Today felt kind of like a preview for running at the shore in a few weeks. It was around 80°F out with a dewpoint of 71° — definitely the most oppressive weather I’ve run in so far this year. I wasn’t able to get out until 11:00am, and by then, the sun was starting to break through the clouds and heat things up. I ran 8 miles before the humidity finally got to me. It was actually a better run than Thursday’s, even though Thursday’s weather was better. I ran at a very relaxed pace of 11:40/mile, which kept me from overheating. I had good energy for the entire duration of the run, and felt like my form was pretty good as well. I went through 16oz of water, and ate a granola bar at around the 5 mile mark. I stopped with about a mile to go to get home, which I walked. While I was walking, we had a 10 minute cloudburst, which felt great. I actually felt a little chilly when I walked into the air-conditioned house. All told, not a bad run, in spite of the weather.
Blog
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Back to Climbing
I climbed this morning for the first time in a while. Two weeks ago, I took a lead fall and tweaked the middle finger on my left hand somehow. Not quite sure what I did, but since both of the people I usually climb with were out of town last week, I took it as a sign that I should give the finger some time off. It is still not 100%, but I’ll keep an eye on it and cut back if I feel like I’m doing anything to aggravate it. That strategy worked well the last time I dealt with a tweaked finger.
I climbed 8 routes on top rope, which is what I usually shoot for when Cathy is belaying me. They were all in the 5.10a-5.10d range. I had climbed a few of them before, but a couple were new sets since my last visit. I felt a little rusty on the first climb, but the rest went pretty well. No issues with the finger while climbing, but we’ll see how it feels over the next day or two. Just wanted to test the waters before I climb with my friends next week, when I’ll likely do a little bit of lead.
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Run Notes
It’s another very un-summer-like day here in central Maryland, with clouds, mist, and temperatures in the low 60s on the day after the solstice. I actually wore long sleeves for my morning run. I ran 6.8 miles, which is a pretty typical distance for me on a work day. My overall pace was around 10:30/mile, which also is about average for me. The first half of the run was great, but the second half felt like a struggle. I’m wondering if I started out trying to run too fast, which has gotten me into trouble in the past. My next run will likely be in two days, and I’m hoping to go 9 miles or so at a more relaxed pace.
My work to move the blog (and a couple other web sites) off my old EC2 instance is moving along. I’ve now moved all of my persistent Docker volumes onto an EFS volume, so there is no more persistent data stored on the EC2. Next step is to start moving containers into EKS/Fargate. I find it kind of amusing that, behind the scenes, the EC2 instance uses NFS to access the EFS volume. As someone who administered systems running NFS back in the 1990s, I remember it as a buggy, insecure system built on Sun RPC. Apparently, though, it has improved in the ensuing 30-odd years. At any rate, it seems to perform pretty well over a AWS VPC connection, at least for my purposes, which aren’t all that demanding.
Anyhow, that’s more than enough acronyms for one post. 😀
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Ride Notes
2023 marks the 15th anniversary of when I started using a bike as my primary method of commuting to work. Nowadays, I only go into the office once or twice a week, so I’m not bike commuting nearly as much, but I’m happy that I’m still doing it, and I almost never drive my car to work any more. In fact, I’ve been able to save some money by ditching my annual parking permit in favor of pay-as-you-go daily permits.
Today, I rode through Catonsville, which I haven’t done much lately due to the Grist Mill Trail closure in PVSP. With school out for the summer, there’s less traffic on the roads, so I rode through Ilchester and out River Road to Oella, where I picked up the #9 Trolley Trail. I then rode Edmondson Ave. out to Ingleside Ave., found a geocache off Harlem La., and headed to UMBC via Prospect Ave., Short Line Trail, Kenwood Ave., and Wilkens Ave. I’ve ridden on all of these roads before, but never this exact route. The weather was cloudy, windy, and drippy. I wouldn’t call it rainy, but it sprinkled almost the entire time I was out. I ended up putting my rain jacket on when I stopped for the cache, as I was actually getting chilly. It definitely was atypical weather for the first day of summer. My watch tells me I rode 17.33 miles, which is a couple miles longer than my usual commute through PVSP and Halethorpe/Arbutus. All in all, not a bad ride.
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Today’s (cold) brew notes
- Beans: German St Coffee & Candlery Private House Blend
- Coarse grind (JX: 3 rotations + 4 clicks / 94 total clicks)
- Recipe: https://www.acouplecooks.com/french-press-cold-brew
- 140 grams coffee (roughly 2 cups ground), 840 grams water
With summer upon us, I decided to try making some cold brew. The hardest part of this was grinding 140 grams of coffee with the JX. This job would be better suited to a higher capacity electric grinder. Other than that, there’s not much to it: just add the ingredients to the french press, stir, cover with plastic wrap, refrigerate for 24 hours, and strain into a glass jar or pitcher. The resulting brew is concentrated, and the recipe recommends diluting 50/50 with either water or milk. I tried it with milk, and it was pretty good. Now, I need to work on trying to get a good cup of regular hot brew with these beans, but that’s for another day…
On an unrelated note, I just moved the back end database for this blog to a AWS RDS MariaDB instance. It had previously been running in a MariaDB Docker container on my old EC2 instance. This is the first step to getting my stuff off the EC2 instance and into (probably) EKS with Fargate. If you’re reading this, it means that it worked. 😀
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Today’s Brew Notes
- Beans: Lost Dog Coffee “La Esparanza” Organic Medium/Medium Dark Roast (Nicaragua)
- 17 grams coffee, 160 grams brew water
- 90°C water
- JX 1 full rotation + 6 clicks (36 total clicks, or 12 on the grind chart) (fine)
- Recipe: V60 Style Aeropress (dark roast)
- 40 grams bypass water for a 200-gram cup (roughly 1:12)
This was the best cup I’ve gotten so far from these beans using the Aeropress. My previous tries all turned out under-extracted. I suspect I had been grinding the beans too coarse. This recipe seems to work best with a very fine grind. This was the exact same formula I used yesterday with a darker roast, except I increased the water temperature from 85°C to 90°C. Seems like I’ve found a go-to recipe for medium to darker roasts.
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Today’s Ride Notes
I’m trying to start using my long-neglected blog kind of like a daily journal. We’ll see if I keep up with it.
Ever since COVID hit back in 2020, I’ve been doing more weekend bike rides, combining them with geocaching. Prior to that, I used my bike almost exclusively to commute to work. I still commute by bike, but not nearly as much as I used to, so these weekend rides are a good way to get some more biking in.
Today, I rode a 32 mile loop, which included some areas where I hadn’t previously biked: BWI Trail to B&A Trail, then back to Linthicum via Marley Neck Blvd., Fort Smallwood Rd., Hawkins Point Rd., Pennington Ave., and Ordnance Rd. Ordnance through Glen Burnie is not a route I would typically recommend, but it was doable early on a Sunday morning. The rest of the ride was great, and I found 5 caches along the way. I rode my Masi single speed for the first time in several months. The bike had been out of commission because the valve stem on the rear tube had broken, and I was out of tubes that fit the wheel. It took me a few months to get around to buying new tubes, putting one on, and reinstalling the wheel. Also, last year, the bike shop rebuilt the front wheel, because I had been breaking a lot of spokes. I wanted to take a few longer rides on the bike before I take it to the beach later this summer, just to put the wheel through its paces, although I’ve taken several rides on it already. So far, so good.
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Brew Notes
- Beans: Lost Dog Coffee “Mocha Sidamo” Organic Dark Roast (Ethiopia)
- 17 grams coffee, 160 grams brew water
- 85°C water
- JX 1.5 rotations minus 3 clicks (fine)
- See comments — an even finer grind than this (1 rotation plus 6 clicks, or 36 total clicks), seems to work better
- Recipe: V60 Style Aeropress (dark roast)
- Cup #1: 80 grams bypass water (240 grams total; 1:14)
- Cup #2: 40 grams bypass water (200 grams total; 1:12)
I got pretty good results the first time I tried this recipe, but didn’t measure how much bypass water I added. The recipe calls for 100mg, but even 80 tasted weak to me. 40 grams (a 200g cup) seemed about the right strength, and was not a bad cup. Given that the recipe calls for so much more water, I’m wondering if I’m not getting enough extraction out of the beans. I don’t think I want to go up much on the water temperature, so I guess I could try grinding even finer and see what happens.
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Today’s Brew Notes
- Beans: German St Coffee and Candlery Private House Blend
- Attempt #1:
- 13 grams coffee, 200 grams water (roughly 1:15)
- 95°C water
- 2 rotations (medium-fine)
- Attempt #2:
- 11 grams coffee, 200 grams water (1:18)
- 99°C water
- 1.5 rotations (fine)
- James Hoffman’s Ultimate Aeropress Recipe
I’m not sure exactly what kind of beans these are. It looks like a medium roast (darker than light, lighter than dark) but the bag doesn’t have any info on it. I remember getting OK but unspectacular results with it in the French Press. Previous attempts with the Aeropress were underwhelming, and today’s weren’t much better. This recipe assumes a light roast, so I started out by tweaking it with a slightly coarser grind, lower temperature and more coffee per volume (Attempt #1) and that turned out underextracted. Then I tried treating it like a light roast, following the recipe exactly, (Attempt #2) and that turned out weak and flavorless.
Although neither of these cups was very good, Attempt #1 was slightly better. I might try Attempt #1 again with a finer grind, and see if I can get more extraction out of these beans. If not, maybe I’ll go back to French press with a really long steep time, or just use the beans to make cold brew.
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Paddle Notes
Cathy and I headed to Middle River, MD today and checked out Dundee Creek, where we had not previously paddled before. The put-in is at Marshy Point Nature Center, just to the south of the nature center building, from a floating dock at the end of a several-hundred-foot-long pier. Definitely bring a set of wheels, or a partner to help carry. It’s an easy put-in once you get there, though.
Dundee Creek runs on the north side of Marshy Point, and Saltpeter Creek is on the south side. The two converge and feed into the Gunpowder River, which in turn feeds into (of course) the Chesapeake Bay. All of these are tidal estuaries. We were there near low tide, but we mostly avoided the shallow side channels. Marshy Point has set up a nice paddle trail, which we followed using the provided GPS coordinates. The paddle trail would probably be about 2 miles if we had gone directly point-to-point, but we meandered around and stretched it out to 3 miles. Almost all of the shoreline here is lined with reeds, which we learned are invasive Phragmites australis. It is kind of scary how it has taken over almost every inch of real estate along the shore.
For a Tuesday morning, there were a lot of people out on the water — a bunch of people kayak fishing, a ranger-led canoe tour, and several folks out in identical sit-on-top kayaks, who I figured must have been together, although I’m not sure where they launched (possibly from the nearby Dundee Creek Marina). Definitely plenty of room for everyone, as the creek is essentially a very large expanse of open water.
This was a nice place to paddle, but given that it’s 35 to 40 minutes’ drive from home, I probably won’t be coming here all that often (although I do enjoy the hiking trails here). Nice to have checked it out, though, and I’m sure I’ll return one of these days.