So, if I ever get to Squidley’s house on Mr. Bikey, I’ll put the knobbies on. As can  be seen from the hot pink line in the picture (below), I discovered a trail linking Filman Road with… um… Filman Road. Okay, so my sense of discovery is a little bit tarnished, but it was fun (if by “fun” you mean “sweating, heaving, panting death”). It’s a little bit steep uphill at times, with lots of loose or not-so-loose sharp rocks.

The really cool part is that it links up to Bruce Trail via a nifty highway bridge (green line). I went as far as the line shows, and then I figured I would be late getting back here for office hours this morning. However, it took me  40 minutes to get there, and only about 10 or 12 to get back. My bike computer says I went about 10 miles (16.1 Kanadian). That feels lame, except for how hard I worked to get up the stupid hill (Filman Trail).

Notes:
1. There’s a stupid short way steep section at the South end of Filman trail that I couldn’t climb, and I couldn’t descend (tried twice; ungracefully biffed it twice). Stupid trail.
2. I saw much wildlife, including a mole or something, a chipmunk, a hunting kitty, and a deer. The deer was about 10-15m off Bruce Trail in the bush, eating the, um, bush. He was a young buck, with antlers just about to fork, all covered with fuzz, about as long as his ears. He didn’t seem scared of me, although he watched me for a while.

…so… Alex is in the kitchen with a towel over her head, trying to steam some of the mucus demons out of her lungs. I’m in here with the A/C, trying to ignore the lesser (but still irritating) mucus demons in my head. Brad is at his house, battling his own demons of phelgm and sickness.

Mr. Bikey came today. Yay. I was way too exhausted to ride it to Brad’s, which is probably OK because he sounded too exhausted to get the door if I had shown up. It’s still in the box. I dealt with several student problems today, including the following:

• I don’t really have to meet those prerequisites, do I?
• Instead of actually writing three of my own thoughts, I cut and pasted three of your PowerPoint slides for Assignment #1. With the fonts and graphics.
• Please give me a “Drop Pass” instead of a general withdrawal, because I don’t want to be in your class anymore.

Actually, not too annoying. Alex is a good voice of reason to keep me from being too harsh on the little youngsters. Twentysomethings… what can you do? They’re so cute at that age.

Speaking of punitiveness, my dissertation-mining expedition goes on, with the first article coming back from two faculty (one at UTPA, the other at Ohio State) giving me pointers. They both noticed that I have a teensy bit of bias in the article. I suppose I should cut the sentence that says, “In short, the American public appears to want criminals to suffer ever-increasing levels of punishment even when these measures might be illegal and unethical, and are likely to be ineffective at reducing crime.”

Alex is back. More Daria!

UPS is giving me grief. Based on my careful analysis of costs, I decided to ship my bike up here (Ontario) for the summer, rather than pay the airline’s extra-big-baggage fee of $70 or so. UPS seemed to be reasonable. They told me it would be $78 or so. I paid it.

Mr. Bikey might get here today. I’m being told by the UPS phone lady that there is an additional $63.48 due for “brokerage fees” to UPS, for their service of getting it through customs (luckily, no taxes or customs duties; yay!). I asked her if the UPS location in Texas should have known that, and she replied that yes, it’s based on my declared value, so they most certainly should have known and informed me. And it’s something UPS charges, not customs or Homeland Security or anything like that. Grr.

This started when I checked the tracking information online today. There has not been a single phone call or door knock (or call through the outside buzzer) from UPS, but this is the online message:

THE RECEIVER DID NOT HAVE FUNDS AVAILABLE ON THE 1ST DELIVERY ATTEMPT.

Yeah. Because we totally had that conversation. UPS weasel person.

The phone lady seemed surprised at the discrepancy between the online message and my reality. She said she’d have the guy call me within the hour (38 minutes and counting). Now, it has cost me $140 to get my bike up here. It will presumably cost me another $140 to get it home, unless I take it by the airline, in which case it will cost me half that. So, about $210 to $280 to have my bike for the summer. My own bike. That I already own. Stupid unexpected charges. Grrr.

In retrospect, I perhaps should have gone with Plan B, which was to find or buy a beater bike up here, and have fun fixing it up for a week or two, then ride it all summer and leave it here. That plan seems like a beautiful dream, now. Oh well. Nothing to do but enjoy Mr. Bikey as much as I can, given the fact that the cost of ownership has gone up.

So I get home from work, after missing Mr. Bikey for the last week, and after ordering some new tires for running around in Hamilton this summer, and I get home just in time to meet the UPS guy delivering my new (albeit kind of cheap) Sette shoes, and I wheel my bike out the door to go for a nice zippy ride in the 95-degree heat, and…

CAHRUNCHA!

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