• Anabasis 2024

    We did our annual group ride and camping trip last weekend, beautiful Fall weather if not quite peak foliage (it was still pretty good), and some really nice riding.

    Friday: Up To Mauch Chunk Lake

    We started at the CAT office and rode up to where we could pick up the Nor-Bath Trail at Bicentennial Park, which brought us to the D&L at Northampton. We then rode the D&L all the way into Jim Thorpe, stopping for lunch at the Slatington Farmer’s Market, passing the newly repaired/reopened sections near East Penn and Weissport, and grabbing supplies in Jim Thorpe at the grocery store in East Mauch Chunk — the west side of town was a madhouse, the Fall Foliage Fest basically took over downtown. Luckily, we rode through the crowds easily enough and back into relative calm, and finally made it up to our campsites at the lake — we had three next to each other, and all along the lake shore. Sweet!

    Saturday: Rockport and Back

    This was our recreational ride, up through the Lehigh Gorge to Buttermilk Falls, just little past the Rockport Trailhead. Our first stop was back in town, where we bought our lunches for later in the day, and from there we continued on to the Glen Onoko Trailhead, where a bunch of other people were joining us for the day’s ride.

    It’s a fairly straightforward ride up through the Gorge, beautiful sights all around and the occasional excursion train passing by. We were traveling at different speeds, and some with children and time constraints turned back early, but the bulk of us regrouped at Penn Haven and continued on to lunch at Rockport. A quick trip to Buttermilk Falls, and we were on our way back down the Gorge, and through town again, and back up the hill to our campsites.

    Some of the Saturday crowd set up camp with us, and others just went home after hanging out for a while, but this was our night around the campfire. The evening was gorgeous and the views of the lake and ridge were spectacular, but I couldn’t tell you more past sunset — I was in bed by 9:30.

    Sunday: Homeward Bound

    My Garmin ran out of juice some time before Sunday morning, but Sunday’s ride was mostly just Friday’s in reverse. We stopped at Hug in a Mug in Weissport for breakfast, and at the Slatington Farmer’s Market again for lunch, and when we got to Northampton Anne and I broke off to take the roads more directly home.

    And that was our trip!


  • Rest In Peace, Dad

    My father passed away last week. I really don’t have much to say about it here, but I think I have to put this much down to clear my mind — I have a more private journal where I wrote the details of his death, and my own thoughts and feelings, but I will not be sharing them, here or elsewhere.

    It was a pretty rough week: he was in the CCU for a few days before he was gone, and we were with him through to the end. His wake was Thursday and his funeral was Friday, and the only bright spot was that he’s now buried in a beautiful place in the iconic, historic cemetery in our old home town, which he loved. (An old school friend was at the funeral, and after the burial he showed us his wife’s grave not far from my dad. My school friend Mike is also buried nearby.)

    I suppose I’d been preparing myself for this for a while, but it still felt like “not yet, not yet,” and I’m sad but mostly OK, but every so often the grief just comes out of nowhere and hits me again full force.

    Goodbye Dad, I didn’t want to say goodbye. I love you, I love you forever.


  • I Had A Good Run But I Run Too Slow

    I don’t really know yet if COVID actually, finally, caught up with me, but something laid me low for the past few days. What I have seems mostly like a sinus infection: stuffy nose, chest congestion, slight fever, and just a tired, washed-out feeling. It could be anything really, but Anne just got over COVID and it seems an implausible coincidence that I would come down with something else right now. It feels weird to get it now though, after seeming almost magically immune these past few years, walking fearless through the valley of the shadow…

    I tested negative, for what that’s worth — I will take another test in a day or so before I go back out into the world. Meantime, I took my usual cocktail for sinus (Benadryl, Mucinex-D, and Tylenol), sacked out in bed for a day or so, and I’m already feeling better.

    What have I been up to? Mostly reading: I picked up Starfish where I left off, which is saying something for my boredom levels — I put it down months ago because it was such an unpleasantly weird psychodrama. Now it doesn’t seem all that bad.

    I also have been re-reading SSH: The Definitive Guide, and just got a book on PHP the other day. I’ve been searching for a new tech “sugar high” ever since I got that SSL certification automated. If anything ever makes me a Buddhist, it’ll be the cycle of buzz and crash that defines my relationship with technology.

    UPDATE: Yeah it’s COVID. Just took another test.


  • Jasper And Blue Jingles

    This was a short bike tour we took, a loop south along the Delaware, then west and back home by way of Vera Cruz. We took some liberties, but it was at least nominally meant to follow some of the old native paths in the area south of us.

    Day One

    We left Bethlehem, heading cross-country over to Riegelsville, brunched at the Riegelsville Inn (we got there just as it opened), then we continued downriver on the New Jersey side, crossed back into Pennsylvania at Milford, and rode down the towpath to Tinicum Park, our stop for the night.

    Tinicum was fairly primitive as far as campgrounds go, but it was very pleasant, and we got to watch some local equestrians play polo for a while before we crashed for the night.

    Day Two

    This was another beautiful day. We got up and out early, got breakfast at a diner not far from the campsite (again arriving just as it opened), then rode down the towpath and Rt 32 to Point Pleasant.

    Point Pleasant is where Tohicon Creek meets the Delaware, and just above that is where Geddes Run enters Tohicon Creek. This area had a substantial native population once, and the mouth of Geddes Run was once a place where Native Americans worked a local stone called argillite (aka “mudstone,” or “blue jingles” as the local quarries later called it). The actual native quarry site is now on private land, but we could get a view of the general area from the road.

    Our route from there took us west on the Point Pleasant Pike, generally following an old native path to Schwenksville, through scenic little roads, and into more built-up and heavily trafficked areas, until we finally made it to Green Lane Park, our second night’s lodgings.

    Day Three

    From Green Lane we went north, again following the general outline of a native path — this was the path from the Phoenixville area to the jasper quarries at Vera Cruz. The route was a bit of a surprise; I expected it to be fairly flat (something I’d heard was a hallmark of native paths) but it was actually fairly hilly and rolling.

    We got into Vera Cruz, stopped to explore Jasper Park (sorry, no pictures this time), and then we went into Emmaus to get lunch. We came home on our usual route from Emmaus, which was once also a native path. And that was our little holiday!


  • Some Bike Love

    I had a slow leak on the Santa Cruz’s rear tire, which turned out to be a stuck valve and relatively easy to fix (disassembled and cleaned it), but then the next day the front brake felt super soft. I got new brake pads, replaced the front brake — fixed! I did the back brake as well the next day, and I also finally got the shifting dialed back in. It feels like a new bike…

    I took it out on the towpath Tuesday after the front brake fix, then again on Wednesday with the rear brake and shifting done as well. Both times were awesome, but on Wednesday I took the little alternate “fisherman’s trail” in Freemansburg. Big mistake!

    The whole trail was completely overgrown with downed trees, sticker bushes and nettles. I fought my way through — it took forever, I had to shorten my ride I took so long — and when I was back on the towpath I got a good look at my arms, which were completely covered in blood. Yikes! It was from the stickers, and it was really just a bit of blood from the tiny sticker scratches, mixed with sweat and looking worse than it really was — the nettles were far more annoying to be honest. But it sure looked dire; I took pictures but I won’t post them here.

    Post-ride shower, and my arms looked like it never happened. Bike is still great.


  • The Eagles of Merrill Creek

    Bald Eagle, Merrill Creek Reservoir

    We went kayaking at Merrill Creek Reservoir on Sunday, with Anne’s brother and his wife. It was a beautiful day for being outside, and a wonderful way to spend the day. Anne and Joe both brought binoculars and were checking out the local birds, I saw a bunch of turtles sunning themselves on a branch, but the best part was when Anne said “Look up there, a bald eagle!”

    It was just above us in a tree, a fully-grown (huge) adult watching the water for fish. We watched it watch the water for about ten minutes before it flew off, and Laura told us she’d heard that there were two nesting pairs of eagles living at the lake with their juvenile children.Not long after, we crossed the lake to another area, and saw another, smaller adult bald eagle, watching the water from a dead tree. Bonus!

    After that we paddled back to the boat launch. We were out on the water for about two hours in total, and afterward we got lunch in at a diner Washington, and a beer at a local brewpub before heading home. What a lovely day!


  • Fun With Bash

    I got to play with shell scripts a few times over the past few weeks, thought I’d talk about them:

    Wordle Helper

    I have a script I use to help me make my guesses when I play Wordle; it basically generates a list of available words based on my results, analyzes these available words (by checking the overall letter frequency, then scoring the words based on which letters they contain), and returns the word list with their scores, sorted by word score. This is especially helpful as a process of elimination, and most especially in the first rounds — I can confirm or eliminate the most common letters and quickly narrow down my choices (well, usually).

    I decided at a certain point that multi-letter combinations might be even more useful, so I wrote another script to score words based on the frequency of two-letter combinations. This worked well enough that I wrote a three-letter scoring script, and then realized that I should just write something generic that would score based on however many letters I would want in my combinations.

    For some reason I brought my laptop on vacation, and when things got quiet I broke it out and wrote the multiple-letter scoring script — it works like a charm. What I found though, is that there are diminishing returns for the letter combinations: there is no real advantage to use more than two letters. Still, this is a script that I use every day.

    Getting SSL

    Every 90 days I have to get a new SSL certificate for this website, so I can use the more secure “https” rather than plain “http.” This was once a pretty easy process, until my (free) certificate-generating organization got taken over by someone else. I found a much more onerous (but still free) web-based method and have used it for years, but I knew there had to be a better way.

    I eventually found something called getssl, a bash script that automates the process used by that onerous web-based approach. Ufortunately it’s meant to be run on the computer where the website resides, rather than on my local machine which is what I preferred, so I never really messed with it… Then one day I just set it up and ran it, and it basically did 99% of the work, generating the certificates and storing them on my laptop. All I had to do myself was install them manually, which was pretty easy. Awesome! The whole process went from an hour to about a minute, and I’ve been using getssl for almost a year now.

    But it still bothered me that I couldn’t get the whole process automated, and then last week I found an extra feature in getssl that would get me that final one percent; the only problem was that the extra feature would need to be modified to run on my machine rather than remotely. (This modification turned out to be fairly straightforward, which was a bit of a surprise actually.) I managed to make the code change just a few days ago — again, while out of town with my laptop — and my current certificate was installed, fully automatically, using the modified feature.

    Neither of these little projects were hard, but it’s so seldom that I do anything like this anymore that I was pretty proud of my accomplishments.


  • Ant Bait Recipe

    We have an infrequent, but still recurring ant problem: every few years or so, we find ants coming into our kitchen. Now is one of those times, and our go-to solution is to destroy the colony using homemade ant bait — a cotton ball soaked in sugar water (which also contains borax) brings them swarming, they bring the sugar water back to the hive and feed everyone else, and the borax kills them all over a few days. I currently have a cotton ball near their entrance point, and it is literally covered in ants…

    Anyway, when I went to set the bait I found that our previous batch was almost all gone. I couldn’t remember the exact proportions for the recipe so I had to do some Googling, and then I prorated what I found to fit in our container. For my readers, and for my own future self, here is the recipe:

    • 1/4 cup sugar
    • 1 tablespoon borax (we have this for our DIY laundry soap)
    • enough water to make 1 cup of the mixture

    Mix the borax and sugar into the water until it dissolves, then put it in a container and toss in some cotton balls to soak. That’s it!

    I put one cotton ball on the kitchen counter, and one at whatever entry point I can find, and change them every day or so when they dry out. This is a bit harder to do right now, because it takes as long as a week to wipe out the hive, but we can’t leave the bait out when we have Iris over. Still, it seems to be working; the ants are not in the kitchen anymore and I’m sure we’re almost done.


  • Vacation Photos

    Here are some photos from our Adirondack vacation. These photos are the ones not connected with any activity or event in particular, just shots I took while out and about.

    A lot of the nature shots were from walking around behind the cabin, near the Ausable River which was literally in our backyard. I also got a few good photos of some tree trunks behind the cabin:

    We did a few bike rides and a hike, and I got some photos on those as well but I think I’ll give them their own separate posts. Enjoy!


  • Greetings From The Adirondacks!

    Posted on by Don
    Our Cabin

    We’re away in the mountains near Upper Jay, NY — the AuSable river runs behind our place; Whiteface Mountain and Lake Placid are only a stone’s throw away. It’s Anne and me, Emmi & Kyle with Iris, Joe & Laura, Lorraine who arrived yesterday, and Ben & Jenny who arrived today. (The bulk of us have been here since Saturday.)

    We’re just hanging out, going for hikes and bike rides and brunches and shopping sprees — today I bought a hiking book, then coming home, dipping our toes & butts in the river, and just sitting around reading or playing with Iris. It’s been unseasonably warm for this area, but not too crazy.

    I’m feeling kind of lazy, and I’m pretty deep into “vacation mode” so I probably won’t post more until we get home, but we are having a great time.