Author: lpaulriddle

This morning’s ride

lpaulriddle

Wow, where to start with today’s ride.  Upper 30s with a 15-20mph west wind.  Same clothes as Monday 12/7 morning (including arm warmers).  I was comfortable in these clothes, but the real story was the wind and mud.  I took Montgomery out to New Cut Rd, which was uneventful except for a head wind.  New Cut dumps me out on Main St in Ellicott City, and at that point I have the choice of taking Oella Ave and going through Catonsville, or taking River Rd and going through the park.  Oella is kind of hilly, and I wasn’t feeling particularly energetic this morning, so I chose River Rd which turned out to be a mistake.  River Rd apparently flooded out during the rain we had Tuesday night into Wednesday, and while it was rideable, there were a lot of muddy, washed out sections.  There was also mud in spots on the Grist Mill trail, and lots of standing water, runoff and debris pretty much everywhere.  My bike ended up looking like I had just taken it through a cyclocross course.  It’s covered with mud and also making lots of unhappy squeaking noises.  This weekend it’s getting a thorough cleaning.

When it wasn’t muddy, I was fighting a strong head wind heading west through Relay and Arbutus.  Taking Oella would have avoided most of this, too.  Of course, if I had taken Oella, I’d be complaining about having no energy during all the endless hill climbing, blissfully unaware of all the mud and wind I was avoiding.

The ride home tonight may be a little chilly, but at least I remembered my headlight this time..  🙂

Yesterday’s return ride

lpaulriddle

Overcast/41.  Same clothes as the past 2 or 3 rides.  Fairly comfortable.  The big story with this ride was around 3 in the afternoon when I realized I had left my headlight on the other bike.  Fortunately I keep a mini “Mag Lite” flashlight in my rack trunk, so I strapped it to the handlebars with a couple zip ties and rubber bands, and it was my stand-in headlight for the ride home.  It’s really not bright enough, but I know the roads, and I have a front LED blinker for visibility (ironically, I remembered to move the blinker over from the other bike, but not the headlight).  So it was enough to get me home.  Ideally it’d be nice to have a brighter LED flashlight that’s about the same size as the Mag Lite..  that would give me a brighter emergency headlight if this ever happens again (or if the “real” headlight ever stops working on me).

Ride notes

lpaulriddle

Around 15 miles again today.  34 or so at the start of the ride, 38 or so at the end.  Partly cloudy.  Same clothes as yesterday’s afternoon ride.  Feet cold after first half hour.  Head really sweaty at the end of the ride.  Comfortable otherwise.  I’m going to need to do something about the cold feet if I want to take longer morning rides in January and February.

I took the geared road bike today because bad weather is threatening for later, and the road bike has fenders and additional storage capacity for rain gear (side pannier).  Turns out I do have the same issue with this bike with the right shoe cover too close to the crank arm.  I guess I just never noticed it before.  Anyhow, when I get around to it I’ll adjust my cleat(s).

Today’s ride home..

lpaulriddle

It was around 40 degrees for the ride home.  Left at 4:45 and had a little bit of light for the first half of the ride.  Wore exactly the same stuff as the morning, minus the arm warmers.  This would have gotten a bit warm if the ride had been longer, but it worked for the approx 8 mile trip home.

So, this is the first time I’ve ridden the fixed gear bike with shoe covers, and the right foot is a little too close to the crank arm, to the point where I can feel the crank when I’m pedaling.  I’m hoping I can correct this by adjusting the cleat.  My right foot is slightly larger than my left, so I occasionally have problems like this.  But I don’t have the problem on my geared road bike, so the cranks obviously have something to do with it too.  Both bikes have identical pedals (Look Keo) and I ride them with the same shoes.

Ride notes

lpaulriddle

So, I’m starting my second winter season commuting by bike, so I figured I’d use the blog to record notes on my rides, including clothing I wore, which bike I rode, etc.  The idea is to get a better sense of what works best in different weather and road conditions.  So here goes.

First sub-freezing morning ride today (28°).  Partly cloudy conditions with twilight at the beginning of the ride and sunlight at the end.  A glaze of snow, mostly in shady grassy areas, left over from the snowfall at the beginning of the weekend.  Some wet spots on the road, and a bit of ice here and there, but not too much.

Took the fixed-gear bike and rode through Patapsco State Park on the Grist Mill Trail.  Total distance a little under 15 miles.  Trail was actually in better shape than I expected 2 days after a snowfall.  Ilchester foot bridge had a glaze of snow and ice, so I got off and walked over.  A few puddles here and there that I rode through slowly (no fenders), but other than that, no problems.

Clothing: arm warmers, polyester athletic t-shirt, “Under Armour” long sleeve athletic top (mostly polyester), Performance “transformer” shell/windbreaker, thermal tights, wool socks, neoprene toe covers, neoprene shoe covers, REI helmet liner, medium weight cycling gloves.  This was comfortable for 90% of the ride.  Feet starting to get cold toward the end.

The Great Tire Showdown

lpaulriddle

Summer’s over, and that means that the joys of cold weather bike commuting are right around the corner.  I’m still trying to find an all-season commuting tire that provides the best combination of speed and resistance to flats.  And of course, nothing provides a better test bed for tires than Maryland roads in the winter.

The ultimate tire for flat resistance (at least in my experience) is the Specialized Armadillo.  I’ve ridden a set of these for over 3000 miles, until the sidewall wore out, without a single flat.  They’ve worked as advertised for me.  The only problem with them is they’re heavy and somewhat slow.  I’m not racing with them, so that’s not a huge problem.  But if I can find something a little lighter and faster with the same resistance to flats, so much the better.  If not, I have no problems sticking with the Armadillos.

Last winter I ran a set of Vredestein Fortezza SEs.  These are more known as racing tires than as all-seasons, and they also have the advantage of being relatively cheap at under $30/tire.  The Vredesteins rode well, but the back tire only lasted around 2000 miles before it started flatting on me regularly (the front tire is still going strong).

After buying a second bike this past summer, I now have 2 bikes to use for commuting, so this winter I’m putting 2 different tires through their paces:  Continental Ultra Gatorskin on the road bike, and Bontrager Race Lite Hardcase on the fixed gear/single speed bike.  Both sets are 700x23C, and both are new as of this writing.  I’ll be running both sets at 110psi, give or take.  NB – I never seem to get flats on the front tire, so I’m only comparing performance for the back tires.  The fixie has a set of 2 Bontragers, and the road bike has a new Continental on the back and an older Vredestein on the front.

It’ll take a little more time to get the results in, as I’m now splitting my commutes across 2 bikes, so it’ll take longer to rack up miles on the tires.  But I’m looking forward to seeing which tire lasts longer under similar conditions.  Took my first ride on the Continental this morning, and surprise surprise, it rides a lot faster than the Armadillo it replaced.  Stay tuned!

Brewing…

lpaulriddle

Thinking about brewing this yummy-sounding brown ale this fall…

Oak Leaf Brown Ale

  • 6 2/3 pounds light malt extract
  • 1 pound crystal malt (80L or higher)
  • 1/2 pound chocolate malt
  • 1 pound dark brown sugar
  • 1 ounce Kent Goldings hops (bittering)
  • 1/2 ounce Perle hops (flavoring)
  • 1 package British ale yeast
  • 3/4 cup corn sugar (priming)

Place crystal malt and chocolate malt in water and steep at 155 degrees for 30 minutes.  Remove spent grains and bring water to a boil.  Add malt extract, brown sugar, and Kent Goldings hops.  Boil for 1 hour, adding the Perle hops after 30 minutes.  Cool the wort and pitch the yeast.  Ferment for 7 to 10 days.  Bottle, using corn sugar.  Age in bottle for 7 days.

Original Gravity:  1.044

Looks pretty easy. The recipe is from “The Homebrewer’s Recipe Guide” by Higgins, Kilgore and Hertlein.

At the same time, we’re going to brew a second batch of the holiday ale we brewed in 2007, which turned out really good.

The big question is, when are we going to find a free day to brew 2 batches of beer?  Hoping to do it in early October, when the basement should be getting to a good temperature for ale fermentation.  Stay tuned!

This morning’s fun

lpaulriddle

Today’s pool maintenance fun..

  1. Spend 30 minutes with the leafmaster, vacuuming up all the junk at the bottom of the pool from the storms last night.
  2. Achieve pleasant sense of accomplishment and well-being as I begin to remove the leafmaster from the now-clean pool.
  3. Watch leafmaster bag separate from leafmaster as I’m pulling it out of the pool, spewing all the junk back into the pool where it immediately settles back to the bottom.
  4. Mutter some choice words as I attempt to re-attach bag to leafmaster while it helpfully sprays water all over me and the pool deck.
  5. Check that bag is secure and repeat step 1.
  6. Pull leafmaster out of pool, this time with no mishaps, but now, instead of being happy, I’m sweaty and irritable.  But at least the pool is clean again.

Ever think you might want your own pool?  Forget it and go join the neighborhood pool.  Thank me later 🙂

Beep. Beep. Beep.

lpaulriddle

So.  We were without air conditioning in our building for awhile today.  Fortunately it’s a nice day out with unseasonably low humidity and a breeze, so I was able to open the window to make it tolerable.

It’s amazing how much beeping you hear in populated regions (like college campuses) nowadays.  Seems like all day long, there’s beeping somewhere from a truck backing up.  There’s so much of it that it just kind of fades into the background with other stuff like birds chirping.  After awhile you don’t even hear it.  Something about the sound makes it carry over really long distances, and it’s also very non directional, making it hard to tell where it’s coming from.  It could be right around the corner, or it could be a mile away.  You can’t tell.  It’s just sort of “there.”

Last fall I put fenders on my road bike, which I use daily for commuting.  They work great, but they make the bike really noisy.  Now that summer is here and the weather is drier, I decided to try to figure out why the fenders are so noisy.  I took the front fender off and rode to work with just the rear fender.  The bike was TONS quieter without the front fender.  I think that’s the culprit.  The fender itself doesn’t rattle, so apparently something is vibrating against the bike frame.  My front fork doesn’t have dropouts to mount fenders, so I had to use zip ties to attach the struts.  Could be the struts vibrating against the fork, or the front of the fender vibrating against the underside of the brake, or who knows what else.  If I can’t figure it out and make it stop, I may end up getting a clip-on fender to use on the front.  Or I could replace my front fork, or I could forget about fenders on the road bike and get a hybrid or cyclocross bike (with better clearance for fenders) to use in wet weather.  One can certainly never have too many bikes…

This and That

lpaulriddle

So..  another summer is upon us.  Howard County schools finally let out at the end of this week.  I remember when I was a kid, summer vacation was almost 3 months long, and now it’s down to barely two.  Instead, there are tons more random days off during the school year, for “professional teacher work days” and the like.  Not sure if it’s a step forward or back, but I think if I was a kid I’d feel a bit gypped.

Three weeks after uncovering, the pool is finally clear, clean and up to a reasonable swimming temperature.  It was more of a swamp than usual this spring.  Over 3 weeks I’d say it took 20 gallons of 12.5% sodium hypochlorite, 10 pounds of dry acid, 15 pounds of baking soda, and 3 pounds of aluminum sulfate (a flocculent) to get it cleared up.  I had to vacuum to waste 4 times, compared to twice on an average year.  Not sure what the deal was this year, but I’m sure the April heat wave didn’t help.  It also didn’t help that the pool was already starting an algae bloom when we covered it in late September.  Didn’t feel like dealing with it then, knew at the time it was going to give me headaches come spring, covered it anyway.  Lesson for the day:  Never put off fixing pool water problems..  they never go away, they just become bigger problems over time.

The big new thing for the pool this summer is the salt water generator.  I installed it over the winter and early spring, in the hopes that it would cut down on work and help prevent water problems.  One of the problems with manual chlorination is that during the summer, you can’t neglect it, even for a single day, or you will end up with algae.  Automatic chlorine feeders are a step up, but you still have to buy, store and handle the chlorine, and you have to remember to keep the feeder full.  With the SWG, you dump an initial amount of salt into the pool, then you set the SWG and forget it.  Obviously they still require maintenance, but they eliminate the day-to-day drugdery of manual chlorination and eliminate the need to handle and store lots of chlorine.  Now, I keep a little bit on hand for “shocking,” but that’s it.  The jury will be out on the SWG until I’ve had it for a whole season, but up to now, it’s lived up to the hype and seems like the best thing to come along for pools since automatic cleaners.