GLOBADOM

Busy busy busy.

This is the busiest week of the year at work. I occupied much of the long weekend by taking on a last-minute but well-compensated side job. I have a meeting tonight, and I was working on lawnmowers in the free hour I had last night. Then my neck seized up so badly I could barely turn my head. It was so bad this morning I nearly didn’t go to work. Instead, I just drove the car (wouldn’t have been safe or smart to ride my bicycle in this condition), ensuring a grim drive home.

I have 10 minutes for this posting. And then it’s back to work.

August goes out like a lamb, and September comes in like a shovel to the head.

Gotta run.

…A good time to be in Florida. (Link goes to a satellite picture of hurricane Frances; I’m not sure how persistent this link will be).

Ooh, it’s a Landau:



Hm. That’s a pretty tiny picture. But what you’re looking at is a Nishiki Landau, a bike that must date from sometime in the mid-1980s (the surest sign being the midrange (V-GT) Suntour drivetrain), but it shows some notable details for such an old bike, the most interesting of which is vertical dropouts for the rear wheel. Even my early-90s Pinarello doesn’t have that. Why vertical dropouts? A bit easier to insert the wheel, and it holds the rear wheel more securely. The trick is that they require more precision in frame-making, as you can’t use adjustment screws to “fix” any rear triangle misalignments.

This bike uses 700C wheels and the aforementioned dropouts. That means that Mike Latondresse’s Landau fixie must be a bit older, what with its 27″ wheels and horizontal dropouts. Both bikes show nice detail touches like gold highlight paint outlines around the lugs.

These were “Norco design” Nishikis. “My” Landau has a made in Japan sticker, which in this era is a good sign (Taiwanese bikes could and can be very good, but by then nobody was making bad bikes in Japan: it was too expensive). I think I have related some of this odd brand’s history previously: was apparently once an independent maker, then got bought by Norco (I have a late-80s Nishiki Rockhound from an era in which you could buy the same bicycle as a Norco, a Nishiki, or a Fiori), and then was apparently sold into the Derby group (according to Sheldon). It lives on in parts of Europe presumably still part of the Raleigh (nee Derby) group. Interestingly, their US office is in Kent, WA only a few hours South of me.

Argh. I’m in a funky, bilious mood, mostly due to work-chaos and the sense that I’m buried by badly-handled responsibilities in both work and at home. Nothing big is going wrong, but aside from the sheer volume of tasks, I feel beset by stupid screw-ups on all sides (many of my own making):

-I finally assembled the new bike and got it delivered to Proximate Drea’s little sister, and it’s really nice (pictures shortly). Packing that and my race bike into the Tercel was a trick, but it worked. Until I got impatient when delivering the bike to PD’s little sister, pulled my bike out too forcefully, and completely tore up the back of my bike’s saddle. And then when I pulled out the little black bike I’m selling, the brand new tube I had put in the front wheel was completely flat. Oh well, at least MEC was only a few blocks away. And I think PD’s little sister really likes the bike. And I still got back in time to pick up The Lovely One after work.

-I had to borrow a hydrometer (hygrometer? No, that’s for humidity) from my in-laws to check on my fermenting mess of stuff in the basement (which, on the upside, is fermenting, and smells more like wine than vinegar). After a fruitless search, I went looking in the wine cellar a second time, and found the hygrometer. Which I promptly dropped and broke. So I’ll get a new one for them tonight. And then on my way out of the in-laws’ house, I slipped down the steps and fell.

It seems like everything has been working out this way. Work has been chaotic all week, for reasons I won’t go into here.

Oh well, at least the bike race last night was fun, even if it was also chaotic. Because it was the last race of the year, the organizers did two things to mix it up. The Cat 4 and Cat 3 races were united, so we got to compete as one big, fast, crazy group. And the format was changed to a points race, which meant that we were sprinting every second lap (to my surprise, my computer said the race pace was not unusually fast: 38 km/h, but it was hard efforts throughout). I wasn’t a factor in the race, but I managed to hang on until the end, and that was better than some riders did, and much better than the unseen rider somewhere behind me who made “shopping-cart noises” (to use a phrase I overheard after the race) in one corner. Apparently he broke his collarbone.

As for me, the worst I managed was a highly embarrassing but very minor abrasion on my forearm. Before my race started I was riding up the course, but wanted to stay off the road so as to be out of the way of the racers. I was riding on sloped, dry grass, and overestimated the available traction. Whump.

On the upside, the SISU rep at the race, a charming young woman who shows up almost every week dispensing sweet, wonderful Hydrade, gave me a container of my favourite performance beverage just for being a swell guy. That made my day.

So, you know, it was one of those days.

So, I watched some CBC news this evening, and it turns out Canada’s Olympic medal count constitutes a crisis for Canadian sport.

It surprised me not one bit to find out that the major culprit was, according to the Canadian Olympic Committee and others, insufficient government funding.

Now, let’s be clear: we’re not talking big dollars either way. This short article nails down the three key numbers: current federal government spending for athletes is $16M, Dick “WADA” Pound figures $50M would be about right, and Australia, poster child for Olympic overachievement, budgets $98M for what the article calls “high-performance athletes.”

Okay, so let’s just assume that nothing aside from a good-sized pile of money stands between Canada and substantial Olympic-medal-count improvements, and let’s further agree for the moment that a $50 million athlete fund is not going to starve any important government operation. It’s spit in the ocean when seen beside health care funding or, um, whatever else the feds still have responsibility for [the military, maybe? -ed I’d hardly call that responsible -RjC].

Even assuming all that, who cares? Who gives a good gosh darn if Canada came home with one, ten, or all the medals? Will it improve national pride in some civically useful way? Will it make all the fat kids faster, higher, and stronger? Well, hopefully not higher, unless they take up a jumping event. Will anyone even notice aside from the biennial fortnight when other countries kick sand on Canada in beach volleyball and leave us for dead in biathlon?

The counter-argument that makes sense here is that elite achievement drives grassroots participation, and Canada is a nation that could collectively stand to get off the couch, run around a little, and lose a few pounds. My brother-in-law with the hockey-school business claims that his business sees a noticeable correlation with how well the Canucks do in the playoffs. It seems reasonable to conclude that something similar would happen in other sports after the Olympic games.

Please also keep in mind that I come at this as an avid latecomer to serious competitive sports. I participate in what could be called beer-league bicycle racing, except that even at my rather unexalted level of performance, a fairly decent level of fitness is necessary to play. I think sports and athleticism, in general, are good things, and a healthy part of life which most people ought to make some time for, both as children and adults.

But I still have a hard time believing that elite achievement in the Olympics is an important measure of anything. Australia kicks our butt in Olympic sports, but begs the question: which came first, the substantial sport funding or the sports-mad populace?

Canada may be well-served by programs that encourage people to get up and run around. Funding Olympic achievement may be a good way to make that happen. But I think that’s the only useful rationale for increasing sports funding. Arguments revolving around national pride are lame. If we have $34 million handy, I suggest we add it to the Armed Forces budget, though I encourage you to imagine your own underfunded hobbyhorse instead.

Not much to say this evening. The wine yeast has been busily doing its part, and we’ll soon see if I have something like wine, or something like vinegar. Keith sent us a postcard from Singapore with a “spiky” theme. I think I’ll have to scan it in.

Did a nice, hard 90+ km with the club, including the optional loop out to Iona Beach. The fast boys were riding steadily, and the ride took a bit out of my legs. That’s good: I hope to do that ride regularly through the Winter. one club-mate gave me some good bike-handling suggestions last week, and I worked on being steadier.

A funny thing about my riding gear: I like having my arms and legs covered up, but torso coverage isn’t a big deal for me. This is the opposite of most riders: a team-colors sleeveless vest is standard cold-weather gear for many in our club, while I don’t even own such a garment. Though here’s some good advice for Heather & Karl especially: a neck-warmer makes a huge difference when you’re exposed and moving quickly in cold weather. I own a small collection of scarves, which saw regular use when I had a motorcycle (sob), but which have been supplanted on the bicycles by an acrylic neck-tube. At least for me, that neckie is as good as putting on another layer, and until it gets very cold indeed, I can happily commute my normal thin jersey, arm-warmers, and a neck-warmer.

One issue: if the neck-covering gets substantially soaked, a common problem on the motorcycle, it becomes a cooling device. I never experimented with one, but a neoprene neck-warmer is the obvious solution. When it’s that wet and I’m on my bike, I have a rain jacket with a stand-up collar.

Dinner tonight was curry from a new place in Burnaby Heights, but I paused at…a store to be named later when I saw some Atari 2600 cartridges in the window, 50 cents each.

Ah, my ugly weakness.

I went in. Hm. Video Pinball in shabby condition. Hmm. oddball catridges from makers I had never heard of. Huh? Activision and Atarisoft cartridges for the Intellivision? Hey! Xonox Double-Enders!

I bought 11 cartridges. I’m a slave to the collector’s urge: I’ll never even play some of these, but I want to go back and buy all of the rest.

To do: finish readying the Nishiki for sale. Make a dentist’s appointment. Set up a fixed-gear bike. Tend to the wine. Do the dishes. Lube some bike chains. The simple life: suburban edition.

Well, rainorama! Fall has arrived early if only temporarily. And it’s hardly fair to fully damn the days: I was wandering around downtown in short sleeves this evening.

The Lovely One and I went to the Storeyeum today, lured primarily by the irresistible-for-strange-personal-reasons advertising slogan, “it’s story time” (to put this in perspective, one of our hobbies is finding businesses with imperative names, such as our local laundromat: “Drop Your Laundry.” Yes, we like words). I give it a mixed review. The show seemed to be a succession of lavish sets (essentially, there are a series of different venues in the Storeyeum show, each big enough to hold 200 people) with some pretty impressive effects, passable acting, and decent-but-predictable storytelling.

What is the Storeyeum? It’s a 72-minute (nominal; our show ran rather long for some reason) live-actor multimedia history show, covering British Columbia history from the time of the natives to the arrival of the railroad. It does so with some wit, a moderate amount of insight, and as a reasonably entertaining show. The back of the ticket

It’s not cheap ($22 regular admission for adults; we had coupon that gave a slight discount). But you can see that they could hardly do the show for less. The whole thing apparently cost some considerable millions of dollars to build, and I completely believe that. We’re talking a full-sized (or nearly so) mobile steam locomotive replica as a key part of one of the nine sets (and the others are in that realm of elaboration, too).

That said, I had to compare it to the gold standard in stagecraft and showmanship, Disneyland. And it suffers by comparison, and also in absolute terms. The worst part is that we’re talking millions of dollars of technology and set design, but I would get distracted by things that really indicated that the last ten percent hadn’t been sweated over. Examples: in the “native forest” set, the ancient tree, which is a key part of the tale, rises up realistically until it gets tangled in a maze of piping and HVAC vents clearly visible at ceiling level. The graphics in several parts of the show were horribly scaled and had visible jaggie artifacts, not to mention graphics showing trade routes and regions that looked like the worst sort of Powerpoint dreck. Unacceptable in a presentation that must have cost as much as this one did, and the person in charge should not have signed off on that one. A projection in one of the two 200-person super-elevators distractingly shot its image against the upper door, which was pretty distracting. It would have been pricey to put a properly seamless door in there that looked like part of the white walls until it opened, but it would have been the right thing to do. Nitpicky? Yes. But I make no apology. Considert that these tickets cost nearly what an evening at Bard on the Beach would set you back (and by comparison, Bard is the one I would recommend).

Great for kids and school groups, though. On balance, I would not recommend it to adults unless you had a special interest in multimedia presentations or local history. But if you do go, I offer you this potentially lucrative spoiler: in the final elevator (following the “train station” set featuring the full-sized moving locomotive), they gave away an Old Spaghetti Factory gift certificate to the person standing on a “lucky X” marked on the floor of the lift. I didn’t see where they were standing, but that’s something to keep in mind if you go. Let me know if you use this advice to win some free pasta.

Wine. Wine wine wine.

This was the weekend I did my darndest to be a terrible son-in-law, only to have my in-laws feed me dinner twice.

The impetus was the crab apple wine project. It all seemed so simple: throw crab apples in crusher. Throw resulting pulpy mess into press. Throw resulting pulpy juice into a big tub. Add water, sugar, special wine-making stuff, and yeast. Wait 9-12 months.

Almost every part went wrong. It turns out the crusher, optimized for mutilating grapes, was terrible at mutilating crab apples. Strike one. I ended up crushing (and rather badly) 95 pounds of crab apples by hand with a piece of wood. Not recommended.

On to the wine press, where the real fun began. My father-in-law has a small but wonderful little wine press (it looks much like this one), perfect for home vintery. Not so good with crab apples.

As I started cranking down on the crab apple mash, the press squirted crab apple mush out the sides at irregular intervals. Soon, the walls had a spray of crab apple goo on them and the floor was slick with crab apple mush. I crushed apples for several hours on Saturday night, and only really finished the job on Sunday. By then, the fruit flies had arrived.

Sunday afternoon was a delightful mixture of mopping out the crab apple abbatoir, de-appling the press and the various other containers, and mixing up the mash. After consulting three different online recipes and my in-laws, I dumped in a sugar-water solution, and now I have to add some nice yeast when I go home. At this point, I’ll be thrilled to end up with vinegar, much less anything drinkable.

At least the fruit flies seem to be a bit reduced now. Or maybe they’re just waiting at my house, now that I have 50 pounds of unwanted crab apple pressings sitting beside my garbage cans.

The good news is we’re into the less disastrously labour-intensive part of the game. From here, most of the work is done by yeast, with my intervention limited to a little stirring for a few days, and then a little racking and testing every few weeks for the next year or so. If all goes well, the result will be somewhere around 50 litres of wine.

Riding-wise, a pretty good weekend: I finally got back and did the EV Saturday-morning ride, which started under troubled skies and ended under driving rain. Then, Sunday was the criterium championships, which I completely chickened out of, reasoning that spending $40 for 30 minutes of being pack-fodder was not a good return on my entertainment dollar. Next year, maybe.

Gotta get a track bike,

People keep telling me the heat is a little less this week. I’m not sure. I’m just sure it’s time to cut my hair.

The race on Tuesday night went as usual: finished with the pack, but held on until the end. Oh, except for the part where on the last lap two guys started bouncing off of each other ahead of me. This was as they entered the fastest part of the course.

To my credit, I saw it all happening just ahead of me, and backed way off. Then, as they had clearly locked bars, I moved as far to the inside of the turn as I could. They disappeared rather rapidly to the outside of the turn, where I heard a couple of nasty sounding crunches. On later investigation, this turned out to be the death-throes of a Cannondale frame. Net result of the crash was two guys slightly hurt (minor cuts, thanks to a soft landing in grass), and a Cannondale with three fatal kinks in its tubing, and the most colossally bent handlebar ever: the right bar was folded up in an almost tidy fashion.

My quick thinking kept me way away from the danger zone, but I was already well out of the sprint. I just managed to catch up to the pack in time to finish with the ragged bunch.

Wednesday night, I mowed the dandelions in the lawn.

The Lovely One’s new job is peachy, so she’s enjoying that. I’m stuck in neutral, and now I’m addicted in fierce fashion to Weboggle, which is the cleanest, tidiest, neatest implementation of Boggle ever. It makes Frenchy’s Cubes look really bad.

To do: make crab apple wine, play more Weboggle. That is all.

Even I am sometimes scared by what I am interested in.

Monday was an odd evening: came home from work, microwaved some perogies, rushed downtown (a little late…) to pick up The Lovely One at her new job, and then rushed back to Belcarra to pick up my mother-in-law from a wedding shower. We stayed for a while to visit, and I was relegated to the back room, where I chatted with the gentleman of the house. He was a building inspector by current trade (he said he liked it because people appreciated his work), but in a past life had been an unloved designer of helicopter parts.

Of course, this fascinated me. I spent 20 minutes quizzing him about the various types of load harnesses, pick-up hooks, swivels with electrical contacts, and the various other load-carrying bits he had designed (stuff which he probably expected to bore me to tears). Even when I mention it, it sounds silly, but I’m serious: this was the most interesting conversation I’d had all day.

Sunday was Middle Brother’s birthday, and by proxy my father’s birthday too (later in the week, really, but mid-week parties at the lake are a bit tricky). A delicious meal ensued. I took my usual dip in the water, which was cool and refreshing (or, if you’re The Lovely One, bloody cold and unsuitable for human occupation). Being at the lake is so relaxing it’s worth any amount of traffic-fighting to spend a few hours there. I must drop by more often.

I don’t remember what I did Saturday.

Race night tonight. Wish me luck.