Glad that wasn’t you.
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The annual Beach Winter Stations are up! Every year various architecture firms and groups of architectural students are invited to submit proposals to turn the life guard stations on the local beach into warming stations and/or interactive sculptures. Here are some of the highlights from this year’s group:
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Very nice.
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This is the same place I went last fall, but quite a bit greener now. No hiking this time, I wanted to be back in time for a meal. I was out for two hours total. It only took 38 minutes to get there, doing my best to haul ass on 2-inch knobbies, but then I goofed around and took a bunch of pictures.
Quiet, bird song, tree sighs, lovely. Mid July, this literally becomes a tunnel of fireflies. The Firefly Brigade.
It was just entering the golden hour as I left the house, and full dark when I got home.
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A couple months ago I had the chance to do some volunteer trail cutting and building, which was pretty cool because that’s long been a bucket list item and there I was, well in advance (one hopes) of any buckets, checking that one off. The event leader introduced us to the Pulaski and the McLeod and the 5-degree slope off to the side for drainage, then turned us loose on a section denoted with marker flags. I labored for four hours to produce (“a biological, Seaman Beaumont” … no) about 60 feet of multi-use trail. And crippled myself for two days. (Worth it.)
So I went back recently to check out my work and get up into the trail system the new section feeds into. It’s very satisfying to use something you made. (I’d thought I’d hike up in there after the trail work day, but ha ha, no, that wasn’t happening.)
I’ve been hitting it pretty hard lately, between the biking and the hiking. In fact, this may be the weight loss summer I’ve been dreaming of since I got the bike two years ago. My rides have been edging up to 20 miles/3 hours (long but not so fast … I fidget and like to stop a lot) and when I do two decent rides and two decent hikes in the same week it spins up my metabolism like I connected a power drill to a flywheel and turned it on high.
Especially since I added a couple days of fasting and a couple weeks of calorie restriction to kick this all off. Reset my appetite, reset stored glycogen, reduce any fatty liver going on, generally get to feeling leaner and cleaner. Not quite keto because I can only do that for so long before I start to lose my shit mentally (must … have … carbs … like a person compelled, like a crazy person) but mostly protein and fat, fewer carbs, more fruit and veggies, and less of everything. I seem to have disconnected from whatever emotional need kept steering me back toward food. Not that I’m huge or anything, I’m 6-2 and 212, down from 245 a few years ago, back up from 195. Still, I could cut 30 pounds and not lose anything vital, and for now it’s working.
But on the day of my last hike I was still weaning off the fasting and not feeling super peppy. A couple hours in I was just like, you know, a nap would be about perfect. Nobody around, flat section of trail, quiet setting, why not? So I just did it right there. Let my default-mode network work its magic, nodded off for a while, then woke 45 minutes later to the scene above. It had been there to notice, I just hadn’t been there to see it.
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how’s the bike holding up?
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LOL much better than it should be considering it was a $50 bike and I overpaid by $40. Still, I love it, and I’ve gotten a lot of great rides from it.
I had to replace the rear brake mech at the wheel to address uneven wear some people noted (maybe you) on the rear brake track. This year the right grip shifter gave out, but a neighbor had left a TAKE ME bike by the street, and the shifter there happened to be an exact replacement. I put pedal extenders on it for a wider stance (Q factor) which is much better. The tires lasted a year and now I’m on to a set of WTB Prowlers, low profile in the center with higher tread toward the sides ($15 for the pair as take-off tires at the LBS). When I got into the rear hub there was some pitting on the drive-side cone, but the guru at our LBS tossed a replacement over the counter for a buck-fifty. Hard to beat that. Several of the spoke nipples were deformed and had to be replaced, so I went ahead and put spoke prep on all the nipples as part of truing. Took everything apart, cleaned everything, lubed everything, threadlocker, the works.
At this point, I’ve done about everything routine to it (not frame shaping and not rear-wheel dishing, I don’t have the tool) and feel like I know every piece of it. Honestly, the first year I did more maintenance than riding, but that seems like good preparation for being on a bike and having to deal with it when things break. (Wax on, wax off.)
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you did great in terms of learning but about how I expected in terms of everything breaking lol. But that’s actually a favorable trade-off; when you actually spend money on parts or a new bike, you’re going to understand what you’re buying now. I’m impressed. Wheel truing and building is a patrician pursuit.
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Thanks, although I can’t take credit for a wheel build; I worked on one spoke at a time, servicing it, putting it back in and retensioning it before moving on to the next spoke, specifically to avoid having to rebuild the whole wheel from scratch. I am pretty happy about wheel truing though. That too was a bucket list item. When I was growing up that always seemed like a mysterious dark art and something to aspire to some day, but that was pre-Internet. Turns out with YouTube many things are possible.
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I’m in Africa! Just finished a 12 day tour through Zimbabwe and Botswana. Now in South Africa. Four more days here then Perth, Australia for another four days then home to my sweet, sweet bed.
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That’s fantastic, what a great trip. More pics please if you got em.
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Thanks! Will do, after we get to Perth later today 
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So here’s some more Africa pics. Random selection from Botswana, Zimbabwe and South Africa. We’re in Perth now and while I’m enjoying being back in my home country, am very much looking forward to being properly home in Melbourne in three days.
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And a couple more. One of the gorgeous sunsets, plus ‘bonus’ shot of the scratch/souvenir I got on my lower back/love handle/muffin top from a lion cub, possibly the one pictured above. They were about six months old, rambunctious, muscly and scratchy!
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Oh, I love the discussion going on in picture 2! 
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I feel we could all do with some happy-ish cuteness right now. So here’s some quokkas from Rottnest Island, off the Perth coast.
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Every time I go by one side of the house I notice this tree in the neighbor’s yard. That’s a black walnut tree, and Wikipedia says that leaf form is pinnate, or feather-like. The way the leaves overlap makes it look like something vibrating, the way an illustrator would draw shaky borders around something quivering. Or like something in contact with the surface of a lake, making ripples. Catches my eye every time.
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