Hill Slug Chronicles: Catch-up Post: From Chocolate Bunnies to Belmar, or Excuses, Excuses, or Why I Haven't Been Blogging

Belmar jetty

20 April 2013

This morning, Burnaby, my 8-year-old kitten, was chasing his tail, and, while doing so, let out a yelp. He'd caught his claw in his own tail. This is the perfect metaphor for my life for the past two weeks, which goes part of the way towards explaining why I haven't posted anything to this blog since announcing the Chocolate Bunny Ride.

Several of my readers have been getting worried about my blogging absence. Herein I will attempt to catch up, with more pictures than words.

Most bikes on campus are beaters. Once in a while a pretty one shows up (March 20).

I've been managing to bike commute at least twice each week since we moved our clocks ahead. Once in a while I can catch a worthy sunset (March 20).

On March 22 I took a day off to go to the Whole Bead Show in New York City. Jack went with me, passing time in the Strand book store while I spent far more money than was necessary. On his way back towards the show he ran into our Jersey City friends, so we found a diner and ate fried things. Then Jack and I went to MOMA, where, as usual, we agreed that, while there are good things to be said about modern art, too much of modern art is crap.

Singaraja has the best silver/semi-precious drops and linkers anywhere.

Grace Ma makes fun and funky affordable, Dale happy, and me break even.

Meanwhile, back in the lab, we'd become addicted to the rice pudding provided by Prospect House. I decided to make my own, following a recipe from the New York Times. It came out a little watery, but all agreed that it beat what Prospect House has to offer. Those are orange peels and vanilla pods floating; they get fished out towards the end, before the raisins go in (March 29).

That brings us to the Chocolate Bunny Ride, about which Plain Jim posted the same day as the ride (unlike me, almost a month late).

The only picture I took on that ride was this one, of the Bagel Bistro's menu board. Look at the bottom left for the perplexing "roast bee" wrap. John D and I contemplated what sort of bee would make the best eating. Probably bumble.

Roast Bee

Happy B

The tradition is for me to hand out chocolate bunnies at the end of the ride. On our way back we ran into another group of FreeWheelers on an ad hoc ride. I'd known they'd be out and promised the leader, Marilyn, that if I saw her they'd get bunnies. I still had a pile in my pack after that, and when our ride was finished I still had a few left over. I left them in my pack.

The next day, I went riding with Terry C. We figured it'd been about a decade since we'd ridden together. Easter Sunday was cloudy and windy. We took it easy, figuring we'd go to Allentown and back.

I stopped on Gordon Road, over the Turnpike, to look at the construction. "This," I said, "is what people think of when they think of New Jersey."

I wanted to show Terry the new best Allentown rest stop, the Stonebridge deli. We got there at 11:06; they'd closed at 11. We hadn't gone far, so we weren't really hungry, and we didn't need water. As we were standing around, the door to the deli opened and the owner came out. "You two want a drink or need the bathroom?" We didn't, but Stonebridge just scored some major points for asking.

I gave Terry two of the four remaining bunnies and took a picture of the others, figuring I'd use it as the lead photo in my Chocolate Bunny Ride blog post.

We left the deli to go back the way we came. As we passed Bruno's bike shop, I saw the Sunday Bruno's ride people just coming back from the first half of their ride. I handed the last of the bunnies to Chris C, who'd missed yesterday's ride anyway.

We were halfway home, battling the headwind, when Terry shouted, "They've ruined it! Ruined it!" I had no idea what she was talking about until we came upon the warehouse construction where an open field used to be. Yep, more beautiful New Jersey, courtesy of Matrix this time.

I never did get around to writing about any of this, of course, but I figured I'd get the chance in Cleveland, where Jack and would be spending Thursday through Sunday at a literary conference. We weren't going for the seminars; we were going to hang out and catch up with people we hadn't seen for a couple of years.

This being Cleveland, and the conference being a conference, we didn't get out much. We didn't see the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. We didn't see more than the atrium of the art museum (we spent more time on the conference-sponsored buses to and from the museum than we did at the reception, during which all the exhibits were closed anyway). We spent most of the time within several blocks of the hotel.

The food in the city was surprisingly good, though. As it happened, our room was directly across from the hotel gym. I worked off all I ate.

As social as I am, there's only so much of it I can take at once, especially when it involves small talk over the din of a hotel bar. We had no wireless connection in the room (we weren't going to pay what the hotel was charging when we could do email from our phones), so I retreated to my neglected world of jewelry-making. I'd brought Dale's claim of the Grace Beads stash, plus some others that I'd planned to keep for myself.

After spending a couple of hours engineering a necklace that looked like crap three inches in, I gave up on it and went for an easy job: earrings. Five minutes, tops.

The next day we did get out, by taxi, to a far-flung neighborhood, Shaker Heights, where Loganberry Books resides. Here, Jack and Kevin are in their element.

Loganberry was having their annual "Edible Books" contest, in which, apparently, people bake cakes with book themes. For $3, patrons get a fork and a ballot. I took pictures before the eating began:

These are edible paper butterflies:

I don't know who won. After we paid for our books (Jack bought so many that we had to have them shipped back), we found a cheap diner and waited an hour for a taxi to take us back to the hotel.

I got some time to work on Dale's beads.

So, that's why there was no blogging for a week. We got home on Sunday. On Monday, Paper Resubmission Hell began. It was so bad that my usual nine hour days were replaced by tens and elevens, and one fourteen-hour day. Long story short, I had the worst two weeks of my now two and a half years at Princeton. I think I burned up some of my massive cred, but when one starts from high enough up, one has room to fall. Grace under pressure? Not so much, it turns out, for more than just myself. On the other hand, it could have been worse. A whole lot worse. I didn't end the week hating my job.

OK. Enough of that. Time for cats.

Here's Moxie.

The boys sniff spring:

Burnaby hams it up in the bathroom sink:

I didn't ride that Saturday because I was at a day-long Sierra Club meeting, where I worked on another necklace for Dale:

The next day I led a ride to the Homestead General Store, about which Plain Jim posted, as usual, the day of the ride. He wrote that I'd post pictures, eventually.

The ridge above Milford, NJ, across the Delaware River from Upper Black Eddy

Here's Homestead's assurance that, despite the bridge being out behind their store, they were, indeed, open.

Bridge construction over the Delaware Canal:

There's a temporary footbridge over the canal, so those who want to ascend Bridgeton Hill Road really have no excuse.

When the ride was over, I had just enough time to clean up before heading to an organizational meeting for this year's Ride for McBride, at Judy's new digs.

While we organized, Elliot supervised:

So, there was another blogging-free weekend. I was so trashed after work this past week that the best I could muster in my hell-addled mind was to make a necklace for a fellow Sierran, who saw what I was doing at the meeting and wanted one too.

Yesterday at work we began to see the light at the end of the tunnel. This is a view of this weekend's cool front moving in, as seen from the pedestrian bridge over Washington Road.

So. Today.

I'm sure Tom will have more and better pictures. Once again I link to Plain Jim for the ride details.

You can't get there from here: Police still have a stretch of road between Spring Lake and Belmar closed. We took a two-mile detour around Lake Como to get to Belmar.

Belmar is re-building the boardwalk with Trex recycled plastic, after the Sierra Club and others protested the planned use of global-warming-contributor rainforest wood. It looks good.

I like it this way, without the ugly seawall. Tom says the seawall is coming back, though.

The beach was deserted, save for surfers riding waves and bulldozers moving sand: