• Summertime

    Posted on by Don

    We did another Bike Smart rodeo this morning, again only a few blocks from home. It was pretty low-key compared to some of the others, but still very fun, and I’m actually pretty proud that this is something I’m involved with. However…

    When we got home, I saw on Facebook that today was also “Take A Kid Mountain Biking Day” at Trexler, and it was also the day of Curt Cyclery’s “Angel 34” century ride. Too many summer things in too few summer weekends, you’re going to have to make some hard choices.

    Meantime, last night we had Indian food (the perfect food for this time of year), followed by a nice long walk, and tonight we’re having another Indian dinner, and then we’ll be heading out again.

     


    📂This entry was posted in day by day

  • Over Blue

    Posted on by Don

    So, about yesterday’s ride…

    My original plan for this week was to do two 75-mile rides, Tuesday and Thursday, and then take it from there. Tuesday turned out to be quite a bit shorter and, what with a lunch break and afternoon thunderstorms, so my training hopes were set on the Thursday ride. My plan was to get up early and do go over Blue Mountain at Little Gap, then take Mountain Road to  Little Gap and head home from there.

    I got up fairly early, but then procrastinated fairly heavily — in my defense, there was a pretty strong wind blowing, and I was hoping it would abate, but by 1:30 I was done with everything else I needed to do (we’re talking gardening chores here, the subject of its own procrastinations), and the wind was still whipping so out I went anyway.

    Turned out, the wind was pretty bad, somewhere around 17 mph and it was a headwind, but I felt good and strong if not fast, and once over Little Gap it was a tailwind, albeit somewhat blocked by the mountain. I now felt like superman, cruising uphill with very little effort. My mileage was 25 at the top of Blue, and it was 40 at Wind Gap.

    …And then it was 60 miles and I was home. To my surprise, and despite some backing and filling — frankly, I got myself a bit confused, OK lost — it was actually shorter to get home from the “far” gap than the “near” one. I’ll have to study on this more with a map…

    Stats: 63 miles in 5:15, 4112 feet of climbing, 2078 calories burned.


    📂This entry was posted in the sporting life

  • Another Rest Day, Another Brew Day

    Posted on by Don
    Home-brew beer boils on outdoor burner.
    The second boil for our Berliner Weisse, on our new outdoor burner.

    Yesterday was another long ride, so today was another rest day, and today we did our second boil for the new batch of Berliner Weisse we’re brewing.

    (Our method: We do the mash as usual, e.g. strike and sparge, and after a very short boil we cool the wort and pitchLactobacillusfor a preliminary fermentation.Lactobacilluseats sugar and produces lactic acid; it’s the bug that turns milk into yogurt, and it gives a clean tart taste to sour beers. After a few days its job is done, and we perform a second, 60-minute boil, the “real boil” which in addition to killing the Lacto is where we toss in the hops. After that comes the regular yeast-based fermentation to convert the remaining sugar to alcohol.)

    We were a little surprised and disconcerted when we opened the pot with the wort: it had a nasty off-odor, very much like cooked corn, and it didn’t look as clean as the last batch. Fortunately, I’d read that this particular odor — an indicator of dimethyl sulfide — is common in certain types of beers if they’d been cooked but not thoroughly boiled, and is easily driven off with a longer boil. Like the one were about to do…

    We’d done the strike-and-sparge on Monday, along with making a batch of a Bell’s Two Hearted Ale clone, using an outdoor propane burner borrowed from Keystone Homebrew. That worked out so well that we bought our own on Tuesday when we returned the loaner, and today was our new toy’s maiden voyage. Everything worked out great, the off-odor was driven off pretty quickly, and after cooling the wort we pitched the yeast. Both beers are now in carboys in the kitchen.

    Homebrew beer ferments in jugs.
    Our latest brews fermenting away in the kitchen.

    📂This entry was posted in pioneer arts

  • Rest Day

    Posted on by Don

    Things are working out pretty well this week, weather-wise: Anne and I rode yesterday, down to Quakertown for lunch and back (we saw Scott S lunching at the cafe, and Lori P joined us for a coffee), enjoying a lot of good weather and about 10 minutes of storm along the way. Today I took as a rest day, and did my first stint volunteering at the National Canal Museum while the thunderstorms rolled through, and tomorrow I’ll be doing a road ride up and over Blue Mountain. Timing is everything.


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

  • Paradise Lost

    Posted on by Don

    Or maybe “Paradise Destroyed” would be closer to the mark. I’ve been on a mini-obsession over that island in the Lehigh (Calypso Island) that Calypso Street and Calypso Elementary are named after. Here’s what I found so far:

    It was an island near the south side of the river, maybe a quarter mile west of the current Hill-To-Hill Bridge. Owned by the Moravian Church, it was maybe 13 acres total and covered in catalpa trees, with a pavilion and a natural spring, and was a popular spot for Sunday School and summer picnics — it was named after the Greek nymph Calypso by George Henry Goundie at the July 4th celebrations there in 1869.

    Unfortunately, environmental stresses (coal and other pollution from the steel mills and railroads, frequent flooding, and increasing difficulty navigating on the Lehigh) started cutting into the popularity of Bethlehem’s river island resorts in the late 19th century. In the meantime, the Lehigh’s south bank bulged south at Calypso Island, forcing a big curve in the railroad at that point. In 1902, the Moravians sold the island to the railroad, who dug it up to fill in the south channel and straighten their line. (Judging by old maps, I’d say that Reeb Millwork currently sits on the old island’s infill; you can still see the river’s old bulge in the shapes of Brighton street and the millwork building on Google Earth.)

    It may have been gone, but I guess it wasn’t forgotten for a while: Calypso Elementary was built around 1916.


    📂This entry was posted in looking back

  • Calypso

    Posted on by Don

    I’m feeling a bit tired right now. Anne and I did the CAT/BikeSmart “Calypso Bike Day” at Calypso Elementary this morning. It’s really fun to watch the kids, some of them diffident at first, lacking skill or confidence, come to enthusiastically ride the bike course over and over with their friends — you can actually see them become better and more confident, even stronger, as they ride. My job was to sort of referee the course, and get the kids to stop at the stop signs we had out — not an easy task sometimes, but the kids do pick up on “who’s turn it is”  at the intersections, and kid-land social pressures usually take it from there. Totally fun, for them as well as me, but keeping tabs on that chaos eventually left me feeling frazzled. It was over at noon, and I helped pack up and put things away and was home by one-thirty or so: hot, tired, over-stimulated and sunburnt, I came in, took a shower and napped for three hours.

    FYI: At the end of the day we quizzed the school principal and found that the school was named for Calypso Island, a small island in the Lehigh. The more you know…


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

  • The Big Push

    Posted on by Don

    Morning weigh-in: 184.5#, 14% BF

    A little bit of suppression in there, as I pushed it a bit on yesterday’s ride: I did Sals first, then afterward I did a towpath ride. Total mileage was only about 33-34 miles (took me about 4 or 5 hours), but I was pretty depleted when I was done. Today, I feel like I’ve been beaten with sticks…

    The thing is, I am down to the final push. The Wilderness 101 is late July, meaning it’s about 6 weeks away, meaning I have one more month of training and preparation left to get ready — and I really feel like I could use three or four. An ugly win is still a win though, and a weigh-in is still a weigh-in, for all that suppression, and I am starting to feel like, with the proper choice of goals (“just finish the race”), this thing will be difficult but no longer impossible.

    My next big tasks are to incorporate longer (much longer) rides into my training — nothing crazy, but we’re talking road centuries and the like. I also have to start working on my on-bike nutrition, this will play a critical role in both the training and the race.

    I also need to spend a shit-ton of money: I need new pedals, new cycling clothes, and I may get a new bike. I have a month…

     


    📂This entry was posted in the sporting life

  • Life And Love Update

    Posted on by Don

    By the way, today is the eight-year anniversary of Anne’s and my first date. We’d been in the same crowd, meeting Tuesday nights for drinks, and slowly it became more common that our seats would be next to each other, and we would go out expecting to hang together, but this was the first time it was just us two.

    Naturally enough, it was a bike ride. I came down Applebutter Road from Easton, and met her coming the other way just about where that S-turn is (towards the Freemansburg end of the road), and we went up and did the farm roads north of the Valley. We stopped at Brew Works afterward for a beer and snacks at an outside table, very cool and Euro.

    It would be another month before we really considered ourselves an item, but I think of that ride as our first real date.


    📂This entry was posted in day by day

  • Conky Update

    Posted on by Don

    I turned it off, as well as all the RSS feed screenlets I had all over my desktop. (I kept the clock.) Those RSS screenlets turned to be a distraction and an annoyance, and luckily nothing worse, but I’m pretty sure that Conky made my system unstable: whenever I had it running more than a day or so, I started getting weird crashes in other programs. Turned it off, crashes (at least,thosecrashes) went away.

    I’m keeping most of my Compiz eye candy, but it turns out I actually prefer a cleaner desktop…

     


    📂This entry was posted in tech talk

  • The Bullet, Bit

    Posted on by Don

    I’m not sure why or even how this happened, but ever since I upgraded to Mint my web server had been dealing with PHP in a very unsatisfactory manner: as long as the PHP file was in the main website area (/var/www/html) it worked fine, but I usually keep my web stuff in my own “user directory,” and in that directory any actual PHP was just totally ignored when the file was served up.

    This, for security purposes, is basically the default behavior, and there is supposedly an easy way to change the behavior, which involves minor changes to the configuration files. But, when I made those changes to the configuration there was no corresponding change in behavior… A week or so of Googling for answers, and (in the end, almost random) fiddling with the configuration files, file permissions, etc etc, got me nowhere, so I decided to just live with it for a while.

    Fast forward to Saturday night. I have no idea why I decided to mess with things again, but in the end I got so frustrated that I just completely uninstalled both the Apache server and PHP, and did a clean reinstall of them both, just before bedtime… Actually the reinstall went reasonably smoothly, to my considerable surprise. I broke a few other things along the way, PHPMyAdmin among them, but the server was up and running, correctly — after making those configuration changes that refused to work before — before I went to bed.

    Yesterday I spent a little time fixing and rebuilding, and today I got the last error messages in PHPMyAdmin to go away. Anne was joking that I love a challenge, but playing with PHP would have been the challenge, and this was more like finding my bike tools needing repair (and in the end, replacement) before I could even work on the bike, to get ready for a challenging ride.

    Mixing metaphors: I feel like like I’ve been putting off dealing with a toothache, and am now kicking myself after the dentist visit, for putting it off so long.


    📂This entry was posted in tech talk