I am writing this on Saturday, May 31. There are several pics.

Removing the railing

This the week that deck repairs started. There are a lot advantages to hiring professionals. They get a lot of work done. They get it right the first time. And they’re fun to watch. In two days, they removed the old floor and trim, and installed most of the rubber that will be below the new floor. They also lowered the deck so it slopes away from the house. These pics will show their progress, but unfortunately you can’t tell the deck now slopes at 1/4″ per foot from the pics. The deck should be put back together this week. The support beams were quite saturated with water. I decided it would be a good idea to let them dry out before installing new trim. My contractor’s next available slot is in August. So the support beams will have plenty of time to dry out.

Watch that Edge

I read a couple of interesting books lately. “The Last Voyage of Columbus” by Martin Dugard is an excellent history and biography of Columbus and his times. I picked up James Shapiro’s “A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599” as a lark to learn something before going to Stratford-Upon-Avon. It turned out to be a quite interesting and very illuminating book. It compares events of the day to Shakespeare’s work. Shapiro chose his year well. 1599 was a turning point in Shakespeare’s work (he wrote “Hamlet” near the end of that year) and an important year in England’s history. On the other hand, “The Secret Life of William Shakespeare” by Jude Morgan is getting good reviews. But I found that it’s a completely fabricated story, written to include the highlights of Shakespeare’s history, with no discernible insights offered. I couldn’t get past the first few chapters.

Removing the Floor

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

Perhaps a Trellis instead of a Deck?

This Rubber will guide water away from the house and past the beams

I am writing this on Monday, 5/26. There are no pics.

We’re enjoying a quiet and relaxing holiday. The weather has been very nice. We had our Thursday dinner out on Wednesday this week. On Friday, Danita worked at Goddard. This always means a longer commute with more traffic. By Friday afternoon, the holiday traffic was so bad that I-95 became a virtual parking lot. Danita had her GPS route her home on back roads. With nothing happening Friday evening, and having eaten at home Thursday, we decided to go to Jason’s and have a salad bar dinner. After that, we watched the last of this season’s TV shows. We stayed home Saturday.

Sunday was Ed and Lynne’s Parkton Open, the annual invitational croquet championship. There were so many people this year, Ed had 3 croquet courses set up. There were two sets of games (6 games in all). The winners of each game played in the championship game. Danita was in the first set. She came in 4th out of 6. I was in the second set, coming in 6th out of 5. In my defense, I was knocked way out at the beginning of the game. After that, I was well behind everybody else. Unable to tap anybody’s ball and get two more strokes, I ended up almost half way through when the game was won.

This morning, we took Mark out to breakfast. He’s busy packing for his big trip. He got a summer job teaching physics to high schoolers through CTY. This year, he’s teaching in Saudi Arabia. He’ll be living on the US compound. The Saudi students will come on the compound for their classes. The second half of the summer, he’ll be teaching astrophysics at Hopkins, also for CTY. Mark knows a lot of people working in physics. One of the things he likes to do is arrange Skype sessions so the students can meet a lot of people and hear what they do with their education in physics. He’s had a bit of a trouble getting people lined up this year due to the time difference. His classes start at 1 AM East Coast time. While it’s possible that some folks are awake at 1, he also needs them to be sober. ;-) He’s using more folks from the west coast for this class. They told him to be a cultural ambassador. He’s taking that seriously. He said he has females, blacks, asians, whites, and even a middle-eastern person lined up.

My personal news is about my laptop computer. The fan started making noise. Sometimes, the computer reports “fan error” and refuses to boot. I decided to have the computer repaired. It’s amazingly expensive, but the computer is only 3 years old. I’m hoping that a new fan will make it good for another 2 years. In the mean time, Danita has a work laptop and iPad. She uses them for working at home and takes the laptop to Godard when she works down there. But one of them is generally available. She has a keyboard for the iPad, which makes it much easier to type. In fact, I’m writing this on her iPad. My computer is supposed to be ready near the end of the week.

That’s the news for this week. I’ll be starting the charcoal for some hamburgers pretty soon. Then we’ll stream a movie suitable for Memorial Day. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

I am writing this on Wed, May 21. There are a few pics.

Monday

If you want to move your boat between the lake and the river, you can use this handy lake lock.

One thing on my “A” list was to do a 2-day ride around Cayuga Lake. The total ride is 100 miles. I didn’t do this when I first arrived because of the rain Thursday. I didn’t do it over the weekend because my overnight parking spot was next to a church, and I figured they probably use that lot. So I got up bright and early Monday morning and drove an hour to get half way around the lake. The ride didn’t start well. I put my cabin key in my car’s cup holder. Or I should say that’s what I meant to do. Actually, it fell between the console and the seat. When  I got to my parking spot, I didn’t see the key right away, got distracted by something else I *did* see, then forgot about the key. I remembered it a couple of hours later, but it was too late to turn back. That created a little anxiety, because I didn’t know for sure where the key was, and I didn’t want to buy a new lock for the cabin.

Bucolic Scene – It’s important to have a good bucket to sit on when fishing.

The other thing that went wrong was breakfast. They were forecasting rain and possible thunderstorms to start about 3 PM. I decided to get to my parking spot early, have a cooked breakfast at the “Be Happy Cafe”, and skip lunch. That way I would be back well before any T-storms. That would have been a great plan, except that the “Be Happy Cafe” is closed on Mondays, and it’s the only place in town that serves breakfast. This wasn’t a major issue. I rode 15 miles to where I could get breakfast, and finished my ride in plenty of time to ride into town (4 miles uphill — an easy ride back on a full stomach!) to get a sausage and onion sandwich, with homemade sausage and homemade bread. It was quite good. The rest of the ride was great. I expected to see a lot of scenes like the “Bucolic Scene” in the pic, with guys fishing and whatever, but I guess it was too early in the season. This is the only one I saw. I took this from a distance because I didn’t want to be intrusive. When I rode closer, I saw that they were sitting on buckets. It’s important to have a good bucket when fishing.

Tuesday

Imaginative Hot Dog Stand

Having ridden half way around the lake, the only thing to do is to ride the rest of the way around and pick up the car. So that’s what I did. My route took me through some of the “unsquished” land (i.e., HILLY). But that was fine. Most of the land I saw Mon and Tue was farms, but larger than the Mennonite farms I saw around Seneca Lake. It wasn’t the most exciting ride I’ve had. Once you’ve smelled one cow, you’ve pretty much smelled them all. I was thinking about what a great idea it would be to stop for an ice cream when I had the great good fortune to ride through historic Aurora. Among other things, Aurora has the birthplace of Wells (founder of Wells Fargo Express), Wells College (how many other people do you know who have personally lied eyes on this august institution?), and the first house built by a white man in 1789 (sometimes I can tell you the words on the sign, but you have to determine the meaning without my assistance). But they do not have anyplace that serves ice cream. Fortunately, it was near the end of the ride. I was not about to see if the Be Happy Cafe served ice cream or not. It’s pretty easy to find ice cream if one has a car.

I got back to the cabin about 1:30. The forecast was for rain to start around midnight, with thunderstorms Wednesday and more rain Thursday. I decided I had done all my “A” items, and there was no reason why I shouldn’t drive back in nice weather. I was home by 9 PM.

A few of observations

All the bridges close to Cornell are netted. Students can jump. If they hit their head on a steel beam, they can die. But they can’t fall into the gorge. Having seen the gorges, I know this is a huge advantage to the first responders. It would take all day to retrieve somebody at the bottom of the gorge, even if they weren’t being moved downstream by the river. Cornell must be a very, very tough school.

After the first day, lows were in the very low 40s and highs were 65 to 70. It’s possible to be sitting in camp reading and be quite comfortable in this weather. It’s easy to be comfortable all night in a cabin without heat. But it’s very difficult to get out of bed in the morning and get dressed. Especially after having done this for several days.

It was very nice having shoes and boots and hiking gear, and the all the other stuff I could bring because of driving up. I enjoyed the hiking even more than the biking. Cooking on the electric griddle was easy. But I missed not having a destination. Being at one spot and being required to reach a second spot is a powerful motivator for getting moving in the morning.

Living in a house with heat, indoor plumbing, and a kitchen sink makes life a lot easier.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

I am writing this on Saturday, 5/17 and also Sunday, 5/18. There are plenty of pics.

Friday (The pics are from Saturday. I’ll write about them below.)

Water Exiting WG Gorge

It was raining or rainy all day. The temperature started cool and slowly dropped during the day. (The high Thursday was 80. Today the high is 65.) I was still recovering from my insane ride, which made it a great day to visit the Corning Museum of Glass. This is two museums in one. It’s a glass art museum, which has some amazing pieces, including Egyptian glass that was made back in 1400 BC when glass was “invented”. The second part is a glass science museum, which is totally geared towards kids (actually, dumb kids) and which I didn’t find interesting at all. The things people do still amaze me. There was one woman who was taking a picture of everything in the art museum with her camera phone. She wasn’t looking at the pieces, or reading the cards, or even being careful of how she framed her picture. She just shot half the case, then the other half of the case, then moved on to the next case. Very strange.

Saturday

Rainbow Falls

Today it’s sunny but still cool. I spent the day hiking. The number one attraction in the area is the gorge trail at Watkins Glen, about 20 miles from here. This was my 3^rd time in WG. I parked my car there for my insane bike ride. I rode through there to get to Corning. And today I rode there to see the gorge. Unfortunately, there was an over-abundance of water in the river, and the gorge trail was closed. So I hiked the “Indian Trail” on the rim. (Hey! I didn’t give it that name.) After that I walked the trails around the Taughannock River where my cabin is located.

The first pic is of the water exiting the bottom of the gorge. The pic looks kind of “meh”, but being there is an awesome experience. It would probably help if you play some thunderous music, and crank the base. The gorge trail goes by a bunch of waterfalls, and even goes behind one, which is cool but not as cool as the Phantom cave or Zoro’s lair. The only waterfall one gets a good view of from the Indian trail is Rainbow Falls, which is pretty impressive.

Taughannock River – This doesn’t count as a water fall around these parts

Taughannock Falls – taller than Niagra

My cabin is at Taughannock Park. The river’s lower falls is the tallest waterfall in the area, taller than Niagra. I walked up the gorge trail and back to see it. Then I walked up the south rim trail and down the north rim trail so could see the upper falls also. The upper falls in some ways was even more impressive.

I took advantage of the placards and other information available and studied up on my history. Here’s what I learned. A long time ago, the Canadians were exporting duty-free icebergs. The thrifty yanks couldn’t turn down the bargain and said “We’ll take tons”. They put them in upstate NY because there’s no WiFi here and nobody would ever know, so they wouldn’t have to do an environmental impact study. The ice weighed so much, it squished the ground down. Then it melted and made the Finger Lakes. Water from the unsquished ground ran down into the lakes, cutting gorges in the rocks. The yanks decided to make the best of a bad thing and built water mills so they could make stuff here in the good old US of A instead of buying it from England. And that’s why England taxed our Tea, and that’s why we drink coffee and had our rebellion. A little while later, it flooded, washing the water mills away. That was OK because Edison invented electric lights and everybody wanted light bulbs. Glass blowers were taking their own sweet time, making artisan bulbs one at a time. So somebody built a factory to make light bulbs with machines in Corning. Then they used some of those light bulbs to light the factory and went to Detroit to get some union labor to run the second and third shift. Before long, there were so many light bulbs that there was more light than we needed and we had light pollution. But that turned out OK also because somebody else invented optical fiber and used that and the extra light to build the Internet, and now we have information pollution. I couldn’t figure out what they did with all those icebergs, but I happen to know that they use ice to make raspberry snow cones in Baltimore. I’m not sure exactly how that relates, but as they say in the TV detective shows, “There are no coincidences.” And this is just one of the things I know that a lot of other people don’t know.

I would like to tell you more, but Danita made some fabulous stew and let me take some on the trip and it’s just about heated to the perfect temperature.

Sunday

It was quite cool last night and this morning. The day started with a few showers,then slowly cleared up. Taughannock Park is about 15 miles north of Ithica. There are two more state parks just south of Ithica, plus several major waterfalls in the city itself. I decided to drive down to Buttermilk Park, which has what I think is the prettiest waterfall in the area. From there I took my bike into Ithica, hitting all the major waterfalls and also finding several very nice waterfalls that weren’t mentioned in the tourist literature. From there, I dropped down to Robert H. Treman Park, which is build around Enfield River. I walked up the gorge trail and down the rim trail. RHT is the prettiest area I’ve found around here. The lower falls are nice. The upper falls (Lucifer Falls) are quite impressive. The mill above the upper falls was built in 1850. It is not in working order, but the built that stuff to last, and last it did. The mill itself is quite similar to George Washington’s Mill. But the area along the river is beautiful country. The other stuff is just a bonus.

That’s it for now. I hope everybody is doing well.

I am writing this on Wednesday 5/15. WiFi has been less available than I thought it would be. I hope to post this tomorrow, so you may not see it until Friday. There are several pics.

Typical Winery Retail

The drive to Finger Lakes was uneventful. I was driving and listening to songs about the open road as only Bob Segar can sing them, when I came upon a small truth. When it comes to open roads, nobody builds them worse than Pennsylvania. I stopped at a Wegman’s in Ithica and bought some food for the week, including a salad for dinner. I got into camp about 4 and spent the rest of the day organizing all the stuff I took.

A Boat out of Water

The forecast for Thursday was great – sunny and warm. But the forecast for Friday was for rain all day, heavy at times. So I decided to spend Thursday riding around Seneca Lake. That’s a 77 mile ride. At home, the longest ride I plan is a little over 60 miles. With the hills in Howard County, I expect to complete the ride with less than 6 hours of saddle time, and less than 6 ½ hours overall. That’s pretty much my limit. The road around Seneca Lake is a lot flatter than Howard County, so I figured everything would be fine. Everything started out fine. I broke for lunch at mile 35, a little over 3 hours after I started. Winds were calm. Flags and signs hung limply from their posts, lake water was smooth. My average speed was over 15 MPH, which is much faster than normal for me. I was looking forward to a relatively easy completion, but Mother Nature had other plans. While I was eating lunch, the wind picked up big time – and it was going to be a head-wind all the way back to the car. I don’t have quantitative data, but I’ve ridden in a lot of wind. This one was absolutely awesome. Flags and signs were going crazy in the wind. The Lake had whitecaps. There were times I could barely keep the bike moving forward. I needed breaks every 2 or 3 miles. No matter the weather, there’s only one way to get back to the car. After almost 7 hours in the saddle and over 8 ½ hours on the road, I finally made it. I was so tired I didn’t even know what hurt. I got wind burns on my face and legs. My riding glasses were not doing a very good job of keeping dust and stuff out of my eyes. When I got back to camp, I forced myself to take a shower right away because I didn’t know when the rain was going to start. Then I laid down for a couple of hours because I was too tired to eat. The rain held off and I ate some snack foods after I felt a little better.

Waterfall

The countryside around here is very nice but not the breathtaking types of scenery that makes it easy to take pictures. There’s the lake, of course. Over half of the Seneca Lake shore is privately owned. The summer season hasn’t started yet, and lots of people haven’t opened their lake homes or put their boats in the water. One thing I noticed is that nobody up here leaves their boat in the water over the winter. There are plenty of wineries, many with very impressive retail / tasting areas and great views of the lake. There are also several houses, a few small towns, and lots of small farms. Many of the farms are Mennonite. I saw road signs warning of horse buggies, but I didn’t see any Amish. It’s pretty flat land and mostly open. There are plenty of trees, but not nearly enough to break the wind. This is an area with a lot of waterfalls. I passed my first waterfall near the end of the ride. As you can see, it looks pretty impressive.

I am writing this on Saturday, 5/10. There are no pics this week.

Last week was booking along. I was putting the finishing touches on a computer upgrade for the last computer at Habitat. This computer was used for their register, so I was taking it easy, launching a set of downloads in the evening, rebooting to install the updates the following morning. Saturday, they called me mid-afternoon. The computer had stopped working. Is there any way I could have it working by Monday? Unfortunately, the disk drive was totally corrupted. I took it home, installed Windows from scratch, installed all updates, added Office, and delivered it to them Sunday afternoon. It turns out that Jimmie, their their in-house techie, is the store manager of the Columbia store, which is open on Sundays. The store is about 2 miles from my house. Jimmie installed their Point of Sale software and had the computer running Monday morning. I was glad we were successful, but it put a kind of a crip in the weekend.

This week I’ve been packing and riding, getting ready for the Finger Lakes trip. I’m leaving Wednesday. Woo-Hoo! I have a killer biking list. It’s in Excel. It has everything anybody could possibly want to take on a bike trip. There are columns for “Not this time”, “Need to Buy”, “Staged”, and “Packed”. I go down the list, one item at a time. Excel tracks for me the status of each item as it moves it’s way from the closet (or the store shelves) to the trunk of my car.  I’ve done my super-duper-training-ride 3 times in the last 2 weeks. I’m not in as good a shape as I was last year, but I won’t be riding as hard as I did last year. Driving up opens a large number of options. Riding the  bike from my driveway, the one-way commute is a good week. Driving drops that time to 5 hours. With a trunk, an empty back seat, an empty passenger seat, and the bike on a rack behind the car, I can carry an incredible amount of stuff. I’m bringing a full set of all-weather hiking gear, as well as biking stuff. The Finger Lakes area has dozens of fantastic water falls. There are a half-dozen state parks in the area with amazing hiking trails between 1 and 8 miles long.

I rented a cabin which comes with a bunk, a refrigerator, and an electric light bulb (complete with a switch). Unfortunately, we got rid of all the camping stuff when we moved, so there’s no Coleman camp stove or camp pots. That’s OK. The meals I made when I took the kids camping are far too much food for one old camper. I bought an electric grill and a cheap camp pot. I’m also bringing a one-cup coffee maker. I can put the pot on the grill to heat some stew, or I can grill some hamburgers, or fry an egg, or grill some carrots and onions. There’s also a good chance there will be firewood available, since it’s early in the season. So maybe I’ll be doing some hotdogs over the fire. I’m just 15 miles from Ithica, which has supermarkets and a terrific bagel shop. Staying at the cabin without a car would be a bummer. There’s no stores and just one restaurant nearby. It takes 3 hours to bike round trip to the nearest grocery store. But with a car, it will be a breeze.

In one week, I have plans to do 5 days of bike riding, and 4 days of hiking, and visit the Corning Glass factory while I’m at it. And of course it’s pretty easy to sit in the cabin and read if the weather is just absolutely nasty and I’ve run out of stores and museums to visit.

The Finger Lakes trip is pretty exciting, but there are a few other things going on. We had Circle last Sunday. There was a neighborhood party yesterday. We’re going to Spotlighters Theater to see a play this evening. I mentioned earlier that I got approval to repair my deck. the contract is signed, work is scheduled to start at the end of the month. Last week, with the weather getting better, several neighbors went out their back door and discovered their decks are in as bad a shape as mine, or even worse. It’s amazing how many people have very nice porches under their deck but don’t go out their back door. I think they went outside to look because the word got out that I’m doing something to my deck. They were shocked at how bad their decks are. They want the condo association to “do something”. They think a deck should last 50 years without any maintenance. They want all the owners to take pictures so they can collect them as evidence. What if everybody started repairing their decks in different ways? They are having a meeting Thursday evening. I’ll be in NY. And I wasn’t invited in any event. I asked my neighbor to let me know how it goes. I think the whole thing is highly amusing.

We’ve been thinking about being away from home for 2 weeks when we go to London in June. And we’ve been thinking of taking longer trips of some as-yet undefined nature in the coming years. We live in a nice neighborhood, but there have been several thefts. We don’t want to install an alarm, but we would like a little more peace of mind that our house is undisturbed. The neighbors are nice, but they have their own lives and take their own trips — sometimes without checking with us first. (Can you believe it?) Somebody mentioned that Samsung makes a good security camera, so I looked it up. I liked what I saw and bought one. It arrived, but I didn’t have several hours to install it, so I put it off. A couple of days later, I had an hour before dinner and decided to start doing whatever has to be done. 45 minutes later, the camera was fully installed and working. I was amazed how easy it was. I can see the camera picture on my computer or on my phone, from anywhere in the world. The camera has a wide-angle lens so it sees the entire main living area with just one camera. The picture has amazing detail. It has an infrared LED which lets the camera pick up a pretty good picture at night. I have it set up to detect motion. If it detects motion, it sends an Email to whoever I wish, complete with a picture of the house so we can see who is in it. It also posts the picture on Picassa. Samsung says they will soon have the ability to post a short video on Google Documents. This is certainly no alarm. It can’t call “911”. (Neither can I, if I am out of town — I have to call the non-emergency police number.) It is a pain to activate or disable the motion detection. None of this works if the power is off, or the internet service is down. But it does a lot, all with no monthly fees.

That was a lot of news for one fortnight. You might have noticed the list of amenities for my cabin in the Finger Lakes included some items that some people would take for granted. What I noticed is that “WiFi” is not on the list of amenities. I’ll do several posts from the Finger Lakes, but the area is quite rural. Several sections of road go 50 miles without a single Starbucks. So posting is likely to be quite irregular. But it will all get up, sooner or later. I’m not on a formal bike tour, so I’m not eligible to post on “Crazy Guy on a Bike”. Instead, I’ll be posting on this blog.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.