Just got back from 4 days in Algonquin Provincial Park. We stayed on North Tea and Manitou lakes, in really very lovely campsites. 1 day was kind of miserably cold for a few hours, but otherwise it was awesome. Alex, her brother Geof, his wife Veronica, our friend Brad, and I all went. 2 canoes and 1 kayak (I got the latter; insert squeal of excitement). It was way rad. :) I don’t have most of the pics, since my camera had some bad batteries… and bad backup batteries. But I have a few, and here are three:

so, I did an endo in a little dirt and grass field not far from home, just now. My laptop and other sundries were in my bag on my back. Luckily, I broke the fall with my FRIGGIN’ SHOULDER! Holy ow. As soon as I got up, realizing what had happened, the pain kicked in. Major pain. It has calmed a little as I have begun learning how to not anger it. My hand and forearm work just fine, but anything requiring my upper arm to move away from my body is several kinds of agony. Ow.

So, I am pumped full of 1000mg of ibuprofen, had a hot bath (getting out was not easy, and drying is going to have to be of the “drip” variety for a while), and now I’m in an odd position on the couch, from which I can protect said shoulder. Ow. I don’t think it’s out of its socket or anything; my guess is that I just tore or strained some muscles. Ow.

So, no kayaking tomorrow, for sure (couldn’t lift a paddle, let alone a boat). No biking (I tried that on the way home; no dice). I suppose I could walk, as long as I keep arm-swing to a minimum. >:(

Anyone know what kind of mushroom this is? I certainly don’t. Feel free to comment if you do.

redheaded kid catching air @ Skate Park

Apparently some armed Canadian forces stormed a Dutch seal-hunt protest vessel and arrested people. The head of the organization behind the ship called this an “Act of War.” Just between you and me, I suspect the Dutch government might not back him up all the way on this.

In other news, I listened to audio study materials for the EPPP exam while I walked to the grocery store today, with my big backpack. Google says it’s 1.6 miles each way. I shopped too much. In the future, I should probably remember that a good rule of thumb seems to be: $1 = 1lb. $50 is too much.

So I went to the Island yesterday. Only kayaked for about an hour (left late, due to previously-procrastinated tasks), but it was a good hour. The beach was nice, and nearly empty (one family and one fisherguy), and the waves seemed very manageable. In fact, I was a little disappointed.

I was quite intimidated, however, once I got down nose-to-nose with the waves. A five-foot breaker seems like no big deal until you’re in a boat that only puts your head about 2 1/2 feet above the water, and you’ve got the task of getting over or through that wave. I practiced launching and landing, and the latter is definitely more challenging. I got flipped once (and didn’t even try to roll; just did a wet exit… stupid), but then did 3 more launches (followed by landings, of course). Good experience. By the end, I felt comfortable enough to sit in the breakers and just play lazily for a while. It’s very soothing to let the waves roll under or around you, and be concerned with nothing more than the physical handling of the boat.
There’s a joy in doing something successfully. I got broached a few times, and the high-brace-into-the-wave technique that I had studied (but never tried) is wonderfully effective at preventing being flipped. Toward the end of the session, I got myself broadsided on purpose by a largish breaker, just to see. It was a cool sensation to be holding the boat upright in front of the crest with a paddle in the water behind the crest of the wave, while being pushed (fast!) sideways, about 20 yards toward shore.

I tried surfing a few times, too (on the smaller of these already-small waves), instead of the more rational, patient approach to landing. Wow. Surfing is kind of difficult. At least for me. It’s an all-or-nothing game, almost. Like downhill skiing, or freeriding; if you go slowly enough, you have a little control, but if you let fly, you’d better know what you’re doing.

Of course, the usual penalty for messing up is usually just a swim and gear retrieval. Not like the certain broken bones to be had on a black diamond mogul field.

Past the breakers is an interesting place to be, emotionally. Land is close, but it seems very far. The swells are not terribly dangerous (like very slow rollercoasters), but they’re impressive and more menacing than the little breakers, farther in. They imply an unstoppable, non-negotiable force, right under your tiny boat. I never went more than 1/4 or *maybe* 1/2 mile out, but it seemed like much farther. The breaker zone was a strong psychological dividing point for me.

On the way back, I snapped the pic of the little guy you see at the beginning of this post. My best guess is that he’s a Red-Shouldered Hawk, but I’m not sure. If you have info on this topic, please share.

I also took another couple of photos, although clearly not as cool.

Continue reading →

So I know how irresponsible it is and everything, but before you say anything, just try to imagine what it was like. There I was, out in the flea market all alone, walking along, and I had already been tempted by a $10 singlespeed Schwinn ladies’ cruiser just about Alex’s size, as well as cruelly mocked by any number of Murrays and Huffys that looked SO much better before I got close.

And you know I have never fully recovered from the Vera Horsman experience (even though that centurion was much better for her than it would have been for me). I been pining, you know?

So put yourself in my shoes. There you are, thirty meters away, jaded and longing for bikeness, and you see THIS:

zippy at a distance

What do you do? What do you do?

Me, I talked to the guy, and then talked some more. He wanted $65. I had $31. He wouldn’t let it go for that. I walked away. He said $50. I still walked away, because I only had $31. I went to an ATM and got $20 more, and brought it home. Continue reading →

But first, a gratuitous picture of my sweetie at Garden of the Gods:

So Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams got together in a dark bar one night…

First Excellent Thing:BLDGBLOG has a wonderful, wonderful, delicious article about Michael Cook, a guy in Toronto who is an urban explorer, with an emphasis on subterranean exploring (especially Toronto and Hamilton). This means drains and sewers, largely. There are some sa-weet photos here, which you simply must see to appreciate. The article links to his blog (which has apparently crashed from the newfound publicity), and to sites of other underground urban explorers. Seriously, if I didn’t suddenly have a heightened sense of my own mortality (since, say, June 3 of last year), this is the kind of thing I’d be really, really tempted to do. It tickles my fancy in particular ways. Actually, I’m not saying I won’t do a little of it. The not-very-dangerous kind. Here’s a sample photo (click for larger size, as usual):

Toronto drain pic

Second Excellent Thing: Berkeley Breathed, author of the original Bloom County strip, has continued (with much less fanfare) to create Opus. Recent strips about Lola Granola jumping on the “Radical Islamist” bandwagon in her peripatetic spiritual journeying were immediately pulled from many national newspapers for fear of offending people. Pfft. I love Berk Breathed. He’s been shooting sacred cows on a regular basis since I was too young to understand political sarcasm. And we need to people like him to continue to help us see the absurdity inherent in the world around us. [click for the full comic]

Opus Islamic Fundamentalist strip

(note: I found out about this by way of boing boing, and also through Salon.com, who has not pulled the strip).

ironic… like rain the day after your wedding.

I’m leaving now. I’m ambivalent about it, because there are pluses and minuses to being here in Ontario. In fact, here are some of them:

+ First, I enjoy living with my wife much more than living 2,000 miles away
- I do not enjoy being isolated from the university, people, and other resources that help me do my job. It feels like trying to run a business in Pittsburgh from a tent in the Sierras.
+ It’s only 3 months in the summer
- Then there’s winter… Continue reading →

Bubble-Blowing Festival as an Alternative to the Reception

So the wedding was great. I had missed Cowbell and Database. And Fev’r, too, though I’m loath to admit it. The location was completely gorgeous. Christ Haven is a Christian retreat lodge a few miles outside Florissant, Colorado. The elevation is close to 9,000 feet, so climbing stairs, walking, sleeping, etc. resulted in frequent pauses to gasp for breath.

Due to some freak of room rearranging, Alex and I got the Bridal Suite in the lodge. OK. Twist my arm. It looked out over Pike’s Peak. It’s hard to describe how completely beautiful the countryside was. As we walked through the Fossil Beds, Garden of the Gods, etc., I kept having to stop and just soak it in. Those high meadows and forests… I had forgotten. Continue reading →

foxy at the Florissant fossil beds

It’s weird to be back in Hamilton, feeling like it’s home, but knowing that in 5 days I’ll be in my “real” home in Texas. As my sweetie pie has mentioned, our trip was great. Even the family reunion, which I was initially not very excited about, turned out very well. My only gripe about that is the accommodation situation (medieval torture hide-a-bed in an alcove with no privacy in a condo with 8 children and 6 other adults… not a lot of sleep for those 3 nights). My family is great, and every time I’m around them, I’m reminded of that. It was really nice to get to hang out with my nieces and nephews, too. Alex and I spent some serious quality time with Carter, Lindsey and Truman, and we had a total blast playing with them in the water park.

Speaking of water parks, Alex and I ditched the kids and rode roller coasters and vomit-inducing carnival rides for the last few hours at the amusement park. I have to say I did not expect Alex’s manic desire to spin us around and around and around at high speeds on the ferris-wheel-esque-puke-ride-of-death. This animated mockup is from Amazing Earl’s rollercoaster modeling website, and I hope it’s OK that I borrowed it. As a note, the spin on our ride was controlled by the riders. This means Alex.

computer model of something like the ride that Alex tried to kill me on

I enjoyed every second of the ride, by the way.

I’ll blog more about the wedding itself, later. It was great to hang with Scott and the other interns again, and it was very nice to gasp for breath every night at nearly 9,000 feet altitude.

OK, so here’s some video of that little trail (I call it the “Rabbit Tunnel” trail) that I like. Short little trail, but lots of fun. And more fooling around with YouTube. A clearer version can be downloaded here.

So… I met Bruce Trail again, this time in a dark alley. And he was armed. I took the trail West-ish from where it crosses Wilson near Tiffany Falls, and found out that it’s a hiking trail. Not biking. Hiking. Lots of stairs, lots of sudden steep ups and downs. Several gnarly rubbly sharp-rock gardens. I got off the bike several times, often because I lost control in technical stuff.

At this point I will note that Mr. Bikey was running on 1/3 of his gears. The front derailleur is unusable due to a stripped cable retaining screw. I hacked the thing by forcing the derailleur to stay permanently on the middle chainring. Meh. But I found out that this was not such a bad arrangement.

Eventually I wised up and got offa the psycho trail. I biked around on gravel roads until I found “Maple Woods” or something like that, with an attractive barrier that seemed to call out, “Please!  Bypass me!” So I did. It’s a really nifty series of roads and trails on the other side of the hollow from the Dundas Valley Conservation area. I asked some Slavic-accented walkers how to get to the DVCA, and they gave me good directions. Down a zippy, curvy trail into the hollow, then climb back out the other side, take the first right… and then get distracted by a little rabbit-trail singletrack climbing the hill above said first right.

The rabbit track was just that. Mostly it was a rut about 10″ wide. In or out? “In” seemed wise, since there was little choice. The trail followed a ridgeline with steep dropoffs on one or both sides much of the time, and thick vegetation the rest. The best part was a downhill section that was so overgrown with vegetation that I found myself flattened on the bike, chin on stem, branches scratching at my helmet while I tried to pilot through what felt like a very extended rabbit hole.

Then I ended up in a neighborhood in Dundas. Then I got spunky and dove back into the hollow again, on Old Ancaster Road. Then I got scared of being flattened by cars who couldn’t see around the tight corners on the no-shoulder bike-killer pavement, and I took the first trail I could find, which turned out to be Monarch Trail, which led back to the Rail Trail near our apartment. Fun!

Total time: about 1.5 to 2 hours.

In the vein of avoiding work, I just read a 1996 Outside article about a truly amazing (in both the positive and negative sense) man in the Eastern Andes of Peru. Excerpt:

Don Benigno Añazco carved his way 36 years deep into the green heart of the Andean forest, founded 14 settlements, abandoned his wife and many children, married his daughter, slew his son-in-law, fought drug peddlers, tamed the wilderness, and reclaimed, as best he could, the Inca Empire. And now I was going to find him.
By Kate Wheeler

Lesson #1: don’t mess with Don Benigno Añazco.
Lesson #2: don’t mess with Kate Wheeler.
Lesson #3: special characters like á, ó, ñ, and ü sometimes don’t age well in the www environment.