Rolling Along

Well it’s coming up on that time again! Bike the barns season...

check out our pledge page!

Sev



Help support the Madison Area Community Supported Agriculture Coalition’s (MACSAC) 3rd Annual Bike the Barns bike ride!

This event raises critical funds to support MACSAC’s Partner Shares Program, which brings fresh, organic food from local farms to low income families in our community.  Please visit my personal rider page and pledge your support.   


Pledging is fast and easy; please support my ride and this great cause!

I truly appreciate your support and will keep you posted on my progress as I prepare to ride and continue raising funds to support this critical program.

Together with MACSAC I am working to create a sustainable, local food system in Southern Wisconsin by supporting CSA farms and ensuring that fresh, local food is available to all.

Thank you so much for your time and your support of local farms, food and families!


 Your pledge of $250 or more can be TAX DEDUCTIBLE!   If you’re mailing a tax-deductible pledge, please make checks payable to: REAP Food Group


WebLink: http://bikethebarns.dojiggy.com/samandaddibikethebarns2009

Well, I don’t get to avoid my old shop as I had planned. The boss called and asked me to come in and help out with projects around the shop. Building bikes, cleaning, reorganizing etc. I can deal with this... I think.

In personal news I had a fine day cycling to a coffee shop then down to the river to do some fishing. I caughts me 6 bluegills! Yaarr! I am the mightly huntrly!


ahem....


I should mention that Bluegills are some of the dumbest fish to be found in nature. They will literally bite at goobers if you spit in the water above them. They are just that dumb.

Well, the new store is supposed to open officially tomorrow July 6th. This will not be happening. We don’t even have real walls or a completed floor. I am highly disappointed. Due to some festering personality conflicts at my previous shop I am considering taking furlough just to avoid the heartache. In the mean time I have the following plans:

1) Build storage bench for the garage.
2) Plan some semi-permanent canning shelves for the basement
3) Go fishing (gonna do some of that tomorrow I think)

I am also going to attempt to use Journler to post some code to LiveJournal. We’ll see how it works. If it does I will possibly include this as a weekly supplement to my normal post.

TEST TEST TEST

I ended up doing just under thirty miles, a good portion of which was ridden on a 3.5 mile loop of dirt track in Middleton just north of Century Ave. I’m definitely gonna hit that trail again because it was just that fun to tear around it on my ‘cross bike.

I need to figure out how to ride at high speed on loose pea gravel. Almost lost grip going around one corner when I was out on the ride.

Helped a kid and his mom who were out for a ride. Mom was going along with her two kids and pulling a third in a buggy. She was riding a coaster brake beach cruiser bike and had a backpack on her back. Barely staying upright so she would keep up with her middle child who was inching along on training wheels. Her eldest could have ridden pretty fast for a kid but he didn’t want to leave his mom behind. Poor dude went too slow around a corner and washed out.

I admit its tough for me to understand how some folks find cycling difficult. I’m sure that fish feel the same way when they look at us trying to swim.



For dinner I broke out our stand mixer to pull together a lasagna. Spinach, hot italian sausage, tofu and egg as a substitute for ricotta. High praise from the wife for a good dinner. Its stupid easy to process tomatoes with our fruit and veg grinder/strainer. Makes fast pasta sauce.

Back in Madison after a weekend away.

Things to do:
Get some bike rides in. Tomorrow I will probably do a 20 mile loop. With the cool weather I will need to break out my wool jersey.
Go fishing on Thursday. I’ve re-considered fishing the mid-yahara. I think I can get access to the river source just north of Mendota
Clean my fishtank.

Things I’ve learned:
Anarchists who couch their philosophies in legalistic terms are really just Libertarians.
Libertarians want the protection of the rule of law without any of the responsibility.
If you have a sip of Ola Dubh 12 yr Scotch Ale and then a sip of J. W. Lees Vintage Harvest ale you get a taste of BBQ.
Road Paving Equipment is ridiculously cool, and causes interesting patterns in freshly-ground dirt.
It is a shame that Bella Lugosi and Mel Brooks never made a movie together.

aetrix9 and I are going out of town for the next two nights. Gonna B&B it up somewhere quiet. Talk, walk, poke around some odd shops, eat too much. I can certianly say I’m looking forward to it. And to the fact that, when we get back, I will still have 2 more days left of my vacation time I took from Work.

I believe that I will go fishing on Wednesday. Pack my rod and kit on my back, bike over to the East side of Town and fish the Yahara. I stopped at Fontana yesterday and grabbed some panfish flies. If I keep buying flies I may have to pull together the scratch to get a hook vise, materials and some instruction. I turn your attention to Oliver Edwards (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFYlIwDuPiE) whose skill at tying a fly is rather ridiculous.

Cheers!

Went fishing this evening. Had two little brown trout jump at my fly. Lost one fly to a treebranch. Stood in an icy stream up to my knees.

All in all, it was a good time!

My friend Justin tried my rod out (har har). He likes my “cheap” rod better than his expensive rod.

I just watched “Underworld: Rise of the Lycans” and found it to be much like the previous two. If a bit more Conan the Barbarian in its type.

However, I found out that one of the principle actors in Underworld 1 and this latest Underworld 3 is also one of the writers of all three films AND the original concept creator. His motivation is to explore interracial dating. This really bears some thinking about if true.

“Using Romeo and Juliet as an archetype, Grevioux, a former microbiologist with a background in genetic engineering,[citation needed] based Underworld on his experiences with interracial dating and the tension that it often causes. He also brought a scientific element to the world of vampires and werewolves by basing vampirism and lycanthropy on a viral mutagen rather than the mysticism typically associated with these two mythic creatures.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Grevioux

First canning day. Picked 20 lbs of strawberries. Canned a few dozen jars of jam. We have a vegan strawberry pie setting up in the fridge. Gonna freeze a few pretty soon. I also made up some pear sorbet today, it came out a bit too sugary.

For my caffeine research I found an un-sourced document online that gives a minimum threshold dose as 10-20 mg.
http://www.erowid.org/chemicals/caffeine/caffeine_dose.shtml

Interesting starting point. I discussed my ideas during picking with aetrix9. She’s offered me access to pubmed and her pharmacokinetics book as there is a wealth of data on caffeine in the latter and good general info in the former.

Aparently when pharmacists (not the folks at walgreens, but the boffins at drug labs) make a drug they will package the human trial tests with caffeine in order to measure the metabolic life of the test drug versus the very well known metabolic life of caffeine.

Recently I began using a journaling/GTD productivity application called Journler (http://journler.com/). For those on a Mac who would like to post and retain offline copies of their posts, as well as keeping extensive project notes and life documentation where you get to choose what and how much goes up in your public space (concept: the internet message boards and social networking sites as “public space”). As well as giving you a fully functional way of tracking and processing your projects (art, academic, media, life etc) I highly recommend it.

A bit ago I was interested in the affects of caffeine on sports performance. Most of the documentation I read was very thorough on exploring dosage intake in various forms. Focused on the MAXIMUM dosage intake of a particular vector (be it supplement, tea, coffee, candy, soda etc). The questions I want to explore are...


1) Minimum effective dose (MED, or CMED for CaffeineMED); broad category explore the following:
a) resting event; no activity level previous or following
b) ramping; increased minimum dosage for setting up the body state for activity (see glycogen and carbo-loading)
c) active intake; coasting rate for MED
d) cooldown; if the intent is to cut back on MED at what point must intake be cut in order to metabolize remaining caffeine and return to a non-enhanced state
e) recovery; a common discussion among athletes, particularly endurance athletes. This is the time to restore the body.
2) Long Term CMED use:
a) eventual desensitization
b) chemical dependency
c) resensitization to CMED after period of abstention


WHY? I think that the caffeine intake of the average American, and quite possibly all Americanized Food Cultures, is excessive. If the goal is alertness, mental acuity and/or some modest athletic benefits then those states should be attainable by an MED. There seems to be extensive opinion and fact in the literature that raises concerns about caffeine hyper-Dosing. I hesitate to call it Over Dosing.

I realized recently that I neglected some inter-personal commitments I had made. All of them are very old.

For those who had depended on me to honor those commitments, please forgive me. Let me know if I will be able to get in touch with you to resolve them.








I’m not quite sure if anyone to whom I owe contact will even read this. I’m being self-centered about this, and going about it all wrong. crap.

I’m not quite sure why I’ve decided to post after a long hiatus. I’m not quite sure what I feel at this moment.

What I do know is that I can’t sleep. I haven’t been going to sleep at a reasonable hour for the last handful of days. I think this may be a symptom of not being entirely happy with life as it is right now. But, I couldn’t tell you what, why or how.

News For Anyone Who may be Interested

I have a semi-new job. Still with the same company. We’re just opening a new store in the downtown area. This is only relatively exciting.

I’ve taken up fly fishing and bowling.

I’ve given up on the Martial Arts.

I have less time in my life...

Some years ago I mentioned pulling up the stakes like a nomad and going somewhere new. But, this is not wanderlust. Think “Starsign” by Apoptygma Berzerk

Maybe there will be more later.



links to check out:
http://www.mycyclinglog.com/profile/Severian
http://madisonbiking.com/profile.php?id=145
http://www.bikeforums.net/member.php?u=38112

That’s my public existence on the internet. Very bike-centric. Maybe of interest.

Cheers

I have sand under my nails. I set off fireworks. I'm toasting our new president with some Whiskey.

I got 4 voters to the polls.

Yours,

Sev

Another giant of my world, and member of the bicycling community, died this week.

Sheldon Brown, known for being the head tech and webmaster of Harris Cyclery as well as his own website, died this monday at the age of 63. Heart attack is the listed cause...







in memorium I rode my bike yesterday in a "Wintry Mix"... icy roads.. .yuck. But my new headlight works nice.



I also cleaned the kitchen of Superbowl Detritus.

Well.. I'm now three days back from Ashland... a few days of work, a few days off. I'm glad to be home to my wife (who is playing with her phone and trying to get an internet connection up and running on cellular modem for her computer). Catching up on my reading I found a gem on metafilter.com.

Octopous now goes to 11

The main link is to a talk from TED (very cool talks about any subject under the sun, any subject currently studied by humans). The second half of the talk covers nifty camo and communication abilities of cephalopods. Ya'll should check em out!


cheers!

WOW.... JUST....... WOW...




topical considering what I'm doing this week.

I am amazed.

A few days worth of suspension overhauls and an hour long bike ride makes me feel pretty good. My hands have been COMPLETELY covered in lube for the past two days. Not good lube mind you... but lube non the less.

And I got to watch a calf being born this evening. After class I went out into the hills around Ashland for a bike ride. Did probably about a thousand feet of climb over two miles. I passed a farm and the cows were out wandering around in the still evening. I heard lots of mooing and looked around at all of these cows, and one mother cow off on her own, licking her newborn calf.

Cool shit. I got a pic of the calf.

I didn't get a pic of the deer I saw later. A whole herd of them. I was tackling the last few hundred feet of climb before the road I was riding on turned into a fire-road and went up higher into the mountains. The herd passed me and ran into the woods to watch me huff and puff my way up the hill.

perhaps I should get an advanced account so I can post pictures.

I didn't sleep well last night for some reason... may have to do something with not having drunk enough water all day and sitting around on my ass.

Got up today panicking that I'd missed classes or work or something. But, I made it to the UBI facility before anyone else... except the owner. Whom I haven't met. First day of class was interesting, but not anything I don't already know. They grade performance though. I find their grading scheme kind of distasteful... or at least, it seems a little heavy-handed.

The information was good, there was actual discussion on wheel theory. Tomorrow we get to build a pair of wheels! But I don't get to keep em (sad).

I'm seeing a lot of mountains while I'm here... its very comfortable in this little valley. Not like the poorly named "Valley of the Sun" that Phoenix AZ sits in.

more later