My bike's odometer showed 600km as of mid-morning, on a bright and beautiful bike to the Quaker Meetinghouse through Victoria Park. 400km in the last 41 days feels like a lot, given I was in California for a week.

1112km for the season, hoping for another 300 to match last year's.

This evening on everyone's favourite TV show, "You're Biking The Wrong Way," we see da_lj encounter two cyclists who need a talking-to. *scowl*

At least they were biking together. The only reason I bother mentioning this at all is that in the process of our three-minute conversation when I caught up (talking across the roadway, them biking into traffic, the lead cyclist asserting that she was safer seeing the traffic coming at her), they turned the corner by the pool, which was a golden teachable moment- I immediately said, "and this is why what you're doing is so dangerous- in that very spot, I almost clobbered a little old lady who was exactly where you were, going the wrong way around the corner. I was scared out of my wits, and so was she. And both of us could've ended up in the hospital, because we were going at each other as fast as you are!"

The lead cyclist turned to her friend and said something, and I thought she was continuing their conversation, so I broke off and sped up, saying, "take care," back at them, and the lead cyclist said "you too" back to me.

Then I glanced back and they had switched to the right-hand side of the road.

And they turned up Erb Street, on the sidewalk, but on the right side.

*sigh*

Odometer: 10200 km. (712 km so far this season; low compared with last year, which was 1000km for the season by September 23rd, ending last season 1390 by Nov 11).

Biking home today, on my regular commute.

Though, not really, because I didn't turn at the usual block.

So I'm biking a street off from the usual commute, and I wonder why I didn't turn.

And I come up and see a bicyclist on the left side of the street, biking against traffic. Wearing a helmet. In his mid-20s.

So I say, "Hey there."

He says, "Hey," in a friendly way. I slow down a bit to match him.

I say, "I hope you don't mind, and I'm not trying to give you a hard time, but did you know it's really dangerous biking on that side against traffic? Because the cars aren't looking for things moving at bike speeds on that side of the road. And that's really dangerous for you."

He stopped and looked confused. "But I thought we were supposed to go against traffic to see them better. For safety." He sounded betrayed.

I said, "It's safer if you're a pedestrian. On foot, you're moving slowly, it's fine to be on that side. But on a bike, according to law, you're a vehicle."

"Oh. Wow. Thanks."

"You're welcome. Yeah, I think a lot of people got told that in school a while ago, that they should bike against traffic, but it's really unsafe for you, and it's unsafe for bicyclists who are coming the other way. Nobody expects bikes to be there."

"Oh. OK."

"Take care."

"Yeah, have a good day."

And I biked on home, with a lump in my throat.


---

Today at lunch, melted_snowball and I were talking about the condition of being a bicyclist or pedestrian in this town, or in many places in North America. And we agreed there is no reason, other than lack of public will, for car/bike/pedestrian interaction to be as fraught as it is (particularly car/bike, but also bike/pedestrian). d. mentioned a friend's post today considering his choice to bike on less trafficked roads and to back away from engaging motorists who are being dangerous. This is come up regarding a recent grisly Toronto road-rage altercation that left a bike courier dead, though it's mostly gotten press because the motorist is a former Attorney General of Ontario charged with vehicular homicide. That situation is sad, but the overall condition of culture around bicycles is pretty damn sad too.

I want to see a lot more public will toward educating both cyclists and motorists about the rules of the road. I want to see a police blitz ticketing cyclists without lights or bells or running red lights; I want to see a lot of blitzes. I want to see a lot more adult defensive-cycling classes. (A national program recently sent a trainer-instructor here, for companies or individuals who wanted to teach cycling classes; I have heard nothing about its success or failures. And only heard about the program in take_the_lane's blog.)

But the status quo is deeply frustrating.

Oh, to post or to go to sleep. I will take the wiser choice, since I should be rested before getting on the road tomorrow. My plans: leaving around 9:30, stopping for lunch in Kingston, and getting to my parents' place before 3.

But on the other hand: I seem to have a backlog of 9 things I've meant to review from the last few weeks.

Guess you'll have to wait!

Thanks for all the well-wishes for smooth driving. It will go fine, I'm sure; just a bit long.

On that note, G'night. :)

[ps- bike odometer rolled over this evening, 200km.]

I really ought to give myself a bike icon.

Anyway, since I reset the odometer two weeks ago, I've gone 100km. For a total of 10100 since summer 2000, yay!

My odometer today read 229.11, which means 6,229, which is 10,000 km. So I reset it to measure km. Only 7 years and 11 months after we moved here!...

My bike odometer just rolled past 215 miles, which means it's gone a total of 6,215 since I put the odometer on the bike nearly exactly 9 years ago. As melted_snowball pointed out, that's 10,000 kilometers, so I'm going to reset to kilometers.

I wonder where the next 10k will take us.

Tomorrow, I'm off to IAD (Dulles) and ROA (Roanoke) thence to Virginia Tech for Friends Gathering. This year, as last year, I'm not taking a workshop, as I'm helping out the community instead. The week promises to be very full, very warm (Virginia! Summer! Oy.) and hopefully with surprises of the good kind.

My bike odometer just rolled over another 1,000 miles. I expected it to happen in the middle of the park, and I briefly considered taking a photo of the llamas/swans/bridge/whatever was in sight at the time, then decided it was unnecessary; I'd remember it well enough as I remembered the last 5 times and that was sufficient.

Probably that choice was for the best, because it rolled over on University grounds, just at the first path intersections where you've got loading-dock on one side and shopping-plaza Bank Machine on the other, with a side-helping of advertising signs. I'm all about the urban photography, but if you've seen one mini-mall you've seen them all.

And equally valid, if you've seen one odometer roll from 999.99 to 0.0, you've probably seen them all, too.

The university exams continue this week. Students walking singly or in groups into the buildings, with palpable energy/fear/resignedness. I've been there and done that countless times as well; still have dreams about it, and who doesn't? Grateful for the opportunity to swing past, hold the door for them, go up to my office and do the work I can to make their profs' jobs easier.

lim-i-nal \ˈli-mə-n^əl\ (adj) Latin limin-, limen threshold 1: of or relating to a sensory threshold 2 : barely perceptible 3 : of, relating to, or being an intermediate state, phase, or condition

Not figuratively, literally. My bike has developed a (dangerous) tendency to lose its gear, often when I'm starting up from still, and also when I'm coasting. Not the chain, but likely the freewheel, according to elbie_at_trig, who was conveniently going home at the same time as me, just as I was thinking, "if only I could ask someone to jog along next to my bike..."

So, yeah. Tomorrow morning, cycle shop is my first stop on the way to work.

Otherwise, I feel like I'm not spinning wheels, quite the opposite.

Work is going, and the three active projects are interesting, if potentially long. But the structure of things allows me to interleaving the work, and I can't imagine getting bored with it. Really, this still feels like perfect job for me. And hey, I missed my boss, who was gone a week on vacation, but I can hardly fault her for that.

Life feels adequately social, these last weeks. Care and feeding of my introverted self- it sometimes feels like I need a push, but I'm getting most of what I need.

This Thursday evening is the third and final Quaker Seekers at Laurier session we have planned; we're speaking on Equality. I think there's an LJ post sitting in my brain, to help me organize what I'm saying in my two 6-minute pieces.

Last week I had a conference-call with co-organizers for the Quaker Quest Traveling Team. A month from now I'll be one of two presenters to a regional Quaker gathering, and in early May they're sending me to Pendle Hill for a weekend conference with other trainers. This work feels both like something I'm pulled to do, and a big side-order of "what the hell was I thinking when I said yes?" Where it goes nobody knows, but I am loving the finding out.

In late May melted_snowball and I are taking a vacation to Nova Scotia for my birthday; it's our first time to Atlantic Canada and I am already having dreams about rocky shorelines and whale-watching.

This week has featured two meals with duck (breast; and burgers), and two meals with pesto. It is a good life, my friends.

I'm midway through installing linux on a mac mini. I'm in love with this hardware; it's so quiet, runs cool, and is barely bigger than my hand. I'm putting Xen-enabled debian onto it, so alongside the web and email services it can run virtual servers such as Asterisk, or possibly freePBX. Anyhow, my coder.com server will move over some time in April, I hope.

Also in April, my geek crew of Perl Mongers are doing a hardware hacking workshop with Arduino microcontroller boards. So far, I've tested sample programs that play a simple tune; flash LEDs; and (sort of) replicate a Clapper but send a signal over USB to computer. My goals are to control a 600x200 pixel LCD display, and to precisely control a stepper-motor to... well, it'll be cool if it works, that's all I will say for now.

So, all you folks who haven't posted about yourselves recently- what's up with you?

Start of biking season! Went uptown and back
Odometer: [5]896 mi. Fairly warm. Lots of crud on the roads.

Yay!

I've decided I'm done biking for the season. This evening, not only have I lost my ear-protection (second set this fall) but my front light died and my derailleur seized up. Also it needs a tune-up badly.

Last year, I put away the bike away on November 15, just after buying the AirZound horn. Since then I've used it zero times in traffic, which is a statistic I'm OK with. This morning's near-miss, I was close enough that my voice alerted the driver, and I was too busy steering and braking to honk.

[Total mileage: odometer has [5]895mi now, had [5]035mi at the start of the season, which was mid May. 866mi = 1390km since then, or 7km a day. That seems high, except I biked to work nearly every day, 7.2km, and the Quaker meetinghouse is 9km, and I biked to various evening events once or twice a month too.]

On my Thanksgiving day off, while dan's still traveling:

Biked from City Cafe to City Cafe again; I took a huge number of photos of leaves turning. Homer Watson Park was quite beautiful, as was the road into Hespler (Fountain St.?) along the waving grain... The weather cooperated well- I was warm in short-sleeves.

Down:
12:46p-1:50 (10min stops) odo 736.76

Back:
2:22p-4:00 (30min? stops) odo 760.85

So, 54 minutes down, 68 minutes back. 24.09 miles.

I should upload those photos!

It's been a busy 5 days. Friday we drove to Erie PA, which turns out to be just as quick as Google Maps says, if the border crossing is perfunctory, as it was. d. had us switch from the Interstate to Rt. 5, which took us past some beautiful Lake Erie shoreline and some distressingly funny road-signs (including "North Gun Club Rd." across from "South Gun Club Rd.," and more housing developments named "Lakeview" than deserved to be along one road...)

And in Erie, we saw his cousin married, in a Catholic service that felt just a bit over-long on the sermon, but quite well-paced with the singing. And we took d's parents to dinner (at the "best restaurant and lounge between New York and Chicago." All things considered, I'll take NY or Chicago, thanks.) dan's mom grew up near Erie, so we heard some of the story to the city, though she didn't know what the current economy looks like. There were lots of neglected early-20th-century buildings, so I took lots of photos of Art Deco and decrepitude. I imagine the city's OK if you know it, but for a weekend trip it didn't strike me particularly strongly.

We returned home on Sunday, and I got busy on our deck, which has been stripped and waiting for stain since April. (Which isn't exactly my fault; the instructions I read online said I was to wait a week after any rain, and don't do it if rain's expected in the next two days. In this rainy summer we had, I believe we've had precisely one 9-day window without rain, and in it, I was visiting relatives or some other good excuse.) I finally said, 6 days of no rain is close enough, and whipped through 2/3 of it on Sunday, and the rest after work on Monday. And I ran out of stain just 3 square feet from the end- I had to wring the stain from the container with a tiny roller, and it just barely made it. I guess I can conclude the deck was sufficiently pre-seasoned. And it looks pretty good now, too.

What with various other bleh, I'm looking forward to the weekend; maybe even just forward to tomorrow.

Oh yeah- today my bike rolled over its 1000th km for the season.

I should have a bike icon.

The odometer rolled over to 500 miles today, plus 12 from a few weeks ago when the sensor was out of whack, minus 45 miles on the odometer when I started cycling this year equals 467 miles this season.

Equals 751.56 km so far this season.

Commuter happiness: they finally street-cleaned the bike lanes on part of my daily ride. It's only a few hundred meters each way, but it's been filled with crud and it's made me grumpy every time I have to swerve around the glass. I've apparently gone 80 miles / 128km in the first three weeks of bike-commuting season, including a few trips downtown. I should get my bike tuned, but I'm riding it too much to spare for a few days. My legs are starting to feel better about the extra exercise, though I still feel quite out of shape.

Office happiness is also mine. My office feels like home. I really did miss working for CS, in ways I keep rediscovering. I'm digging into maintaining some php code- and it's well written. Wonders never cease. I'll probably have more techie notes next week. All I'm really missing is a window (I wonder what it would take to bribe one of the local readers of this blog to plug my spare webcam into their computer, point it out the window, and save a still image to the web once a minute or so... I have a few candidates; once I make sure the webcam works.)

I got two emails which amuse me today. One was from me, eleven months ago. I said, "Subject: Renew (domain name) now, nitwit. Thanks, D."

The other was spam with the subject, "Listing of general practice physicians and 34 more specialties." My assumption was that they were trying to sell me the very valuable list of which Canadian doctors might be accepting patients. But no; it's a list of US doctors which they will spam on my behalf. Ick.

melted_snowball and I went to the new Marble Slab Creamery ice cream shop last night. Aside from the horrible work-flow the (brand new!) store demonstrated, it also showed off how to still make a profit even if they don't churn through many customers: quite tasty product, and amazingly high prices. Like, $6 a waffle-cone prices. With a half-off coupon, our cones were each $3.50 with tax. But: I will say they were tasty. And giant (too big). They mixed in the mixins of your choice while you wait. So I had chocolate/cherry ice cream with fresh strawberries and oreo bits. And it was yummy, but I had a hard time getting to sleep from stuffedness. Serves me right.

The life? It is good.

On the topic of bicycling with an air-horn. I might buy an Air Zound, which is mentioned in the comments. It refills with a bike-pump and doesn't use cartridges, and the control mounts on the handlebars. And maybe one of these days it will save my life. I've relied on my voice to shout at drivers in situations where my safety is at risk, but I don't think my voice is loud enough because occasionally the driver has no reaction. But 110db? Yeah.

[bike odometer: roughly 50mi when I put it away for the winter]

Friday:

- I caught the first half of the Critical Mass ride. I chatted and rode with nobody_here and psychedelicbike and peeled off home at a convenient point. I continue to be conflicted about the message they're sending- a bulk of the people wanted to take both lanes, so both lanes we took. Sigh. Also, the fraction of people wearing helmets felt, um, quite low. I'm pondering how my own energies might be best spent, and after this last ride I'm feeling less like it's via the "unfocused protest" route. *ponder*

[edit to add: Bike odometer has 4950 miles; exactly 800 miles this calendar year, or about 1280km (see previous bike post about nice round numbers). I'm hoping to get another 50 miles before it gets icy and I put away the bike 'till the warm season again.]

- Dinner and movies chez chezmax and the_infamous_j. I liked Perfect Blue, though not as much as Paprika, but it was neat to see some of the same character touches used in more ominous ways- such as the spritely evil Mima skipping around just like Paprika had. I'd give it 3/5 stars. Then we watched a bit of trippy anime as a palette-cleanser, Azumanga Daioh, which is addictive in much the same way chocolate-covered espresso beans are, that more than a bit tends to make the brain hurt some.

Saturday:
- Low energy day, because I didn't sleep very well. I might blame the chocolate-covered espresso beans, though I expect that's only an excuse. Saturday I ran errands, and cleaned the vegetable drawers of the fridge. It was too pissy out to do much else outside. I bought new pants.

Sunday:
- I was out the door before 8, and off with two other Quakers to Sparta, just a few km from Lake Erie, for a regional meeting. These were the first Canadian business sessions I've attended outside our local Meeting, in the six years I've lived here. The business sessions felt to me like going-through-the-motions, rather than something at all spiritually led, and the afternoon presentation was... a mixed bag. The best part of the trip was meeting people at lunch- including one family who got excommunicated at their last church. Also, singing this hymn set to "Finlandia", which I've always enjoyed. (I didn't think I knew it; but I remembered harmonies from the second bar onward!)

On the drive, we passed Mapleton's Taxidermy and Cheese Store.



Finally, I was glad to see d., since he got home before I did; and I was happy to take him out to sushi in the evening, but otherwise, the day felt frustrating.

The first thing anyone said to me yesterday morning was "I've seen two people killed right here." Salt and pepper beard, bike helmet. We were waiting for the light to change at the edge of the University, and had just watched a young guy, no helmet, bike out in front of a car. We chatted a bit. He's been working here for 20 years.

Today my jacket smells wonderful, like garlic and onions. Last night I made a convert to the joys of Spanish Potato Tortilla. It's a really easy recipe, except for the next-to-last step of "when it's half-way set in the middle, flip it onto a plate then slide it back into the pan." Which is always much easier than it sounds. I'm thinking about making an Instructable.com video or something, because tortilla's just too tasty to not share.

Finally: I like when powers of two show up in the day-to-day (what, me, geek?). Dan pointed out to me recently that miles-to-km is much more accurate at 8/5 than 3/2. On my commute this morning I had a (very small) realization that if your miles happen to be a power of two, you always get powers-of-two on both sides. And it's an easy calculation: multiply by 16 (bit-shift right 4) and divide by 10. So: more accurate than 3/2, quicker if you remember your bit-shifts, and more satisfying numbers too. 160 miles? 256 km. (only 1.49km off the real value). Going the other way, km-to-mile is divide by 16 and multiply by 10. 1024 km? 640 miles. See? Satisfying. At least, if you're me. :)

This felt like a full weekend.

Friday afternoon I took part in a Critical Mass ride (post updated with more detail).




In the evening, melted_snowball and I celebrated our 11th anniversary with dinner at Bhima's, which I had bicycled past a mere 90 minutes earlier. We made an early night of it, due to exhaustion for the both of us.

Saturday morning I ran errands, and I stopped by catbear 's photography open-house.


In the afternoon, I played Arkam Horror with the_infamous_j and two of his friends, Chris, and MJ. The game went faster than we expected- only 4 hours, including explaining the rules to MJ. But he was an extraordinarily fast learner, and he kept us on-track during the game as well. I played the salesman, just because. He wound up collecting some nice toys, but didn't buy either of the Elder Signs we used to win. We did less story-talking during the game than the other time I've played; which was OK, but it sort of made it seem less epic. :) We randomly chose Azethoth again (we even re-drew because both the_infamous_j and I played against him the last time too). But he kept coming up. Meant to be. We lucked out in having monster-surges instead of new gates early on, and a few times, new gates were to appear on already sealed locations. We squeaked to a win in the 12th turn.

We had pizza, then broke out the Singstar 80s edition. melted_snowball and I know all but a few of the songs. And I even hit some of the notes. I still had a lot of fun, even if MJ and Chris were looking a bit leery at the videos. But c'mon- it's our childhood here! :) J was game and played a few songs he'd never heard before. Then a bit of anime video, and home.

Sunday morning was Quaker Meeting (small turnout- four regular attenders and three visiting Bible School students!). We spent a while answering their questions afterward- I think we did well. I'm glad I took a workshop on outreach this summer; the students seemed to be really working to try and fit Quakerism into their own religious models.

Sunday afternoon, melted_snowball and I went to a local-food tasting where we ate foods from 19 of 20 local farms, prepared by local restauranteurs. We ate very well.

A CSA basket.



Arctic char by Peel Street Bistro.