Author: Aly

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On Lake Ouachita, and Naps

By the middle of May, I was pretty much worn out.  For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been kind of ragged.  It was a tough end to the semester, and we’ve been shorthanded at work, and I’ve overcommitted myself on bike projects, and I just needed a break.  Bryan and I decided that, after Mandy left for Tulsa on Friday evening, we’d just disappear for a couple of days.  We chose Lake Ouachita for our getaway, since we thought it would be the quietest of the nearby lakes on a busy holiday weekend, and we put in at Buckville since it’s a faraway boat launch.

We didn’t get the quiet lake we’d hoped for, but we did manage to find our own private island on the edge of it. Continue reading “On Lake Ouachita, and Naps”

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National Bike Week – Rocktown Trackdown

Since last summer, Bryan and I had been thinking that a bike/walk scavenger hunt in Little Rock would be fun.  Vinny’s alleycats are great fun for a handful of people, but what if somebody did a race that was a little less competitive and a little easier to navigate?  If participants were given a map, it’d be easier to plan a route.  If people just had to answer questions, we wouldn’t need many volunteers. Continue reading “National Bike Week – Rocktown Trackdown”

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National Bike Week – Bike to Work Day

Sometime in February, a coworker from upstairs said that she’d like to do Bike to Work Day as an ’employee wellness program.’  She’s the one who does Walk Across Arkansas, and a number of other wellness things – she’s a gerontologist – and she thought we should do Bike to Work again.

In the past, Extension has done Bike to Work Day as part of the 4H program, with really limited success.  LaVona and I decided that we’d do better.  Against my better judgment, we formed a Committee.  I hate committees.  But this one was pretty good, because we picked people we liked, and every month we’d ride across town to eat lunch someplace and talk about what we were going to do about Bike to Work Day. Continue reading “National Bike Week – Bike to Work Day”

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National Bike Week – Cyclofemme Womens’ Ride

One thing I brought back from the National Bike Summit this spring has to do with women in cycling.  Only 25% of cyclists in the US are women.  Why is that?  Because, as a group, we really do need different things than men in order to be comfortable riding bikes.  Women like to ride as a social thing, I learned.  Women like to feel clean and safe.  Women like to feel accepted when they ride.  And if women can be encouraged to ride more, more kids will grow up on bikes.  It’s worth working on.  I hadn’t realized it before. Continue reading “National Bike Week – Cyclofemme Womens’ Ride”

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Poor Hayduke

Hayduke’s been swimming so much that his ears have been bothering him.  We ordered some stuff online that was recommended as a sort of dog swimmer’s ear remedy.  It reviewed well, and we figured it would help.

Last week, we noticed some little bumps on top of his head.  No big deal, we thought – they’re probably some kind of bug bites, or scratches from sticker bushes incurred while crashing through the underbrush in the woods somewhere.

But this week, on Monday, the little bumps were all over his poor head, and they were bothering him.  All around his ears, and all down his neck, were little bleedy bumps.  On Tuesday they were worse, and by Tuesday night they had spread to his muzzle.  His eyes and mouth were all swollen.  He was really feeling bad, and it was scary for him and for us.

First thing Wednesday morning, he and I were at the vet’s office.  The awful hives and the swelling were an allergic reaction to the ear stuff, they said.  He got a terrible haircut and some benedryl and steroid shots, and I stayed home all morning with him until the antihistamines kicked in and the swelling started to subside.  He’s got different ear medicine now, and some oral antibiotics, but it’s going to take awhile for these awful itchy bleedy hives to go away.

And the worst part?  He’s not allowed to swim for ten days. So stay away from “Vet’s Best Ear Relief” or else your $12 in over-the-counter product will turn into a $150 vet bill!

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We Has Boats

Well, we did it.  After a couple of weeks of semi-intensive research both online and in the water, we settled on what we wanted, confirmed our choices on the lake during the Ouachita Outdoor Outfitters spring “Demo Day”, wrote the check, and picked up the boats.

We figure that this year, we’ll skip our usual out-of-state week-long vacation in favor of buying the boats and then taking a couple of super-long weekend trips to boat around in our home state. Continue reading “We Has Boats”

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Falling Water Gravel Tour

Mandy’s shaping up to be a singlespeed rigid mountain bike girl.  She wears plaid and she smells bad and she says she has three speeds:  pedal, pedal harder, and walk.

We spent some miles last weekend on gravel roads up near Sand Gap.  Jarion decided to play SAG wagon / fisherman, which meant we could ride light and put our gear in his Jeepett.  It was a great weekend of grinding up gravel hills, flying down them, wading in the creek, eating steaks in the rain, and playing cards in the middle of gravel roads. Continue reading “Falling Water Gravel Tour”

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The Rebel Alliance

BACA, our local bike advocacy group, has been pretty stagnant for awhile.  Membership’s sort of gone flat (click here to sign up).  Lots of clubs and groups don’t feel represented.  Lots of minor events are sponsored, without much effect.  Meetings felt useless to most cyclists, and people stopped coming.  The most recent board tended to get into shouting matches at their meetings.

Major local issues went unnoticed, or worse, BACA board members said the wrong thing in public and other cyclists and groups spoke up to disagree.  The city and county government stopped listening because they didn’t know who to listen to.  BACA could have an enormous impact, but it doesn’t.

Or it didn’t.  Some of us got together to talk about it.  It turned out that a lot of cycling families and groups felt the same way we did.  We extended some olive branches to teams that have been feeling like outsiders.  The sort of vague, leaderless group ended up hatching  a group volunteers excited about serving on the board to make it a wider, louder, more active advocacy organization.

I managed to get a spot on the nominating committee, and four days after that committee was established, we had a full slate of officers to nominate – mountain bikers, road racers, blog writers, trail builders.  The April BACA meeting saw that group voted in, amid angry confusion and loudish cheering. It makes me smile to watch people do what they care about, and I’m looking forward to this year.  I’m looking forward to having an advocacy group here in LR.  I think they’ll accomplish great things, starting right about now.