It’s summertime, and it’s far too hot to backpack. Why not round up some friends and spend a weekend on an island? Bryan packed his TLR and the good pinhole camera into a Pelican box for the trip.
Transit of Venus
We have no telescope. But Bryan didn’t want to miss the transit of Venus across the sun, so he did a little research on the interwebs and came up with a way for us to watch safely.
He put a tripod in the driveway and mounted the binoculars on it. Then he fixed up a light stand with a piece of corrugated plastic clipped to it, and situated it so that the too-bright sun image from the binos would hit it. Hooray! The transit of Venus projected safely onto white plastic. Pretty clever, if you ask me. As an added bonus, we were able to see sunspots too!
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”
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”
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”
National Bike Week – Ride of Silence
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| Photo by Judy Lansky |
In May, every year, there’s an international event honoring those cyclists killed while riding. This year’s local event saw about 75 local cyclists riding silently, in pairs, from the Clinton Library to the state Capitol. We wore white shirts, and on our backs we pinned cards with the name and age of a fallen bike rider. Continue reading “National Bike Week – Ride of Silence”
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”
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!
The Maiden Voyage
Our new boats had been sitting in the garage, teasing us all week. Bryan and Mandy have new crossover kayaks and I have a hybrid (a kayak that looks a lot like a canoe). Jarion has a greenish fishing-ready sit-on-top, and Kathy chose an orange sit-on-top that’s now outfitted with a yoga mat trimmed to fit Ivy’s special sitting spot.
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”