• Huckleberry Hounds

    Posted on by Don

    We just got back from a trip to Brady’s Lake to pick blueberries, the high-bush kind that may or may not actually be huckleberries rather than blueberries — these are big berries, and huckleberries are supposedly smaller (and grow on evergreens), so I’d still go with blueberries. Two hours of picking, and I think we got more than three quarts — and it looks like there’s a lot more to be had as the season progresses. No bear sightings, though…

    Yessssssss! Successsssss! The keyboard crapped out on my laptop a few weeks ago, with the “S” key sticking more and more — very frustrating. I finally brought it in to a repair shop yesterday, where I had the keyboard replaced, as well as the insides cleaned (like, the fan/air vents) and the heat sink refurbished. I thought it would be days, but he called in about an hour saying it was done, and I picked up my cool-running, feels-like-new laptop that afternoon. Sweet!

    No Bearings On The Case We rode to Anne’s orchestras summer picnic yesterday, along with Shari, an orchestra-mate who lives in our neighborhood. It was a reasonable distance, maybe 14 miles one way, but we were going slow and I wanted to be wearing normal clothes/shows when we arrived. So, I took the Iguana, for its first big ride since I re-worked the headset last Tuesday at the CAT office. That was a bit of a disaster: I took off the stem, lock nut and spacers, then as I was taking the upper race off all the ball bearings fell out of the bottom bearing and scattered bouncing across the floor. Turns out the seal was gone, and the bearing cage was mostly gone, so once I loosened the fork there was nothing holding them in. I managed to retrieve most of them and replace the missing ones, put them into what was left of the cage with a whole lot of grease to act as “glue,” and put it all back together. This is a temporary fix until I can get a new bearing/cage assembly, but despite everything, the bike’s steering feels better now than it has in years.


    📂This entry was posted in day by day nature journal tech talk the sporting life

  • Sprinter’s Blues

    Posted on by Don

    I’ve fallen so far behind my normal riding fitness this summer that I decided to take a drastic step:  intervals.

    Yes, I began doing them last week, on a standard towpath ride to Easton and back — I added three 1-minute intervals (with approximately 2 minutes rest between) on the return, and it beat me into the ground. Today I did a harder but more structured workout: 10 minutes warm-up, then the same 1 minute all-out, 2 minutes easy for five intervals (basically, from the Minsi Trail Bridge to the ball-field), then did the rest of the ride at an easy pace. It was totally doable this time, but now my legs have a lot to say about it.

    Tomorrow I’ll be riding in to the Canal Museum, but that (and the later “Ladies’ Ride”) will be fairly easy. Thursday morning will be a run, and then Friday morning will be the next interval workout. Two days a week is pretty hardcore, but I should start seeing results within a month.

    But…. well, ugh. I guess all I can say is that I did it to myself.

    PS I also did a short run this morning. One mile at a really mild pace, no knee issues.

     


    📂This entry was posted in the sporting life

  • The Fever Broke

    Posted on by Don

    Pretty cool today, and rainy too. I’m just hanging out, arguing with people who are wrong on the Internet (Facebook specifically), claiming that pedestrians do not have the right of way at every crosswalk, whether marked or not. FYI: unless there are traffic lights to otherwise control the intersection, pedestrians do have the right of way at every crosswalk (which includes the implied continuations of sidewalks, etc. across and through an intersection), not just the ones that are marked. Now you know — and now so do they, but they won’t believe me…

    Meantime, I got in a few good rides this week, including one “hot lap” on the towpath: pushed the pace on the way out, then did intervals on the way back. I was beat up, but still managed to join Anne, John, Dianna and another rider for a more leisurely, evening towpath ride, followed by burgers & beer al fresco at Brew Works. (Anne and I did a nice rode into Easton the other night, and had a nice beer at Two Rivers.)

    I may take a walk over to Southside for some sort of lunch, where I will also be buying tickets for Southside Film Festival for tonight and tomorrow.


    📂This entry was posted in day by day the sporting life

  • Dog Day

    Posted on by Don

    We’re in the middle of the first real heat wave of the season — we went from “you could probably get away without a light jacket, if you’re in full sunshine” last week, to our third day of cloudless upper nineties — so of course we’re spending the day brewing! Of course, we’re also doing it outside, so the house at least is not like an oven, but it still is a hot sweaty operation on a warm day.

    We are making a clone of Bell’s Two-Hearted Ale, one of our favorites and, strangely enough, one we brewed almost exactly one year ago today.

    Other than that, there’s not much else on the agenda. I’m about halfway through George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, which I started yesterday after Anne finished it (in two days). Really weird and intense, a compelling creepy page-turner and that’s all I’ll say about it now, except to say that you should also read it.

     


    📂This entry was posted in pioneer arts

  • Gardener Blues

    Posted on by Don

    Just got in from doing a spot of weeding in the front yard. The garden got away from us this spring, but as our free time slowly ramps back up we’ve been tackling it in bits and pieces. There has been a definite “two steps forward one step back” vibe to our efforts though.

    I’d grown a bunch of seedlings inside, and planted them out front a few weeks ago. Then just last weekend we bought a bunch of flowers (perennials: phlox and coneflowers, plus a few low, ground-cover things) at the nursery, and I planted them where the seedlings had been, because those had all been eaten by birds. We also picked up a box of ladybugs at the nursery, to deal with an aphid problem on our brown-eyed susans. We put the ladybugs out on Sunday night, and spent the week watching them in among the plants — they seemed happy, though I never saw them actually eating any of the aphids — but as of today they all seem to have disappeared. Aphids are doing fine.

    Anyway, the front garden is getting cleaned up (I just harvested our second bumper crop of weeds), and we have moved on to the beds out back, which all need a lot of love. I’m not saying I miss winter, but…

     

     


    📂This entry was posted in day by day

  • Dissolution

    Posted on by Don

    Beautiful weather so far this week, but I haven’t been able to get out quite yet. I did get to do some trail work at Sals on Sunday, while Anne did some hiking with Deb, so there’s that. Tomorrow is my volunteer day at the Canal Museum, and I’ll be riding over.

    QGIS vs GRASS vs SAGA: I’ve been trying to work with some more geoprocessing tools, specifically Dissolve (where several regions that touch or overlap are combined into a single shape — their borders are “dissolved,” hence the name). I set up some small test shapes and tried dissolving them. It worked perfectly well with GRASS, but with QGIS the two shapes did not actually become one. I tried using SAGA, and got the same failure — WTF? I thought at first that both programs were broken, but then found out that the two shapes weren’t actually adjacent, there was an infinitesimal sliver of empty space between them; technically, they didn’t actually have a common boundary for these two programs to dissolve, while GRASS apparently has a built-in tolerance to handle slivers like this and just ran with it. The more you know…

    More Maps: Check out Walking Purchase Park on the MTB Project. There were a few trails already done, but I added a bunch more, and it should now hopefully be a useful guide to the trail system there.

     


    📂This entry was posted in tech talk

  • Getting In The Miles

    Posted on by Don

    We just had a string of nice days this past week, and I finally got in some decent riding: I did a towpath ride on Monday, a decent (if slow) lap at Sals on Wednesday, followed by another towpath ride Wednesday night with Anne and some friends, and I took the towpath to get to and from the Canal Museum yesterday. (I also got in a good ride at Jacobsburg last Friday, as well as that aborted Nox ride on Sunday.) The rides are currently a bit Towpath-centric, but I had a lot of fun at Sals and the ‘Burg so I think I’ll be branching out. I still have yet to get out on the road bike.

    Today is rainy, and tomorrow and Sunday might prove to be the same. Blogging, bike maintenance, listening to the blues…

     


    📂This entry was posted in the sporting life

  • What Not To Do

    Posted on by Don

    Today I had plans to ride at Nockamixon, my only worries being that the trails might be closed because of recent rains (though it hadn’t rained in four days so things were probably OK), and if it were open, that it would be so crowded I wouldn’t be able to park at Tower Road. I got a late start, and the Tower Road parking lotwas pretty crowded but there were still a few spots open. So far so good: I got a spot and the trails were open.

    There was a weird vibe there though, something I pick up on sometimes at certain New Jersey trailheads: a sort of laconic cockiness in the conversations, everyone pretending to be the alpha male or something, and trying to sound superior without allowing the effort to show. Hard to describe, but I know it when I see it or hear it, and it always indicatesthe presence of assholes. Uh oh, maybe Sunday isn’t my day to hit Nox.

    I didn’t know anyone there at first, but then Jen S rode up just as I finished getting ready. She was parked right next to me, and we got to talking. She said she’d come out with the intention of doing several laps but had stopped after one — the place was really muddy.  Now I was in a quandary: Nox is fragile and the ground gets really soft when wet, but I was already there after a 40 minute drive, and I really wanted to ride…

    I rode anyway — I figured it couldn’t be all that bad and still be open, but I was seriously mistaken. I got about a mile in on the first loop and hit a long section of inches-deep, churned up mush with standing water on top, and saw moving water, like maybe from a seep, flowing over the ground in another area, and decided that being out was a bad idea. I bailed not long after, taking a grassy doubletrack that led back to Tower Road.

    It was a bit disconcerting to think that so many people were riding there in these conditions, but of the people I came across on the trail, I was the only one who seemed bothered by the mud, at least in terms of trail damage, and I was the only one who didn’t continue.


    📂This entry was posted in the sporting life

  • Where Does The Time Go?

    Posted on by Don

    I’m not sure where it’s gone, but here I am all alone… Anne is at a knitting convention; she should be home tomorrow, but I’ve been on my own the past few days.

    So, what have I been up to, this past week and this past month? Lets see:

    Riding: I got out at Jacobsburg yesterday, and I got in a towpath ride the day before — a fairly hot lap too, for me and for this time of year, which I guess is why the ‘Burg was so tiring. Today I helped out with Bike Smart Easton (kid’s biking education program) at Calypso Elementary, but otherwise took it as a rest day, and tomorrow I may ride either Sals or Nox. I’m supposed to help with a Sals trash cleanup tomorrow, so that may influence my decision, one way or another.

    Travel: We just got back from visiting Emmi and Kyle in Durham, where we participated in the March for Science in Raleigh, among many other things, except riding: we did a run the first day we were there, and it was sunny for the march, but otherwise it was a rainy, rainy visit. Plenty of good but heavy food, some bookstores and coffee shops, and some really cool night spots — our typical Durham visit.

    We also did a short trip to Rehoboth Beach about a month ago, just a few days to do some riding and visit Dogfish Head Brewing.

    Reading: I’ve been obsessing over the “Expanse” series, by James S.A. Corey. More on this later but it’s some seriously good space opera, and I’ve read five of the six published books (out of a total of nine planned).

    I’ve also been doing a bit of volunteering at the Canal Museum, and also quite a bit of playing with the mapping software, but those’ll have to be other stories.


    📂This entry was posted in cultural ramblings day by day the sporting life

  • Brew Day

    Posted on by Don

    Morning weigh-in: 192.0#, 14.0% BF

    (Those are the figures from yesterday morning.)

    We got up this morning at the crack of 10:00 AM  — thanks, Daylight Saving Time! — went for an easy mile run, and then after breakfast we got down to brewing. We’re doing it inside today because it’s just too windy out for the propane burner, so that means we’re stuck brewing for six hours on the stove burners instead of two on our “jet engine” of an outdoor system, but it is a nice day to just hang out.

    NEWS FLASH: Anne and I played a duet together today, for the first time ever! I broke out the cello and we played some of the things from the first Suzuki book. “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” that sort of thing — all I could really handle, really… I’ve been resisting this for a while, but a friend came over and played with her the other day, and I realized I was no worse than she was, if not much better, so we gave it a try. Totally fun, but now I have to start practicing again.

    Yesterday was another mellow day at home, with a visit from Ray and Lorraine in the middle of it. We did get out for a walk in the afternoon, over to the Southside where we put in an order for our brewing supplies at Keystone, stopped in for a beer at Bonn Place, and then picked up our supplies on the walk home. Tonight we’ll probably do the usual with John and Donna.


    📂This entry was posted in day by day