• Jasper And Blue Jingles

    This was a short bike tour we took, a loop south along the Delaware, then west and back home by way of Vera Cruz. We took some liberties, but it was at least nominally meant to follow some of the old native paths in the area south of us.

    Day One

    We left Bethlehem, heading cross-country over to Riegelsville, brunched at the Riegelsville Inn (we got there just as it opened), then we continued downriver on the New Jersey side, crossed back into Pennsylvania at Milford, and rode down the towpath to Tinicum Park, our stop for the night.

    Tinicum was fairly primitive as far as campgrounds go, but it was very pleasant, and we got to watch some local equestrians play polo for a while before we crashed for the night.

    Day Two

    This was another beautiful day. We got up and out early, got breakfast at a diner not far from the campsite (again arriving just as it opened), then rode down the towpath and Rt 32 to Point Pleasant.

    Point Pleasant is where Tohicon Creek meets the Delaware, and just above that is where Geddes Run enters Tohicon Creek. This area had a substantial native population once, and the mouth of Geddes Run was once a place where Native Americans worked a local stone called argillite (aka “mudstone,” or “blue jingles” as the local quarries later called it). The actual native quarry site is now on private land, but we could get a view of the general area from the road.

    Our route from there took us west on the Point Pleasant Pike, generally following an old native path to Schwenksville, through scenic little roads, and into more built-up and heavily trafficked areas, until we finally made it to Green Lane Park, our second night’s lodgings.

    Day Three

    From Green Lane we went north, again following the general outline of a native path — this was the path from the Phoenixville area to the jasper quarries at Vera Cruz. The route was a bit of a surprise; I expected it to be fairly flat (something I’d heard was a hallmark of native paths) but it was actually fairly hilly and rolling.

    We got into Vera Cruz, stopped to explore Jasper Park (sorry, no pictures this time), and then we went into Emmaus to get lunch. We came home on our usual route from Emmaus, which was once also a native path. And that was our little holiday!


  • Some Bike Love

    I had a slow leak on the Santa Cruz’s rear tire, which turned out to be a stuck valve and relatively easy to fix (disassembled and cleaned it), but then the next day the front brake felt super soft. I got new brake pads, replaced the front brake — fixed! I did the back brake as well the next day, and I also finally got the shifting dialed back in. It feels like a new bike…

    I took it out on the towpath Tuesday after the front brake fix, then again on Wednesday with the rear brake and shifting done as well. Both times were awesome, but on Wednesday I took the little alternate “fisherman’s trail” in Freemansburg. Big mistake!

    The whole trail was completely overgrown with downed trees, sticker bushes and nettles. I fought my way through — it took forever, I had to shorten my ride I took so long — and when I was back on the towpath I got a good look at my arms, which were completely covered in blood. Yikes! It was from the stickers, and it was really just a bit of blood from the tiny sticker scratches, mixed with sweat and looking worse than it really was — the nettles were far more annoying to be honest. But it sure looked dire; I took pictures but I won’t post them here.

    Post-ride shower, and my arms looked like it never happened. Bike is still great.


  • The Eagles of Merrill Creek

    Bald Eagle, Merrill Creek Reservoir

    We went kayaking at Merrill Creek Reservoir on Sunday, with Anne’s brother and his wife. It was a beautiful day for being outside, and a wonderful way to spend the day. Anne and Joe both brought binoculars and were checking out the local birds, I saw a bunch of turtles sunning themselves on a branch, but the best part was when Anne said “Look up there, a bald eagle!”

    It was just above us in a tree, a fully-grown (huge) adult watching the water for fish. We watched it watch the water for about ten minutes before it flew off, and Laura told us she’d heard that there were two nesting pairs of eagles living at the lake with their juvenile children.Not long after, we crossed the lake to another area, and saw another, smaller adult bald eagle, watching the water from a dead tree. Bonus!

    After that we paddled back to the boat launch. We were out on the water for about two hours in total, and afterward we got lunch in at a diner Washington, and a beer at a local brewpub before heading home. What a lovely day!


  • Fun With Bash

    I got to play with shell scripts a few times over the past few weeks, thought I’d talk about them:

    Wordle Helper

    I have a script I use to help me make my guesses when I play Wordle; it basically generates a list of available words based on my results, analyzes these available words (by checking the overall letter frequency, then scoring the words based on which letters they contain), and returns the word list with their scores, sorted by word score. This is especially helpful as a process of elimination, and most especially in the first rounds — I can confirm or eliminate the most common letters and quickly narrow down my choices (well, usually).

    I decided at a certain point that multi-letter combinations might be even more useful, so I wrote another script to score words based on the frequency of two-letter combinations. This worked well enough that I wrote a three-letter scoring script, and then realized that I should just write something generic that would score based on however many letters I would want in my combinations.

    For some reason I brought my laptop on vacation, and when things got quiet I broke it out and wrote the multiple-letter scoring script — it works like a charm. What I found though, is that there are diminishing returns for the letter combinations: there is no real advantage to use more than two letters. Still, this is a script that I use every day.

    Getting SSL

    Every 90 days I have to get a new SSL certificate for this website, so I can use the more secure “https” rather than plain “http.” This was once a pretty easy process, until my (free) certificate-generating organization got taken over by someone else. I found a much more onerous (but still free) web-based method and have used it for years, but I knew there had to be a better way.

    I eventually found something called getssl, a bash script that automates the process used by that onerous web-based approach. Ufortunately it’s meant to be run on the computer where the website resides, rather than on my local machine which is what I preferred, so I never really messed with it… Then one day I just set it up and ran it, and it basically did 99% of the work, generating the certificates and storing them on my laptop. All I had to do myself was install them manually, which was pretty easy. Awesome! The whole process went from an hour to about a minute, and I’ve been using getssl for almost a year now.

    But it still bothered me that I couldn’t get the whole process automated, and then last week I found an extra feature in getssl that would get me that final one percent; the only problem was that the extra feature would need to be modified to run on my machine rather than remotely. (This modification turned out to be fairly straightforward, which was a bit of a surprise actually.) I managed to make the code change just a few days ago — again, while out of town with my laptop — and my current certificate was installed, fully automatically, using the modified feature.

    Neither of these little projects were hard, but it’s so seldom that I do anything like this anymore that I was pretty proud of my accomplishments.


  • Ant Bait Recipe

    We have an infrequent, but still recurring ant problem: every few years or so, we find ants coming into our kitchen. Now is one of those times, and our go-to solution is to destroy the colony using homemade ant bait — a cotton ball soaked in sugar water (which also contains borax) brings them swarming, they bring the sugar water back to the hive and feed everyone else, and the borax kills them all over a few days. I currently have a cotton ball near their entrance point, and it is literally covered in ants…

    Anyway, when I went to set the bait I found that our previous batch was almost all gone. I couldn’t remember the exact proportions for the recipe so I had to do some Googling, and then I prorated what I found to fit in our container. For my readers, and for my own future self, here is the recipe:

    • 1/4 cup sugar
    • 1 tablespoon borax (we have this for our DIY laundry soap)
    • enough water to make 1 cup of the mixture

    Mix the borax and sugar into the water until it dissolves, then put it in a container and toss in some cotton balls to soak. That’s it!

    I put one cotton ball on the kitchen counter, and one at whatever entry point I can find, and change them every day or so when they dry out. This is a bit harder to do right now, because it takes as long as a week to wipe out the hive, but we can’t leave the bait out when we have Iris over. Still, it seems to be working; the ants are not in the kitchen anymore and I’m sure we’re almost done.


  • Vacation Photos

    Here are some photos from our Adirondack vacation. These photos are the ones not connected with any activity or event in particular, just shots I took while out and about.

    A lot of the nature shots were from walking around behind the cabin, near the Ausable River which was literally in our backyard. I also got a few good photos of some tree trunks behind the cabin:

    We did a few bike rides and a hike, and I got some photos on those as well but I think I’ll give them their own separate posts. Enjoy!


  • Greetings From The Adirondacks!

    Posted on by Don
    Our Cabin

    We’re away in the mountains near Upper Jay, NY — the AuSable river runs behind our place; Whiteface Mountain and Lake Placid are only a stone’s throw away. It’s Anne and me, Emmi & Kyle with Iris, Joe & Laura, Lorraine who arrived yesterday, and Ben & Jenny who arrived today. (The bulk of us have been here since Saturday.)

    We’re just hanging out, going for hikes and bike rides and brunches and shopping sprees — today I bought a hiking book, then coming home, dipping our toes & butts in the river, and just sitting around reading or playing with Iris. It’s been unseasonably warm for this area, but not too crazy.

    I’m feeling kind of lazy, and I’m pretty deep into “vacation mode” so I probably won’t post more until we get home, but we are having a great time.


  • Cancel The Exorcist

    Posted on by Don

    I’ve had a creaking near my mountain bike’s bottom bracket for a few weeks now. I was pretty sure it was either the crank or the bottom bracket itself (rather than, say, the suspension pivots), since it seemed to happen with every pedal stroke, as in an unbalanced load on the BB, rather than with the bike suspension flexing.

    I tightened the cranks — no luck, so i took them off, lubed them and reinstalled them. Still no luck, so I took them off to get to the bottom bracket, cleaned and lubed the threads and reinstalled them, and still had the squeak. Maybe my bike was possessed?

    I thought maybe I didn’t do the job well enough, so I took the cranks and BB off again, and this time I also took the rear wheel off to access the suspension grease port and pumped it full of grease. I put everything back together, and this time the creaking was gone. No idea what actually worked, but the pivots really did need the grease…

    Of course, the bikes never stay perfect for long: the MTB shifting is now a bit funky, and the touring bike had a flat tire when I checked on it. It’s always something.

    Saturday was a ride at Nockamixon with Tim C, someone I know from the Museum, and Sunday was a ride up the D&L to a coffee shop in Weissport. Hot rides, both days!


  • More Iris Photos

    Posted on by Don

    Here is a quick photo dump, some of my recent Iris pictures.

    These are from about a month ago. We had her over maybe two weeks ago and I took these:

    Finally, some pictures from just last week, when we rode the Bob trailer over to yet another park, and also visited friends who had chickens:

    At The Playground

    Our little lady tends to seize her days…