Author: Bryan

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Making himself at home

We’ve had a “FOUND PUPPY” sign up out by the busy road for two weeks now.  I’ve only received one phone call, from a woman who lost her little black pomeranian.  “I’m not sure what this dog is, ma’am, but I can tell you for sure he’s not a pomeranian.”

I brought him inside on the first night and slept on the couch with him, since it was chilly and there were thunderstorms. I just didn’t feel right about letting the little guy stay outside by himself. Now he stays outside during the day, while we’re gone, but spends his evenings in the kitchen and sleeps inside, too. Continue reading “Making himself at home”

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Tent Cleaning

Seeing as how this blog’s name is “Past Tents”, you shouldn’t be surprised to find out that we are frequent tent USERS but we’re not very good about maintenance. We tend to leave our tents crammed into their stuff sacks for weeks after a camping trip, without airing them out or cleaning them at all.

20110306 - Tent Cleaning-4

Finally, we had enough of stinky tents and washed all four of them this afternoon. We scrubbed them down with soapy water, rinsed them, and even soaked each piece in Mirzyme to get rid of that wet-tent smell. We hung our strange laundry on the backyard line to dry in the breeze. Worked like a charm.

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Snow Day!

Snow Day #1-

It’s a snow day!  The snow began to fall in the middle of Sunday afternoon, and by dark we had six or eight inches of white powder.  I tried to take a silent bedtime walk in the quiet blanket of snow, but instead my walk because a sort of proving ground, a laughing kinetic experiment.  Yes, they CAN ride polo bikes and municycles in the snow. Continue reading “Snow Day!”

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I Heart Hydrocodone

I used to have great teeth.  And then they absolutely went to shit.  (This happened around the time Mandy was born, so I’ve always blamed pregnancy and nursing.  I’m not sure if this has any foundation in fact, or if it’s just imaginative fault-finding.)

I kept up with dental work for awhile.  But then there were the single-mommy-with-no-dental-insurance years, and it just wasn’t possible to take care of everything.

So, now that I have good insurance, I’ve been working on getting my teeth fixed.  Last year, we did lots of cleaning and filling and a ridiculously complicated root canal.  This year’s big project is to remove teeth that can’t be saved.  Friday, I went to the oral surgeon and had four baddies cut out.

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CRF New Years

This is Bryan’s seventh New Years at Hamilton Valley, the Cave Research Foundation’s facility at Mammoth Cave in Kentucky.  For Mandy and I, it’s the fifth New Years.  It’s become a sort of fixture in our family schedule.  Mandy makes a big deal about having just the right kind of sparkling grape juice, which she drinks right from the bottle at the New Year’s ‘party’ with our friends.

This year, for the first time, our family was asked to handle kitchen duties for one day.  We got up early to cook breakfast for about 40 hungry cavers.  Then Mandy and I got ready to go caving, and Bryan stayed above ground to cook garlic chicken, rice pilaf, and the best lemon pie in the world.

For the first time, this year (because of newly revised guidelines) Mandy’s old enough to cave with regular survey teams in Mammoth Cave. (She went on a trip to Roppel a couple of years ago, but that was a special one-time deal.)  So in addition to her usual long visits with friends, and helping a bit in the kitchen, and hanging around the edges of conversations with people she admires, she actually got to go caving two days in a row.  She was a happy, happy girl. Continue reading “CRF New Years”

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Christmas 2011

We had a good Christmas weekend at our house.  We slept late several days in a row, and we ate Chinese food at two different restaurants.  We went on a long bike ride with a friend.  It’s true that there were lots of presents – we worked together to choose and send gifts to family and friends, and when Mandy got home from her trip to Tulsa, we took turns opening gifts from other family members and friends, and gifts for us from each other.

At our house, Christmas isn’t a religious holiday.  And while we do like presents, we try hard not to focus on them.   We celebrate Christmas by taking the time to stop everything else we’re doing and be with the people we love.  We drink eggnog together and we lay in a pile on the couch, reading, for hours and hours, because it is Christmas, and because these are the people we care most about in the world, and because what we want is to be here, with them, in this warm house, always.

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Mandy Goes to Camp

Through the geology instructor I had last fall, we found out about the Halberg Ecology Camp, a week-long program for middle school kids, run by Audubon Arkansas. Mandy had to apply for the camp, which included recommendations from teachers and an essay. But she was accepted! (And I had to send a big fat check, also.)

This was her first ‘sleep away camp’ but as predicted she didn’t miss us at all–she had a wonderful time. She spent a week in the heat of summer outside, and sleeping in a forest service cabin without air-conditioning. She spent a week with a group of kids who also like to be outside, and who like to learn about science and nature. Best of all, I think, she got to spend a week in science classes taught by high-school and college science teachers. The kids learned about mammology and herpetology and geology, got to spend time in canoes, and ate good food.

She came back tired, happy, and using big words. A handful of this year’s campers get to return next summer for a ‘senior camp’. Mandy’s looking forward to finding out if she made the cut.

UPDATE 11/15/10 –
I got an email today from the director of the Halberg camps. Mandy has been invited back for “senior camp” next year, and so has her favorite other camper, Inge. Hooray!

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Alys Super Cool Polo Bike

When we decided we’d like to try playing bike polo, we started looking for a ratty old bike to use. I was surprised at how difficult it was to find an adult-sized bike at pawnshops and thrift stores. After several days of dedicated effort, I found this great girls’ 1975 Schwinn Varsity at a scary pawn shop in south LR. The guy wanted $40 for it, but I told him it was clearly not worth it, since the back brakes didn’t work and the tires were too rotten to hold air for more than eight minutes, tops. (Should I feel bad about this? I’m not sure.) Fortunately, I’d worn black pants to work on Friday, so grubbing around in the back room of a pawnshop was okay, because the grease didn’t show.

Aly's Polo Bike-18

Schwinn used to make great bikes, back before they became a toy company and started producing full-sized bicycle replicas instead.

I guess I have a soft spot for the old Schwinns. (And I’ve noticed that Bryan’s an amazingly good sport about it.) This bike’s great, a real classic, made in Chicago, and came with many entertaining features, such as Giant Reflectors The Size of A Cat, Awesome Upside Down Homeless Guy Handlebars, and those old paddle-style shift levers that look like they should be used to serve draft beer.

Aly's Polo Bike-14

Saturday, Bryan and I spent lots of time happily fiddling with the bike. We removed lots of unnecessary parts. He took off all the reflectors, and everything related to the non-operational back brake. He removed one of the chainrings and the guard, along with the front derailleur and cabling. I chopped off the kickstand with a hacksaw.

Earlier this spring, when we remodeled my Voyageur touring bike, we replaced the useful but ugly Michelin gumwalls with nice new Schwalbe tires. We’d saved the Michelins, though, and I was thrilled to find that they’d fit on the polo bike just fine. We only had to buy new tubes and rim strips for it.

Aly's Polo Bike-2

We moved the handlebars, but only a little bit. We decided to, for the most part, retain the Awesome Upside Down Homeless Guy Handlebar arrangement because it’s surprisingly comfy. We took off the ratty handlebar tape, and after much experimentation, settled on a new placement for the single remaining brake lever.

Aly's Polo Bike-7

Proper polo bikes, we’ve learned, have spoke protectors. This makes sense. It seems as if mallets, balls, and other peoples’ feet would not only make for bad crashes, but could really damage a wheel. So early in the week, I secured a generous supply of corrugated plastic scraps from the sign shop at work. We traced the wheels and cut out circles, making a straight slit along the radius so that the discs would ‘dish’ properly along the spokes. Then we marked the spokes, drilled holes through the plastic, and attached them to the wheels with zip-ties.

Aly's Polo Bike-1

Being less than amazingly creative, I copied the old Schwinn “star” pattern from the frame of the bike and filled it in with Sharpie. I threw in some polka dots made with paint from Mandy’s crafts box, just on the principle that polka dots are usually a good idea.

Aly's Polo Bike-3

I’m ready to play. The back wheel discs aren’t quite done, because I’m waiting for some sort of creative inspiration. We may make some changes to the handlebars and brakes at some point. But for now, it’s great. Total cost: $38, for the bike, rim strips, and tubes.

Aly's Polo Bike-5

It rides beautifully. 3-2-1-POLO!

Aly's Polo Bike-9

 

 

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Date Night for Bike Nerds

We heard at the last minute that Ian Sims, the founder and CEO of the Australian recumbent trike company Greenspeed, would be visiting Little Rock late this afternoon. It was very cool to meet him (and Greenspeed’s US marketing person, Deanna) and ride the X5 trike they brought with them. (BOO CHAINWHEEL BIKE SHOP STAFF, for your total lack of marketing and general pigheaded ignorance about this event.)

After a nice supper, since we had our Greenspeed GTT in town with us, we went out to Two Rivers Park for an early evening ride. The weather was perfect and the park was uncrowded. I wonder how much more traffic those paved trails will get after the new bridge is completed?

Then we headed to MacArthur Park, near the Arkansas Arts Center, to watch the Little Rock Bike Polo club play. They use an old tennis/roller hockey court that’s only half-lit, so they bring their own lighting for the other half and run extension cords across the grass. And what they do looks like a ton of fun.

It would be easy to say “we don’t have time to play” or “it looks dangerous.” It would be easy to say “what a silly idea.”

But when I’m all used up and it’s time for me to die, I want to say things like “remember the summer we played bike polo? Remember how the weeds grew up the sides of the court, and how we drank cheap beer in the dark, and how we laughed?”