Iceland Poppy

A picture of an Iceland poppy I took a few weeks ago.

Stellar weather and long term forecasts

I found this long term forecast from the Climate Impacts Group. They've done a little weather projecting into the fall and winter (and even the spring). Here is an excerpt,

The seasonal outlooks through spring 2007 suggest... a continuation of warmer than average conditions throughout the region for the coming fall, winter, and spring seasons... pointing toward[s] a weak-to-moderate intensity El Niño event for the next few seasons... suggest[ing]... an anomalously dry fall and winter for much of the region.

Of course there were some serious disclaimers, but if you follow this prediction, the forecast doesn't look so hot for skiers.
In the meantime, it's warm and dry on the mountain. Camp Muir enjoyed a balmy low of 49 last night! It's at 59 degrees as of 9 AM.
Image by Rob Veal

First on Fixie - I Didn't Die

When I did the single-speed conversion on the Schwinn Le Tour II, I was left with a rear hub that has mysterious threads on the non-drive side. "So this is a flip-flop hub," I thought.
Curiosity got the best of me today when I went to the bike shop and got a Surly 17 tooth track cog and lock ring. Let's try fixie!
Fixie, or fixed gear, is when there is no freewheel or freehub allowing the rear wheel to coast when not pedaling. If the wheel is turning, so is the chain, and so are the cranks, and so are your feet. A flip-flop hub allows a regular freewheel cog on one side and a fixed cog on the other. By taking off the wheel and flipping it around, one is able to ride either single-speed (with coasting) or fixed gear (with no coasting).
Mike at the Re-Cycle bike shop was kind enough to let me use his work stand and tools to put it on. The cog was too thick for the multi-speed chain I was using, so I also had to throw on a beefy, silver single-speed chain.
Having never even sat on a fixed gear bike, I didn't dare try to ride home in this configuration. So I flippity-flopped the wheel back to single-speed and rode home normally.
Once home, I grabbed the wrench and flipped around the wheel and tightened up the chain and took it for a spin. Actually, the bike took me for a spin. I had trouble just getting out of the driveway. I live at the top of a pretty steep hill. I was riding both brakes at a slow crawl all the way down the hill.
My plan was to ride down to a nearby parking lot and just get the hang of the track bike style pedaling. The first parking was being resurfaced, so I rode neighborhood streets to a shopping center and practiced a while there. What pitiful track standing I had learned to do on my single-speed didn't seem to help much on the fixie. No longer able to ratchet the cranks to keep my best foot forward, I was all over the place, backward and forward, and thowing a foot out constantly. At one point I fell over when I couldn't get my foot out quick enough. Embarrasing, but expected. Standing for only a few seconds was the best I could do. Maybe some practice will help.
Finally I felt comfortable enough to try some back streets. I rode around a couple of blocks, ascending and descending hills. I was completely unaware of how the whole back-pressure on the pedals would feel. Once or twice I went to wipe sweat or shift in the saddle and forgot that I couldn't brace myself on one leg for a moment. Gotta keep pedaling!
Want to stop? Gotta keep pedaling!
Want to slow down? Back pressure, but keep pedaling! I felt no shame applying both front and rear brakes.
The 17t cog was a little steeper than the 18t that I've been riding, but it felt kind of aggressive and snappy. I zipped up the hill to my house a little more quickly.
I doubt I will try this configuration when riding the streets on my commute. It just makes me too nervous. The real fun will begin when I get to a trail or lonely road, flip the wheel around, and see what happens on a nice, long flat.
Even if I don't ride the fixed cog often, the thick silver chain looks a little sharper than the previous chain I had on.

The yearning

It is rapidly dawning on me that at some point this weekend I need to clean my tent and assemble my touring equipment and have it at the ready. At the moment I really feel the need to get away for a weekend, to tour somewhere. I have no idea where I would go just yet, or when the opportunity will present itself, but I just need to be ready for when it does. Right now nothing else really seems to interest me. I managed 44km on the bike before work this morning -- it was pleasant, but it simply wasn't long enough to offer the sort of escape that I feel I need right now.
Ironically, I had the chance a month after returning from Scotland -- with the Gold Coast Show long weekend. At the time I opted to stay back, feeling a little "toured out" and nursing an ankle problem. Ever since that weekend, I have yearned to get away, not just for the ride, but for the whole experience of pedalling to a destination unknown and setting up camp wherever I feel like it at the end of the day. There are no more long weekends this year -- so it can only be for one night at this stage, but that alone would be worth it.
* * * * *
In other news, Tweed Coast Treadly reports that tomorrow is National ride to work day. I must be out of the loop because this is the first I've heard of it, and I wasn't even aware it was a national thing (I think Brisbane runs it's version in March). Ironically, tomorrow may well see the start of a spike in the number of people riding to work here on the 'Coast with all the road closures in Sufferer's Parasite because of a car race this weekend. That said, my route is usually gridlocked regardless, so it won't impact on me at all.
I'll be riding to work as normal tomorrow regardless, but I often wonder at the effectiveness of running something like this once a year. I really think using a free breakfast to entice a large number of people to get on their bikes for one day a year without any kind of education, training (or even a clue in a lot of cases) has the capacity to do more harm than good. Essentially the problems occur when these people have "close calls" in the traffic, or encounter other problems like flat tyres that they have not yet learned the skills to deal with. These people then end up telling all and sundry about their bad experiences, which only puts more people off (the old marketing saying is that a person who has a bad experience tells 30-50 people, whereas a person who has a good experience usually tells 3-5 if you're lucky).
A better option in my view would be to abolish the free breakfast and t-shirt altogether, and just run smaller group rides to the city centre for work on more regular intervals. That way, the experienced cyclists could actually ride with and instruct the newbies rather than slaving over a barbecue. Once people have learned from the experienced cyclists, they might just enjoy it enough to do it more often than once a year. Sure, we might have to survive without the politicians speeches that way, but anyone who's watched the opening of the election campaign this year will realise that those rarely lead to enlightenment.

Torridon photo course

Dawn over Loch Clair, looking towards Liathach. A couple of weekends ago I was on a photography course in Torridon. It was a revelation. Not, unfortunately in photographic terms, but of the beauty of this part of Scotland in autumn. I know my own east coast stamping grounds well in all seasons, but this was the first time I'd been on the west coast outside of the narrow band of June to August. It was empty (save a few bands of tripod-toting photographers, and the cars of hill walkers at road ends and wider verges of the single track roads). The sun was low and the light (on Friday and Sunday) reflected off the tawny hillsides. I had never imagined such warm colours in an almost treeless landscape.
The shot above was taken on Sunday morning, towards the end of an early session at Loch Clair. We were in the minibus at 7 am, in the dark, slowed momentarily by a stag walking slowly down the road in front of us. On location (how pretentious that sounds) by 7.30, as the blue light gave way to rose and silver, and I sustained a tripod injury while trying to coerce what to me is basically machinery into capturing the beauty of the dawn.
Sunday at least had a dawn. On Saturday we were also out by 7, and bracing ourselves and tripods against rain and gale-force winds at the same location, and then after breakfast at Loch Maree.

My aim for the weekend had been to get a concentrated infusion of technical know-how and that wasn't forthcoming. However, looking back from a couple of weeks distance, I'm realising that I did learn some things about composition. The most frustrating thing was to know what I wanted to capture in terms of the quality of light, and not to be able to manipulate the camera to do that. I am singularly dim when it comes to f-stops. The old horror of maths lessons at school rears its head.
Throughout, I was concentrating so hard on trying to take artful photographs that I didn't take shots of what would normally appeal to me in a landscape. It was a very strange experience - 'trying too hard' is how I sum it up to myself.
I'll leave you with another shot of Liathach, again one of frustration as the clouds scrolled and crimped over the summit quicker than I could fumble with my f-stops, and I walked ankle deep into the loch before I'd realised it, in search of the perfect composition.

'THERE'S MORE THAN SEVEN (MODERN) WONDERS IN THE WORLD ...

..I've just seen number 8... '





You won't remember that song Jonny, it was 'Venus in Blue Jeans' - which I absolutely adored when I was a young girl of about 9 or 10!





Back to our wonder, it is the 'Great Wall of Aby', built by you and your Pa. The final brick was laid today! That completes all 200 foot of wall, 17 levels, as it rises and falls. It has taken a long time but it was worth it.

The retaining wall is finally finished! How many years has that taken?





This is the view from the patio - it all looks a bit different now Jonny, especially with the laurels in place.





It has been a quiet day, but a nice day - we picked more apples at the apple farm down Rye Lane; some are for storing and the rest are for the apple chutney, which I will make tomorrow. We have already tried a jar of the first batch, it goes very nicely in our lunch time sandwiches.





The cats had a lazy day - they insisted on going out last night and this is the result



they spent the day snoozing in the conservatory - but they did leave an impressive number of bodies outside the patio doors this morning. Clever girls. Lets hope that this means we won't be seeing rats whizzing around the garden this winter!





I hope all is well with you.





Lots of love,





Mum





xxx

32

I haven't got around to posting this yet, but I managed to have a birthday and survive yesterday. I would like to say that I have some kind of divine revelation to mark the occasion this year, but that would be a complete lie. About the only thing I've discovered is that Queensland traffic lights are slow enough that they allow time to do a few stretches in the closing stages of a long ride if you happen to cop a red one. I practiced that on the way home from Little Nerang Dam this morning, where I was reminded of just what a nice ride that really is at dawn.
In other news, I have managed to complete the full journal for my trip to Christmas Creek earlier this year. I wrote about it on this blog, but the journal includes a few pictures that didn't make it onto these pages. I have some more tour journals to update before heading off on the New Zealand trip next month, with all the riding I plan to do in that time (starting with The Wonders of Glorious Mee this weekend), it could be a busy five weeks or so.