Bicycling

The Emperor’s Repose

The Emperor got to laze around the garage today as Donna and I took advantage of the nice weather and the reduced traffic of a no-school day to ride the tandem into work. This was the first time in a while that we have ridden on just two days rest and my sit bones were a little tender when we started out this morning, but I forgot all about them by the end of mile one.

Speaking of sore, I am going to have to give up raising the Miata’s top while seated in the drivers seat for a time. Monday morning when putting the top up for the cold drive to work I strained something in my right shoulder and it still hurts a bit when raising it up over my head.

I am one of the lucky ones because I sit with the seat all the way back and my arm length was just right for hoisting the roof up with little effort. Both shorter and taller drivers didn’t line up well for doing the over the shoulder flip up routine. The folks with roll bars or style bars were usually out of luck doing that procedure too. All and all, a lot of Miata owners had to raise the top while standing outside the car. Hopefully after a couple weeks of rest I will be able to return to my previous ways.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 904

Let’s Do The Time Warp


Hitchcock Woods Simplified*

This morning I got up and blew the dust off the single bikes and filled their tires with air. Donna and I had decided we were going to see what it felt like not to ride the tandem. At the last minute I realized that the cyclecomputer clocks were one hour ahead. Dang, I forgot about those a couple weeks ago when daylight savings time ended. As I was breaking out the instructions on how to change the clocks, Donna said, “Forget about them, let’s go.” Try as I might I felt slightly askew in the space time continuum the whole time. The weather was so nice that by 10:00 AM (possibly really 9:00 AM) we had our breakfast at an outside table at the Atlanta Bread Company near the end of the ride.

As if the 16 mile bike this morning wasn’t enough, Donna, I and a friend went for a 2-1/2 mile walk in Hitchcock Woods in the afternoon. It was pleasant enough that I walked in shorts. Because of the nice weather the woods were busy, we saw a group of two horse riders and then a group of 4 more as we were standing where the above photo was taken. There were also several people walking their dogs, including one woman who was talking on her cell phone while her dog was checking us out about 50 yards away from her. As we exited the woods a truck slowed and the woman behind the wheel asked if we had seen a muddy border collie. I said no. After she drove off my mind kicked in gear and I remembered something. I should have told her yes, the last time I saw that dog was when he was way ahead of you on trail while you yakked on your phone.

*a photo from an overlook near the Chalk Cliffs in Hitchcock Woods post processed with a filter called Simplifier by AmphiSoft in Paint Shop Pro

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 902

Two South Carolina Geocache Challenges Finished

Donna and I finally made a day trip to the northwest part of SC to get the final 5 caches we needed to complete the South Carolina DeLorme Challenge [GCVG6Y] (Pages 16, 22 & 23) and the South Carolina County Challenge [GC1ACWC] (Oconee & Pickens). Now we just await approval from the cache owners that we have completed them to their satisfaction and they will send us the coordinates for the extra special bonus cache associated with the challenges. The County Challenge one is less than 10 miles from here, but I have no idea where the Delorme one is.

All top transitions occurred today because the Emperor sat in the garage all day on Friday as Donna and I rode the tandem to work…

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 860

Laborless Day

Typically this is the day we native New Englanders consider summer over. School would start this week and the mornings are cool enough for a light coat or sweater. Then I moved south and all that went out the window, school’s been in session for a two or three weeks and the mornings won’t cool off until the end of this month. But today it felt like I was transported back north. We went for a small bike ride this morning and when I stepped outside the garage, I turned right around,went back inside and got a long sleeve shirt to wear. At the end of the ride Donna and I sat outside at the Atlanta Bread Company eating our bagels, drinking our coffee and reading the morning paper and it felt like fall. I would have liked to have been able bottle a bit of that to break out one grim winter day this coming January.

I spend the rest of the morning giving the Emperor his quarterly wash and wax. Amazing the amount of tiny little bits of paint that has chipped off the front end of the car in the 111.5k miles it has traveled and they are all the more noticeable because the primer underneath the dark Garnet Red is white.

Started up, went down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 819

Rule #1

“Cardio”

Part of it is we have found other interests, part of it is time, part of it is age and when you get right down to it, all those are really the same reason. We used to ride thousands of mile a year, but now we are down to just hundreds. Now we are happy to get out at least on one weekend day and get in a 10-15 mile ride. There is hope that when the weather cools a bit we might stretch the mileage and maybe add a week day commute to the Valve Store. We still like to walk in the woods, but that pales in comparison to the cardio work out you get from bike ride.

Today we managed to get in a dozen miles surrounded by a biscuit breakfast at Popeye’s (whose service still sucks, even in the morning when you are the only customer in the joint.)

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 783

Thanks

Slept in a bit this morning and did a short bike ride, 10 miles total, ending up at Atlanta Bread Company for breakfast. A bagel each and a large OJ set me back $5 and some change. I swapped my last dollar for quarters so we could buy the Sunday Aiken paper, and because it was early with the sun behind some clouds, we ate our meal outdoors.

When we got home the weather wasn’t too bad (it was humid as all get out though) and we were already sweaty, I suggested we go out and grab the six caches we didn’t get yesterday. Donna was up for it, so we changed real quick and jumped in the car.

We had quite an assortment of styles of caches on the list too. If you look in the geocaching dictionary under bushwhacking, our first cache would be listed as a prime example. It is about 350 feet from the road and the only humans who have been in this patch of woods since the earth’s crust cooled are the 63 people who have found this cache and the 1 person who placed it there. Luckily it is just a bunch of dense underbrush and pine trees and not much in the way of thorny bushes. Finding the black painted mayonnaise jar was not too hard, but because I didn’t set a way point at the parking spot, the trip out was a little longer, and we came out of the woods about 50 yards away from the Emperor. The second was a short little 2 stage multi behind a hotel just a little further down the road. Number three was a mystery cache, you needed to solve a small crossword puzzle to come up the coordinates. I solved the puzzle last weekend and this weekend Donna found the cache. The fourth one on our loop was 5 feet into the trees at a short pullout on a busy high speed two lane road. The fifth was the very definition of one of my favorite geocaching phrases, “A 35mm film canister well integrated into the environment.” The sixth and last cache of the day was an ammo can next to a tree about 200′ off a back road which required traversing a long stretch of scrub grass, crossing a picket line of briars before entering a bit of woods.

The best story came from cache #5, called “Ice Ice, Baby” and here is how I logged it on geocaching.com:

Considering the name of the cache, as we approached in the geomobile I figured it was going to be something magnetic stuck to the ice machine outside. When I stopped in front of the establishment the GPSr said there was 165′ more to go. So much for that idea. I went inside to buy a cold drink and my wife went in search of the cache.

I walked inside and the proprietor was on the phone reading bible verses to someone (it was Sunday morning after all.) She said hello and I went to the drink coolers and pulled out Diet Sprite. As I headed towards the counter she started to wrap up her conversation, I stopped her from hanging up. I had opened my wallet up and noticed that it was empty, I forgot that I had spent the last 6 dollars earlier in the day at Atlanta Bread Company for our breakfast. She looked at me questionably when I told her not to hang up and I explained that I didn’t have any money and showed her the empty wallet. I started back towards the cooler with the drink, and she stopped me. She said, “Keep it. It’s hot outside, I can’t deny you a cold drink. It’s only a dollar, it’s not going to kill me and if it does, so be it.” I thanked her and left the store figuring my wife must have found the cache by then.

She was sitting on a retaining wall with a look that I recognized as defeat. I told her my story, we drank our cold Diet Sprite with gratitude and when we were finished, started the search anew. A couple minutes later she made the find.

Next Sunday at around the same time we plan on stopping back at that store and buying another cold Diet Sprite and paying two dollars for it.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 762

It’s Digital Cable Month 2010

Stopped off at the cable place on the way home from work today. Saturday the Tour de France starts and to get Versus, the network that carries the race, we have to upgrade to the Digital Plus tier. It costs and extra $20, but it is worth it for the three weeks of Phil Ligget and Paul Sherwin narrating the bike race and watching the beautiful French countryside glide by. While my CSR was filling out the “paperwork” I picked up a channel guide and noticed something called “Value HD” which offers most of the usual cable channel’s HD versions. I asked her how much more would that be, $4.95 came the reply. What the heck, we have a HDTV this year, it’ll be worth the extra five spot to try it out.

We got home and quickly realized that we had no real place to put converter box. It is a lot larger than last year’s model which fit on top of the tube TV. At first I figured I’d place the flat screen TV on top of the converter box, but it was full of holes for cooling and I didn’t want to melt the TV’s plastic base. Even if there was room, I couldn’t place the box sideways because there were holes there as well. Next we thought that we could just place it on the floor in front of the armoire, it’s only for a month. I doubted the remote would work with it there without having to hold it high over our heads to get the proper angle to clear the coffee table. Didn’t matter, the cables weren’t long enough. It ended up on the empty shelf to the left of the surround sound/DVD player, the only down side to this is we have to keep that door open when watching TV. Small price to pay.

The remote they gave me didn’t match the instruction sheet they gave me, so at first I couldn’t program the cable remote to operate the TV. That meant we now needed two remotes, one for channels and one for volume. I did a internet search for the model number of the remote and found several helpful sites that would offer me the manual – for a fee… But then I decided to RTFM and there on page 3 of the cable company’s booklet were instructions for the remote. Now we are making progress.

I then started surfing through the HD channels and of the approximately 40 available it seemed like every 4th or 5th was viewable. That’s no good. So I then checked to see if we could get Versus, the whole reason for getting the converter box, and we could (unfortunately it isn’t offered in HD though.)

As always the Digital Plus comes free with the half dozen of each Encore and Starz movie channels. I checked them out seeing if I could find something to watch and as I surfed them I kept on going past and discovered that I could also watch all the premium channels, HBO, Cinemax & Showtime.

So, should call and complain about the missing HD channels and take the chance that when they correct that they will also yank the free premium movie channels? or should I keep my mouth shut and enjoy the movies and learn to live without the missing 2/3s of HD channels?

Started up, went down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 710