• 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.

  • Another Green Cusp

    Posted on by Don

    Happy Spring! It’s raining right now, like early April Showers rain, but yesterday was really nice and I got in a decent ride through Cherry Valley.

    This was the third of my four reconnaissance rides to be ready for next week’s Road Scholar program; we’ll be doing this as a point-to-point ride, Cherry Valley Winery to the Water Gap bakery, but I got in double the miles to get back to my car. The ride was super pleasant, especially the outbound loop — when I turned around I found myself riding into a slight headwind the whole way back, but even with the wind it was a beautiful day on the bike.

    Today is more Road Scholar prep, tonight is nothing in particular, and tomorrow is more prep, getting any last-minute items like tubes or zip-ties etc. I’d like to ride the Lehigh Gorge trail this Saturday, I’m hoping but we’ll see.


    day by day the sporting life

  • Top Of The Morning!

    Posted on by Don

    Happy St Patrick’s Day!

    I’m just hanging out while the furnace guy does some repair work (a little more than routine, but nothing major), waiting to see what the weather decides to be today — I woke up to some drizzly weather, but now the sun looks like it might come out. A soft day, as they might say in the Old Country…

    I got in a decent towpath ride on Wednesday, once again killing multiple birds with one stone: I wanted to survey the route for the upcoming Road Scholar ride, maybe taking a few pictures along the way, and I also wanted to get in a D&L trail patrol ride.

    Wednesday (like most days this week) was windy and a bit chilly, but the ride was pleasant and the trail surface was much more solid than I would have expected. I guess that with so little snow for the ground to absorb, it didn’t take much for the recent wind to dry things out. There weren’t all that many people on the trail, but I did see my old friend Kim H walking her dog, so we caught up for a bit before I continued on my way. My total distance was about 25 miles, and my total time, what with the wind and all the photography and socializing, was almost three hours.

    I saw a few reportable issues on the ride, mostly garbage piles, so I documented them (with QField), and when I got home I tried uploading the incidents to my QGIS “trail reports” project before reporting them for real. (The trail patrol stuff is completely separate from and independent of the QGIS project, but hey I guess I just like doing things twice.) I thought that my recent network improvements would make the upload process smoother, and it probably would have but I use QField so seldom that I mostly just frustrated myself relearning what to do. Eventually I got it done, and also logged my trail patrol report.

    Yesterday was another D&L day, volunteering at the Museum. I did some bike work and helped with moving some old exhibits into storage. Dinner was El Jefe take-out at Bonn Place, visiting with Anne’s friend Sarah. Today we’re going to see Chris Smither play at Godfrey Daniels, and then tonight is a St Patrick’s party in Jim Thorpe. Slainté!


    day by day

  • Walkabout

    Posted on by Don

    Anne’s been gone all week, in Denver helping Emmi with Iris while Kyle came here to do some real estate transactions. He went home Friday, and I’ve been living the bachelor life this weekend. I’m right now waiting for Anne’s much-delayed flight to arrive; I’ve got a little time to kill so here’s another post…

    These are some pictures I took on a walk a few weeks ago. I was just rambling around, on Sand Island and across the Lehigh bridges, no special agenda but I did get a few nice photos, mostly of the river and of Monocacy Creek.

    Bethlehem Steel from Sand Island
    Sand Island: Monocacy Creek
    Sand Island: Monocacy Creek
    The Lehigh River from the Fahy Bridge
    Lehigh River and Bethlehem Steel
    Sand Island: Canal Lock and Aqueduct

    day by day nature journal 📎and tagged

  • Recent Reads

    Posted on by Don

    I am currently reading three books:

    Foster (by Claire Keegan), is about a young girl who is sent to live with another family. The book isn’t a long one (I’m about halfway through); it’s very well written, and a sweet story (so far), but there’s a growing feeling of foreboding, of another shoe about to fall… Anne recommended this to me after she read it. Interestingly, the story takes place in Wexford, Ireland, where some of my ancestors came from, and where we spent some time on our honeymoon.

    Cloud Cuckoo Land (Anthony Doerr) is another recommendation from Anne. I just got it from the library last night on my tablet, so I’m only a few pages in but I’m already liking it.

    The last book is a loan from Jeff. Evening in the Palace of Reason (James R. Gaines) is about the fateful meeting between Johann Sebastian Bach and Frederick The Great, the generational and cultural clashes represented by that meeting, and the resulting creation of A Musical Offering. It’s a great story, but the best part of this book is the background material: digressions, biographies, histories of musical theory, the Reformation…

    I keep moving from one to the other, to the other. They’re all great.

    Some other recent reads:

    Still Life by Louise Penny, the first novel in her Inspector Gamache mystery series. Anne loves these books, and so do several of her friends and they’re always talking about them, so I thought I’d give the first one a try. The book was pretty good, and I can see why people like it, but I have to say I’m still not a fan of mysteries — especially here, where the author’s head fakes, misdirection, and general control of the information flow was a bit on the clumsy side. I’ll probably read the second one eventually (where the author may hit her stride a little better), but I’m making no promises about the entire series.


    day by day

  • Eyeball Kid

    Posted on by Don

    So I started seeing a dermatologist last spring, not long before our big Alberta trip. He gave me the once-over — I even got a biopsy — and recommended a new eczema medication called Adbry. It’s something you take by injection every two weeks, with an initial double dose which you have to redo if you mess up your dosage schedule, so I held off on the new medication until we got back.

    It took about a month to kick in, but then it really started working — I have no idea of the how’s or why’s, but my life was like “eczema? what eczema?” This was the most effective eczema treatment I’d ever had, and one of the best things in my life.

    Until it wasn’t.

    Adbry has a known side effect, affecting about 8% of the people who take it, which causes them to get conjunctivitis (aka “pinkeye”), and I won that lottery: starting sometime in November my eyes started getting itchy, and irritated, and really red. (Again, I have no idea of the mechanism, but it was like all my eczema problems were taken from my skin and transferred to my eyeballs…) At first it wasn’t too bad, but then the constant watery eyes started to affect my vision, especially for things like reading, and the irritation made sunlight, or even bright lights, uncomfortable. I saw the dermatologist, and he referred me to my eye doctor. The eye doctor initially tried some milder treatments, which were OK but not 100% effective so he put me on steroid eye drops, and they seem to be doing the trick. I am now tapering off the drops, and going for weekly eye exams — steroids come with their own set of issues. Meantime, I discontinued the Adbry.

    I had a problem, I took that stuff, now I have two problems… the eczema is kind of manifesting again, but it’s not all that bad yet, and the dermatologist may have another treatment recommendation for me when I seem him in a few weeks.


    day by day

  • Fun With Networks

    Posted on by Don

    So the other big news, that I didn’t actually talk about last week, is that Emmi and Kyle are looking to move back East — specifically, they are moving to Bethlehem in the spring. Awesome news! But that also means a lot of work, as they must now shop for a home long distance…

    We’re helping where we can, looking online for suitable houses, searching the neighborhoods for new “FOR SALE” signs, etc, and we went on a walk-through of one hot prospect the other day with the realtor. Emmi & Kyle participated on Zoom, and I documented the walk-through on video.

    That all worked out pretty well, but when I got home I saw my video file was pretty big, like 2.5 GB, too big for regular email, so I tried sharing it to Google Drive. I clicked the link, and it said “uploading” but there’s no progress indication, and more than an hour later it’s still hanging fire, so I canceled the upload. I figured I could just put it on my laptop and move it from there, but the USB cable was wonky and won’t connect data; I tried moving it via FTP but the file is on my auxiliary memory card and the server wouldn’t access it. Cue that song about the hole in the bucket…

    So now what?

    Well, I’d set up an SMB share on my laptop a while ago, so I can share things from the laptop to other devices on the network, but it was deliberately set up to be read-only for guest accounts — I don”t want people to be able to come along and dump arbitrary files onto my computer. What I forgot I did though, and remembered in the heat of this debacle, is that I’d also made the share read/write for an authorized regular user (like, say, me with my regular login and a password) — hmmm, maybe I’ll give that a try. The SMB connection on the phone was set up to be anonymous, so I had to change a few settings, but after that I was able to move things easily from either the phone or the laptop over to the other. I tested it on that big video file, which took some time to transfer but it worked fine, and then I just uploaded the file in the usual way to Google Drive. Easy peasy!

    (I also made those changes to my tablet settings, so I can share files the same way there.)


    day by day tech talk

  • Some Photos From Our Trip

    Posted on by Don

    We passed through 30th Street Station on our way to the airport, and that’s where I got these photos of the bas relief sculpture “Spirit of Transportation” and a moment when no one was walking in front of it:

    “Spirit of Transportation” in 30th Street Station
    “Spirit of Transportation,” a closer look.

    That was on our first attempt at flying out (the flight that got canceled), when I was feeling pretty optimistic. I didn’t take many other photos after that, until we were safely in our AirBnB, when we had a good night’s sleep behind us and were ready to receive visitors.

    The star of the visit was Baby Iris (of course):

    Ben With Iris
    Ben And Iris
    Ben And Iris
    Iris and Me
    Iris and Me
    A Christmas Angel
    Uncle Ben With Iris

    The next day it snowed, mostly overnight but totals were 8″-plus throughout the area. My eyes had been bothering me, and the bright sun on the snow was a bit much so I NOPE’ed out of any outdoor fun and just stayed indoors. Ben made an awesome chicken pot pie for dinner.

    Denver, Post-Snowstorm
    Denver After the Snowstorm
    Piano Room
    Anne and Ben
    Ben’s Chicken Pot Pie
    Dinner!

    Just a few more photos of Iris:

    Anne With Iris
    Anne With Iris
    Iris

    Then our trip was over, and we took the red-eye back to Philly. We got breakfast with Ben downtown, before we all went our separate ways:

    Anne & Ben in Philly
    Ben and Ann in Philly

    day by day

  • Welcome to 2023

    Posted on by Don

    Anne and I were exhausted on New Year’s Eve after all our traveling, but we rallied a bit and had a few friends over: John & Donna (with Finn and Sloane) and Sean & Jennifer. Snacks, drinks and catching up, low key and pleasant; John & Donna left with the kids relatively early but Jen & Sean were here almost to midnight. (We made it to about 12:10 ourselves, watching the neighbors up the street shoot some fireworks before crashing.)

    New Year’s Day was pretty low key — we did a short walk down to Sand Island with John and Donna (again with Finn & Sloane), and even saw some people doing the Polar Bear Challenge in the Lehigh.

    Yesterday I got together with Doug, and also Renee & John to do a towpath ride — we rode to Easton and then took the trail up to Tatamy and back. It was a pretty big ride for this time of year, almost 39 miles, cold and even rainy at times. After I got home, Anne and I made a housewarming visit to Scott & Kellyn at their new home, and then I came home and visited naptime …

    Today is a rainy day. Anne is in NY visiting with her sister, and I am here working through my to-do list backlog (cello, blogging, etc). Trying to stay on top of things, trying to keep some new leaf, or even the same old leaves, turned over. I’ll probably post some resolutions in the next day or so.

    Anyway, Happy New Year!


    day by day

  • There And Back Again

    Posted on by Don

    Well, we’re back! Our new flights out to Colorado (on American Airlines) worked fine; we got in late Monday night and were entertaining visitors at our rented AirBnB home by Tuesday morning… Emmi and Kyle came over with Iris, and we ate cookies and made lunch and dinner and played with the baby; it was a wonderful day. Our big Beef Bourguignon Christmas Dinner was on Wednesday, and the rest of the week (Thursday and Friday) was more hanging out and cooking and eating, and just enjoying being together.

    Our trip back was on Frontier — yikes! — but things went smoothly this time: we were in the air a little after midnight, and on the ground in Phillly by about 6:00 or so. One last breakfast with Ben in Center City and then we took the train back to Landsdale, where we’d parked the car. We were home just before noon.

    I’ll post more about our trip (including pictures) when I get the chance, but in the meantime Happy New Year!


    day by day 📎and tagged