New Calendar

It sure is.

- b

Christmas Finally

Left Tuesday afternoon around 4pm. Checked into a hotel in West Virginia somewhere between midnight and 1am after they closed the highway due to ice. We were 15 miles from the house.

Wednesday morning got up and waited for the ice to thaw, then headed down the highway in torrential rain.

Finally arrived in Tennessee Wednesday night.

Christmas is nice.

- b

Speaking of Fire

Sometime during my freshman year at college somebody in our dorm decided to set some fires.

Most of the time they were set in the central trash bins for the floor and in the middle of the night. Our dorm had ten floors.

I can't remember how many times this happened, but I do remember many sleepless nights from evacuations and standing outside in the nighttime cold.

Fires were set on every floor - every floor except mine and maybe one other.

The only reason there weren't any fires on our floor was because we started a fire watch. Each night, all night, two people were awake for "fire shifts" in the hall of our floor.

This was a picture I took while on one of my shifts. I had my stereo and mini speakers set up to keep me awake and motivated. If you look close, you'll see an envelope, with fire on it, on the top of my stereo.

With a couple of random hours in the middle of each night, you never knew what you were going to produce.

- b

So Tired

In the last four weeks, I've only taken a single day off work.

Between all that work and all the play last night, I'm beat.

Today I'm resting.

First day of winter is a nice day to do it too.

- b

Some Bike History

The history lessons laid out in pictures are not going to be necessarily chronological, so where we left off in 1989 we're now moving forward a little to 1993.

I started college in the fall of 1992. Late spring of 93 one of my new college friends finally mentioned and invited a bunch of us to his parents cabin a mere hour away.

From that point on, most weekends at school meant weekends at the cabin.

In the fall of 93 I came back to school with a pickup truck and a greater ambition for riding mt. bikes. I spent my summer working full time at a golf course primarily to outfit my mt. bike hunger.

Luckily my college friends had done something similar. Now we all had bikes and wanted to ride them - everywhere and especially at the cabin.

Over the summer I had built the box you see in the bed to keep things dry and protected on my long trips to where ever. The rest of the bed turned out to fit five bikes quite nicely. Being in college and having very little cash, we built our own racks out of 2"x4"s. Literally each rack was made completely of 2"x4"s. Obviously there were the runners, but the areas where the forks connected to the runners were simply blocks of wood cut to fit between the fork blades. A hole drilled through the block and an old skewer was all that was needed to anchor it all down.

So we threw the bikes in the back and headed to the cabin - a lot.

Being our sophomore year we still had a lot of time on our hands. With that extra time I did a lot of bike maintenance. I used to repack hubs on a nearly biweekly basis. If you expand the picture, you'll see my cranks are off (my bike is the purple Diamond Back sitting upside down). Not sure why or what I was doing, but I did that a lot back then.

Somebody snapped a picture before our ride.

Our ride took us to Little Pine State Park. Though I don't remember any specifics about that particular ride, I know I've ridden around there many times through the years.

Across the road from the park is a nice fire road climb that switch backs into the sky. It's a real lung buster for sure. After traversing the top there's a gnarly downhill Jeep road that drops you out pretty close to this point in the picture. I've had lots of good times bombing down that Jeep road.

What I also find interesting about this picture are the front tires on at least my bike and the green GT behind it. Back then everything was rigid. Suspension forks had just come out, but were way too expensive for us college types. In place of squishy forks, we discovered squishy tires. The tire manufacturers had finally stepped it up and started making huge 2.2" tires. I think my friend Aaron with the green GT is even running one on the back of his bike. They were a revolution in cush'.

Yeah. "Those were the days."

- b

Heat Streak

Was severely crippled by the latest attic insulation work.

The red square is/was the location of the heat streak (i.e. the area where heat escaped into the attic and continually melted condensation (of any kind) from the roof). When you expand the picture, you can see the area in the red square is completely white and that's a good.

The blue square is in the rafter next to the heat streak. You can see there's some evidence of melting there. This is to be expected as I have not completed the insulation work in that area. Currently there's only a single (pieced together at best) piece of insulation there.

The green square identifies another area of melt. Though somewhat perplexing, I think it's related to the vent pipe in that rafter space. The vent pipe prevented me from properly filling the space with insulation. Maybe I'll go back and try harder.

The other perplexing area of melt is the bottom right hand corner of the bathroom vent furthest to the left (I know. I'm totally OCD about this). I'd expect the snow to melt first around the metal vents through the day being they are metal, black and absorb a lot of heat, but this picture was taken in the morning after the nighttime snow. I could also expect a certain amount of heat to escape up through the vent from the bathroom and cause some kind of uniform melt around the metal cap, but this isn't uniform. To avoid being too anal about all this, I'll probably take a quick look the next time I'm in the attic, fix what's obvious, or leave it alone.

- b

Icing

Got some ice last night.

Not a whole lot different then other times we've gotten ice.

Like usual, it weighs down the bamboo across our driveway.

And like other times, I had to go out and "relieve" the bamboo (i.e. whack it with a broom) of it's weight.

Though this time I was a little more careful and first took some pictures.

The above photo is of a piece of ice the shape and contour of a leaf that has slipped to the bottom of the leaf from which it was formed. Unfortunately my picture taking really doesn't do it justice.

Again, the photo doesn't quite capture how I saw it, but everything was bending down from the center of the grove. The area that's usually the most dense and impenetrable was completely open and exposed.

None of this happens when it snows - no matter how much. It's mostly an effect of heavy rain and/or ice, which we tend to get a lot more of.

- b

Christmas 1989

This year isn't any more memorable over another. I just happen to have photos from the time.

They (i.e. the photos) start with a busted knee.

Earlier that fall I had torn some cartilage in my knee from skateboarding (woohoo! learned how to "rock-n-roll"). Sometime in December they cut the torn piece out and left me as you see above.

Hmmm. Now that I look at the picture closer, I notice the worn spot beneath the table between the chair I'm in and the couch. I seem to remember one of the dogs (or any of them) used to sleep there, though not relevant to the current topic.

Not completely relevant, but while on the topic of dogs, we used to have two Christmas trees. One was the main tree, as you see here.

It was set up in our living room and had most of the decorations and presents. For a while we used to set up my Dad's old Lionel train set next to it. It was kind of crazy considering the train set was 30 years (or more) old.

The second tree was called the dog tree. At some point my sister and I started picking out and cutting down these "Charlie Brown trees" that we set up in the family room and called the dog tree.

Obviously smaller and containing less gifts, I think my sister and I originally really considered it a tree for gifts for our dogs. The reality was we never went in the living room except for Christmas morning. It was nice to have something more Christmas-like in the family room where we all spent most of our time.

In addition to two trees, another tradition was parties. Thinking back, it seems like my parents had all kinds of parties. In reality it was probably every other year or something. Either way there was a party in 1989. I remember all the adults would come over and do their thing, while we kids ran about the house avoiding them. I really have no idea what they (the adults) did, and can hardly remember what we did (except for the time the Bolen's had a party and we got in trouble). Luckily someone got a picture of the 1989 party.

I still don't know what they're doing or even who some of them are, but I do see my Dad with a video camera (somehow I doubt he's filming two chicks). What I do remember is my Dad renting (or borrowing) these VHS cameras and playing film maker at various parties. As a side note, I should try and You Tube some of those.

Would anyone have ever thought, one day they could stand there with their cell phone and do the same thing?

In nearly twenty years times have seriously changed.

Maybe not exactly Christmas, but definitely the same roll of film was this picture taken.

That's our pool - frozen enough for my sister, my Dad and myself to stand on.

Right now my pool is slush. The cover surface water gets cold enough to freeze nowadays, but the water in the pool hardly freezes. The ground around it just doesn't maintain that kind of cold anymore.

At least tightly cuffed pants are no longer cool.

- b

Ghosts of Xmas Past

In an attempt to get more in the holiday spirit...

That was Seaford, De. 1976 was the year - the height of knotty pine and faux fireplaces.

By the way, I've been scanning photos again. Since there isn't much currently going on with me besides work (count myself lucky right?), I'll take some trips down memory lane and hand out some history lessons.

- b

Introduction to Bean's

I moved to the area in 96 after college. Being just out of college, I didn't have a whole lot of cash.

Sometime in late 97 or early 98, I visited a bike shop near where I worked called Bean's Bikes. There the proprietor (i.e. Sean) sold me a lightweight performance oriented Cannondale frame to upgrade my old school Diamondback steel frame. I say old school, because that steel frame was already 5 or 6 years old by then.

I loved that Cannondale frame. The handling was amazing or at least a noticeable improvement over the old steel frame.

I rode it mostly at French Creek and Marsh Creek for about two years.

Roughly about the same time I got this frame (within the same year at least), I also got into motorcycles. The motorcycles turned out to be the demise of my beloved Cannondale. Sometime in 2000, I sold the mt. bike (the Manitou Three included) for extra racing cash and never saw it again.

Hmmm. I wonder if there's any chance of hunting it down?

- b

Up in Smoke

I've been reading an article in the New Yorker about the guy that's most accurately reconstructed the atomic bomb, Little Boy, dropped on Hiroshima.

He's done most of it from old photographs, interviews, sketches and mathematical guesses.

Though horrible at math and science myself, I've been going around looking at things with a different perspective since reading the article.

Take the ash pan of our pellet stove for instance.

I clean it out roughly every 7 days. We burn roughly a bag of pellets a day. A single bags holds 40lbs. of pellets. That's 280lbs of pellets reduced to this pile of ash.

Wow! is about all I can come up with. Sure, I could weigh the ashes, give you the size of the ash pan, blah, blah, blah and we could probably figure out the BTUs for the week, etc.

But I'm empirical at best, so all you get is - wow!

- b

Who Wins?

We had a wishbone. We made wishes. We pulled.

So who wins?

- b

Recursion Perversion

private void recursionPerversion() {
     while(1 != 0) {
        recursionPerversion();
    }
}

- b

Three Dreams

Had three anxiety filled sleepless dreams last night. Not at all what I needed.

Dream I
Two girls and three guys (including me) were in the mountains somewhere. We were in some kind of clearing or lair. The one guy was dead and mangled. It looked like he'd been run over, but I knew that wasn't the case. There was some kind of cave or hole in the ground where the others were stuffing his body. The others (the two girls and the guy) were vampires or something like vampires. The one girl had big red rings around her eyes that were cuts. When she got all fired up, the rings glowed or bled bright red, but not enough for the blood to run down her face, just enough to change color and look really menacing.

I was a co-conspirator of sorts, but I was not one of them. There was always an edginess between myself and them. Toward the end of the dream the edginess turned to threat. Her rings glowed bright red and I knew my time was up.

Dream II
I was in college or a college atmosphere hanging out at someones house. There was a girl I was with, but not really "with." When I decided to stay the afternoon, she somehow secretly gave me some kind of drug. She told her friends or house-mates (which I overheard) it was HGH (human growth hormone), but it didn't feel like a steroid. I got real groggy and slow. I could think, but everything was moving in slow motion. I couldn't figure out why she drugged me. Was it for fun or was she hurting me? She wouldn't tell me either way and acted indifferently to my concern and condition. Annoyed and realizing I needed to protect myself, I got in my truck (my truck?) and left. As I was leaving things at the house were starting to heat up. They were all preparing for some kind of sex party. Not sure if I was meant to be a victim, participant or what, but I got out of there.

Dream III
A friend and I were cruising around a college town (college again?) in some big old car that I think was a convertible. There was a girl cruising with us. She was riding in the back amongst a bunch of blankets or some other large and concealing material. At some point we stopped and the friend and I went inside someplace to grab a bite to eat or run some other errand. Meanwhile the girl stayed outside in the car to nap or relax beneath the blankets. While we were inside, someone drove off with the car, but they weren't just someone they were some kind of violent criminal. Our friend within the car realized she'd been taken with the car, but didn't think the assailant knew she was there. Discretely she called us from underneath the blankets and quietly gave us directions to find her. We knew it was only a matter of time before the thief stopped the car and figured out our friend was there. Frantically we rushed about town following our friends clues to locate her.

The car stopped and was left in a bad neighborhood. We were able to rescue our friend before she was found. In the interest of our own safety we left the car where it was. Though this one had a happy ending, it was stressful nonetheless.

- b

I'm Itchy

Spent far too many hours in the attic today.

Working on the outdoor speakers this summer when the heat in the attic maxed out at 120 degrees, I knew something was wrong. When we bought the house, the inspector mentioned there might not be enough ventilation due to the insulation stuffed between the rafters and into the soffit. The way to remedy that is with rafter vents. The black plastic things you see create channels between the rafters for air flow from the soffit to the ridge vent. With the vent channels, you can stuff all the insulation you want against them.

Without the vent channels you get too much moisture, heat, and ice damming on and in your roof. The fact two rows of plywood across the front of the roof were replaced three years ago, again, tells me there's an issue.

Considering I have an ongoing attic insulation project and it was cold today, I decided to do some work up there.

I'm so itchy.

There are twenty four rafters in my attic. That means forty eight channel vents. At $2.27 a pop, that's not going to happen - not today at least. I settled on seventeen for the front and twelve for the rear. I think I managed fourteen total today.

Attic work sucks. My knees are killing me and I'm tired.

Did I mention I'm itchy?

- b

Befuddle Rebuttal

Compliments of OMR

- b

Leaves are Done

Before
though each weekend I've done this, the before has looked like this.

During
Gretchen loves raking leaves

After
Just in time too. This morning we woke up to this

- b

Sawmill Charley

There's a guy, who owns some land, that let's us ride on it. He's totally open to hikers and bikers enjoying his woods. "That's what they're there for" he says.

Luckily for him, a very well organized mt. biker (Bud) put together a fund to gather some cash to show Charley our appreciation. In Bud's own words, here's how it went down.

I made contact with Charles *** (names have been removed to protect the cool) aka Saw Mill Charley, Science teacher at *** Middle School and cooperating landowner who lives just above a large section of the Sawmill Trail. On behalf of the "entire" mountain bike community (all groups plus Loweriders, Bikeline and Bean's) we presented him with a Home Depot Gift Card in the amount of $300. To say he was surprised and grateful would be an understatement. Actually his words were:"I'm embarrassed, this is bringing tears to my eyes!" We talked for about 20 minutes, I froze my ass off since I was not prepared, but persevered for the group. Ended with he wants to have a major barbecue this summer for all "the bikers" and asked for help with planning.... not that many landowners, if any at all, who would offer that kind of hospitality. So we will keep "all" the groups in the know about this summer's "Bike to it Barbecue @ Saw Mill Charley's Place!"

Nice job Bud, and thank you Charley!

- b

I Wish

If #4 was true, why can't I sleep at night?

- b

Cheat Sleep

when you don't get home from work till after 8pm, it's hard to get to bed by 10.

Going to bed means sleeping. sleeping means waking. waking means going back to work.

If i stay up later, the time till work is longer.

if the time till work is longer, sleep is shorter.

...

- b