I’ve been experiencing winter mornings early this year. Beet has been getting up extra early recently this week, and I’ve been having to turn on the lights downstairs. Yikes. I am not ready for winter just yet. Getting up while it is dark is just hard for me, even with coffee. 🙁
There is some guy that works on the base that rides past our house every morning around 6:30 and his bike is extremely loud. It is quite annoying. It hasn’t woken the kids up yet, but it has woken me up and I am always afraid that it might wake them up.
This bike is loud, but I know not all of them are. One of our neighbours rides a bike early in the morning, and it is quiet. He short shifts, doesn’t accelerate hard, and is quite considerate. The other guys accelerates hard, has loud pipes, and doesn’t care since he doesn’t live here.
I wish he would take a different route.
Derailleurs have been around for a long time, and the technology hasn’t really changed in a long time. This one is interesting in that it is electronic. No more cables that stretch over time, you just need to worry about battery life. Read more about them here.
via BoingBoing
It almost looks normal, but this bike frame is actually made from polypropolene and is designed to be recyclable. A good option for a town bike.
via Gizmodo
A minimalist design to say the least. Using hubless and spokeless wheels, and a special drive system, this bike would certainly turn some heads while you were riding down the street.
via Gizmodo
Belt drives aren’t that new, but they seem like a great idea for a town bike. This wouldn’t work on a dual suspension bike like my Bullit, but it would definitely work on a hardtail.
via Gizmodo
Some people don’t want to wear helmets since they aren’t necessarily a fashion statement. But what if they could be? Add a slip-on cover to your helmet and away you go.
via BoingBoing
Not much has changed at that clinic. A lot of the same friendly faces, a lot of the same cookies and juice.
The donation took a little under five minutes. In fact the nurse doing the labelling of the various bags and collection tubes didn’t get to finish before I did.
I had eaten dinner just before going so I didn’t really feel like eating a bunch of cookies, but the volunteers get a little cranky if you don’t follow the rules. I managed to choke back a couple cookies 😉
I had a great day at work, accomplishing more than I had intended. I was in a great mood when I left, the sun was out, and it was warm out. Perfect.
Driving home I approached Douglas and Pandora, and my light was green. I was doing about 40 KM/H through the intersection when some druggy looking idiot and his two pals, walk right out in front of me. They were wanting to cross Pandora and didn’t feel like waiting for the light.
I slammed on the brakes and layed on the horn (out of instinct). Dipshit looks at me and continues walking. As he walks through the next lane I notice he is holding up a bottle of some sort of pills and sort of waving it at the cars in the lane beside me.
The three of them continue on like nothing happened, seemingly stoned out of their minds. Morons.
This put me in a foul mood, and I am still feeling it now.
Until the morons emerged.
The first dipshit passed me while we were approaching the train underpass right before the blue bridge. It is a 30 km/h zone, and I was actually doing 40km/h. Dipshit passes me, barely gets in front of me, then slowed down. Grrr.
Across the bridge I made my way over to Fort street, went up there and turned right onto Blanshard. I was going to turn left onto Broughton, but there was some traffic so I opted to keep going to the next street. Until dipshit lady came into the picture. She wanted to turn right onto Broughton, so she passed me, slowed down with her right turn signal on, then stopped and looked at me. She was still in the right hand lane of Blanshard.
I hate, hate, hate it when people do this so I stopped, unclipped, and looked back at her, waiting for her to leave the scene. Aargh, why do people do this weird shit?
A perfect day for a ride ruined by dumb drivers.
I had settled on Canon’s 40D, and as I was getting ready to make my purchase I started to hear rumors of a 50D.
Sure enough the 50D was released and now I don’t know what to do. Do I still buy a 40D expecting that it’s price will drop? The 40D was a definite improvement over my 20D, but the 50 is even better than the 40.
Right now I am leaning towards the 50D. I might even go for the 50D plus a kit lens that I can sell that lens with the 20D to increase it’s value. I know someone who might be interested in my 20D body but I have no idea how much I should sell it for.
What is a photographer to do?
The first one was a very friendly little dog named Petal. The gate to Petal’s yard was open and she came out to say hi to Yoshi, then me, then Sprout. I didn’t actually see Petal escape, so I called the number on her collar, and the owner came out of his house to usher her back to the yard.
The next day I was walking Yoshi up to the grocery store, and a block away from Petal, another dog came to say hi to Yoshi. Bruno saw Yoshi, and lunged at him excitedly. He was tied to the stairs, but something broke and Bruno was free. The owner was on her deck playing a guitar and I called up to her to let her know that Bruno was free.
2 days, 2 dogs. Pretty funny.
Mmmm, local tomatoes. We got these from SPUD a while ago, and they needed to be eaten. I made a small tomatoe salad with some cucumber, feta, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar. Very tasty.
The snack was had was amaaaazing. It was a langosh from the Ukranian food stall. It was a flat deep fried donut like thing that you sprinkled cinnamon sugar on. It was hot and delicious. Yum. Think mini-donut taste, but 10 inches in diameter and a half inch thick.
I didn’t spend a lot of time taking pictures, but I sure had fun showing Sprout the sights. We saw all sorts of animals: pigs, goats, sheep, cows, a calf, horses, guinea pigs, rabbits, ducks, ducklings, chickens, roosters, and donkeys.
After lunch we poked around a little bit, then around 1 we decided to head out. We were in the car at 1:20 and on our way. Leaving at that time was a good thing. During the morning the crowds weren’t too bad, but by the time we left, the place was packed. As we were driving, we saw the line up to get to the grounds. The traffic was backed up from the grounds all the way to the Pat Bay Highway! This is a distance of 2 miles or 3.2 kms of bumper to bumper stop and go traffic. Yikes.
The sun had also come out and it was starting to heat up. All in all we had a great time, and we timed it well.