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27 February

11:05 p.m: I just looked at my calendar. I was supposed to have led a ride today! And nobody even called me on it. Must've had something to do with all the snow on the ground.

It'll all melt eventually.

Meanwhile, if you're not already doing so, start building your aerobic base. Take some Spinning classes or work out on your trainer at home. If you haven't been exercising, don't get your heart rate higher than 75-80% max (*) for the next six weeks.

After you build your aerobic base you can venture into the 85-92% range for a few minutes at a time during interval and strength workouts.

You can work on endurance by keeping your heart rate between 65 and 80%; that might sound simple but it's not so easy to hold your heart rate within five beats for 55 minutes.

I've been Spinning (even in the summer) since 1998. This winter, worried about losing my endurance, I've been putting in a few 2-hour endurance sessions on my trainer at home. I have no idea if it's going to help me when we hit the road again. I do know that the first hour is easy, the next half hour tiring, and the final half hour very difficult to keep my heart rate up. I'm pretty loopy by the end of it all.

Anyway, I'm scheduled to lead a ride next Saturday. Watch this space.




(* A rough estimate of your maximum heart rate is 200 minus your age for men and 226 minus your age for women.)

Life Off the Bike

From Left to Right, Back to Front: Chris, Brenda, Mike, Michael, Jack, Hilda, Cheryl, and Andy

20 February

Like a lot of other Freewheelers I've been doing other stuff while there's been snow on the ground. Unlike a lot of other Freewheelers I'm going to try to continue to do other stuff long after the snow is gone.

Two Fridays ago Jack and I went to New York City with Gordon and Terry. I brought my little point-and-shoot camera. Gordon, a photographer, bought the real thing.

We walked from Penn Station up 6th Avenue on our way to the International Center of Photography. I took these pictures at 42nd and 6th.



This one was a little farther along 6th Avenue.


We passed under a scaffold. From the sides came a small waterfall as snow melted from above. Shooting into the sun resulted in the drops looking more like one of the scratchy prints we'd just seen at the photography exhibit.


Gordon took this picture. Chaos and crowds were all around us at this intersection, but somehow he managed to get a picture that made the street look deserted:

Here's Gordon's take on the building at 42nd and 6th:

And of a window washer:

Here's the rainy scaffold, before the rainy section, on our way to the exhibit. Jack and I sure have a lot of hair. I'd gone nearly five months without a haircut at this point.

Gordon captured isolation on the subway ride downtown. I ruined the shot by smiling. He needs to edit me out.

Pylones, which is a Parisian store now in London and New York City, is a great place to window shop, or "leche vitrine" (literally, "lick glass," in French). It's even more fun to go inside. Gordon took a few pictures of the window displays.

Eiffel Tower-shaped cheese graters and springy people memo holders:

Squid-shaped whisks:

I have to confess that I've amassed quite a collection of Pylones merchandise over the years. It's funky yet utilitarian. Take a look. It's fun.

We came home from the City laden with nuts, dried fruit, candy, coffee beans, and a few things from Pylones.

*****

Today I was supposed to lead a ride, but the roads were still narrowed from the snow, which is down to about a foot in my neighborhood. I'm trying to do some outdoorsy things that Jack will want to do, so we decided to try a walk on the D&R Canal towpath in Lambertville. We got a pretty good group together.

The towpath was still covered in mashed-down snow.


It wasn't as bad as I'd feared but I'd been hoping for better conditions. That didn't stop anyone from walking the four miles to Stockton. We hung out there for a while, flitting between the general store and the brand new farmer's market.

Jack was drawn to the wine store next door. I found a local organic coffee roaster and two kinds of beans I've never tried. For those keeping track, that's a pound from my NYC trip and 1.5 pounds today. I don't drink the stuff every day, so it tends to pile up.

Michael had the brilliant idea of walking back to Lambertville via the rural roads on the ridge above Route 29. We took Brookville Hollow to Seabrook, which dumped us back on Route 29 just outside of Lambertville.

I stopped for pictures on Seabrook.

Hilda stopped too when she saw this field. Then we had to catch up. "It's easier on a bike," she said. We caught up eventually.



This is on the down-slope going into Lambertville:


I have no doubt we'd have made a detour to get there, but since it was on the way we stopped for a while at Rojo's for coffee. I got some to drink, but I didn't buy any beans to take home. Honest.

Jack and I drove back to Stockton so he could take some more time in the wine shop. He found some worthy hooch, so, despite the snowy towpath, the trip was worth something to him.

When things dry out we want to try walking from Frenchtown to Milford. And I'll do it on a good biking day. As difficult as it is for some hard-core cyclists to imagine or say, there's more to life than bicycling. Really.

Hill Slug Ad Hoc, Saturday, 20 February

18 February

Biking? Forget it.

Instead we are going to do a towpath walk in Lambertville. We'll go as far as we feel like going and we'll stop for lunch when we get hungry. Maybe we'll get to Stockton. Bring your cameras.

This is a leisurely walk for Freewheelers and their non-cycling buddies. It's not a forced march. Pace-pushers are not welcome.

Meet at the Lambertville Trading Company coffee shop on Bridge Street in Lambertville at 10:00 a.m. We'll get started a bit after that. Contact me for carpooling.

Penn in the Snow

15 Feburary

Even though the university was closed, some intrepid lab members fought their way into work on Thursday. Bin Zhang was one of them. Between the train station and the lab she took lots of pictures, sending her ten favorites along to us in an email the next day.

Here are my four favorites from her collection.

Here's what we see from near the entrance to our building if we face Spruce Street. This is 36th Street, a pedestrian walkway through Penn's campus. The building on the left is, I think, the alumni center. I can't say for sure. I've only been inside a few times. There used to be a fancy restaurant in there (maybe there still is), the sort of place you only go if someone you work for is paying.

Here's one of the prettiest buildings on campus: Logan Hall. Only it's called Cohen Hall now because Ms Cohen gave gobs of money to Penn a few years ago. We old heads can't get used to the name change. It's Logan Hall, dammit. To the left of Logan Hall is another building that looks almost identical; in this picture it looks like part of Logan. Anyway, that's College Hall. Charles Addams, cartoonist and artist, drew College Hall, which ended up being the model for the Addams Family TV show.

It wouldn't be Philly if there weren't a Love sculpture somewhere. Meh. But the tourists like it.

If you stand outside of our building at the corner of 36th and Spruce Streets, and look southwest, you'll see the Quad, the oldest dormitory on campus. The gate on the left straddles a pedestrian walkway. To the left of the gate is where we work. It's a 1920's-era brick number, with vague hints of Art Deco, but it's mostly just boring. The Quad makes for a better picture. In the lower left corner you can see part of the Johnson Pavilion, where I worked immediately after graduation and again from '98 to '04. Behind that you can just make out the top of one of the newer Penn science buildings, the very obviously temporarily-named "Biological Research Building II/III." Penn is clearly waiting for two donors on that one. Wanna swap, Ms Cohen?

We commuters walk to 30th Street Station to catch our trains. This is a picture from just outside the station, looking into a parking lot we used to be able to cut through. Anyway, on the right is the edge of the station's west entrance, in the center is the SEPTA train platform, and the tall building behind it all is the Cira Centre.

Thanks, Bin!

Heavy Snow, Part Two

Mike Makes the Cover of the 11 February Blog
(and immediately emails the picture to everyone)

11 February

So I ended up shaking off the pitch pine three times yesterday. After the second time I tethered the top of the tree with twine to the blue spruce, forcing it upright. Or so I thought. At 10:30 p.m. I looked out the window and couldn't see the pine. Out I trudged again to find it bent over once more, this time towards the spruce. Too bad there aren't pitch pine Olympics; this little tree would get a gold in gymnastics. I shook it off again, stood it up, and tightened the noose. It's still standing.

Meanwhile, after focusing so much on the little pine, I realized that the arching bamboo might have squashed the tops of the four junior arbor vitae trees that were planted before we got here to hide the compost pile. So, I guess the first thing I'll have to do tomorrow morning is attempt to de-arch the bamboo, whose tops are now thoroughly buried in the snow. Notice I don't care about the bamboo. We didn't plant that either.

*****

For lack of anything better to do, and because his condo complex gets plowed out before our street does, Mike likes to show up unannounced and start shoveling our driveway.

With more than a foot of snow on the ground I wasn't about to let him do this solo, so I jumped into my boots before breakfast and grabbed the good shovel. This left Jack with the bad one so we traded off halfway. It took a while to get the job done.

A few hours later we rescued Cheryl from her stay-at-home job. It's been a long time since the four of us hung out at the diner.

In mid-afternoon Mike showed up again and the two of us went to the Pole Farm. The gate was closed. We ducked under, got about six feet in, and decided that snowshoes were in order. So I got to wear Theresa's snowshoes again. This time I didn't trip over myself.

If I buy my own pair it will guarantee we'll never get deep snow around here again. Some of you are about ready to make a donation, aren't you? Because there's more in the forecast next week.

Anyway, pictures.

Yesterday afternoon, while the snow was falling at a furious pace, I opened up the porch door on my way to rescuing the pitch pine for the second time. There was about a foot of snow piled against the door, which faces east.

The wet, blowing snow stuck to the screens, making it seem as if we were buried.

Even on the western side of the house the snow was smashed into the screen. Here is a wire moose dinner bell/chime/who-knows-what that somebody gave us in our early moose collecting days.

The bamboo continues to sag. The pitch pine (top center) stands.

The view through the southern screens:


Yet another wire gift moose.

Twilight, as the snow stopped falling:


Snow on the trees on our street this morning (that's my glove in the lens in the upper left):

The sidewalk, dug out. Snow makes suburbia look pretty.

The deck. The National Weather Service reported 18.7 inches of snow in Ewing, one town west of us.

The pitch pine survived the night:

The bamboos, however, seem to have given up, and taken the arbor vitae with them (one still stands, upper left):

Fence and rose bush:

Over at Cheryl's is the biggest residential snow pile ever:

The Pole Farm (known to the rest of the world as Mercer County Park Northwest) used to be AT&T's property, full of telephone poles. Only one remains, but we didn't see it today. From the main trail we took the side loop into the woods, around a meadow, which looked like a field of grass with a dusting of wind-blown snow:

It's not. It's the tops of a field of shrubs under a foot and a half of snow. The ski poles are for scale:

A comfy place to freeze your ass:

A field, a hedgerow, and our snowshoe tracks:

Random shots of snow on trees:


More trail. I couldn't decide on horizontal or vertical so I took it both ways. Horizontal makes a better desktop background. Vertical has the better composition. Whatever.


Understory archway:


Huh! I can shoot into the sun!

We reached the main trail again. Like everyone else, we turned back towards the gate. The main trail goes on towards Blackwell Road, but nobody had gone there today:

The way back:
Long afternoon shadows: