(no subject)

Took advantage of yet another weekend of unseasonably warm weather, and went biking today. I'm usually such a weenie about cold-weather biking, because I don't have the appropriate cold-weather gear. But I've fallen under the influence of Rivendell, and I've come to realize that I don't need fleecy spandex and what-not; I can bike in jeans and a sweatshirt. Just like I used to do when I was a kid. How...liberating.

Anyway, the ride was great, except for a mile or so of UNPAVED, UNPLOWED road. The snow was packed down and all, but it was also soft, and my skinny tires were cutting through it and slipping all over the place. Where it wasn't snow, it was all mud and pot-holes, which were honestly much easier to negotiate. But other than that, great ride.

But it's time to make some mods to the bike. Out of my three downtube-shifter-double-chainring-6-gear bikes, this is the one I ride, and I love it except that it doesn't have enough low gears for effective hill climbing, and the rear shifter slips under load (like hill climbing). So I want Rivendell's "power ratchet" shifters, and I want to convert the double to triple. This means a new crankset, longer bottom bracket, probably a new front derailleur...

In other news, I spent way too much of the past week trying to rebuild my friend Dan's laptop. His hard drive was reporting imminent failure (they do a lot of self monitoring these days), and freezing up post-boot. I got a new hard drive and USB enclosure, but data transfer wasn't smooth. Knoppix does a great job of reading NTFS, and I've used it before to recover data off a drive with more severe problems than this. But it can't seem to write to NTFS file systems worth a damn. dd_rescue took 15 hours to copy a 40G disk, and ended up producing crap. In the end, I used a shareware windows app, and it performed flawlessly in about half an hour. If I knew then what I know now, I would have had it back to him last weekend. But he was still grateful enough to pay me in beer. Mmm, beer...

i said to the horse, "surprise and delight me," and he did

Lovely ride this afternoon. My horse is a natural explorer, nay bush-whacker. Sometimes I give him his head just to see where he takes me. (Usually it's somewhere in the direction of home and dinner, but there are many ways to get there, and many possible side-turnings.) After 14 years, I still haven't fully explored the 3000 acres of the Harold Parker State Forest, but I've done a lot more in the last couple of years of solo trail riding than I'd ever done on group rides, let alone on foot.

Today I let him take me down a path I'd never been on, and I doubt he'd ever been on either. It didn't go at all where I thought it was going to, but that's okay - we were going out for a ride, and so we did. Anyway, it wasn't more spectacular than any other part of the forest, but it was new on me, and I saw it with new eyes. And when we finally came out to a trail I knew, it was like stepping through a door I'd never noticed before, and might have sworn wasn't even there.