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.
Fourth of July, third day of vacation, a bit of a mellow day after yesterday’s hike. Anne and I got up early and went kayaking with Lorraine, Laura and Marie, and we might do a short walk on our dirt road soon, but we just finished lunch and the ladies are carding and spinning wool, and I’m just sitting here watching the lake and trying not to nap…
Wet day here, and its also a bit of a rest day, waiting for the oven repair man to show up. So, I’m off the bike for the day, and just in time because I’ve been feeling tired. Tomorrow I’ll be riding the towpath (volunteer work day at the Canal Museum), Thursday I’m meeting Renee out in State College to do some of the W101 course, Friday we’re going to the Wharton Esherick Museum, and then this weekend we go off for a week in the Adirondacks! Whew…
This weekend was a blur. Anne’s mom stayed with us from Thursday, the night of Anne’s concert — by the way, Anne is in a new orchestra, better than the last one IMHO but with the same playful spirit — through Saturday (when we went to a memorial service, and Marie got a ride home from there with Anne’s sister Lorraine). There were many people we knew in the concert audience, including Lorraine and Ray with their grandkids Jonah and Quinn, Toby and Erika with Josiah, Donna and John, and many people from the neighborhood. Afterward, we sat on the porch and sampled our new beer (the Two Hearted Ale clone — verdict: delicious) with John and Donna.
(By the way, I got in a short Towpath ride while Anne was picking up her mom. I only went to the boat club and back, but I was trying to push my heart rate, and ended up with a 15 mph average, better than any towpath ride this year.)
Friday was a quiet day, just hanging out, but I did get in a Sals ride, one where I felt pretty good on the trail.
Saturday was the memorial service for Marilyn, the mother of Anne’s sister-in-law Laura. She’d passed away just recently, and she’d been ill for a long while before that, but before her illness she’d been an incredible woman: vibrant, warm and loving, and a real force of nature and positive force in every life she touched; those were the memories that we celebrated. Afterwards we had a lunch at Joe and Laura’s with much family about, and many friends.
We went out that evening to catch up for a bit with Doug and Lori.
Sunday was the Steel City Enduro at Sals, and I went up to volunteer. I ended up running the start, no clue what I was doing but I think everyone survived, then I walked the course and did a little race-course cleanup after the riders went through. I was out of there by noon or so, so I could clean up and stop by John and Donna’s place for a picnic with their family. (Anne was off dealing with other mom-errands.)
Yesterday I woke up really tired, and it took me a while to actually be awake. Went for a Sals ride anyway, felt pretty good, then came home and took an hour-long nap…
We did another Bike Smart rodeo this morning, again only a few blocks from home. It was pretty low-key compared to some of the others, but still very fun, and I’m actually pretty proud that this is something I’m involved with. However…
When we got home, I saw on Facebook that today was also “Take A Kid Mountain Biking Day” at Trexler, and it was also the day of Curt Cyclery’s “Angel 34” century ride. Too many summer things in too few summer weekends, you’re going to have to make some hard choices.
Meantime, last night we had Indian food (the perfect food for this time of year), followed by a nice long walk, and tonight we’re having another Indian dinner, and then we’ll be heading out again.
Things are working out pretty well this week, weather-wise: Anne and I rode yesterday, down to Quakertown for lunch and back (we saw Scott S lunching at the cafe, and Lori P joined us for a coffee), enjoying a lot of good weather and about 10 minutes of storm along the way. Today I took as a rest day, and did my first stint volunteering at the National Canal Museum while the thunderstorms rolled through, and tomorrow I’ll be doing a road ride up and over Blue Mountain. Timing is everything.
I’m feeling a bit tired right now. Anne and I did the CAT/BikeSmart “Calypso Bike Day” at Calypso Elementary this morning. It’s really fun to watch the kids, some of them diffident at first, lacking skill or confidence, come to enthusiastically ride the bike course over and over with their friends — you can actually see them become better and more confident, even stronger, as they ride. My job was to sort of referee the course, and get the kids to stop at the stop signs we had out — not an easy task sometimes, but the kids do pick up on “who’s turn it is” at the intersections, and kid-land social pressures usually take it from there. Totally fun, for them as well as me, but keeping tabs on that chaos eventually left me feeling frazzled. It was over at noon, and I helped pack up and put things away and was home by one-thirty or so: hot, tired, over-stimulated and sunburnt, I came in, took a shower and napped for three hours.
FYI: At the end of the day we quizzed the school principal and found that the school was named for Calypso Island, a small island in the Lehigh. The more you know…
By the way, today is the eight-year anniversary of Anne’s and my first date. We’d been in the same crowd, meeting Tuesday nights for drinks, and slowly it became more common that our seats would be next to each other, and we would go out expecting to hang together, but this was the first time it was just us two.
Naturally enough, it was a bike ride. I came down Applebutter Road from Easton, and met her coming the other way just about where that S-turn is (towards the Freemansburg end of the road), and we went up and did the farm roads north of the Valley. We stopped at Brew Works afterward for a beer and snacks at an outside table, very cool and Euro.
It would be another month before we really considered ourselves an item, but I think of that ride as our first real date.
Morning weigh-in: 187.5#, 11% BF
Holding steady, which is good because yesterday sure wasn’t a ride day — dreary, rainy, and I was too tired. Anne had things to do, so I got up and futzed around with the computer and some house projects, then later in the afternoon we went to her office and I helped her with some painting. Last night was a retirement party for a friend in the neighborhood, and the weather had cleared up (it turned into a beautiful evening, actually) so we walked over. Very nice, and we slept like the dead when we got home.
This morning we both went to volunteer at the Bike Smart Easton bike day. Anne worked registration and helmets — every kid gets a new free helmet — and I helped with bike safety checks. It was a very busy couple of hours, and we just got home a few minutes ago. We had plans for this afternoon, but I think our next step will be a nap.
Tomorrow we go to visit her sister and family in Tamaqua, and Monday we’re helping Donna and John move, into a house right around the block from us.
Morning weigh-in: 187.5#, 13% BF
Just thought I’d check in, and brag (I was pushing 200# in March)…
The Sporting Life: The bike training continues apace, by the way. I’ve seen some definite improvement, in strength mostly. Endurance, not so much, but it should be coming. I have started riding Lehigh and Sals again, and I even broke out the singlespeed last night for Jacobsburg. What I really need is long road rides, sigh.
Meantime, Anne and I also signed up for the Hersey Half Marathon in October. Her sister, and a bunch of her nieces and nephews are doing it too. I should — hopefully — be ready in time.
Reading: I just finished The Mathematician’s Shiva, by Stuart Rojstaczer. Very good book, an awesome, well-written and well-structured read, with a great story — by turns funny and heartbreaking — with a lot of interesting math and science tidbits thrown in. It’s the story told by a professor of his mother, a towering figure in the world of mathematics who passes away, and the chaos that descends on their family when all her former students, acolytes, and adversaries come to pay their respects. There are also many jumps back to her early life, her work in mathematics, family history and dynamics, and academic and international politics. Just a really good book.
RIP Joe Martin: I had a funeral of my own to go to recently. My cousin Joseph Martin passed away a few weeks ago. He’d been suffering for many years with Huntington’s Disease, and had been institutionalized and bedridden for probably the last fifteen, and now his struggle is over. So sad, he was one of my older cousins, just two years older than me, and was the one I studied, as a pre-teen and teenager, for what “cool” was supposed to look like for me in a year or two.
The wake and funeral were both in his home town on Long Island, and many of his old friends and hockey teammates came, as well as a large portion of the Long Island side of my Dad’s extended family. The funeral home was just up the block from where Joe grew up — the last time I was there was 2002, for his mother’s funeral, and he was buried in the nearby cemetery with his mother. My cousin Wayne came up from Florida; he brought the ashes of his parents, and after Joe’s service we had a small ceremony at the cemetery, where they will be buried with their daughter, my cousin Suzanne who died at 19 in 1967. (We stood around and marveled at the massive trees that weren’t even there when she was buried.) A sad day, but one with a bit of closure, and it was good to see so many of my relatives, and hear so many stories…
GRAMPS, QGIS, Postgres: All that family talk, and all the photo albums that were bandied about, got me thinking about geneaology again, so I got that GRAMPS program up and running, and started updating what I had in there. I have about 250 people listed, but for many of them I don’t have much information other than where they fit in the family tree. Birth dates, death dates, where they lived or worked or got married, even for relatively close relatives I’m missing information. Working on it, along with everything else I’m fussing with.
It’ll be a whole other post, but I’ve also been playing with Geographic Information Systems using GRASS and QGIS (mostly QGIS), and that led me to start messing around with databases. I’d already installed and played with MySQL for a while, but even if it’s everywhere MySQL is not all that advanced (especially for GIS), and so I also got PostgrSQL/PostGIS up and running. I played with those for a bit, but sort of ran out of interest. Until…
I started thinking again about one of my pet peeves (lack of information about old family photos), and since I was hyped up about metadata after reading a book about it, I thought I should be able to do something to capture or store that information, especially electronically, when or if they got scanned. (I’m talking about who took the picture, when/where it was taken, who are the people in the photo, stuff like that.) Anyway, there are all sorts of methods, including embedded metadata in the image files (like EXIF data for digital photos, only these are XML-based and show different info); even GRAMPS could be used with a little work, but I finally decided on a Postgres database using LibreOffice Base to be the front end. I have been on a steep learning curve — mostly LibreOffice, and mostly YouTube tutorials with droning voice-overs, so I do it when Anne’s not around — ever since.
It’s coming down like it did 20 years ago, almost to the day — “it” being the snow, and it’s been dumping here since last night around 9:00. I just came in from a second shoveling of our sidewalk and porch, and I’d guess that we already got 24″, though it’s also very windy too, and straight snow depth is hard to tell because of all the drifts. I haven’t even tried digging the cars out yet.
(The papers have all been talking about the “Blizzard of ’96” lately, and contrasting it with this winter, which has been snow free and relatively warm up until today. Well, we got our party…)
Today has mostly been sitting here, playing Internet radio and playing with the computer, and occasionally shoveling. We may try snowshoeing tonight, or cross-country skiing later (or tomorrow), though the snow seems like the wrong consistency. We shall see — tomorrow is pretty much going to be “Winter Wonderland” time; going out right now seems too much like work.
Just kicking back on a Sunday afternoon, playing with the computer and brewing beer…
As you may know from my post at the old place, some changes are in the air for this new year — and for the record, I did give my notice at work, on my first day back from Christmas break, negotiating a deal where I would be laid off at the end of February (thus getting severance pay, which is not insignificant) — but there have been a few other changes I made over the winter break:
Computer Upgrade: The operating system on my laptop was Ubuntu 10.04, which was so old it was completely unsupported. This was basically because I didn’t like the newer Ubuntu window/desktop setup, so I procrastinated and procrastinated, until the software on my machine was obsolete, and my only upgrade option was a complete re-installation of a more modern system, which would mean all sorts of headaches. But the time finally came, headache or no, and I started getting ready to make the move.
The one good thing about a complete re-installation was that I no longer constrained (by simplified upgrade convenience) to stay with Ubuntu. There are all sorts of Linux distributions out there, including one based on Ubuntu called Linux Mint, which purports to keep the user interface more like the older ones, even while using the new underlying architecture. Long story short, I installed the latest Mint system.
I’ll fill out the longer story later in other posts, but so far I’m pretty happy with the new system, even though there have been a lot of growing pains and I’m still having my frustrations.
Biking Goals (An “Uh-Oh Moment”): My friend Renee did the Shenandoah 100 last year, and had a blast doing it. She knew that I’d done similar things in the past, so prior to her race she asked me for advice, tips etc, and then came back after the race aglow with war stories, and said “we should totally do the Wilderness 101 together next year.” All this enthusiasm already had me going “hmmmmm…” and Anne was also like “you should do it,” so I am going to race the Wilderness 101 this summer.
The decision to do this was made a few months ago, but the training regimen I put in place only began in earnest at the start of the year. Given the fact that I DNF’ed the last time I raced the W101 (in 2009), and my strength/fitness/endurance/etc has only gone down since then, I have a lot of work to do, even though my only real goal is to finish. I just finished two weeks of easy rides on the Lehigh Towpath, and I already feel both exhausted and like I am falling behind. Welcome back to the rat race, Mr. Kelly…
