ITEM: My sleepy wife is very inspiring. Space isn’t the final frontier; sleep deprivation is. And she’s like Amundsen, or Armstrong, or Magellan or someone.

Go Sweetie!

ITEM: I bought a Canada Bike on Saturday. This means I can take my real bike home at the end of the summer, and never bring it back, and I’ll still have one here to ride. The cost? About half of what I have paid (and will pay) to transport my real bike.

ITEM: I am not feeling like working. What else is new?

ITEM: Wanna scare yourself? Click here. I especially like the counter for # of barrels of oil.

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).

Google Map capture of Filman and Bruce Trails

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.

1. In response to a slashdot article: “The sooner pirates bring down the entire entertainment industry the better. Time to clear the slate and start over.” Thought-provoking. It pleases the inner anarchist.

2. I hung out with a ground squirrel on campus yesterday. He was sniffing my hand, wanting some food. He was very cute.

3. I fixed the bike. Sort of. The derailleur really was bent. I may need to remove it, disassemble it, and bang the cage into shape some more. I messed up the rear wheel of my road set, so I’ll just put my mtb wheels on, and get the road wheel fixed later. But the mtb wheels are out of true, which was part of the reason I had the road wheels on in the first place.

4. I waited too long to get my ticket to Ontario for the summer. Now it will be $500. Damn.

5. I made a poster tube. It is waterproof and sturdy. My poster will be secure and comfortable, all the way to D.C. next week.

6. Alex is in Newfoundland, as of tomorrow. I’m a bit jealous. It sounds like an interesting place.

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!

Continue reading →

So I got this package from Pricepoint, and it has my real life non-I-beam seatpost in it, and some boots for my forks (maybe prolong their life; I have seen their mortality… ::shudder::). It came while I was gone, so I had to go get it from UPS (which is on Upas Avenue… no laugh required).

Turns out it’s a bit of a ride. Google maps didn’t plot my actual route (Jackson instead of McColl; it has a bike lane in both directions. w00t!), so I painted it in with orange fuzzy. I’d say I got my exercise for the day. It was a delightful day for riding, too. About 70f, and breezy (as always). The trip was around 8 miles each way. Not bad. I did it in about an hour, so that’s, um, a 16 mile-per-hour average. Anyway…

Why did I spend 15 minutes doing this? Now I need to go home and continue icing my knee. But class goes until 10 pm. [/whine]

Boondocks - RIAA

There I was, minding my own business, which happened to be hauling like mad on a half-buried and quickly rusting Wal-Mart shopping cart, ankle deep (and sinking fast) in smelly mud. I wanted the front wheels. They come with integrated casters, and I’ve had a hankerin’ for one of those rolly middle-of-your-kitchen-floor portable counter things for a while, now. But they’re expensive. And wheels with casters are even more expensive. But then I noticed (in my frequent biking through unpopulated urban areas) that shopping carts, when abandoned more than a block from the store they came from, or in inconvenient locations (such as a couple of feet off the sidewalk, for instance), never get returned. They just get smashed, or rusted, or gradually turned into artificial canal reef environments.

The wheels came off pretty easily, once I hauled half the stupid cart out of the nasty, squishy, stinky mud in the drying ditch. The wheels were pretty gross, though. So were my shoes, by that time. And my back wheel was flat. I guess tire liners can’t protect you against everything.

Now the wheels are sprayed off and awaiting naval jelly for the rust. I only got 3, which is a bummer.  The fourth wheel was so far down in the mud that I couldn’t pull it out, and I really really really didn’t want to dig.

So, now, when I cruise around town on my bici (the fork is working just fine, so far… knock on wood), I’m going to be carrying my ratchet with a 19mm and a 13mm socket, keeping my eyes out for shopping carts that will most likely never find their way back home.

Then, off to Harlingen. I hunted down the only other disc golf course in the Rio Grande Valley. Turns out it’s a pretty OK course (which means it’s approximately 2,452% better than my nemesis course just down the road in Freddy Gonzalez Park). The pictures above are from the newer, cooler course. The fourth one is a weird brick in the grass. I think maybe it’s a distance marker (350 feet), even though it was in the middle of nowhere. The course isn’t very well marked. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out which basket corresponded to which tee.

Maybe it was laziness, or maybe the fatigue of constantly teeing off and putting at various angles to the 30-mph wind, but I gave up after 8 holes. It was fun, but some of the pure joy of a nice drive was taken away by the climatic situation.

Then back home, stopping for tacos on the way. Since then, I’ve been wasting time in a variety of ways, each more pointless than the last. Except my brief chat with my honey. That is always pointful.

So this nice lady named Vera had a post on Craigslist that asked if anyone had a cheap or free bike. She’s dealing with a family situation, down here in South Texas supporting her Dad, and she is without bike. She has many things going for her, that give her points with me and/or Alex:

1. She’s Canadian
2. She has cool tattoos
3. She loves bikes
4. She’s helping out her family

And, she was really nice when we met her. So how could I say no? Plus, the bike fit her much better than it fit me, so the bike is now hers.

I am happy thinking of someone who really needs it (even if it’s only for a month or so) zooming around McAllen on it. Also I’m happy thinking of spending my weekends for the next few months combing through thrift stores, garage sales and pawn shops looking for another bike (that will fit me better this time). :)

That is all.

Shrine to the patron saint of irritability

2 days ago, I found Bruce Trail. It’s really, really neato. Gorgeous, lush (bikeable!) trail with lots of nifty natural beauty. It connects to this end of town by a short spur trail that starts where Filman (sp?) Road ends, just off Wilson St. (that’s where I found the angry monk, in someone’s backyard). Of note, there was a section of forest off the road (just North of the trail) cordoned off in yellow police-tape zigzags. I wanted to take a picture, but a very stern-looking police officer discouraged this. Anyway, a few more pics of the trail are under the cut.

Other news: Yesterday was a bit blah. I’m still bummed about not having a computer of my own here (it’s just frustrating, you know?), even though Topita is being so nice and lending me hers. I went to get her a gift last night, from Best Buy, and that provided more frustration. I looked at the flyers, which advertised said gift, and I looked online and the website said the Burlington store had some in stock. So I drove there. The customer “service” representative said, “Yeah, we have two of those” while looking at his computer screen. When I asked where they were, he looked around a bit, then informed me that they must be on the truck, and it would be a real hassle to find them. I pressed, and he agreed to go look. He then ducked back onto the sales floor and ignored me for 15 min. I cornered him and asked him again, and he said it would take “way too long” to find them. Sigh. I told my story to the helpful person at the front, and he said the same thing. Sucks to be you, man.

In positive news, Urbie came over for dinner. That was fun, even though I was in a crappy mood. She helped raise it a bit. And then I got to write a little, and help Topita with her lines for Oedipus Rex. I think (semi-)trained monkeys translated this version. In the 19th century. It includes lines such as “Apollo is forsook…” and it uses “weird” as a noun (I know it can be one, but still; it’s… um… strange). Continue reading →

I
Tunnel downstream of Tiffany Falls

Urbie and her beau were kind enough to invite me ice skating last night. Well, ALH and I were both invited, but she was busy dissertating. So I went. Guess what I learned! Hockey stop! Well, mostly. I can’t do it totally consistently, and it’s not always super-awesome, and I think I’d die if I tried it from a seriously fast speed… but at least I can do something like it, on both the right and left sides, which is more than I could do last week. Sweeeet! Did I mention that Urbie and ALH are awesome for getting me hockey skates for Christmas? They are.

In other news…

• My Big-Brothery government is going to put RFID chips (always “on”) in passports from now on, so your personal info is constantly being broadcast to anyone near you who feels like receiving the signal. Nice. Thanks, Big Bro.
• Somalia is still a mess, and the U.S. may have backed the wrong horse. To be fair, however, there may not have been any good horses to choose from (but still, maybe we should stop supporting petty clan warlords in foreign power struggles…).
• My laptop still shows no signs of getting here. ALH is still angelically letting me use hers, both for work and for… um… this. Nonwork.

And now, I think I’ll post the rest of the usable photos from my visit to Tiffany Falls. I walked up there yesterday morning, spent a while shooting things, and then walked back via Bruce Trail. I will post those photos tomorrow. Continue reading →