- Happy Birthday to me!
- Happy Anniversary to us!
- I just added Chapter 100 (Saint Joseph’s Path) to my Indian paths database.
That is all…
- Category Archives day by day
This is the category closest to just being a plain diary. Places I go, things I do, people I see, what’s happening in my life.
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Staying On The Straight And Narrow
So I’m starting to get ready for the next set of Road Scholar rides. I’ve done the (now deprecated) Bethlehem-Easton towpath ride over and over again, and I think I have a good feel for trail conditions in this section. I’ve also done the section from Lehighton to Cove Road, which is the replacement for the Bethlehem-Easton section, and I did the Cherry Valley ride with Anne and Julie just the other day; that leaves the Allamuchy and the Lehigh Gorge rides to do in the next week or so, and then I should have a good idea of what to expect.
I’ve been trying to ride more and more lately, and not just recon rides — I need to bring myself up to summer fitness, and I’m also trying to lose weight (again). Anne and I have both taken up the practice of intermittent fasting, where we skip eating two days each week. We fast on Mondays and Thursdays, and we’ve been at it for maybe three weeks now. it’s both easier, especially physically, and harder (psychologically) than I expected: hunger pangs are no big deal, but that whole late-evening-check-the-fridge snacking out of boredom or nervous energy is a whole other ball game…
Anyway, here’s the weight loss saga for 2022 in graph form:
My fluctuating weight, winter 2022 Yesterday was a hike with the old Chain Gang crew (Doug & Lori, Eric & Kris, Joe & Cindy, Greg & Judy) up at the Lehigh Gap Nature Center, and today I’ll be tooling around on the new bike, dialing it in.
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My That Was Quick
Wow, so much for one of my resolutions: I’d hoped and expected to be blogging multiple times a week, maybe daily, but definitely a lot more frequently than I have. I guess February was a pretty short month after all, eh?
So today was a cello duets make-up day: I was down visiting my parents on Tuesday, and Donna was busy with something as well, so our usual date wouldn’t work; we would usually just let it roll over to the next week, but since they’re going on vacation for the next few weeks, we thought we’d better get some playing in…
Meantime, my cello/bassoon ensemble met on Sunday, for the first time in probably two years. There were a few people missing, and a few new faces as well — I’m no longer the greenest cellist in the room. A milestone: our bassoonist Milt just celebrated his 93rd birthday! Anyway, it was a fun evening, and I felt I played well — all of us did, really.
Mud season looks like it’s coming to an end — we never really had a “snow season” this year — and Doug and I got in a pretty decent towpath ride yesterday. Spring isn’t here, but it’s just around the corner.
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Snowblind!
That was us, Anne and me after our long-postponed eye exams. It was last Thursday, and the day was snowy and overcast when we walked over to the eye doctor. On the way home, with our pupils dilated after the exam, the sun came out and the brilliance was overwhelming…
Yesterday was a hike with Doug & Lori. Our planned hike was basically Bake Oven Knob, but the final section of mountain road to the trailhead — straight up, “not maintained in winter” — was too icy and treacherous to drive. We conferred a bit, and went instead to the Lehigh Gap Nature Center and walked some of the trails there. None of us remembered to bring our Yak-Trax or any other winter hiking gear except warm clothes, and the trails — surprise! — were pretty icy. We had an interesting climb up, and an even more interesting hike down at the the end, but it was a good day out, and good to hang out with those guys.
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Native Paths Update
I kept at it, and am now about a quarter of the way through the trails — the motorway parts, at least — in my Indian Paths of Pennsylvania project. I have a pretty good idea of how the book is organized now, and came up with a pretty decent workflow that gets me through a single path in just under an hour. I do one or two a day. It’s pretty easy to get absorbed, trying to find the tiny old roads and landmarks based on their descriptions in the book, and I’ve been totally sucked into the history of that Colonial-Revolutionary era. (I picked up Mason & Dixon again, since it goes right through the middle of that time and place.)
I also think there will be some epic rides this summer, based on these routes — I’ve been drooling over some of the scenes I see in Google Street View.
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I’ll Always Have September
Meanwhile: Happy New Year! We had a really good time, hanging out with Ben and Candace and a few of our neighbors. We also had Anne’s family Christmas celebration this Saturday, pretty much the final event of the season. Now it’s time to pick up the pieces, and maybe make some resolutions. Actual “resolutions” may take some time to formulate, but I do know one thing I want to get back to — weight loss. Read it and weep:
My weight loss saga in graph form That’s quite a yo-yo trick! I guess I’ll have to get serious about losing that weight all over again…
By the way, this is what I wrote fifteen years ago.
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Some Christmas Photos
Here are some photos from some recent events:
Luminaria 
Luminaria
These are the Luminaria in front of our house. Luminaria Night had been postponed twice because of crazy bad weather, and the second rain date wasn’t all that great either — it was so windy that the candles kept blowing out. Still, plenty of people put them out, and we went for a walk with John & Donna and Matt & Diet to check out the displays. We visited several neighborhoods, including the historic district, and eventually ran into Scott & Kellyn, and even sang some carols at Jeff & Kristen’s house. That was a fun night out!
On Thursday we did the CAT Christmas Lights Ride through Bethlehem. These are some photos from one of the must-see stops just at the western edge of our neighborhood. Some guy basically has every square yard of his house and property lit up, well, like a Christmas tree. The owner came out — he remembered us from last year — and talked about his display and how he manages it, and then we moved on.There were many more displays, but non beat this house:
Christmas Lights 
Christmas Lights
Finally, some photos of our Christmas visit with my parents. Me and Anne, Mom and Dad, and Chris & Tara with Maureen and a surprise visit from Chris Jr, who flew in on an earlier flight.
Chris With A Present 
Tara And Maureen 
Chris 
Chris, Tara and Maureen 
Mom, Chris and Tara 
Tara With A New Sweater
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Waiting For The Snow
Merry Christmas, everybody!
We had an awesome Christmas, spread out over several days: there was the CAT Christmas lights bike ride (followed by a get-together with neighbors a bit later) on Thursday evening, then we visited Anne’s mom on Christmas Eve and my parents on Christmas Day, and saw Anne’s brother Joe and family yesterday.
Now I’m just sitting here, reading some of my Christmas loot and doing a bit of mapping, and waiting for the weather to do …something. Earlier forecasts called for a “wintry mix,” which is basically the seasonal version of the generic “chance of rain/whatever,” but then the forecast changed to a possibility of up to an inch of snow, along with sleet and some freezing rain. I’ve been looking out the window pretty regularly since I got up this morning — nothing: the streets are dry, and though it’s overcast right now, the sun broke through a few times already today. I’m not holding my breath…
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Oh No Not That Again (Part 1 of 2)
I’ve been looking at my Lehigh Valley bike commuter routing project again.
I decided to update the recommended routes with additions based on some of our recent CAT rides, and found that the line geometries representing the various routes were missing. It’s no biggie, some things didn’t survive those destructive “upgrades” I did a few years ago, and the actual recommendation info is stored in among the road network data anyway.
But, I still had the old routes as GeoJSON files, and it’s easier to work with them as geometries in their own right than as attributes on the road network, so I added them back into the database. Then I added that new route (Cedar Street, which parallels Union Boulevard but is much quieter), and used it to update the network. Piece of cake!
I also decided to tackle the problem of updating the network paths themselves, which is not so much a piece of cake. I get the roads from OpenStreetmap, and there are mostly automated tools to build a routing network from OSM road data, and that’s followed by a whole lot of additional data massage to put it in the form I use. But the underlying OSM data isn’t always accurate — roads don’t go where they are supposed to, intersections don’t actually connect, that sort of thing. I would find a lot of this out after building the network, but the task of editing the network, once it’s built, is so onerous that my preferred method has been to fix the issues in OpenStreetmap, then just download the roads and rebuild the whole network from scratch — also onerous, but slightly less so.
Anyway, I planned to make this a part of the usual site maintenance if this ever went live: maybe once a month I would download the OSM roads, rebuild the network, and then install all my extra stuff, and in between these upgrades I would fix OpenStreetmap whenever I found a problem.
The last time, and in fact the only time, I ever went through this updating process, was October 2018. I did some serious cleanup on OSM before that, so the map was in pretty good shape, but I got an embarrassing surprise when I demo’ed it to John R (an actual computer professional), who was thinking of commuting to Easton via the towpath. I’d just added offroad path options, and I was eager to show John my new toy, but the program refused to route onto the towpath at Sand Island — there was a missing intersection! A classic case of “broken demo.”
The need for (and my interest in) the routing program faded not long after that, so, although I cleaned up the offending roads and paths on Sand Island within OpenStreetmap, I never did download any newer road versions. And that’s how it sat for three years, until this week…
(to be continued)
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Storm’s A Coming
Pretty weird weather right now, warm and gray and on the verge of raining. We went for a walk over to the South Side this morning, wearing our raincoats (but we didn’t bring umbrellas), and it was spitting every so often. We were one-for-three on the coffee shops: Zekraft (the new place) is closed Mondays, and so is Lit, and we found this out by trying the doors at each of them, and so that’s how we found ourselves at Deja Brew. Pretty nice place, even if it isn’t usually on our cafe radar… On the way home we stopped at a candy store, and now I’m humming along on caffeine and jelly beans.
The Weekend
We had a bit of a blowout on Friday night, at least by our standards: we walked over to Christkindlmarkt with Scott and Kellyn, and grabbed dinner and a few beers afterward at F & A Grog House, the new place where McGrady’s used to be. It’s run by some of the old Which Brew and Porter’s crew, and it has serious bar food and a a great beer selection. We scarfed down our burgers and brews, and then…we walked back over the river to Joe’s Tavern, where we met our neighbor Christine for karaoke. Kellyn and Christine both sang, two songs each in fact, but Anne and I just kicked back and enjoyed the people-watching. The place was packed (we even saw our old friend Maria E), and we didn’t get home until after 1:00.
Saturday morning should have had a slow start, but we had a CAT ride in the morning, and so we were out of the house by about 9:30. Our ride went through East Allentown, across the Tilghman Street Bridge (still closed for construction, but open to bikes) and through Jordan Park, before returning by way of Luna Bakery. I had myself a good nap in the afternoon, and Sunday was pretty subdued.
GnuCash, Again
I’m currently looking over our last year’s finances, and once again I’m making a stab at using GnuCash. This is a great, open-source accounting/money-management program, and I’ve managed to get a lot of benefit out of it before, but every time I’ve used it I ran into the same problem: my use case is pretty simple, but the program is so full of features that my simple project starts suffering from “scope creep,” and in the meantime the program requires a lot of detail-oriented data entry, only some of which is easily automated — it gets tedious if I try to do too much, which is pretty much inevitable once my ambitions kick in. We’ll see what I can get out of it this time. KISS!
