Killed -- To Make A Roman Holiday!

Here's a photo of my mom, yukkng it up with some kind of centurion or gladiator or something in Rome, where they're apparently not as stuffy as those British guards, no matter how much Beefeaters you try to give them...

This is from their cruise through Europe (the water part) and the Mediterranean. I saw a lot of the pictures already in album form, but Mom passed along a few of them along with the article she wrote up for her local newspaper. Pretty cool!

The Drama Continues, Abated

Morning weigh-in: 173#, 11% BF (that's what happens when you don't eat for 24 hours)

 

Whelp, back at work and feeling better, even if I'm not fully 100% yet. I basically slept from around 1:00 PM yesterday through to this morning, with a short wake-up (where I made some long-overdue uploads to flickr, answered email and in general played with the "old computer"). Tomorrow is a day off, and I think I'll be taking it easy tonight after the gym. Tomorrow's nightlife will hopefully be a different story, Brujos is playing at Pearly Baker's...

 

Take The Train: Two recent stories about rail transportation, here and here.

Gaaaa!

Morning weigh-in: 177.5#, no idea what the BF is because I jumped off the scale...

 

Hopefully I'll be able to turn over a new leaf, because that number is pretty scary. But... I haven't been to the gym in like two weeks, or yoga or bike or anything else -- one day of riding and one hike while on vacation, and that's pretty much it since the McSorley's trip, and there wasn't too much going on before that either. (Meantime, I've been eating out almost every night for months.) Tonight is the Chain Gang monthly meeting, no real chance to do anything beforehand, but I guess tomorrow I'll have to start getting my act together.

 

Anyway, here is a little something about my new laptop. Pretty sweet! I was up pretty late with that thing last night, or rather late compared to my more recent bedtimes, and am now paying the price but it was worth it.

UPDATE: I wrote all that at lunchtime today, but "the price" I was paying was not really related to the late night or whatever -- I got pretty sick and took the afternoon off. Spent the day sleeping, no appetite, headache, stomache ache, body aches...

Even More Mobility

Well, here I am in Porter's, wirelessly connected and typing away on my new laptop... had dinner here with Anne and her friend Donna, who are doing the knitting thing. Major hassle with Fed Ex picking it up today, but I do have my new toy: it's a Dell something or other, 15" screen, seems pretty fast, and it runs Ubuntu so I'm still kinda-sorta a Linux purist. More on all this later, gotta run and drink beer.

By the way, the end of last week's vacation was all rainy, so the pattern was: breakfast in a coffee shop (wireless and Anne's laptop), browsing the college town bookstores mid-day, and ending the day at the local brewpub. Life was good, and it still is...

Our Trip So Far

Well, here we are in Greenfield MA, at a coffee shop called the Koko Cafe. Our trip so far:

New Paltz: We hit town around 9:00 and went to the Gilded Otter Brewpub for dinner. Pretty nice, though I thought the beer was better than the food: my roast beef sandwich fell far short of the "Christian Springs Hotel roast beef standards" to which I had become accustomed, though Anne did like her meal. We asked about lodging, and ended up at some interstate motel, where a teenager asked me to rent him and his friends a room. Sorry, Bub... I was polite about it, but the last thing I needed was our sleep disturbed by a bunch of kids trashing the hotel on my credit card. They took off, and the rest of the evening was uneventful.

In the morning we got biking advice and breakfast at a crunchy coffee shop in town, then went over to Lake Winnemaska to ride the carriage roads. I hadn't been there in years but it was the same as ever: still scenic, still reasonably easy/aerobic riding. Cold and breezy but beautiful, we got in about 12 miles over maybe 3 hours, then took off for Vermont via the Champlain Bridge.

Burlington: This was Anne's birthday, and we hit the Vermont Brew Pub to celebrate but it was a fairly early night. Motel outside of town, breakfast next day in town, and then we headed up to Stowe for some hiking -- snow was already on the ground, and when we got up to higher elevations it got to be 4"-6" deep, then icy, and so we turned around, and got pizza in Stowe. We didn't get as far as we wanted, but we were out for a good chunk of the day -- it was beautiful up there.

Back in Burlington, dinner was a nap but then we went out to catch some night life. We went to Ri Ra for a few pints and Irish atmosphere, then caught a good blues band at Red Square. (I'd heard a few years ago that they were going out of business, but they seemed to be going strong that night.) Rain started to fall, mostly just drizzle, and hasn't stopped since... 

Yesterday was browsing Burlington, then we traveled here with a dinner stop: friends of Anne live near a brewpub outside Springfield VT, and we met them there. Tonight were meeting her son in Northampton.

Leaf Mold And A Head Cold

The leaf mold finally got to me. It's worst year I can remember, and I've been suffering after every time out in the woods -- even worse than the May "tree pollen rides." It was really bad the other day, and must have opened a door for some germ because I am now colonized: sinuses, chest congestion, the usual.

It hasn't slowed me down (yet): we went to McSorley's in Manhattan yesterday, with dinner at Carmine's afterward, and both were awesome, as was the other little bar we stopped in (for a break from the McSorley's scene). It was the 3rd annual Which Brew / Porters bus trip into the city, the usual suspects but with a more Porter's-oriented crowd.

Today I'm on vacation for real, and in about four hours (after laundry & housecleaning) I'm picking up Anne and we're heading North. No real plans, but we'll probably be stopping near New Paltz tonight, hiking the Gunks tomorrow, and then heading for Burlington; the eventual goal is to visit her son Ben, going to school near Amherst, later in the week. Lots of hiking, biking, reading, coffee & beer in the meantime...

To get ready we went to that semi-new (me) sporting goods store, Cabella's. What a nightmare, a total big-box store dedicated to mostly hunting -- they even had a furniture section, the kid of stuff that would go well with the elk on the wall... I got a couple of pairs of hiking pants, she got boots, and then we got the hell out of Dodge.

Anyway, that's it for a couple of days. Stay tuned for pictures -- I have about a hundred from yesterday, plus a bunch of earlier ones, various events, that I still didn't get to. But, later...

Well!

Our first Muslim Socialist President!

 

I went to Brew Works last night after a bit of housework, to watch the election returns. The Obama Campaign victory party was there as well, but the bar at least was still open to the public, and the place was packed. (You could still get into the party-controlled dining room or downstairs to the Steel Gaarden, if you wanted to check out the big-screen TV's and the excitement, but if anything it was even more crowded than out front: the bar was fine.) Anne got there around 10:00 or so, after being at the polls from 6:30 AM on. Some burgers, and beer, and some nail-biting (the networks seemed to drag things out, to make it less lopsided & more interesting), and then at 11:03 or so, almost immediately after the West Coast polls closed, they called California for Obama and that was all she wrote. The place erupted in cheers, people were hugging and shaking hands, wiping tears from their eyes...

 

We stuck around for McCain's concession speech (well done and well received) and Obama's awesome acceptance speech, and then went home around 1:00. What a night! Whatever comes next -- and the real hard part isn't even on the horizon yet -- last night we were a part of history.

 

Vote Early, Vote Often

Morning weigh-in: 173.5#, 10.5% BF

 

So I voted this morning before coming in to work. I arrived at exactly 7:00 when the polls opened, and there was already a line; it took me about a half hour to vote, and the line was the same length when I left as when I got there... I don't always vote early, so this may be more common than I think in the morning, but that was the longest I ever had to wait to vote. I was joking with the woman behind me, that the situation was like before a snowstorm when everyone stocks up on the bread and milk that they don't even need: we all heard about possible long lines so we went early, and created our own. All in all the process went rather smoothly, even if I was a bit late for work.

 

I think people are expecting trouble though. A cop car cruised by once, people had their ID ready (normally it's not necessary to show ID), and the ACORN vs voter suppression shenanigans has people kind of hopped up. Anne is volunteering in Allentown today, to help protect the rights of voters who might get challenged.

 

Tonight I'll be skipping the gym to do chores at home (mostly laundry-type stuff), then I'm joining Anne somewhere for the post-election nail-biting.

 

 

The Oil Fields At First Light

No morning weigh-in, but last I looked I was 172#.

 

On the ride in this morning I finally spotted the pattern: every Monday at about 7:30 AM, they play U2's "Beautiful Day" on the local station. The song really puts me in a good mood, and presumably does it for the rest of the Monday morning commuter demographic as well. It usually is a beautiful ride in too, in that "advanced nature appreciation" way you have to do it, gleaning what beauty you can, from the sky and the Interstate... Filled the tank on the way in, prices really have dropped.

 

Backwards:

 

Yesterday I went for breakfast with Anne, walking over to Southside to Blue Sky with her and her dog. Langston had a banner day, which started with him tearing into the garbage (he's on anti-seizure medication, which makes him hungry) and strewing it around the kitchen -- Anne said he looked quite pleased with himself. He was pretty agitated, tied outside Blue Sky, and he got into a fight with another dog, he was wound up for most of the rest of the day... Anyway, we also went for a mountain bike ride at Jordan later on. That was pretty nice, and I think a few things clicked into place for her there. If the learning curve is a wave, like body surfing at the beach, Jordan's easy enough that she was able to catch the wave and move forward . Kind of fun to watch, actually.

 

Saturday was an Allamuchy ride, with the usual Gang: Bob & Karen leading the ride, plus Doug, Eric B, Eric R, Greg, Butch & Mindy, and Nelson, but also Joe & Jon G, Keith, and Claude in a slightly faster group out front. We got in about 13 miles, maybe 2 hours ride time between 10:30 and 2:30 -- hard to believe we stood around for two hours, but there were a lot of blown-down trees & branches that we cleared as we came upon them. Leaf mold or something, had allergy problems which persisted through the rest of the day and into Judy's party.

 

The party was nice though, almost an Obama campaign meeting or something, except for the occasional Halloween costume (I was Franken-pimp, whatever that might be, while Anne was Joe The Plumber, complete with gigantic fake butt crack showing above her pants).

 

Friday night started with Frank P's daughter hosting an "urban fun ride" through Bethlehem, in costume for Halloween of course (except for me, d'oh), and after that we all went to Greg H's for a Halloween party -- I wore a mullet wig and that fake butt. Riding there through the Bethlehem trick-or-treaters with my butt hanging out was a total hoot, a moving wave of gut-busting laughter followed us as we rode up the street.

 

Tonight is yoga, followed by chores/laundry, and tomorrow is the election; we'll probably watch the returns at a friend's house. (I remember watching the 2000 returns at Weyerbacher -- it seems so long ago now! -- and the 2004 returns at Democratic Party headquarters in Bethlehem.)

 

 

And Another One

Leopard Suits You
Originally uploaded by donXfive.

This photo, my third-most popular one based on views -- wonder why? -- just passed the 300-view mark. This was from last year's Halloween party at Which Brew. This year was the first time in five years that there was no a Which Brew Halloween party. Sigh, but I went to Greg's party last night (we rode there, after I rode the CAT Halloween Fun Ride), and we're hitting Judy's party tonight. Yo later.

Another Milestone

My Shiny New Toy
Originally uploaded by donXfive.

This photo is my most popular one, based on number of views, and it just hit the 600-view mark this week.

AWOL

(Sorry, no weigh-ins lately, but the weight's been hovering around 174 pounds.)

 

Well last night we did the unthinkable: Anne and I went for a night ride at Sals. Really, we just rode from her house, rolling out almost as soon as I got there and crossing the Hill to Hill Bridge, and we did a very short loop, out on the Orange trail and back on the Red, but we were out in the woods, and we needed our lights before it was over. Here we are on real trails, she's riding offroad for maybe the 6th time, and she complains about her technique when riding over logs -- she'll be better than me in another month or so.

 

We hit a nice little Mexican place for dinner after that, up the street from the Brew Works, our last stop for the evening where we caught game one of the Series.

 

A Sign at Porters:

 

LADIES OF THE EVENING BRINGING IN SAILORS

SHALL PAY FOR THEIR ROOMS IN ADVANCE

 

We were at Porters on Tuesday, where the Brew Knits (a new crew of knitting, beer drinking ladies) were assembled, and where I expect signs to be posted, similar to their other one:

 

KNITTERS CONSUMING ALCOHOL ARE KINDLY REQUESTED

TO EXTINGUISH ALL CANDLES AT THEIR TABLES

 

Yes, amidst all the levity and cheer, one errant scarf (Courtney's) managed to find a candle and get scorched. Stinky like burnt hair, and we couldn't stop laughing.

 

Long story short: I've been spending a lot of time with Anne lately, like most of my free time (and that's the way I like it), and since I've been busy here at work I suspect that blogging will be sparse for a while.

 

 

The City of God

Morning weigh-in (Tuesday): 170.5#, 9.5% BF
Morning weigh-in (Wednesday):172.5#, 10.5% BF
Morning weigh-in (Thursday): 174.5#, 10.5% BF

I've got a few minutes downtime -- I'm just back from yoga & breakfast, and I'm heading out to Weyerbacher when they open around noon, to buy a case of their new stuff -- and I thought I'd update a few computer things, ie posting here, as well as adding a few photos from the Sals trail maintenance last month.

It's been a fairly rough week, mainly because of two pieces of news that came my way.

Bad News The First: At the Chain Gang meeting this week (that was Wednesday night) we were discussing where to have our annual Christmas party, and someone mentioned the Christian's Spring Hotel, especially since we had such a good time in their barn at the weekend party -- maybe we could rent the barn for our own party. Rich called them up while we moved on to other business, then came back with the news that CSH is closing and that Saturday (ie today) would be their last day. Aaaargh!

Bad News The Second: This one is a little more serious. My friend Dan sat a few of us down at work the other day, and told us he'd been talking to Vito: his wife had been getting dizzy again (this was probably just after I visited), and passed out in the bathroom the other night. They went to the hospital, where they found out she'd had a stroke: she still has powers of speech, but her right side has lost some mobility. (She's been in rehab at Sloan-Kettering ever since, learning to use a walker and trying to get as much of her mobility back as possible.) Doctors say it was caused by her tumor, which means that the tumor is active again -- and the tumor is inoperable, and she can't have any more chemo or radiation, and so what this really means is that Di is now basically into her endgame. She'll be home in a few days; Vito's probably a wreck right now. This is so sad.

Both of these (of course) put me in a fairly bad mood for the end of the week, though I've been trying to be philosophical about them. Which Brew is gone, and now Christian's Spring Hotel is gone, but Anne and I met at WB and first started hanging out at CSH, so maybe they had accomplished something, like the booster stages of a rocket, or maybe the Roman Empire before it fell.

Di is a little harder to take. She and Vito have led exemplary lives, and I'm glad that she can take some
comfort in her faith and in the expectation of a better world, but that doesn't really leave me with much.

Meantime, I can't make lemonade out of those weights either...

Anyway, Tuesday night was Porters after the gym, where the girls had taken over one corner and were experimenting with a new scene: the "Brew Knits" is what they called themselves, and that's exactly what they were doing -- sipping brews and knitting.

Wednesday was the Chain Gang meeting, Thursday was the gym followed by a visit to Christian Springs -- the usual "Thursday night supper club" (me, Anne, Lee, Judy, and Sally & Joe) though there was no food, and last night was a towpath ride with Larry (Happy Birthday!) and dinner was a pot roast at Anne's. Not sure what tonight will be, but I'll be riding with Anne and a few others at Jacobsburg later in the afternoon.

Those photos are posted (go check them out) and I'm all caught up, so I'm outta here.

Monday Night Quarterbacking

Morning weigh-in: 171#, 10.5% BF

Doop de doo, just catching up on my bills, internet addictions etc, thought I'd post a little something...

Anne bought a mountain bike on Friday, a used Cannondale F600 to be specific, off a fellow VMB member. It had some minor issues so we did some work on it, then took it up to Jacobsburg -- we rode just about 15 miles total, pretty cool. (One very valid point she made though: she doesn't have to drive anywhere to ride her road bikes. But, she lives right around the corner from Sals, ditto Lehigh; once her skills/confidence are up to the challenges she'll have all the out-the-front-door, local riding she'd want.)

We saw Religulous that night with a bunch of people. Verdict: it was OK, but not much better than OK. I thought that they cherry-picked their religious spokesmen, who seemed a bit stupid, and were flummoxed by fairly standard anti-religious arguments -- ones that any decent theologian should have at least some answer to by now, even if it wasn't an answer I'd agree with. Dinner was at Pacifico, and was also just so-so.

Saturday we (Anne and I) did a road ride, a metric century over Little Gap and back through Wind Gap. The evening's entertainment was at Christian's Spring Hotel, where they had an Octoberfest party: German food, beer specials and three great bands out in their barn. These bands were not what I was expecting (punkish/rockabilly garage stuff, maybe?) but instead were more bluegrass than anything else -- one was actually a bow ties and straw hats, banjos and kazoos kind of novelty act. Great stuff. Tons of people there too, including a big chunk of Chain Gang peeps and pieces of the Which Brew diaspora, as well as the usual CSH regulars.

Sunday was mellow by comparison, did a little hiking -- walking, really -- in and near Bethlehem. Tonight after laundry & bills I'll be zipping around for a while downtown on the singlespeed. Dinner already happened and was Brazilian black beans. Tomorrow I'll be eating at Porters.

Goddamn You, Pointy-Headed Arithmetic!

Morning weigh-in: 172# 9.5% BF

 

By the way, the weekend:

 

Friday night was dinner with Anne in Bethlehem, after the usual towpath ride (just Kirk and myself this time). I suggested J.P. McGrady's as a nice change of pace, but when we got there it was jam-packed full of Lehigh students, standing room only, so we went back to Brew Works.

 

Saturday was busy, an ultra-mega-Selfish Day: yoga in the morning, drycleaning, banking, then over to Coffee Exchange to meet Anne before we hit the Garlic Fest. (Her home-brewing buddy Josh had a booth & was pushing garlic beer, but we were too chicken to try it.) Saw a few peeps while walking around, then we drove over to Weyerbacher and split a case of their special Harvest Ale, made (in very limited quantities) with fresh hops from Dan Weierbach's garden.

 

We then went up to Jacobsburg. That's where we met Lenny, and also Butch & Mindy: Butch was looking to sell Anne his old F600, and this was the test ride. Verdict: it's a go! We rode for about two hours, maybe 10 miles, ran into Joe G while riding but he was in high-speed mode...

 

Saturday Night: Lenny was down so I could show him Pearly Baker's so that's where we went next; after dinner he took off for home, while Anne & I grabbed dessert and coffee around the block, then returned for the Time Code show. Saw the crew (Bill & Danielle, Tara, Michele, etc) and the show was good but my day was long, and I went home early and slept the sleep of the dead.

 

On Sunday I took a trip out toward Scranton, carpooling with Eric and fellow biker Bernie, to the grand opening of a new trail system. This was a bigger deal than I realized; there were probably about 100 bikers there (including the Hubbard Bike Club crew, plus Rich B and Joe G), as well as a similar number of hikers, some police and Game Lands officials, and the local news crews. Plenty of speeches, snacks, ribbon cutting, and then finally we rode. Mucho recommendo, these were some killer trails and you could see they put a lot of thought and work into making them. We only rode 10 miles or so, but in our group there were several flats, one busted derailleur/hanger (Eric), and a broken frame -- I also got lost at one point. Tough trails!

 

More Fun with Pointers: I've been fooling with that program some more, and was still getting fairly random results out of the computer. Until last night, when... well, imagine you need to store data of a certain size, so you tell the computer to allocate some memory to store that data -- except you tell the computer, in a very subtle and hard-to-detect (for a neophyte) way, to allocate less memory than you need? Then when the time comes to store that data, and you go to put the tenth pound of shit in your five pound bag: the data pours out all over the place, corrupting other memory, results become unpredictable and then your program crashes... I found the problem and fixed it last night, now my test program runs flawlessly. I don't know if I'm a genius or a moron.

 

Last night was the gym (mini-workout) and laundry, plus dinner at Porters with Anne, the debate on TV and a couple of odd/interesting bar mates. Tonight is yoga, with symposium to follow.

 

Porn Emergency

Morning weigh-in: 171#, 10.5% BF

 

Went to yoga last night, then hit Porters for dinner and some Monday Night Football. Pretty cool, though the place wasn't too busy. I saw Lucas there, young guy who sort of disappeared after he broke his bike, and also saw Randi, who was the old bartender at Jabberwocky (or Curve or whatever).

 

She's now a bartender and a "dancer" somewhere, except she recently sprained her ankle and it's cut into her ability to work -- she was ranting about certain mutual friend who shall remain nameless (Joe) who owes her money she could really use right now... Meantime, she and her friend were out to pick up the latest issue of some exotic dancer trade weekly, but the local adult novelty store was closed, handwritten "closed for family emergency" sign in the window. So they came to Porters...

 

A priest, a rabbi and a minister walk into a bar, and the bartender says "What is this, a joke?"

Hail Hail

Morning weigh-in: 171.5#, 10% BF

 

Gym last night, then over to CSH for dinner. Nice surprise, some of the old Which Brew gals -- specifically Michele, Margarita and Carrie, whom I hadn't seen in forever -- were there, along with the usual crew (Anne, Judy and Lee). We hung out for a while & chatted, then the girls absconded and we listened to part of the VP debate on the radio. Static, volume issues; we lost interest and conversation returned to the usual subjects.

 

C For Success: Well, almost. I changed a few things on that program I'm writing, and all of a sudden it works, for reasons I don't really understand.

 

Tonight I'm riding the towpath. Tomorrow is going to be a very busy version of "selfish day."

Golden Sunrise Mountain

Morning weigh-in: 170.5#, 10.5% BF (sigh)

 

Beautiful ride in to work today, fog/clouds over Jugtown Mountain, itself silhouetted by the early morning sun. I was also listening to Gang of Four's "Tattoo," the perfect song for driving in heavy traffic at high speeds...

 

Linux Voyager, Heavy C's: I decided to write a small program, something semi-work-related,  that would take a bunch of individual pieces ("cut lengths") of tubing, and and organize them into ordered lengths -- ie "sticks," or pieces of tube, around 40 feet long, that are meant to be cut into several of the smaller cut lengths -- for optimum bundling and shipping. This is a laborious process, something I can't stand and I've been doing a lot of it lately, but recently I came up with a clever method that organizes the pieces rather well, and can also be automated -- bonus!

 

The trick involves ordering the cut lengths by length, then divvying up the cut lengths according to a certain pattern. This looked to me like the ideal place to use something like a linked list, and decided to try my hand at doing this in C. I used to be pretty good at C programming, but that was like 20 years ago, and I found that I was pretty damn rusty, at least at first. I'm getting the hang of it again, and the code I need to write is surprisingly small for what I'm trying to do, so things should move along pretty quickly now -- all I need is a couple of rainy days.

 

Speaking of rainy days, last weekend was a wash. I didn't go to Vermont because it was pouring there, and I didn't ride locally because it was pouring here too, especially Sunday. I spent most of the weekend reading, or watching movies (saw Juno at Anne's on Sunday, gotta love a girl with Netflix), or surfing the web... we walked over to Brew Works, Sunday afternoon after the movie, and looking down from the Broad Street Bridge we saw that the Monocacy had gone over its banks, which in turn caused them to close Celtic Fest.

 

Tonight I'll be riding the towpath if it doesn't rain (otherwise I'm hitting the gym), then it's off to Porter's while the laundry dries. Last night was yoga, tomorrow night will be more yoga, and Thursday is back to the gym.

Quick News Tidbits

Morning weigh-in (Friday) 169#, 11# BF

More photos are now posted, my Saturday shots from the BASH. Enjoy! Stay tuned for more, some BASH Sunday photos plus a bunch of trailwork shots I took last weekend.

Meantime, the rain (here and in Vermont) has caused those of us going to race to cancel our trip to the Vermont 50.

Tonight I'll probably see Brujos at Pearly Baker's, and tomorrow will probably be a Lehigh ride.

That is all.

"M" Is For "Methane"

 This can't be good.

 

"You think the end of the world's comin'?"

 

"Preacher man says it's the end of time; he says America's rivers are running dry. The interest is up, the stock market's down... You boys better be careful hanging around here this late at night, this -- no ma'am, I'm sorry we don't -- this is the perfect place to get jumped!"

 

"But do you think the end of the world's comin'?"

 

"Naw... So says the preacher man, but I don't go by what he says."

 

-- Godspeed You Black Emperor

 

Klondike Barbie Watch: Yup, witchcraft-free since 2005! Too bad the long-running affair with her husband's business partner just came to light...