greymatters

Lately I've been doing a lot of hikes with my folks. That's good because the last several movies we've watched together have been near-intolerable. Even in the rain, Jennings Peak is less abuse than City of God.

This was a good length of hike for Kaya. Even at the end, she was perky and jumped into the car with no trouble. I'm beginning to wonder whether or not she has the capacity for the bigger mountains anymore. At some point, we'll have to stop with the rocky 5000ft peaks. Just not yet. Please....

You take your adventures where you can find them. The rain went hiding for just long enough to slot in a 50 mile bike ride around the north shore. Unlike previous LobsteRides, we started so early that we flew by all the lobster pounds well before they opened. The Cape was eerily "maritime" in its weather, cycling between cloudyfoggy and warmsunny. Visibility was so short in places that Thatcher Island was only a grey wall from my favorite stretch along Atlantic Rd. dg and I made good time, averaging 18mph. This is fast enough that we feel we earned our celebratory lobster rolls.

When edrie asked a random sample of the public to "sing" on the new Army of Broken Toys album, it should have been obvious that technique would not be the most important thing. I spent an hour or so last night yelling "off". Some other folks yelled "head". At some point, we were told that we sounded awesome. My yelling voice isn't as well developed as my singing one - I left cracking through my range like a teenage boy. The rough cut of the track did sound pretty cool. I can't wait to hear the final.

I may have found a new winner of a bike ride. The south shore features the same rocks, lighthouses, lobster, ocean, and fancy homes as the north shore. But it's not quite as navigable, which is why it has taken years to piece something together. I may finally have a good ride which follows the coast from Hingham to Cohasset and returns via Wompatuck State Park. There are great views of the sea, including frequent sightings of the eerie Minot Light. Many of the coastal towns aren't quite "in season" yet so a sandwich is much harder to score than it should be.

Masterworks Chorale has moved its summer sings to dedham. Much as I love the chance to rock faure and mozart with a thrown-together choir, I'm not travelling that far out of my way during rush hour. Do you, dear readers, know of anyplace else I can sing over the summer? pekmez, does the somerville community chorus organize anything similar?

• Air temperature: 75 degrees.
• Water temperature: 52 degrees.

youraverageninj

Since moving in, my house's bathroom has been responsible for more trouble and aesthetic unhappiness than any other room. It's been a long wait of research, planning, design, shopping, interviews, booking, demolition, and finally construction. Now it looks great and I feel much better that the underlying plumbing has been inspected and fixed. Six months and several fiascoes later, the shower doors are on and the bathroom is finally done. Check it:

In my customary machine-aided approach to solving the weekly NPR puzzle, I have been searching for an easy way to generate a corpus of all topics known to humanity. Wikipedia has recently made available a list of all article titles! Between this and the SCOWL, I'm ready for anything algorithmically-solvable Will Shortz wants to throw at me.

• Do contractors really work at 8:30pm the friday of a holiday weekend? Wow.
• Hiked up to Bridal Veil Falls on the backside of Cannon Mountain. Good warm-up hike.
• Hiked up Mt. Avalon with the parents. I had planned to push over Field and Willey, but the rain and view-obscuring cloud cover were enough to send me back to the car. Of course, the sun appeared as soon as we returned to the trailhead. Drat.
• Engagement photo shoot. I can only smile for so long before it looks fake.
• Dropped Ringo the kayak in the water for the first time this season at Lake Squam. High winds and whitecaps created a more technical environment than I expected inland. Learned that I have to sink an eye bolt into my front bumper to tie down ringo's bow. Strange.
• Had my first lobster of the season taking the parents out for their anniversary lupper. (congratulations!) You know it's summer when your food fights back.
• I am going to plunge ball point pens in my ears if I hear one more All Things Considered story on Flanders Fields and the brave men who sacrificed everything for my freedom. My theory is that these stories can be put in the can months ahead of broadcast so that the staff can warm tofu burgers instead of sitting in the editing bay.
• Good grilling with you, zmook! Sorry I almost fell asleep in your adirondack chair.

...and other 6/5 word pairs which are not answers to this week's NPR sunday puzzle:

Think of a six-letter word in which the third letter is "S". Remove the "S" and you'll be left with a five-letter word that means the opposite of the six-letter one. What is it?

Dear Cyclotourisme Magazine, how can I make my recumbent bicycle look even more ridiculous and unwieldy? -w

Either ride wearing a Godzilla suit or get a trailer. Good luck. -ct

The circumnavigation of Lake Skaneateles is one of the best bike rides I have ever pedaled. It's a 35-40 mile circuit where the lake is in view about half the time. From the posh mansions on the north tip to the cliffs and cottages of the south, we heard almost no traffic. It's a tough one, though, with rolling pitches in and out of town and then a steep drop into and climb out of the canyon.

We cleverly cut about 5 miles off the trip by exiting through Vincent Hill Road. It's a mile, unpaved, straight up. Bad idea. I'm sure that some of the rocks here were responsible for the flat tire I sustained around mile 27. Next time I'll overshoot and hit Grout Mill for a more gradual climb.

To add some challenge, I hooked up a trailer and towed an extra 20lbs or so. I plan to tour this summer and learned the hard way in New Zealand that it's important to train like you ride. As a veteran of panniers, the trailer is a revelation. The extra structure adds more total weight, but the rolling resistance and balance penalties are almost unnoticeable. I could get used to this.

Happy 60^th, grandma and grandpa! It was fun visiting you.

toutbeurre braved the windy charles for my first outing of the season. Some would say that 25kt gusts is not the best warm-up trip. I say fie unto them. toutbeurre was a good sport, soaking up gallons of spray over the bow and gamely shifting high side when the wind smacked the mast downward. It's going to be a good sailing year if this is how it starts.

Pirate barbecue. Really.

I'm about halfway to developing a good "lakes of the northern suburbs" bike loop. dg and I managed to tag spy pond, upper and lower mystic lakes, lake quannapowitt, crystal lake, eli pond, spot pond, and wright pond in the same ride. The back half was pleasant with wide open parkways in wakefield and stoneham. But the first half needs more work to avoid all the traffic lights in winchester and woburn. We got rained on just enough to appreciate the sun when it appeared at the very end of the ride. I guess we need to work on our timing as well.

From last week's This American Life live show (paraphrased):

I didn't believe in marriage. I still don't. But I believe in her. And I've given up on being right.

Someone finally called my bluff. Every time we go out for dim sum, I dare everyone to order "phoenix claw". (Just a nice marketing spin on "chicken feet"). Turns out that mdt is a fan, so I had someone to share with. Unsurprisingly, a mass of bone and connective tissue isn't that great no matter how much sauce you load it with. I'm just happy that we explored outside of the usual safe white-people realm of pork buns and gyoza. Thanks for organizing, and happy birthday yurt!

( other festivities... )

I've had an unusually good run of films from Netflix lately. ( naming names ) This is after a nearly year-long dry spell since I've rated a rental movie 4 stars. I'm starting to wonder if there is a latency effect: Oscar contending or other prestige films are released around christmas, then release to DVD after a few months, then bubble through the queue for a few weeks. Voila - quality film just in time for the start of the mindless summer blockbuster season.

(Are you excited about any particular upcoming mindless summer blockbusters? I've already seen the only one I was really interested in. "Brothers Bloom" is directed by Rian Johnson of "Brick" fame - that might be good. )

I don't believe in much, but I do believe in cheese. As such, a trip to the Formaggio's cheese cave is not far from a personal hajj. I took a charcuterie class there on Sunday and learned how to make duck confit, pork cheek pancetta, and sausage. This focus on accessible projects was great, since I once took a class with noted domain expert Brian Polcyn and left amazed but utterly intimidated. This time I am determined to give home charcuterie a try. And getting to see the cheese cave was a special treat.

I've been neck-deep in a Manhattan Project crash R&D project at work. This has meant 12 hour workdays, 7 day work weeks, and having little energy for anything but coming home and sleeping fitfully. Things are looking better now and though the problem is not completely solved, we are getting good preliminary results. I'm once again ready to have a life.

For you, my friends who are currently studying for finals and quals: you have my deepest sympathy. I almost forgot what this is like. To think that there was a time in my life when this sort of focused intensity was taken for granted. Good luck on your exams.

I just purchased what is likely to be my last manual-transmission car. It's a Mazda3 hatchback, small and zippy. As the "sport" edition, it comes equipped with a short-throw 6-speed gearbox. Fun, but it's probably also the end of an evolutionary line.

• Hosted medyani's brief return to the industrialized world from Honduras. Pity she has to go away again.
• Neko Case puts on a good show. There was good banter and she connected well with the audience. Her studio albums have always sounded "live" to me, so the music was not much different on stage as recorded. I would have been interested to see how some of the more lush arrangements in "fox confessor" got stripped down for a smaller instrument set. Instead of "dirty knife" and friends, she stuck mostly to her poppier favorites. Alas, the string bass player never even touched his bow. The screen behind her projected images of the type her music evokes in my head: starry skies, naked winter trees, rusty trellis bridges, crumbling grain elevators.
• Worked most of easter sunday. Things are rough at work these days. If you don't see or hear much of me, it's because I'm trying to figure out the best way to normalize my histograms for cross-correlation and don't really plan on sleeping or doing anything outside of the office until this thing works.
• Cooked CSA ham steaks for toutbeurre and her fiancee as easter dinner. I have cooked for them enough that I'm only sort of intimidated by the idea of making food for a pair of professionally trained chefs. That's the third of my friends to get engaged since I did it last fall. I really thought that we'd be the last of my peer group. Am I setting a trend?

Once upon a time I worked in Ford's long term reliability division, designing mechanical and computational test fixtures to ensure that every part on the car would last for the 100,000 mile warranty period. We worked very hard at that goal and made sure that the car would be bulletproof up to that threshold. I'm happy to say that except for an unfortunate incident with the ignition lock, the little Focus has been trouble-free for its entire life.

But 100,001 miles was a non-goal. Throwing around words like "self-destruct" may be too histrionic, but it's probably time for a new ride.