This is what I wrote five years ago, ten years ago, and fifteen years ago.
Meantime and by the way, Roy Edroso is a national treasure.
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Make Room For Cellos
I got in about an hour playing yesterday (not counting my Zoom lesson), and about another hour this morning, which are good things because cello sometimes to seems to sink to the bottom of the priority list, and the day moves along and suddenly it’s too late to play, or I’m too tired or other things are going on… So I have to make the time, preferably in the late morning when I’m fresher.
I’ve been making some pretty good strides lately though, working with some books of exercises (fingering positions, bowing), which have helped with my two “ambition” pieces: Miska Hauser’s “Berceuse,” and “Bouree” (I and II) from Bach’s Cello Suite in C Major. “Berceuse” is coming along, and I’m starting to feel I’ve mastered the piece, or at least I’m getting there, but “Bouree” is still a struggle. Yo-Yo Ma is doing a live show of all of Bach’s cello suites tomorrow, so I’m hoping for a bit of inspiration.
Meantime, I did a bit of cleanup on that new map — fixing some bugs and adding features, and changing the marker icons to more closely match the ones in my original QGIS project. I also did a bit of housekeeping here, adding a new menu item at the top for non-blog projects (like the map).
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Yet Another Half-Finished Magnum Opus
I put the D&L trail data online, formatted as a map/website that I hope could be useful to someone, as soon as I fix a few tweaks — and add the missing portion of trail. Meantime,
Click Here
Enjoy! I’ll soon be adding some more useful UI parts soon, and eventually I’ll get to the trail stuff south of Riegelsville.
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Trail Project Update
I got those new amenities into my D&L trail amenities database — it was a piece of cake, once the data was cleaned up. The whole process went smoothly, even the main database report (done through Jaspersoft Studio, which can be a pain in the neck to work with) digested the new information without any glitches.
But I couldn’t leave well enough alone after that: I decided to add the amenities between Allentown and Northampton where the trail is incomplete. My original feeling was that the trail would be too vague through here — where are the “access points,” the intersections between the trail and the wider world’s road network, if you’re riding on the roads and there is no specific trail? But I’ve been riding this section a bit more lately, since it’s not been inundated with users like other sections, and discovered that much of it is only “unfinished” in the sense that it’s not up to the specifications of the rest of the D&L; it’s perfectly rideable on a mountain bike, and actually more fun than the more polished sections. If you don’t mind riding the rougher stuff there’s not much trail missing, and the remaining road portions are remote enough that there’s no need to worry about nearby amenities.
So, I repeated the process for the incomplete section: identify trail access points, import amenities from OpenStreetMap (and then clean them up, by far the most laborious part) and finally tie access points to amenities using that routing distance matrix script. Again, it worked like a charm.
…and then I started thinking about what I might want for output. That Jasper Studios report is nice, but the current output is a PDF — ugh, not very net-friendly — and I thought it might be nicer to get a more straightforwardly data-oriented output, something I can massage and format as necessary in a browser, something like JSON. Unfortunately, though Jaspersoft can do JSON output, I couldn’t quite figure how to get it to do what I wanted. Postgresql, the database I’m using, has JSON capabilities of its own, and final-product-straight-from-the-database seems like a better approach, but I didn’t know much else about those capabilities, so I sat down over the past few days and doped it out. The learning curve was pretty steep, more like a brick wall, and my code is pretty convoluted but I did get it to work. Of course, this success is just a lead-in to another escalation: if I want a web page I now have to code out the rest of the stack.
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Speaking of Eating
We’ve been eating a lot of salad greens, and also turnip greens (that come with the turnips), and I turned to an old go-to recipe: pasta and tuna with wilted greens. I learned the “tuna in olive oil over pasta” thing from my work friend Vito, probably more than 20 years ago at this point, and over the years I modified the recipe to add spring greens. (I actually wrote up a vegetarian version — sans the tuna — for a recipe exchange once.) We had it with tuna one time this week, and another time I made it with smoked mussels. Both were excellent…
Meantime, this is what I wrote ten years ago.
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Finally Something To Chew On
So we finished Devs (which, after all that buildup, ended on a disappointing note), and we just started Community, but I’m not really feeling it yet. I’m a reader and I don’t expect to be engrossed by any show for long, but even reading I’ve been struggling to find something I actually like right now. I picked up a few new sci-fi novels recently, but found most of them juvenile and annoying; re-reads of old favorites, in any genre, end up testing my patience…
Luckily, my streak ended with Hilary Mantel’s new The Mirror and the Light, the final book in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy. I’m about a hundred pages in, less than a quarter of the way through the book, and I’m totally engrossed. The story picks up just after the execution of Ann Boleyn, where the last book ended, and though I know how it all ends — after all, everyone in it has been dead, and buried in the history books, for centuries — it’s amazing to watch Cromwell’s virtuoso performance, like someone juggling on a high wire, trying to keep Henry VIII’s kingdom from imploding.
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Some Projects
We’ve been watching our shows, and getting out when we can for walks and bike rides, but what else have we been up to?
Gardening
I did a bit of cleanup in the front, but we’ve been mostly working in the backyard, and most of the gardening so far has been food rather than ornamental: last week we ripped up the weeds in our old garden and worked in a bunch of compost. Anne had planted things like radishes a few weeks ago in a separate raised bed, which are coming up nicely, and with the old garden back in play we have three more beds starting to sprout.
We also have a bunch of day-lilies I planted a year or so ago — they were gifts from when Lorraine thinned her own garden — which I had given up for dead, but this year they came up strong and hardy, and look to be in good shape. So, I cleaned out the weeds that might choke them, and also put, in the same spot, a few potted herbs we had languishing in the kitchen. We’ve had a few freezes since then, so we’ll see how the herbs fare.
Here are a few photos from the backyard:
The older raised bed, with radishes and cooler weather crops just coming up. 
The old garden beds, now prepped, planted and made new. 
Day Lilies, dill and parsley along the fence. 
The “native” part of the yard, with may apples and violets.
The Coffee Table
This was purely Anne’s project. We have a coffee table in the living room that I got from my parents when I moved out in 1990. It had originally been a gift from my Aunt Kathleen and Uncle Ed, and they probably gave it to my parents in the early 1970’s; family lore had it that it was made from “driftwood.” (I believe that it’s a merchant shipping “hatch cover” similar to the ones shown here.)
Anyway, the table’s surface has been getting worse over the years, and Anne, who often sits at the table and gets splinters, finally decided to do something about it. So, she took took the top off, planed and sanded it (much easier to say here, it took her days of hard work), then stained and sealed it (more days, more work), and then we put it all back together yesterday. It looks beautiful, better than it has in decades.
The old coffee table, sanded, stained and sealed. Brewing
It turns out that the homebrew store is still open — you can order online, and (several days later) when your order is ready, you drive down and get it placed in your trunk. So that’s what we did last week, ordering the ingredients for two batches of beer. We picked up the ingredients on Saturday, and brewed the first batch — our Bell’s Two-Hearted Ale clone — yesterday. There really wasn’t much to say about the process, just the usual cooking and cleaning, but now we have several gallons bubbling away in the corner of the kitchen. It should be ready in about two weeks, and we’ll be making our next batch — our Rye IPA tomorrow morning. I documented some of the process:
Our water-heating setup for brewing. 
The brewing setup in the backyard. 
Our grain bill, waiting for the hot water. 
This recipe calls for 75 minutes of boiling. 
Hops get added at various times throughout the boil. 
The brew is now ready to start fermenting.
Towpath Amenities
This is what’s actually been taking up most of my time and energy lately. I have a database of access points along the Lehigh Towpath, along with nearby “trail amenities” like bathrooms or restaurants, from an earlier project that has evolved over time. What I want to do now is expand it to include all access points and amenities along the entire D&L. I broke this up into three parts: the first part being everything north from Northampton to White Haven, where I would also develop (and document) the “work flows” a little better, then the second part would be the sections from Riegelsville south to Bristol. (The final task will be adding the undeveloped sections — from Allentown to Northampton, and from White Haven north — but I suspect that these areas will need a bit more re-conceptualizing first.)
My first steps were pretty easy: I used an OpenStreetMap search plugin in QGIS to get all the roads near the river, then did other queries to get all the nearby amenities I track that are known to OpenStreetMap — this time I kept copies of my actual queries so I can reproduce them. I combined all the amenities into one layer, then used some spatial queries (and a list of official trailheads) to find all the access points where the surrounding roads contact the trail. So far so good…
The next step would to identify all the amenities that are actually accessible via local roads, and this part wouldn’t be as easy. I wrote a script to do this when I did the original project, but that script is no longer compatible with the newer version of QGIS so I had to rewrite it. That (aside from typing errors) turned out to be more straightforward than I thought it would be, though it still took several days, especially tracking down and debugging those typos. Along the way I also made it more general, added improvements etc, and now it works really well.
I haven’t done the final step yet, which is to move the selected amenities over to my database, because I’m not yet happy with the quality of the new amenities data. “Garbage In, Garbage Out,” as the saying goes, and the OpenStreetMap amenities turned out have a lot of missing contact info, outdated info like closed restaurants, and amenities I know about that are just plain missing from the data. So I’ve been slogging through the list, searching Google Maps and Googling for contact information, to try to raise the data quality before I can add this stuff to the database. In the end, and especially because I eventually might want to update OSM, I think I’ll have to check it all out for myself on the ground. Someday.
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The Way We Live Now
Happy Birthday to me! It was my birthday the other day. We didn’t do anything in particular about it; Anne made a cake and we ate it while we did a video chat with my parents. We’ve been doing a lot more of that kind of thing lately: I had a cello lesson on Zoom this morning, we’ve done several “virtual happy hours” with friends — our weekly Sunday nights are now online — and we both have been using internet video to keep in touch online with our families.
I’ve also been riding, mostly road with Anne but some towpath as well. This (bicycling, or even just being outside) isn’t so great right now because the pollen is pretty bad, but the masks Anne made seem to help there. The other day I did a towpath ride and saw a bald eagle, not ten yards away, flying low over the canal, probably looking for fish or frogs or something. I also saw mounted police riding through the neighborhood when I came home, something I’ve never seen before but possibly part of some social distance enforcement.
The town has cracked down on gatherings in the neighborhood parks. We have been allowed out to get some socially distant exercise, like the rides or daily walks we do, but people have also been playing basketball, and playing on playground equipment, so the baskets have been disabled and the playgrounds are covered in “DO NOT CROSS” police tape. We do a daily walk if it’s nice enough, and we still see plenty of other walkers but the playground crowds are gone.
Meantime, we don’t need to do much shopping. We’re pretty well stocked with staples, so all we really need is fresh fruit & veggies. Friends of ours are farmers; they are the “farm” for a bunch of high-end New York “farm-to-table” restaurants, but those restaurants are now closed so they’re selling their produce to neighbors like us. They do things like baby lettuce, arugula and bok choy, so we’ve been eating tons of really good salads, as well as a lot of really good bread. Anne and a few friends are making bread to give to neighbors, through Donna’s “Little Free Library” which is now doing extra duty as a “Little Free Pantry” and “Little Free Bakery” to help ease food insecurity.
Some Things To Watch
We just saw the Season 2 finale for “Killing Eve,” and the latest (the penultimate) episode of “Devs.” Wow! No spoilers, but both were pretty shocking.
Right now I’m re-reading The Girl With All The Gifts.
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Interesting Wake-Up
Anne usually gets up a bit earlier than I do. This morning she got up around 7:00, and I was just beginning to stir about half an hour later when we heard a crash outside. In my sleepy state I just thought some snow had fallen off the roof (by the way, of course there’s been no snow), but Anne runs in, looks out the window and says “someone just took out our fence with their car!”
I jumped up, got dressed, and joined Anne out back in the corner of our yard, where the car was stuck on a part of our fence that’s still standing. One of the fence posts is snapped off, and some sections had fallen over. Anne was talking with the driver, a woman from the neighborhood; she had stopped on the way to work (to drop off cloth for people to make face masks), but she had neglected to engage her parking brake, and her car had rolled backwards down the alley and through our fence. She was pretty distraught, and also late for work…
We took some pictures and got some information, then (after breakfast, with some help from John & Donna) we got the fence back up and reasonably together, enough at least for a few days until a contractor can take a look at it.
And that was our morning!
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They Can’t All Be Good
So we saw The Hangover the other night — it stank. I was able to sit still from the beginning to the end, but that’s about all I can say good about it.
We are now watching Devs, on Hulu I think. Much better, though the acting isn’t the best. (Actually, the acting and actors are fine, it’s the script that could use work.) This is the one to watch.
