Finally back on the bike after a little break. The weather in the DC metro area has been so messed up lately, I think it’s causing mood swings. One day it’s 65° and the next it’s 30°. This in turn leads to a huge freeze/thaw cycle that is only made worse by the impending riders who decide that a 65° day is just too nice to pass up a day of riding. The wild shifts in temperatures have also made the sky open up and dump a good amount of rain on us, which then ends up getting caught in the same freeze/thaw cycle that helped to produce it. The end result is no dirt love for me. On this past Saturday we got another 65° day and with the nice temps, bright sun, and blue sky, I made a small pilgrimage over to Wakefield.
Strapped with the Bianchi Pista I headed for the dirt roads. The park was busy with people taking advantage of the day. People playing tennis, working out, running, mountain biking, even saw a guy with his 4 kids out on the trails. As I passed a few spots where the trail spits out to the gravel road, I walked onto the singletrack to find the horror that is a rutted muddy mess. It’s a sad sight, but I know the good volunteers at M.O.R.E will work to fix any trail damage that comes from this winter. If those volunteers could spend as much time building new trail as they do repairing damaged trail, we would have a hell of a lot of trail! For this reason alone, I wish we had more dirt roads in the area. It’s just something you don’t find a lot of in such an urbanized area. Muddy conditions on the roads is just more of a workout… Anyway, after walking up to the trails to scope out the damage, I grabbed the Pista and rocked out a few more miles on the gravel/dirt/paved path that is the Fairfax CCT (Cross County Trail). It was my first chance to stretch the legs in quite a bit and damn it felt good! If it wasn’t for the lack of mud clearance on the Pista, it would be a really great offroad animal. But I’m now back to the conclusion I made just before the end of last year…the Pista will remain on the road, at least until the trails are super dry, which won’t be happening for a couple more months. I’m hoping that once I’m finished putting together the touring bike I’m building up from crap in my shed, that it will have a good amount of clearance.
All those old 70’s road frames seem to have pretty good clearance being they used 27″ wheels, which end up being slightly bigger than 700c. Not to mention, most road bikes these days are tweaked more for a racing lifestyle, not an everyday riding lifestyle. Once I buy the special tool needed to pull the old crankset/bb out, I’ll be on my way. The only thing I have to buy (other than the crankset tool) is a new threaded stem, preferably something with a removable face plate and I should then be able to put her all together. I’ll try to remember to take pics of the build process, should be pretty easy.
DT
So people that know me, especially from back in the day, know that I love music. I’ve got a pretty large CD collection, something around 1000+ albums. I’m not picky in the fact that I can find something in probably most genres that that suits my listening pleasures. My CD buying habit had been compared to the addictive nature of heroin. Putting me in the middle of a CD store at one time was like putting a loaded needle in my veins for me and just telling me to push… Back then I don’t think there was a time I didn’t walk into a CD shop and come out with less than $100 of music. Kristin is fond of the story where I hit up the CD store at the beginning of a walk in Baltimore and dropped enough for 15 albums. Her and her father felt that was out of control, but hey, if that floats your boat…I think they bought 5 albums total. About 2 hours later on the walk back we walked right by the shop again, only I was kicking myself for not picking up a few things that I really wanted, but figured I didn’t really “need”. So 20 minutes later and 15 albums later we walk out of the shop again. This was at least at my peak and it never got any worse, just better. Once I was aware of my problem I backed off a bit, slowly weening myself. The secret…don’t go into the CD shop, period. I’ve been back to shops a couple of times since I made this decision and it’s still hard. It’s been a few years and I still get anxious when I enter. There’s just something about the packaging, the art, the “album” that I love. I was never a big downloader of music as I prefered the complete package. Now with all the DRM crap, I’m no safer buying a CD than I am downloading the music from iTunes. But that’s a whole other issue for another day…
Anyway, what got me thinking about this is how with my iPod I usually listen by just going to “Shuffle Songs”. Occaisionally I have a real hankering for something, and in that case I usually just do random on that particular artist or album. This morning was one of those times. I had a song that I just had to hear that had been running through my head all night. So as I started working this morning I made sure to start off with The Jon Spencers Blues Explosion. This isn’t your typical B.B. King type of blues. This is raw guitars, pounding drums, and bassless blues. Their only album I own is Orange and it’s incredibly powerful. They have the talent to bring you the blues, yet the energy of a alcohol fueled bar fight. I’m not saying it makes you aggressive, but you would have a hard time listening to Greyhound and not moving, at least following along with your head. Click on the album art below to take a listen.
DT
Now that I’m finally up and running on WordPress, I thought I’d tweak it a bit. I don’t currently have a good photo that would work up top, so I’m using the default photo that came with this theme. I’ve added plugins and changed the theme around to get some new features I wanted and to streamline the look. Not everything worked, but I think it’s a good start.
First thing I did was download a plugin that would allow visitors of the site to see what music I was currently enjoying, in real time. But the plugin is still early in development and I was unable to use it at work where I listen to most of my music. I think this had something to do with not being able to set a proxy in the plugin. It also would have been nice to have a little more control over the look and feel of the plugin output. So instead of using the real time plugin, I opted for a plugin where you can add your mood and music at the end of a post. Not nearly as fancy, but it’ll get the job done for now. Yea, that plugin kind of sucked, back to the drawing board…
Second, I downloaded the GeoPosition plugin. This allows you to georeference places and include a geo tag in your posts. This essentially puts an icon of your choice in your post and allows the user to go directly to a map of the place. I’m only using the GoogleMaps and GoogleEarth icons, because that’s pretty much what I use all the time.
The only other things I’d like to do is make some static pages to hang off the main page. Maybe a contact form, a links page, maybe a race schedule page. Things that don’t really need to clutter up the main page, but would be nice to have around. I’m still figuring out how to get around inside WordPress and exactly how I’d like it to seperate posts into specific categories. Probably continue to have this thing a little more underground than the previous blog, especially until it’s all setup and flowing like I want it.
If you found this site, well you done good, because I haven’t given the address to anyone yet, so you obviously have some good stat checking stuff. So here’s a song for you.
DT
It’s a new year, so I’ve moved over to the new blog. I’m trying to get away from Google’s Blogger and moving onto WordPress, via a suggestion from Jason Stoner. Every new year people come up with ways to better their lives and make a list of New Years resolutions and I’m no different. My resolutions are:
- Break down all empty boxes in attic.
- Try new things when presented with the opportunity.
Seems fairly easy, right? Well so far it has been. Resolution #1 was taken care of the first Monday of the new year. It took the majority of the day to break all the boxes down, but now you can look around the attic and find things without having to move empty boxes around. Resolution #2 has been a great one. I’ve already applied it a couple of times. Last weekend, over the Martin Luther King holiday, I spent Saturday and Sunday snowboarding at Loon Mountain in NH with the wife and some friends. It’s been something like 2 years since I’ve ridden my board and it felt incredible to be out carving the snow. Then this past Tuesday, Kristin and I headed over to REI [GP:REI Fairfax] for their free Rock Climbing 101 class. Rock climbing…so much harder than I thought. I took my chances on the hardest wall, not rated but normally would be around a 5.9. I made it to the top eventually, but not without relying on my belay numerous times. Both experiences are probably worthy of their own posts.
Well hopefully I can post more often than I have been as of late on the previous blog.
DT
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