sprung for the professional version -- then trying to import them into FreeCAD and turn them into 3-D objects, with very little luck. There are several laborious ways to make tubes, but none that just convert from polyline to tube the way I want.

We'll see how it all works out.

The Call Of The Crows

I go to work at the same time that the crows do.

They winter in Bethlehem and Fountain Hill, millions of them roosting near the river, the leafless trees ominous with their dark rustling forms at night. In the morning they all scatter, to forage in Bethlehem or maybe nearby farm fields and garbage dumps etc -- I'm pretty sure crows are omnivorous, people talk about feeding them corn and I've seen them quarreling over roadkill, there's probably quite a variety for them to eat around here -- and you can see them just at sunrise, flying just over the rooftops and calling to each other. It sort of looks like the flying monkey scene in The Wizard of Oz sometimes, there can be so many of them in the sky, and it's easy to pinpoint where they're coming from, because they all seem to radiate from a single point on the horizon.

As the sun rises earlier and earlier, I'm falling more and more behind my carpool buddies, and lately there are just a few stragglers by the time I go outside. I can hear the cacophony peak and subside outside, and I know I'd better get myself out the door, and by the time I'm outside and it's just me and the stragglers the individual calls can easily be distinguished.

Most of the time I notice a sort of even-numbered grouping of caws, like "caw-caw, caw-caw," i.e. groups of two with a short pause in between.

I've heard as many as six caws together like this, but it's mostly two or four; the other day I heard an unusual set, three caws like this: "caw-caw, caw," repeated back and forth between the stragglers.

What does it all mean? I'd heard that crows are pretty intelligent, and they are obviously social, so the calls must play some role in all that communal living. Strangely, they don't seem to call as much at night, though they're pretty vocal when they gather at dusk and scatter in the morning. Maybe they just converse quietly amongst themselves, with their "indoor voices," once they're roosting.

I tried Googling "crow calls" but found out very little, aside from the fact that different populations of crows have different accents, and possibly different vocabularies. (There seems to be a market for crow call CD's, to be played as decoys when hunting. This is a fairly creepy technique practiced by someone near Sals over loudspeakers, blowing the crows out of the sky and littering the trails with blood and broken birds. It's worst when there's snow on the ground.) Apparently, some sounds are known to be alarms, and some are "gathering" calls, but no one I found distinguished the calls, or their meaning, in terms of number or cadence/inflection of caws.

I guess it will have to remain A Mystery.

Solar Tower

I saw an incredible solar tower on the way to work yesterday. The sun was just up, but below a hill in front of me, and the tower was a bright pink-orange; it looked almost like a searchlight it was so strong, and seemed to be in front of the pink-purple clouds that were a little higher in the sky (the horizon was mostly clear).

Later as the sun got above the horizon, the tower seemed a bit diminished, but there came a time where the sun was mostly blocked by (bare) trees, and the tower again was more pronounced. It was mostly orange by this point, with maybe a bit of yellow-orange mixed in, and looked less like a tower than a steady jet of flame coming out the top of the mostly obscured sun.

It was gone a few minutes later, when the sun was high enough to be yellow instead of of orange.

Pattern Recognition

Morning weigh-in: 187.5#, 14.5% BF

Just put that in there to show where things stand... We did our dumbbell routine this morning, and I ate close to correctly, but when I got home (from the first day back at work in almost a month) I had no interest in riding. So in terms of my resolutions, I'm probably batting about .900 -- for today.

They came in peace, and we ate them.

Anyway, here's something I'd never seen before, until it started showing up in our local supermarket. It's called romanesco broccoli. It looked so perfectly like 80's- era CGI fractals that I had to take a picture in the store, and apparently the flowers have something to offer fans of Fibonacci numbers and logarithmic spirals as well, at least according to Wikipedia. I may get some to try eventually, but right now it looks too good to eat. And probably not from this planet.

Power Stroke

There's a significance to the solstice coming just before the New year. It's sort of like in the I Ching, when some phenomenon or process nears its maturity, the first signs of change, of the coming new phenomenon, are already starting to show themselves. We pass bottom dead center of the year at the solstice, the shortest day, and momentum takes us on to the new year when we make our resolutions -- maybe there's a crankshaft and piston somewhere, now it reaches the position to get the most benefit from any effort, and so now is the time when we commit to the efforts we resolve on. So anyway, in that spirit, here are my New Year's resolutions:

1. Get my diet under control: Things aren't really all that bad right now, my diet has been worse in the past, but I've been developing bad habits recently -- especially at work where it's easy to get a bacon, egg & cheese sandwich for breakfast and a burger for lunch -- and this is a good excuse to do something about it. Nothing too crazy: we've cut way back on eating out, basically by eating at home before we go out, and that's been major improvement.

Strange to say, it's more an appetite thing than anything else: when I'm hungry I want the greasy bread and cheese mistakes more than anything else on earth, but I'm usually sated just as well, and for a longer time, with healthy stuff, especially if I didn't already reach the "crave" stage -- I never want an apple when I'm hungry, but I eat one and I'm satisfied. Meantime, when I eat a cheese steak for dinner, I'm bloated immediately afterward but ravenous in the morning, while if I eat, say, some vegetarian dinner, I'm less stuffed afterward, and less hungry the next morning; things are in better balance when I eat to make it so. I guess the trick is to unlearn desire for the things I crave.

2. Exercise more: This goes with the first resolution; though exercise can sometimes mask rather than compensate for bad dietary choices, some of my less-than-swimsuit fitness can be chalked up to a drop-off in my level of activity, with no concomitant reduction in my food intake -- the eating stayed the same, but I was no longer burning it off. A quick look at my Garmin data shows that in 2009 I averaged about 6 hours of exercise a week -- at a time when I did not record much exercise other than cycling, but was going several times a week each to yoga and the gym, so that 6 was more likely 12 hours a week -- to averaging 4 hours a week total in 2012. So yeah, there's been a drop-off...

My exercise resolution is just to stick with a more active process. Anne and I have been running every other morning, and lifting at home on the off days. Neither workout is very intense: the run is about 2.5 miles at a 10 minute pace, and the weight workout is a short upper-body dumbbell routine with light weights. I think I'll keep that the way it is, but add an afternoon bike ride on the weight days and a short yoga routine on running day afternoons. (These configurations may change, we'll see how it works out -- yoga may be better for the morning, and weights in the afternoon.)

I think I'll keep the intensity pretty low for the first few months, though maybe increasing the volume of the afternoon workouts. Rubber and road may have something to say about these plans.

3. Bring more organization to my finances: Not much to say here -- I've fallen under the influence of Mr Money Mustache, and I just want to save a bit more money, maybe get a better handle on budgeting and knowing where my money goes now, spend it more wisely, and start investing some more of what I save.

4. Put a little more effort into work: Again, nothing much to say here, and I have no specific plan -- I'm pretty happy with my job, and I think my employers are happy with me, but there's always room for improvement...

5. Read a little more: I was planning to set a goal, say one book a week, but there are books, and books -- some are longer than others, or more difficult  reads, and these are usually the ones I like. This resolution was inspired by someone else's resolution to read a book a day for a year, but the details of how he did it (shorter books, easier books) were less than inspiring. So, since my other resolutions are more about self-improvement process than specific goals, I'm just going to resolve to read more.

6. Write a little more: This one sort of developed while I was talking about the "more reading" resolution with Anne last night. I may write in other venues (like those nature journals), but I think that this resolution will essentially mean that we can expect more blog posts here.

So there you have it -- my resolutions for 2013. I might add that I'll try to be a better person (not that I'm an especially bad one).

To Build A Fire

We're having a party tomorrow (mainly to celebrate Christmas, but for our theme we jumped on that Mayan "end of the world," bandwagon); Emmi will be here with a friend or two, and Ben and Jaime, and some other friends and their families. We've already got two batches of beer brewed -- one brown ale in bottles, and a keg of imperial porter -- and we have plans to cook a turducken for the party, and of course there will also be bread, and pizza, and all sorts of other things cooked in both the inside and outside ovens.

Anne plans to bake bread today too, and we want to have ribs tomorrow as well, so we had to fire up the oven this morning for the party's first day of baking (and overnight slow cooking of the ribs).  Since she has to meet a deadline with some work, and I'm on vacation, the fire job fell to me.

So it not quite first thing in the morning, but not long after my breakfast and shower, that I went out and split a bunch of (already cut, split and somewhat seasoned) wood into not-quite-kindling pieces, maybe an inch or so on a side. I then put two bigger logs inside the oven as sort of side walls, piled my sticks crosswise on top, then another layer crosswise on top of that. In the little cubby hole below the crosswise sticks I build a pyramid of twigs on top of newspaper, then I hit the pyramid with the blowtorch. The result, after a minute or so, was this:

The Start of the Burn

The fire is still a bit cold in this picture, still smoky and dirty. In a few minutes it had warmed up enough that the smoke mostly disappeared; now it's hot enough that I've got the bigger logs on, and it's burning clear. (I'm on stoker duty, and I'm watching it from my blogging perch in the dining room.) The wood is a mix of miscellaneous hardwoods, I have no idea what but it smells awesome.

Old School

I can remember riding the American Standard back in the day, in what was the original preferred direction (clockwise), starting across from the first Game Lands parking lot, back behind the truck turnoff where the abandoned Red Road ended: you'd go down some singletrack and up that notch of rock, then across the weird area behind the rifle range (sort of like "the blocks," for any Pocono guys following along here), down that always-muddy jeep road and across the stream, and eventually the trail tees and you make a left.

 

I didn't really think about what was to the right at the time, we all just went left at the tee onto another ATV trail, which eventually became a steep drop -- there always seemed to be a tree down on that trail too, causing the inevitable pileup when the lead guy hit the brakes, or crashed, but since we had to make a right turn somewhere on the steep part, into barely visible singletrack and the lead guy was always taken by surprise, we crashed here a lot even without the tree. That singletrack would take us to another trail, the actual trail with the urinal, at a point midway between where the old urinal was and where the new one now is, and we'd turn left again, on to the urinal ("NO DANCING"), the roller-coaster trail, and the rest of the ride. (If I remember it correctly, that surprise right turn was our first modification to the route, which originally kept us us on the steep downhill and down to to the dam for the Broad Run reservoir; from there we had a hike-a-bike up to the old urinal's location.)

 

Years go by, the trail evolved... We changed our "approved direction" to counterclockwise and added some more stuff we found up there, , and more stuff, and we eventually ended up approaching that tee from the right, this time making a left turn and heading towards the swampy jeep road. It was a sort of "A-Ha!" moment, seeing that tee and realizing we were now coming from what was once the mystery direction.

 

More years go by, and the stuff to the left at the tee gets neglected, forgotten, and it slowly becomes the Mystery Direction...

 

This fall I did several rides, almost sentimental journeys on some of those old trails. One took me the usual direction, but when I got to the old tee I kept going straight. It was pretty wide like a jeep road or ATV trail, and started descending -- and completely unfamiliar to me, as if I'd never been on it. I stopped by the remains of an old tree that had fallen across the trail years ago, consulted my Garmin and decided that the official trail was close by, off to my right -- I didn't have to bushwhack, there was the ghost of an old trail right there, and it took me to where I'd broken my dérailleur only a few weeks before, near the location of the new urinal -- I'd rediscovered the trail that was our first modification to the route, a trail I'd probably not ridden in ten years. It was still there, but barely. I continued on that loop and returned to the tee, this time taking the left, but towards the end I made another left, to go behind the gun range on a trail I literally hadn't been on since maybe 1995, when I rode it with my friend Joe and his then-girlfriend.

A few weeks later we were up there, a big ride that Jay put together to ride some new stuff called "Young American," to access which we did the trail "backwards," ie the original direction, so even with the new stuff it was a nostalgic ride, especially since the ride contingent was huge, just like the big big rides of the olden days.

A Walk In The Woods: Sals

Hi it's me. I've been off work (from last week through the end of the year), but I just haven't got around to writing anything here -- nothing especially noteworthy has happened, but that's never stopped me before; there were a few things I could have written about, but I just didn't have the motivation...

Then this morning I saw something on Facebook about the Nurture Nature Center having a multi-week workshop in "nature journaling." It sounded interesting, so I Googled "nature journaling" and became even more interested. I may sign up for the workshop, but in the meantime I decided to just dive right in, based on the things I saw online.

I had to run a few errands (Christmas shopping, etc), so as part of the trip I finished at Tulum and got a burrito to go. With that and the coffee I got earlier, I drove up to Dodson Park, and after eating my burrito I took a little walk on the hiking trails east of the "Yellow Trail."

The Start of the Yellow Trail at Dodson Park

First impression -- it was a pleasant day, warm for December but breezy and brisk, maybe 50 degrees: sweater weather, and I was comfortable in my sweater, either sitting in the sun or burning calories hiking in the woods. The sky was deep blue, with a few not-puffy white clouds. The trees were swaying a bit, but it was not all that blustery.

Dodson Park: Ball Field and the Start of the Woods

The colors were mostly the ones you'd associate with late winter or early spring, rather than late fall: yellowish-green wet grass on the playing fields, the gray of the tree trunks and the brown of old leaf cover on the ground. Not much seemed to be going on, unless you knew what to look for in terms of leaf decay or whatnot, and in the woods my eyes were drawn to the few green spots I saw. One of the first things I saw was this half buried, mossy piece of wood.

Mossy Wood At Sals

Just a bit further in, the woods seemed to thin out quite a bit, possibly because so many trees had fallen in the recent hurricanes, but also likely because of attack from vines. These vines are everywhere in some places up there; some are wild grapes and some are poison ivy, and there may even be other kinds, but they all grow and cover the trees and eventually kill them. There didn't seem to be any Japanese stiltgrass (an invasive) in the area, but other places I've seen that growing among the down trees and it contributes to the sense of winter dissolution.

Downed Trees and Branches at Sals

Thin Woods

There was also a sticker bush which I though might have been multiflora rosa, another nightmare of an invasive plant.

Sals: A Sticker Bush in Winter

Eventually I was back in a section where there seemed to be a lot of healthy mature trees. The picture doesn't do this justice, this was a really big and nice looking tree.
 

Sals: Winter Trees

I wasn't familiar with the trail I followed, since it was not one of the official bike trails, but it was wide and well-kept, and easy to follow, so I could let my eyes wander without fear of tripping on roots or rocks as I walked. I saw a few bouts of color (ie green) here and there.

Sals: Scallions in Winter

Sals: Greenery in the Leaf Litter

The plant in the first photo looked like clump of scallions or wild onions; there were a bunch of these clumps scattered in the general area I took that photo. The second plant was nearby, and looked like it might have been wild ginger except the leaves looked crinklier on the tops. These grew a little more spread out, but it seemed to me clustered as if all the leaves in an area were part of the same plant. These plants also seemed to be fairly common in that area.

The trail eventually headed towards the reservoir, so I took a left onto a side trail, which led to an impressive rock.

Sals: The Trail Led to a Rock

Not much further past this, my trail approached the bike trail, and I saw two riders conferring. One continued on, while the other seemed to be having mechanical difficulties. I took a connector over to the bike trail, and the rider turned out to be my buddy Joe, taking his new hardtail out for a shakedown cruise, and he'd just got one pinch flat more than he had spare inner tubes... I walked with him back to the parking lot, and that was my hike.

Postmortem: There were two things, that I saw in that online advice for nature journaling, and that I didn't do, and now I see why they might be important. The first was the advice to take a notebook (they usually had a description of the best kinds to bring), and make notes and drawings of observations in real time. This mainly frees you from trying to remember what happened afterward. The other piece of advice I didn't follow is to budget a big chunk of time for journaling -- I'd been out for about an hour rather than the recommended full day.

I can see both of their importance or practical usefulness, but these, or at least the notebook one, are going to be hard to follow: my plan is to do more of a nature photo-blog when I do this, and if I'm on foot the notebook is fine as a recorder of first impressions, but I also intend to do a lot of this from the bike, stopping now and then; a pocket camera could be handy, but a notebook might be a luxury.

Frankenstorm Apocalyptipalooza

Right now I'm sitting in the Bethlehem Public Library. At home we've been without power (and heat, and Internet) since Monday night; sleeping's not so bad but the house can be a bit cold (and dark) for hanging out. Luckily the stove works, though not the oven, and we have hot water -- we've been eating like kings and taking nice hot showers -- as well as a house full of books, but Cabin Fever set in days ago... (It doesn't help that what I'm reading is James Howard Kunstler's The Geography of Nowhere.)

Even so, I've seen the pictures of NYC and the Jersey Shore, and even some of the local damage around here that managed to miss us, and I think we got off pretty lucky: some spoiled food and a few roof slates.

What else s new? Not much! I hate to say it, but I seem to be running out of things to say here. Let's see:

Before we lost electricity I got back into that GRAMPS software, and I'm filling in my mother's side of my family tree; I've been using my cousin Joanne's comprehensive family tree for a reference, so even though I don't have much biographical information yet -- birth/death dates (other than the year it happened), marriage dates, home addresses and schools and jobs and churches etc, I have most of the names and relationships filled in to about four generations back, and all descendants from that point. My mom's family is larger, and much more complicated, than my dad's, so this is a good, and non-trivial, first step.

In the last few weeks I did three good adventure rides: two on the American Standard at Jim Thorpe, and one at R.B. Winter State Park. The first JT ride was a "no GPS allowed" ride on some new trails (dubbed "Young American"), a huge ride with thirty one riders. The next weekend my friend Joe wanted to e photo ops, so we went back and did the east side of Broad Mountain, stopping at the overlooks to take pictures, then did a little exploring to find those new trails. Both rides were 20+ miles of solid MTB.

The weekend before last was the annual trip out to R.B. Winter for the Cowbell Hollow ride: 100 or more miles driving to the trailhead, then 28 miles of mixed singletrack and jeep roads before the return trip. I did it with Mark W, a VMB cohort, th only one I could get to go with me, and I don't think he'll ever do it again -- I think this kind of riding is not as popular as it once was.

It might be a while before any more big rides, based on the reports coming in of how the local trails fared in the storm (not well). Lots of cleanup and repair for everyone in the coming months.

A Dilemma

Last weekend we had a party for Emmi's graduation: family, church, some of her college friends... We'd brewed five gallons of "FI" imperial IPA, and had another five gallons of Irish Red on hand in another keg, and another five gallons or so of yarrow-blueberry beer in bottles, but I thought that we might need something more normal for possible beer-muggles among our guests, so I picked up a case of Leinenkugel Sunset Wheat.

 

Well, our guests had a blast, and hoovered up both kegs, most of the bottles and a bunch of stuff they brought themselves, and left the Leinenkugel. So, we're stuck with a case of it, and no other beer in the house. I had one last night before dinner --- grilling burgers in the backyard, beer in hand, going full-metal bourgeois -- and it wasn't too bad. But we still need to replenish our real supply.

 

This Is The Droid I Was Looking For

My old phone finally bit the dust, or more accurately, I destroyed it by running it through the wash in my pants pocket. There are some things you can try, to salvage your phone if it gets mildly wet (like putting it in a bowl of rice for a few days to absorb moisture), and I did try them, but to no avail -- the wash/spin cycle is just too extreme an environment. I really didn't like that phone, and I have been looking for an excuse to replace it, but that was a stupid mistake...

 

Fast-forward one week and beaucoup bucks later, and I have a brand new Samsung Galaxy S2. Not the ultimate latest technology, but pretty close, and it seems to be running the latest Android version. Strangely enough, the biggest difference between this phone and my old one (a Samsung Transform), is that this one is not underpowered: they have very similar feature sets, except that the Galaxy has more memory and the CPU is a bit peppier, and so it can actually use those features. (That drove me nuts about my old phone: it had maps, but the GPS was unreliable because the phone had a cheap, weak GPS chip, and though it had features like a front-facing camera, you couldn't use them, for Skype or or whatever, because the phone wasn't powerful enough to run an operating system that could support them. There didn't seem to be any attempts to upgrade the system software/firmware either after a certain point, like maybe Samsung just gave up on the Transform as a bad design.) Anyway, it's up and running, and I have my old apps reinstalled, as well as a few new ones like Skype. I was pretty lucky, the micro-SD card was fine -- photos are automatically backed up to Dropbox, and my music is backed up at home, so all I would have lost was hardware, but still -- and so I'm pretty much back to where I started, except with a better, faster phone, the one my Transform should have been, if it had been built right.

 

One new feature I've come across is that the new phone uses something called MTP, when I try to connect via USB cable to my laptop. This has been a bit frustrating for me so far, since I deliberately run an operating system that is several versions behind the cutting edge (Ubuntu 10.04), and MTP does not seem to be implemented very well -- I can connect the phone, and see some of the files on it, but writing to the phone usually fails. I'm thinking of maybe trying to do a wireless workaround, like network shares, but that seems to have roadblocks of its own, this time on the phone side. There are workarounds for now...

 

Empire Building (Procrastinator Edition)

Morning weigh-in (Monday): 180.5#, 15% BF

Morning weigh-in (Tuesday): 179.5#, 14.5% BF

 

Anne and I did a mellow ride out to South Mountain Cycles for coffee on Sunday morning, then spent rest of the day with errands/chores. The main thing we did, and this has been hanging over us for a while, was that we bought a new lawnmower, and electric model now waiting for me to put together. While were at the store we also made our other big (outdoor) capital improvement, a propane BBQ grill. That's also waiting for assembly at home, but it's here and it'll be ready for Emmi's party, as well as for everyday grilling -- we cook a lot of steaks and beef, mostly by frying, which works well and tastes great, but the kitchen gets really hot and smoky when we do.

 

Two down, and that leaves two more capital improvements in our infrastructure upgrade: one is the new kitchen floor -- we're looking to rip out the linoleum, and replace it with slate -- and the other is a kegerator. I may try to get one by Emmi's party, but there's a lot more research I need to do (prices seem to be all over the map, I'm not sure what's good or bad) and the truth is, kegs at a party are no problem -- just put them in a garbage can full of ice. Our big problem, now that we're kegging the beer, is that we have no keg infrastructure suitable for day-to-day use. The kegs, convenient as they are when making/storing the beer, are almost useless for drinking beer without this last piece of the puzzle. We knew we'd need to get one when we made the switch from bottles, but have been putting off the kegerator purchase, and now it's past time...

 

(By the way, we also bottled the yarrow beer on Sunday, and had a sample with dinner. It's one of the best we've made. That makes two monster brew batches, this and the F.I., and we've been eating like kings lately with all the fresh food available, fruit and tomatoes and corn etc. Summer is awesome.)

Here Comes The Sun and I Say

Morning weigh-in (Wednesday): 180.5#, 15.5% BF

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

 

Some of that might be suppression (Tuesday night towpath ride, 24 miles in 1:39 -- not even a personal best for this season, but still pretty good -- then a mellow Jacobsburg ride last night with Anne) and dinner has been pretty light the last few days: basically sliced fresh tomatoes, and some cheese maybe, and a blueberry/yogurt dessert both nights. But I'll take it.

 

(It's rainy today though, so we're possibly looking at a rest day, at least on the bike. Tonight is dinner at Black & Blue, but their food is pretty high quality, and nowhere near as fattening as your typical bar food.)

 

Skin: My skin has been in pretty good shape lately: most of the rashes and dry patches are long gone, and though some places are still occasionally itchy it's no longer a constant issue. I no longer need to moisturize constantly, and even the need for cortisone has become pretty rare.

 

What's the secret? I basically changed three things: one was I started taking cold showers, rather than the scalding-hot ones that feel great but do a lot of damage, the next was that rather than scratching, I've been washing itchy areas with an alcohol-soaked cotton swab, and finally, and probably most importantly, I started taking vitamin D supplements. The first two I started doing directly in response to the eczema (the alcohol mainly something I made up, thinking I might have had allergens on my skin), but the vitamin D thing was just something I started doing: I'd been told a while ago that I have a vitamin D deficiency, and so I was adding a few drops, along with an Emergen-C packet, into my post-ride recovery drink mix, and all of a sudden I feel like a million bucks.

 

I looked it up on the less-than-infallible Internet, and there were a lot of alternative-medicine posts, recommending vitamin D supplements as a treatment for eczema. I'm not sure I believe all of the mumbo-jumbo I found, but the supplements seem to be working for me -- or, at least one of those three changes I made is working. I'm going to keep doing all three for now...

 

I may try to talk Anne into a short run tonight, then we're going to Black & Blue for dinner. It's the Homebrew Club monthly meeting tonight too, so we may bring a sample of something, and also a few records since it's also the weekly Bring Your Own Vinyl Night. Probably an early night for us though, since we're meeting some friends (Judy, maybe some others) who are just not the night owls we are.

Eleven The Hard Way

Morning weigh-in: 181.5#, 14.5% BF

 

So about two days after I hit the gym, and then went running, both for the first time in months, my body totally let me know it was not happy with my new decision: aches and fatigue like I couldn't believe, it shut me down physically for the rest of last week. On top of that Anne and I managed to catch a summer cold, which hit us both while she was away and is only now starting to fade. So there's not been much physical activity...

 

We do have the F.I. coming along nicely though, and while I was off helping with Sunday's Enduro Rama at Sals (which was lovely) she brewed another batch of beer, this time using yarrow instead of hops -- these are the beers we'll serve at Emmi's graduation party, and the yarrow beer is in honor of her Botany degree. (Emmi is in town for a visit by the way. We watched "The Royal Tennenbaums" with her last night, which was very good, and which I'd never seen before.)

 

Tonight is a towpath ride.

 

Old Man River

Morning weigh-in: 181#, 14.5% BF

 

No run this morning, I kind of slept in until 6:15 or so -- I felt tired, and finally sore from the gym, and I think I'm getting a summer cold -- but I did bring my yoga stuff. I want to do a  towpath ride, but the weather is supposed to get nasty later, so if it rains tonight I'm prepared to hit the beginner class at Easton Yoga. We shall see...

 

Last night I stayed a bit late after work, then went to my friend Greg's surprise 50th birthday party. Pretty nice, but I was tired and I got out of there early, and was probably in bed by 10:00. Dinner beforehand was tortellini with hot sauce, which might have some significance because my stomach felt like I'd eaten a big rock, and I was up most of the night just feeling uncomfortable.

 

Tonight I think I'll make pasta and tuna.

 

Ten The Hard Way

Morning weigh-in: 181.5#, 14% BF

 

So I went to the gym last night after dinner, the first time in more than six months. I can feel a twinge here and there, but I took care to take it easy on myself. (Dinner was steak stir-fry, by the way.) A light workout, immediately followed by a trip to Wegman's to buy food I know ho to cook -- pre-made (frozen) meat tortellini, pasta and tuna with wilted greens, cereal, and some yogurt and cottage cheese -- enough to get me by until Anne gets back.

 

I've been "planning" to drop some weight for a while now, but all of a sudden I really feel a need for it to happen. I'm going to try to get down to about 170#, by the end of the summer, if I can. Some of those food choices won't help get me there, but some will, and I also decided to add back some of the exercise things I abandoned to push the early-spring bike training. Last night's gym visit was the first one added, and this morning I got in a run: 1.7 miles, 12 minute pace, not exactly lighting the world on fire but I am back in the game. (Next up is yoga.)

 

Tonight is another towpath ride, then I am off to a friend's birthday party.

 

Ominous: Does anyone else remember the summer of 2001, pre-911, all those bogus Shark Attack and Missing White Woman stories as the newspeople tried to find something sensational to report? Sure seems that there are a lot of those stories in the news again, and I see that terrorists vandalized another third-world World Heritage Site. I sure hope the Olympics security is not as incompetent as it looks...

Pranayama, or, "They Said Size Wouldn't Matter"

Morning weigh-in: 181.5#, 13.5% BF

 

Yes, I have the scale properly calibrated again, and once again will be regaling all my faithful readers with the weight stats -- for as long as I remember to do it...

 

So last Wednesday I had a followup appointment with  the pulmonologist, where I did another set of spirometer tests, and got another set of ambiguous results. They seem to think that my lung obstruction isn't so bad, ie my maximum breath flow rate is OK if not stellar, but the volume of air in my lungs (volume available for me to breathe out) seems to be reduced. Not by much, and not too far outside what's considered normal, but it's almost as if my lungs were small or something, which apparently is something they ruled out with the chest X-rays.

 

So back to the hospital on Friday morning, for another set of more advanced breathing tests, this time to look at lung volume. The test machine was the same as last time, sort of a giant, NASA-designed bong enclosed in a glass box, and I was set to breathing through a sort of scuba mask again, but this time the med tech closed off the box. Breathe normally, big breath in, all your air out, breathe normally again, then a set of rapid, shallow puffs, repeat. The machine produced a bunch of interesting graphs and a table of calculations, but they meant nothing to me and the med tech wasn't forthcoming -- they know what's their job, and what's the doctor's. All she said was that everything seemed normal, just... small.

 

Anyway, that was a pretty quick test, and I spent the rest of the morning doing stuff around the house until Anne got home; then we hit the Allentown Farmer's Market, and then met her brother Joe and his wife Laura, and Paul & Ann at the Velodrome. It looked almost like it was going to be rained out, but things cleared up just enough, after a rain delay, to dry the track out. We caught some of the Jr Nationals (a friend's daughters up on the podium) and the usual Friday night races.

 

Saturday we brewed another batch of "Fucking Intense," that super-hoppy, high-alcohol beer we made a few years ago. Long day of watching pots boil, but it should be worth it, and ready to drink in about two weeks.

 

Anne took yesterday off with her buds to do a bike tour of the Finger Lakes, and I sent the afternoon finishing 1Q84 (verdict: not great but OK, maybe I'll give it a "meh+") while the storm cells blew through, then when it looked like the coast was clear I did a towpath ride -- I got slammed by heavy rain with just five minutes left to the ride. Dinner was at Brew Works with John, also stag while Donna visits friends in Denmark.

 

Tonight I'm hitting the towpath again, then I'll have to do some shopping for things I know how to cook.

Duly Noted

Morning weigh-in (Thursday): 179.5#

 

Probably a fluke, based on a skipped meal or two and some dehydration in this stinking heat, but I thought I'd make sure the date was marked...

 

A Quiet Fourth: There were some possibilities, but Anne and I opted to kick back and catch up on our sleep -- we woke up early enough according to "California time," but we were in Pennsylvania so breakfast was really brunch. We futzed around the house for a bit, then went over to Lake Nockamixon and did a mellow mountain bike ride, followed by a dip in the lake. Later in the day we caught up with other friends at Greg and Judy's barbecue, then caught the Bethlehem fireworks.

 

A Late Night: Deb and her boyfriend have been vacationing in Kenya, which from all accounts has been the adventure of a lifetime, but then, with the recent terrorist attacks, things got a bit too real and they decided to cut their trip short. We were going to pick them up tonight, but they cut their trip so short we got a text, last night, that they were on the ground at Newark Airport... Cue the comically fast music and off we drove, picking them up not too long after they cleared customs. They regaled us with their adventure stories (or maybe it was venting, with the focus on when/where things went downhill), and we got them home safe by 2:00 AM. So that's a big relief: except for sporadic Facebook posting they've essentially been incommunicado for about a week, and we've all been worried.

 

Anyway, tonight I think I'll be catching up on my sleep again.

 

Like An Angel, Standing In A Shaft Of Light

Back from my California vacation. I flew out to LA with Anne's sister Lorraine, picked up her daughter Vicky and drove to meet Anne in San Diego. Spent a few days there, then an overnight in Thousand Oaks before driving to Pismo Beach for a few days, and finished with a day or two in LA before heading home. I took about 300 pictures, many of which were either multiple shots for stitching into panoramas, or attempts to get a good shot of some nesting birds -- night herons were nesting in the tree outside our hotel window at Pismo Beach, and I have about 40 blurry photos of the (enormous) chicks -- but I should have about 150-200 good photos to post after the final cull. Stay tuned, but don't hold your breath...

 

So-Cal: First Impressions Three things impressed themselves on me right away: The first and biggest was that the traffic was far heavier, everywhere, than I expected. The second was that Southern California, though not particularly hot, is intensely sunny (and my hair is much thinner than it used to be, so I now own a hat like the ones that little-old-lady gardeners wear, bought in San Diego, and I still managed to get a serious full-body-plus-scalp sunburn) and though I knew the region was a mountainous desert, it was more mountainous, and far more desert-like, than I expected. And the third? The people I met and saw were nowhere near as "California" as I'd hoped -- they were pretty much like everybody else, oh well. Uggs seem to still be in style though, and there were one or two common male hairstyles that we don't see back home.

 

I did some mountain biking, not as much as I would have liked but we got two good days in, renting bikes and riding in Topanga Canyon, on mixed singletrack and dirt roads -- including the famous Mulholland Drive, which is unpaved at one end. Not particularly technical except in a few places, but was very hilly, and very scenic.

 

Most of the rest of the trip was nice but uneventful (we had a great meal at Bo Beaux in San Diego, where Vicky knew the chef, and had a nice day sightseeing in San Luis Obispo), but there was one unexpected highlight: The Getty Museum in LA. I'd never heard of it but Lorraine wanted to go, and we did that on our last full day. The artwork inside was almost an afterthought, the architecture and outer gardens were so beautiful.

 

(My laptop battery basically reached the end of its life last week, holding only enough charge for 20 minutes or so off the grid, so I ordered a new and better one on vacation, and it was waiting when we got home -- I went from 20 minutes to over five hours, which I verified yesterday. My car also got worked on while I was away, another burden off my checklist.)

 

We got home after midnight Saturday night, and spent yesterday just hanging out -- reading, browsing the web, and gardening (that last was Anne, even though I do have the hat for it now).  Later in the afternoon we biked out to the swimming hole near Freemansburg, and we ended the day with a visit to Brew Works to see some friends.

 

Anyway, I'm home now, and back at work, listening to the Penn State fans weasel-wording their way around the latest revelations in the Sandusky scandal.

News

Well, I made my decision: I'm not racing the Wilderness 101. So what does this mean? I still want to do it next year, so I have more time to get back in the game, or go further away from being ready for that matter, but there's no longer any training pressure this summer -- I still plan on training, and hopefully I can keep on improving, but I am no longer under the gun for the late-July due date. This also frees me up for a bunch of other things, like maybe that trip to Vermont, and maybe a bike tour with Anne (though she already has planned, and it looks to be a girls-only event). We shall see...

 

They Are Penn State Actual quote from accused pedophile Jerry Sandusky's lawyer, part of his opening statement: "Jerry loves kids so much that he does things most of us wouldn't think of doing." Well, that's kind of why he's in court...  I guess this proves that even his lawyer hates him.

 

(Meanwhile, there are still a lot of JoePat sympathisers here, moaning about how he was dissed -- that saintly man! winningest coach ever! railroaded! --  and how this was what finally broke him and killed him. I think that they're putting the cart before the horse here: he kept the lid on this scandal for years, for as long as he still had all his faculties, and the scandal broke when it did because he, with his health failing, was no longer able to squash it.)

 

One more decision made: I found a lightweight XML library for C, which I think I'll use to write a translation program, from an XML-style data file to the old-school punched card input format used by that FORTRAN program. This way I can either hand-write my own XML input file, or make one (or more!) input programs to create this new-style data file, then just pipe the data file through the translator and into the original program. I'll probably write a second translation program to go the other way, that is a card->XML translator as well as an XML->card translator, for the sake of completeness.

 

Tonight I'll be hitting Sals, maybe chasing after some of the VMB crew, who will be starting earlier on a group ride. Brew Works afterward...? The South Side Film Festival is also happening this week, maybe we'll go see a few movies tomorrow or Friday.

 

Memento Moritori

Whew! Emotionally tough weekend -- I won't get into it now, but I am actually glad to be back at work this Monday morning.

 

FORTRANNING: I got that program up and running for real now, it seems to work for any data set I give it, though the data I give it has all been generated in the past -- I have yet to create my own data set and run it. Data input, especially the fact that was designed around punched cards, and so the input file is very difficult to read/edit, is the Achilles Heel if this program right now; I think my next task will be to either rewrite the program to deal with a better input format (my inclination is to leave it alone), or (more likely) write some filter that takes a more user-friendly input file and translates it into the old format. I was also thinking of building a graphical user interface to create/edit the input files, and started playing with Glade to see how that might happen, but that will probably be a winter project.

 

Riding/Training: I am still on the fence about where I stand in terms of fitness. On the one hand, my monthly miles and hours took a dip in May, and fell off the cliff for June, and on that same hand I find myself off the back and hurting even on fairly easy rides. On the other hand... well there really isn't much on the other hand, except that now and then on a ride I feel good about something I used to have trouble with. I can see that there have been improvements, but I am nowhere near where I was two or three years ago, and more to the point, most of my improvements occurred in the Base training section -- when it came time to take it to the next level, my training regimen fell apart, and now I am nowhere near where I need to be. I worry that I will not be ready for W101, and may need to make the decision, within the next few days, to bag it.

 

Listening: I downloaded Blunderbuss the other day, and though I do like it, it's really just "meh, more Jack White." I downloaded the first Florence + The Machine album at the same time, and find I like it a lot more, though I do still like Ceremonials better. Anne said the other day that she needs new music, which she felt was more like she needed to find some new music to want, and get it, and I think I am in the same boat. Any suggestions out there?

 

By the way, I just posted the photos from Sarah's wedding on Flickr this weekend. Enjoy!

 

 

Newport: There She Sat

We were in Newport this past weekend for a wedding. It was the daughter of some of Anne's friends, to a young man with an apparently wealthy family, since the wedding and reception were at his aunt's summer home, and by "summer home" I mean one of those bazillion-dollar-mansion "cottages" that Newport is famous for -- we were in fact next door to the famous and exclusive Bailey's Beach, and just down the street from The Breakers and The Elms. It was really nice, a very pleasant setting and not as over-the-top as it might have been, and the reception was a total blowout. Photos to follow -- stay tuned.

 

(I'm mostly caught up with photos by the way, just posted a few oven shots on Flickr the other night. I have basically just a few gnome home shots from a recent ride -- don't ask, you'll have to wait and see -- and the wedding shots I took over the weekend, and I'll be up to date.)

 

Away from the wedding, the rest of the town of Newport was not as impressive. They make a big deal of of their history as the center of Gilded Age summer-home society, and they expend a bit of effort keeping the place quaint -- and there are a lot of really fine old Colonial-era houses that are still up to code and in use in town, in addition to the preserved Gilded Age "cottages" -- but the vibe in town was relentlessly tourist-trap commercial, a more upscale version of the Jersey Shore. The tell (and something I first spotted in Florida, likewise in a wharfside setting): lots of nice-looking pubs and bars and restaurants, but no good beer. Luckily, we found one exception...

 

Friday was a travel day, including a lunch visit with Anne's sister in Milford CT, Saturday was some touristy exploration followed by the wedding, and Sunday was more touristy exploring with some friends, a hike along the cliffside trail that runs behind the mansions, before the drive home. Traffic was typical for New England: awful.

 

Computer Fun: I've been trying to get an old FORTRAN program to work on my laptop, and I ran into some difficulties when some subprograms couldn't be found; I decided after some Googling that my best bet was to just rewrite them from scratch. Two of them just looked like old-timey "standard library" routines, and were fairly easy to emulate, but the other two seemed to be custom subroutines, part of the program and probably in some missing file, and it took a little sleuthing to even dope out what they did... (Basically, they were poorly-conceived workarounds, written to ease the transition from punched cards to file I/O. Yeah, it's an old program.) Anyway, I was messing with these over the weekend, planning & researching at the B&B, and the wharfside coffee shop, in between our other activities, and then last night I sat down and wrote the subroutines, and they worked fine -- if not on the first try then at least before I went to bed. The rest of the program is still hanging up, but that might be because of calls to some missing database, a project for another weekend.

 

How's Your Bike Training Going? Don't ask...

 

It All Turns On Affection

Morning weigh-in: 182#

 

"We know enough of our own history by now to be aware that people exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love. To defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know." - Wendell Berry

 

So we went down to Washington the weekend before last, to see Wendell Berry give this year's Jefferson Lecture, and we decided to make a long weekend of it, Saturday through Tuesday evening. (I had Friday off, and we were contemplating maybe playing one night in Philly beforehand, but I had a bunch of weekend chores and Anne had some 24-hour bug, so we kept it to four days.)

 

We took the bus to Philly on Saturday morning and hopped the train to Union Station in DC, where we met Emmi. Lunch was at the Native American Museum.

 

Dinner was at the Bier Baron, a rathskeller-type place we found last time we were in town. Our dinner guest was Liz H-D, and she was vivacious as ever, and she seems to have acquired a new poise or confidence -- she seems to be thriving in DC, and we were graced with an hour or so of exciting conversation between the garden party she was coming from, and the "Nineties Party" she was heading to. ("Nineties Party" -- am I really that old?)

 

Sunday was rainy, and we spent the day at the National Gallery of Art -- two big wings, hundreds of famous paintings both modern and classical/historical, lunch in the underground passageway/cafeteria between wings, and they let you take pictures... (BTW I already posted most of those pics over at Flickr, go wild.) It was awesome but in the end exhausting, and I had little energy left when we hit the African Museum afterward -- and not much time either, we got there with only an hour left until closing. It was Earth Day on the Mall, and in our peregrinations we caught bits and pieces of it but the rain put a serious damper on events: even Cheap Trick attracted just a handful of stragglers.

 

That night we had dinner with Emmi's old college friend Amanda and her partner, at another awesome local place called Meridian Pint. This was Amanda's recommendation, but I'd done my homework and knew that it was considered one of the best beer bars in DC, and it didn't disappoint: food and brew choices were both unbelievable, and the service was both casual and top-notch. Amanda, outspoken and vivacious in her own right, also seems to have matured, mellowed even.. It was really nice to catch up with her, she with her newly-minted admittance to the bar and Emmi with her own brand-new PhD.

 

We hit the Smithsonian on Monday, but just the Museum of Natural History. (Another overwhelming experience, stay tuned for pictures.) Anne and Emmi went shopping beforehand, so I found myself in a DuPont Circle institution -- Kramer Books -- bought Bill Bryson's Notes On A Small Island, and kicked back for a while in their coffee shop. The girls joined me for lunch there, and then we were off to do the museum thing. We were there long enough, even just scratching the surface, that were pressed for time getting to the Kennedy Center for the lecture.

 

Tickets were free, but you had to reserve them months ago, and then claim them an hour or so before the lecture or they'd give them away to someone else. We got there in time and retrieved our tickets (walking through literally hundreds of people camped out waiting to grab unclaimed tickets), then we had some time to check out the Kennedy Center -- I mostly sat on the stairs outside the auditorium, where Amanda joined us again. (Anne's friends Lois and Mary Lou were also in town for the lecture; they drove down together that day from the Lehigh Valley, but we didn't see them until afterward.)

 

The lecture was titled "It All Turns On Affection," which was itself a quote from E.M. Forster. (You can find the lecture here.) It really was very moving, and he was quiet and soft-spoken and seemed to become choked up from time to time -- maybe he was rallying his resources, he's not a young man -- and he held us spellbound in our seats for the duration. The lecture ended on an ironic note when the head of the NEH came out and announced that 'the opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the US Government or the NEH." (More on the lecture here.)

 

Afterwards we (Anne and me, Emmi, Amanda, and Mary Lou and Lois) all had dinner at Meridian Pint's sister establishment, the Smoke and Barrel. This was another of Amanda's recommendations, and it was a good one (though I think Meridian Pint was the nicer of the two), and we also got to see some of Anne's old neighborhood from when she lived in DC.

 

Tuesday morning it was finally nice out again, but we were heading home. We said goodbye to Emmi, who was off to a job interview in Maryland, grabbed breakfast in Union Station, and took the train for Philly. We had some time to kill there, so we walked around, hit a few bookshops, and had a long lunch at the White Dog Cafe. One last bus ride, a quick hike across town, and we were home.

 

I have to say, I really liked that train ride.

 

On The Beat Down Beat

I raced yesterday, once more unto the Michaux Maximus... I took it as a training  race, which was good not only because I could use the experience -- it's been two years since I raced, or participated in any large-scale cycling event for that matter -- but also because if I had to take my results seriously I'd be pretty upset: I basically got my ass kicked, if not dead last then close to it, even in my age group.

It was a fun day though even considering the smackdown: the weather turned out to be perfect, and course conditions were as good as I've ever seen them there, dry (for the most part) but still pretty tacky where you needed it. The course itself (you can see my GPS track here) started a little different than the way I remember it, but it still hit many of the familiar trails: the Huckleberry, and the Fuzzy, and Dead Woman Hollow and Three Mile Trail, and it finished with the usual climb up the Log Sled Trail.

I really can't complain too much: my biggest problem right now is fitness (which I knew going into this, and which this is supposed to help address), followed by a general aversion to riding too close to other people -- I stopped a few times to let riders pass, and often paced the guys in front of me rather than muscling my way through -- but I think that this aversion could also be attributed to the fitness thing, since I blew up whenever I put out a truly competitive level of effort, especially in the first section, where there was a rapid succession of short steep climbs, so that ""fighting i n the pack" mentality really wasn't working ofr me.

I was more than a little gratified though -- shocked, even -- at how well I did on the technical stuff, especially in comparison to the people I was riding among. This was a real switcheroo: I used to be pretty bad at technical riding, and made up for it with better climbing ability;  yesterday, I struggled to keep my place climbing Dead Woman Hollow, got passed by a few guys, but then I utterly dropped them, and a few others, on Three Mile Trail.

They all caught me before the end though, either on the long, rolling dirt road stretch that came immediately afterward, or when we were climbing the final mile on Log Sled Trail, or at the point  in between, probably the easiest part of the whole course, when I suddenly needed to pull over and hurl. (Apparently I still have a few kinks to work out. When I got back I skipped the free meal...)

My ride time was about 3:15 and my time on the course was probably around 3:30, no worse than I expected but I do see I have some work to do. About par for the course.