Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Today we went to see Sandra Tsing Loh’s new show, “Mother on Fire“.

Sandra Tsing Loh and I have similar backgrounds. We’re both half Chinese and half German. We both got degrees in Physics from major universities. We both spent some time working in the aerospace gulag of Hughes Aircraft. But then she went off into performing arts and writing, while I became a computer nerd.

Her latest show is about parenthood, and particularly about the travails of trying to get her daughter into a good school in Los Angeles. Having just been through that particular crucible last year, we were primed for a good time. And she did not disappoint. The show was a hoot, with stories about the Los Angeles Unified School District, where the kids eat candy and are stalked by an obese mountain lion in the hallways, to a bidding war over a house in La Cañada and talk of moving to Utah. It was hugely entertaining and tremendously funny.

If you’re in Los Angeles, go see this show.

Today’s ride was down to Whittier Narrows and back. This was a good choice for today, since a lot of our regular routes go into areas that have a lot of smoke from the brush fires in the mountains this week.

We started off heading east through Arcadia and Monrovia. We took the upland route through Monrovia to get in a little hill. That was where Doug broke his chain. I’ve been cycling seriously since 1973, and this is the first time I’ve ever seen a chain break. I’ve heard of it before, but this is the first time I’ve seen it happen. It’s not a flat tire, but it was unusual enough that I took a picture to put in the Flat Tire Gallery

After the chain repair, we continued on, passing through Duarte and getting on the San Gabriel River bike path. We took the path all the way over Santa Fe Dam and down the river. There were two places where the path was being rebuilt. The pavement was gone, and we had just dirt and loose sand to ride on. At the second spot, there were some trenches for the new construction, so we had no choice but to hoist the bikes up and carry them through.

When we got down to Whittier Narrows Dam, we took the cross path to get to Durfee Ave. That was where Gene got a flat. So we stopped at the corner of Rosemead and Durfee and he fixed his tire. For some reason, it smelled like a sewage treatment plant there. I’ve still got a stuffy nose from being sick this week, but it was still pretty rank. After putting in a spare tube, Gene started pumping up the tire. Then the valve stem snapped off. In 30+ years of cycling, I’ve seen this happen several times. So he had to put in his second spare tube. Since this was caused by something other than the initial puncture, I figured it constituted a ‘second flat’, so I took another picture.

After the tire repair, we took the Rio Hondo bike path back up to Lower Azusa Road. We got off the bike path there and went west a bit to El Monte Ave. This is the street with the biggest bike lane ever. We rode this all the way up to Duarte Road. Then we took a left and a right, ending up on Huntington Drive.

Huntington Drive took us back through San Marino. At Old Mill Road we took a right, taking that and El Molino Ave back up into Pasadena. Then we stopped for a snack at the Corner Bakery on Lake Ave.

The last part of the ride was across the Caltech campus and then home by way of San Pasqual and Altadena Drive.

49 miles.


cycling