Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Last Halloween, Lucinda saved a few seeds from our pumpkin. Over the winter, she planted them in a pot in the back yard. They started to grow, so we planted them in the back yard. The plants have gotten quite large, and they’ve been flowering a lot. Today, we noticed the first two little pumpkins forming on the vines. Lucinda is quite excited by this.

Found this today on Lifehacker:

It’s a great hack for Google Maps: the Google Pedometer. But it’s not just for walking. It works for bike rides, too. For instance, here’s last Saturday’s ride to the Encino Velodrome as plotted on the map: see the route

Note that the final calculated mileage of 60.9 agrees pretty well with the 61.<mumble> measured by my bike computer.

Now, if only this could be combined with Bike Metro’s route service to give elevation data, it would be perfect.

The August issue of “Outside” magazine has an article titled “The New American Dream Towns”, and Pasadena made the list. There is an article about this in the Star News today.

I’ve always been skeptical of these ‘places rated’ surveys, since they always seem to end up liking dreary little cities that I’d hate to live in. I always remember when Rand McNally’s Places Rated Almanac picked Pittsburgh as the most livable city back in 1984. I was living in San Diego at the time, and everyone there was incensed that anyone could think that Pittsburgh was a better place to live than San Diego. The irony of this was that while I was pretty sure I’d hate Pittsburgh, I hated San Diego, too.

My personal rating scheme has a complex checklist:

Is it Los Angeles or close by?

• Yes
• No

We’ve lived here in Pasadena for just over ten years now, and we like it a lot. It’s a very pleasant town, and we have lots of city culture here. If you want real gritty urban culture, it’s close at hand in Los Angeles. The mountains are pretty. But calling it “a Paris on the 210 Freeway” is perhaps a bit much.

I built the ladder yesterday, and I put it up today. The photo shows the top half of the ladder, along with some detail about how it is attached. The bottom of the ladder is sitting on a couple of concrete paving stones. It didn’t seem quite necessary for it to have massive concrete footings, and with the big carriage bolts holding it on, it’s quite solid.

I put the monkey bars up this morning. It was a bit of an adventure, since the assembled bars with their 4×4 rails were quite heavy. Then I mounted the end posts and added an “X” brace for stiffness. Lucinda took the inaugural trip across them, and then we posed for a picture.

Next up, I have to make a ladder up on the posts at the end of the monkey bars. Then, I’m going to make a real ladder up to the second level, and finish the railings around the top.

Since Lucinda had her first sleepover at her friends’ house a few weeks ago, they are over here tonight for their first sleepover at our house. We ordered a pizza for them, which turned out to be a bust. But I made a fudge pudding cake, which was a hit.

There was a fair amount of bickering about toys and sharing, which we had expected. They also argued about the order of their bedtime stories.

This is quite the adventure.

Since I can’t do the regular Sunday ride this weekend, Gene and I rode out to Encino to the velodrome today. We figured it would be a nice ride, and we could watch a bit of the racing there.

We started out heading west across Eagle Rock and Glendale. That was where I saw Tep Thai and Tip Top right next to each other. Coincidence, perhaps?

Continuing on through Burbank, we passed the Igloo Cafe with its Eskimo caricature on the front. Then we took Moorpark across the east end of the Valley, passing an apartment building with cube-shaped topiary trees in front.

When we got to the 405 freeway, there really wasn’t any good way to go, so we just took Ventura Blvd for a short stretch. This was the ‘gritty urban cycling’ portion of the ride.

When we got to the velodrome, there wasn’t much going on. We just sat and watched the riders warming up for a bit. Then they started the preliminary heats in the Keirin. This is apparently a new form of racing that they didn’t have back in the ’70s when I was a racer. It was a bit odd, but still fun to watch.

I was never much of a track racer. I did most of my track riding at Kissena Velodrome in New York, which was widely regarded as the worst velodrome in the United States. Imagine, if you will, 1/4 mile of typical New York City street rolled up into a banked oval. That was Kissena. It was rough, it had weeds growing through cracks in the pavement, and it had a big hump in the last turn where the track had settled after it was built. There was a sewer pipe running underground across the field, and the ground settled less over the pipe, so the track had a hump. But, being a road rider at heart, Kissena suited me just fine. The back stretch was oriented right into the setting sun for the Wednesday night races, so that was always where I made my move. I used to attack at a lap and a half to go. I managed to win a few races that way, because at first, nobody thought I could go all-out and last for 600 meters to the finish. I even have a picture of this. Those were fun times. When I first came to California in 1978, I raced a few times at Encino. It seemed weird, not having the bumps and hump, and the track was shorter. It felt like riding around the inside of a bathtub. But it was a lot of fun. And it was fun to see it again.

Leaving the velodrome, we looked for a drinking fountain so I could refill my water bottle. Apparently, all of the fountains by the baseball fields there were broken. So we left. We took the bike path across the Sepulveda Dam Recreation Area, where we finally found a working fountain. I refilled my bottle, and all was right with the world.

At the end of the park, we got on Burbank Blvd for a short stretch, before turning south on Van Nuys to get to Chandler. Chandler is a nice quiet street, and we took that all the way over to North Hollywood, where it ended. Then we went south a few more blocks to Riverside and headed back into Burbank. I snapped a picture of the Work Boot Warehouse babe, since we’d been seeing her on lots of billboards all across the Valley. We figured that she is part of a time-tested marketing strategy for businesses that have clientele primarily composed of young men.

It was just before we got to the Bette Davis Picnic Area that I noticed that my back tire was going flat. So we stopped there, and I changed it. I had Gene take the obligatory picture for the Flat Tire Gallery. This also marked my second appeance the gallery, and so far I’m the only one with two flats in it.

From there, we headed up into Glendale to Verdugo Blvd for the climb up Hospital Hill. Gene had an accident back in May, so he missed riding for a few weeks, and he was fading out a bit as we went up the hill. But when we got to the top, it was all downhill back to Pasadena, so we made it home just fine.

61 miles.
cycling

Bruce tagged me with this one.

The ChildHood Meme: What 5 Things Do You Miss About Your Childhood?

This meme requires you to do the following things:

Remove the blog at #1 from the following list and bump every one up one place. Add your blog’s name in the #5 spot. Link to each of the other blogs for the desired cross pollination effect.

1. Cincysundevil
2. Lindsay
3. News to Hughes
4. Fluxion
5. Our Obligatory Blog

When your blog reaches the top of the list, you will receive 3,125 different childhoods to choose from. Note, do not break the chain. Myron Bichelmeyer of Culver City, California broke the chain and had to relive his own pathetic childhood.

Next: select new friends to add to the pollen count. This is the part I hate, but I’ll try to pick all the curmudgeons I know:

1. Chuck
2. Ray
3. Len
4. Karl Elvis
5. Grace

Now list the five things you miss about childhood most. Ordinarily, I say that I’m glad to not be a child any more, but upon reflection, there are a few things I look back on fondly. Here they are:

1. Summer vacation – No school. I could just hang around and do whatever I wanted. I did a lot of exploring.
2. Climbing trees – I climbed almost every tree in every yard of every house I lived in.
3. The Hall of Dinosaurs – The American Museum of Natural History in New York had the best dinosaur exhibit, and I went there a lot as a child.
4. Sledding on the big hill by my house after an ice storm – Now that I’m grown, I hate cold, snow, and ice, but then it was fun. The sleds got going something like 35 miles per hour on the hill. Being young, this was exciting and not scary.
5. Rockets to the moon were real – I grew up watching the Gemini and Apollo missions on TV. I thought that space exploration was just Something We Did. It was only later that I realized that it was all just a big dick contest with the Russians.

Tonight I went outside and had a look at Venus and Mercury. They are very close together, and I figured that they would probably fit within one eyepiece field on my telescope. So I got out the telescope and set it up in the front yard. I was able to see both planets at the same time, so I thought I’d try some more duct tape astrophotography. I taped the camera directly to the eyepiece and set it on no-flash mode. Then I set it on a ten-second delay and just shot a few pictures to see what would happen. And here it is.

Today’s ride was Gene’s ‘Old Town Monrovia’ ride. This was a mostly-flat jaunt out to Irwindale and Azusa, and then back to Monrovia for a snack at the Coffee Bean.

The first thing everyone noticed today was that Sandy and Rasheed were twins. They had the same jerseys, although we were still able to tell them apart. Also in the well-dressed category was Jason, who had his bright red ‘CCCP‘ jersey, complete with hammer and sickle.

We started out going east through Arcadia, Monrovia and Duarte. Then we got on the bike path above Santa Fe Dam and rode that all the way down over the dam and down the San Gabriel River.

We got off the bike path at Lower Azusa Road, which we took west for a bit to Peck. Then we turned north, passing Dandy Doors and the Taboo Gentleman’s Club. The funny thing about that place is that apparently the city of Arcadia made some rule prohibiting them from having a big sign out in front. So they got a truck billboard and just keep it parked in the parking lot in front of the building.

A bit farther north, we passed back into Monrovia, passing the now-derelict train station there. We also passed the Wizard of Bras, which may well count the Taboo dancers among their clients.

Then we got to Old Town Monrovia. We stopped at the Coffee Bean at Myrtle and Foothill and had a snack.

Leaving the Coffee Bean, we headed west on Foothill Blvd. We passed the Aztec Hotel, which is a rather distinctive building. Then we took Highland Oaks up the hill to Grand View in Sierra Madre. After that, we came back down the hill and we were back at the park.

At this point, we had only gone about 35 miles, so Jason, Matt and I decided to do a bit more. We headed west across Pasadena, crossing through Old Town (we have an ‘Old Town’ everywere here) and then down into the Arroyo. We went around the Rose Bowl, where we saw the ‘you are in a golf area’ warning signs. Sadly, the sign was just text, and didn’t have a graphic of a little stick-figure man being beaned by a golf ball. At the end of the golf course, we took a left and went up the hill to Linda Vista. Then we went north a bit to just below the dam. From there, we took Windsor Road up to Casitas, and then took Mendocino back across Pasadena.

50 miles.
cycling