Overdue

Bad habit: Every five years the siren song of the emergency room calls out, and I find myself heading in with some minor damage. Never anything truly threatening -- the sort of thing that requires a small amount of attention, the appropriate bandage and instructions to take ibuprofen until it feels better. Sort of the grown-up version of a band-aid and a kiss on the boo-boo.

Lately, I thought this trend was broken. It's been a whole eight years since the last incident (broken ankle coming down from Joe's claim). Maybe at 40, one grows out of this sort of nonsense, or has developed better woe-avoidance skills. It's certainly not that I stopped doing interesting things. (I hope)

Alas, it was merely overdue.

This time it was four stitches on my chin. I was minding my own business, riding a consistent 24 mph downhill in the bike lane along Foothill near the 280 on-ramp near the end of my ride two weeks ago when a clueless and/or evil driver attempted to maneuver his/her car into the same space I was to occupy.

On the bright side, despite the car's apparent intention to inhabit my space sneakily from behind, I did have the reflexes to avoid it. However, the thought "Phew that was close -- jerk!" was closely followed by "Oh no -- there's no way I'm going to avoid going down..." Because I had to veer off my line and brake hard to avoid the car, the bike then fishtailed toward a curb. One could argue that the fishtailing would have been avoided by not hitting the back brake so hard, but in the heat of the moment, all possible braking power was needed.

A real rider would probably have been able to bunny hop up the curb, but I still lack the ability to reliably execute this skill. So I hit it -- hard. Argh. I did manage to aim myself in such a manner to end on the sidewalk instead of in the road. It just seemed prudent.

The bike toppled over gently once it ejected me; I got to experience a slow-motion Superman flight while musing that Chad would be annoyed by me damaging myself just before a trip, and then the sidewalk came up and met my hands and chin.

Did I mention that, quite uncharacteristically, I had forgotten to wear my gloves that morning? Ouch. I forgot my phone too. Bad Ma.

It was pretty apparent almost immediately that all the major parts were ok. I pulled myself into a sitting position next to the bike and reached for my water bottle to take a drink while collecting my thoughts.

Problem-Car did not even bother to stop, but Roberta, the next driver on the road did. She was incredulous at the dumb move of the other driver and wanted to know if there was anything she could do to help. A passing pedestrian also stopped -- he was livid about what he had seen and wanted to call the cops. I didn't see any point, as the only part of the car I saw was the side passenger door, and it all happened so fast that I'm not even sure what color it was, much less who was driving or what the license plate number was.

Amidst this discussion, I realized that my chin was bleeding a lot, and decided to take Roberta up on her offer of a ride. She kindly put the bike in the back of her truck, found some water and a wad of paper towels so I could clean off a little (with a quick peek at the gouge in the mirror -- eeew!), let me borrow her phone to leave a message for Chad, and dropped me off in downtown Mountain View. I wandered into the Minor Injury Clinic at Kaiser, hoping to get an appointment for later in the day to get stitched up.

Yes I was dirty, but do people in the waiting room really need to stare so much when you limp your bike into the doctor's office?

Fortunately, the staff at Kaiser in Mountain View are quite helpful and good. They squeezed me in between existing appointments and did the standard crash check, x-rayed my hands, and scraped the gravel out of my chin before stitching it up.

I reclaimed my bike from the security desk where the receptionist had left it and walked a block down the street to the bike shop to get help untangling the chain, which had dropped off the inside of the rings and jammed itself up against the frame. The guys in the shop didn't seem as actively disturbed by my appearance as much as those in the waiting room, presumably because I was no longer actively bleeding, but one of them did comment that I seemed remarkably cheerful for having just crashed. I only wish I had been able to come up with the reply that occurred to me later: "What would Jens do?"

(Jens Voigt is the epitome of the hard man of the cycling peloton, for those unfortunate enough not to know already. He bounces off the pavement, gets back on, and gets the job done. Most admirable.)

At any rate, once the bike was taken care of, I rode gently back to Sunnyvale, just in time to pick Nim up from camp and pack for Downieville.

It wasn't until I got home that I realized that my bike jersey was (a) covered in blood and (b) riddled with holes across the chest. No wonder the other people in the Kaiser waiting room looked at me oddly.

Lest you worry, I was out on the mountain bike at Yuba Pass the very next day. You can just barely make out the little black threads of the stitches hanging down from my chin.

And now, just a couple of weeks later, all is healed up, and my hands no longer hurt, even after logging a 100+ mile hilly day near Mt. Rainier this week. More later...

Sand

Five years later, she still does the same things at the beach.

Nov 2006

Aug 2011

4th of July in Downieville

The Fourth of July is always entertaining in a small town. Here are a few highlights:

Nim decorated her bike so she could be in the small town parade down Main Street. Linda walked with her so Chad and I could be spectators.


The fire danger up there is too high to allow fireworks, but one couple in town has a tradition of unrolling two giant rolls of bubble wrap down the street at the end of the parade, which everyone duly stomples -- it sounds a lot like fireworks, and is just delightfully wacky to watch.

The rest of the afternoon brings a tug-of-war and foot races down Main Street. Nimue entered the 8-year-old race, came in third (of three) and was frustrated, only calming down after I grudgingly ran in the over-30 women's race. I'm not a sprinter, but managed to strategically place myself in third, just like Nimue, which cheered her up immensely. (Good thing she didn't come in second; I let myself get boxed in, and probably couldn't have placed myself in that spot!)



Race written up in the Downieville Mountain Messenger. Oooh, we're famous... (Click on the image to blow it up and see our names.)



Much water play. It was up around 90 degrees the whole time we were up there, so the kiddie pool, sprinkler, and mister were much appreciated. The first small pool suffered a large woe after being cartwheeled into one too many times, was resurrected as a circular slip-and-slide dance floor, and then replaced with a bigger splash pool.


Chad and I took an entertaining bikepacking trip on local dirt roads and trails --more on this later.

Fishing at Upper Sardine Lake, at the base of the Sierra Buttes:




Nimue's other big project in Downieville was to try to make money to buy more Zoobles. For those not in the know, Zoobles are disgustingly cute little plastic critters that come be folded up in a ball; they pop their ears and eyes open when the little magnet inside gets close enough to something metal. I keep finding an armada of them bristling off the refrigerator door.

At any rate, she had a few, wanted more, and decided that selling chocolate chip cookies in Downieville was the way to make money more quickly than waiting forever for her allowance savings to build up. Being a Towle, she quickly set up the "Towle House" cookie booth, and smiled and waved at every passer-by until all the cookies were gone.


She made such a haul at the first attempt (something like $40), that she was motivated to repeat the process the following weekend. By chance, this was the weekend of the Downieville Classic bike races, which multiply the town's normal population by about a factor of 10 and fill the main street with a mountain biking festival. However, it was less of a cookie-eating population (a beer stand would have gone over well, albeit illegal for the small ones...), and some of the local kids got in on the action to provide some sales competition. Nimue banded together with them and did sell more cookies during the bike races, though her take was not quite as much as the previous attempt.


Part of the deal with us to allow her the second stand (these things do require parental/grandparental effort and resources, after all) was that she would donate some of her profit. She chose to give 25% of her take from both sales days -- $16.27 to be precise -- to the Sierra Buttes Trail Stewardship operation that maintains the trails up in that neck of the woods. The woman who got the envelope was so tickled that she immediately took Nimue over to the race announcer, who not only announced her donation to the entire town, but also interviewed her over the very loud microphone. Linda could hear it all the way over at her house across the river! Nim was nervous, but spoke very well, and was clearly on a high, feeling famous, afterwards.

Scan Pile Procrastination

I've been working through the scan pile this morning, procrastinating other things, and trying to clean up the office enough to locate the missing truck service coupons. Here is another batch of Nim's work for your enjoyment.

Peepie Cheepies

A quick update on the finches who needed help with their nest:

6/20: Three little hatchlings, small enough to hide under the pile of fluff. You could see them poke their little heads up only when it was feeding time.

Today: Looking like awkward teenagers.

I suspect they will be gone by the time we get back from Downieville.

First Week of Summer Vacation

Not much writing lately, as we've been too busy doing stuff since school got out.

The first week of vacation included:

1) A trip to Gilroy Gardens. I took her friend Jenna along too since it was "Bring a Friend Free" week. The place is small enough that they could explore the park in a more or less free-range fashion.

2) A sub-24-hour backpacking trip up to the Black Mountain Backpack Camp. Nim and I hiked in with most of the stuff on Wednesday afternoon; Chad joined us by bike after work. We enjoyed the sunset, stars, fog rolling in over the ocean, and city lights twinkling around the Bay, and had the entire place to ourselves. In the morning, Chad rolled down early to work, and Nimue and I headed out later in a more leisurely fashion. Nim carried her own sleeping bag and all of her stuff!


3) A most excellent piano performance by Allen Toussaint, as part of the Stanford Jazz Festival.


The second week of summer vacation started out with a dinner party (butterflied leg of lamb, grilled -- yum!), followed by me essentially giving my finger a gooseegg by slamming it in the garage door. Big purple swelling on the pad of the fourth finger on my right hand; the photo below does not do justice to the violently dark purple color it is at present, but does give you an idea of how much bigger it is than the other one. Nim said "You should be more careful with your body, Mommy!" and then got me ice and tea, all of her own accord. "That's what you do when I get hurt," she says. Good kid.

Butter Fail

I went mountain biking this morning, to shake off the aftereffects of helping with the early part of the end-of-year 3rd grade picnic of chaos. Naturally, going mountain biking means making butter.

Normally this is a straighforward process: add a spoonful of yogurt or buttermilk to a cup of cream and let it sit in the bottle overnight on the counter, put bottle on the bike and go for a ride, and drain the buttermilk/rinse the butter when back home.

Not so easy this time, sadly. I realized about halfway through my ride that I had put two cups of cream in instead of one, and they had rapidly whipped and expanded to fill all of the head space in the bottle. Doomed from the start. I figured it'd be no big deal -- just throw the goo in the stand mixer at home and that should be the end of it.

Not so. Ten minutes later, there was still no separation of butterfat solids from buttermilk. It was so warm in the house that I suspsected that was part of the problem. Let's add some ice water to the mess in the mixer to cool it off...

Fling! Watch the ice cube describe a beautiful parabolic trajectory across the kitchen, as the splotches of butter substance that came out of the bowl with it de-adhere and splatter everywhere. The cats will celebrate when they discover the happy scavenger hunt.

Still no separation of the buttermilk out. The gloop had a nice whipped texture, as well as a yummy flavor and aroma, so I delcared it to be "Delicious Buttery Spread". Selling these creations to the rest of the household is all about the right name -- Buns of Happiness (random leftovers chopped up, encased in bread dough, and baked) will be cheerfully eaten, whereas Cheesy Gloop (random leftovers mixed with cheese sauce and baked) is roundly rejected by the small one. In this case, the mystery substance is indeed quite buttery, and delicious!

Make your own gum kit

I've been fighting a cold for the last few days. The insides of my lungs feel like they are covered in sticky goo, and coughing it all out is slow going. So, when Chad got up early this morning to go out on a mountain bike ride, Nimue and I decided to slug about the house instead of going for a ride as originally planned. She lazily watched way too many cartoons, while I enjoyed the latte Chad made me before he left (thank you!) while reading in bed.

Eventually, though, I had to get up. I figured that *something* useful should be wrung out of the day, and headed out into the yard to find some gentle chore to putter away at. Maybe just some light weeding...

which led to the realization that the bushes needed to be trimmed,

which led to the thought that maybe the shredded cedar mulch sitting in the side yard should be put down on the spot that had just been weeded and cleaned up,

which led to the thought that perhaps the other section of the yard needed the same treatment...

You see where this is going. Eventually I managed to stop and emerged back into the house, battered in cedar tufts adhered to me with multiple varieties of sticky sap.

Thankfully, Nimue's morning pancake project hadn't involved any major kitchen mayhem. However, at this point, she had gleefully dug a project out of the pantry: The "Make Your Own Gum Kit".

If one of your kids ever receives this item of wonder, you might want to consider conveniently "losing" it. It looks like an innocuous little box with a few bags of stuff that need to be microwaved and mixed up, and voila -- gum appears.

Right. I was suspicious, and decided to have a snack before taking a shower so I could vaguely supervise the action. Good thing, too.

Step one: put the little bag of corn syrup in a cup of hot water so it'll be runnier and easier to get out of the bag. So far, so good.

Step two: Heat up the chicle pellets in a little plastic tray in the microwave. Nimue grabbed a spoon to stir it. Said spoon got covered in sticky goo, so naturally, she grabbed another spoon to scrape it off. Now there were two spoons covered in incredibly sticky, non-water-soluble stuff. Great. I stopped the process before any more spoons were involved, and got most of it back in the tray, and went out to the garage to find the Goo-Gone.

Step three: Mix the corn syrup into the chicle and knead the whole mess in powdered sugar. The usual powdered sugar mushroom cloud ensued; on the bright side, Nim knows how to clean this one up. I continued to work on the Goo-Gone-soaked spoons. Much kneading ensued.

Step four: Knead in the powdered flavor. Seems simple, right?
Not if you've already kneaded in so much powdered sugar that the mass is stiff and crumbly. Nim took a little break while I finished cleaning off the spoons, and then I effected a recovery of the crumbly gum by getting my hands wet and kneading in a little water. Sounds unwise, I know, but it worked -- aside from leaving a monolayer of sticky gum over every surface of my hands.

Step five: roll the mass out thin and cut into sticks. No way was this stuff touching my rolling pin or knives. We ripped off hunks and rolled them into gumballs instead.

The end product was a gum-like substance, which Nimue reports has good flavor...for about 30 seconds. "Kind of messy, but ok," she reports. Also the grumbling about kid kits that can't be completely done by the kids, on both of our parts. All kid projects should be water soluble, too.

So let's recap: sticky mucus in lungs, sticky sap covered in bark dust all over body, gum-covered hands. A humdinger of a Sunday morning, for sure. Nimue did learn the trick of cleaning gummy hands by rubbing them with olive oil before washing them. As I tried to scrub off the sap in the shower, it occurred to me that I should have brought the oil in there with me too. Clearly, I need a strigil. Or fewer sticky things in my life.

Crazed creatures this week

Insane cat.

Demonic butterfly on Mt. El Sombroso.

Results of tired Ma + crazed child.

Gratuitous mariposa lily picture.