« September 2007 | Main | December 2007 »
November 22, 2007
happy Thanksgiving
To those of you in the US, happy Thanksgiving. To the rest of you, happy Thursday. So far, it's been a most excellent day.
I woke up at 3:30 and was wide awake. So I got up. Within about a half hour, sweetie was up too. By 5am, we were talking about breakfast. So we went driving around looking for a place to get breakfast. I figured that Hot Cake House would be open (wrong), so after touring much of North and NE Portland, we ended up at My Father's Place when they opened at 6. We sat and read the ad circulars and then ate some underwhelming breakfast -- all in all, it was great.
Then we got home and went back to bed. I've been up for a couple hours now and we've putzed around. I've been doing some light cleaning along with some internet surfing; sweetie has given birdy its first bath and been doing some internet surfing. Right now I feel more relaxed than I can remember feeling in quite a while.
We have no commitments today. We do have some food to cook, but none of the crazy over-achiever stuff that usually marks my holidays (though honestly, I love the overachieving cooking). Food will get cooked when it's time. I'm hoping to do a fair amount of knitting and cleaning, and to haul the Omabike into the living room where I can work on it in the comfort of a heated, well lit space.
***
Since the time changed, I've haven't been riding my bike. Mostly, it's been about simple logistics -- I don't know how to turn on my generator powered lights. It's probably really simple, but I just haven't figured it out.
Yesterday, we were going to have a short day at work, and I realized as I was getting ready that I could ride my bike if I want. Suddenly, I was flooded with irrational happiness, and even though I had a huge deadline to meet at work, I couldn't get the grin off my face.
So I go out to the shed, and check the tires. One is soft; one is all but flat. Ugh. So I get out the pump and I get the front tire, with its schrader valve, right about right. Then I go to the back tire, with its non-schrader valve, and immediate let all the rest of the air out. And I can't seem to get any air in.
This just about reduces me to tears. I thought about riding one of the townies, but I was having a temper tantrum in my mind. I wanted to ride the Oma. Damn it!
So I got to work and was just obsessed with the issue. I thought the valve was a presta, so I looked that up and read all the stuff about it online and just felt like crying again. Damn it, I had tried filling the tube the way they described.
I finally got to work on my deadline and that made me a bit more serene.
After work, I stopped at my bike shop, Clever Cycles. I hadn't been in the shop since they had expanded onto Hawthorne, and it is gorgeous. The front room is full of gorgeous natural fiber clothing for bicycling -- no spandex, indeed nothing sillily jocky -- and bike bags and baskets (this doesn't show all of what they have from Basil, but it will give you an idea. They also carry some other lines of bags). The back room is still citybikes and bakfiets and folders, and other beautiful accessories for your bike, like beautiful handmade bakfiets cushions.
I have a real bag/purse problem. I love a nice reasonably priced purse, and when I got serious about incorporating bicycling into more of my life, I got really annoyed by how ugly the pannier bags are, and how tiny the baskets are. If I have one of my Queen Bee satchels (eg what they call their Trucker bags), it won't fit into my basket.
Of course, what can you do? I have an ugly double pannier which annoys me everytime I look at it.
Anyways, Clever Cycles has beautiful wire and wicker baskets. They have gorgeous panniers in so many colors. And they have purses that work as a single pannier. I of course bought one (it was cheap, cheap, I tell you), and I am most likely going to go in and buy another, as well as a large wire basket on Friday.
I told my tale of presta valve woe to Dean, one of the owners, and Todd ran over and brought me a Woods Pump Connection Schrader Adaptor, which I can just screw on and pump the tire as per usual. Who knew: the valve was actually a Woods, so following the Presta directions would have just resulted in more frustration.
Then, I ran over to the scooter shop and picked up my scooter. Yay!!
Anyways, lazy day ahead. Yay!!
permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
November 17, 2007
Trimming down
If you've been wondering what I've been up to, it can probably best be summed up as cleaning house. Literally and figuratively.
About 6 weeks ago, I innocently upgraded the software that runs this and my other blogs, and whoops, managed immediately to break commenting and search functions. This still isn't entirely fixed right now, though as far as I'm aware, the problems remain in the big "daily" blog.
When I had done the upgrade, I had about 40 indexes and probably around 100 categories. At this point, I'm down to 20 indexes and probably around 75-80 categories. This stuff is so amazingly time-consuming, you would not believe.
I've also been clutterbusting, thinning out clothing, redoing my tiny closet so only clothes that fit are in it, redoing my drawers so they are organized, and generally trying to make home a better place to hang out.
I am still bike commuting some, though not as much as I'd like. I need to address lighting on the new bike, and figure out how to quickly turn that off and on.
The rest of the commutes, I'm on the bus, and I've been trying to add more walking to the bus commute.
The weird thing, and unpleasant, is that I feel really really out of shape. The bike ride home is still arduous, and isn't getting any easier. I feel completely winded from walking a couple of blocks, or climbing a flight of stairs. I don't like this a bit, and I don't know what's going on, because I'm still being fairly active. Oh well, I'm keeping on keeping on.
Anyways, you've slogged through this boooooring entry, I must reward you. You will enjoy this, and then it will be stuck in your head, and you can blame ME! Mwah-haha-ha-haha-ha!
permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
on cats and cat littler
I was reading Kate's Ride my Handlebars, and she wrote about attending an event featuring Jeanne Roy. In it, she mentioned the whole issue of cat litter -- that it's heavy and expensive and difficult to get home on a bicycle, and she mentioned that she was going to ask Roy about the effect of housecats on the environment for her story in the Trib.
So I excitedly check out There’s more to it than recycling, and there's nothing about cats. Damn it.
Here at Athenaville, we have three indoor-only cats, four catboxes and damn, a lot of issues around cat littler. The stuff doesn't biodegrade!
I'd really like an alternative that doesn't involve letting the cats outside. We have one cat who leaves editorial statements about the litter when it doesn't meet her high standards. So when I think of feline pine or other products like that, I fear for how many editorials I'll have to endure.
I did learn recently, however, that Charles Mingus -- who wrote a book on cat toilet training, called the Charles Mingus CAT-alog for Toilet Training Your Cat -- shredded his own newspaper for cat litter.
Dear g-ds, what did our grandparents use? (Oh yeah, they prolly didn't have cats in the house)
