A Month In Review(s)

Well that went pretty quickly, I didn't realize it had been a full month since my last post. Work has been insanely busy lately, and I've found myself with little time or inclination to write anything here: all my resurces have been used up. Not much worth noting has gone down either, not that that has ever stopped me before, when I'm in the mood to write, or had the strength.

Right now I'm on vacation. We drove down to Asheville, North Carolina on Monday, and we're here until Friday, when we go to visit Emmi in Knoxville.Monday night was a bit of night life, yesterday was a 40 mile road ride (20 miles uphill, then turn around and coast back) on the Blue Ridge Parkway, followed by more nightlife, and today is a sort of rest day / weather break so we've been checking out the local downtown scene in the daylight, brunch and bakery and coffee shop, and my batteries have recharged enough to check  in here...

Listening: I got that SqueezeBox I was talking about. It was kind of a compromise between what I wanted and what's readily available, but it seems to do the job as advertised. The biggest -- and really, the only -- disappointment is that I can't seem to just transparently stream sounds through it from my computer: it has a special server I had to install on my laptop, which reads music files (from the same music collection my "real" music program uses) or internet radio, and sends the results to the Squeezebox. The server has a browser interface which actually works very well, and as time goes by it's pretty much become my "real" music program.

We've been listening to a lot of music lately, including some radio stations Anne likes that we can't ordinarily get, as well as internet-only stuff like Radio Paradise (Strangely enough, we're listening to Radio Paradise right now, in an Asheville bakery/coffeeshop.) The next step is to get Anne's music available through the Squeezebox, which should be pretty easy once we get the server installed on her laptop.


Doing: We've got about a month of P90X under our belts now, Anne and I; we've been doing it together most weeknights after I get home from work. We are basically through the first of three phases, each lasting three weeks with a "rest week" in between. It's pretty hard, but I've done harder workouts (back when I was younger).

The biggest positives so far have been that the workouts, especially the "cardio" ones like Plyometrics and Kenpo, are really fun, especially when we're working out together, and that I am starting to see some difference in my arms, which had been suffering a bit of neglect over the past year or so.

Negatives? There are two: one is that the program is extremely rigid, so there's no real "wiggle room" in case I want to, say, do a ride, or maybe just take a rest day, instead of that day's scheduled workout. (We tried doing them in the morning to leave the evenings free for other things, but that has its own downsides.) The other big negative is the trainer himself, Tony Horton. He seems to know his stuff, and keeps the workout moving along, but he's an old stand-up comic and it shows -- his constant stream of banter, workout slogans and bad jokes becomes wearing after a while. Anne and I have taken to repeating his expressions as inside jokes...

New Bike: The new trails at Lake Nockamixon finally had their Grand Opening complete with food, music, guided trail tours, and a raffle -- and I won the Grand Prize, a Specialized Hardrock Disc 29er. So far I've only played with it by riding around town, but as soon as I have it dialed in, and install some clipless pedals, I'll be hitting the local trails so stay tuned for a full report.

Autumn In The Air

Morning weigh-in: 188#, 14% BF

 

It's been really nice the past few days, more September-like than September's really been so far: sunny, cool verging on brisk (we've been waking to chilly mornings); my favorite season is just around the corner...

 

My Mom's birthday was yesterday and we visited for a little celebration dinner, and we decided to make a day of it:

 

Our first stop on the way down was the Englishtown Auction, which I'd been talking about a lot after bumping into some High School friends at a recent party. (The standard joke was that every teenager in Manalapan worked either there or at Raceway Park at some point; my friends and I worked at both, and lived within walking distance, and we had many teen adventures at both places and the surrounding woods, now long gone.) It's been years since I was there, and Anne had never been there, so we stopped for lunch at the good old burrito stand in the Yellow Building. I parked a bit towards the back, and we walked through the farther sections of the outdoor stands -- we were late, and things were winding down, but it seemed like the place was smaller than I remembered. Over to the taco stand, where the burritos also seemed smaller than I remembered, though still delicious, then we wandered back to the car by cutting through the buildings.

 

Next stop was Allaire, where we put in just over an hour of exploring. It was a perfect day for a ride, and we a great time, even with the World's Largest Vuvuzela blasting at intervals int the distance -- not annoying or anything, just weird, like maybe there was a factory with a horn, or some football game with fans blowing horns, nearby. Sandy soil and twisty trails over moderate terrain, we had a lot of fun until we realized that it was getting late, then had to find our way back to the car.

 

Luckily my parents only live a couple of minutes away, and we arrived only a little late... It was us, and my parents, and my brother and his wife and her parents; snacks and and small talk, ziti and meatballs, and a birthday cake -- I gave my mom Wolf Hall and In Hovering Flight. We were home by 11:00, and asleep about two minutes later.

 

Tonight we both start the P90X program.

Itch 2: Electric Boogaloo

My computer play has been pretty desultory lately: I keep sitting down in front of my laptop, wanting to do something "computerey" and creative, and I can think of nothing I want to do, and I just end up surfing. But, finally driven by rainy-weekend boredom, I decided to take a look at that GRAMPS genealogical software, and sat down Sunday morning to figure out my family tree.

 

I'm totally hooked. It took a while to figure out how to use the software, but it seems logical enough once you get the hang of adding data and navigating among people and relationships. I input the stuff I knew, the low hanging fruit like my family, parents and grandparents, brothers and their families, cousins etc, with birth dates if I knew them offhand -- this "vital statistics" kind of biographical info is a big part of genealogy, and the genealogical software, but I know very few birth, death and marriage dates for even my closer relatives -- then broke out a history of my father's family (written by my mother) and spent Sunday afternoon and Monday parsing it for stuff I could use. I exhausted that family history, got in touch with some cousins on my mother's side, who'd done their own family tree research and got some online stuff from them, and in the course of that I contacted someone at Ancestry.com, who has info about the ancestry of my father's paternal grandfather, but needs info on his descendants and is willing to trade (I'm waiting to hear back)...

 

Like I said, I'm hooked; I found something to scratch my itch. I think I have most of my ancestors, their names at least, to about four generations back, and pretty much all their descendants; now I just need to start fleshing them all out with vital statistics, photos, and family stories.

 

Here's a story: My father's father died the year before my parents met, but my paternal grandmother was still alive when I was a small child. According to my mom's email, she died in August of 1967, which would be when I was four years old, and the month before we moved to Englishtown, and about the time of my earliest memories. (The earliest memories that I can date are of Kevin and me, arguing over whether I was still older when we were both three for a time, which means it would be late March or early April 1967, and some from the summer of 1967, when we visited the construction site for our new home -- but those might be mixed up with photos and 8mm movies of those visits.) So I'm guessing then that the one time I remember meeting my grandmother was (obviously) before August 1967, but not too much before.

 

It's just a few jumbled images: she was in a wheelchair, and maybe that wheelchair was on a a sort of dais or podium, and she seemed out of it, or possibly just unable to communicate, but happy. She had longish white hair and was maybe wearing a brownish cardigan; the walls might have been a light green but floor and furniture were brown wood, and the wheelchair seems to be wood and wicker in my mind's eye. My mom and dad sort of introduced us and put me in her lap, and she held me for a moment. They probably did the same with Kevin and Chris but I don't remember. It was the only time I can remember meeting her, and it was possibly the only time I ever did meet her.

 

Speaking Of "The Itch:" My dad tells stories about a really downscale second-run movie theater in his childhood neighborhood, nicknamed "The Itch" because it was a good place to end up with lice if you leaned back in your seat. I googled it once, and found that it was a generic NYC name for that type of theater back in the day. Who knew?

Why Can't I Just Have What I Want?

I'm looking to set up a wireless music connection to the stereo at home, a bridge receiver, or media bridge, I think it would be called. Something that connects wirelessly to the home network, and has audio output for the stereo, so we can stream music wirelessly from our computers -- my Ubuntu machine as well as Anne's Mac, plus Emmi's or Ben's, or any visitor's, laptop. Sounds simple, right?

(This is actually what we have right now via a Bluetooth receiver, which shows up as headphones on your Bluetooth-enabled laptop or smartphone:  You have your music program send the audio signal to the "headphones" instead of the normal speakers and it comes out the stereo. Very simple and easy to use, and music quality is OK, but the Bluetooth range is so short it's almost useless -- I usually just use my phone's music, and lay the phone on the stereo while things are playing, so I might as well have connected the phone to the stereo by headphone jack. The range issue is why I'm thinking of going with wifi.)

 

Some parts of my wishlist make this less than simple, though: I would prefer that no additional software needs to be installed on any computer, and I would also like the music to be played (ie, the file decoded and turned into an audio signal), or at least controlled, by the music program on the laptop, and the system must be usable with Linux, Mac and Windows systems.

In other words:

1. Data enters the hypothetical device via wifi, and leaves via some audio jack.
2. The device can be accessed by any computer connected to our home network, and can play any music stored on those same computers, without having to modify those computers (ie add new software:,I would prefer if the device were controlled by the standard music player on each computer).
3. The device either simply pumps an audio signal from the network into the stereo, or can handle audio encoding formats besides the standard MP3 -- I'm thinking specifically of FLACC and Ogg Vorbis.

The biggest problem I've found so far is Apple. ITunes is ubiquitous, but the Mac stuff has a lot of DRM in the way, and Macs work best -- or at all? -- only with the Mac-approved products. My Linux laptop can handle the reverse engineered Apple protocol (DAAP), at least earlier versions before Apple re-crippled it, as well as the more common DLNA/UPnP, which actually seems more like what I want anyway.

My solution: It's not a perfect match to my needs, but I just bought a Logitech Squeezebox Touch. It needs special software to run, but that software is available for Mac, Windows and Linux, and the interface is via web browser. (There are also Squeezebox controller apps available for smartphones, so our iPhones and Droids can be used as remotes.) I don't know what the story is yet about oddball file formats, but I guess if it comes down to it I can do some kind of on-the-fly transcoding.

The main thing is that it receives the music via wifi -- the only other serious choice, the Sonos ZonePlayer 90, does not use wifi but its own wireless network, so at least one component of your system has to be physically attached (by Ethernet cable) to your router, and what that means is that if the router and stereo are not near each other, you either have to run Ethernet cable between them or buy a second Sonos device for a non-wifi wireless connection.

Anyway, we should be up and running by next weekend.

A Shifting In The Sky

Ah yes, woke up this morning and it was the start of a beautiful September day, blue-sky sunny and cool, and while I was in the basement I even heard the furnace come on...

 

Speaking of basements, we had a bit of water in our basement but came through otherwise unscathed from Hurricane Irene. Saturday was weirdly warm and occasionally rainy -- which was fine by me, since Rob's funeral was in the morning, and the rest of the day was spent sort of hanging out in a depressed, headachey torpor -- then the real rain started late in the afternoon, and at around 9:00 the wind, which had been getting gustier and more ominous all evening, suddenly increased to a constant howl. Anne and I were reading in bed and listening to the storm until about midnight, it was pretty wild.

 

We took a walk in the morning and met Debbie; we checked out Monocacy Creek (it flooded the Colonial Industrial Quarter, but I've seen worse), and the Lehigh from Sand Island (also high, officially at "flood stage," but again I've seen worse). There were a few trees down on Sand Island, and some we saw walking through the neighborhoods, and power was out in a few areas, but overall I think Bethlehem, and the Lehigh Valley in general, came out OK -- I have friends in Vermont who have been cut off by floodwaters since the storm.

 

We've never had water trouble, it's just not on our radar, so it wasn't until afternoon that we even thought to look in the basement. Sure enough, we found about an inch of water, in the portion of the basement inaccessible to the drain. We had to bust out the Shop-Vac for a an hour or so, and we tossed a bunch stuff that got ruined, plus a bunch of stuff we just pretended was ruined and tossed anyway because the basement was cluttered.

 

Monday I did a decent run. Normally I do almost exactly a 5k, and my body can absorb that distance just fine, but anything past that (like literally 5k plus five steps) is torture; Monday's run was a pleasant four miles, mostly along the towpath. Not a personal best, since I used to run that far or further on a regular basis, but it was my longest run in quite a while. Just don't ask about pace...

 

Tuesday was the VMB meeting at Jordan, which was nice and short and we got a lot done. I did a ride beforehand, and it was short but not so nice, mainly because of debris (and a few down trees), along the trails. Last night we watched the Brew Works Mug Club Auction, and tonight we're seeing a show at Steel Stacks.

 

A Lovely Evening

Morning weigh-in: 185.5#, 15% BF

 

I met Anne and Donna last night at Nockamixon, me coming from work and them from Bethlehem, and we had an awesome time riding the trails. Anne loves it there, and this was Donna's first time and she really liked it too -- she said it was one of the nicest places she's ridden so far, fun and challenging without being impossible. High praise indeed! It didn't hurt that it was a beautiful night, with the late afternoon sun bouncing off the lake and illuminating the woods...

 

Summer is winding down though, and right now the place it shows most is in the woods on a late afternoon ride: we started at 6:00, and by 7:30 things were already getting dark under the canopy, even if it wasn't quite twilight elsewhere, so we skipped the last part and took the road back to the cars. Anne says they'll be riding there again in the future, but during the day -- while I'm at work, oh well -- so they'll have time to explore and try things.

 

Home, where Anne and I were both feeling tired and lazy, so we just kicked back and read awhile before crashing. I'm still in the middle of The Pale King, while Anne finished Mason & Dixon the other day and is now working on The Slap. Funny, we bought both our books in the same bookstore (in Northampton MA) at the same time, so our store-supplied bookmarks are identical -- which, under the right conditions, can be the source of much comedy.

 

Tonight, if the rain isn't too bad, I'll probably do a run, otherwise I'll hit the gym. Meanwhile, I need to think of a new winter computer project now that the weather's starting to change. Maybe I'll put together a file backup system using my old computer, and maybe some DIY music server?

 

These Little Earthquakes

So there I was at work yesterday when the room started shaking -- actually, more a gentle swaying, probably the building's reaction is what I felt -- and the guy across from me and I look at each other and say in unison: "Earthquake?"

 

And that's just what it was, the Great Virginia Quake of 2011, 5.9 on the Richter Scale or whatever it is they're calling it these days, felt, according to the posted reports of my Facebook friends, from Vermont to North Carolina. Luckily, damage was fairly minor, and I don't think anyone was killed or even hurt, though there were evacuations in Washington and New York. (I've lived on the East Coast my whole life and still managed to experience four earthquakes before this, and yesterday's was the most obvious, possibly because I was on the second floor, and awake. Anne was working in the backyard when I texted her, and she thought I was kidding -- she never felt a thing.)

 

Anyway, I hit the gym after work, and after the homebound commute's construction craziness -- even Applebutter Road? WTF? -- then walked over to Steel Stacks to meet Anne and catch the Two Man Gentleman Band. I bumped into my friend Lee on the way in, and Donna was there with Anne, and we sat with Doug and Lori, and Doug's parents, and Eric and Kris and some friends of theirs eventually joined us -- we had a pretty big crowd at one point. (Outdoor venue, free show on a beautiful night, the place was packed, and there were many others there that we knew.) Dinner at Brew Works after the show, hanging with Matt and Erin & Rick.

 

Tonight is Nockamixon after work, riding with Anne and Donna, and then we start our countdown to Hurricane Irene, which now seems like it might miss us.

 

Alvin and The Mysterons

Morning weigh-in (Monday): 189#, 12.5% BF

Morning weigh-in (Tuesday): 185#, 13.5% BF

 

Ouch! That was the result of a fun and rather "nutritionally dense" weekend...

 

Friday night was another "Heels on Wheels" ride, which was pretty awesome: Anne and myself, Emmi (who drove up from Knoxville and hopped right on a bike), Ben & Jaime, Donna, Erin & Rick, and Brian & Maris, and we were joined occasionally by pedestrian Matt. It was Brian's birthday, Ben & Jaime's only chance for a "Heels on Wheels" ride before heading back to whatever their destination was, and I think that all the girls got especially dolled up for this ride. (The guys? Not so much...) Way fun, we started and finished at Brew Works, and in between we hit Welcome, Molly's, the outdoor concert at Steel Stacks, and the Wooden Match.

 

Needless to say, the morning after was not quite as awesome, and I believe we all slept in on Saturday, except Ben and Jaime who were gone when we got up. I was going to do a JT ride, but I blew it off to just hang out at home. Saturday night we stayed in and read some more.

 

Sunday was a trailwork day at Sals for me, helping the crew do a little rock armoring in some of the wet areas, then I came home, and vegged out some more before diving into my bike project: the Turner had a major creaking problem, making noise on every pedal stroke and getting louder over the past week or so. I'm not sure what the exact problem was but I suspected either the suspension pivots or the bottom bracket, so I took off the rear wheel, cranks, shock etc, loosened and lubed the pivots, checked the BB bearings, and put it all back together nice and tight. So far it seems to be working -- I got skunked by a storm Sunday afternoon, but I got out to Sals yesterday and it was great to ride a bike that didn't sound like it was going to collapse any second. I also got to try the new rock armoring we did, and it was pretty sweet.

 

Listening: I just downloaded the first two Chemical Brothers albums, like from 1995 or so. For some reason -- and this isn't really true of the Chemical Brothers, but one or two of their songs do fall into this category -- I've been really enjoying 90's-era songs with droning or altered vocals, like Placebo's "Pure Morning," or "Setting Sun" by the Chemical Brothers. It's just a real mysterious sound to me, like exploring the abandoned, derelict and possibly haunted alien starship...

 

Tonight is the gym, then I should be meeting Anne at Steel Stacks to see the Two Man Gentleman Band.

 

 

Damn You Bacon Cheeseburger!

Morning weigh-in (Wednesday): 189#, 13.5% BF

Morning weigh-in (Thursday): 187#, 13.5% BF

 

So Tuesday night was a pretty decent run along the towpath, maybe 2.7 miles plus a walk back up the hill (that was my reward), 3.5 miles in 39 minutes; I'll be back in running shape, and shapely enough to fit in my kilt, in time for the Halloween 5k. It totally caused me to overheat though, I didn't feel comfortable for several hours afterward. I kind of blew the fitness afterward too, with a bacon cheeseburger & fries at the Brew Works. I needed my comfort food though, and it was a nice night there: Anne and me, and Ben and his girlfriend Jaime who are in town for a few days, and Debbie, and Donna was there with Brian and Erin. A good night, especially with Ben and Jaime there, but still pretty somber.

 

The cheeseburger bit me back though, as can be seen in the Wednesday weigh-in. Last night was a short ride along the towpath with Anne -- I must have been tired, because according to the computer we weren't going all that fast but it sure felt like we were flying. We did about 14 miles, out to the boat club and back, in about an hour. Then home and shower, and we hit Black and Blue in Easton for dinner, just me and Anne, and Ben and Jaime, though we did see a few of the usual suspects. A quiet night, and I watched the old caloric intake, and I think I did a little better on the scale this morning.

 

Tonight is the gym again (just in time too, as the pain from Monday is starting to fade), then I'm heading over to Eskandalo for a haircut.

 

Listening: I've been into Death Cab For Cutie's "I Will Possess Your Heart" lately, really getting obsessive about it, listening over and over. Creepy and stalk-ey, and for some reason it reminds me of this incident (see more here and here), and I thought that would be a good video: a girl in an elevator, seen from outside, as a guy gets on the elevator. She turns and recognizes him, and not in a good way, just as the doors close on the scene. Scenes of those see-through elevators like they have in tacky-fancy hotels, doors closing and elevator descending, scenes of the guy getting on various elevators, over and over... I don't know, it works for me.

 

When It Rains Here, It Rains So Hard...

Morning weigh-in (Monday): 187.5#, 15% BF

...but never hard enough to wash away the sorrow. Goodbye Rob, I don't know if I'll ever be fully able to understand or accept what happened; all I know is I'm going to miss you.

The party's over: Musikfest ended Sunday night (we didn't go), and the summer is winding down. Time to start looking at those admittedly scary morning numbers once again... I'll be getting back to the gym, actually started last night after work, mostly arms and upper body for now. I dread what I'll find out about my diminished fitness over the next few days, but hey that's step one -- right now my chest and arms are awash in prostaglandins.

 

Watching: Anne read Barney's Version recently and really liked it, so she picked up the DVD when her friend Judy, who also loved the book, recommended the movie. (Usually people like one or the other, movie or book but not both, so this was a rarity.) We got a chance to watch it on Sunday afternoon. Verdict: not my type of movie, but good, and the ending was sad but pretty powerful -- sorry, no spoilers! I'm still on the fence whether I'll read the book or not.

 

After that we went over to Nazareth.  Sally's mom passed away last year, and Sally & Joe had a small memorial service/party at their house. It was nice, and their son Ben was there, and Judy, and Erika and Toby, and a bunch of other people plus members of the extended family, and tons of good food... I was doing well despite the presence of their dog, but we snuck out after about two hours; I took an antihistamine when we got home, just to be on the safe side, and we spent the rest of the evening with our feet up, reading. (Anne is almost done with Mason & Dixon, and I am totally engrossed in The Pale King.)

 

So yesterday I hit the gym, then when I get home Anne's out to dinner with some of her friends -- they get together every Monday -- but there's a note, placed strategically on my laptop, saying to call her as soon as I get home. So I do, and she tells me that Rob, a young friend of ours, had taken his own life that morning -- she didn't want me to find out on Facebook or email like some smack in the face.

 

I walked up to Brew Works and met Anne there, along with Donna and her daughter Erin -- Donna has a son and a daughter, and their ages bracketed Rob's, and she sometimes called Rob "her other son" -- and we just sort of hung out, gloomy but still too numb to really be distraught yet. Rob was a regular there, though Thursday was usually the night his crew got together; he lived on Main Street and worked for a company that had a Main Street presence, and there were some of his co-workers there as well last night -- it was an unusually subdued crowd. I guess we'll be finding out about arrangements over the next few days.

 

One More Nail

Another post, another rainy Sunday...

We were down at Musikfest yesterday and stayed, despite the rain, until the evening shows rolled around. (We visited Brew Works, bumped into Joe and Cindy, Eric and Kris, and Doug and Lori, and promised to meet them at Volksplatz later -- they were getting dinner.)

Down to Volksplatz where we'd been hiding from the rain earlier, and where we now caught up with Deb and Donna, and caught Marching Fourth, a crazy sort of marching band on stilts; we were in place, front and center, when Start Making Sense came on. Unfortunately, by that time it was pouring again, and with those guys already drawing a huge crowd of fans, and the tent swelled with people escaping the deluge, it was just too much of a crush -- Anne and I absconded to Emily's Kenyan food booth. We could see the show, and also the show of semi-inebriated kids dancing in the downpour. It was pretty cool, hanging out with Emily, and her crew, and Deb and Donna, but the rain kept getting worse, and our phones were beeping with flood warning alerts, and the Monocacy was an ominous presence right behind the midway...

We decided to beat it back to Brew Works, and got a fairly decent table, especially considering how crowded it was, and all our friends came in not long after: the creek jumped its bank and flooded the midway, and the venue tents were collapsing from the rain, and things came to an abrupt end when the cops made everyone evacuate. We hung out at Brew Works for quite a while; it turned into a pretty wild night. When Anne and I finally left the rain had stopped, and we could look down at the destruction in the Moravian Quarter as we crossed the Broad Street bridge. It was awesome and scary and depressing, and we were thinking about Emily's food stand and John's glass-blowing stuff, and a guy watching next to us said he was from Florida and his booth was under about four feet of water.

 This was the first year with venues on the Southside, and I think they were a mixed and limited success (read: bad idea made manifest), but I also think that the Fest cannot be split in two the way it was, and I am sure that the ArtsQuest guys will never back down on using their new space for Musikfest, so eventually the Northside part -- Main Street, the Colonial Industrial Quarter, the better, and more popular, and more local rather than corporate part -- will wither on the vine. A Southside-only Fest is just not viable though, and Musikfest will enter its graveyard spiral once the Northside venues get shut down. I give it five years, tops.

The stabbing on opening night might have pushed things in this direction, and last night's flood might have been the final straw for Musikfest in the Moravian quarter, and so maybe for Musikfest itself.

Train Kept A-Rollin'

It wasn't all that nice -- the Sunday weather, that is -- so Anne and I skipped the Jim Thorpe riding and just went up to her mom's for a visit. When we got home we crashed for a bit, then went out and did our first real "Musikfest evening." (Friday's "Heels on Wheels" pub crawl didn't count in my book, since we mostly avoided the fairways and musical venues, and on Saturday all we did was buy coffee on Main Street like any Saturday, then skedaddled to Easton, hitting Pearly Baker's for dinner and Black & Blue for drinks.) We caught a bit of BC Combo on Sunday, and a set of the Red Elvises, but missed what's apparently the new buzz band, Here Come The Mummies.

 

Last night we saw Los Straitjackets.

 

Reading: The Pale King, an unfinished novel by David Foster Wallace; I think it's basically about a bunch of people who work for the IRS in the Midwest. So far it kind of reminds me of the start to Infinite Jest, each chapter jumping around and introducing a new character, and these characters, likeable, or not, or just neurotic, have already managed to get under my skin: I can't put it down.

 

Computing: I am playing with maps again, this time buildng a map of the new bike trails at Nockamixon. This is supposed to be something accessible via smartphone, and it works great on mine but it seems to have trouble on iphones.

 

Tonight we're seeing Alison Krause.

 

Meanwhile, Back In Realtime

Here I am at Re-Wired Cafe on Main Street, ground zero for Musikfest on a rather wet Saturday. (Here we are actually, since I'm here with Anne.) The place is a mob scene, mostly Fest peeps avoiding the rain -- the streets are not empty but they sure are emptier than usual, and a lot emptier than they were a few minutes ago -- and the baristas are like dervishes trying to keep up.

Last night was the first night of Musikfest, and it was also First Friday, and we did a Heels On Wheels pub crawl to check out the scene. Me & Anne, Donna, Amy & Aaron, and Emily and Mike and Brian and Maris, all the girls in short skirts and high heels... (We also met up with Debbie, as well as Doug and Lori, near the end of the night.) Pretty fun, though we walked more than biked (crowded streets) and only hit four places: Brew Works, Home & Planet, who had wine and birthday cake in the back of the store, Molly's, and The Wooden Match, the new place at the old train station (motto: "Beer, Meat, Cigars"); we finished with some late-night snacks back at Brew Works.

It was an early night, or early by the usual standards for these things, but we slept in anyway, and it's been a lazy Saturday ever since, just sort of hanging out, though we did manage to keg and bottle our latest batches of beer.

Tomorrow, if it's nice, I'll be riding in Jim Thorpe while Anne visits her mom. I think tonight we might buck the local trends and either stay in or hit Easton, though we could also do the music thing if the rain stops -- there are a number of good bands I want to see, but I really don't want to deal with outdoor shows in the rain, even if it's under a tent.

The Sad Saga Of The Phone

My Motorola Droid is defunct, and I now have a Samsung Transform courtesy of CREDO, my new phone company.

 

It wasn't a software issue. No amount of removing or reinstalling apps helped, and no factory reset -- despite the advice of the guy at the Verizon store, who said that that was what he did -- was going to fix it. I remember doing the factory reset and the phone came back on with the touchscreen already going haywire, my only consolation being the knowledge that the idiot who recommended it was eventually going to suffer as I did.

 

And it wasn't a "thin film of oil forming on the glass" either, though I did slavishly scrub the screen with rubbing alcohol, and swore like a good Pavlovian that I saw some improvement whenever I did it. What it was, was basically a design flaw: the "ribbon wire" from the screen runs too close to the phone earpiece, making the connections more than usually vulnerable to moisture and dirt through that nearby hole in the casing. When the connections got bad, the screen started going haywire. It took me forever to find the info online.

 

Since my phone was out of warranty and I didn't have insurance, and per my policy I couldn't get my free replacement phone until December, I was SOL at Verizon. I was looking at paying full retail for a replacement phone, like somewhere around $450 or a little more if I stuck with them. But as it happens, Anne has her phone through CREDO (formerly Working Assets), who channel some of their profits into progressive causes, and who had a deal where I'd get a new phone for $30 (and they'd buy out my old phone contract) if I signed up with their plan. So that's what I decided to do.

 

The setup: All of this was going on, phone misbehaving and me deciding, while Anne's big trip -- her solo bike trip to Knoxville, where our smartphones would be her only lifeline -- was getting closer. I thought the phone would make it, but it died and I ordered the new one just before she left... (She had email on her phone, so I stayed close to the computer for a few days, and my new phone arrived on her second day out, so things weren't too bad.)

 

So anyway, here I am with my new Samsung Transform, with about 3 weeks under my belt to figure it out. I think that it's a decent enough phone, but I think that the Droid (except for the fact that it crapped out) was a better phone, and more advanced in some ways. I've had three disappointments so far: the phone seems slower at times, there is no port of the Flash plugin for the Transform, and while the phone has a front and rear camera, Skype does not have video calls enabled on the transform. I can live with it all, live and learn.

 

In terms of my new phone company, I like CREDO so far. The network they use is really Sprint, and I found out the hard way that Vermont is Verizon Country -- we'll see how hard I got socked for roaming charges when my bill comes -- but otherwise my coverage has been fine.

 

The kicker: about two days after I got my new phone, Anne's phone fell and broke.

 

Now Every Day's The Fourth Of July

Not sure what happened, why there was such a big blogging lapse on my part. I looked the other day though, and I hadn't posted a thing for almost the entire month of July, that caught me by surprise. What could have caused this, what have I been up to? Last thing I remember Doc, I started to swerve...

 

Reading: I just finished China Mieville's The Scar, the second in his Bas Lag trilogy, but last in my personal order of reading them. It was good, especially when considered on its own merits, but I couldn't help but be disappointed: Iron Council was a tough act to follow, and when I read Iron Council it really felt like a cowboy story even with the fantasy stuff, which made me think it would make a good movie along the lines of "Cowboys vs Aliens." The action in The Scar is mostly nautical and concerns a floating pirate city, but it never really became a swashbuckler, or or even movie-adaptation-friendly really. Anyway, and though I would definitely place it in the Guilty Pleasures category, it was another decent summer page-turner.

 

Listening: I downloaded Jefferson Starship's Blows Against The Empire (and I understand that it's not that Jefferson Starship, but another one of the same name and personnel that made this album). I probably haven't listened to it in a good 20 years, but I knew every song on it... Strangely enough -- and I don't think it's just the temporal juxtaposition -- but this album and The Scar seem thematically related in my mind. 

 

Long Live The New King!

RIP: my Turner 02, bought in 2000 and ridden hard ever since; it bit the dust two weeks ago while I was on vacation. (I was riding with friends in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, climbing the Moose Alley trail so we could turn around and descend,  and suddenly it sounded like a stick in the spokes --- but it wasn't a stick it was the frame leaning on and rubbing against my knobbies.) Snapped the seat tube right in half just above the shock mount, instant trash and I was lucky I was going up instead of bombing down the trail, had nothing worse to deal with than a long walk back to our cottage...

Luck or foresight led me to buy a spare of the exact same frame five years ago, Doug's slightly-damaged frame from when he had some UPS mishap and they just bought him a new one. I left Vermont a day early, retrieved the frame from storage and dropped off the whole job at Cutters, and took off for Knoxville to catch up with Anne and Emmi.

But the Knoxville visit is another story; we got back from Knoxville last weekend, and I picked up my "new bike" after work on Tuesday. Anne and I hit the towpath for a short ride with Debbie, but that didn't count as a maiden voyage: I brought it to work Wednesday so I could take it to Nockamixon after work, only to realize I had a dentist appoint that afternoon. D'oh!

Tried again Thursday, and things worked out a little better: I was at Nox and on the bike by 6:00, and was off to a good start when -- PRANGGG! scrape scrape scrape... The tiny spring holding my front brake pads apart got entangled between the pad and rotor, and my only choice was to take the front brake out of the game. No biggie, it wasn't the best but you can ride like that, and I finished my ride, but now I had to track down a new set of brake pads. Yesterday I went on that quest and came up empty-handed, so I mail-ordered a bunch of them (just in case), and resigned myself to road rides until my package arrived. Then, Doug made a late-night phone call (OK, text), and invited me to ride this morning. Sorry, can't go, no brake pads...what, you have a pair of pads that fit my brakes? CU 2morrow kthkbye!

Early morning at Doug's wrestling with recalcitrant bike parts, then a pair of broken glasses (Lori and Krazy Glue to the rescue), but we finally were on our way. Long climb up the mountain and feeling like shit, until we met Scott and Mark, and when I stopped I realized my front wheel was hardly turning. OK fixed that, then it got worse again before the pads settled in -- it really wasn't my day.

But, the bike is back in the game, and it feels awesome.

This Just In: An Evening

Morning weigh-in: 185.5#, 12% BF

 

I got home yesterday and thought twice about doing a ride, so I stayed in -- I sometimes say that there's two kinds of discipline: one that sends you out to ride in the rain, and the other that keeps you home resting on a nice day; I'm not sure what kind of discipline issue that was... Anne had been out on a long road ride, and arrived home about the same time I did. Dinner was leftover beef/beans/rice with a baked sweet potato, and the evening was spent at home; Anne read, and I posted a bunch more photos (check them out, and there's more to come). It felt good to not be running around.

 

Tonight is the VMB meeting, followed by Taco Night at Brew Works.

 

By the way, I finally remembered -- rather, I asked Anne -- what we did Friday night: we hit the Velodrome! Totally slipped my mind... We saw Pam there, and Janna with her nephew, as well as Arnie hanging with the Cycle Fitters crew and some others from the Rodale/SMB crowd. Pretty full house, actually.

 

Los Alamos Will Burn With You

Morning weigh-in: 185#, 12% BF

 

Item: The Los Alamos National Laboratory is closed today as wildfies sweep the area.

 

Item: Floodwaters broke through the protective dam around Nebraska's Fort Calhoun nuclear plant, luckily in shutdown mode for repairs.

 

Anyway... short weekend, at least it seemed that way. Friday night was pretty quiet, and we got up early on Saturday to get moving on the next phase of the Bread Oven Project: shoveling sand into the backyard, replacing the fence where it had been removed to get the materials in, going out to buy more stuff... Anne did a bit of mixing and filling with insulating earth, and I went out for a towpath ride, which was surprisingly difficult, until I remembered all that shoveling... Saturday night was at the Steelgaarden, helping Amy celebrate her birthday.

 

We slept in a bit on Sunday, then went out and picked up beermaking supplies -- we're making a Sierra Celebration clone. I went out to ride South Mountain while Anne got things started, and I got home in time for the pitching of the yeast. I was totally whooped, surprisingly so until I remembered the day before, but I also think that there's more pollen in the air lately, and it was robbing my wind.

 

I had a strange dream last night: I ran into Brian and was hanging with him. I remember asking him "Hey aren't you dead?" and he sort of waffled on his answer. Sometimes the allergy medicine makes my heart pound in my chest, like last night on the walk to Brew works, and maybe I was thinking about him, and his heart, and mortality. (There was also something disturbing in there about a memorial liqueur distilled from his body parts, but that may have had something to do with his ashes.)

 

Tonight is the towpath, probably with Anne.

 

Restaurant Review: An Evening In Easton

Tuesday night was the big night -- the opening night for Black and Blue, aka "Which Brew II," Kelly-Jo's, and Larry's, new bar and restaurant. We'd heard rumors that they would be open soon, then heard last week that it would be "next week," and finally I got a few phone calls, from people who'd heard that Tuesday was the day... so off we went to Easton last night, to the old Blue Tone (on Walnut street, across from the courthouse), and it was like entering a reunion -- Didi, and Kateryna, and Caitlin, and Michele (plus a couple of new faces) were all working the bar and tables; and there was Ed, Lee, Larry, Mark & Terri, and Margarita, among many others -- the place was mobbed. (Plenty of other WB regulars came in too as time went by.)

 

We eventually settled in with Joe and Sally, and were joined by Judy and Erika; dinner was "pommes frights" -- though they may have had a new name, to go with the new location and theme -- and sesame-ginger hot wings. They have twelve taps, with the expected awesome selection -- trust me, only the surface was scratched...

 

Creak! Creak! I finally broke down and replaced my bottom bracket bearings on the Turner. It's a surprisingly easy task, easier in fact than doing a standard bottom bracket replacement, and I think I re-remember this fact every time I replace them (after long procrastinations those times too). We'll see if that fixes that squeak in the bottom bracket.

 

I also got a new middle chainring, since the chain was skipping last week at Lehigh and the (very worn) chainring is the most likely culprit, but that didn't work out quite as well: even thought they have the same bolt pattern and the old/new rings should be pretty much identical, there's a tab on the inside diameter of the ring near every bolt hole, which butts against a sort of shoulder on the crank, and my new (Shimano) ring has a larger tab than my old ring, and it doesn't fit on my (TruVativ) crank. D'oh! I may try to grind the tabs down to fit tomorrow, and if that doesn't work I'll just order a TruVativ chainring. In the meantime I have the old ring back on, so I should watch my gearing on hard climbs.

 

Next up on the bike is replacing the shifter cables and housings.

Greetings From Ithaca

Monday morning, and we'll be getting ready to take off from our hotel soon, but for now I'm just killing a little time, in the lobby with a cup of coffee...

We're up here for the wedding of Pam's daughter Sarah; Pam is a good friend of Anne's and we spent a lot of time with Pam and Sarah a few summers ago before Sarah moved up here. She and her husband both went to Cornell, and I think a lot of their friends did too (or at least they made a lot of friends here), and so they had the wedding at the Sage Chapel and the reception at an on-campus hotel. The reception was very nice, but the wedding ceremony itself was one of the best I'd been to, made truly awesome by the huge pipe-organ playing the wedding music.

That was Saturday. Friday was our arrival, and we caught up with the rehearsal dinner revelers downtown Friday night. Saturday was an easier morning than I expected, but a bit later wake-up than was practical... we rode over to breakfast, then did a relatively short ride (20 miles) along the eastern shore of Cayuga Lake, all we could really do before getting ready for the wedding.

Yesterday was another relatively late start, but we had nothing on the agenda except a ride... It was still not the longest we could have done, but a beautiful ride up the western shore, then west to the town of Ovid and south from there -- we could see Seneca Lake along this section -- and back to town. Out for about six hours, or 3:30 ride time once you removed our breakfast and lunch breaks, a beautiful sunny day and pleasantly cool, almost chilly. Perfect! Except for that bit of sunburn I got...

Today we're going hiking among some of the gorges, then heading home.