GLOBADOM

So, I must be feeling better, because I’m at work, right? Right.

This morning’s ride in was euphoric after so many days of virally-enforced house arrest. I got on the bike, flew up my favourite hill (Clarke Road), and charged through my trip to work. I felt happy, I talked to cars, I greeted onlookers at bus stops, I generally enjoyed myself. Maybe it was the endorphins, maybe it was lightheadedness, but the ride in was superb. Really a glad-to-be-alive moment.

A bit of a postscript to yesterday’s F1 yammering. I first recognized the news about Jacques because when I saw the coverage, I recognized his helmet design plopped in the cockpit of a Renault. Why is it so distinctive? Well, he designed it himself, long before he became a pro, and has used it ever since. Unfortunately, I can’t find a good online link to the full story of this design (I think he did it up as a teenager), so you’ll have to settle for that.

A 1996 version of Jacques’ helmet design. It hasn’t changed much over the years, as you can see in this 2004 version.

Here’s one of the helmet designs his father used.

Ah, helmet anoraks. But do scroll about halfway through this thread to see a helmet visor really worth checking out, atop Graham Hill’s noggin.

Wait, you don’t think I’m a helmet anorak do you? Naaaah.

Posting is frequent but disease-ridden, as yr. humble servant is still home and ill-at-ease. But as the title says, 100% better! That, of course, doesn’t mean I’m anywhere near good.

This morning was an entertaining scene, as I arose feeling 200% better (I know what you’re thinking, but I was only feeling about 25% of nominal yesterday, so 200% improvement got me to about 75%. See? This is not the proverbial 110% fallacy). I was feeling so good and right with the world that I started making my lunch and deciding what I would wear on the bike. Then, as I packed up the lunch, the wracking coughs started. And then I realized the only thing making me feel good was eight hours of rest, since the 10 minutes of lunch-making left me feeling half as good as when I arose, thus leaving me 100% better than yesterday. And infectious. And in dire danger of being unable to do my job (“Help desk, can I COUGH COUGH HACK AUGH CAUGH oooohhh…help you?”), and in need of some rest.

So today was another rollicking romp of staying in my pajamas, handling onerous chores like sewing underwear and acting as the evil cat’s personal trainer, giving it a speed-and-agility workout. Which was completely exhausting.

Because I love all of you (let’s not examine that too much), and because I read Fark more often than is good for me, the curious tale of the CSS Alabama.

I feel compelled to comment on the site here. For while I love the Confederate flag as much as anyone (having been brainwashed by The Dukes of Hazzard), some things on the site are um, interesting. Peruse if you will the captain’s first-hand account of the destruction of his own ship, but pardon me for noting that the introductory paragraph sounds a mite defensive.

What the? I just tuned into practise for the Chinese F1 Grand Prix (because it was there), and my hero, the until-recently unemployed Jacques Villeneuve, is driving a Bennetton around the course.

A quick Google, and it turns out I wasn’t as out of the loop as I thought. After spending nearly a season working on his tan, Jacques got signed to not one, but two different teams in the past week.

Next year, Jacques will race for Sauber, a second-line team with aspirations. How serious those aspirations are I’m not sure, since they are closely tied to Ferrari and run old Ferrari engine designs, which somewhat limits their ultimate potential. But for the rest of this year, Canada’s man will be driving the very serious Bennetton-Renault.

And when the Renault interviewer asked Jacques why he wanted the job, the younger Villeneuve’s answer was like that of Homer’s: revenge.

Okay, I’ve been up too late. Going to try to get to work again tomorrow.

So, Colby Cosh is trying to scare the heck out of me with this story just as my body is fighting a pitched battle with something that started as a sore throat last night and has progressed nicely into sniffles and general weakness today. But my fever is up a bit, and that’s okay, and since the combo of sore throat and sniffles met all three of my criteria for not going to work (Will it prevent you from doing your job? Will it get worse if you go to work? Is it infectious?), I called in.

So, in keeping with the idea that diary-keeping makes people more anxious, we’ll play the glad game instead.

The weather was unseasonably nice last night as The Lovely One and I walked the dog. Even today, as I look out the window, the sun is setting on a gray but pleasant day. The miracle of indoor plumbing has made recuperating a reasonable experience, and I’m on a flex day Wednesday, and it’s vacation time at the end of the week. The sore throat I had last night is gone, and we’re into the acceptable but fatiguing part of being sick, the part where the pain and symptoms are fine, I just feel old and weak. No, wait, that’s because I turn 31 soon.

Thirty-One? I’m okay with that. I feel like I’m in my prime. Heck, I feel pretty darned immature! So it’s ok.

The Lovely One made one of my favourite meals tonight: chicken dumpling stew. It hasn’t been cool enough to make it for a few months, but it was the perfect day for it today.

If you’ll excuse me then, I have a lot of fluids to drink!

So, I checked out one of the new episodes of Duck Dodgers that have been airing lately. yes, I know, but The Lovely One has often commented on my complete lack of televisual taste.

Actual dialogue:

Porky: Trust your feelings, Captain.

Duck Dodgers: Nah, I’m pretty sure I’ll use this expensive targeting computer.

I’ll be watching more of this one, I can see.

It was my treat day at work on Friday, and The Lovely One provided some most excellent chocolate-chip oatmeal cookies.

Saturday morning I did my usual club ride, though it was a mere five riders until we picked up a sixth at the halfway mark. Relatively easy going, and the weather was unexpectedly good.

A friend of TLO’s got married on the same day; we attended the reception at the UBC golf club. Very nice, quite sweet, all the usual nice-wedding details, and a live two-man band playing the dance. An unusual touch in these DJ’d days, and they did a good job. I learned two things: a gin and tonic is nice, and I need to have my suit taken in, as right now it looks like a quality wool potato sack on me.

Also, somewhere in there I rebuilt the electric litter box, maybe the most disgusting task I have ever done.

I’m not doing enough. Sunday was a day of rest. No, more like a day of lethargy. We made our way out to a shabby toy and collectible show at the Croatian cultural centre, but TLO found some Strawberry Shortcake odds and ends there. After, we hit two Value Villages, finding nothing of value in either.

Tasks in the job jar: build wheel, patch tube, take a $10 bill out of one front wheel (it’s a trick for “booting” a tire when the sidewall gets a hole in it), fix a lawn mower, mow lawn, finish the AirGames project, check on the wine, make a dental appointment, restore the Ideale saddle, construct a track bike, clean the house.

Once I’m done that, I should really change the brake on The Lovely One’s BMX, work on the Auto-Mini project, build the Sturmey-Archer 3-speed transmission into a 20″ wheel, and then I can take a rest.

The first rule of posting stuff to the web: don’t talk about your work. One thing will lead to another, your co-workers and bosses will read your blog, you will say something stupid, and then you’ll get fired.

I really, really don’t want to get fired.

That said, and putting this as cryptically as possible so nobody gets offended, I have learned that “D’oh” is not acceptable in office correspondence.

Very well then.

I’m just feeling tied up in more and more knots. I’m using my morning coffee break to vent to y’all, since for some reason I’m just finding work a bit stressful right now, and it beats swearing under my breath, which is what I was uncharacteristically doing this morning. Blame complicated problems which I have little control over. Blame the fact I haven’t taken any vacation time this Summer, instead hoarding it for the long-put-off trip to Ottawa. Blame the fact that I have terrible workflow management skills, and tend to get behind, and then frustrated, because of it. Blame “Magic”, the viciously work-impeding call-logging system we use.

Maybe I would be less stressed if I had beaten myself up on the velodrome last night, but instead I chose another therapy, dinner with my parents. Which was great. Saw my youngest brother and the niece and nephew and my sister and her husband, and it was great. I threw dog toys. I watched the twins race up the stairs. I had a great evening. But the visceral pleasure of overexerting one’s body for an hour or so is also incredibly cleansing.

Right now, I think I’d like to crawl under my desk for a few minutes. That would feel better.

43 work hours until my vacation. 13 work hours until the weekend. 71 minutes to lunch. Happy thoughts. Keep smiling. Baby steps.

Argh. This post will shortly degenerate into self-pity. but first, updates!

Here’s the pictures from the weekend Escape Velocity Reunion Ride in Langley. Apologies for the non-interface.

The last few are from the bikes I bought at the garage sale I hit on my way out of Langley. I found a Motobecane from the 70s. Neat. Even nicer is the classy Ideale 80 leather saddle that was on the bike, and which might be worth $40 all on its own. It turns out it’s pretty much the archetypal French leather saddle, and considered the match of the more famous Brooks leather saddles. Not bad for a farm-find.

Now, the self-pity: I just feel tied up in knots right now. Not sure why, but I’m really glad it’s vacation time at the end of the month.

I have spent most of this evening lying comatose in front of the television set. Maybe, like eating fried chicken, I have it out of my system for a while.

I did go out for an entertaining club ride today. All the fast guys stayed away (well, one came for the first 20 minutes, and another rode with his wife, but they fell pretty far behind in the later part of the ride), so we were left with mostly cat-4 types. We made each other suffer pretty good, and I contested the mock-sprints with elan, doing very well in both. Then, had a snack at Max’s Deli with two other riders afterwards. Max’s was a tasty revelation. They also have a fascinating arrangement of several ceiling fans, all connected in series with belts and pulleys to a single electric motor. the fans and pulleys have a nice industrial-revolution aesthetic about them, and the Rube-Goldberg arrangement appealed to me.

After that, it was just an antiques show with The Lovely One, and pie for dinner. Delicious pear pie.

(Yes, from now on it’s all bad titles all the time. Sorry. -RjC)

Thursday was my glorious flex day, and as usual, I frittered most of it away. But in the evening, I got a little busy. It was more than time to finish primary fermentation on the crab apple wine project.

By the time I actually got down to this first racking, the fruit had devolved into messy scum atop and below a large quantity of wine. After an hour of sterilizing bottles and washing equipment, I was ready to siphon out of the primary fermenter and into the glass 12-gallon bottle where secondary fermentation would happen. But I had no way to lift the load safely (12 US gallons of water weighs just under 50 kg, or somewhere around 100 lbs. I can lift that much, but not when it’s in an awkward container and I’m trying to disturb the liquid as little as possible).

So, I did some clean-up and waited for my father-in-law to come home.

Wine is a fun thing to make because when done right, you can drink the results. And as I mentioned previously, this wine project started as a desperate attempt to use up the parish crab apples. There were a lot of crab apples. Fortunately, my in-laws have a serious hobbyist’s collection of wine-making paraphenalia, and my mother-in-law was making fruit wine before I was born. Theoretically, the process is pretty simple: you introduce yeast to fruit juice and sugar, because yeast loves sugar. When there’s no free oxygen available (in this case because the yeast is in juice, which is mostly water), it turns sugar into alcohol. When the alcohol concentration gets into the 10% area, the yeast gets poisoned and dies happy, thus stopping fermentation.

As we siphoned wine, I got the occasional mouthful, which is a good thing, since it let me test the basic flavour of the raw wine. It’s not vinegar! I’m not blind! That’s a good start.

The devil is in the details. For example, that basic process, which turns fruit into wine, takes a week or so. But if you stop and bottle that, you get raw, hard-to-drink wine (the state at which my crab apple wine exists now). That’s bad. So instead, you rack and wait. Racking is just a nice word for siphoning wine into another container, but racking and patience is the key to changing your wine from something like paint thinner into something like good wine.

The blindness joke up there is really only applicable when you do distillation. Things would have to go rather wacky to get enough methanol in a fermented beverage (wine or beer) to cause trouble.

I did a little web search on wine chemistry to find out what’s going on. There’s some rather nice stuff out there about the reaction which turns sugar into ethanol, but that’s a reaction which is almost completely done a week after you’ve started making wine. So what happens next?

As far as I can tell from a cursory check, very little. There’s really no fermentation going on after the yeast gets drunk and dies. Most of the other pages I checked talk about the racking and aging process as being primarily about removing wine sediments (which are generally made up of bits of fruit, random impurities like leaves, and lots of yeast corpses) and letting the wine settle. I think there are also some nice slow reactions that change the esters in the mix, which are the chemicals that give a wine most of its flavour. But mostly it seems to be a very slow method of getting rid of sediment.

So now I should just leave the wine alone. No messing with the stuff for about three months, at which point I’ll be siphoning again, mainly to reduce the amount of sediment carried through. After that, another three months of rest and settling for the wine, at which point I’ll be racking it into gallon jugs, and from then it’s mostly a question of patience as to how long before the wine is drinkable. If all goes well, pessimistically guessing that I’ll lose about a quarter of the wine to racking and sediment, I should have about 45 (!) bottles of wine in about a year.

You’ll know if I don’t give you a bottle next Christmas, you must really be off my list.

Interesting page on wine-making issues.

So, at my leisure, I thought I’d elaborate on my pain in the neck. Because you all want to hear about my soft-tissue maladies, right?

Hah. I seriously considered not coming in to work today, but annoying neck pain met none of the key criteria: I could still do my job, my neck wouldn’t get appreciably worse at work, and I wasn’t infectious.

And you know, as long as one guy is coming to work with a broken foot (hi Kim!), I don’t think “sore neck” is worth much.

Oh, let’s talk about something more fun. I’ve been on a strange classical-music jag this week, partly because I’m driving a lot more, and the car now has a pretty nice CD player.

The experience has left me with a few delightful amateur impressions. Debussy’s string quartet (he only wrote one) continues to be one of my favourite works. I love string quartet pieces, and this one feels so perfect. But The Lovely One, somewhat understandably, requested something less depressing (I don’t think it’s sad, but it is minor-key-wacky). so back to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, a standard part of the classical canon. Why? Because it’s wonderful and accessible. I loved it too.

Right now, one of my favourite films is playing on the TV in front of me: Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould. It’s about Glenn Gould, which is great. It’s incredibly good (at least in its best parts), and it is structured as short films, which is very convenient for a short-attention-span type like myself. When one of the boring short films is playing, you won’t have to wait long before something more interesting starts. It was co-written by Don McKellar, the official star of serious Canadian films (if it doesn’t have Don, it’s not a serious Canadian film!) It stars Colm Feore, an actor so malleably Canadian he has played both Gould and Pierre Elliot Trudeau (and D.W. Griffith).

Oh. And Tafelmusik is coming at the end of next month. Get your tickets now.

It’s not so bad lying up trying to rest my neck. It gives me a an excuse, and some narrative drive, for my usual sloth. Thus, extensive essay-length blogging.

It’s also worth noting that n the bicycle front, one of the three great grand tours is on now: the Vuelta Espana. It looks to be a barn-burner of a race, with no decisive favourite and some strong teams. despite the fact Lance isn’t there, the US Postal team is still a strong force in the race, and has some Canadian content in the form of domestique Michael Barry. Barry is even diarizing the experience.

Share & Enjoy,