So don't have time

to be blogging. But I gotta do something while I eat my breakfast, right? Speaking of breakfast:

That's a banana orange white peach smoothie, coffee, with a nice side of bicycle tools.

Here's one project that has kept me busy lately:
This is one of the stencils I cut to help with a fundraiser bike ride (we spray painted route markings and turns on the streets with these.) I'd forgotten hot long cutting good stencils takes. It takes a really long time.

And I was reminded how, if you just act like you're allowed to spray paint whatever shit you want, people don't really bother you. One cop looked at me a little sideways, but I kept painting, and he ignored me.

And this is a current shot of my tomato plants. Inexplicably, the heirloom that was doing the best (the Red Strawberry) and already had half a dozen tomatoes flowering just started to crap out. No idea why, other than possibly the slightly chilly overnight temps we've had lately (high 30s and low 40s.) The others are still doing okay.

Alright, gotta ride downtown for a city council committee meeting. Big Fun Times!

Digital photography

When we had dinner with friends in Denver last week, one of the things that came up is the having too many digital photographs to deal with. I mentioned, as has occurred to me many times, how different it is that when I had to carefully compose every shot, think about the aperture and shutter speed, depth of field, and so on.When you had 12, 24, or 36 shots to work with, and then had to drop it off at the pharmacy or photofinisher, or develop and print it yourself. Develop the film, examine the negatives, maybe print a contact sheet, print some or all.

Point being, you really had to think carefully about each shot. Now with digital cameras, you can just take five (or twenty) shots, and hope one of them comes out.

Some flies in the ointment, though: organization, storage, and just never going through the gazillions of photos you now have.

Case in point: I just downloaded 273 photos from three CF cards from my DSLR. Many of them are duplicates of a given shot. And now I'll have to go through them, delete the ones I don't like, maybe crop some, upload them to this blog, or just let them sit indefinitely.

Another example: my Pictures folder on this computer has 21,425 items in it, totaling 43.1 gb. And this isn't my only Pictures folder.

Ugh. On which note, here is one of the 273 photos:

These are stuffed mushrooms I made last night: the filling is the stems, garlic, jalapenos, and sun-dried tomatoes. This is the dish I refrigerated them in; the rest of the series includes my usual play by play cooking photos, which will likely get their own blog post later. Which tends to lead to, well, needing to download 273 photos.

Cycling weather! Earth Day! Bike sharing! Woo!

And it's gettin' me antsy! I've actually been doing a bunch of fun volunteering with the Atlanta Bicycle Coalition, so that's getting in a good bike fix.

But the tour to Massachusetts is looming large. The tour to Savannah shook out some logistics, and I've been slightly changing my gear, including picking up new brakes to swap out. (I want a little more stopping power, and the Tektro Oryx the Surly LHT comes stock with just don't cut it.) The tour is looking like the last week and a half of May, and the first couple weeks of June. Then I might ride to Colorado or something.

Speaking of Colorado, some fun news for Earth Day: Denver launches Denver B-Cycle , which is billed as "the first large-scale municipal bike sharing system in the United States." If it's anything like the big programs in European cities, like the amazing program I saw in Barcelona, called Bicing, it could revolutionize how we get around in cities. The first half hour of any ride is free, so it's a great way of getting around a city core, without waiting on public transit, trolling for parking, or, god forbid, walking. Wait...

This all said, of course, cycling in cities is only feasible when the cities invest in meaningful infrastructure and policy for cycling. Denver is moving that way, but like all cities, has a long way to go.

My Big Fun Denver Day

Yesterday after the walking tour detailed in my last post, I realized there was a Rockies day game. Baseball is basically the only major sport I like, and I have a soft spot for Rockies games, having spent many a day sitting in the $4 Rockpile bleacher seats studying for the Colorado bar exam. (They used to be $3.)

So I grabbed a burrito and hotfooted it to Coors Field, only to stand in line for about a half hour to buy a ticket. I got inside to an unusually good seat for me, since the Rockpile was sold out:


and slathered myself with sunscreen, and immediately began to get irritated with the moron sitting two seats over, who couldn't shut his mouth the entire game. He was immensely entertaining to himself, and laughed at almost all of his own comments. He carried on a running monologue with all of the players, and butchered the names he didn't know how to pronounce. (Jackass somehow managed to make De La Rosa sound like an Italian name: dee-le-rozza.) He loudly yelled that he could pitch a strike better than De La Rosa. He poo-poohed 93mph fastballs. Jackass was in his late 50s or early 60s, and had more hair on the tops of his hands than most people have on their entire body. His father was sitting next to him, and even he tried to shush him throughout the game: "Tom, c'mon, just watch the game." Jackass Tom was having none of it.

There was a seven or eight year old kid on the other side of me who several times threw peanuts and peanut shells over the railing (where people were sitting below.) His idiot mother-figure was several seats away, occupied with two other kids who pretty clearly didn't give a shit about the baseball game. I hissed "QUIT THROWING PEANUTS" at him, and after shooting me a slightly scared but calculating look, he did indeed quit throwing peanuts. I don't think he was particularly scared of me, but it's a strange thing to have an adult who is a stranger tell you what to do, and he probably worried I'd narc him out to his mom. Which I gladly would have.

By the fifth inning, I couldn't deal with Jackass Tom and Throwing Peanut Kid anymore, so I moved down to the main concourse to stand in the shade and watch the game from practically field level:

It was a pretty meh game, with the Rockies never coming back from the 5-0 the Mets established in the first few innings. I left in the bottom of the 8th to beat the crowd, and watched the last bits on TV at Falling Rock Taphouse a block south. I had a powerful thirst for beer, since even in one of the five best beer cities in the country, the beer selection at Coors Field (go figure) is horrid:

It's a terrible picture, but basically the best option are the mediocre and overmarketed Fat Tire and Guinness, and it plummets from there.

Falling Rock has an amazing tap list, but it gets spendy fast, so after one I headed over to Wynkoop Brewing for happy hour ($3 imperial pints!) I was on a roll now, so I walked over to Great Divide for the 4 o'clock brewery tour and had a delicious Old Yeti Imperial Stout made with coffee beans.

A little full from beer, I wandered back to the hotel, and swam for about an hour in the great pool. I also took advantage of the decent jacuzzi, and the fantastic sauna. The steam room was entirely too hot, even for me.

Today is my last full day here, with more walking (maybe a trip to the REI flagship store to buy cycling shorts), more swimming, jacuzzi, and sauna, and more fantastic beer on the docket.

I have a ridiculously good life.

Mile high

God, I love Denver. J and I both do, and are sad that we're unwilling to move back until a certain someone is no longer here. but we can bide our time. I'm a patient, patient man.

J is doing a multiday training, and your tax dollars are very kindly putting me up at the Marriott in LoDo. Thank you! I walked with her the two miles to the hospital where the training is, and then continued with my walking tour of all the places I have lived in Denver. Big times!

I have lived in Denver three separate times (well, sort of four, but that's a long story.) All three places were within three blocks of Colfax Avenue, the main west to east thoroughfare that runs through central Denver. Many people's notion of Colfax is that it's all seedy and run down; in the late 90s when I first lived here, a local nickname was Cold Facts Avenue. Not very original, but it gets the public opinion across. While this was and still is true in parts, I have always loved Colfax. It's vibrant, alive, dynamic, loud, urban (until you get into the suburban eastern stretch), fun.

The first stop was actually on our way to the hospital, at the first house J and I lived in together:
It was on Detroit Street. Well, actually, it was in the alley between Detroit and Clayton.

Here's the view from another part of the alley. It was an 80 year old converted carriage house for the main house in front, brick frame construction, basically a pet project of the owner. With a nod to Tom Waits, it got colder than a welldigger's ass. The owner insisted that the pellet stove was amazing, efficient, would easily heat the whole house, including the upstairs where the bedroom was. I don't think she was stupid, so I can only conclude that she lied. Yes, you could heat the whole house with the pellet stove, if you cranked it to full blast for several hours, and wore ski clothes in the meantime. That winter, we were going through an average of two 50 pound bags of pellets a week, and were definitely not blasting it all the time. I worked at a desk that was about five feet from the pellet stove, and still had to use a space heater under the desk to keep my feet from going numb.

In retrospect, this might have played in somewhat to our decision on where to move next: San Diego.

(Confession: I have a somewhat checkered history of selecting housing for J and I. Those of you who saw the studio in Ocean Beach, San Diego, know what I mean.)

After dropping J off at the hospital, the next stop was Rosemary Street, about a 4.5 mile walk from where we started:

I lived in this house the summer after graduating from law school, while I was studying for the bar exam. The old DU law school was a couple blocks away, where it shared a campus with Johnson and Wales University, a culinary and business school that now occupies the whole campus. I shared it with a couple pleasant but dimwitted guys who, as far as I could tell, didn't do anything but drink beer and smoke pot.

It was a run down dump, but good for what I needed at the time: a bedroom, a toilet, and a kitchen. I didn't study there (I mostly studied in the law library, at St. Mark's Coffeehouse, and in the bleachers at Rockies games.) It was cheap, and the owner was perfectly willing to do a summer lease to await the fall semester students who wouldn't mind living in relative squalor.

Lastly is the first place I lived in Denver. I had just graduated from college, and was going to enter a master's program in experiential education in Minnesota. It's an extremely well reputed program, but I decided that summer that (A) I was partially doing it because I couldn't think of anything better to do, and (B) I really didn't need a master's degree for a field where you don't even really need the bachelor's degree I already possessed. So I called A, asked him if he wanted to move somewhere, and Denver was it. We landed in a one bedroom apartment at this miserable little dump on Cook Street:

It was great. We chose Denver basically on a whim, since we both wanted to live in the west, and Denver had the best combination of cheap housing and a strong job market. I literally got calls from all ten jobs I applied to within the first few days, and started a job within a week. It was at Cook Street that we invented the disgustingly delicious Pickle in a Blanket. (Don't ask.)

I worked mostly overnights at a residential treatment center, which was an experience that deserves its own telling. I rode sometimes, but often drove to work in my Ford Festiva clown car. I had a tape with Cowboy Junkies on both sides: The Trinity Session on one side, and Lay It Down on the other. The tape deck was auto-reverse, and that tape played more or less nonstop for about six months.

Many mornings when I got home from work, A and I would walk a couple blocks down to Colfax and get huge, greasy breakfasts at Goodfriends, sometimes washed down with a beer. (HEY, LOOK. It might have been 9 in the morning, but it was the end of my workday, okay? And A may or may not have bothered to go to sleep yet.)

It was actually at Goodfriends where the monumental event of A starting to like good beer occurred. I had been making him taste my beers for a couple years, and he had only two descriptions: "ugh, beery" and "ugggggh, VERY beery". A New Belgium Sunshine Wheat opened his eyes, eliciting a "Hey, that's actually pretty good" and it has never been the same sense.

The Cook Street apartment had no anti-scald hot water control valve in the shower, and for the first month that we lived there, we regularly got burned. Our jackass landlord insisted that it was isolated to our apartment, he had no idea, blah blah blah. We soon found out that many of our neighbors had the same problem. I finally had to threaten to withhold rent and sue in housing court to get him to fix it. He probably wasn't real pleased when we broke our lease early, but was also likely relieved to get rid of us.

This is a half block north of the Cook Street apartment, looking out over City Park to the rocky mountains. It was lovely.

Overheard on the bus

The Denver RTD bus from DIA to downtown Denver, that is. The ridiculously overpriced ($10), slow, unnecessarily large bus. There was an off-duty driver sitting there bantering with the on-duty driver. He laughed after every single sentence, and before about half. It was exceptionally annoying.

They traded stories about their various vehicle violations, all the tickets they have had, the time when he (John Payne, RTD operator # 75049) got pulled over on the E-470 coming back from the casino, and it was sure a good thing he didn't have to walk a straight line, never has been able to do that, har har har, and of course his eyes were red, he told the cop he should try getting four hours of sleep a night and not have red eyes, har har har.

But I did find out something really important: Texas will extradite you from Colorado for an unpaid speeding ticket. Oh, yeah, he knows, and he told his wife so. Just call you sister, he said, and she did, and oh yeah, the sister said definitely, they'll come and arrest you and extradite you. Better pay up.

I didn't bother to mention that I have represented a number of clients in Colorado who were facing extradition, and many states will barely extradite for low level felonies, much less traffic citations. But RTD driver was positive, and his sister in law used to be a prosecutor for the Denver city prosecutor's office downtown, so she would know.

Whoops

I guess I wasn't totally awake. Since I'm flying out today, I didn't want to make a whole pot of coffee. I have some instant espresso, which is marginally so-so but drinkable, so I put the teakettle on the stove with some water, and returned to the bathroom to brush my teeth.

Only I turned on the wrong burner. And the burner I turned on had a glass plate on it. Which loudly exploded. And which I then spent about twenty minutes cleaning up the little shards of glass from all over the kitchen and nearby living room. It shattered like safety glass does, into a gazillion pieces, except without any plastic layer to hold it all together.

Oh, well. I have coffee now. And the floor needed sweeping anyway.

San Francisco

DAMMIT, I want to move to San Francisco.

And no, not just because of the accordion, harmonica and drum playing guy dressed up in a bunny suit in the Haight that W and I hung out and sang with:

No, the immediate reason is that even the SFPD, which is as backwards as any other major police department much of the time, encourages cyclists to take the lane. [Found via a fun new blog, recommended by -A, which he sent on for a current event story where an SFPD officer told a cyclist "Shut your fucking mouth bitch or I'll knock you off your bike."] Here is another telling of the story, albeit slightly edited for the SFPD's vulgarity, from Streesblog San Francisco.

Okay, so San Francisco clearly isn't perfect. But damn, the people and beer are great. And who doesn't want to take the lane?

Stats

These won't be super fancy stats from my recent bike tour. I can't fairly blame this on the fact that my in-house statistician, J, is on a plane to Denver. (I join her tomorrow: Wynkoop, ready the casks!)

I do have some basic stats:

DAY 1
Atlanta to Macon
miles: 83.23
riding time: 6:15:12
maximum speed: 30.0
average speed: 13.3

DAY 2
Macon
(a very short day, due to sticking around in Macon to see if I could get my implant abutment re-placed, which I couldn't. It was also a nice excuse to not ride too much in the one-day thunderstorms that swept through the area.)
miles: 19.08
riding time: 1:31:49
maximum speed: 27.0
average speed: 12.4

DAY 3
Macon to Swainsville
miles: 90.28
riding time: 6:51:56
maximum speed: 36.5
average speed: 13.1

DAY 4
Swainsville to Savannah
miles: 86.79
riding time: 6:58:35
maximum speed: 22.5
average speed: 12.4
I was literally riding into a stiff headwind almost the entire day: the only exception was the first five miles. Just look at the day's maximum speed. There were MANY downhills where I had to pedal hard to maintain speed. I'm not gonna lie to you: it kinda sucked.

TOTALS
miles: 279.38
riding time, rounded to minutes: 22 hours, 53 minutes (I think I did the math correctly. Feel free to comment that I messed it up. Dammit, I need my in-house mathematician!)
daily maximum speed, average: 29mph (wow: there's a totally useless statistic, eh?)
average speed, over trip: 12.8

Marginally interesting is that my highest average speed came on the first day, even though Atlanta to Macon is by far the hilliest part of the trip, and included google maps dropping me onto dirt and gravel roads a couple times:

Actually, this image is from day three. Just past this sign was a 2.5 mile stretch of loose gravel road, which is moderately difficult riding on a loaded touring bike with 700c road slicks, especially since it was uphill, then down, then up, and down again. Increasing the difficulty was one of the largest, most actively aggressive dogs of all those that charged me on the ride.

FAJITA FAJITA!

I wasn't teasing, I really do have plenty of food porn to post. Here are fajitas I made when J2 came over a few days before my bike trip:

The produce before cooking, and:

after cooking, with the tempeh thrown in. Tempeh, you say?

Oh yeah, tempeh! Cubed and uncooked, and then:

fried with olive oil and salt.

Some reasonably good looking organic bell peppers.

And a side profile. You can see a seam on the green pepper, the kind of thing that "perfect" conventional peppers wouldn't make it to supermarket display with. You would probably have to dumpster them, if they made it as far as the store.

Cut and cleaned, and ready to FRY!

And the peppers, with a little olive oil and fry lovin'.

More before and after magic, with organic zucchini:

FRIED! Woo woo woo!

Green onions, and

broccoli.

Made for some damn tasty fajitas, lemme tell you what. So much so that when J got home from work last night, she wanted fajitas, too! So, with (no) apologies to a nasty pizza chain which shall remain unnamed for the play on words, I made fajitas fajitas!

Of course, any proper meal that any reasonable person would eat starts with ONIONS!

We were hungry, so I was working quickly and don't have many prep pictures this time. Suffice it to say that they look a lot like the prep pictures above. Here is the veggie mixture cooking.

And fully cooked.

And fully cooked.

And I had a hankering for more fried food, so I did a slightly lower-oil version of battering and deep fat frying. Here are some onions, about to get bathed in batter, and:

FRIED! I mean, for real: how can you not want to eat these?

Here are some similarly frying green peppers. J made a wasabi veganaise for a dipping sauce. Yum yum yum!

Bikes, food, and travel!

What more do you need? I'm back from my bike tour to Savannah, which was pretty solid. High points included many, many miles of open roads, mostly friendly people, and finally getting to see Savannah:


It also had low points, like the abutment and crown from my implant falling out at lunch on day one, necessitating a trip to the dentist today, and literally dozens of aggressive charging dogs. I managed to outpace all of the dogs, but had to bear down and hustle many times.

Savannah is pleasant, but very touristy. It also has a somewhat complicated relationship with bicycles:

The relationship is sometimes downright antagonistic:
This last one is the square that, just a little west of this sign, has the Mercer-Williams House made famous in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

Savannah also has:

creepy fish, and

fancy cemeteries.

A few random shots from the bike tour itself:

This was the first picture I took. It seemed like a good omen.

I didn't go there.

Plenty of services available along the route.

And just in case you were under the mistaken impression that racism wasn't still alive and well in Georgia, here are some shots from near Wrightsville:

"Southern independence / a time of truth". You can't make this shit up.

Here is the whole monument to bigotry and hatred. The confederate battle flag on the ground was about 12x12'.

And here's a little old time religion thrown into the mix. The monument is in the background, with handy directions to church in the foreground.

If you read the plaque carefully, you'll see that the whole nightmarish monument to bigotry, oppression and hatred was erected by the:

Sons of Confederate Veterans.

Need a little background? The "SCV" "is preserving the history and legacy of these heroes, so future generations can understand the motives that animated the Southern Cause. " And SCV has a program called "Heritage Defense" which, among other things, is taking to task those bleeding heart socialist radicals at NASCAR which "continues to publicly denounce it's southern roots and pander to the anti Confederate Flag elements." [Editor's note: I think the ignorant bigots mean "its" rather than "it's."]

Plenty of people still fly the 1956-2001 Georgia state flag though maybe it's just coincidence that it prominently features the Confederate Battle Flag. You think?

And since I promised some food:
The eating on the trip was pretty rough. I ate a lot of toast and clif bars. And the beer options really sucked, really bad. But the people here, in Metter, GA, were super friendly.

More food to follow, I promise!

Reading

This is a really extraordinary story, which I picked up on through my friend Skye's wonderful blog.

It's really well worth taking a few minutes for. Go. Do it.

Letter writing

I was just writing a friend a too-long email, given all she has on her plate. It included this random observation:

Not necessarily in the nostalgic way you hear older generations talk about it, but I miss writing and receiving letters. I was a big letter writer in high school, and through about half of college. And cliche though it is, email took that away. I had a friend in high school that I saw daily, but we still wrote each other letters. I don't know if I still have them, but I had many dozens of letters, likely 100+, from this. I think that maybe 5% of it was flirting, but mostly we just liked writing letters.

Nothing ever came of whatever was the flirting part, probably for the best. We both burned too brightly then, were too intense. (M: are you out there? Was any part of it flirting for you?)

And if any of you are thinking that I'm intense now, well, you have no idea. (Though several of you do.)

I wonder if blogging is public letter writing. Probably.

Shorts and thriftiness

I'm a big fan of thrift stores. Atlanta has been a pretty big disappointment in this category, at least intown. Fortunately, I used to regularly peruse the thrift stores in Anchorage, and pretty much couldn't pass up a pair of cargo shorts that fit, which is good, since it's definitely shorts weather in Atlanta.

I broke out my cargo shorts collection from the closet this morning:


It's a little difficult to see, but I treat my clothing pretty hard. Bicycling is particularly hard on shorts and pants, especially in the crotch. Here's a visual aid:

Conveniently color coded, the yellow circles are tears and holes. You'll note a particular prevalence in the area where, well, contact with a bike seat is made.

The red circles are what results when you're replacing your food waste disposal,
and realize when you're halfway through that the pipe leading from the disposal (visible righthand side, ~1/3 from top) is kinda gross, so you decide to spray bleach water into it.

Hot tip: this isn't blood stains on a carpet resulting from removing bike pedals (shout out to J2!), and
quick treatment with hot water or other cleaner doesn't actually make a bit of difference.

One more hot tip while we're at it: turns out that cheap screwdrivers aren't designed to be used as prybars when replacing food waste disposals.

READERSHIP POLL: Which, if any, of the above shorts should be (A) turned into rags, or (B) replace the even more ragged cargo shorts in the painting clothing collection?

Time to go for a bike ride in the one pair in the photo without obvious damage.