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.