Magic Spot Flowing

Ride report 1, this morning’s ride:
Portola Loop, backwards from usual (Santa Cruz > Alpine > Portola > Sand Hill).
DST: 17.5mi
AVS: 13.9mph
MXS: 39mph according to the computer, but I think really about 32-33mph
Time: 1:15 riding time (about 1:25 total)

I had a really wonderful ride this morning. I decided to go in reverse from the way I’ve done Portola Loop before, to find out what it was like to climb Alpine. Answer: weird. Alpine starts at about 3mi from home for me, but the climb-that-feels-like-a-climb doesn’t start until about 5.5 or 6 miles (and ends at about 7.5 with the turn to Portola). But the whole thing feels like a downhill going the other way, though a very gradual one.

On one of the steeper early sections, I was being passed a fair bit by other cyclists. This happens to me a lot when I’m out in the hills, because 14mph is a fairly slow average speed for a road cyclist (why I’m pleased our W2W team is called Team Slowpoke :) and my hill-climbing skills aren’t the best anyhow. However, I found myself extremely content to be doing exactly what I was doing at that moment. It was sometime between 9 and 9:30, a warmish, calm morning with the fog slowly clearing, gradually creeping up from Menlo Park into Portola Valley, and I was delighted to be alive, to be there, and to be riding, and to be riding at the speed I wanted to ride. I had a similar moment yesterday on the way to the train station. It’s wonderful to be in the moment and be happy to just be riding.

(In my training program, weekend rides are done at “Pace” speed, which means the speed you plan to ride during the event, and I’ve decided I’m not going to try to get faster than 14mph AVS. If I do, that’ll be a bonus. This is about endurance for me rather than speed.)

The rest of the ride was lovely too. I took one brief rest stop before Portola, and then had an incredibly fun screaming descent onto Sand Hill at Whiskey Hill. That’s where I was going the fastest, but I’m pretty sure my computer got confused later on by a sensor, because I wasn’t going 39, more like 32ish. It was exhilarating.

The downside of doing the loop that way is coming back on Sand Hill. The 280 interchange there is not as well designed as on the other side; the bike lane doesn’t carry through, so you have to be very careful about merging motorists. Also, Sand Hill has a number of traffic lights, which Alpine doesn’t, so descending, although incredibly fun, is apt to be interrupted by a few lights and by people turning right who fail to merge correctly. My mirror helped me avoid a few potential trouble spots.

Still, I enjoyed that route tremendously and likely will take it again. One advantage is the slow climb up Alpine; another is that the Alpine/280 interchange area is safer than the equivalent on Sand Hill (the stop signs require people to use lower speeds). There’s also more variation in the up-down profile that way, because Sand Hill goes up again before it goes down, instead of only going down.

One other advantage is that it can more easily hook in with other routes that way. For example, you can go off to Arastradero at one point, or you can take Mountain Home or Whiskey Hill to Woodside, and even go all the way up Cañada to Edgewood or 92 if you are just that crazy. Someday I probably will when I am scheduled for longer rides. Right now I’m just in the last week of base-building before training, so 17.5mi is plenty.

Ride report 2, a coworker’s first ride to work!
I don’t have the statistics for this one, but I wanted to recognize/congratulate a friend of mine at work who rode her bike to work for the first time on Friday. She has been talking about buying a bike and riding to work for a while now, and gas prices lately have provided more motivation to do so. So she is the proud new owner of an Electra Townie and rode it from home to work (and back home, I imagine) on Friday. Go K!

On Friday she very kindly thanked me for the support I’ve provided in suggesting bikes, equipment, and routes, and explaining traffic laws and safe cycling. I’m glad to have helped her do what she wanted, and I’m glad that my help is helpful, because it bodes well for my potential attempt to become an LCI.

My Verizon “new every two” thing keeps showing up in my mail in recent months — I think it started last year sometime, but I’ve been resisting.

However, the BlueAnt V1 is coming out soon! And I have been helping to test the tech in them at work* (and may eventually get one), so it is a pain for me not to have a Bluetooth-enabled phone. Thus, I’m finally going to give into the desire to get a new phone.

The only question is: what phone?

I am not getting a Blackberry because they are too expensive for data, and I really don’t need one.

(I am not getting an iPhone for a multitude of reasons, not least that I would have to switch carriers. My objections to the iPhone are really a whole other entry, and not very interesting.)

So that left me with the options of upgrading to other phones within Verizon. I decided I would rather stick with LG because although their phones have certain quirks, I am used to them.

So today I looked at the Dare, the enV2, and the basic VX8350, which is essentially just a modernized, Bluetooth-capable version of my current phone (the VX6100).

So:
1) Stay with the same kind of phone and plan
2) Upgrade a bit, QWERTY keyboard & camera w/higher resolution, same plan
3) Major upgrade plus web data plan

The LG Dare is basically Verizon’s iPhone, though there are a lot of differences. It’s touchscreen only, but not capacitative (wtf?). It also has a 3MP camera (…almost as many MP as my large 2002 digicam!) and full web browser (which is the part of the Blackberry function I would actually like, though the quality of the rendering engine gets mediocre reviews). It’s also really new, and I’m worried about it having weird flaws (user reviews of the Voyager, the previous all-touch phone, suggest the touch screen may not be that great).

The enV2 doesn’t have a true web browser or as good a camera (CNet says mediocre) but evidently is sturdy and has good sound quality and a good keyboard.

The VX8350 has some neat features, like being able to be a USB mass-storage device and transferring files via Bluetooth. Photo quality is said to be good but MP is only 1.3.

All of them play music, which is kinda cool — I haven’t had a phone before that would do that — but may require some extra equipment to transfer files, which isn’t so cool. (None of them plays OGG, of course, but I didn’t expect a phone to do that.)

And they basically cost either $100, $50, or $0 (after contract credit + rebate). Kind of an interesting stack, that.

I’m going to think about it for a while longer, but right now I’m basically playing with the tradeoff of better camera & web/risky touchscreen & web contract expense vs. mediocre camera & no web/good quality keypad interface & no new contract expense. One thing that worries me is that I tend to knock my phones around a bit in my bags, and I’m worried about damaging the Dare. OTOH people keep iPhones in their pockets with no apparent ill effects, so maybe it isn’t really a problem.

*This blog should not be taken as representing the views of anyone other than me, certainly not my employer or any business the company works with.

1/4 lb TJs whole wheat pasta (cooked) +
First fresh pesto of the season (so fresh it was still bright green when I put it on) +
small grind each of parmesan and black pepper +
Alexis
=
Happiness

Basil, how I love thee.

I almost have a hard time believing this, except that there are so many Google results for the word:

Is hited a word??

People ask Yahoo Answers a lot of strange questions, including many that would be best answered by a dictionary and another whole batch that would be best answered by a philosopher, plus a lot of others that just really aren’t the Internet’s business, but this one just kind of bowled me over.

I reorganized some blog categories this morning. I’ve been a bit lazy about adding all the categories I want, because it requires more effort than just tagging a post (but also forces you to actually reuse the same categories again and again, so you don’t end up with tagging issues like having “geekyness” and “geekiness” both as tags) so I went back and added some.

I also moved Cycling into its own top-level category. It’s by far my most heavily-used category (except for “Personal” which is a default category), and with all the recreational cycling and Waves to Wine stuff I’ve been doing, I wanted to have a category for that, which didn’t fit into its previous home under Transportation Alternatives. The category structure is more complicated now, but it reflects reality better.

I also moved the categories and links around, so that “links” is at the top now and includes a link to my Waves to Wine personal page. You can donate there, and I’d love to start getting some donations (W2W is less than three months away now, and I’m doing formal base-building to prepare for training, which will start in July), so if you have a spare few dollars and want to donate, please use that link. I really am happy with any amount of donation, so don’t feel it has to be a lot. If you have any trouble donating let me know. I haven’t tried to use their system yet, but hopefully it’s pretty good.

There are ducklings again this spring! Five of them. Teeny little fluffballs right now. Adorable. I need to take my camera and see if I can get any pics of them.

As of today, I’m literally and officially certified Road I proficient by the League of American Bicyclists! I have a piece of paper that says so. I passed with flying colors.

I’m glad I took the class, because since then my road positioning has gotten more appropriately assertive, and I’m feeling more comfortable on the road because I know some evasive maneuvers.

On another subject: cooking. I haven’t been cooking a lot lately for various reasons (it’s been hot, I’ve been busy and away from the farmer’s market) but tonight I made something tasty and not very difficult. I’m going to do my best to recall exactly what I did, but as usual it’s not a very exact process. It tastes a lot like a chinese restaurant dish except light and fresh.

Spicy Eggplant in Brown Sauce
Vegetable oil
1 yellow onion
4 small Japanese eggplants
6 small or medium cloves of garlic
1-2 tbsp basil (6-10 leaves), chiffonaded
Soy sauce (~1/4 cup)
Mirin (~3 tbsp)
Water (~3 tbsp)
Corn starch (1/2-1 tbsp)
1/2 tbsp chili-garlic sauce (or to taste, but this is meant to be spicy*)

Chop the onion, and cut the eggplants into half-rounds about 1/4″ thick. Saute the onion in a tablespoon or two of oil over medium heat, stirring frequently, until browning and translucent. Add the eggplant and continue sauteing until the eggplant is mostly soft. Add the garlic and saute a few minutes until eggplant is done. Add a little soy sauce and/or mirin if necessary to deglaze the pan and keep everything from burning.

Add the basil and stir, then add the soy sauce, mirin, water, corn starch, and chili-garlic sauce. Stir, and bring to a simmer. Simmer 30 sec - 1 min or until the sauce thickens, then turn off the heat.

Serve with whatever you like with spicy Chinese-style dishes. I used rice noodles.

Yum.

*Not as in burns your mouth off, but as in, packing the heat. Whatever that means to you. Just don’t get between me and my chili garlic sauce.**

**It occurs to me that this should be spelled chile garlic sauce, because it’s made with chiles, not chili, but I always see it spelled chili garlic sauce (734K GHits to 465K GHits, and most of the ones for the latter are the same as the former), so, whatever.

This week is the Towards Carfree Cities conference in Portland, and Kent & Christine and Beth both have lovely things to say about life without a car. So many lovely things to say that they’ve said everything I could imagine saying!

My favorite line:

As Peter once told Kent, “I don’t ride my bike because I’m a damn hippie like you, Dad. I ride my bike because I am a FISCAL CONSERVATIVE.”

On my birthday, I drove to the VA in Palo Alto (for the Sequoia ride), to the Farmer’s Market, home, and then to Berkeley, in a friend’s car. While I was on 880-N, driving 65-70mph (and being passed regularly, since this is California), I kept thinking “This is just insane. Why am I going so fast? Where is everyone going?”

Practically speaking, that day was very unusual for me. I had too much to do and too much to carry (a full trunk and back seat) to take my bike or transit. I needed to be able to get to Berkeley in an hour with a whole load of crap, more (I think) than would even fit on an Xtracycle. (You also can’t take Xtracycles on Caltrain.)

What it ended up doing was reinforcing for me how utterly weird it is in my life for me to want or need to be somewhere 50+ miles away in an hour, and how much I no longer enjoy doing that. Slowly, through habit, my life has been reshaped for a more human scale, where ten miles in an hour seems like plenty and trying to locate appropriate places to put a 2000-lb vehicle for 30 minutes to several hours seems bizarre. It also reminded me that I could have made other choices, that it was my own choices that put me in that situation to begin with. Had I made a greater head start on the prep, I could have sent a lot of the stuff back with the other party host, and I would have needed less time for last-minute prep and thus had more time for travel. I’m not unhappy with the choices I made, but I might make different ones next time.

Life without a car is just like any other life: full of evolving choices about how I most want to spend my time.

Re-reading some old posts from my LiveJournal, I came across one about “cyclist’s left”, and remembered that among the things I learned in my LAB Road I class was yet another name for this type of turn (in addition to cyclist’s left and hook turn): box turn. However, the results I get on Google for “box turn” are ambiguous, with none seeming to refer to the maneuver in question, and the only “cyclist’s left” in the Google results with my meaning is my own citation, though there is an interesting Google Books result discussing bikeway hazards which uses a similar term to discuss a similar, but not identical (because it doesn’t presume the stop), maneuver.

The bikeway hazards result is gives a good illustration of why I hate bike paths and why riding on sidewalks is a bad idea. And yes, it’s by John Forester.

Speaking of which, that reminds me about something I read recently on a Portland bike blog where someone was foaming at the mouth about vehicular cycling. They raised one issue that I felt was interesting, which is that the theory behind the fact that Oregon doesn’t use the dashed stripe at intersections that CA uses is that it reduces the number of right-turn conflict points. Which is probably the only even vaguely sensible reason I’ve heard for it, though I don’t know that I buy it.

But the main thing that annoyed me was that the person was saying that you have to be “highly trained” to ride integrated with car traffic. You do need to be trained, but not “highly trained”. Ten-year-olds can do it; attentive adults can learn it in 1-2 days. Learning to drive takes longer. Anyone who can drive already knows about 75% of what they need to know to cycle. The rest of the effort is in a few cycling-specific issues and overcoming prejudices that don’t really need to ever develop (fear of traffic, inculcated by not knowing how to handle it). Saying that vehicular cycling advocates are requiring that people be “highly trained” is rhetorical trickery of the sort that attempts to conceal blatant falsehood.

So I went through this entire odyssey after I discovered that Meg’s handlebar/stem combination wasn’t working well for me and wasn’t going to be easy to replace. I looked for stems that would work and found almost nothing, and I couldn’t figure out whether any non-31.8 handlebars would work. I think the odyssey is finally over, at least for a while.

When I went to Mike’s Bikes tonight, I talked to a guy about searching first and he tried to find me a stem, but came up with nothing. So I went back to the repair guys to talk about moving the levers again, and they finally explained that the reason they were worried about moving the levers and rotating the bars was that I might not be able to reach the brake levers from the hand position on the drops.

I demonstrated to them that I already can’t do that, so to please go ahead and make the change if that was their only concern!

I didn’t even know it was possible to do that — my hands just aren’t large enough; I can’t do it effectively on my road bike either. If want to brake I put my hands either forward into the furthest-front part of the drops or I come up to the hoods.

Now that my bars have been rotated, the very bottom of the drops is at a bit of an angle and isn’t quite so comfortable to use, but given the small amount of time I spend in the drops compared to the time I spend up top, it’s a tiny loss. The top feels very much like my road bike bars and is so much more comfortable it’s almost unbelievable.

Thank heaven for Mike’s Bikes and service guys who actually are patient and take the time to talk to you and explain their perspective!

While there I also picked up two new pairs of gloves that I hope will be much more comfortable than my current Novara ones, and which were, surprisingly, no more expensive. I also got another jersey identical to my favorite blue one that I got last year (someday I’ll have someone take a picture of me in those on my bike and put in on my W2W page and you’ll see what I mean) which I love and which was 40% off! I couldn’t believe they had some left over. They also have some Specialized saddles that look interesting which I may look into for my road bike because I think that saddle is too wide, and some road bike fenders that use clip attachments to the rear triangle instead of going under the brake, so I’ll be back for at least one pair of those come winter.