Middle of May
Here's an update:
It's Thursday night of finals week and tomorrow at noon is my last exam. Last Monday saw a six hour marathon of tests for Linear Circuits, Physics and Strengths of Materials. Tomorrow's Differential Equations exam intimidates me, but at least it won't take too long.
Then I've got a few hours of work left for Paul, followed by a few hours of work for Chico Chai on Saturday morning.
Saturday night I'll be flying out to JFK where I'll meet up with Xue on Sunday morning. We'll take the Metro North train up to New Haven, but on Wednesday we'll be headed right back down to New York to catch a flight to Japan. A few hours after landing we'll fly out of Tokyo and enter China.
We'll be there for two weeks. This is the most exciting traveling I've ever done and I have very little idea of what to expect. I am going to try to keep as open a mind as I can. I will try as many of the foods as I can and will have a camera in hand as often as I can.
Then, upon returning stateside, I'll be working at The Devil's Gear in Connecticut until late August. I'm shipping my mountain bike out to spend some time on those East coast trails. Several other employees are just getting into trail riding and I'm looking forward to "shredding the gnar" alongside some other rookies.
I emailed Rock Lobster today to get the ball rolling on a custom steel frame, and I hope I didn't come on too strong. Maybe it will be done by the time I come back to California, or maybe a few months after. All I know is that I'm going to have get in shape if I want to do it justice next 'cross season.
Also, if one of the endless trains or planes I'm on explodes and Xue & I die a terrible but instantaneous death, I leave this blog to my brother, Lisa can have my Flickr photostream, and all my bikes go to Quinn. Dylan can have my guitars.
Working Day
Campus was closed today, on account of it being Cesar Chavez Day, so instead of spending my ten to four in class I just worked all day.
It’s been a while since I’ve put in more than three or four hours at work, and today’s nine hours didn’t feel as long as I thought they might. I got so much done, it was really satisfying, and I know I’m lucky to be working where I am.
Emails and adverts and bug fixes and copy writing and photography, ooh the photography
Scott, who’s an incredibly fast ride on the CX team and a very nice guy, brought his Rock Lobster over so I could take some photos of it. It was caked in mud and is fully decked out in our parts, so I had to give it some “lens love”, as they say.
I was pretty happy with the full photo set, and will likely post some more of it to Flickr after it goes up on the gallery.
As is always the case, I am pining for a new bike. Maybe someday I’ll have a Lobster so nice.
S24O 1
Something I've read and heard murmurs about is overnight bike camping. So yesterday I left work an hour early to come home and pack.
It's very exciting to do something new, even if it's not a big thing. Heading out for a sub-24hr-overnight trip made me nervous and excited and hopeful.
As the sun went down over the valley and a nearly-full moon came up over the foothills, I was riding my bike up old 32 to a campsite Lisa mentioned. I was a little worried about finding it in the dark, but everything worked out okay. It turns out there are plenty of good spots up there.
I had my tent pitched and my legs in a sleeping bag by about 8:30 or so. Half a can of Torpedo made it easy to close my eyes and start drifting off. I woke up several times in the night though, mostly due to the lumpiness and slope of the ground my tent was on.
I think the main reason why the park is "day-use only" is that the ground is too full of rocks and bumps to find a comfortable place for a tent.
When I woke up in the morning I watched the orange moon setting over the coastal range. It was surprising how fast it disappeared over the mountains once it was down by the horizon. It's hard to have a proper sense of scale and speed for the moon.
I took some film and camera-phone photos of the park, ate a snack and packed up my things. A few minutes later I was rolling back down the hill towards town, breakfast, and a shower.
What's nice about a short venture like this is that you don't need to stress too much about what to bring along. If you forget something vital you won't be without it for long.
Next time I'm going to bring some warm pajama pants though, and maybe a book.
How to Share
Cue the tired refrain of all lackadaisical bloggers, "I am sorry I haven't written more (but not really that sorry)." I'm not completely absent from the internet though, of course not, in fact I've uploaded forty five photos to Flickr and sent at least sixty three bundles of a hundred forty characters or less to Twitter since the last time I posted anything here.
What I used to think held me back from writing here was something like friction. All the additional steps it would take to post on my own blog, as opposed to Twitter or Facebook, made it a slightly more difficult path for the ideas that I wanted to share, and like an electric current they would choose the path of least resistance. But after streamlining both the visual layout of this blog and the process of posting to it, I still don't find myself writing here often, or writing much at all beyond 140 characters. Maybe that's okay.
I was thinking about it earlier today, the little bits that I do write go for quite a trip thanks mainly to the bit-shuttling duct-tape that is ifttt.
Like many, I accept the dominance of Facebook but still entertain the notion of Google+ as an alternative. I follow people and groups on Twitter who I don't necessarily want to see in my Facebook feed. Sometimes I take a photo and want to share a link with anyone who follows me on Twitter, but I don't want it hosted by photobucket, I want it hosted on Flickr! I want to share different things with different groups in the very specific ways that I decide upon. ifttt gives me that, and it makes me smile like the biggest dork for doing so.
If you are curious how I do it, well, I made a flowchart. Here's how it happens:
- Photos I want to share are uploaded to Flickr from my phone or camera and laptop. Flickr is by far the best photo-whatever on the whatever, and I love them.
- If the photo is tagged "share", ifttt posts a link to it on Facebook, along with the title of the photo and its description (if it has one). Also, ifttt send an email to a funny email address that posts the same photo-link-title-description on Google+.
- If I have a photo and want to make a short quip about it, I upload it to Flickr as per usual but don't tag it. I then grab the canonical flic.kr shortened url and send it along with my super insightful text to Twitter. Unfortunately, Twitter takes the liberty of wrapping any links longer that 19 characters with t.co and makes everything a bit uglier. I wish they wouldn't do that.
- Anything I post to Twitter, whether or not it contains a link to a photo, is reposted to Facebook and Google+ by ifttt. In addition, tweets are (from now on) going to be reposted here by ifttt. I am not yet sure if this is a good idea, but the narcissistic archivist in me thinks that if I am going to be publishing things on the internet, they should have at least one home that I own. This is not a good idea.
- If I want to share something longer that I've written here, I give it the tag "share". ifttt goes to work scraping that tag's RSS feed and forwards the title, content, and url of my post on to Facebook and Google+
Is all of this necessary? Probably not. The things I end up saying to the internet are really of no great import to most people. This might even qualify as spammy behavior towards people I'm connected with on more than one service, as it mainly serves to provide redundancy between services. To them, I apologize. I'll probably outgrow it soon, or just stop writing all together, and maybe that's okay too.
Recorded Today
It's been a while since I've played much music, and even longer since I've played my own. But the other day I bought some fresh bronze strings and picked up my guitar again.
I guess the motivation started to return after spending some time working on jonodavis.info/music and my songbook.
I feel that for the past few years I've been stuck in a way. I'd write songs, maybe record a rough draft, and then drift away from them. What this resulted in was a pile of songs that, to me, never really sounded all that polished or even well fitted to each other.
So yesterday I made a list of songs I'd like to see finished, tied up, recorded, and safely tucked away somewhere. This list was then whittled down to the ten songs that I can stand to play. Down in the living room I played through them all, recording as I went. I think what I produced is a fairly accurate snapshot of where those songs are at.
What I'd like to do, since my opinion of these songs is at this point kind of stuck in the mud, is to get some outside criticism on the songwriting. If you're interested in helping out, feel free to download the recordings and let me know what you think.
Busy Four Days
On Friday my dad and Karen took Xue and I up to Vermont to see The Mountain Goats and Bright Eyes. For an outdoor concert it wasn’t that huge, there were maybe a few hundred people there, and the light rain may have been partially to blame for that. But we ate dinner on the grass in clear plastic ponchos and by the time the music started most of the clouds had drifted off.
It was my first time seeing The Mountain Goats, and the first big show I’d been to since seeing Modest Mouse with Xue last summer. I was impressed but not surprised by their vigor. John Darnielle was only a little creepier in person than I had imagined. I’m not a huge Bright Eyes fan, but their set was good rock and roll. I was a little disappointed that the Goats, as the opening band, didn’t get an encore, but that’s how it goes sometimes.
We stayed overnight in an olde bed & breakfast and did a little sightseeing along Lake Champlain in the morning before driving back down to Connecticut on Saturday.
Xue continued to pack up her room while I was at work on Sunday, and was checking out her new studio apartment while I went out for a ride with coworkers after closing. I got three flats, crashed into a tree, and worked myself to an uncomfortable degree of exhaustion. It’s always surprising to me how much faster and harder you can ride in the company of other than by yourself. It was a fun ride.
When I got home I packed up my suitcase and shoulder bag and started to disassemble the bed. By the end of the night all our our belongings were in boxes in the living room, and we slept on the mattress on the floor.
Monday morning I picked up a U-Haul van and parked it in front of the house. With some help we had it loaded up quickly, drove it over to the new place, and unloaded the contents into the basement studio. We were moved.
The new place is great, and feels really spacious for a studio. A partial dividing wall makes it more akin to a one bedroom, Xue says. I dig the exposed rock wall and ample lighting. We are both really into the lack of housemates.
In comparison to the last four days, today has been super mellow. I slept late. I made some scrambled eggs on toast with hot sauce. I played as much vvvvvv as I could stand. I might go to work to pick up a paycheck, or I might go take a nap.
Summer in CT
Since the end of May I've been living in New Haven with Xue. I'll be out here until mid-August when I fly back to ol' chico for the Fall Semester.
While I'm out here I've got a sweet bike to ride, a good job turning wrenches at a respected bike shop, plenty of books to read, and a new city to explore. This is of course in addition to having Xue to come home to.
I'm only growing fonder of my Shogun now that there's no snow on the ground and I get to ride every day. In my dreams I rebuild the wheels with some polished Paul hubs and replace the brakes with silver anodized Touring Cantis, but for now I'm satisfied to upgrade the tires and install fenders.
The shop I'm wrenching at is The Devil's Gear Bike Shop. Not to discredit any of the fine shops I've worked in before, but the team at Devil's Gear is inspiring.
Thanks to my dad, I've been tearing through old sci-fi paperbacks about time travel. There's nothing quite like the smell of yellowed pulp pages.
School is Crunching
Hello all, hello.
School's been getting heavy lately. It is that season, after all, when profs glance at the perilous gap between what's been taught and what needs to be known; when the densest of topics are rapidly shoveled atop one another, piled high and steaming.
In Physics we're tackling some universal problems like simple harmonic motion and gravitation, but fluids had to be cut from the plan for lack of time. We just covered angular momentum and it kind of blew my mind.
The last midterm exam for Physics is in a week, and then the final is the week after. They're technically not supposed to give us exams (or still be covering new material) during Dead Week, but it happens.
My manufacturing technology class (Mass Reduction by Material Removal) is moving along briskly. We're learning the final operations to finish making our cute little bench vises. Driving around a Bridgeport CNC mill from the late 1970's is getting to be routine, but the turret lathe still makes me nervous. I'm going to anodize my vise pink or blue when it's done and mount it to that workbench I used to be so excited about. Maybe that bench will get done in the Fall...
Calculus has been focused on series and divergence/convergence tests for a while, and we're finishing the semester on the topic of Power Series, the Taylor Series and other strange beasts. My interests have been piqued, but it's hard stuff. I've been told that Calc II is the most challenging math course I'll have to take, so it's a little thrilling to still be following along in class. But I get home and, shit, where'd all that understanding and enthusiasm up and run to?
On Friday I'll take my fourth midterm for Calc. My course grade is going to be based on four exams and the final, which is in two weeks. I wish I could say I'm confident I'm going to pass, but the last two midterms didn't bode well. If I don't pass the class I can take it again, as many do, but it will till throw a nasty wrench into my schedule. If when I pass it will keep me on track to graduate in 2014. I'm going to be a Level 5 Black Belt Super Senior some day.
And someday, so very soon, this semester will fall to the ground like every one of its forebears, and I will be a free-er, sociable, happy, Eastward-bound, more-often-writing, knowledge stuffed shell of a man. The good kind of shell, think pasta or seafood.
Close Enough!
It may not be the steel Surly of my dreams, but I am now the proud owner of a new-to-me mess of a mountain bike.
It was hanging out at Pullins, flipping through dealer catalogs, that Mike heard me bemoaning my continued lack of mountain bikey goodness. “I’ve got a frame you can have,” he said, “it’s too big for me and has just been sitting unused in my garage.” A miracle! Maybe not a miracle, maybe just the incredible generosity of friends.
A well beaten Motobecane Outcast 29 then became mine, in all its aluminum fully-rigid single speed glory. Paul chipped in too, big time, supplying me with a wealth of new and used components, and promising to take me out on some of the easier trails in the coming weeks.
Today I built. Thursday my knobby knobby knobby tires should arrive, and this weekend I will taste dirt.
Karate Monkey Dreams
photo from cyclotourist's flickr
Inside my chest, somewhere near my heart, there's been a growing want for a mountain bike. Last Summer Tristan (with his proper dirt death-dealing machine) took me (and my 'cross bike running 700x39 knobbies) through the woods along some Massachusetts single track. My bike, my beloved Soma Double Cross, was not bike enough, and the want began.
Talking with Tristan, we both agreed that a fully rigid 29'er would be very awesome. A Surly Karate Monkey frame set built up with a full Paul group that I, well, just happen to have laying around, would be very awesome indeed.
The Karate Monkey in particular seems to hit a sweet spot of bike-dork re-configuration for me that just gets me really excited. Single speed, sure. Rear derailleur, if you like. 700c slicks or 29" knobs, disk or rim brakes, it can be (an has been) built in so many different ways, and invites constant finagling.
But what of the fact that I already own too many bikes? Room would need to be made. So I stripped my polo bike and sold the frame. I stripped that old steel Atala that was always two sizes too small and put it up for sale too. And I could easily swap out my Double Cross for the Karate Monkey frame. A little bit (no, it was a lot) of searching on Flickr for "karate monkey" brought up several examples built up just like my current Double Cross, including fenders, (fat-ish) slick tires and drop bars. But at the same time, the Karate Monkey Frame offers the clearance for much, much larger tires, along with the standover height and headtube angle of a trail bike. Mmmm Chico trails...
I didn't make much this last year, nearly half what what I did in the previous. But my tax return came in recently and it might be enough, just maybe enough, to get me into the dirt.
There She Goes
It was really great having Xue in town. There was working, relaxing, riding bikes when it was sunny, cooking food, baking a pancake cake, taking the same photos over again, scary video games, the littlest bit of playing music, rolling around with Lola, going to market, hiking upper park, going to a pastry / margarita potluck, haircuts for e'erybody, hidden love notes, breakfasts in bed, no homework, not enough photos, too much bacon grease, extra blankets, and kissing.
But on Monday night Xue had to go home. I borrowed Suzy's car and drove us to the Sacramento airport. I've never been that great at driving stick, so I did a sweet burnout immediately followed by a sweet stallout as we inched along the In-N-Out's drive through lane. Animal style everything.
There wasn't any crying at the airport this time. Maybe it's getting easier, maybe we're turning into professionals, maybe I know I'll be seeing her soon and staying for the summer. Maybe it hasn't hit me yet.
Driving home up 99 was like space travel. There was nothing out there but the little lights on the horizon and the super-moon hanging low.
Woody’s List
Xue sent this my way, Woody Guthrie's New Year's Rulin's. It's a to-do list of sorts, including but not limited to:
- Work more and better
- Eat good - fruit - vegetables - milk
- Write a song a day
- Read lots good books
- Listen to radio a lot
- Don’t get lonesome
- Keep hoping machine running
- Bank all extra money
- Dance better
- Make up your mind
I've got my own list going, not for New Year's but just the next two days. Something like:
- kill all the ants
- go to the market
- ergs
- chai
- greens
- nuts
- fruts
- flwrs
- phys midterm - FRIDAY!
- phys problem set - ALSO FRIDAY!
- laundry
- shave, haircut?
- finish rebuilding Royce Union
- sleep some
- drive to Sacramento and find Xue
Xue’s Coming To Town
Tonight I made two quiches and my first lemon meringue. Tomorrow morning I have a quiz in calculus on work, spring tension, and the anti-derivatives of logarithms and exponentials. After school tomorrow I have work. After work tomorrow I have more work to do. On Saturday I'll go to the market in the morning, and then work on a bike in the afternoon. Specifically, Lisa and I are fixing up an old Royce Union for use as a loaner bike when Xue comes to town.
Xue is coming to town a week after that.
Next Saturday I am going to spend all day doing two things: bouncing up and down in anticipation and cleaning house. Saturday night I am going to borrow Trenton's silver-blue Volvo station wagon and drive to the Sacramento airport, where I will circle until Xue calls to tell me she has deplaned. Then there will be so much kissing and hugging.
She'll be staying for a week and some days. Our Spring breaks happened to line up perfectly, so my regularly scheduled bouts of education won't be getting in the way. It also looks like both my house mates will be gone, so we will have the place to ourselves. I look forward to a lot of eating, lazing, some bicycling, a bit of kissing maybe, and the feeling that we've been living together all this time.
Shooting Film
Sure, a modern digital point and shoot can shoot circles around a film SLR. Camera tech's come a long, long way, but there is something so appealing about shooting with an older camera like the Canon A-1.
Plastic can be wonderfully durable, inexpensive, and light weight, but I really admire the metal body of the A-1. The black wears off on the sharp edges, showing a copper-colored surface underneath. Beausage, if you can palate the portmanteau.
Since high school I've had my grandfather's Canon. When I first got it I remember the shutter would emit a terrible squeal as the inner mechanisms worked through their practiced routine. I took it to the local filmsmith who promised a remedy with a few carefully placed drops of special lubricant. I was at the time becoming most comfortable with the machinations of bicycles, but the interior of a camera threatened me with its delicate precision, so I gladly let the shopkeeper tune it up. When it was returned a few days later the squealing shutter was much quieter, but it has continued to whistle a short note when triggered.
My mom recently decided to give me her A-1 as well, along with a trove of lenses and other accessories. The fine scratches on her camera's body indicate that my grandfather may have been a little more careful with his camera, but the shutter sound tells a different story.
Whereas the brief chrip of my grandfather's camera allows you to imagine the ground mirror lifting up to reveal the film before gently returning down again to rest, my mother's A-1 snaps like a rifle. Trained by the older, lazier camera, I almost expected recoil from such a snap. The body may have suffered a few more blemishes, but the inner workings were serviced often and well.
Making the Ring
I remember seeing instructions online for making rings from coins a few years ago, but it wasn’t until last year that I decided to try my hand at it.
I wanted to make Xue’s engagement ring instead of buying one for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I think engagement rings are primarily symbolic, and I would much rather have it represent my dedication than a dollar amount. Secondly, I think we share a taste for simple jewelry, if anything, and I was able to make the band as clean as possible (though they “traditionally have a stone”).
The ring was made at home in my spare time over the course of a few months. Most of that time was spent gently tapping it into shape against a small jewelry anvil using my favorite little ball-peen hammer. I tried to use hand tools whenever possible, but ended up using an electric rotary tool for some of the surface finishing and polishing.
The box was made at work on a manual mill to unnecessarily exacting specifications. Paul gave me the wood, a small block of black walnut, and showed me how to treat it with a heavy oil to bring out the grain.
The ring definitely took the most time and effort, but I have to admit that I am a bit more proud of the box. I remember hiding it in a pair of socks when I went out East over winter, and later feeling it in the breast pocket of my coat, worried that Xue might hug me and feel it.
More photos from the making of the ring can be found here.