Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Today’s ride was the “Glendale Vistas” route. A trip all around Glendale, with a nice hill at the beginning and the end.

We started out from Victory Park and rode across Pasadena and into La Cañada. Then we turned left and rode up Chevy Chase, which is a nice little hill. Then at the top we rode down the other side into Glendale.

At the bottom of the hill, we continued on through Glendale all the way down almost to the L.A. River. Then we turned north and went back up to Glenoaks Blvd. We turned left and took Glenoaks out to our snack stop at Paradise Bakery.

They have the best chocolate eclairs at Paradise, and I made sure to have one today.

After the stop, we headed up to Kenneth and Mountain for the trip back across Glendale. Then we went left on Verdugo for the climb up to Hospital Hill. At the top, we took a right on Descanso and headed back down through La Cañada and back into Pasadena.

By the time we got back to the park, it had turned into a very nice spring day. Newton had ridden from his house in Covina, so I followed him part way back just to enjoy the nice sunshine. We rode out through Arcadia and Monrovia. I had heard that Velo Monrovia had changed its name to Stan’s Bicycles, so I had to stop for a photo-op. I always take pictures of signs that have my name on them. And I got to meet Stan, too.

Then I went back through Sierra Madre to my house. It was a very nice ride.

51 miles.
cycling

It’s April, and that means it’s time for our trip down to Seal Beach for dinner at Walt’s Wharf. That was the site of our first date. It was April 4, 1986. So this year marks twenty years together, which still sounds like a long time to us. We certainly don’t feel old enough to say, “We’ve been together twenty years”.

So we went down to Seal Beach. When we got to Walt’s, there was a wait. Apparently they don’t take reservations for dinner, so we got the little pager-thingy and went out walking on Main St. We walked down to the pier, but it was closed, apparently because they have some heavy equipment parked on it to repair a wall underneath. Then we browsed around in various stores until they had a table ready for us.

We were seated upstairs, just two tables over from where we sat the first time. We had a nice dinner, finished off with some killer desserts and a souvenier picture. So overall, it was a fun time, and a good way to mark twenty years together.

Today Lucinda and I went to a birthday party for a girl she knows from school. They had a big back yard and a very big jumper-slide for the kids to play in. And play they did. Pretty much the whole time except for cake and piñata. The while all of this was going on, the adults were chatting about real estate and taking tours of the newly-remodeled house. And by the end of the party, all the adults were trying out the jumper, too. It was a tall one. From the top we could see over the roof of the house, and it was a pretty long drop down the slide. I carried my camera up to the top and tried to get an ‘action shot’ on the way down the slide. And Lucinda learned to do her Spider-Girl thing and climb up the slide. It was fun.

On Friday we took out our old Sun Enterprise 5000 server. This was the big refrigerator-sized computer that was the main Southern California earthquake system for many years. It was a bit of a dinosaur, as it required a special 220V circuit in the computer room to feed it. We got this system back in 1997, and this particular computer has been nothing but trouble. If they had a ‘lemon law’ for computers it would have been sent back. But we finally got it to work, and it served us reasonably well for all these years.

Still, this machine had more than its share of stupid moments. One time it crashed mysteriously. When I went in to see what had happened, one of the small heat sinks on one of the CPU boards had fallen off and fallen onto the back of the CPU board below it. That shorted out things on the second board and caused the machine to freak out and die. Another time I had a set of new memory SIMMs to put in it, and it kept failing self-test. So I ended up having to reseat the chips about a dozen times, each time having to sit through the 20-minute self-test. I spent the whole afternoon shivering in the computer room, watching Das Blinkenlights. Fun times…

So Tammer and I got the machine unbolted from the floor, and we removed the CPU and IO boards to keep as spares for the E4000 we still have. Then we wheeled the carcass out of the computer room and down to the junk-collection room in the basement. It was a lot like the last scene from “Raiders of the Lost Ark”. We dropped the computer carcass off in a big room filled with other big computer carcasses. And thus ended an era.

Have I mentioned recently how much I like my job?

It rained today. This is the tail end of the rainy season here in SoCal, and this winter hasn’t been particularly wet. Today was the first day in over a year that it’s been raining hard enough that I didn’t want to ride my bike to work. I checked my calendar, and the last time I drove to work was January 10, 2005. Every time I drive my car to work, I root for it to rain hard. If the sun comes out I feel like an idiot. But today it rained. Not quite to Biblical levels, but still hard enough that I was glad to not have to ride in it.

Caltech recently started charging for parking, and just last week I found out that as a bike commuter I could get three free parking passes a month. So the timing was good. Still, it was kind of sad to break such a long streak.

And to top it off, I had to buy gas on the way home. On average, I only buy gas about four times a year, and so I’m always a bit shocked at the price. But now my car is back in the garage, and I’m hoping to leaving it there for at least a month.

Route map and photo locations

Today’s ride went all over the world, and we were just riding around L.A.

The first part of the ride was down Huntington Drive and then across Ave 60 to Figueroa. Then we took Figueroa down to the river and into Riverside Dr. Then we went north a couple of miles to Alessandro St and took a left. That brought us to the first sightseeing stop of the day. The Fargo Street Hill Climb.

Fargo Street is reputed to be the steepest street in Los Angeles. In fact, it’s the steepest street I’ve ever seen anywhere. It’s funny, but in real life it looks about twice as steep as it does in the picture. I don’t know why that is. I tried to ride it last year but was defeated. This time I didn’t try. I’d pulled a muscle last week fighting with a stuck gas pipe fitting, and I didn’t think it wise to risk aggravating that further by trying to ride up a 33% grade.

Still, it was an entertaining thing to watch. And while we were there, I ran into an old friend who I know from somewhere else entirely. Lisa is someone I know from tattoo conventions, but it turns out that she has bike-riding friends, and she now lives just a few blocks from Fargo St. So I got to visit with her for a bit, which was fun, even if it was one of those ‘when worlds collide’ kind of things.

Leaving Fargo St, we headed south on Glendale Blvd, and then go on Sunset to head into downtown. At Broadway we passed the dragons that mark the gateway to Chinatown. Then we took a left on Alameda and passed Union Station. At Ord St we took another left and I once again heard that unmistakable “PANG!” sound that meant I’d broken another spoke. My bike went gimpy again, but I was able to make it the last couple blocks into Chinatown. After my experience last week, I had put a spoke wrench in my bag, so I was able to get the wheel straight enough to limp the rest of the ride.

In Chinatown we stopped at a bakery, right by the statue of Sun Yat-sen. Gene was looking around and he pointed out the sign for “Ooga Booga” around the corner. That was definitely worth a photo.

Leaving Chinatown, we went up Main to Daly and then turned south. The street turned into Marengo when we passed Mission and the L.A. County Coroner’s Office. I always say that Los Angeles is a unique place. How many cities have a gift shop at the Coroner?

Heading into East L.A., we came to the Evergreen Cemetery, and then the excavation next to it where they discovered the bones of 108 Chinese who had been buried in a potter’s field dating from the 1800s.

Continuing on, we went deeper into East Los Angeles. Newton is from El Salvador, and he remarked that the houses looked just like the ones he remembered from back home.

Coming out on Whittier Blvd, we came to the Home of Peace cemetery. We went in the gate and followed the streets back to Curly Howard’s grave.

The last part of the ride was north a bit to get to 3rd St, which we took east until it turned into Pomona Ave and then Potrero Grande. We took a left on Del Mar, which brought us all the way back up to San Marino. Then we got on Sierra Madre Blvd and then Altadena Dr for the last bit home.

It was a fun ride.

43 miles.
cycling

Route map and photo locations

Today’s ride was out to San Dimas to see the third stage of the San Dimas Stage Race. This is a three-day affair, and today’s race was a short-course criterium around downtown San Dimas.

We started out from Victory Park and rode out through Arcadia and Irwindale to get to San Dimas. We had hoped to get there in time to see the Masters 45+ race, since they are my age, and some of them are even people I raced against back in my racing days. But when we got there they were running late, so we ended up seeing the finish of the Category 5 race and the beginning of Category 4.

As I usually do when we go to see a race, I’d brought along an extra $20 bill to donate as a prime for one of the races. So I went up to the stand and gave it to them for the Category 4 riders. They did a good sprint for it, but I missed out on getting a picture, since the batteries in my camera decided to go dead right at that moment. But it was a good sprint, and I hope the winning rider got some satisfaction from it.

After that, we rode up to Gladstone and took that back west to go home. While we were riding through Glendora, suddenly I heard that unmistakable “PANG!” sound that meant that I’d broken a spoke. My bike immediately went gimpy, with the back wheel wobbling and rubbing on the frame. Vikki had the presence of mind to grab my camera and take a picture for the Flat Tire Gallery. It’s not technically a flat, but it’s a mechanical failure, so that’s close enough. Fortunately, Makoto had a spoke wrench, and I was able to call upon my old bike-mechanic experience and managed to get the wheel straight enough to limp home. It wasn’t rubbing on the frame, but it still was hitting the brake pads. That meant that I had some extra drag, and that made it impossible to do my usual track stands at the red lights. But my Gimpy Bike and I made it home just the same.

43 miles.
cycling

So Lucinda had some money from her birthday. At first she wanted to buy two more American Girl dolls, but we pointed out that she hardly plays with the ones she already has. We told her she should think about different things to buy with the money and compare them carefully. We came up with a list of about six or seven things that she wanted. The list included things like the Barbie Power Wheels Jeep, a loft bed, a Playstation, and a few other things. In the end, she decided that she wanted her own phone.

Now, we’re not philosophically opposed to this. But at seven, who are you gonna call? But we’d told her that it was all right, so yesterday after school Mommy and Lucinda went and got it. It’s a Cingular Go Phone on a pay-as-you-go plan. So now she’s all set up. She picked out a ring tone and now she’s just trying to figure out who to call. It’s kind of cute in a weird sort of way.

Yesterday, I read that DEVO, one of my most favoritest bands ever, has a new kids’ CD. It’s ten of their classic songs and two new ones played by the original band and voiced by five fresh-faced tween-agers. And it’s put out by Disney. I thought, “this is just wrong on so many levels“, followed immediately by, “I must have it”.

Now I’m sure that this is an idea that Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald V. Casale had had bubbling around in their heads for some time. I remember hearing about them doing some shows back in 1985 with a band called “Visiting Kids”, featuring their own pre-teen kids. And I’m sure that the fact that Disney wanted to do this was just the icing on the proverbial cake. Is this the ultimate sellout, or gaming the system from inside? Stylus magazine wonders

“Are all these questions beside the point because Casale and Mothersbaugh have produced something both funny and unsettling, just like the original Devo?”

Regardless, the kids do a good job. Lucinda likes it, and she’s their target audience. So overall, it’s a Good Thing.

Addendum: Lucinda and I watched the DVD that came with the CD. They have ten videos for the songs. Dancing animated pandas and dinosaurs. Energy domes everywhere. And spuds. Lots of spuds. I was trying to explain to Lucinda just why there were so many potatoes in the cartoon sequences. But she enjoyed it. A lot of the songs have been Disney-fied, so they’ve stripped out pretty much all of the original angst. But that in itself is tremendously funny. Songs like “Beautiful World”, which is very dark and depressing have become bouncy and happy. It’s the happiness of an idiot. And that’s very DEVO. So we’re each enjoying this in our own way.

Also, they have a web site:

http://disney.go.com/disneyrecords/Song-Albums/devo20/

This is just something that I marvel at. The human ability to rationalize completely opposite points of view when necessary:

Stories of anti-abortion women who have had abortions

This is something that people do all the time. They will find a way to rationalize the most ridiculous things as long as that means they don’t have to re-examine their core beliefs.

I found this link on Susie Bright’s page today. I recommend going there and reading her complete rant on this subject.