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.

Love Me Now That I Can

Woo, what a ride!

Jon is an old friend, the younger brother of my riding buddy Joe. He's been a professional racer for years, just an awesome rider, and now that he's a mountain bike coach I decided to get some lessons. (I want to get out of the "comfort zone" I built for myself over the last few years, and was especially looking for help with cornering, which has always been a problem -- maybe a mystery? -- to me...) Last night was our evaluation ride: he followed me down the usual Yellow/Orange/Red route at Sals, from Dodson to the bottom of Constitution, stopping a few times to give pointers and to practice at good "teachable moment" locations, then in the bottom lot he had me practicing the new cornering method he wants me to master -- I think it'll be a while before it really clicks. Time and daylight were running out by that point, so we took the road back up the hill, practicing the relaxed standing climb he also wants me to use.

It was a real eye-opener. My main take-away (other than the new cornering tips) was that I'm too stiff on the bike, mainly because I spend way more time than I should seated rather than standing. Jon also wants me to lower my cadence in a lot of stuff, especially hills -- a bullet through the heart of my previous training regimen -- powering up with standing sprints and recovering at the top; he had me ride through technical sections in a higher gear than I normally would, at higher speeds, and whenever I "got it" (not always), it would really work. You learn something new every day...

There Are Many Rooms In The Super Dimensional Fortress: I was playing with my toy program again the other day, and it finally dawned on me why I was getting that intermittent "cannot execute binary file" error: when you log onto SDF, there are a number of different machines you can connect to. Normally I don't make any distinction between them, letting the system choose the most convenient connection at each logon, and I never really noted which machine I was running on. It turns out though, that there are differences between the different servers, and when you compile on one server it produces a program that runs on that server, which may or may not work on the other machines. Log in on one server, compile and run, log out and back in (onto another server), and -- fail.

The explanation is simple enough, but -- other than always logging in to the same server (or always running make before using the program) -- I don't know what the solution might be.

Looking Back

Pretty good weekend, though a little on the low-energy side...

 

I took off Friday, and we went to Barnegat Light to visit my brother at the beach house he rented -- photos on Flickr -- then Saturday was a sort of "slacker day" for me -- no doubt a necessity after all the sunburn and playing in the ocean -- while Anne tackled some heavy-duty gardening. (We were supposed do the Hash Run, but neither of us felt really motivated.) Saturday evening was a tour of Southside: we hit the Bookstore (OK) and the Funhouse (boring band), then stopped in at Brew Works on the way home and met up with some of the bike crowd.

 

Sunday was another mellow day, a rainy day... We had a late breakfast at Jumbar's with Donna and her beau, who told us of all the Hashing shenanigans they got into (and it did sound like fun, but I'm glad we skipped it), then we all went over to the Brew Works for their Mug Club Auction.

 

Yes that's right, we finally got our Brew Works mugs, but not without a fight... Instead of a straight mug purchase, like at Weyerbacher and Which Brew, or the "drink all the different beers on this list and you're in the club" approach of Porter's Pub, Brew Works does things a little differently: mug club size is kept limited, then every year they auction off the non-renewing memberships. We spent over $200 apiece in very competitive bidding for the limited places, but we now have our place among the Star Bellied Sneeches. We drank our complimentary mug (most expensive Free Beer I've ever had) then headed home.

 

Anne and I crashed for a while, watched "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" (Swedish, subtitles, pretty good & it didn't stray too far from the book), then rode over to Lehigh Pizza for a late dinner.

 

Last night was the gym, followed by our first paying use of our new mugs.