• Storm’s A Coming

    Posted on by Don

    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!


    📂This entry was posted in day by day

  • Some Recent Ride Photos

    Posted on by Don

    Two recent rides, three photos:

    I did a ride along the towpath a week or so ago on a beautiful, sunny fall day. I wasn’t feeling particularly mellow, but there were a few places where I just had to stop and soak in the view. This was one spot, The Chain Dam is usually a pretty dramatic scene, with the old Locktender’s House on the other side of the river, and the hills of Williams Township in the background.

    river flowing over dam
    The Chain Dam
    autumn leaves in sunlight
    Autumn Leaves Along The Lehigh

    A little later on the same ride, I came to this spot just to the east of Freemansburg, and had to stop to take a photo. I took a bunch but this one — the first I took — turned out the best. I think that this is now one of my all-time favorites.

    Another day (Wednesday), another ride: I went out on the towpath with Doug, and we took the Two Rivers Trail to Hackett Park. There’s a pretty good view of the western part of Easton, Wilson Boro, and in the distance the hill (really, the garbage dump, sadly enough) in Williams Township. Still, it’s a great shot of my old neighborhood — I lived a few blocks from that water tower, and was living there when they built it.

    vista of a town across a valley
    Wilson Boro Seen From Hackett Park

    📂This entry was posted in day by day the sporting life 📎and tagged

  • Out and About

    Posted on by Don

    I started the day listening to GIS podcasts and, thus inspired, I went out to do some OpenStreetMapping. I’m now sitting in Zekraft Café, the new coffee place on Southside where Sagra Bean used to be, and blogging the adventure by phone. (I got a cup of coffee, and a poached egg with avocado toast.) Nice place, and soon it will be on the map…

    UPDATE: This didn’t publish from my phone until I got home — I think I might need to work on my security settings to get the WP app to work.


    📂This entry was posted in day by day

  • Two For Two, Times Two

    Posted on by Don

    We had our second Thanksgiving yesterday with Anne’s mom and some family. Turkey & rice soup, carrot soup, some bread and salads, and desserts of course. Lorraine and Ray stopped in, and Anne’s brother Frank came with Heather & Bruce and their son Isaiah (almost two, and this was the first time I’d seen him in real life), and Nick, and Holly with her boyfriend Chris. What a hoot! That little kid never stopped moving while we all hung out, gabbing and watching him do laps around the house.

    (Our “real” Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday was with Lorraine’s daughter Liz and her family, plus Lorraine and Ray. It was a very pleasant and low-key event: too much food, too much dessert, and some fun with the kids and board games afterward. Even the travel — they live outside York — wasn’t all that bad, the roads seemed fairly quiet.)

    Meantime, on the yardwork front… I managed to rake the leaves into the street just before the leaf cleanup a week or so ago, and no one parked on our leaf pile this year, and our leaves got taken — and then I managed to do it again, just before the second cleanup on Friday. This time I was “that guy” whose car was blocking the leaves; I moved the car just in time, and watched the giant leaf vacuum truck go by. I told Anne once how I loved watching the garbage men do their thing when I was little, and on Friday she reminded me about it, and laughed and said I hadn’t changed…

    I got the leaves done just in time too: the first snow fell last night. Luckily it was just a dusting, a warning shot, and it’s mostly gone already. We’re getting ready to ride the towpath in a few minutes.


    📂This entry was posted in day by day

  • Gratitude

    Posted on by Don

    Today was a beautiful fall ride on the towpath after my cello lesson. It was kind of spur of the moment, but the day was so nice (if chilly at first) that I’m now really glad I got out.

    Last night we stopped by John & Donna’s for post-turkey dessert — her brother was in town so they celebrated early — and we saw him and his son, Donna’s parents, Erin and Todd and baby Sloane, Brian and Sam, John’s boys, and Liz H-D. We didn’t stop in for too long, but it was nice to see everyone. (I also got to play cello duets yesterday with Liz’s mom; it was a full day.)

    Meanwhile, back at the official, obligatory Brooklyn-jerks-turned-Buddhist rappers Thanksgiving song post:

    Things I’m Grateful For

    • I’m alive, and I have my health.
    • I have a roof over my head, and food on the table, and financial security.
    • I’m blessed to have the family and friends I have, and I am thankful that we are all still here through these difficult times. Not all my friends can say this, many have lost someone to COVID — or just plain lost someone — but a good chunk of the people I care about most are still here.
    • I can ride my bike, and I’m thankful for the rides I’ve done, and the pleasure I got from them, and for the people I’ve shared those experiences with.
    • I can play my cello, and again I’m thankful for the pleasure it brings me, and the people it brought into my life.
    • I am thankful most of all for my love and life partner, Anne who is busy right now baking pies for tomorrow.

    This is a short and pretty abstract list, but our friend Julie just stopped in with her child Lee (who is here to get some knitting pointers), so I think I’ll wrap things up now.

    Happy Thanksgiving everybody!


    📂This entry was posted in day by day

  • Little Hacks

    Posted on by Don

    Just a few simple solutions to life’s little computer problems…

    WordPress

    When I post photos on my blog (in photo galleries, like the one here), if the photos have captions they show up when you hover over the photo thumbs. So far so good, but when the caption appeared it was at the top of the thumb, as opposed to appearing at the bottom, and the space used by the caption was much bigger than it needed to be, almost covering the thumbnail image. This has been driving me nuts for about a year; I assumed it had something to do with my offbeat WordPress theme, but yesterday I did some Googling and found people complaining about it, starting abut a year ago — apparently the offending caption styling was related to some WordPress update.

    I found several styling fixes posted online, but none seemed to work — it seems that a later WP update might have broken these fixes as well. The nature of these posted solutions gave me an idea though: I used Mozilla’s “inspect element” to get the CSS elements responsible for the captions, and used what I found to come up with a modification that would properly style my gallery figure captions. I added that to my theme’s custom CSS and it worked like a charm.

    Here is the new custom CSS that did the job, in case I need it again, or others need it and find themselves here:

    .wp-block-gallery.aligncenter .blocks-gallery-item figcaption, .wp-block-gallery.alignleft .blocks-gallery-item figcaption, .wp-block-gallery.alignright .blocks-gallery-item figcaption, .wp-block-gallery .blocks-gallery-item figcaption, .gallery figcaption {
     min-height: 5%;
     left: 0px;
     top: auto;
     height: auto;
     bottom: 0px;
     text-align: center;
     margin: auto;
}

    Fonts

    Fonts have always been a mysterious pain in the butt for me. It doesn’t help that I have hundreds of fonts installed by default, many with similar names and meant mainly for non-Latin alphabets. I was experimenting, searching for the right look for a document, and had to scroll through hundreds of useless fonts while trying to find something to suit me — very frustrating!

    I did some Googling, and I found I could just delete font files to get rid of them — but that’s a non-solution since I hate to throw anything away, you never know when you might need the perfect Linear B font…

    A little more research, and I eventually found and installed a simple utility called (surprise) “font manager,” which let me enable and disable fonts without deleting them. I spent some time shutting off my nuisance fonts, and now my word processing life is much simpler.


    📂This entry was posted in tech talk

  • A Quiet Friday, And A Quiet Week

    Posted on by Don

    Anne and I both got our booster shots yesterday, so today we’re just hanging out in case we start feeling sick. So far it’s just a sore arm — two sore arms in Anne’s case, since she also got her flu shot…

    Last night was a visit with Shari W at Lost Tavern. Nothing much to say about that really, it was just a pleasant evening.

    Wednesday afternoon we went over to the Museum of Industrial History with Judy J, starting with a pre-game lunch at La Lupita, and Tuesday was a cello day: practice in the morning and then duets with Donna H in the afternoon.

    I don’t even remember what happened Monday.


    📂This entry was posted in day by day

  • Good Day For Cellos

    Posted on by Don

    It’s raining out right now (though the weather is supposed to get nice later), and I am suffering from either allergies or a cold, so today is a good day to stay indoors and play the cello. Its also a good day for it because I haven’t played or practiced once this week…

    The past three days were spectacular, and that’s good because I was working as a Road Scholar guide again. This trip worked out much better than the last one, probably because:

    • there was a more manageable number of participants (12 vs 23), and they were all really nice,
    • the weather was perfect for cycling,
    • the bike transportation infrastructure had been improved,
    • I was not in charge, so I didn’t have to feel as responsible — though I certainly did my share of what needed doing, and last but not least…
    • there were no e-bikes! One guy used the Shawnee loaner e-bike when his own (regular) bike had trouble, but that was it.

    I wasn’t there for the first ride because of Monday’s funeral, so I probably missed the day everyone had to work the bugs out of the system, but things seemed to run very smoothly — the crew, and the participants, were all playing on a higher level than on other rides.

    The weather is improving moment-by-moment as I write this, but I’m sticking with my original plan. The quartet is playing Sunday, duets are Tuesday, and I have my lesson on Wednesday so there is definitely a groove I need to get back into.


    📂This entry was posted in day by day

  • One Day Like This A Year Would See Me Right

    Posted on by Don

    That’s the song that’s playing right now, and it sums up today for me. I met Doug for a ride at Jacobsburg, and we got in about 12 miles or so on some really beautiful trails — blue skies and fall colors, leaves on the ground rustling under our tires. There was still a frost on the ground when we started, though I can’t say we were particularly chilly either riding or standing around. Neither of us were particularly interested in going fast, we just enjoyed tooling around in the woods. Plenty of other people were out too, biking, hiking and riding horses, but the place was big enough that we weren’t on top of each other — there would just be a sociable moment every so often, when we came across some fellow trail users.


    It was an easy day to get up earlier than usual because of the time change, but also because Anne’s sisters were over for a visit, and we all just naturally got up early. They knitted and watched “The Great British Baking Show” yesterday, and while I was out riding they spent the day trying some of the “show stopper” recipes from the episodes they watched. Not a bad thing to come home to…

    Tomorrow is going to be a bit rougher: we have to go to the funeral for a friend’s grand-daughter, who died in a car accident the other day.


    📂This entry was posted in the sporting life