no longer at ease

armed hiking

2011-10-20T21:40:00.000-07:00

For slow-learning elk hunters, the effort morphs into good healthy exercise in the pure mountain air, with guns. There was a lot of fine empty country.

We'd hiked in under moonlight to hide in the woods near a confluence of game trails. In the silver pre-dawn chill two coyotes on the far ridge performed a howl and response duet, interspersed with barks and imitations of elk bugling. Perhaps they weren't imitations ? but we found no evidence.

The small orange spot here is Ian, left to guard the exit from the woods while I circled around to tramp through the crusts of snow remaining in the shade of the dark timber. Nobody home there, either.

The hunter's moon waned. The weather was good and forecast to hold so, which is bad. In warm weather like this, with plenty of water available, the elk tend to scatter into the woods, there to hunker down and wait for cold. They detest heat. Time for plan C and 3/4 (I had many different plans, none of them effectual).

We hied ourselves off the top of the mesa and to another drainage. Here I embarrassed myself in front of the DOW, who were sitting on top of the mesa with spotting scopes, inspecting the hunters. Some joker had planted a trail marker on top of the hill next to the parking area. A simple trusting soul, I plunged into the scrub oak and fought my way up and down the cliffs several times, trying to find the trail, which surely must exist behind the trail marker. The officers of the DOW were alarmed by this erratic if not eccentric behaviour and came down to check. They found only Ian, as by now I was down in the wash looking at some unusually large bear tracks. It turns out the real trail is 200 yards up the road, marked with a stick.

Camp on the side of the hill, tucked in among the scrub oaks, surrounded by bear trails. Elk tracks were everywhere too, though none too new. By this time we'd hiked about eight miles, ten for me, the last few with backpacks in searing heat. Ian went off to inspect the nearby meadows while I cooked dinner, but found a freshly steaming bear sign in the middle of the game trail, which rather blunted his enthusiasm for solo wanderings into the dusk. All of this country sloped to one degree or another, our campsite no exception. The night was spent gradually slipping down to the bottom of the tent, then inchworming back up in the sleeping bag, all the while nervously listening for approaching bears with one hand on the bear spray. I've slept better.

Morning, looking out over Pinon Mesa with the La Sal peaks in the distance. I climbed up behind camp and glassed the hills for signs of life. Two elk were pottering around a meadow a half mile away across the creek. We pelted over there, circled around downwind, then stalked up along the game trails: the elk knew several tricks each worth two or more of ours, they skedaddled quietly and comprehensively.

Some animals had bedded down for the night below these aspens. It was hard to tell if they were bears or small elk. Later I went out to find an ambush spot above the meadow for evening. The picture below is taken from one of the candidate spots. The scrub oak here is dense, penetrated only by bear tunnels, trails closed over by the bushes at about four feet up. I got lost in these for some time while trying to find a way across to some dry water holes with good grass.

In the afternoon we climbed up to the other spot to wait in hope. No elk appeared, instead a bear ambled through the spot from which that photo was taken. We weren't sure what one would do with a bear once dead.. make a nice rug ? seems insufficient reason to shoot that handsome beast. I knew the old mountain men would eat bear, then again they'd also go without bathing for years, so their tastes might have run to the rancid. These bears were eating mostly berries, to judge by the steaming evidence. Berry-fed bear, mmm. Perhaps we'll get both tags next year and try it.

Rereading that last sentence, it sounds both sanguinary and offensively nonchalant. I recall an interview with a French chef, part of some new wave of cuisine, where he said his primary concern when cooking was to remember that in order to produce the meal, something had to die: the approach was always through gratitude and reverence. Even our language hides the animal and its death from us. As historian Robert Bartlett observes, "When it's in a cold and muddy field covered in dung, it's named in English with the old Saxon name - ox, cow, pig, elk. When it's been cooked and carved and put on a table with a glass of wine, it's named in French (by the Norman conquerors) - beef, pork, venison." It seems more honest to do one's own killing, though of course this also might be mere affectation. Bears are different though, it would feel like murder I think: not sure I could actually pull the trigger.

Lenticular clouds hung above the mesa as we waited. The morning brought 5:30am sleet to ice the tent before packing up for the hike out at 6:30am. As we drove out so the local hunters were driving in, the weather now being more like hunting weather and less like sunbathers'. There's always next year, though I'm running out of them: in five years or so, Ian will have to take me hunting.

Orient Mine

2011-07-29T12:07:00.000-07:00

After the slalom races, we made a visit to the abandoned Orient Mine high on the side of the San Luis valley, for C who is a bat aficionado. We stopped at a gas station in Poncha Springs. The attendant asked what all those canoes had been doing in Salida yesterday, so we explained. A friend of his had decided the historic high would be a good time to raft Brown's Canyon above Salida. Luckily he lost only his raft and quite a bit of skin after swimming through the Seven Stairs.

The mine hosts a colony of some quarter-million Mexican free-tail bats, all of which come pouring out of it in the dusk to hunt the valley.

It turns out that 250 000 bats whoosh as they flood out, from dusk until too dark to see: also they bring a trail of bat poo odor out with them. Quite extraordinary.

The mine is in the hills above the Valley View hot springs. Those folks are on the far side of hippy. As a canoeist I’m usually the crunchiest granola in any given group, but felt like the man in the grey flannel suit out there. On the hike back to the car, we stopped in at what turned out to be a unisex bathroom - was peacefully having a pee at the urinal when several women came in. There was a brief moment of nightmare like one of those dreams where you are naked at the office, before reality resumed. Women's bathrooms don't have urinals so if anyone was wrong it had to be them. I know this about women's bathrooms because as the Officer on Duty after hours at Army Intelligence HQ, I had to check all the rooms including the women's bathrooms: definitely no urinals.

open boating

2011-07-28T13:40:00.000-07:00

In canoe and kayak parlance, the open boat is just a good old-fashioned canoe (English: Canadian canoe) though usually made of newfangled materials for whitewater boating. These are also known as Tupperware boats by the wood-and-canvas canoe snobs, who in turn are looked down upon by the birch-bark canoeists, and so on back to papyrus or so I guess. We paddle plastic quite happily. I figure the karma is different with a petroleum product under you, but the zen of paddling is the same.

This year my old friend Jeff led with his chin, and agreed to organize the open canoe slalom National Championships. The plan was to hold it on the fine slalom course at Clear Creek in Golden, which is good at river flows from about 300 cfs up to 900 or so. Parenthetically, cfs here is a measure of water flow, cubic feet per second, rather than chronic fatigue syndrome, for which latter trouble canoeing is an antidote. Above 900 cfs that course becomes hairboating - boating extremely dangerous water within a hair's breadth of disaster - and not only that, but hairboating with no recovery pool below the rapids, where distressed boaters could be picked up. Instead they'd end up sucked into the Coors factory intake downstream and turned into ricewater beer. We had a long cold spring with extra snow falling in the mountains until June, followed by a warm snap so it all melted at once, producing a predicted 1400 cfs at Golden. The Coors fate was too ghastly to contemplate: Jeff and Julie picked up and moved the whole organization, volunteers and all, from Golden to the Arkansas river whitewater park in Salida. That's about a man-month of work to be done in a week. Luckily Julie was there to get it done faster than the men could have.

Going out the first gate.

Salida had a predicted 2500 cfs. Although this is nearly double the Golden flows, the river channel is far larger, so the course was still approximately manageable. In the event it started at 3400 and hit 4000 by Sunday, an historic high for July. Jeff had to keep changing the course as the eddies disappeared, boiled into a froth, etcetera. As Nate said at the Saturday awards introducing him, "and here's the man standing in front of the train, JEFF!" They pulled it off, no deaths and only one horrible swim, which happened after practice the first evening when the river had emptied of boaters. The swimmer made it out after a mile or so but the boat went on for ten after which it was no longer riverworthy.

Pat the swimmer (also a competitor, announcer, and sea shanty singer - these fringe sports competitions don't happen without lots of help from everyone) got to work with fiberglass in camp that night, patching up the hull to race next day, but somehow contrived to get a fiber in his eye and scratch the cornea. One emergency room visit later he had a natty black eyepatch which did nothing for depth perception around the slalom gates, but went very well with the sea shanties.

Two gate judges huddle in a passing rainstorm, a hired safety kayaker paid from Jeff and Julie's Fund for Indigent Paddlers waits in the eddy for someone to rescue, and the sun shines on the distant Mt. Princeton. We stayed with Jeff at their cabin in the shadow of that mountain, next to Mt. Antero. On all three mornings coming out along Chalk Creek, I got stuck behind gapers on the canyon road. Gapers are those folks who aren't used to mountain scenery, so drive along with their jaws hanging slack and heads swivelling, at 15mph. Bless them all, it's an understandable reaction, but I do wish they'd pull off occasionally to let their accumulating tail of cars go by.

The first day I'd hoped to compete in the solo playboat division. At 3700cfs and rising, not having boated whitewater in the past.. um.. year.. the better part of valour seemed for me to volunteer as gate judge, general dogsbody, etc.

In the afternoon I helped with the timing. The fastest run I timed that afternoon was a woman.The fastest run in the novice recreational boat category, was also a woman. Open boating slalom rewards skill far beyond strength: it's much more zen than kayaking, a sort of active meditation on the river. As the kayakers say respectfully of canoeists (or so we'd like to think), half the paddle, twice the paddler. Actually what they usually say is, "you're going to paddle that in a canoe ?" in tones of mixed wonder, incredulity and doubt.

Sitting on a handsome bit of Salida granite with a simple job to do and the river to watch, I found myself quite contented.
Mark Twain wrote,

The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book .. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day. There was never a page that was void of interest, never one that you could leave unread without loss, never one that you would want to skip .. There never was so wonderful a book written by man; never one whose interest was so absorbing, so unflagging, so sparklingly renewed with every reperusal.

Looking into the face of the water, purling in the sun, was payment and recompense enough for far more work than I was doing.

I read rivers for pleasure only, canoeing, fishing and swimming. The first two readings are quite similar, since the canoeist is looking for many of the same things in the river as a fish: trout don't like to live in turbulence any more than a boater does. Late that day there was a small hatch of caddis fly. I wanted to add the pages on fishing, but there wasn't time. To quote myself,

finding fish means reading the river, like a book in a new language, "like any writing to the illiterate"; deciphering the meanings of leaves that pause in the current, a curl of water on the surface from a boulder five feet down; things for which an instinct would need no elucidation, though dry observation needs a slow long chain of reasons. Carefully, attentively, I watch the tip of the line as it drifts, imagining the fly's progress as it lifts and swirls over the rocks. From diving in rivers, I know the cool gloom down there, under a bright and dancing sky: holding in a break of the current, seeing the drift of small particles of detritus blowing by, travelling fast in one place.

Our good dog Artie waits patiently, bored under the tree.. "so when do I get to run for ten miles wagging happily the whole way ?" As I write he's lying on my feet keeping them warm, sighing occasionally for the pheasants I missed on Sunday.

Sunday morning, and the river she done rise. The original plan was to have son Ian and Jeff's daughter compete in the tandem canoe youth division. This section was nowhere worse than class III, but it had considerable exposure, as the climbers say: a flip and swim here had the potential to be extremely nasty. We decided not to sacrifice our children to the strong brown god of the river, at least today.

Instead we raced as father and offspring, in the mixed tandem division. Here Jeff and daughter peel out of the bridge eddy, very very carefully. To explicate a bit - see how the boat is aligned with the streak of white water running across the river, which is a wave. An unguarded moment on exiting the eddy will put the boat up on the wave and surf it across the channel, leaving you perfectly positioned to smash down onto that bridge wave visible at the top right, flip and swim through the bridge. This happened to a few racers, giving the rest of us an opportunity to practice our rescue skills. Jeff is already turned and safe below the wave, well set up for the next gate downstream.

Nate and his son show why they won the division, staying focused in the rain - just look at those beautiful co-ordinated paddle strokes. Compare and contrast with my disorderly thrashing, below.

We stayed up and made most of the gates, which is about as much as I ever can manage. Dilettantes never never will triumph, but that's OK, we had a good time. Racing is a kind of joy unrepeatable in any other life. The best writing on this is by Jamie McEwan (Sandra Boynton's husband) in a canoeing magazine, not online unfortunately - "The Sublime Irrelevance of Racing", Canoe and Kayak, March, 1997. I clipped that article and saved it, in so safe a place that I've never found it again. A newer essay from Jamie,

competition inevitably brings stress and pain--and that's exactly what we're looking for. We crave intensity. As Charlotte Brontë wrote: "It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it."

Ian and I were fourth by 27 seconds to Jeff and daughter's third place. This seemed after all fair, Jeff deserved more than one medal.

This be the bridge.. fortunately it has a friendly abutment, rounded and smooth, so the water, boats and boaters roll off it easily. Other bridges, such as Mean Bridge on the Bridges run of the Poudre, have sharp abutments which trap and wrap boats. Mean Bridge used to be known as Killer Bridge since it has taken a life or two, but the name was changed to reduce stress for new boaters.

After our second run I was sitting below the bridge cogitating, and not buckled in to the thigh straps. Yells and whistles from upstream alerted us to the imminent appearance of racer wreckage coming down. The safety kayaker and I ferried out, he went after the swimmer and I went after the boat. There are various ways to retrieve a flipped canoe: the safest for the retriever is to use your boat as a barge and keep bumping the hull of the other boat until it gets to shore. As a practicing coward, this is my usual method. I'd almost got the boat into an eddy, then looked at the six-foot wave preceding a strainer just downstream and made an executive decision to let the boat go. It worked out since there were people below salvaging a boat from previous carnage, and the new boat came right by them into the next eddy. Yoicks. Open boaters know we're all just in between swims.

Pat's sea shanty was sung at the awards to reward the most difficult feat in canoe slalom, a clean tandem run. I regret to say I don't remember all of it, only this fragment:
with our spins and braces we can win this race
we might even have some fun, boys,
we might even have some fun

The three bachelors of Doris Straat

2011-05-16T21:21:00.001-07:00

Last year at the Brass Bell, a quarter century later, the three bachelors as yet unbowed: oujongkerel innocence long gone, however. 'oujongkerel' is the Afrikaans for bachelor which may be rendered literally 'old young lads'. Now Peter will never be old.

The three bachelors comprised in fact a rotating cast of characters, like a sitcom or reality show. At first it was Peter, James and John: I broke the apostolic succession (the gospel according to Doug ? maybe a Monty Python skit). The small house in Doris Straat, Verwoerdburg, belonged to Peter. One day James was out for a walk when a small girl skidded to a halt on her bicycle next to him, asking excitedly "is Oom een van die drie oujongkerels van Doris Straat ?" - are you (respectful honorific) one of the three bachelors of Doris Street ? James admitted guilt. We were the cynosure of the neighbourhood.

This little piggy is unhappy because he has to live in Verwoerdburg, the suburb named for the architect of apartheid, its residents wholly of one mind with Dr Verwoerd. James had a job at the CSIR, Peter was working off a scholarship obligation as a nuclear physicist at Pelindaba, and I'd taken the first job offer I got after national disservice. I was introduced to Peter by another eccentric friend from the Army. We'd discussed James Joyce and so on at 2am while monitoring mock-enemy comms in training exercises, so he thought Pete and I would get along as well. Indeed we did. Soon James left to take up a postgraduate position at Cambridge studying (in his account) vibrators, in reality it involved abstruse calculations of the resonant frequencies of jet tailplanes. Greg, also from the CSIR, moved in to complete the set again.

The dining room had some truly horrible wallpaper which we ripped down in an aesthetic frenzy. The repaint was delayed for some years, so we went for a boho graffiti theme. The Freedom Charter was posted up next to the 1983 Constitution of Suid-Afrika, as a compare and contrast. If our neighbours had reported us we could have been jailed for this. People are strange.

Note the three carefully matched chairs. There was also a mock-leather sofa to which we took turns sticking in the heat of summer. I learnt how to cook in this house, inflicting a series of culinary catastrophes on us all, starting with the Famous Pancake, a two-inch thick lump of mostly raw dough. We went to a nouvelle cuisine place after one of these. It took two hours to eat a series of beautifully presented morsels, following which we had to go across the street to get hamburgers.

As shown here, there were strong overtones of artistic aspirations, even though the house was a congeries of engineers. As Greg used to say if someone accused him of being an intellectual, "..pseudo-intellectual, please.."

I still have that blue poster of the pinup girl. Next to her is a conscript in uniform. The text starts "the reason I fight has blue eyes and looks great in a bikini", goes on in similar vein to explicate all the things 'we' were fighting for in the old Suid-Afrika, then ends "but what I don't understand is, what is his reason for fighting ?" I thought then as now it is a question worth asking. Perhaps they don't simply hate our freedoms ?

Here is Frikkie, testing out Pete's new high-altitude fully shielded sunglasses on his babbelas. Frikkie like the rest of us was conscripted: unlike the rest of us, he was sitting on the lorry with fifty other unhappy young men on the way to camp, when he began to miss his wife unbearably: at the next robot he leaped from the back and ran back to her. As I recall the army never did catch up with him. He was subject to enthusiasms, one of which co-opted me into a fishing trip to the Natal north coast. A pretty cousin or inlaw rode up front in the two-seater bakkie, I rode in back under a tarpaulin and the night skies. Next day the cousin made us the best potjiekos I'd ever tasted while we failed to catch fish.

The house was chiefly a base from which to launch expeditions. My brother and Pete are fossicking in the innards of Pete's Opel Kadett, trying to find another horse or two to get up the mountains with.

Some contact of Pete's gave us access to this nice little house in Rhodes village, near Tiffindell. Those nights were the coldest I've ever been. Houses in SA don't have heating as such, and we couldn't find the coal scuttle. Not for the first time the other two had girls to stay warm with, while I attempted to content myself with an inadequate superlight down sleeping bag. The fog in this picture is condensation on the lens as the camera and I slowly warmed with tea and sun.

Mostly it was mountains. Greg and I ran to the top of the local high point, Ben McDhui, and brought back a film canister full of snow as souvenir, snow being a novelty in those climes. On the last morning we started up that white Volkswagen Kombi only to find it bleeding its life's oil in an ominously black puddle. There is a cunning device known as a 'freeze plug' in these engines, which helpfully blows itself out in case of low temperatures. There wasn't much for auto repair in Rhodes village but the barman sent us to his friend Toffee, an unreconstructed hippie who was able to carve us a new plug out of some remnant hardwood from one of his sculptures. Hammered that in, and so home.

Somewhere in the Drakensberg. If memory serves this is Bell cave below Cathedral peak, misty and cold outside.

This is certainly the Bell itself, perhaps from another trip. Pete and I were up taking photos in all directions using the glory of this morning's light. I have a great many indifferent landscape pictures with no human figures, which now seems a waste. The mountains became part of my internal topography and do not change anyway, the arc of a life is harder to trace.

In the Amatola mountains (Hogsback), after enduring two days of steady rain in a dire commercial campsite under dark pines, we gave up and went to James and John's old house. They weren't there nor were their parents, but Pete knew where the key was hidden. There were plenty of books as always, we purloined some tea and read quietly while the garden and roses enjoyed the mizzle. The flavour of that blackcurrant tea is still vivid in memory.

There isn't a good story to go with this picture, I just liked the characteristically jaunty pose. After the sodden Hogsback, down the hills to Port Alfred, rented some dodgy canoes and paddled up the Kowie river to overnight in the riverine forest with the vervet monkeys and duikers, impossibly delicate little deer.

Rhodesia had become Zimbabwe a few years previous. It was now possible to visit without having to travel in armed convoy, though the remembrance of those convoys rather haunted the long desolate roads through the bush. These are the eponymous ruins.

In ZA and Zimbabwe the petrol stations would always have attendants to pump the gas. One of these gentle men asked us how it was now, living in South Africa: we were at a bit of a loss to answer. Afterward Pete wondered what the attendant's new freedom could possibly mean to him, working the same job as under the colonialists, and still quite without any means of improving his lot.

Further down the road, another cave, this time in the Chimanimani mountains on the border with Mozambique. The ranger gave us a map with the safe trails marked on it: all the rest had not yet been cleared of APMs, and there was a possibility of Renamo guerrillas coming over on certain of the safe trails. This concentrated one's route-finding skills wonderfully.

We flew into Victoria Falls, abandoning my car with a busted u-joint and propshaft under the shade tree, with its mechanic breaking out his best sledgehammer as we left. One night in a nasty campground in town was enough. The cabins for rent on the Zambezi were several miles out of town, but fortunately there were also bicycles for rent. Riding out in the sun was fine, riding back at at 10pm from the Vic Falls Hotel among the marauding hippos would have been terrifying if we'd been quite sober.

Booze cruise on Lake Kariba, a safer form of hippo watching. All those beautiful girls went on and married someone else. Maybe we were just too young to know.

Pete and Greg were both doing BA degrees by correspondence course at Unisa. I joined in on the philosophy courses. When it was time for finals, we decided an appropriate place to study would be up the chain ladder to camp on top of the Amphitheater, near Tugela Falls.

At the top of the falls is a little plunge pool, like an icy jacuzzi, with views down a kilometer of cliff: expands the mind but constricts the circulation. In these streams there lives a little red-fin minnow Oreodaimon quathlambae. The genus Oreodaimon means spirit of the mountains, its sole species is quathlambae. Trout have been planted in the streams for tourists to catch, but the minnow hangs on grimly in the trickles of headwaters. I've never seen one but I like to know they are there.

We drove back in the morning to write the exam in the afternoon. Pete wrote one essay on alienation with me featured as leading man.

A short weekend trip to Swaziland, the Malolotja nature reserve. At that time sex across the colour line was streng verbode in ZA, with the natural result that all the white Johns streamed over the border to find their doubly illicit pleasures. One of the ladies in a downtown bar tried to pick up the three of us, not serially but altogether. Golly.

In the morning there was a strange quiet munching sound going on outside the tent, like a hundred herbivores browsing. Oddly enough that's exactly what it was - a mixed herd of zebra and wildebeest peacefully trimming the veldt. We were able to hike downriver to the falls since the big 5 were missing from the reserve: no lion, leopard, buffalo or elephant, just one lonely rhino who'd been orphaned, raised by humans, and now hung around the visitor center for company.

Greg decided to hare off to Swansea on some post-graduate quest. For a last Berg hike, Pete knew a place with an excellent cave and fine views which in the event hid itself irretrievably in the mists.

In the morning we made do with scrambled eggs and a bit of a view. I remember one morning like this when a freak of atmospherics seeded the air with ice crystals in a perfectly clear sky: the air sparkled, bright motes sliding down the morning light, tumbling and eddying over the cliffs, to disperse over the far dry plains.

Soon after Pete's obligation ended, he sold the house and embarked upon what looked from the outside to be a wholly successful life, lived on his own terms, always with kindness. The bachelors to their scattered bodies went but did not forget. The cancer diagnosis came about a week before the picture at the Brass Bell, now it is over. Another of his legacies is SERI. I admired Peter and enjoyed his company; I owe him a great deal; I'll miss him for the rest of my life. May his memory be eternal.

"When we lose certain people.. we may simply feel that we are undergoing something temporary, that mourning will be over and some restoration of prior order will be achieved. But maybe when we undergo what we do, something about who we are is revealed, something that delineates the ties we have to others, that shows us that these ties constitute what we are, ties or bonds that compose us. It is not as if an “I” exists independently over here and then simply loses a “you” over there, especially if the attachment to “you” is part of what composes who “I” am. If I lose you, under these conditions, then I not only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. Who “am” I, without you? When we lose some of these ties by which we are constituted, we do not know who we are or what to do. On one level, I think "I have lost you” only to discover that “I” have gone missing as well."
- Judith Butler, via.

deer hunting

2010-12-12T19:19:00.000-08:00

The tale condensed, courtesy of Ian:
Such is the neophyte hunters' life, lots of good stories but not much to eat.

Camp made with the remarkable generosity of the DOW and its volunteers, on private land along Box Elder creek. The hunter's code of secret locations doesn't apply here: since it's private, naming it does not call in the competition of other hunters. The bathroom was heated but a twenty-minute walk away through the cow pasture, one fence climb, one chained gate, and thirty placid cows on route.

The closest we got to a deer all weekend was volunteer Tony's deer chili for lunch on the last day. Thank you Tony. We saw deer but only at long range. Sitting in a deer blind keeping quiet, in 20 degrees, was a bit of a challenge.

The last morning we were in the blind 600 yards from camp at 6am. At 6:25am a herd of 10 deer walked through camp. If we’d stayed in camp drinking coffee, we could have shot one through the flaps of the tent. They milled around for a bit, then moved off down the dry sand creek bed. We attempted to stalk them but chased across two property lines without getting closer than 300 yards, then they were on a property we didn’t have permission to hunt. We also saw a herd bedded down on a neighboring private property, and spooked another herd by walking over them on the way to set up a blind on a different property: all nice big healthy-looking mule deer. So, plenty of beasts, just not in the right place.

Luxury camping: electric light in the kitchen tent from a remarkably quiet Honda generator, gas lamps in the bedroom, and both tents had marvellous little wood stoves for heating. I tried to capture the smoke coming out of the tent's chimneys here but my camera and I were not equal to the low-light shot.

Ian doesn’t seem downcast by his ill fortune this year, still keen on hunting next year, even with all the cold, snow, and privations. It’s a pity I have no idea what I’m doing.

fourth season

2010-11-24T12:18:00.000-08:00

The fourth season of elk hunting in Colorado is the harbinger of the real world's fourth season: only for the bold, the foolhardy, and those who've forgotten what it was like last time.

The grimace here is because the feral cats got into the rubbish bag, smearing leftover lasagna over everything. One of the boys left the tent open one morning upon which the cats got in and broke open the box of Sun Chips in their hunger. Cats eating chips ? When we came in, they panicked and leapt up to the roof, hanging there upside down with their claws dug into the mesh. That's a new indignity for this tent.

We picked fourth season since that was when leftover licenses were available. The hardest part of big-game hunting is navigating the Byzantine castle of regulations and finding a place to hunt. Thanks to Teddy Roosevelt, the game belongs to the public, but the laws of trespass still apply: shoot a public beast on private property and it will be very painful, fines, confiscations and jail time may result. Colorado doesn't have a posting law, which means private property need not be posted as such. Instead, buy a probably outdated BLM map at a large scale 1:100 000, overlay it with the topo map at a much smaller scale 1:24 000, and determine your legality. The BLM map shows public lands managed by the BLM, National Park Service, Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife, lands managed by the state, and private lands. Then, overlay that with the map of summer elk habitat, winter habitat, and migration routes; check the long-range forecast for the next year to determine snowfall and precipitation patterns, take your best guess; then enter the lottery to get a license for the selected area. Simple ay ? Or, do what we did: get a leftover tag, scout the area by Google Earth, and hope that Luck will be a lady and not a beldame. Real elk hunters spend 51 weeks of the year researching and scouting for one weeks' hunting, dilettantes like us just blunder into the woods regardless. Finding the creatures actually out in the hills is not simple.

On the first morning, we ditched the car, a rented Jeep Commander SUV, and postholed out into the snows an hour before sunrise. The area we'd planned to hunt was six miles up a 4wd road under two feet of snow, unreachable, so we had to improvise. A herd of five cow elk appeared on the edge of a far ridge, browsing slowly up the hill below the sundogs. Upon investigation there was a thirty-foot wide river, half frozen, at the bottom of a gorge between us and them. There's that Lost Creek again. When writing about remote secret fishing locations it's generally understood that Lost Creek and Lost Lake may or may not be their real names: though there are so many of both, it might even be true. I'm not sure what the equivalent convention is for hunting locations - let's just say we were up in the Lost Creek drainage and call it close.

We roved around the drainage for a while, contouring along the cliffs in a foot or so of snow, but saw no more beasts. There were plenty of tracks, elk yellow holes in the snow, and so forth, but no actual incarnations of wapiti. Back at the SUV we concluded that stood for Stupid Useless Vehicle: no low-range 4wd, no traction from the silly urban tires, we remained in the ditch. Courteous fellow hunters with a proper truck pulled out us city slickers and were kind enough not to laugh.

Back in camp my minivan wouldn't start. People look at you funny when you go hunting in a minivan. I lived up to our city slicker reputation by forgetting to pack towropes, shovel or chains, all of which were safely home in the garage: and driving up with the old balding back tires. The van helped by deciding this was a fine time for the battery to give up and the headlights to blow. Complete collapse of stout party, in fact.

In the far corner of camp is an elk rack. The unfortunate creature is strung up by the legs, skinned, to hang and cool before processing. At least so I am told. The camp is nearly impossible to find as the sign fell down after thirty years. Our hostess told us she's trying to get permission from the neighbours to put it up again.

After two more days of rising long before dawn and hunting hard to no effect, Ian sat disconsolately down in the snow and said, "I'd like to see a little gun action here".

On the last evening we found the elk highway across Lost Creek, the only crossing for five miles either side. The trail had cut down through the snow to mud over the island, then the herds split up again across the hills. We'd planned to sneak in the dark the last morning and ambush them but snow stopped play. It started as rain about 1am, to lay down a nice layer of ice, followed by 6-8" of fresh snow: that was in camp, the hunt area was another 1000ft higher. We got up at 4:30am, crunched disconsolately through the mess, knocked the worst of it off the tent and went back to bed. Even if we'd gotten in to the hunting area we would not have emerged again. I wasn't certain if the minivan was going to make it up the muddy icy snow-covered hill out of camp, but it clambered out quite easily. The road back to town was fortunately half ploughed, unfortunately it was the wrong half. We drove on the left, swerving wildly into a foot of slush and ice whenever another car appeared oncoming. The van didn't have enough clearance for this and surfed happily from side to side. Home again safely with the white fading slowly from my knuckles, in good time to dry and sew up the tent again.

autumn 2010

2010-11-17T12:52:00.000-08:00

what if much of a which of a wind
gave the truth to summer's lie
bloodied with dizzying leaves the sun
and yanked immortal stars awry
..
- e.e. cummings

though in my case the bloody leaves were all over the muddy ground, and had to be raked up.

We ate the first pheasant of the season (shot with my phowling piece) in a modified coq-au-vin using a white Vinho Verde instead of the more traditional reds. My dear wife was amazed that I didn't use a recipe, as her rule-bound hide-bound grumpus of a husband likes precise instructions, as a rule.

A picture from many years ago, this is me sneaking past the hole in Skull rapid on the Westwater stretch of the Colorado, a different autumn day. That's one of my favorite canoe runs, like a miniature Grand Canyon.

Never Summer

2010-11-09T15:27:00.000-08:00

After the Grand Tetons trip I still had a couple of days' vacation time and did not feel like going back inside. A swift planning session ensued to pick out one of the many backpacking trips on the list and pack some food, then off outside again. A loop through Never Summer wilderness won out for its high mountains, deep woods, trout possibilities, and relatively short driving time.

The way in is 5.5 miles and 3000ft climb to the first lake. Columbines and showy bright red mushrooms enlivened the trudgery. If I knew anything about mushrooms perhaps I could have had a fine wild-gathered dinner.

Three hours took me to timberline, rapidly followed by the appearance of the lake.

There were rises going on, so tossed out the usual #12 Royal Coachman dry. The fish materialized out of clear water and sailed cheerfully up to attack the fly. It turned out to be a 12" brookie, fat and brightly coloured, which was a little depressing. Normally I'd be very happy with such a fish, but in a high country lake a brookie like that usually means the whole fishery is confined to a passel of similar fishes: which rather limits the opportunities for hope: and so it was, all the 10-12" brookies you could eat. They weren't particularly easy to catch as the cruisers would spook while the line was still descending. A number came to an assortment of dry flies. Eventually discovered a red-tail Invicta retrieved slowly near the surface worked best, a hit on most casts: but the fish were expert at bite-and-release so missed a lot. Some fish were plump with small heads, as pretty as you could find anywhere. The larger ones had that big-head snaky look that creeps over them as they outgrow the food sources.

Weather made its appearance as expected in the mid-afternoon.

There wasn't any rain, but clouds and thunder in surround sound. These are the conditions where lightning comes out of a clear sky to hit the highest thing around, which in this case would be the fool standing in a lake waving a lightning (fishing) rod. I'd thought of camping near the water, instead bucked back over the ridge and down below treeline to find a cosy campsite tucked into a cove in the rocks.

The rain did eventually move in - dinner was a race between my stove and the raindrops.

As I bolted the last mouthful of curry and beans (excellent for pre-heating the sleeping bag) so the rain bucketed down. I had brought a book but left the energy to read it on the climb up: dozed until a break in the rain at 10, then got seriously to sleep. Storms went on and boulders crashed down across the valley, a mountaineer's lullaby. It sounded like a scene from The Hobbit, "the stone-giants were out, and were hurling rocks at one another for a game, and catching them, and tossing them down into the darkness where they smashed among the trees far below, or splintered into little bits with a bang."

Next morning was sunny and clear with the usual scenes of hopeless beauty all around.

On the first lake picture above a faint trail can be seen cutting across L to R and up to the Continental Divide at 12 000 some feet. That's the route. Up there were good views to be had, North Park and human habitations to the west, Rocky Mountain National Park apparent wilderness to the east. I turned on the camera and it helpfully turned itself off with a cheery reminder, "replace batteries". Um, with what exactly ? oh well no more pictures.

Contoured along the side of the divide in the high clear air; cliffs to one side and meadows full of flowers to the other; big clumps of blue columbines, 15 or 20 blooms all together. Climbed up again to drop down into the next drainage over, where I met a loquacious solo hiker. He said there were several moose in the first meadow after the fifth stream crossing but they'd moved on by the time I got there. There were moose signs everywhere below treeline, huge hoof indentations in the mud, willows browsed down to moose-head-height, even some loose moose stool next to last night's camp.

Bowen Gulch is home to old-growth spruce, trees six hundred years old, fine deep wet old woods. This was the ground of a big battle with the loggers last century (1980s) when the Forest Service sold it to Louisiana-Pacific Corp. There were protesters chained to trees, lying down in front of the bulldozers, all the desperate expedients of the last ditch. For once it worked and the trees are still here. As I barreled along the rocks the clouds descended, the trail a spooky tunnel through black-green darkness. The gulch trail is very rocky and unpleasant: comprised of boulders, rocks, stones and pebbles; mostly in a rough staircase configuration down a gully, but quite often random; all of them the wrong size, the wrong shape, and in the wrong place for a human foot to traverse.

Down to the stream and trail junction then up again to 11 150ft to the next lake, just below the Divide in a bowl of trees. What the thunder said today was, "you should have started fishing before eating lunch" as it broke over my unsuspecting head. With the woods and the hills, it can really sneak up on a guy. Not quite damyata, datta, dayadhvam, but I'm long past revelations here.

There were Colorado River cutthroat trout prowling the shoreline, in a nice range and selection of sizes; little ones flipping out of the water in the shallows, bigger ones cruising at the edges of the downed timber where the clear water shaded to a dusty green the colour of seaglass. I had to wait for the storm to turn to rain from thunder before I could attempt them. Caught fish from 9" to 14", and I'm sure there were bigger ones in there as well: four fish in less than an hour and missed a couple more. All were strong and colourful, a healthy fishery. Now I can say I’ve caught a cutt standing on the Continental Divide trail.

It rained and blew for about an hour then the real weather kicked in, gales blowing wildly from all directions with horizontal rain gusts slapping me around. Wind this fierce and vagrant feels like a personal attack, or maybe it's just the hypothermia delusions firing up. The whole thing seemed a bit risky, plus I still had what I thought was four miles to walk out: concluded a judicious retreat would be in order. At the campsite packing up, the wind blew the pieces of the fishing rod out of my hands. Yep, time to go. The campsite was big with a huge fire-ring which seemed odd for 2800ft up and 7.5 miles in on a bad rocky trail. Typically the guys who build huge fire-rings don't walk much. As it turns out there’s an easy 4-mile ridge walk to the lake as well: par for the course in US 'wilderness' areas, there's no way to get more than a few miles from a road. In the arrogance of my youth I'd despise the 4wds driving up to the boundaries but now I'm old fat and weak, am in fact myself lusting after a 4wd to drive comfortably close to the tatterdemalion remnants of wild.

I'd made a slight miscalculation on this day's hike distance and wound up with 13.5 miles, plus two and a half crossings of the Continental Divide (the lake at 11 150 ft, hence the half); about 2000ft climbing and 4000ft descending. The second drainage emerged above the Colorado river with a three mile drag through second-growth spindly pines to the trailhead. My dogs were barking all the way home.

Grand Tetons

2010-11-09T15:25:00.000-08:00

The iconic image of a Grand Tetons vacation, at least its public face. Really the image could as easily be the thousand or so people packed in 350 campsites along the Gros Ventre (Big Belly) river, many of them in RV cocoons to make sure nature doesn't intrude too far: a sort of industrialized recreation. Last year we'd camped up the river in a National Forest campsite, quiet and pleasant, but a bit far from the fleshpots of the visitor center etcetera. This year we'd planned to spend most of the time in a backcountry canoe-in campsite, consequently resigned ourselves to mass camping for a couple of nights. It was endurable but not really what we'd driven eight hours for.

In the evening we walked the two hundred yards down to the river itself, where the moose and her child grazed on the willows. The blurry mess of this image is because light was low and my tripod safely home in the closet. I fished a bit but only small fish attempted to drown the big dry fly. The boys threw rocks to encourage the fish while a beaver fled the scene with alarmed tail-whacks on the water.

The vacation fell plop in the middle of what should have been the heaviest training weeks for my competitive swansong, ITU championships in Budapest. In the grotesquely early morning, face grey as the dawn, up and off again on the bike for ninety minutes, followed by forty minutes' worth of distance run. Sunrise on the Tetons was a fine distraction.

Time for the gear-fussing, loading the canoe with surprising quantities of food and variegated sorts of equipment. The put-in is at String lake, a couple of miles up against the current (in a lake ?) then a short portage. 'Portage' means unpack all the gear so recently packed, hump it up and over the ridge to the next lake, and.. pack it all again. Whee.

At least the scenery was gorgeous. As can be clearly seen here, where I used to have abs there is now a small comfortable puppy of fat. I suppose I'll have to drag it along with me wherever I go now that it's followed me home.

On the way up String lake, there was a young grizzly at the water's edge having a drink. We looked at each other and he faded back into the woods. This was about a mile from the portage, so we hoped nothing in our foodstuffs was smelling too irresistible. The swimming in Leigh lake was good.

The lake was perfectly calm, clear water turning black in the depths, as we cruised in to camp. The site was up a little hill deep in old-growth spruce, willow fringing a small stream delta of sand and rocks below. I hugged two of the big ancient trees, using for excuse the installation of a hammock.

Ian had just returned from a week-long Scout camp where he'd earned his canoe merit badge. He'd paddled bow in Ken's boat on the way in. I asked how it went, "it was very tiring, if I stopped paddling Ken would stop too" whereas sucker Dad just keeps paddling if his crew gets lazy. Hm takes notes.

Ian cruised the lake with his fly rod, but the fish were sparse and cautious in the clear cool water. From the edge of the stream delta, the water dropped straight down to twenty feet or more. It was the first time I've been able to dive off a beach.

We did get a couple of fish, a smattering of smaller brook trout and two big cutthroat, both around 20-21". Ian broke off one of these on the spinning rod, and I lost another on the fly rod, since some fool thought he could fish a big streamer on 5x tippet. The one landed came to a Peter Ross, an old Scottish loch fly pattern I tied thirty years ago in the sun room of the house in Newlands Avenue.

The next day we paddled to the north end of the lake for a change of scenery. This beach had huge prowling cutthroat, they'd come in and snoop through the shallows looking for a little something to eat, like an innocuous version of sharks.

There was a small cabin here, with a ranger lady and her daughter living in it for the summer. They came around the campsites each day to make sure there weren't any bear incidents or drunken campers. The day we paddled out, they came out as well - for a change from living in a log cabin in the woods, they were going backpacking. I thought I was a hardcore outdoor enthusiast.

C got a plump healthy cutthroat on the way back, the only small cutt we saw in the lake. Down in those black depths are shoals of aliens, giant lake trout mistakenly transplanted from northern lakes, which push the cutts down a link in the food chain.

That night another moose and her child tried to take a shortcut through camp, then decided against it and swam around us instead. I nearly had a heart attack, quietly washing the dishes in the dusk, when her large brown head came quizzically around the tree: thought it was the bear, come to see if we had left any of that delicious-smelling dinner sausage for him.

Ian went back to the inlet, where we'd caught most of our fish, to see if there was anything doing. A steep creek runs in a flume from the high country to vanish into the lake here. The winds blow hot from the far shore, then a gust down the ravine brings icy air.
They allow only two nights in the backcountry per permit, so we had to get out again. I abandoned my family in another industrial campsite, fenced about by RVs, while Ken and I headed in to the deepest backest country we could find via 4wd road, in between Grand Tetons and Yellowstone. H assured me they wouldn't spend any time in the campsite except for sleeping, straight to the Jackson Lake Lodge deck.

We found our way down to Lake of the Woods and camped on the east shore in clouds of mosquitoes. A couple of recent graduates of UW (Criminal Justice) were hanging out in their campsite, heavily armed. Ken discussed large handguns with them for a bit. We proceeded peaceably out on the water, where a few fat strong rainbows rose in the evening mists. Strange streams with no apparent drainage area came in from the dark woods, edged by flowers and pebbles.

Wait, mists ? that was smoke from the Boy Scout camp at the other end.. with a merry clangour of Grumman aluminum, they emerged from the smoke like a kind of apocalypse. So much for peace and quiet. In the morning they were up before dawn to regale us with the Scouting Symphony, full Grumman timpani. We left.

The road runs on from the dense woods, through ponderosa parks, into the small well-watered Winegar wilderness. At first we overshot it to come out to a view of Idaho farming country. It looked perfect, an ideal landscape of rolling hills interspersed with clumps of trees around the farmhouses, a sort of middle-earth Shire. That wasn't what we were after, at all, so u-turned back into the wild. Parked at Loon Lake for a lookaround, there they were, two loons happily nested on it. The sewage truck that had been tailing us came in, looped around the campsite, and left again. No idea at all what it was up to.

The Winegar wilderness is there for the bears: as that author notes "a wet, boggy, ponded, willow country, an excellent place to stash a body". We hiked in to the Falls river, bear spray on one hip, .44 magnum on the other (Ken that was, I was insufficiently armed). A pretty river in meanders with very little holding water, below that big sky. The fish were mostly small. Ken got the big one, a 12" brookie out of an undercut bank.

There was a whole passel of fish lined up along the current break, requiring a long exact cast and careful mending of the line to deceive them. After taking half-a-dozen, Ken had pity on me, and let me have the last two in the line. We bushwhacked back across the bear logs and bogs through the spookily quiet empty country.

I wasn't ready to stop fishing and prevailed upon Ken to stop at Grassy Lake, a reservoir drawn down for the fall, with an unattractive bathtub ring of greasy mud and rocks. Pitching out a big streamer quickly got a handsome colourful cutt of 16-17", then nothing.

The original plan was to wander back home camping at various spots on the way, but Ian had been out for over two weeks and wanted a bit of quality time with his Xb0x before school started. That seemed fair after all.

We spent one night in Thermopolis at a hotel with a side excursion to the hot springs. The hotel owner was an enthusiastic hunter, filled the place up with dead heads and antlers. He'd started catch-and-release elephant hunting - shoot the poor beast with a drugged dart, pose for photo, then let it go again. We recede from the real world at an accelerating rate.

Budapest - a memory of racing

2010-09-15T20:24:00.000-07:00

The airline of course knocked all the carefully-laid plans into a cocked hat. I had 2 hours to make a connection at Heathrow, and the plane left Denver 2 hours late. Perfect. Another triathlete and I spotted one another in the rebooking queue, so at least the remaining journey wasn't a solo feat of endurance. How to spot a triathlete: the compression socks are a bit of a giveaway; also the only tanned gaunt people are usually endurance athletes of some kind, thus recognizable as kindred spirits. There are lots of gaunt grey businessmen, plump grey also, tanned plump tourists, but we bored them all with discussions of tri arcana. Charles is half my age and twice my speed.

In the Frankfurt airport we hiked well past the smoking areas (the smoke doesn't know to stay in its assigned area) to find something to eat. Here they have small folding bikes to get around the terminal - we discussed renting a couple to get in some training, intervals from corner to corner. Malev Air took us safely to Ferihegi airport where we found they'd contrived to bring my bike but lose Charles'. Midnight on the road and rain.

Next morning, dragged out to breakfast in the hotel for want of the energy to go out and find a better one. The penetrating drone of the Lesser American Bore rose above the murmur of conversation, "soon, I came to dominate my age-group". Boy howdy.

Blaha Luzja metro/tram/bus station is right next to the hotel. The grumpy lady at the metro ticket office sold a three-day pass for all forms of public transport, 3850 forint or about $16. Bargain. The whole complex is underground below a number of streets which provided a navigational challenge, six exits with forks on each one. A fast-motion video of me trying to find the correct tram platform would have looked like whack-a-mole, head popping up at all possible corners of the intersection. Apparently my sense of direction completely abandons me underground.

This is by the transition area. The Danube looks more like the great grey-green greasy Limpopo of my youth than its blue self. Perhaps the blue is upstream, where the waltzing is: or perhaps the blue is up a different river of time: up beyond any travelling, and only flotsam comes down to tell its obscure histories. The rain pelted heartily upon us all. On the tram back again, a young Hungarian couple were speaking English to each other, with careful and delicate accents. Even though they were talking about company websites, it was like listening to dancing. I on the other hand could make no headway at all with Hungarian. Smatterings of German, French, and Afrikaans were of no use, the spiky mouthfuls of consonants and strangely accented vowels would not yield.

The rest of the day went by in bike tinkering, team meetings where they confused us totally about the run course, and a bit of food shopping. I was too tired to attempt anything interesting in the evening, passed out early, rather a waste.

A pair of sphinxes guard the Opera House. She appears to have some prey clasped in her front claws, but I couldn't tell what it was. Across the street, breakfast at the Művész Kávéház was very pleasant - omelette with paprika and mushrooms, fresh bread and a couple of coffees, for half the price of a dull hotel breakfast.

I took out my favorite Waterman pen and pretended to be composing a poem on the back of an itinerary (actually I was writing notes for this blog post, how bathetic). The pen surely marked me as a poser, the attempted poetry even more so. The romantic definition of the origin of poetry is emotion recollected in tranquillity. All I had was the tranquillity, did not want to ruin the hard-won moment with memories. The TV in the corner was playing music videos not so much suggestive as frankly vulgar, so I looked at the Andrassy Ut in the rain instead.

On an ordinary day I'd have walked the mile or two to Szechenyi baths. Sparing my frail old legs for racing, I instead caught the sweetest little metro from the Opera station. This was the first underground railway in Europe, built in 1898. The platforms are big enough for maybe 60 people, with handsome tiling, woodwork and brass. In contrast to the aboveground tram lines where changing lines requires going under the streets, here it was necessary to cross the street to get to the other line: which has a peculiar symmetry.

The entrance to the baths, "And the steam comes out of the grill / Like the whole goddamn town's ready to blow..."
I thought the horses and riders on the upper corners were just your basic St George with Dragon, but closer inspection showed that either the horse or the monster being impaled, has a fish's tail. That added a nicely surrealistic note.

All this useless beauty. No pictures from the baths themselves, unfortunately, as rain stopped play. The entrances, exits, lockers etc are electronically mediated with a bracelet purchased at the entrance. I wandered around confusedly until a kind Hungarian gentleman showed me the tricks. It was a good cold day for warm baths. The bathers displayed that fine European heedless unconcern with physical appearance. This was something of a relief after all the meticulously honed tri bodies, the more so since my own erstwhile hard-edged finely tuned tri body is in a sad state of flab: still that unconcern tends to lead to a series of unfortunate Speedos.

Back on the metro to Oktogon and thus to hotel.

This is the alley not taken, just by the hotel entrance, a sort of urban canyon which I did not have time to explore. Another sight I did not see is Memento Park, a collection of gigantist Soviet statuary, including Stalin's boots. As the Budapest Guide in our race package said, "several hundred tons of Communist fun!" though really it's a tragicomedy like life. The boots are all that's left of the monstrous statue that used to dominate the square, after the revolution toppled it. There was a post on Poemas del rio Wang about being a child in the square at the time of the revolution, but I can no longer find it. I still wanted to reference the Poemas weblog, as Giovanni observes, it is art that could not happen in another medium: try doing that on Facebook or Twitter, or indeed in any 'old' media.

It was time to join the bike ride from the hotel down to the transition area, three miles of congested city-center traffic. As we assembled in the foyer, bemused wedding reception guests fought through the clots of cyclists and machinery.

The ride itself was a unique experience of dodging cars and buses on a tri bike. The real Budapest bike riders pushed impatiently past our group, one with a small pink-clad girl on his bars. Coach Kris did an excellent job of herding us all safely down to the river. For the first time on this trip, it wasn't actually raining, just gloomily lowering. As we racked the bikes the u23 elite race was starting.

Tram back to the hotel yet again, talked to Duncan on the way. Last night he'd eaten at Klassz restaurant, where I planned to go this night. The attraction was their extensive list of wines by the glass - I wanted to try both a Bikavér and one of the famous Tokaj dessert wines. Fine dining the night before a race probably isn't optimal, but then nothing about this race preparation had been optimal. Duncan's brother runs a Hungarian winery and was presenting his wines at the Budapest Wine Festival the next day. He kindly invited me to come along with him and his parents to the festival after the race, which I looked forward to most happily.

Klassz was excellent and I can recommend it to any traveller. I showed up like an American at a ludicrously early hour, but at least there were plenty of open tables. Lamb knuckle with ratatouille and a glass of Takler Bikaver Reserve 2006, followed by an île flottante with Oremus Cuvee Tokaj-Hegyalja 2006. Beautiful. Home in a mellow gastronome'd daze, to pack bags and breakfast for the race.

The wedding guests had their revenge with a continuous thunder of drums from the band reverberating through my room until 2am. I took refuge from this aural equivalent of war in a usual solace, the Mass in B Minor, losing the aches in that cathedral of polyphony.

Morning and the five alarms set plus the wake-up call were all wholly unnecessary. Trams and trains and a bridge walk to the race site, with a New Zealand couple to talk with. Talking about Colorado, I'd preferred cross-country to downhill skiing, which provoked a story. Two years ago he was home on New Year's Eve, resting up for a qualifying race and pathetically reading tri magazines instead of partying. Three lines of small print advertised a South Pole trip. Last New Year's he was at the Pole after fifty-three days of skiing.

We went our ways to the bike racks to putter with pre-race necessities. I'd been working hard on replacing ambition with a calm acceptance and had nearly achieved resignation.

Usually I can swim towards the front of the pack and stay in clear water. At Worlds I'm firmly middle of the pack where it is as Chuckie V says, more like open water mixed martial arts. Some guy kept punching my calf ? a judicious half stroke followed by hard kicking discouraged him. Out of the water in 24 minutes, respectable but not enough.

The transition area was mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful.

The bike course was 3 laps, with each wave of age group starting at 15 minute intervals. This meant a crowded course and great difficulty in avoiding drafting, which was a little frustrating. I'd expected to ride about 21 min/lap - recorded a strong 17 minutes on the first lap. The course was short by about 3 miles, unexpected at a world championship, though it assured us all of personal best times.

The run took off down the Danube. I felt good but was getting passed a lot more than seemed right.

I'd written HURT on my forearm, in the place where goal splits for each kilometer of the run would have been written, in the days of actual racing. When young, racing, and starting to hurt, I took it as a challenge: now it's just more pain that I'd rather not deal with. The HURT was both to remind me that racing is supposed to; and to set the only realistically achievable goal for this effort. An honest effort is all the ambition I had left.

I'm thinking about the lions.. what happened to the lions ?

The run course was marvellous: over the Chain Bridge, along the cobbles past St. Stephen's Basilica, then another loop. In the end I'd thrown everything I had into it, improving on my 2006 placing in Lausanne by a whole one place. That wasn't the plan, but all I had this year.

The finish was some miles upstream of the transition area. The organizers provided a boat ride on the Danube to take us back. Walked the bike back to the hotel, as I did not have the stomach to ride on the road. After a couple of hours of washing mud off gear and disassembling the bike to pack it again, the sleepless night brought me low. Duncan called about the wine festival but I'd reached exhaustion, a pity.

All but one of the race pictures are from the ITU gallery. The other is from a Slowtwitch post on Facebook - visit it soon, before it vanishes in the shifting sands of that unreliable site. There's also video from the ITU of the race. I'm in one of the green caps swim wave, but scarcely identifiable. The pictures below by Miklós Tamási and Krisztián Ungváry, via Poemas.

Update February 2011: Poemas leads us to the time machine, emerging dazed in the aftermath of the siege of Budapest, 1944-5. All the bridges were down. Here is the wreckage of the lions with a background of ruins.

On the corner of Blaha Luzja Ter, the actors of the National Theatre clear away its rubble.

At the outlet of the Szechenyi Baths, it's laundry day.

Perfectly astonishing.

To go back before the war, I can recommend Patrick Leigh Fermor's Between the Woods and the Water. This casts a roseate hue on the landscape, still it places the country clearly in its historical context, with yet more heartbreaking memories. This is the second volume of a promised trilogy. Rumour has it the third is a pile of notes on Sir Patrick's desk. He turned 96 just a few days ago, so we will continue to hope in anticipation.

river ragamuffin

2010-07-07T20:23:00.000-07:00

Here we are, embarking upon another North Platte trip. Although this looks like the aftermath of a bad night in the sleeping bag, it is in fact C's usual appearance (Me: "your hair is a ferocious mess. You look like a wild animal !" C: "Thank you").

We've done this trip in many configurations: me alone, me and H together but in solo boats, H in tandem boat with a girlfriend, all four of us in the mighty Penobscot 186, me and one boy or another. This time Ian was at church camp in northern New Mexico, so it was C's turn to see the water from the front of the tandem canoe.

C nearly died of boredom while waiting for the shuttle, which takes about two hours. I fished quietly within view of the grumpy child, breaking off from time to time to feed him or otherwise ameliorate the tedium. The river was as always generous with its fish, first a plump but startled-looking cuttbow then a pretty red-spotted brown. The brown is a lot smaller than I remember it being.

Is this a Dagger I see before me, its handle toward my hand ? Indeed it is and we caper merrily into the eddy, dragging the Clorox baler for extra turning power.

Lunch in the canyon, below the biggest wave on the river, hidden behind the rocks from this angle. The water was relatively low and warm as we were a bit later than usual this year. On the planned weekend, there were storms, snow, and 5600 cfs: two feet of water running strong through the campgrounds. Wyoming Fish & Game actually closed the river. Ken postponed the trip to the beginning of July when the torrents of spring and the snowbanks had receded.

A blessedly uneventful paddle down to Deadwater South camp. The pumpkin-orange tent is my latest new tent, a Marmot Titan 3-man, rather more colourful than I'd prefer but the price was irresistible. It took me a while to figure it out, but the reason the two-man tents these days are so light is because they're not really big enough for two. While the MSR Zoid 2 is a fine weatherly tent, it's rather like sleeping in a coffin. I confess to a bit of a tent fetish, but buying all these tents does allow me a rich fantasy life where I get to use them all.

Water so warm in fact, that swimming and beach play were possible. Peter's canoe serves as an impromptu drying rack after a regrettable incident with a broadsided rock lurking in the flow. It took us ten minutes to pump the boat dry, and some of the dry bags weren't.

I investigated the river attentively, with a trout fly as a sort of virtual periscope into the brown waters. In past years the micro-eddies along this stretch in front of camp held numbers of trout, this time only a smattering of smaller fish. Small is of course a relative term (once wandering down a rivulet high in the Smoky Mountains, I caught a 9" brook trout that was an absolute monster) and comparisons are invidious, I was quite happy to see their bright sides anyway.

Having failed to solve the fish/river daily conundrum, back to camp where C was reading and snacking. There was a large stonefly pattern lost in the weeds by my chair, a huge black fly with an orange wedge of foam as an eyecatcher. I took the hint, lashed it to a strong leader, and went upstream to the black deep water curling and folding around itself in the hole below the rapids. It looked quite implausible, this monster fly floating about, but a splashy little rise turned into a long run deep into the rocks where the leader parted. No more stonefly patterns in my box, a Chernobyl Ant did not produce. C hiked up the riverside trail in the dusk to tell me it was time to start cooking dinner, which it was of course. With a guilty start I complied.

Here we are beneath the cathedral of trees. Canoe tripping tends to gather congeries of mild-mannered eccentrics. The upside is they all have good stories to tell.

C headed off into the woods with the potty shovel, quoting from Up: "I've always wanted to do this ! .... ... so do you dig the hole before or after ?"

Next day time for the Douglas Creek rapid, not particularly formidable at this water level though. Here's everyone lined up for the run, then Roger and Peter coming through.

Ken and I ran heedlessly down ahead of everyone else, to stop and set up rescue ropes just in case. C enjoyed the rapid too - they are his favorite part, probably because he's never yet had to swim one. I'm trying to hold off on giving him that experience. As you can see, it was all a happy blur as we crashed through the waves.

The rescue setup gave me time for a bit of nature-boy contemplation in the undergrowth among small wild roses.

We all agreed the forecast had been for calm sunny weather all three days, but it clouded up quickly and stayed grey all day. Once out of the wilderness area, there was a near-crowd of rafts and driftboats going down in pursuit of trout. After lunch C started to fish and quickly hooked and landed a nice 15" brown in front of several fishless driftboats. A thunderstorm gathered above us, clear blue skies at the horizons but grim lowering cloud above. It rained, thundered, and then hailed for a while. The hail was quite impressive, flattening the riffles while also raising white gouts of water. Once in camp it was wet cold and nasty, so the bonfire was required again. Once C had dried out and warmed up a bit, he told me "Dad you know I didn't enjoy that part".

Luckily there were some good climbing rocks available for entertainment.

I left C carefully drying his feet in the tent, bolted for the water to get in a cast or so. There was a small storm of pale yellow mayfly and caddis blowing down river, so tried a dry fly and was quickly rewarded with a handsome 15" brown, the match of C's fish from earlier in the day. I took that as my prompt to not neglect my fatherly duties again. Ken went on and caught some excellent fat fish on dry flies from around the island.

We clambered up and among the rocks. It rained off and on all evening. Usually things will dry out overnight in the desiccated Wyoming air, this time it was still sopping wet in the morning, tents, clothes, shoes and all. There's nothing like packing a dry bag full of damp matériel which you know is going to fester in there for another day and night.

The water had grown colder as we went downriver, oddly enough. French Creek came in roaring high with icy green waves breaking into the tiger's eye brown of the main stem. Paddling over near it was like going into air conditioning. A bald eagle watched us go from his dead-tree perch. The high water rushed us down to the takeout.

The Saratoga Hobo Hot Springs were too hot for comfort. C couldn't even get in, and it took me several tries. Usually there's a pool in the river at the outflow where the water mingles with cold river water, but it had been washed away. At Stumpy's Cafe the waitress was a young Goth, didn't expect that in farming country.

Back over the Snowy Mountains still plentifully supplied with snow, even a cornice or two in the highest country. There was a small moose-jam on the road, a big bull up to his knees in a flooded meadow, munching happily while surrounded by cameras. C had fallen asleep ten minutes after leaving Saratoga so we didn't stop.

Some of the pictures are courtesy of Roger. Thank you Roger.

Thanks too to Ken for putting the whole thing together, as every year.

Budapest 2010

2010-07-06T20:23:00.000-07:00

As Don Marquis once observed, "I've finally conquered that G-D willpower of mine. Gimme a double Scotch". In my case it was a tax rebate that overcame real and deserved scruples about indulging in a vanity project, to go and race in Budapest. The swim is in a rowing basin next to the Danube, since the river is sick with wastewater at that point. The bike looks to be flat and drafty. The run goes along the river past the castle, then two loops through the old town - should be a fine route. Originally I'd hoped to be somewhat competitive, but at this point it's looking like it will be more a gesture towards the memory of racing than a race in fact. Usually it's a good party though: it will suffice to bring a period to the end of these endeavors.

peach blossom time

2010-04-24T14:13:00.000-07:00

Friday: worked nine hours straight, packed for two, then drove for five: hopefully grinding our way across the Continental Divide to a weekend of peace and quiet at the yurt. The drive was a bit grim from my perspective, enlivened by a CD of Hank the Cowdog's adventure with the abandoned Mary D. Cat
"A crust of bread, baloney, cheese
Spare a morsel, if you please!
Marooned I am, oh hateful place
At last I've found a friendly face."
Hank bids goodbye by saying "hors d'oeuvre, cat" and responds to the puzzlement by claiming "I speak lots of languages - French, Italian, Thousand Island, and Ranch.."

After an exhausted remnant of the night, morning on the Buzzard's Roost,

with the usual farm detritus washed up on and around the fences and erratic boulders, themselves gradually returning to the earth. As Elizabeth Bishop observed, "Since we do float on an unknown sea I think we should examine the other floating things that come our way carefully; who knows what might depend on it." In this case a closer examination finds black widow spiders in the old shed, so perhaps not.

Breakfasted slowly and coldly waiting for the sun to come over the ridge. There are petroglyphs in the neighbourhood. We hiked up to take a look. Usually they are found in caves or overhangs, it's surprising these have survived on the bare face of the rock.

Presumably a herd of deer, though there were others with
elaborate antlers, one with sweeping horns like a sable. There was elk poo on the trail around the outcrop with the petroglyphs. The dog was completely happy, if a bit hot. Back in Palisade he behaved remarkably well at the farmer's market, doubtless because he'd finally run his yayas out. The brewery has changed hands and no longer has a liquor license to sell beer, except for consumption on the premises: instead of a growler of delicious Orchard Amber Ale, had to settle for 3.2 Corona from the grocery store, eww.

Home again for bacon cheeseburgers on the grill. The carunculated old logs of peach wood did not burn as long as I'd expected but made beautiful coals.

At bedtime I doused the fire with toothbrushing water which was quite inadequate. At two in a windy morning the coals still glowed. Although Grand Junction is just over the horizon, the dark hour stars were still impressive, Milky Way blazing overhead.

Monday the work of the farm got back underway. The beauty is merely incidental, or is it ?

We sold a conservation easement on the farm last year, to ensure it can never be used for anything but agricultural land. This made tax time absolute hell, three midnight watches to get it all posted.

As rentiers we get to watch the tractoring and other actual work. The drill uses shear pins which reminded me of several times Charles and I stranded ourselves on fishing trips, with outboard motors and sheared pins between the prop and the pony. I don't remember how we got home on those occasions - possibly repurposed a different bolt and drove very carefully around the rocks and sandbanks.

A tractor framed by the cash crop. As the fire burned both nights I thought of the time that was burning: when was the tree planted, how many salaries did its fruit help to pay, how many families ate the harvest ?

We hiked up in the Colorado National Monument, where Christopher added to his collection of Junior Ranger badges. It's a gorgeous piece of ground with one of the classic Colorado bike rides traversing it on the Rim Rock drive. One day.

Sunset over the Roost.

The Roost gets all the pixels, so here for a change is a view in the other direction, from the shaky corner of the deck. This point is some eight feet off the ground: walking on the deck here gets some sympathetic vibrations going and the whole edifice shudders.

Next morning before leaving, we caught the last of the morning breezes to put a couple of kites up. I'd been frustrated before by these kites' erratic diving. Today we had a twenty-five foot tail for the dragon kite, and a three-way six footer for the triangular box kite, which worked far better until the wind finally faded.

Here the dragon gets off the ground.

Then it's time to go again, back to cubicle prison to earn my daily crust.

nearly made it

2010-03-23T11:06:00.000-07:00

almost spring I think, nearly survived another winter. Yesterday it was warm for Colorado values of warm, and sunny, though today a foot of snow is in the forecast. Running from the office out to the Highline Canal trail, it occurred to me that I could take that trail over to Waterton Canyon, the canyon trail up to the Colorado Trail, and thence to Durango 500 miles later. A camelbak, some energy bars, bivy sack and a credit card is all I'd need. That, and a couple of weeks off work; oh well maybe in my next lifetime.

Started the run in a long-sleeve shirt which quickly became too hot in 50 some degrees. Highlands Ranch is one of the breeding grounds of America, so I usually encounter moms and children on lunchtime runs. It's also a Republican stronghold, with the accompanying broad but narrowminded Puritan streak running through it. Many of the children are astonished to see a shirtless man. The best comment was from some little mite barely as high as my knee, "mommy why is that man naked ?" I'm not naked, I have running shoes on. And a perfectly decent pair of shorts.. Today it was "mommy where's his shirt ?". Most of the moms smile pleasantly, others give that PTA-GT-Mom rictus which means they're inwardly planning your ritual disembowelment.

Now that we have the Romneycare health care bill on its way, perhaps the country can be dragged kicking and screaming into the century of the fruitbat. As Kieran Healy tweeted, "Hello America! Germany says, Welcome to 1883! The UK says, Welcome to 1911! France says, Welcome to 1930!"

It's also a good time for a redefinition of hope,

Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and

powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or

willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for

success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is

good.

Vaclav Havel

which echoes President Obama in his extempore speech to the Democratic caucus, quoting Lincoln: "I’m not bound to succeed, but I’m bound to live up to what light I have.”

May it continue.

moving house

2009-12-04T19:04:00.000-08:00

Given the ratio of time spent (conscious) in each room and place of the house, clearly my first priority was to preserve the mountain view from the kitchen sink.

In the old house, the view as it actually is,

and the view as I see it with none of the usual distressing kitchen filth in the foreground,

In the new house, the view isn't nearly as good, but the house is bigger.

By squinting carefully through my new bifocal glasses (well, progressive lenses really, but still I feel as if I've tottered over some new threshold) the mountains can yet be seen.

In a Platonic sort of way it should be enough to know the mountains are out there, the shadows on the cave wall are all we have anyway: but I was confirmed in the church of St Thomas, and I need to see.

Over Thanksgiving it was fourteen-hour days shuttling boxes down the road. Some of the boxes hadn’t been opened in 15 years.. some of those contained letters and photos from our childhoods, couldn’t quite throw them away yet. I’ll let my kids do it.

Here’s the short list of major fun incidents :

- washing machine tap snapped on Wednesday evening as I tried to replace it. Memo to self: don't undertake plumbing projects on Thanksgiving eve. The water was off until Friday when I could get to a hardware store for the special extraction tool. The first cheap Chinese tool was made of a metal softer than copper, so it just rounded off – back to the store for a quality US-made implement. That still took a 3-foot lever and all my strength to get the tap remnant out of the pipe threads.

- Used the camping water jugs and fetched water to flush loos, etc. I was so fully into camping mode I went to the basement on Friday morning to get a camping pot to boil water for coffee. H asked why I didn’t just use the kettle, I had no answer. Ahem.

- Sienna hatch door handle broke on Wednesday evening, so I had to remove the rear cover and open the trunk from the inside, all weekend long, while moving loads of junk. Ebay had a new metal handle to replace the original plastic part, but it's wending its way from Florida. I should have it in good time to not need it for the move.

- Dishwasher in new house runs but doesn’t heat water or dry. Handwashing all dishes is just what I needed to do with my free time. While searching the interwebs for a dishwasher manual, I found many references to this Bosch model overheating the circuit board so the solder melts. Tore it open, grunting: by golly one pin on the board was completely dry and surrounded with blackened spatter. Re-soldered it with an added piece of copper wire to act as a heat sink and re-assembled. Now it gets hot but the soap release is sporadic and random. Oh well close enough. You have to wonder about a design that gets the circuit board up to 600 F, hot enough to melt solder. As soon as the cash-for-clunker appliances kicks in for Colorado, we'll get a new washer. The stimulus program has been good to us: $4500 for the old Subaru, $6500 for the home-buyers' tax credit, and now even more money for a new dishwasher. I feel a little guilty but not enough to refuse the moola.

- Went to all the outlet stores looking for a new stove for the old house. This is part of staging the old house, the 20+ year-old coil stove is rather repulsive. We moved it with us, thereby providing another opportunity for the taxpayer to subsidize our new appliances. After 3 hours of fruitless driving around, resorted back to the internet in desperation: Home Depot, Lowes and The Great Indoors were all $50-$150 cheaper than the outlets. Bah. Did you know you can still buy a stove with an oven that isn’t self-cleaning ? I had no idea.

- Realtor said we should re-hang the closet doors in the one bedroom. The previous owner took them off, installed shelves and painted them in bright primary colors for the kid’s room, we liked it and left it. I thought it would be straightforward. Instead started at 7pm Sunday then off to Home Depot at 7:30pm with the project list. It went well until I found my guess that it took ¼” runners was wrong, should have had 3/8”. So then it was only another load to move and unload, got to bed nearly before midnight at least.

This coming weekend is for the crawlspace and garage. The old house had a two-car garage and 1400 sq. ft, new three-car and 2500 squares: yet the new is quite full and there's still all that other stuff to move. Two canoes and six bicycles out of the garage alone, two more canoes and kayaks from the outside, and on and on.

The old house looks quite beautiful now. Empty clean rooms full of sunlight, I think we'll buy it. We were happy there. I'm sure I moved the Lares and Penates in one of those boxes, so hopefully they made it intact.

Opening Day

2009-11-10T08:26:00.000-08:00

November 7th was opening day for Wyoming's pheasant season - not exactly the Glorious Twelfth, but quite good enough for who it's for. The dawn comes up with a distant cackle, "kek-kek-kek" from the cornfields as the roosters feel their oats, so to speak. In this wet year, the corn is still standing, which gives the birds plenty of food and place to hide from dogs and hunters. We were listening to Prairie Home Companion that evening, broadcasting from Des Moines, where they have the same problem: "We're in Iowa, where the major industry is gambling. Some call it farming. The corn harvest is a couple weeks behind, the corn is still wet — do you harvest it now and have to pay to dry it out or do you leave it in the field to dry and maybe lose it to a hard freeze ?"

The road that's dimly visible on the L of that photo runs up past the pea field and sorghum patch, to the neighbour's corn. Often at lunchtime while sitting in front of the barn recuperating, we'll see birds come out of the field, look left and right then scuttle quickly over into the scrub on the other side. For some reason we can never find these birds even with the dogs Spot and Artie. I did notice today that a wing-shot bird can outrun the dogs, so it's possible they just run very fast and far.

The sunflower picture is from earlier this year, now they are brown stubble. My excuse for posting is that it's pheasant food, also I like the picture. Even after harvest there are seeds scattered around, good for giving the feathers that final gloss to just bowl over the hens.

In the field everything is grey and brown except for the hunters in blaze orange. I used to be quite snotty about US hunters and their brilliant garments (the hunters I knew in SA didn't often kill each other by mistake), especially after a deer hunter shot our grey backpacking tent in the Three Sisters wilderness. That was twenty years ago. I still have the two orange ball caps we bought at the first gas station we saw on the way out of Three Sisters. Now I find with any more than two people in the field, the orange is downright necessary. A shotgun blast is dangerous up to at least a quarter of a mile; in the tall grasses it's easy to lose track of where everyone is, especially when tracking a bird moving high and fast on a curve to the next county.

We trudged around for some time, scaring up a number of hens but nothing shootable. Artie got away to do some independent hunting and flushed a handsome rooster at sixty yards, which made me think of getting him back in the shock collar. It has a vibrate mode, a shock mode, then a "bowl 'em over yelping" mode for when they're in full overexcited pursuit.

Further down in the beautiful blonde wheatgrass, a rooster broke out near my feet and hurried down the wind past Ian. He shot it dead center. I shot a second after him, but the bird was already dropping when I pulled. Artie dashed off but did not find it. We found a wing feather so we knew he was down somewhere, but quartering with two dogs did not reveal anything. Apparently the problem is after the flight, the bird is air-flushed so there's not much scent, and it's difficult for the dogs to track it across the dry windy Wyoming plain. A couple of hours later we came back and Spot proudly trotted out of the grass with a mouthful of pheasant.

That's not in fact the gun which did the damage - it's a Remington 1100 automatic, rather looked down upon as inferior to the break-action shotguns. Ian was shooting a borrowed Beretta Silver Pigeon with a cut-down stock when he got the bird. For my sins in not buying myself a shotgun over the off season, Ken made me carry the 12 ga Browning Citori, about eight or nine pounds. That doesn't sound like much, but after keeping it at the ready for five or six hours and ten to fifteen miles, it's a bit of a lump.

Ken was shooting a new-to-him vintage gun, a ninety-five year old side-by-side, with double triggers and an unusual safety. A bird got up out of the cattails while we were searching for Ian's, presenting an easy shot. First the safety was on, then the wrong trigger, so the shot came late and far. Spot was on the case though and pinned the bird as soon as it came down.

By lunchtime my other urchin had arrived. For a cruel and unusual punishment of Artie's independent hunting, we put him in his crate with the urchin.

The sentence for a shot pheasant is to hang by the neck while dead. These are all Ken's birds, though Ian had a beautiful shot at one of them. Artie dug it out of the cattails in a ditch and it hung there in the Wyoming breezes, glaring at us while trying to pick up speed into the wind: but there was a regrettable misunderstanding about the safety on the Remington, so Ken had to shoot it. I'd told Ian the red band on the safety button meant the gun was on and ready to shoot, but he'd understood me to say the red band meant the safety was on. Dagnabbit. By late evening the score was three for Ken, one for the whole Kretzmann tribe, a disgraceful exhibition. Do the birds your sons shoot count for you as well ? I'm demanding credit for taking him hunting anyway.

Early evening, and there's a rooster in that tangle somewhere. Artie knows about it as evidenced by his alert stance, but I wasn't paying enough attention. The bird flushed out from behind my right shoulder as we passed the puddle and headed for the corn. I was slow to respond then didn't lead him by enough and missed clean. No beer for me tonight.

John Buchan wrote, "The charm of fishing is that it is the pursuit of what is elusive but attainable, a perpetual series of occasions for hope." This of course doesn't apply to fishing a popular hatch on one of our Western tailwaters, which is rather a series of opportunities for public humiliation and to be comprehensively ignored by the fish. Still the point holds good for most fishing, and indeed applies to pheasant hunting as well. There's an awful lot of walking through empty fields: but at any moment anything may happen: and at worst there's been a fine long walk in the sun and wind, which is very nearly enough.

A well-hunted dog. That's either bliss or extreme fatigue.

What with all the hurry and scurry of preparing the old house for sale, packing up the old (Helen) and panicking about the cost and debt of the new house (me), somehow two sleeping bags got left behind. Since we're doting parents the boys got the bags and we slept fully-dressed under coats. Luckily it wasn't particularly cold, unluckily my sleeping mat had a slow leak so I'd descend gradually onto a concrete heat sink and wake up shivering. Then it would be time to shove another big chunk of cottonwood into the wood stove and wait for the warmth to permeate my old cold bones. With the air flow turned down in the stove, the flames come up and fold around the new wood slowly and waveringly. This makes for phantasmagorical images in the fire, good for poetical midnight musings but not so grand for a steady eye and hand in the morning.

Next day the mighty mighty hunters went off early to check neighbour Casey's cornfields. Tea and toast for breakfast, made with spray-on olive oil in an electric frypan, an abomination to my Greek-by-marriage sensibilities. We couldn't wake Ian up to go with us, another well-hunted creature. The birds were mostly all very happy where they were, deep in the corn, thank you very much. We did kick up a pair of roosters in a small field that had been left to go to weed for the year. A good shot would have bagged the double here but I'm not a good shot - missed with the first barrel, regrouped myself and re-acquired the target as it built up speed, then brought him down. Artie plunged swiftly into the ditch and brought it back to me grinning through the feathers. We were both very happy.

After brunch we went out on Ken's fields again. Ian preferred to loaf in the sun with a book, fair enough after walking his feet to nubbins the previous day. In the sorghum field, Artie ran his usual enthusiastic circles, wagging like an animal possessed. The rooster was trapped between me and him, panicked and blew up practically in my face. This is hard on the heart, but at such close range even I couldn't miss.

Last weekend we'd taken the dog to Cherry Creek for a walk in the mud snow and slush. Afterwards to Petco, to wash the dog ($11) in their self-dog-wash facility (the new house has a utility sink in the mud room, so we'll save $11 there). A Russian guy working at Petco told me Artie looked just like his Russian spaniel in the old country. He also used to own borzoi for coursing. I asked him what they hunted on the steppes, he didn't have the English names but said "the small wild chicken, and the big wild chickens". We'll eat our wild chickens in a leek soup with wild rice, I think.

In the late afternoon Ian had another shot at it. C got into an orange vest and walked with us. Only hens, and one indeterminate bird which Artie rooted out on an independent foray, far off into the setting sun.

The first time I saw a marsh hawk was near San Francisco, in Tomales Bay. Here again over the wetlands marsh hawks flew low and quartering, snipe gave their alarm calls, and a great blue heron flapped slowly up. That's all, he wrote.

a qualified success

2009-09-11T14:24:00.001-07:00

USA Triathlon National Championships, Tuscaloosa AL 08/22/2009
1.5k mostly upstream swim, 39k bike, 9.8k run

"The tumult and the shouting dies --
the Captains and the Kings depart --"
leaving us with the flags flying over a quiet Black Warrior river flowing swiftly to the Gulf.

This is aftermath of course. In flashback, my story is a below-par performance at the world age-group (AG) race in 2006, see here. The idea this year was to attempt to qualify for 2010 Worlds for one last race, to satisfy my vanity. This was all predicated on job life and health remaining unchanged: Ha, the gods who live past all imploring laugh merrily and long. So as prospects narrow, the goal remained to qualify, but the actual trip to Worlds in Budapest became unlikely. It's just too much money, given the GFC's effects on our college and retirement funds. I’d feel bad leaving the family to spend thousands of dollars on a vanity project. Lausanne actually cost less than Tuscaloosa, go figure.

A cheap flight to Huntsville left me with 100 miles to drive to Tuscaloosa. Walking out of the airport was like stepping into a pressure cooker - the heat and humidity combine to a sensation of physical oppression. Torrential rains and heavy traffic for all those miles wasn't quite as expected, but survived to reach the U of Alabama's campus and the Official USAT Hotel Capstone. Every third radio station in Alabam’ is faux Christian. Luckily one of them was bluegrass gospel, some good old-time music. The mayor was running ads on the radio thanking all the triathletes for coming to spend money in Tuscaloosa.

Dined quietly in the deserted hotel restaurant, as I couldn't face any more driving. There was one other couple, he was another racer in my AG, from Montana which is a long long haul. Nationals draws a crowd wherever it's held.

Next day was all administrivia, fetching the bike from the transport company, checking in, etcetera etcetera. On the walk back from bike check-in, talked to a Pennsylvania couple: we were in violent agreement on the need to avoid unnecessary exertion before the race. Amazingly the bike course was cluttered with clots of bikers, apparently riding the whole way. I drove the course, bike then run. Both were hillier than expected. The run in particular had some startling hills climbing out of the floodplain.

I'd finished the entire 500 pages of David Copperfield by dinnertime. A book is a good shield when dining solitarily but having read greedily, at FIG I had to sit in my usual eccentric-loner pose. The guitar player showed up with an old Fender amp and a couple of acoustic instruments, promising to make our ears bleed, but in the event was gently melodic. My usual pre-race meal is a PB&H (peanut butter and honey), so ordered a PB&J to-go from the kid's menu, for breakfast.

By morning all those rains I drove through had worked their way into the watershed and the Holt Lock opened. This turned the river from a sluggish scarcely-detectable flow to a brisk 1 mph current. I swam a short warmup upstream, turned over and floated down at a good clip. We faced the swim with trepidation. One poor old gal (age 77) never even finished the swim, just stayed in one spot for two hours fighting on, then called for a kayaker and quits. Bravo, is all I can say in admiration.

I usually swim about 23-24 minutes but took a hard-working 33 today: once tried to get closer to shore for quieter water but nearly impaled myself on a snag. The stronger swimmers lost 5min or so, the weaker went to the wall and lost 10 to 50. One of my AG competitors swam 44 so I beat him for the only time I ever will.

On to the bike, a two-loop course, and immediately plunged into a bunch of squirrelly 20-somethings on their second loop. For most of the first loop all my effort went into not-crashing and avoiding a drafting violation. I did clip a traffic cone at one point, but managed to keep it upright. The second loop was much pleasanter, in exactly the same time as the first.

By the run it was 80 degrees and 70% humidity, really not as bad as it might have been but quite bad enough. After ten minutes I decided to take my top off and damn the spectators' eyes, it was just too hot to be wearing anything more than necessary. The hills were staggering. Held on grimly to finish in 2:23, as 33 swim, 1:04 bike, 43 run.

At the finish I was quite satisfied with my effort, as I could scarcely walk. The run time seemed slowish though that could be put down to the uphills. Looking at the results, everyone else ran their usual times or faster: that plus the anecdotal reports of GPS showing a short course leads to the belief that it was short and I was slow. Oh dear.

Later that day, delivering the bike back to Luke at VeloExpress I got talking to Kirk Framke (your M35-39 National Champioeen !) about running and getting old. The postrace exhaustion supplied a form of 'in vino veritas' which let me blurt out a truth I'd not articulated before: the worst thing about aging is that running now hurts. It never used to hurt - the pain appeared as information rather than suffering - but now every blessed step of a race takes effort to oppose the weakness. If I take my watch off it's possible to imagine myself to be running fast, still that's only a comfortable delusion. Kirk was an architect: after 9/11 he took to teaching middle-school math in the poorer quarters.

All this plus my need for a little lie-down at the hotel meant I missed the women's elite race. Here are their bikes at least. The greensward in the background is where the AG rabble racked their bikes. I was by the first flag on the left at the back. A California girl in the 45-9 AG, coached by Michellie Jones, was racked opposite. She assured me her Tyr speedsuit was worth several minutes in the swim. I took an informal survey of all the athletes I saw wearing speedsuits, asking if it helped: 6 "I don't know, this is the first time I've tried it" and 2 definites. The definites came from ex-college swimmers with deep backgrounds, so I'm inclined to think I should have spent the $250.

At the end of the day, 14th in the 2010 50-54 rankings, so a clean qualifier at least - top 18 qualify, this year. 21st in 45-9, a bit weak but as the oldest in the AG I'm not too concerned. The bike was 1:04 for 24 miles which is about 1:06 for 40k, a small PR. The major disappointment was that I'd trained very carefully all year long in an attempt to recover my run, but all the training and tapering did not make any difference at all. In fact the neglected swim was the best performance, bike OK, run mediocre.

From one of President Obama’s books,
“I began feeling the way I imagine an actor or an athlete must feel, when, after years of commitment to a particular dream, after years of waiting tables between auditions or scratching out hits in the minor leagues, he realizes that he's gone just about as far as talent or fortune will take him. The dream will not happen, and he now faces the choice of accepting this fact like a grown-up and moving on to more sensible pursuits, or refusing the truth and ending up bitter, quarrelsome, and slightly pathetic.”

"If you can't let up on the competitive part of it, if you have to go as fast at 50 as you did at 20, you will grind yourself into the ground and become stressed out, bitter and unhealthy." Mark Allen

I'm not bitter, really. It was swell while it lasted.

Brightroom took a picture of me in the race that is the nearest to flattering I've seen in thirty years of race pictures. My nieces and nephews think I look like a velociraptor, strange bug eyes and muscles in implausible places. So much for flattering. After all those pictures I'm forced to acknowledge that maybe I really do look as goofy as they seem.

Letters (well emails in point of sober fact) to and from Tuscaloosa:
here in tuscaloosa
Aug 21
there are no telephones.. the hotel phone is incapable of outside
calls, and there are no public phones. Extraordinary.

Anyway, arrived safely last night about 7pm, after 130 miles of
driving in heavy traffic and torrential rain. The air is thick enough
to chew. Bike also arrived safely so we're all in place. In Kansas
there were 36 in my AG, here there are 61. Yikes. I guess that's the
east coast phenomenon, more people everywhere you go.

The conference center has free computers so here I am.

I plan to have dinner at FIG (food is good)
http://www.figintuscaloosa.com/
and order the kid's pb&j to go, for breakfast tomorrow.

Haven't seen anyone I know yet, talked to a guy from Montana
yesterday, the only one from the state. The hotel has the same feel as
in Kansas - individual triathletes are in general pleasant to know,
the herd emits a narcissistic vibration.
How do you know there's a triathlete in the room ? He'll tell you..

The hotel bed is very comfy. Two queen beds, I need my family with me.

> See. You need a cellphone.
>
> I was wondering why you hadn't called last night. Boys came up with all
> kinds of excuses for you. Maybe your plane was late, maybe you were too
> tired, maybe YOU WERE ON THE PHONE,MOM, AND HE COULDN'T GET THROUGH
> (see, we need call waiting).
>
> Dougie needs to catch a fish and release it to complete his
> fishing merit badge. We might all go down to the gravel ponds on Sunday
> to find a fish to release. Any suggestions on what lure to use ? Can
> you use bait there?

bait is allowed, a nice worm is the best bet - the ponds have mostly
warm-water fish, bass etcetera, so woims is what you need. Otherwise a small minnow lure.

Yes, now everyone has a cellphone, no-one is allowed to not have one:
since the public phone infrastructure has withered away.

The goodie bag includes a fine big towel from Ekanuba (dogfood company), with a pawprint on it. Odd sort of triathlon sponsorship.

It's raining and hot. The bike course is a lot slower than I thought
it would be, hilly and two long climbs. The most part of the swim is
against the current, which is bringing down quite a bit of detritus,
leaves twigs branches and probably the odd dead dog. Not much chance of a PR I think, but I do not repine.
Aug 22
the current in the river picked up overnight. One 70-year-old woman
spent 2 hours swimming upstream before giving up..
I was 10min slower than usual, but the weaker swimmers were 15-20
minutes off their usual swims. This was an advantage for me.
14th in the age group for Worlds qualifier (top 18 qualify), 21st in
45-9 AG. So an OK race, not as fast as I'd hoped, but the course was
very hard. I put my name down for Budapest, have 4 weeks to make a
decision before they want a race fee, but I'm thinking probably not.

off to chipotle for dinner because it's getting late and I'm tired
now. Drive at 7:30am tomorrow and away we go again.

the end

North Halfmoon creek

2009-08-12T10:25:00.000-07:00

We dragged our children up a mountain for a backpacking trip, assuring them it would be fun. I'm not sure if our enthusiasm has quite taken. Here we set out - note the kids are carrying their share of load.
The trailhead road is also the access to the fourteener Mt Elbert and Mt Massive trailheads. I’d guess a couple hundred people established in dispersed campsites along the creek: never mind what the bears do, it worries me what all those people must be doing in the woods. Turd blossoms everywhere, I suspect. The last mile is bad 4wd road but luckily Evan’s Tundra Toy (ota) had the clearance and the low range for it.

Quite a few hikers on the trail, but not many backpackers. Kid backpacking has shown this to be a good strategy for the crowded Colorado backcountry - backpack on a dayhike trail and camp just a mile or two in. This gets away from the 4wd campers, and once the evening comes on, the country empties out wonderfully.

Progress was slow, as there were backpack adjustments to be made about every 100 yards. The smallest child found his pack to be unbearable, so I wound up with 50lbs on my back and 15lbs in one hand. This is doubtless good strength training. Oh well, as long as it gets him out of the house. I'd packed a variety of junk food to entertain them at the frequent rest stops.

We were a bit late for the wildflowers. These I believe to be Gentiana alpina. The next picture is certainly Fireweed or as the British say, Rosebay Willowherb. It always makes me think of Alaska. When we visited eighteen years ago in autumn (August), the fireweed was flourishing in the clearcuts.

While we rested in the meadow, the others went to reconnoiter for a campsite. They found a nice flat island where the creek split around it, about a half-mile square, whistle pigs (yellow-bellied marmots) all around. Here's a Google Map of the campsite. Go down from the marker on the map, which is just by the trail, to the little open space with the crick bending around S of it. Switch to the 'Terrain' view and zoom out, for an idea of the topography. Although we hiked just 1.5 miles in, it was 800 feet of climbing.

The crick here is tiny, just a good jump across, with cutthroat trout that are probably the Yellowstone subspecies stocked in earlier years. These are in the wrong place, strictly speaking, but the habitat is close enough that they seem to be doing well. I caught some plump cheerful 9-10” and I’m sure there are bigger ones living quietly in pools back in the woods.

The views from camp couldn't be beat. We had a quiet night for the most part. The two youngest boys were in a tent on their own, with only stuffed animals and a small Maglite as defense against the night noises. I expected to have to offer shelter at 1 am, once the marmots or ground squirrels came around prospecting, but they made it through the night. C said he heard an extremely angry squirrel chittering at some dark hour.

Next day we pottered another 1.5 miles and 1000ft up to the lakes. C clambered up then ran down a big boulder, luckily just fell and skinned his knee. I had this vision of him falling off the wrong side of the boulder and bouncing a hundred feet down, so he got yells instead of sympathy for his sore knee. Quoth he to his brother later that day, “here on a silver platter, you can see why I prefer the indoors to the outdoors”.

The lakes are at 12200 approx, a good stiff climb up there, rewarded by the usual gorgeous high mountain views and wildflowers.

Small caddisfly were skittering across the lake and getting walloped by the fish in big splashy rises. We weren't very successful predators. I got one brookie on a #12 caddis, didn’t have anything small enough to match the hatch.

Young I worked on his flyfishing skills: rollcasting, and disentangling the result of a roll cast gone bad. He's making good progress, I wish he'd been rewarded with a fish. The brookie used up all our luck for the day I think.

Two hirsute fishing guides came down from the upper lake with a goofy black Lab puppy. They said the fish were cutts and brookies, allowed as to how they got a few but were cagey about the details.

Then it was time to beat feet out and back to the city. Both sets of children had highly-scheduled weeks ahead of them; we were supposed to deliver them home in good time for showers and general prep. In fact we rolled in around 11pm. Evan and I compared notes on the comfort of our respective doghouses, to see where we might be better off. C said he loved going into the doghouse - he's all set for married life.

H stayed home with Artie, to do some housepainting prior to putting said house on the market. While I was out having fun she was home toiling so I didn’t even get any dadly points for entertaining and educating the chilluns. Still it was worth it.

Farewell my Subaru

2009-07-29T10:46:00.000-07:00

"Cars are cars, all over the world
drive them on the left, drive them on the right
susceptible to theft, in the middle of the night

but people are strangers.."

Paul Simon, Cars, on Hearts and Bones (1983)

The gummint will now give you $4500 for your old clunker car - see www.cars.gov for details. One of the catches is it has to get 18mpg or less on the EPA combined mileage estimates. Both our cars are heading for that 200 000 mile mark, though the Subaru is aging far more gracefully than the Toyota. We'd planned to craigslist the horrible heap'o'junk Sienna and keep the Subaru: but it gets 18mpg, the other 19. That $4500 sounded its death knell.

Last night driving back from the dealer, I put Springsteen on the tape deck, opened the sunroof and let the wind whip the tears from my cheeks. The Subaru was the first sober respectable car we bought, to transport new baby boy who is now a smart-mouth preteen. Even though it looked like a station wagon, the turbo made it into my secret rocket sled. 'Rosebud'. I never did find out how fast it could go. The speedometer goes to 140mph, once took it up to 120 on the way to Santa Fe: the car was perfectly willing to go faster but my nerve failed.

Now we have the first, the last, the only new car I'll ever buy, a shiny happy Honda Fit. It doesn't have anything in the way of personality, which is my word for the dings dents and leaky sunroof of my fine old Subaru. Helen has a different word for its condition. Once it was broken into in a parking lot while surrounded by new SUVs, though nothing was stolen. My theory is that it looked like a doper's car, and the thieves were looking for money for dope, so they decided to go straight for the source as it were.

Now I'm driving the minivan, which feels like a procession of one going down the road. It's comfortable, quiet, and powerful but tends to proceed in a stately fashion, rather than nip around.

Of course you have to remember my dream car was and is the 1982 Ford Econoline adapted to a camper van. It was a getaway car - all we needed for a weekend away was a few bits of food, ice and beer. Everything else was already loaded. It had lots of personality too.

New cars are overrated, plus that 'new-car smell' is actually pthalates and extremely bad for you. Bah humbug.

(apologies to Doug Fine, I pinched his title and made it mine)

Update April 2010: On a macro level, it looks now as if the the clunkers program was a highly effective stimulus. The authors conclude,
"A plausible interpretation of the available data, in fact, is that many of the CARS sales were to the kinds of thrifty people who can afford to buy a new car but normally wait until the old one is thoroughly worn out."
I'm busted.

boiled frogs and lions

2009-06-26T15:13:00.000-07:00

James Fallows has his quixotic struggle against the boiled-frog cliche.

In solidarity, I am now taking arms against the stupid, mendacious, cruel "when the sun comes up, you'd better be running" so-called motivational running quote, not for the first time.

My hope was that it would vanish into well-deserved obscurity. Now, in Christopher McDougall's book Born to Run, comfortably placed on the bestseller lists, he attributes it to Roger Bannister. That attribution is creeping into the internets too, for example at the ironically-named factsleuth site.

Here's the quote.

"Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed.

Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve.

It doesn't matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle - when the sun comes up, you'd better be running."

I cannot prove Roger Bannister never said it but am entirely convinced that no-one can prove he did say it. Sir Bannister is a scientist, on the evidence of his life and 'The Four-Minute Mile' a careful thoughtful man, who would not knowingly say a false thing. The entirety of this farrago of nonsense is false.

Let me break it down:

Gazelles don't wake up in the morning, because they don't sleep at night.

Lions don't wake up in the morning, because they hunt at night or early in the morning before sunrise.

Lions don't run down their prey, instead stalk it and then pounce, like a domestic cat writ large and terrible.

In the morning when the sun comes up, the gazelles may safely graze around the lions, who are probably lounging happily near the carcass of last night's dinner. The time to worry is when the sun goes down, and running won't help you then.

A bravura performance by whoever wrote this, a whole paragraph without a single true fact. I saw it first on a motivational poster in a Fortune 500 company office, its natural habitat. It was doubtless composed by some ignorant cubicle corporate drone in a flop sweat, fabricating motivation for other wage slaves; to sell posters to executives who think talking on the phone and tinkering with spreadsheets qualify as work.

In terms of running quotes, it's a blight and an excrescence. The facts matter. Falsity must be opposed at every level. If you take falsity as your token in small things then how will you resist its blandishments in the large things ? Even on the surface level, perhaps it's just me, but I don't find inspiration in the fear of starving or being eaten. Terror is a fine goad and entirely appropriate to most corporate cultures, but fear is not why I run. If you want inspirational running quotes, Sir Bannister's book is a good place to start. On running as a child: "I had found a new source of power and beauty, a source I never dreamt existed". Power and beauty: this sounds ridiculous if you don't run, still it is neither more nor less than the truth.

There, I feel better now.

A few notes on Born to Run (whoops, wrong Born to Run, but I think we should acknowledge prior art).

Of course I enjoyed the book, it's about running after all so I am bound and determined to interest at the very least. The first few chapters took me aback with their overcaffeinated, Outside magazine neo-gonzo, jaguars-ripped-my-flesh kind of prose. Fortunately it settled down after that, but as a whole it seems a pastiche of magazine articles roughly stitched together. Many of the articles were interesting, though. The standard of research is often poor, as in the misattributed quote that started me off.

Another fact check - a Dr Bramble is interviewed, who says that according to New York marathon times, sixty-four-year-olds are competitive with nineteen-year-olds. This seemed wrong to me. I know my times at sixty-four (when I get old, and losing my hair, many years from now) will be a lot slower than I was running at 19. Checking with the WMA Age-grading calculator, using a 21-minute 5k, that performance at age 19 is roughly equivalent to the same time at... age 35. At age sixty-four, that performance is roughly equivalent to a 17-minute 5k by a nineteen-year-old. The same proportions apply to marathon times. Thirty-five seems a bit young as well so the truth may yet be somewhere else: still it shows not much effort going into finding facts. The WMA calculator uses world age group records as one of its inputs. Looking at the NY Marathon results for 2009, Dr. Bramble's numbers are confirmed: top 3 for 19 and under have times 2:55 to 3:09, top 3 for 60-64 are 2:58 to 3:04. Looking at world age group records, 19 is 2:10, 64 is 2:42. That rather makes a nonsense of the NY marathon times, and the whole contention that sixty-year-olds can compete with the young guns.

Another age-based calculator that uses world bests only, can be found here.
The study on which it is based finds "the estimates show linear percent decline between age 35 and about age 70." That only addresses the aging side of the equation though. Also, I'd contend that using world bests only has an inherent bias. Most runners reach a personal peak after five to ten years of consistent training, and it's very rare that this peak can be sustained for more than a few years. Look at the list of world bests for the marathon, linked above: there aren't many names that appear more than once, those that do are not far apart in time.

The WMA calculator also uses age-grading factors from the Masters Track website, motto: "older, slower, lower". I can get behind that.

The mysterious Caballo Blanco has a website where some later history of the Great Race can be found. It is sadder than the story in the book of course.

The story of Louis Liebenberg was fascinating. He was studying philosophy of science in the early 80s at the University of Cape Town when he had an epiphany about the origins of science, believing that tracking animals was the motivation for the scientific method. I took that same course in 1979. The professor was an eccentric who would show up, talk rapidly and eloquently throughout the lecture, then stride out of the room in mid-sentence on the pip of the hour. No epiphanies for me, though I did get a lot of running done, mostly in the forests on the slopes of Table Mountain.

dogs and children

2009-06-03T11:58:00.000-07:00

C (7) hurt himself in some fashion, rooting around in the basement in pursuit of a special Lego piece. He refused consolation from his mother, heading instead for the sleeping dog under the coffee table, where he got loving face-licks for ten minutes. According to C, Artie is better at comforting than Mom, since "Artie doesn't press for details".

yurt raising

2009-06-03T10:01:00.000-07:00

Memorial Day weekend turned into four days straight: working construction in Palisade, to get the deck down and yurt up. I forgot the camera, so the first picture skates blithely past a days' work of finishing and framing the first subfloor.

Here Keith and I are slicing and installing insulation below the second subfloor. The fibreglass made me cough, probably should have worn a mask. Keith's t-shirt says in Dutch 'horen, zien.. en suipen' which translates in Afrikaans (kitchen Dutch) to 'hear, see, and get happily drunk'. In Dutch the meaning is the same, but there is an extra layer since it's a corruption of "Horen, zien en zwijgen", the Confucian edict.

Rain stopped play quite often. This ensured the insulation got nicely saturated. The menfolk hoped this would translate to a stinky mould infestation, so the yurt would become a man cave, unsuitable for wifely habitation. Here, most of the second subfloor is down and wet, and the bender boards are getting bent around it. Eventually the skirt of the yurt (pause for Marilyn Monroe flashback) is screwed to the bender boards.

Two monkeys in a tree, with hangers-on. The lattice is expanded around the inside of the bender boards, and screwed to the floor. What this means, is the entire structure is dependent on the floor's structural integrity. Hm. The scaffolding holds up the center ring of the yurt, as will become clear.

Young Fernando (orange shirt) works with Keith, came along for a bit of mountain biking, plus helped out with yurting.
We drank all his beer - thought we'd be picking up the necessary from the Palisade Brewery, but never quite got off our duffs and the work site. Sorry Fernando..

While on the subject of youth, Farmer Thomas' daughters were around on the first day. Their track and cross-country spikes were in a box on the back porch, awaiting some event. I had a look at the shoes; a lot better than the Nike Elite waffle shoe which was state-of-the-art at the close of my x-c career. The younger daughter and her boyfriend were setting off for a summer of living in a van in Buena Vista, working as raft guides on the Arkansas river. It's one of my favorite whitewater rivers. I was talking to them about paddling, camping and all kinds of groovy things, but kept getting called 'Sir'. While I appreciate the courtesy, it makes me feel old enough to be their father .. wait a minute, I am.. Oy.

This morning I left Artie the Wonder Dog leashed to a tree, so he wouldn’t get into mischief in the 10 minutes between me leaving the campsite and H following. Some child unleashed him, a different child went into the hen run to play with the chickens and left the door open, carnage ensued. Ian reports Artie came out grinning broadly through a mouthful of feathers, 'mmm, tastes just like pheasant'. One of the girl childs screamed loudly enough that the neighboring farmers came out to have a look. Everyone thinks Artie is an evil dog now, but he's just a dog who likes birds, really. The rooster was still walking when we left, not sure of the longterm prognosis though.

Evan has the instructions. We have nothing to fear but Evan himself.

The central ring looks alarmingly toothy.

OK, so far so good. Now where does the rest of the rocket go ?

A steel cable runs around the top of the lattice, secured by a hook that says '2T limit'. The entire weight of the roof plus any forces generated by the winds depends on the frail lattice. Presumably some vector of the forces is actually outward, onto the cable, but it looks implausible. The background on the right is rows of incipient potatoes.

Practicing for when everything's finished, and we can relax on our shady deck. It may never happen, so we have to seize the day.

A layer of insulation goes over a liner. It comes in halves which have to be taped together. Brian invented a giant Q-tip to press the tape down, here he employs it under our admiring gaze.

Ommm.. here in the center of the mandala, perhaps we can get levitation..

Raising the roof. A couple of people on scaffold-stabilization; two on a rope on the left out of the picture; Thomas and Evan on top; and three of us boosting it from below. A good roar (me on the L) clears the pipes, and might even help with lifting it. I don't remember yelling though, makes me wonder what else happens during the day that I'm missing.

The roof unrolls on each side and is gradually unfurled. We had to wait for a lull in the winds to get it up, to avoid a Mary Poppins moment.

The walls then get unrolled around the lattice, and laced to the roof by a kind of crocheting of rope loops and grommets. No pictures of this, as the wind was picking up and it was all hands on deck. No further pictures either, as we were hoping to get home before the early AM and were focused on work. No such luck in the event - last screw driven at 6pm, a chukar running around the farmhouse as we packed up in the rain, home by 1am in torrential rains.

Finally. There's a spacy plastic dome on top, for light: it can also be opened a bit, to let the breezes through. Now all we have to do is put a floor over the particleboard, add railings so kids/dogs don’t fall off the high side, and make a bathroom arrangement. .. oh well. As Thomas said, soon we'll be coming up to clear out the under-yurt storage. Right now it's beautifully open, spacious and light in there.

rainy day

2009-06-02T20:48:00.000-07:00

Here in Seattle-by-the-Rockies, it's been raining for what feels like a month. The grass is lush and soggy. Taking Artie for a walk on the long leash, he runs circles around me dragging the rope through the wetness. The green belt is full of rabbits, which the owls and the coyotes appreciate. When the dog takes off, half-crazed with bunny lust, after one of these, the rope snaps taut: throwing off spray and an occasional rainbow.

Meantime the boys are on summer break, constructing cities and subterranean caverns of Lego on every flat surface in the house. When this palls, Ian painted the grey skies and trees outside the kitchen window. The yellow tree is a honey locust, its leaves a bright green on the yellow side of the spectrum.

Here's the picture with a background of sordid domestic detritus.

In closeup,

The dog that didn't bark

2009-05-13T16:12:00.000-07:00

The Barkin' Dog Duathlon, 5k run/30k bike/5k run, now in Cherry Creek State Park. It used to be in Keenesburg, CO, "Home of 500 Happy people and a few soreheads" and featured an utterly flat 30k with one turnaround. There was the occasional agricultural by-product to dodge on the way, but it was a good ride. The farmer's dogs would come out and bark at the bikes, hence the name. The run went along a dirt road next to the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad which gave the town its reason, now the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe. At times we'd be hurting ourselves along the road as a massive freight train rumbled by, "ground tremble birdseed fly in all directions", made me feel like a small fragile mammal. Eventually the few soreheads tired of roads clogged with Lycra-clad freaks and the race had to move. In Cherry Creek the locals still don't like Lycra-clad freaks but at least they're used to us.

Last year race day was cold and rainy, perfectly miserable weather for bike riding. Today's forecast was for the same, but in the event was clear and cool. I'd decided to do two 5k runs with a jog in the middle if it was raining. The over-45s all started together, with a modicum of creaking and groaning. A mop of white hair shot to the front and was last seen streaking through the woods - turned out to be Scott Hajicek, 54, running a 17:13 first 5k. It's been twenty years since I could run that fast. In the last 3 Dogs I've done:
first 5k, 19:59, 19:53, 19:54
second 5k, 21:20, 21:30, 21:10
I haven't broken 19:50 on a standalone 5k in ten years. Today's race was 19:05 first, 20:10 second. This was entirely due to a new pair of Newton shoes. They have four fat lugs on the forefoot which are supposed to encourage 'good running form', whatever that is. I didn't really believe it but will try anything once, especially now I'm old fat slow and desperate. The shoe is essentially flat - height of forefoot including lugs is the same as the heel. This I suspect is the key. Whatever it is, a 5% improvement from shoes is astonishing. Now I'm on the hook for $160 for new Newtons every year, dagnabbit.

The 19:05 was good only for 6th place in the over-45s. We are very serious old guys: old enough to have the money to buy aero goodies and engage in the whole arms race of buying speed with bike bits; old enough that we've either made our pile, or have given up trying, so have time to train; young enough that there's something left to train with; "made weak by time and fate", but denying it with all the strength left to us. Though perhaps I speak only for myself, in which case strike out the bit about 'made our pile'.

Duathlons tend to attract strong runners who can't swim and don't bike much, so my relative weakness on the bike becomes a relative strength in these races. The bike too had a winter makeover. Brand new used Hed aerobars, plus high-end tubular tires to replace the Continental Sprinters, which are sturdy but slow. Thanks to AFM, whose indefatigable testing of tires has produced the reference database of rolling resistance, for the idea. To my surprise, spending $100 per tire instead of $50 per tire, does produce a difference in the ride quality. Bike aficionados tend to witter on about 'ride quality' but I've always figured a racing bike is going to hurt and there's no doing anything about that. However these new tubulars produce a distinctly pleasurable sensation, even on the ruts and potholes of the Cherry Creek road. They are also faster I think, though the effect is not currently measurable as the new aerobars confound things.

The aerobars are carbon, which I've previously avoided on general principles. Several different carbon fly rods have exploded in my hand while casting: this is not a problem when footling about in pursuit of fish and standing foursquare on the good hard ground; but exploding handlebars at 25mph, suspended several feet above that same hard ground by two square inches of rubber, would be over-exciting. A lust for speed induced the sleep of reason so now I'm riding carbon. The trick is to not overtighten the bolts holding everything together, a torque wrench is a necessity. My bike mechanic-skills were all learnt by making mistakes in a poorly lit garage at 11pm, after the day's work is done. Wrenching on carbon provides an opportunity for new mistakes.

I’d adjusted the length of the aerobar extensions and timidly tightened the retaining bolts to what seemed appropriate. Descending from Cherry Creek dam road at 30+mph, the right-hand extension came loose. This was still manageable, steered with the elbows on the pads, held the loose bar with one hand and shifted with the other. I thought, "as long as the LH one stays solid, I can finish" so of course about 5km later the LH one comes off too. Stopped, jammed them back in, tried to start uphill in a big gear, cramped, got off the bike and downshifted, retried. This was very annoying as I'd been on schedule for sub-45 minutes over the 30k, which would have been a new land speed record for me, averaging close to 25mph. Bashed on regardless, cradling the extensions in a delicate yet firm grip, to the transition.

As usual both calf muscles cramped rigid in the first few steps of the second run. I'd worn compression socks for the full tri-geek look, also to see if it would help with the cramps, but no luck. Peglegged along for a quarter mile or so, then they began to relent. Mr CEO Challenge, Ted Kennedy, had repassed me on the bike during the equipment malfunction, and was slowly dwindling into the distance. Chased, but did not have the legs for it.

At the end of it all I'd won the 45-9 age group by 20s, and 41s ahead of 3rd place. There were four 50+ guys ahead of me though, so felt a bit of a fraud. On the other hand, I've been fourth in AG at races where I'd have placed in every AG but my own: call it karma and feel no shame. The awards are always a nice beer glass with a howling dog on it. I've heard several people complaining about the awards, having too many of these glasses, but that's not a problem for me. In fact the boys usually fight over who gets the dog glass, so I'm very happy to have two now.

There were several dogs at the finish, none of them barking. Most notable, a big Newfoundland the size of a small island, slobbering genially at us all.

Picture from bike leg is here, looking agonized in full aero tri-geek mode.

Racing is a kind of addiction. The reward is an altered state of consciousness, more precisely the obnubilation of consciousness, a holiday from the quotidian: "the strong life; it is life in extremis". This is true, win or lose: but there are many ways to win, and only one way to lose: which is to let winning matter.

Calvin's eschatology

2009-04-24T11:44:00.000-07:00

Dinner-table conversation with the 7-year old. Calvin prompted the dialogue,
C: if I go to heaven where you enjoy yourself being good, but I enjoy being mischievous, how will I enjoy myself in heaven ?
Aged P: maybe you'll live a long time, become an old man like me, then you won't want to be mischievous.
C: do you think you get to choose how old you are in heaven ? How old would you like to be ?
A P: I'd like to be as old as I am when I die, with all my memories: but a 25-year-old body.
C: I think I'd like to be six. Or seven.
.. tires of talking, heads off to climb into the dog's crate with him, an activity C terms 'fur therapy'. I tried to take a picture of this, but Artie saw an opportunity to get in an affectionate lick on my chin. All I captured was two loving brown eyes, closing fast.

Arches NP

2009-03-30T11:23:00.000-07:00

This carefully-framed pic elides the popup camper next door, fully equipped with a generator which ran reliably during all permitted hours. In my simpleness I thought the infernal machine could be run for some period within those hours; but the neighbours believed in the ants' dictum, 'everything not forbidden is compulsory'. Breakfast and dinner were accompanied by its steady brrrr. Otherwise, an excellent site, moderately sheltered from the cruel month's winds, with an unbeatable view across the sandstones to the La Sal mountains. The sand was fine and soft, marvellous below the sleeping bag, not so good as a companion in it.

The boys scampered up the rocks to find a sunny warm spot for re-reading the entire Calvin & Hobbes oeuvre.

A short hike from the campground gets us to Broken Arch, which is not in fact Broken. At kid hike pace, stopping to examine and discuss lizard versus snake trails in the sand, create sandslides, pick up attractive bits of sandstone, etc etc: this hike took nearly 3 hours. On another morning I ran the loop in 18 minutes. Still, the journey's the thing.

Broken Arch from below. There's a goodly bite out of it, and a crack across the narrows so it may not be long. On another day we hiked past Wall Arch which isn't there anymore.

From the top of the arch, views to La Sal. The mountains were clouded and snowy all the time we were there. Somewhere in the dead ground between here and there is the Colorado river. Our last trip on that section is essayed earlier in this screed.

Quoth young C, "I'm enjoying myself in two different ways. It's fun climbing on the rocks, and it's fun making you nervous".

SandDune Arch, good for an hour's innocent amusement. Surely there must be a way to climb up top and teeter precariously above one's aged parent ?

Sunset on red rocks.

We'd planned a nice easy bike ride on the Bar M loop but I managed to snap the rear derailleur cable on the Schwinn Continental. It was only 18 years old, can't imagine why it broke. Of course I had a full set of cables and housing languishing in the garage at home for the last several years, awaiting my pleasure. There was a bucket'o'tools in the car, using for a bit of deck construction in Palisade on the way over, but no cable. We needed to visit Arty the Wonder Dog in town anyway, at his lodgings with the Moab vet, so back to town.

I walked into Uranium Bicycles and waited for the owner to finish selling a $6k Wilier frameset with Dura-Ace tubeless wheels, probably a good $10k overall. Then I asked him about fixing a cable on a shamefully dirty $25 bike. He couldn't do the job before the next day and I didn't want to drive the hour-plus back to town, so he was kind enough to cut housing and sell me a cable for $6. They have some beautiful road bikes for rent, thought briefly of getting one for a long ride through Arches: eheu fugaces, I have children and dogs and a campfire to attend to. I replaced the cable while Arty got a walk through the cow pies at the vets'.

Weather rather shut down over the next few days, windy and cold. It rained the last night, then froze. The drive home as always took place through a blizzard.

gmail offline

2009-02-12T12:49:00.000-08:00

James Fallows asks:
" For all of Gmail really to be available and searchable offline, the entire cache of old messages would obviously have to be stored on your own hard disk. That's now a maximum 7+ gigs per regular Gmail account. More if you've bought extra storage. Do I really want to have all of that on my laptop -- which is the main place where offline access matters? From a couple of Gmail accounts? And Google's "Gears" system of offline sync, already in use with Google Docs, seems to create a separate cache for each browser you use it with. So you could wind up with one 7GB cache for Firefox, and one for Chrome, and... Will there be a way to choose how far back you'd like the sync to run?"

Excellent questions all. So, per my investigations:
- yes, a separate cache per browser. Hm.
- no way to choose how far back to go. For one small account of 128M, Gmail says they will back up to 5 years ago. Larger accounts will presumably not go so far back. There's no information I can find on whether the older emails will be cleared out of the offline cache, or left there.
- On the hard drive, the 128M that Gmail says I'm using, becomes 137M.

The Google Gears FAQ tells us where the data is stored for IE and Firefox, but oddly enough not for Chrome. For Chrome, attachments are stored plainly at for example
C:\Documents and Settings\uname\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Plugin Data\Google Gears\mail.google.com\https_443\GoogleMail[4]#localserver

The messages themselves are in SQLite databases found similarly
C:\Documents and Settings\uname\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Plugin Data\Google Gears\mail.google.com\https_443
The data appears to be binary, so not readable without Gears or some SQLite tool. The files don't have .sqlite extensions, but that's what they are. Open them using any of the handy SQlite tools, for example SQLite Administrator which allows export of tables as CSV, HTML, etc etc.

In my install, a file named accountname@gmail.com-GoogleMail#database is the database. The table MessagesFT_content has the message contents. Interestingly all the email body is in html.

Conclusions:
1. it's still a proprietary format, although SQlite utilities can be used to extract the useful information.
2. the lack of control over synchronization means it's not a good backup solution.
3. I still need to test actual offline operation - is the search as good as it is online ?

more birds

2009-02-09T10:03:00.000-08:00

last night I took Artie the Wonder Dog for a run. He pulled me for five miles. When we got home he did a few dozen laps of the yard, then went a couple of rounds with his old blanket. I was exhausted, he was energized. Today my quads feel as if I just ran ten miles down Mt Evans - had to brake on every step against his enthusiastic trot.

There were redwing blackbirds churring in the reeds. That is the earliest I've ever heard them in Highlands Ranch. On the other hand, every year for the last eight at least, the date has been moving up. I know this because it's noted in my training logs. Since we're right on the edge of its year-round residency, I guess that soon they'll be here continuously, and I'll lose my 'first-robin' marker on spring runs. Well, 'runs' for a generously-defined value of run: I'm working my way down to walking.

I suppose I could switch to the American robins themselves. They are thrushes like the rwb (the English robin is considered an old-world flycatcher) so not too much of a leap; but the rwb has this characteristic midday song so that he who runs may listen. It's easier to ID by ear. Then too, the robins are moving fast as well, according to the Audubon report.

The report also notes the meadowlark population is plummeting. Theirs is the true summer note. I always look forward to hearing their liquid trills on the bike in Chatfield.

weighing anchor

2009-02-02T09:54:00.000-08:00

a marvellous poem by Seamus Heaney in the New Yorker ends up at:

As I age and blank on names,
As my uncertainty on stairs
Is more and more the light-headedness

Of a cabin boy’s first time on the rigging,
As the memorable bottoms out
Into the irretrievable,

It’s not that I can’t imagine still
That slight untoward rupture and world-tilt
As a wind freshened and the anchor weighed.
**

Exactly so. Old, trapped and grounded, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans everything; a last synapse flares, a spark in the punk; we can still set sail out of the dim caverns of the skull; somewhere there may yet be found
"still green water and clean bottom sand,
..
Above a seafloor where striped fish pass in shoals"

Dell and Nvidia

2009-01-09T09:35:00.000-08:00

I'm not having much luck with Dell recently. As per the earlier post, the Inspiron 1510 contains a wireless card that doesn't play well with WPA-PSK secured networks. Now the latest Dell Vostro 2510, although a nice machine, turns out to ship with a defective Nvidia GPU that overheats. Hm.

The Dell 'fix' is to change the BIOS so the fan runs continuously, in an attempt to keep the GPU from frying. This makes the machine noisy and reduces the battery life. The only thing it 'fixes' is Dell's warranty liabilities, as it may extend the life of the GPU to slightly beyond the warranty period.

I posted a review of the machine on Dell's site, but it remains to be seen if they'll publish it. I thought I'd publish it here in the interests of transparency.

I was distressed to find that this model 2510 ships with the defective NVIDIA GPU card, but it is not included in the extended warranty.
Don't buy this machine until this is remedied.
See the Dell blog which indicates the 2510 contains the defective GPU.
But the guarantee is extended only to the products listed here.

I've used Dells at work for quite a few years without problems. However this may be the last Dell I buy..

pheasant with my phowling piece

2008-12-15T15:51:00.001-08:00

We're going hunting, aren't we ? O boy o boy o boy, I can't wait, let's go, now or sooner if possible, this is gonna be great !

Artie does his job exactly as he's bred to do, runs deep into the weeds and flushes the birds out. I on the other hand frequently don't get my part of the job done, and miss the birds.. Once in a while I do hit, thereby avoiding Artie's ire - you should see The Look he gives me after missing - and he faithfully brings it in.

Pheasants are extravagantly beautiful. They are, as Gierach observed of trout, far prettier than they need to be. On the other hand, for the last couple of centuries it's been a very successful strategy from an evolutionary standpoint: be attractive/useful to man, and he'll spread you far and wee across the world. Both pheasants and trout seem like elementals of air and water, jewels that swim and fly. Then men like me come along to turn them into meat.

In the evening, the birds come in from the cornfields to their evening quarters in the bottomlands. We hide behind the haystack and wait to see who shows up. The trick to recognizing a rooster is the C's - either hear him cluck, or see the colour on his face. In the evening the colour trigger isn't usually visible; luckily they'll sometimes declare themselves by chattering to their harem. This evening, four hens swooped in silently. The solitary rooster dropped into the dense weeds. We went to root him out with the dogs but in the meantime he'd run down into the jungles of the wetlands. Outfoxed by a bird, yet again.

Back at the barn having tea, Artie fell asleep standing up, while I scratched his ears. A thoroughly-well-hunted dog.

Update: 'the last couple of centuries', forsooth. Pheasant arrived in England with Caesar's armies. They'd been moving out of Asia for a few thousand years before that. There are some 30 distinct sub-species of the common pheasant; the status in the wild of all of these is unknown. The common and ringneck pheasant are of course not endangered, being so widespread.

Harold Macmillan on pheasants in England, reported in a letter of Patrick Leigh Fermor's,

"We're very lucky to have them. It's entirely due to the Roman occupation of Britain. The junior officers were very fond of them, and collected them in large numbers. I believe there was a certain amount of rivalry about which centurion had the most or the handsomest birds. In the end, of course, in 410 AD, in the reign of the Emperor Honorious, the order came for all the legions to return to Rome, but they weren't allowed to take their birds with them, so very reluctantly, all the centurions let their birds go. There must have been thousands of them. Anyway, they survived the Picts and the Scots, and the Saxon invasion."

There are some other remarkable pheasants. Bird books usually give a picture plus a paragraph or more detailing the 'field signs', the notable features by which the bird may be recognized while twitching. For the Lady Amherst and the Golden pheasant, one word: 'unmistakeable'.

The Lady bird:

From excelglen's flickr set.

The Golden:

From Dave Appleton's flickr set.

eragon and saphira

2008-12-09T21:02:00.001-08:00

#1 son wanted me to publish his picture of Eragon and Saphira, so here it is..

what are we playing at ?

2008-12-05T13:59:00.001-08:00

The last construction weekend of the year. We're putting up the deck for the yurt near Palisade, five 'professionals' with soft hands labouring manually. One ex-engineer who went careering off to law, and one actual engineer, so at least we have good directions to follow.

In the course of the weekend, the side of the shed in the background blew off. We upgraded the yurt with the wind package.

It's quite soothing to have nothing to do but heave lumber and bang nails, in the cold wind below the mesas.

The children of the yurt lent a hand and a hammer, putting in the spacers for the Trex boards. That palled after an hour or two, so they went off to Crash Valley, the gully where the previous farmer sent all his cars to die.

A few vagrant gleams of sunshine were all we got.

On the drive home even those would have been welcome - Vail pass was closed most of the afternoon and evening. We gave up and checked into a hotel. The boys and I went to sit in the hot tub, under snow, where we learnt that the hotel had just filled up and the Red Cross shelters opened. I hardly ever get that right, usually we're in the miserable cold waiting for the pass to reopen. After dinner we all huddled around the laptop, watching 'The Gods must be Crazy'. I thought the boys would enjoy the slapstick, their parents indulged in a bushveld nostalgia.

Two of the pictures courtesy of Mitch and Linda, thank you.

respectability

2008-11-05T09:29:00.000-08:00

Brad DeLong says:
"We can finally have normal politics and policymaking again. That's not a tremendous accomplishment, is it?
It feels like one:
And I saw a new heaven and a new earth... the holy city, new Jerusalem..."

I'm not sure it's possible to return to a normal politics after the last eight years, that well is deeply poisoned: still I agree it's a relief (in the same way that a biopsy for cancer coming back negative, is a relief) to have a respectable President again.

Not much to ask, but it seemed unattainable for so many years. Ezra Klein sums up the Bush legacy:
"He has been worse than a bad president: he has harnessed the power of America to do genuine evil, under his watch."
From the report by the Senate Armed Services Committee (12 R, 12 D, ranking member Sen McCain):
"senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees."
The general counsel for the Department of the Army has declared that what we did to prisoners in Guantanamo was torture. No weaseling, no mealy-mouthed obfuscation by tough-talking bed wetters, just the admission that it is in fact plain old ugly torture. The Red Cross thinks so too. Of course, most of the tortured were innocent as well.

This is the second time I've voted for a black president. I also got to vote for Nelson Mandela, in the first free South African elections. Praise be. Perhaps a Truth and Reconciliation Commission is a good next step, now that we will stop tortu ring people.

John McCain seemed relieved and happy in his concession speech. Odd. Perhaps he does have a conscience after all ?

Elsewhere I proposed 'Caravan of Love' as the song for the day. It's always worth hoping.

Update on torture: there was no campaign promise and no official statement on this. I had confidence however, and now:
"I have said repeatedly that I intend to close Guantanamo, and I will follow through on that. I have said repeatedly that America doesn't torture, and I'm going to make sure that we don't torture. Those are part and parcel of an effort to regain America's moral stature in the world."
Decency in government, what a refreshing change.

dumb humans

2008-10-28T09:26:00.000-07:00

California's proposition 2 will allow farmed animals
"to lie down, stand up, fully extend their limbs and turn around freely."
You mean they can't do that now ?
Astonishingly enough, there is strong opposition to allowing farmed animals the freedom to lie down.

We are all God's creatures; tormenting our fellow creatures seems to me appalling in any religion's worldview. If we are not God's creatures, instead just East African plains apes with delusions, living under an empty sky: then those of us capable of compassion should show it, for the good of our mortal souls if nothing else. We need to obey the Vonnegutian imperative, "There’s only one rule that I know of, babies - God damn it, you've got to be kind".

Update: looks like it passed quite convincingly, sixty-some percent voting for it. Oh good.
On the other hand, proposition 8 to ban same-sex marriage, passed as well. Cruel to humans but kind to animals, there's another puzzle of the human animal..

bird dogs in Veteran, WY

2008-10-14T12:21:00.000-07:00

Off to darkest Wyoming, near the town of Veteran, to take Artie on his first duck hunt. The ducks are coming down the Central Flyway and are susceptible to ambush. Blue-winged teal are still on the ponds: since we broke the weather they stay around a lot longer than what used to be usual.

Ballasbak in the barn, planning a normal distribution of chores and entertainment.

Here's Artie taking a nap with his favorite stuffed toy, a 25c garage-sale cat.

Boy and dogs heading out to the wetlands. Artie thought he'd died and gone to heaven, from the boring suburban green-belt spaces to a whole farm full of smells.

Once the feathers hit the water, the party is reduced to serious hunters only. Artie's dad Spot is point dog.

Artie gets to practice with the downed ducks. Real birds were harmed in the making of this picture, I fear. Very tasty too.

The rest of us needed a bit of shotgun training, making shards out of clay pigeons. Mostly I couldn't hit the doubles, one going R and one going L, because I'm just too slow. Three different guns: a lovely little Beretta over/under 28 gauge, which pointed itself, didn't miss anything with that one; a Winchester 20ga, perfectly competent bit of American craftsmanship but my euro-snob side preferred the pretty Italians; a Beretta 12ga side/side, hardly any heavier than the 28ga. Ken sneaked in a goose load on the 12ga at one point, thing kicked hijus. The last thing I shot with a kick like that was a RPG. The clays would break when hit with 28ga, the goose load basically turned the clay back into silt.

Next day, Artie got to fossick around in the fields, to kick up some pheasant and/or quail. No shooting at these since the season isn't open yet. They tell me Montana is big sky country, but Wy manages a fair old spread too.

a brief excursion

2008-09-11T13:19:00.000-07:00

Ken coming downstream, in a satisfied sort of way: took 5o casts and two changes of fly, but he finally got that 16" rainbow that was rising to tricos.

A turbocharged rainbow, he jumped higher than my head. Returned with thanks.

None of the comforts of home, but many countervailing pleasures.

High country, empty and quiet. Except of course for the cows on welfare, grazing public land to a nubbin. Their outraged moos kept us awake for, oh, nearly five whole minutes.

nothing to say, just gratuitous prettiness.

Next morning on Lost Creek. Nothing much fish-wise, but it could not have been better.

Vista wireless networking

2008-08-18T14:43:00.000-07:00

The Windows 2000 and XP machines work fine. The Vista machine drops and re-connects the wireless connection every 3-5 minutes or so, which is very tedious when trying to watch nbcolympics.com videos. These don't play on Win2000, and the XP box has its own problems with overheating in the GPU, so the Vista needs fixing.

After a brief descent into the usual circles of forum hell, where self-styled hacker doodz spread misinformation and the unfortunate ESL guys patiently try to make sense of it all: here's the short list of things to check.

Update Dec 2: I upgraded Vista to XP, but the problem persists. XP gives a few more things to try:
- used the Dell utility for wireless, and disabled the Windows WZC service
- disabled the Dell utility, and used the Windows WZC configuration for wireless
Also tried a static IP address, which improved the time taken for the initial connection, but it failed in the same way.
Dell 1390 WLAN mini-card, Broadcom 44/10x100 integrated controller. I'm beginning to think the problem is in the 1390 card, since that's the only thing that is different between this PC and the others that work.

The PC works fine at the library with an unsecured network. I tried turning off WPA-PSK at home, and now that works fine too. However I'm not prepared to run without security.

Finally worked around the problem by disabling the 1390 Wlan card, and installing a USB wireless adapter. It's slightly slower, but at least it doesn't crash the entire network on a regular basis. It was a hardware problem, not Vista's fault at all. That hardly ever happens..

Update Aug 29: well, it seems the behavior is by design in Vista. It checks automatically every minute or two to see if there's a better wireless connection. That check will cause a lag in the wireless traffic, and in some cases a complete disconnection. Microsoft believes this to be acceptable behaviour. There are some little programs floating around that may work, try WLAN Optimizer or Vista Anti Lag, but neither worked for me. The only workaround is to buy a wireless bridge, aka wireless gaming adapter, and connect it to the laptop Ethernet port. Then disable the WLAN Autoconfig service in Vista.

Or, simply upgrade to Ubuntu Linux. First get the Live CD, which allows Ubuntu to run from the CD, without needing to install. This is a way to make sure the hardware is supported under Ubuntu. If that runs OK, test the wireless connection under Linux with this step-by-step. All being well, make a dual-boot system with Windows and Ubuntu. Follow the instructions here. Then, boot into Windows Vista when you don't have enough pain and suffering in your life: otherwise use Ubuntu.

Here's the list of other things to check in Vista, just in case something helps.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928152/en-us
Change power options.. Start, search for Power Options, then proceed to set it to high performance for everything.

**

Try channel 11 instead of the default 6. This is set on the router configuration, and should be picked up automatically by the clients.
Both channels 1 and 11 do not overlap with the default channel 6; use one of these three channels for best results.

**

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/814123

Turn off the 802.11 authentication.
1. Click Start, and then click Control Panel.
2.Click Network and Internet, click Network and Sharing Center, and then click Manage network connections.
3.Right-click the network that you want to disable 802.1X authentication for, and then click Properties.
4.Click the Security tab, and then, in the Security Type list, click No authentication (Open). Click OK.

**

Turn off network speed auto-detection:

Select Network Settings, either from your Start menu or from within Control Panel.
Right click on the connection that corresponds to your network card, and select Properties.
In the dialog that results, click on the Configure... button immediately below the "Connect using..." item that shows your network card.
In the dialog that results, click on the Advanced tab.
This is where things vary based on your network card. In the left-hand list will be a series of properties that can be adjusted. Look for a setting similar to "Speed", or "Link", or perhaps "Media Type". Click on that, and the right-hand "Value" dropdown list will probably have something similar to "Auto". If you click on that drop-down list and options include entries that look like "10mbs", "100mbs", and so on, you've found the right item. Change the setting from auto by clicking on the specific speed you've determined you want the network card to run at, and press OK (If the setting also includes a full/half duplex selection, full is normally correct.)

**

Update the drivers etcetera.
1. Verify that you are using the latest version of the wireless network adapter driver that is available from Microsoft or the wireless network adapter vendor. To obtain the version of the wireless network adapter driver that is installed, right-click the wireless connection in the Network Connections folder. On the General tab, click Configure. From the wireless network adapter properties dialog box, click the Driver tab. The version of the wireless network adapter driver is displayed next to Driver Version. If your wireless client is connected to the Internet, click Update Driver to launch the Hardware Update Wizard and search Windows Update for a newer version of the driver. Alternately, check the wireless network adapter vendor's Web site for a newer version of the driver.

2. Upgrade the router's firmware. Since our Dlink is way out of support, we have the absolute latest 2004 firmware already installed..

**
From Microsoft's trouble-shooting document, found here:
Wireless Auto Configuration is Enabled and a Third-Party Wireless Configuration Tool is Installed
Windows XP Wireless Auto Configuration provides integrated support for wireless networking and helps automate wireless configuration. Wireless network adapters also provide a wireless network configuration tool. If the wireless network adapter driver supports Wireless Auto Configuration, installation and use of the network adapter vendor's configuration tool is not needed. To test whether your wireless network adapter supports Wireless Auto Configuration, right-click the wireless connection in the Network Connections folder and then click Properties. If there is a Wireless Networks tab, your wireless network adapter supports Wireless Auto Configuration.
Note: there are no third-party configuration tools for Vista. Only the WLAN Autoconfiguration Windows service exists, which is broken as noted above.

**

If the SSID broadcast is disabled on the preferred wireless network, clever old Windoze might be disconnecting from the network in order to use a different network that is broadcasting its SSID. We do broadcast, so that isn't the case here, but just for completeness..

5430 triathlon

2008-08-12T10:35:00.000-07:00

1.2 mile swim, 56 bike, 13.1 run.
35:06, 2:38, 2:08 for 5:23 finish.

Heading out the door at 4:30 am, I contrived to smack the left quad into a doorknob with sufficient force to bring tears to my eyes. Limped to the car, pondering the three pains to start the race with - quad, bursitis in L heel, and some strange tendon (Flexor hallucis longus I think) in the R ankle. Oh goody.

I'd tapered carefully for this race over 10 days, and it really paid off. The warmup run was the best I've had in a decade or more, felt light strong and fast. Unfortunately the rest of the day was all uphill from there. Swim heads straight into the sun, past the orange round buoys and turn at the yellow triangular ones, which is better than the usual undifferentiated markers. The previous wave had orange caps that matched the buoy's colour perfectly, so route-finding was a bit tricky: the small round red head in the near waves looked a lot like the far buoys at times. Calf cramped briefly at one point, after three sighting strokes and kicks for the route-finding provoked it. The two guys drafting off me were a bit ticked off, but I didn't lose much time. Out of the water in 33:50 which seemed slow: general consensus at the finish line was that it may have been a couple of minutes long.

The bike starts out with a long steady almost invisible climb, 350 feet over 4 miles. The low point of the course comes a few miles before this on the second loop, making the climb more like 500 ft over 6 miles, even better. It's always discouraging to be grinding out 15-16mph on an apparently flat road. Patience and humility are called for but I do not heed the call. Actually I thought I was being very conservative on the bike. Even after the previous 3 weeks at sea level, breathing was easy; I could have passed the talk test at any time. One guy rode by and said 'time for new shorts, dude'. Lycra gets transparent as it ages: but the shorts had looked fine when I put them on in the dark at 4am. At the finish I asked Julie, 'so how bad is it ?' and turned around. She dissolved into helpless giggles, so I guess it was pretty bad. I apologise to everyone behind me..

After the grind, a series of rollers, fun and nothing serious. Then a screaming descent at 40+, whee. Here as elsewhere on the course, anything over 30mph meant tucking into the aero position and relaxing. I was surprised at the number of people I coasted past while they were pedaling furiously on the descents.

There was a strange little dogleg at one point down a side road, with an unexpectedly narrow turnaround. The girl ahead of me went wide, into the dirt, but recovered back onto the tar. I had the first inadvertent unclip of my cycling career while going about and looked down at the pedals instead of thinking. The girl by this time had stopped, so I successfully jammed the front wheel firmly into her rear wheel gears (ooh baby) and came to a halt. Of course I fell over on the side that was still clipped in, head hit the tar with a startlingly loud whack, then someone ran over it. Luckily the long tail of the aero helmet deflected the wheel away from the cranium as such. It was a curious sensation, like a dog had grabbed the helmet and given it a good shake. That evening my wife wanted to know how I'd managed to get lovebites on the back of the neck. My story was that they were tiremarks and anyway I didn't even know the bike in question, think I was able to sell it.

A burst of profanity to relieve the immediate emotional distress, apologised to the girl I'd rammed, and off again bleeding only lightly from the knee shoulder and elbow. Later I discovered this had also cracked the rear wheel cover. There was a lot of equipment damage for such a slow-motion crash. Still, no bones broken. Hopefully it won't show up on YouTube. By now I was up to six pains, the three I'd started with plus shoulder cramps and bleeding, on top of the general systemic effort which I never really feel as pain. So that's OK.

The rest of the course is rather pretty, two-lane roads through farm country with the mildest of rollers, very enjoyable. Halfway in 1:18 which was faster than I'd expected: this probably meant I'd gotten the pacing wrong. Oh well. Second lap was mercifully uneventful except for getting yelled at for going slow at the turnaround. Brother, I have the scars.

Off the bike in 2:37 feeling not too bad at all. Sat down to get socks and shoes on and use an asthma inhaler which was wholly supererogatory, as I never got anywhere near oxygen debt in the entire race. L'affaire doorknob hadn't hurt much on the bike so I'd forgotten it. Now it appeared that I couldn't lift the left leg at all. This didn't matter much at first since the right leg wasn't coming along too well either, but I'd rather hoped to be able to start running after a mile or two. Quoth the raven, Nevermore: thirteen miles of survival shuffle is what it took. I've run over a hundred marathons, trail marathons and ultras, and never had to gut it out for such a long time. It was absolutely the hardest race of my life. My personal worst for a half-marathon in competition was 1:36, after basic training in the Army when I'd bulked up to 180 lbs ('bulk' is a euphemism, there was a fair bit of blubber in there too). Well, I just shattered that mark.

The run route here is lovely, dirt road around Boulder reservoir in the prairie with grand views. The fine weather we'd had all day persisted, good cloud cover, warm but not extravagantly hot. Best weather in years for the 5430 and I couldn't take any advantage of it, boo hiss. Shambled along kicking up dust, tried to 'run' between aid stations and walk the aids but couldn't even manage that. I'd never known it was possible for me to 'run' and go so slowly. The first lap took 56 minutes meaning even my worst-case time goal was out the window. The Gatorade, Coke, water and gels were not mixing well in my stomach by this stage, lots of sloshing and gurgling going on, with shooting pains to add to the other six. I skipped taking the next gel at the half-hour since I just couldn't face (or stomach) it. This produced a swift retribution as the pace dropped to about a 25-minute mile, forced the gel down at the next aid station, after which I was able to pick it up to nearly 10min/mile, woo-bloody-hoo. In the end I just relaxed and enjoyed a fully-catered walk around the res to finish in 2:08 for the run, 5:23 overall. Shameful.

Met Julie at the finish and commiserated on our races. We found shade in the beer tent (mmm) and sat down, but didn't have the strength to get up and actually fetch a beer. Julie's friend Kim was kind enough to get our beer, thank you oh thank you..

One thing I'd do differently in the alternate universe where I'd try this again, is to use trail shoes like the Montrails for the run. The rocks and pebbles in the dirt road had tenderized my feet quite effectively by the finish. Another is to eat some solid food on the bike, instead of just gels. Panini are what I'd try, recipe below. It's possible also that I drank too much for the mild weather.

After six weeks without a bike ride but some good swim and run training, plus some 30-odd (some of them extremely odd) years of marathoning, I'd hoped to be able to fake the run after taking the bike easy. Turns out it can't be done, 56 miles of bike ride even at a relatively easy pace will turn the run legs to jelly. This is not news I suppose, but I thought I could do it. Hah.

Note later: Mike Ricci had this to say on another 5430 race report,
"My thinking from seeing this time and again, is that being in that aero position for 2+ hours (when you aren't training like this) tends to really fatigue the hip flexors so when you get to the run, you feel like it's much harder than it should be. I am betting that's one of the reasons the run didn't go as planned."

Thanks to Barry Siff, Mr 5430tri, for yet another fine race. Thanks to all the wonderful volunteers, in particular the girls in bikinis at aid station 2 on the bike, though the guy in a bikini there I could have done without: oh my eyes.

Receipt from http://www.roadbikerider.com/ though I can't find it on the site anymore:
Panini are usually made with white bread after the crust is removed. This reduces sandwich size so it can be eaten in three or four bites.
Traditionally, the bread is toasted. Then one side of each piece is quickly touched to a flat saucer of white wine. This is done to add flavor and, the Euros believe, it aids digestion. The wine seeps in to make the bread soft by the time it's eaten. Starting with untoasted bread could result in a very mushy sandwich.
Inside is butter, cream cheese or a soft cheese like Brie, and jam. Honey is favored by some riders. On cold or rainy days or for long races in moderate temperatures, soigneurs might add a slab of ham.
The resulting sandwich is wrapped in aluminum foil to keep it protected, fresh and moist so it's easy to eat.

On Mt. Kandili

2008-08-07T16:02:00.000-07:00

Uncle Dino wanted to know if I got paid for all the running and swimming I was doing on vacation.

I am paid in the red coin of the sun going down,
the notes of waves susurrant in the pebbles
which cannot be counterfeited;
the figs ripening and the wind that bears their scent
chattering of cicadas,
goat bells in the olive grove, behind the monastery,
cool sweet water from the mountain springs;
the wages are good enough.

North Platte at 3600cfs

2008-06-10T18:03:00.000-07:00

A clear blue sky to begin with, the last we'd see for 3 days. But note the low grey clouds sneaking in over the horizon..

The bright sun turned the river from brown to silver, luring us down the primrose path (bit muddy for primroses, though).

While waiting for the shuttle drivers to return, I improved the shining hour by going fishing. There was only one little backwater in a mile of river that looked as if it could shelter a fish, and indeed it was pullulating in an invisible sort of way, down there in the murky depths. This is the biggest sucker I've ever caught, 22" or so. I thought I'd hooked a monstrous brown trout, but as a rafter from Boulder Boatworks observed later, there's no second act with the sucker. He fights well for a few minutes, then goes belly up and yields to his fate with scarcely another twitch of the fins. Quite a handsome fish all the same. A couple of smaller brown trout, then this beast, 18" with a jaw like a crocodile. His dorsal fin came sailing up through the thick water making me think it was another sucker, but he went several rounds.

Here's a view from the backwater, into the canyon. Upstream from here is some class IV water (at this water level), which a couple of rafters hiked up to inspect. They'd just come from the Grand Canyon, but decided to give the N. Platte another day to subside before they attempted this canyon.

In between that picture and this one of the first camp, there was an awful lot of activity, but no time to be taking pictures. A pity, since the waves were fearfully impressive. The whitewater canoes and the inflatable were in their element. Mike and Deb were in a well-loaded tandem boat with not much freeboard. They handled the rapids without problems, but tended to emerge at the tailout with gunnels level to the water, up to their waists inside the boat. A swamped canoe like this is very unstable: the usual procedure is to catch an eddy and bale out. Today the high water turned a sequence of class II rapids into one single class II-III rapid, leaving very few eddies, and those few mandated a close personal relationship with the willows. So, the rest of us got some rescue practice. Chasing an inverted canoe through the rapids with no time to read the water for the best route, just ripping through the rocks and holes in hot pursuit, is good for the adrenalin generators. Add in a strong cold blustery wind that kept blowing the boat sideways, and the whole thing became a bit of a tightrope dance: perhaps not the brink of disaster, but certainly an excellent view of it.

By way of comparison, here's the river as it was at 3600cfs, and the last year at 1100 cfs (thanks to Roger for last year's picture).

After all that excitement, I needed to have a quiet spot of fishing to calm the nerves. More healthy happy brown trout, like this one which looked in fine fettle,

and then a rainbow, full of jumps and aerial flourishes.

The view from this backwater full of fish:

I stayed up late that night, closed the camp down at 8:30pm, as we all collapsed into bed just ahead of driving mists. In the middle of the night I got up for middle-aged reasons, and it was the pitchiest sort of black, cold drizzle blowing by.

The inflatable canoe went into Dick's tent with him. I guess some guys really love their boats.. actually he was using it as an air mattress, to sleep on. Quoth Dick upon emerging the next morning, "and it comes with an attachment, named Zelda.."

Next morning, cold grey skies and a wind with ice and snow in it. Midsummer in Wyoming, and welcome to it. Packed up camp and fished for a bit, this morning's chapter of piscatorial incident included a 12" cuttbow which I'd never seen here before. The Wyo G&F doesn't stock the river, but there are private ranches along the river that probably dump dumb stockies in for the paying clients. I'm happy to see the stockies going feral.

Only one rapid of consequence left, Douglas Creek, half-an-hour downriver. We scouted this one since we could. Instead of washing out, the rapid had just bulked up magnificently, huge standing waves curling into white foam. The sun reappeared briefly. In its light the waves seemed lit up from within, glowing brown and gold like tiger's eye. I remember taking a small boat out into the swells off Shark Point, the westernmost tip of Australia: the huge wine-dark waves rolled in with a thousand miles of ocean behind them. These waves were a kind of landlocked miniature version of that emotion; driven by seasons rather than ocean.

"The old voice of the ocean, the bird-chatter of little rivers,..
From different throats intone one language."

Mike and Deb decided that Ken and I could run their boat down, while they took video. We approached the entrance carefully, backpaddling and quartering into the waves to keep the boat dry. After the first quarter mile there was a narrow channel between boat-eating holes which was the must-make move. Going in there we paddled hard, crashed through with the water slapping into my chest, but stayed up and only half-filled the boat. That was fun in fact.
We pulled over after that for a little snack, taking advantage of the brief sun.

Onwards, as the weather closed in again. The sun kept trying to emerge, a bleary yellow eye in the clouds, but it wasn't trying hard enough. The rain began, driven hard by an upstream wind into our faces, like being pelted with small cold pellets. The temperature was medium 40s. As this all soaked slowly into us, on a river which was snow yesterday, it became distinctly cold. Reaching camp at 4pm, we immediately dragged up a heap of driftwood, soaked it in Coleman fuel, and torched it. No energy to accomplish anything except steam gently in front of the fire. I had a backpacking tarp secreted at the bottom of the drybag. We put it up with some paddles for tentpoles, then performed the hypothermia pavane, twirling slowly between shelter and the fire. We did get five minutes of sunset light with a rainbow and a bald eagle working his way homewards. My camera batteries had died by that point so you'll have to take my word for it.

My tent on the lone prairie, with rainbow and pointillist sagebrush.

It was cold and miserable enough that I didn't get any fishing in. Ken and Dick sat around the fire swapping military tales but I collapsed at 8:30 again.

A few rattles of rain swept over the tent in the night. I pulled an all-nighter, which for a middle-aged man like me, means I slept all night without having to get up: very exciting. In the morning, the flysheet clattered as I opened it up, being covered in frozen rain. In that frosty dawn we moved like lizards, slow and careful. We'd planned to leave early to have more time for the Hobo hot springs in Saratoga, but it was no go the merrygoround, we waited for the ice to melt off the tents.

More 'busy' water in Ken's term, that is only 2-3 foot waves, as we forged on to Treasure Island. This stretch of river has a lot of islands and riverine forest, so the birdlife is extraordinary. Ken saw a pileated woodpecker, his first in 15 years and only the second in 23 years of running this river. The rest of us saw orioles, warblers of various degrees of beauty, tanagers, bald eagles both fledged and immature. At the takeout, I did my usual bunk for the backwaters, but found nothing except a huge beaver which dove into the water with remarkable grace.

At the Hobo hot springs, the cold weather and high waters had cooled it off to a mere 105 F, so I could actually get in. Usually it's up at 110-120, and it's too hot for my thin skin. Ken found someone who knew his first wife's parents, and they had a good chat about the snows of yesteryears, the refinery tanks, etcetera. Wyoming has half-a-million people for the whole state, so it's like that. The neighbouring swimming pool had a free swim day, several kids frolicked under the eye of a chilly-looking lifeguard clad in a wetsuit, hoodie and towel.

Lunched late at Stumpy's, fine cheeseburgers and chocolate malts, which Mike paid for in his gratitude for deliverance from the fell rapids of the first day. Thanks Mike. More pictures and video on his page.

Looks like we managed to hit the peak flows for the year:

IT skill shortage

2008-05-30T16:07:00.000-07:00

I keep trying to write a full post on this, but get discouraged by the magnitude of the task.. As a placeholder, here's a short response, provoked by this article.

If there were a skills shortage, then IT salaries would be increasing, not decreasing.

There is also no actual data to support the contention that there is a shortage of trained people. See the Business Week review of the data.

So what the executives call a 'skills shortage' must mean something different. I suspect this means 'short-term shortages of engineers with specific technical skills in certain industry segments or in various parts of the country', as the second article above notes. That is, the executives find it inconvenient that they cannot snap out a C# engineer and snap in a Cobol one, or vice versa, as their needs dictate. My sympathy is limited.

The answer is really as simple as Sandra outlines in the first post - invest in technical staff, to get them the training they need to acquire the skills. The mainframe is not a mythical beast, with its habitat and behaviours shrouded in mystery: it's well-documented and easily learnt. It's the attitude to technical staff that classifies them as interchangeable parts, which produces the appearance of the 'skills shortage'.

Of course required reading on this is Dr. Matloff's investigations.

layoffs

2008-05-30T07:15:00.000-07:00

The redoubtable Yakov points us, grumpily, to Jason on 'what to do when you're laid off'. Jason thinks the appropriate response is to book a flight to somewhere cheap for a long vacation. Yakov does not.
I am of Yakov's mind - this advice is good only for the glittering digerati, the young strong and lucky, the children of privilege. I can't speak for Yakov, but this might be an emigrant thing. Those of us who escaped only by dint of outworking the competition, have a jaundiced view. We see a steep and thorny way through the miseries of poverty: salvation is through hard continous work.

Of course it may also be simpler, maybe it's just the optimist/pessimist divide. I have a nagging suspicion that those damn'd cheery optimists have a way of creating good luck by their very sunniness. I've never been able to fake optimism though and certainly can't pretend to the real thing, so this remains a source of gloominess. Hah.

One more thing: quoth Jason,
"But I'm married with a family and a house... Ok, you win. You're screwed, but that's the life you chose for yourself so you're going to have to live it. It's worth noting, however, that most Europeans wouldn't consider that a reason not to travel. Right this second, there is a German couple pushing a stroller down a remote beach in Thailand, and they're not going home for another month. What's your excuse again? "

Well, let me count the differences between a US couple and that German couple. The German couple each have a Worker's Council (read: union) to protect their interests at work; they have 5 to 6 weeks of paid leave a year, plus 10 other paid days off; they have state-guaranteed health care, so if they lose their jobs they don't lose health care coverage; they have state-guaranteed pensions, so they don't have a 401k as the only thing between them and dogfood for dinner in retirement; they have the euro, the strongest currency on the planet: five excellent reasons they can be a tad more carefree than US wage slaves. "Americans average 25.1 working hours per person in working age per week, but the Germans average 18.6 hours."

That German couple is on vacation for a month. The only way a US couple could get a month's vacation, is to be laid off simultaneously: at which point their family is laid bare to the rapacious wickedness of ill fortune.

bold Nebraska

2008-05-28T14:11:00.000-07:00

We were in Nebraska for Memorial Day. Drove 6 hours on Friday to cover 280 miles, with 30-40mph crosswinds tugging at the canoe the whole way. Pulled into North Platte in horizontal rain, Jeff saw tornados coming down from the clouds. We sat in a restaurant and discussed options. Hotelling it was the consensus, got a 2-bedroom hotel suite, the wives and children were very happy. After the kids had swum for an hour in the hotel pool, watched kayaking on TV, how pathetic. 5 inches of rain and 60mph winds in our destination town of Valentine that night, so I think it was the right decision.

Next day attempting to pitch the monster 8-man tent in a Nebraska light breeze, started setup with tent backed to the wind: by the time it was up the wind had swung through 180 degrees, then a strong gust blew up the tent. I mean literally blew up, the flysheet exploded along the seams, pole shattered, splitrings holding pole anchor points on the inner were straightened out.. etcetera. Then it blew away, looked like a giant tumbleweed thundering through the campsite, nearly took out some tourons walking through to see Smith Falls. Once we'd subdued it again, drove into Valentine for a new tent. Young's Mercantile didn't sell tents but recommended Fred's Bait Shop, Fred had only 2-man tents unfortunately. The hardware store had a 5-man luckily, a mere $160. Next time I'm just checking straight into the hotel and staying there, it will be cheaper.

River high and chilly. On Mem. Day it was a dark and stormy morn, ranger came up as we were packing and said 'you can't leave now, it's just about to start raining again'. Everyone's a humorist.

bold Nebraska ? the song is always in my head when driving to NE. But I see the lyric is actually 'all aboard, Nebraska's our next stop' where I'd always heard 'bold Nebraska's our next stop'. I like my version better.

vaccines and autism

2008-05-14T09:13:00.000-07:00

CBS interviewed Dr. Healy, and now seems to think this is an 'Open Question'. From the interview,
"why in the past decade hasn't the government compared the autism/ADD rate of unvaccinated children with that of vaccinated children?"

Because this has been done before, many times. No link between vaccination and autism has yet been found.
From an article in the Guardian:
"The Danish Epidemiology Science Centre compared 440,000 children who had MMR with 97,000 children who didn't. The children who had MMR were no more likely to develop autism than the children who didn't. A group in London looked at 498 children with autism, to see if they developed it after MMR. They looked at when they had the MMR jab, and when they developed the symptoms or the diagnosis, and found no sudden blip after immunisation. Another paper shows no increase in GP consultations in the six months after immunisation. Two hundred children in London and Stafford with autism were studied to see if there was a new type of autism related to MMR, featuring bowel problems and sudden regression, a bit like in the drama: half had the jab, half didn't, and there was no difference in type of autism between the groups. In California, looking at 1,000 children a year, over 14 years, the number of cases of autism increased by 373%, while the number of children getting MMR increased by only 14% (from 72% to 82%). "

If anyone has published studies showing evidence of a link, I'd surely like to see it.

From the interview again,
"If we can screen children to see which ones might be more susceptible to vaccine side effects.."
There is no known theory and no plausible biological mechanism for vaccinations to cause autism. So how could this screening be done ?
At one point thimerosal was postulated as a possible link. That's a separate discussion, but irrelevant now: child vaccines containing thimerosal are no longer used. Since then, there hasn't been any new causation mechanism proposed.

Also, a study in Japan, published in New Scientist print edition, 17 February 2001:
Journal reference: Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry (DOI: 10.1111.j.1469-7610.2005.01425.x)
"They found that the number of children with autism continued to rise after the MMR vaccine was replaced with single-shot vaccines. The medical records of 31,426 children in the city of Yokohama were checked. Before the vaccine was withdrawn, between 48 and 86 children per 10,000 were diagnosed as autistic. After the vaccine was withdrawn, 97 to 161 children per 10,000 were diagnosed with the condition."

There is considerable evidence that the "increase" in autism rates is an artifact of better diagnosis. See the Journal of Pediatrics, and the British Medical Journal.

If you want scary, contemplate thousands of children in iron lungs with polio, thousands of children blind or brain-damaged by measles, epidemics of whooping cough and thousands dying, malformed babies due to their mothers being exposed to rubella, etcetera. This is a certain result of large-scale refusal of vaccinations for populations at risk.

While Dr. Healy has undoubtedly done a lot of good work in the world, I suspect there may be a political aspect to this. Note that Dr. Healy is a Republican political appointee, and was "a member of the Advisory board of The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, an organization later shown to have been founded by PR firm APCO and funded by the Phillip Morris corporation to criticise scientific research inimical to the interests of tobacco companies and other corporations" (Wikipedia). I don't see what advantage there is to starting this particular hare again, but I suspect it's there. It may just be part of the broader front in the Republican war on science.

The benefits of vaccination are proven. The hypothesis of a link between vaccination and autism is speculative and has no theoretical or evidentiary support. That doesn't mean it does not exist, only that it's unlikely in the extreme. From a public health perspective, investing in studies of a speculative unsubstantiated hypothesis is not easily justified.

Update September 2008: hm, now it appears Lance Armstrong is going anti-vaccine. Science saved his life and career, but now he's joining the druids, the forces of old night and chaos.
Further reading on the subject, rather better-informed than my brief jog through it, here and elsewhere on the scienceblogs.com site. Predictably, measles is first to make a comeback, but the other horsemen aren't far behind.
Some measurements of the number of lives saved by vaccines is at sciencebasedmedicine.org

More on the horrorshow that preceded immunizations at Making Light.

asthma and doping

2008-05-08T12:05:00.000-07:00

Petacchi, the dominant sprinter of the last few years, has been suspended until August by the not-august Court of Arbitration for Sport: for a doping violation involving the asthma drug salbutamol (yclept albuterol in the USA).

In the article, it's claimed that 'Salbutamol can be used to increase an athlete's anaerobic power. '

I have adult-onset asthma, and take salbutamol when racing. The reason I noticed the asthma was that my 5k run times were 10-20% slower at maximal effort, than what training results predicted, with the addition of unusual distress. My training logs go back to 1975, so there's enough data there that I at least am satisfied that the predictions are reasonable. Tests confirmed the diagnosis, so I take it as prescribed now. With salbutamol, performances are back to normal: but I have never been able to measure any performance enhancement, even when running short maximal-effort intervals (400m repeats).

So I took a closer look at the data. The studies that show improvement in anaerobic power used a dosage of 12 mg/day for four weeks. See
http://bjsm.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/40/7/627

That's 12 milligrams a day. To put this in perspective, an inhaler delivers about 200 micrograms per dosage. The anaerobic power improvements require 12 000 micrograms per day. This is equivalent to 60 metered doses from an inhaler. That's a dose every 16 minutes (assuming 8 hours sleeping), for four weeks. It's impossible to hit this dosage except by taking it orally or intravenously. It's clear that Petacchi wasn't doing this.

There are also lots of studies showing that at dosages that can be delivered via inhaler, there are no measurable performance improvements, aerobic, anaerobic or anabolic.
See for example
- The effects of albuterol on power output in non-asthmatic athletes, LEMMER J. T et al,
International journal of sports medicine ISSN 0172-4622 1995, vol. 16, no4, pp. 243-249 (33 ref.)
- The effect of salbutamol on performance in endurance cyclists, Norris Petersen and Jones,
European Journal of Applied Physiology ISSN 1439-6319 (Print) 1439-6327 (Online), Volume 73, Numbers 3-4 / May, 1996

Then there is the question of how the salbutamol dosage is measured. WADA's measure is 1000 nanograms per milliliter (ng/ml) in the urine. This is not a very good measure. See for example this study, which notes:
"Urine cSAL increased with dose and was highly variable, with the peak value observed being 831 ng x mL(-1) after a dose of 800 microg.
Conclusions: Inhaled SAL does not enhance time-trial performance, regardless of dose, and that urine cSAL after exercise is related to dose, demonstrates high variability, and is partially related to hydration status."

Even at 800 micrograms, an order of magnitude lower than a single day's dose of the amount required to produce the anaerobic improvements (and that dosage was repeated for four weeks), it's possible to get very close to the WADA limit. Add in variability, plus the fact that dehydration will artificially elevate the measurement in the urine, and it's clear it's possible to exceed WADA's limit without seeing any performance improvements.

There are a couple more problems here. Metabolization will differ by individual, and by the environment in which it's taken - a fat breathless desk jockey like me is likely to have a different rate from a Tour de France sprinter. Metabolism of salbutamol differs between asthmatics and healthy people too, with the asthmatics showing higher concentrations of salbutamol in urine for the same dosage.

Another thing that's missing is data on the urine concentrations in the subjects who took the massive doses, and showed anaerobic performance improvements. Do they show the same variability of urinalysis data ? What kind of urine measurements were found ?
I suspect their urine would show levels massively higher than the 1000 ng/ml that is currently considered a violation.

Personally I give any endurance athlete the benefit of the doubt in a salbutamol case. A cycling sprinter like Petacchi is a special case, since he could theoretically benefit from the anaerobic performance improvements: but he still has to ride 4-6 hours at moderate to high aerobic pace, just to reach the sprint. Anaerobic performance after this kind of effort has never been tested. Add that to the questions around the current level which is considered a violation, and I think all these salbutamol 'violations' are likely bogus. The potential benefit is too small for the risks.

This 'violation' in particular is nonsense. Even the CAS said, "the adverse analytical finding in this case is the result of Mr. Petacchi simply, and possibly accidentally, taking too much Salbutamol on the day of the test, but that the overdose was not taken with the intention of enhancing his performance. Indeed, it would be an unusual way of attempting to enhance performance to take the prohibited substance after the particular event had concluded."
So.. what is this ? zero-tolerance, as propounded by the imbeciles that propagate the War on Drugs ? It's senseless.

endurance training

2008-04-10T14:31:00.000-07:00

After reading through the 99 pages of the letsrun thread discussing Lydiard and Daniels, I realized I had not understood Lydiard's training methods.. another thing that struck me was how similar Mark Allen's protocol is to Lydiard's. (I see the thread is now up to 128 pages, oy, more homework).

The closest thing to a Lydiard training manual appears to be this document, from a lecture tour in 1999. Another reasonable facsimile of it seems to be in Bill Squire's book (coached Bill Rogers and Dick Beardsley among others).

A compare/contrast of Lydiard and Daniels is on page 12 of the thread, and see an outline of Mark's ideas.

Both systems use a repeated cycle of base/sharpening/specific training. Lydiard had a 6-month cycle allowing for two peaks a year, Mark uses the MAF test to determine when to shift the focus. The MAF test seems very close to Lydiards' "time trials", a test that gives the coach the metric and data to fine-tune training.

- Base: Lydiard liked 8-12 weeks, Mark mentions 4 months. Lydiard threw the watch away and asked his runners to run at a pace that left them 'pleasantly tired', but feeling able to do more. Mark gives an exact HR range based on Maffetone's numbers. The HR makes a lot of sense for new athletes who don't have a good sense of RPE, and as a reality check for experienced athletes: personally I think the old-fashioned LSD 'talk test' works fine too.
- sharpening: Lydiard has fairly detailed and specific sections, but he's on record as saying the actual anaerobic sessions don't matter much, as long as the required work is done. Typically about 3 weeks of running economy work, using hill springing and downhill running; followed by 4 weeks of 'anaerobic training', 2 to 4 sessions/week of the basic interval work we all know and love. Before reading the letsrun thread, I had not realized how much drilling/running-economy-specific training was done in the 'hill training' phase.
Mark is a lot less specific, but the principles are much the same:
"high end interval anaerobic training one or two days/week... just like the aerobic training, there is a limit to the benefit .. you will see your speed start to slow down again.. signal that it is time to switch back to aerobic.. Keep your interval sessions to around 15-30 minutes of hard high heart rate effort total."
- race conditioning: Lydiard uses weekly time trials (not race-effort) and short high-intensity intervals, reducing volume but not intensity over the last few weeks. Mark doesn't explicitly detail this stage.

The commonalities are a base of pure aerobic training, a training cycle that repeats the basics over a maximum 8-12 weeks of any one phase, and regular tests at known distances and efforts to measure the results of the training.

Never underestimate how much improvement you can get from consistent aerobic training. There was a great interview with Peter Snell at Runners' World, but it's vanished now. Luckily letsrun has preserved it (about a third of the way down the page).
"Most physiologists are trained on the idea of specificity, and simply can't understand that slow training makes you faster. "
Bear in mind that Dr. Snell is himself a physiologist.

My favorite quote from the letsrun thread:
"Eventually the Lydiard system vanishes, like the state was supposed to under Communism, and the runner just feels it. It is the way musicians do it. Music and running are really the same thing - performance and emotion."
Tom Derderian (himself a fine marathoner)
Another good Derderian quote: "the world is a conspiracy to keep you from training."

out of season 6

2008-03-18T10:10:00.000-07:00

The graveyard at Lotzbeuren, immaculately maintained. See the first 'out of season' post below for context..

out of season 5

2008-03-14T07:56:00.000-07:00

mere gratuitous prettiness..

out of season 4

2008-03-14T07:54:00.000-07:00

I had visions of renting a bike to pootle up and down the Mosel. Apparently the river is unusually high. Here's the bike path.

out of season 3

2008-03-14T07:33:00.001-07:00

In the early 90's, those go-go days, the egregious Esther Dyson together with some other overpaid theoreticians, proclaimed 'the overthrow of matter'.

Here it is the Year of our Lord 2008 in a bold new century, and we're still pushing coal laboriously upstream in order to fuel the power stations that move our electrons around. Watching these barges shoving along, it looks like they are going uphill. In several senses they are I suppose, but it's still odd to watch.

out of season 2

2008-03-14T07:30:00.000-07:00

Since I can't find a way to format the layout of pictures in Blogger (always get slapped up on the top), my carefully-conceived layouts get bloggered. I give up, one post per picture.

Mosel vine, showing evidence of a moister climate than is usual for winegrowing regions. I expect a stony feel to the wine. No country for cotton socks, this.

As it turned out, everything was still closed until Easter weekend. Eventually found a place to taste wine in Zell/Mosel, but they had run out of trocken wines. All the sweet ones tasted identical to me. I could not distinguish any character, only sweetness. At dinner in Reil, I'd had a sweet Riesling, but it had lots more going on than just sweetness, rather a delicious gulp in fact. I figured I'd get a Beerenauslese just for the fun of it, but they'd run out of that too and I had to settle for a Riesling Eiswein.

In the hotel, I was going to drink the half-bottle of white in the minibar, but it turned out to be French. According to mine hostess, there are only 3 vineyards on the whole Mosel that produce half-bottles: they bottle in late April, so by March there's usually none available. Extraordinary.

out of season

2008-03-14T07:18:00.000-07:00

Back in Germany on company business. Notes from a previous visit are on a different branch, but still apply for the most part.

Currently in a little hotel in Reil on the Mosel river. The Mosel itself looks more like the Big Muddy, and it's raining as is usual in March. My hotel is exactly as it appeared in the brochure, a small converted house, quite charming - except for the scaffolding all over the outside and blocking my view of the river. Humph. Oh well mine hostess is sweet, the town itself is quaint, I'm sure I can find some wine to drink here.

Upon arrival at the airport, they had no cars at all. I took the first one offered, ein plutokretz-mobil. Shown above at the graveyard outside Lotzbeuren, a town I had not planned to visit. It has a fine old cobbled town square with a church big enough to house the entire town. The graveyard is possibly the best-maintained in all Christendom. See picture above, in 'out of season 6'.

Corinne Ellen Kretzmann

2008-02-29T15:59:00.000-08:00

September 13 1925 to January 17 2008

We pray.. for rest to the soul of the departed in a place of light, in a place of repose, in a place of refreshment, where there is no pain, sorrow, and suffering.
- Orthodox Memorial service.

We the living can do nothing for the dead but remember them. In time all the memories of my mother will be perfected, in the single remembrance of God or oblivion.

Until then all I can do is remember to celebrate her life, a life that did good in the world; a faithful life; a merry, kind-hearted life. I never knew all the stories of my mother's life. By now, some of them have traveled past the boundaries of forgetting. This looks like the end of the tale, but of course it is not. Ma lives on in the families of her children, and in the greater family of all those who loved her. It is only the closing of a chapter. All of the new stories run back into this story, and beyond.
I will remember this merry, kind-hearted life.

nunc est bibendum

2008-02-29T11:53:00.000-08:00

"Running out into the summer rain with mouth wide open to catch the heavy raindrops; drinking milk from the ladle in the cowshed down on the farm during the long vacation; later in life, searching for truth in a wineglass - those are just a few of the stages in the evolution of a being.

To blame, of course, is that thirst which befalls poor mortals as soon as they see the light of day and which never lets up again afterwards. Feeling its intensity rise, our smallest contemporaries emit an appropriate acoustic signal (the primeval yell).

To blame too is the thirst for knowledge which fires our ingenuity in devising ever more thirst-quenchers (monks showing the way with holy glee)."

This appears to be a translation from the original German, on the Hotel Schloss Zell website. Marvellous, whatever language it originated in.. holy glee indeed.

Image from the inimitable Alex Waterhouse-Hayward.

Edit 2010: for some inscrutable reason this post shows up on the second page of results for Googling "nunc est bibendum translation": but I do not in fact provide a translation. Sorry folks. Here's a good one, from a Pharyngula comment:

"Nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero pulsanda tellus

Now is the time to drink, now the time to dance on the earth. Horace goes on to explain that there will be no drinking or dancing in the afterlife."

2008-01-08T13:45:00.000-08:00

Children's Song

We live in our own world,
A world that is too small
For you to stoop and enter
Even on hands and knees,
The adult subterfuge.
And though you probe and pry
With analytic eye,
And eavesdrop all our talk
With an amused look,
You cannot find the centre
Where we dance, where we play,
Where life is still asleep
Under the closed flower,
Under the smooth shell
Of eggs in the cupped nest
That mock the faded blue
Of your remoter heaven.

R.S. Thomas

rehabilitation

2007-11-28T16:01:00.000-08:00

When I was young, I used to work out a lot, and rehabilitate injuries occasionally. Now I'm old, I rehabilitate a lot, and work out occasionally. Bah.

I have my first overuse injury from swimming, some kind of rotator cuff problem. Suspect infraspinatus tendonitis but it hardly matters, since the rehab is going to be much the same whichever of the rotator cuff components is busted. Usually with overuse injuries, the cause can be tracked back to some change - more volume or intensity in workouts, new running shoes, old running shoes, etcetera. This time nothing changed, swimming the same distances and intensities as in the past seven years. Then I realized, oh something did change - I got older :-( again :-(

Frankly I'm devastated. Swimming used to be a reliable fallback position, whenever some run or bike or paddling injury sidelined me from the usual pursuits, I could work out as hard as I liked in a swim, with no let or hindrance. Now it's gone, and probably forever: tendinitis in my experience is never cured, only managed. So, I can add regular shoulder icing, stretching and strengthening, to the routine of achilles icing, stretching and strengthening. No time left for actual workouts..

me and Moominpappa

2007-11-25T20:10:00.000-08:00

"I cannot stress enough the perils of your friends marrying.. One day you are all a society of outlaws, adventurous comrades and companions who will be pushing off somewhere or other when things become tiresome; you have all the world to choose from, just by looking at the map...
... and then, suddenly, they're not interested any more. They want to keep warm. They're afraid of rain. They start collecting big things that can't fit in a rucksack. They talk only of small things. They don't like to make sudden decisions and do something contrariwise. Formerly they hoisted sail: now they carpenter little shelves for porcelain mugs. Oh, who can speak of such matters without shedding tears !"
Moominpappa's Memoirs, Tove Jansson.

And how much worse it is when you marry in fact your own self, carpentering quietly in a warm little house and wondering where it all went, what was all that ?

pretty colours

2007-10-08T10:19:00.000-07:00

playing with the new digital camera, Canon A630 Powershot. It seems to be proof against at least my foolishness, though I am overwhelmed by its software. All I want is a manual focus with automatic exposure bracketing, but setting that up is beyond my capability. I have a postgraduate degree in computer science and decades of tinkering - what do the simple folk do when confronted with one of these 'simple' cameras ?
Oh well. At least I was able to turn the flash off. I like its viewfinder too, saves a bit of power and it's a lot easier to see than most LCDs.

Virginia creeper in rain. It's invasive in warmer climes.

V. creeper in sun

sugar maple alone

cosmos on its own

Gloria cosmos, sugar maple leaves

healthcare nonsense

2007-10-05T09:31:00.000-07:00

I see via the reliably interesting Jon Udell that yet another 'health-care database' is being trumpeted abroad in the land. Apparently neither Google nor Microsoft has noticed (or perhaps they prefer not to acknowledge) that the technical problem has been comprehensively solved already, by the Veterans Affairs medical system. The remaining problems are not technical but political. As Jim Gray benevolently wished for us, "may all your problems be technical". The world is full of smart people who can solve technical problems: all the smart in the world can't solve politics.

We can talk about 'shoulds' and 'translucency' all we like, in the end the insurance business will find a way to use such a database punitively.

The real question is how to arrive at a health-care system that doesn't punish the sick. The answer is technically simple but politically difficult. It starts with acknowledging that health care isn't a market. More accurately, it is a market, but the good being traded is healthy individuals, not health care itself. Senator Edward's health-care proposal (or Sen. Clinton's, as it's much the same thing) is a good first step. Once we have a system where we need not fear the database, we can proceed to establish evidence-based medicine.

Until that time, I will fervently oppose all attempts to establish a database of medical records. The incentives in our current system are so perverse, that the database will be very dangerous to our health.

A secondary issue is one of simple data gathering. According to the optimistic hurrahs of Microsoft,
"People want to be able to collect, and securely store, and share their private health care information which is today scattered all over the place, with doctor A and doctor B and hospital C, and wherever they were born."
Lovely. How do they propose to extract that information from doctors and hospitals ? For them, that data is part of their competitive advantage. Whenever I get tests or procedures done (and I've had a lot recently) the results are kept secret from me: sent only to my doctor and doubtless a variety of financially interested parties, insurance companies, and so on. On a few occasions kindly nurses or technicians have actually shared the information with me, but that's the exception. For the most part an inquiry as to obtaining the technical details is treated with a kind of amazed wondering contempt by the administrative staff.

Update 2011:
Via the New York Review of Books I see:
"this past April, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Sorrell v. IMS Health, in which IMS Health, in challenging Vermont’s statutory restriction on the sale of patients’ prescription information to data-mining companies, argued that harvesting and selling medical records data is a First Amendment right. "
I don't have much confidence this Court will decide for the patient: then our data will belong to everyone but us ourselves.

Another notable database effort is the Personal Genome Project. In the different world where this information wouldn't be used by insurance companies to deny care, I'd enthusiastically volunteer. Well, maybe not, given the involvement of the egregious Ms. Dyson.

Update October 2007: turns out these databases aren't subject to the HIPAA privacy regulations. Microsoft's response ? "Trust us". Well, no, I believe I won't.

Update March 2008: ars technica has a decent overview of the situation. The takeaway: "many of the reasons for poor US health outcomes have much deeper structural roots related to a lack of preventative care versus emergency care, issues that are tied in to the lack of a universal healthcare system and the nature of insurance companies, that are outside the scope of medical records databases".

Update March 2010: The announcement of $20 billion in the stimulus bill for electronic health records (EHR) has started a gold rush. There's excellent coverage of the IT issues by Andy Oram on the O'Reilly Radar weblog. It elides the political question unfortunately - with single-payer many of the complexities of the IT implementations simply disappear. The problem of interoperability of competing systems vanishes, for one.

An IEEE Spectrum article covers some of the security implications. In particular my paranoia above is confirmed by Dr. Deborah Peel, who writes
"Today our [the patient's] lab test results are disclosed to insurance companies before we even know the results. Prescriptions are data-mined by pharmacies, pharmaceutical technology vendors, hospitals and are sold to insurers, drug companies, employers and others willing to pay for the information."
EHR will only expedite this process. I'd like to see a blunt rule in the HIT regulations that gives ownership of the medical record to the patient and his heirs and assigns. Currently the ownership is vested somewhere in the aether.

Update July 2010:
the HIT has released its "meaningful use" criteria for the adoption of EHR by doctors, etc. This offers a few thousand dollars (from the stimulus package) for implementation of an EHR. As Andy Oram observes,
"The catch is that they can't just install the electronic system, but have to demonstrate that they're using it in ways that will improve patient care, reduce costs, allow different providers to securely share data, and provide data to government researchers in order to find better ways to care for patients. That's what "meaningful use" means."

A few thousand isn't going to do it. The costs of EHR fall upon the doctor, the benefits accrue to society and the patient. The costs are much higher than a couple of thousand, especially considering the current wholly dysfunctional state of EHR. Many EHRs have no API at all, others have incompatible ones, and so depressingly on. Single-payer with a single EHR solves all these problems at once, but because it's politically impossible, we're left with hideous technical problems.

I am however happy to see that HIT has included the requirement that the EHR be available to the patient.

Back to the original 2007 post..

Side rant on a related note, the faery realm of consumer-directed health care: how is it that society spends six to ten years training doctors to provide health care, then rewards them handsomely for their expertise: yet, once the market fairy appears, consumers (who may not have completed high school) are supposed to be able to 'direct' their own health care ?
For what value of 'direct' can this policy actually work ?
Airily assuming that the policy works, the next question arises - What is the market failure that makes doctors so expensive, when untrained consumers are able to effectively make the same decisions and determinations as said doctors, about their health care ?

Shadowfax makes this point much better than I, patients are not and cannot be consumers. From there, "HALF of all health care costs in the US is concentrated in only 5% of the population". It really doesn't matter how scrupulously the other 95% shop for cheaper bypasses, chemo medications, etc.

Discussing Avatar

2007-09-20T11:43:00.000-07:00

I'm like Sokka - don't have superpowers, but a good analytical mind, also I'm kinda goofy-looking; I'm like Uncle Iroh, in that I am not wholly convinced that a good cup of tea may not be the most important thing in any given day. It's a controllable happiness. If you base your happiness upon conquering Ba Sing Se, or winning back the love of a father whose love is not worth the winning, misery is likely your lot. I am further like Iroh, in thinking kindness is the primary virtue: though he does a better job of living up to his ideals.
There you have it, apothegms to live by. Some of them may even be not entirely false. Your homework, should you choose to accept it: which parts are true ?

Those are the thoughts that remained after a five-mile run following a discussion with the kids. The other thoughts on the way were mostly sun, wind, and intimations of age. The wind and sun don't write down very well, the intimations are old news that does not improve with the re-telling.

down a muddy river

2007-09-11T11:58:00.000-07:00

The map gives a flavour of the expedition - high dramatic redrock canyon walls, vast perspectives whenever the walls opened up. We put in near the ghost town of Cisco, UT, some thirty miles upstream of the map. Actually not wholly a ghost town, there is a general store, five miles off the interstate. The story goes some football player came from Cisco, made his pot, and retired back home with a gregarious wife, who opened the store in an attempt to get some company. Buying an icecream there after the trip is apparently hazardous, the chat will take an hour or more.

Blazing heat at the put-in, I labored for an hour or more packing the barge while H ran shuttle. The boys swam until their lips turned blue, sat in the sun until they were hot again, then swam some more. Mud pies filled in the vacant minutes between these activities. After the loading, tossed out a fishing line with some Powerbait (blood flavour, mmm) which attracted a 1lb catfish in about 30 seconds. More casts brought more fish, but all small. Off down river after a bit more than two hours' wait, with a flotilla of 9 boats. There were many years of paddling experience floating down the river, including Jerry Nolan who wrote the book - well, maybe not the book, but the web page at least - on this stretch of river. What this translates to is a loose assemblage of at least 9 eccentrics, the spouses or spousal equivalents who put up with them, and our two kids. Luckily since we all canoe, we're all eccentric in much the same ways, so within the group we appear perfectly normal to each other. This is occasionally quite comforting.

Fish Ford BLM campsite is very attractive, but is road-accessible. This means at any moment drunken rednecks in 4x4s may descend and render the site uninhabitable, so we skipped it, and went on down to another site. It too had a rough road in, so there was an old sofa above the river next to a 10 foot diameter fire ring mounded high with beer cans. Ah well. The hinterlands were clean, flat, and cottonwood-shaded, so we took it. As we were coming downriver, there was a incessant hum filling the air. At first I thought powerlines, but no. Next theory was the tamarisk beetles, specially imported to kill the alien tamarisks sucking the rivers dry, but this was mere speculation. Upon landing the true source was revealed: vast formations of mosquitoes wheeled and dove down upon our shrinking flesh. We can report that the Repel Lemon Eucalyptus (non-DEET) formulation does work well, but we didn't get 6 hours of protection, only about 3 or so.

More labor, unpacking boat to set up tent, kitchen, snacks, etcetera. Oy. I need an easier tent or a smaller family. Money can solve only one of these problems, so I guess it's retail therapy for me this fall, when I'd rather be camping I'll be tent shopping.

Shattered in mind and body, I went to bed early. The boys stayed up at the campfire, half an artificial log in the world's smallest firepan, while Jeff and Jean played guitar and everyone sang. We all lay on top of our sleeping bags sweating for an hour or two before it cooled enough to sleep. Poor C woke up a few hours later, retching. Poor H took care of him, the five times he woke to throw up. I think he had some bad river water from all that swimming. Of course all these excursions into the mosquito zone allowed the tent to fill up with ravenous bloodsuckers. In the morning the roof of the tent was covered in swollen bugs, too full of blood to fly. Ech. We left C to sleep in the tent while we staggered around packing up camp. This turned out to be a mistake. There were enough hungry mosq's left in the tent that he got devoured alive. On Tuesday at school, they refused to let him in without a doctor's certificate to prove that he did not have some infectious disease rash, obtaining which of course consumed all of H's Tuesday morning.

After cleaning up the puddles of sick on the sleeping bags, sleeping pads, tent floor, groundsheet and shoes, I was ready to start the packing of the dry bags preparatory to starting the packing of the boat. I couldn't see us finishing all this before the launch time, but we had so many helping hands, we were packed before some of the other boats, a first for me in family canoe camping. Thanks Jeff.

On down the river, C perfectly frisky and chirpy, H and I drooping rather. This is a good kid trip, when they get bored we just throw them overboard and let them swim for a bit. After this flat water stretch, there's a day of significant named rapids, which keeps everyone's attention for the most part: though the boys were chatting about Lego in the middle of Ida's Gulch while we had to stare doom in the face, a half-mile of rock spotting and dodging in the equivalent of a loaded 18-wheeler. The Old Town Penobscot 18'6" is a fine boat, but no-one would accuse it of nimbleness, particularly when loaded with 800-odd pounds of people and gear. Momentum, ah we have all the momentum we need to blast through anything, but a turn has to be put on the calendar well in advance, and co-ordinated between bow and stern. "I'm not yelling at you dear, I'm just communicating the turn" sometimes works to patch things up.

Flat water to Dewey Bridge, then a few miles to the first named rapid, Onion Creek: a two-stage rapid with an easy entrance of substantial waves lulling you into complacency, then a sudden boulder garden riddled with holes and pourovers. We took a poor line, I didn't see a rock in time, H was able to get her end of the canoe around it but my end of the barge bounced off. Luckily Ian knows enough to highside, plus that momentum took us past the rock before it could react and grab us (yes, rocks in whitewater have both animas and animus).

Campsites below Onion were almost filled with rafters, but we got the last good site with cottonwoods. Magnificent views across Professor Valley to the Fisher Towers, could not be better. Much too hot to do anything except drink beer in the shade and swim, so that's what we did. Children got bored and fought, a hazard of single-family trips, with not enough playmates to keep the interest up. I think they were also tired and ratty, late night Fri getting to the hotel (we are weenies, yes, but I'm not prepared to try and camp with kids and a 10:30pm arrival), followed by late night and broken sleep on Sat. They needed lots of attention, but we needed to cook dinner and make camp, so it all got a bit fractious. Eventually simmered down with kids fed and tent up. Someone's washing up at the river added a few spaghetti fragments to the mud load of the mighty Colorado, and brought several fat carp in to forage. I plopped a lump of blood-flavour Powerbait upstream of one of them, which charged in with its back showing to gobble it down. Ian pulled it in, about a 3-pounder leaping and flapping in the mud. A handsome fish, though carp get no respect in the USA.

Breathlessly hot again in the night. One tent was pitched in a fine-looking site, below a red cliff, under a cottonwood. That red cliff acted as a radiator, releasing the heat of the day gently throughout the night, and blocking the cooling breezes. We were camped in a much less attractive site, but the winds came through beautifully. Hah. H's ambition for the night was not to be thrown up upon, and have no-one peeing in her shoe. This was a low bar, but it was in fact achieved, hooray.

Next day a variety of rapids. Mostly the obvious route was the correct one, slightly L or R of center, ride out the big waves with a bit of back paddling. Ida's Gulch is on the USGS map as Rocky Rapids, and is the rapid I remember as White's. We ran this twice in the Old Town Discovery 158: the first time on our 1991 wanderjahr, quite alone on the river doing a day trip, filled up and tipped over in the recovery pool at the bottom; the second time in 1996 with Rich Ruehlen, boat loaded for camping, filled up again but did not tip.

The pictures above show C doing his 'see/hear no evil' imitation near the bottom of IG rapid (I never knew he was doing that, was looking somewhere else at the time ;-) When I asked him, he said he finds the bigger rapids scary, but he still enjoys canoeing, just not some rapids. Ian on the other hand laughs all the way down, the bigger the rapid the more laughs. The pictures are by Moab Action Shots. They have photographers camped out on the river, taking pictures of everything that passes. I didn’t know who the photogs under the umbrellas were at the time, but on the way into Moab to Kaleido-Scoops (ice cream shop) we passed their store, and I figured it had to be online. This suggests a new way of rating rapids - those with a photographer camped next to them, must be something significant. Class II rapid, or a Class Photo rapid, hm.

The real White's rapid wasn't anything much, some very big waves and one pour-over that really should be missed, but a straightforward line through it. We had lunch below the rapid, on the first actually sandy beach of the trip. All the other beaches looked like sand, but turned rapidly into a viscous grey mud below the waterline. I'd slipped in said mud and torn the toenail from RMNP (see earlier this month) half off. This was quite painful, plus the fine murky waters infected the wound. When I took the bandaid off on Tuesday night, I could see and smell rotting flesh below the nail, yech. How does a doctor remove a toenail ? with anesthetic, large forceps, and a burly nurse. How.. interesting.

Took off the river at Sandy Beach, yes it was. Unpacked boat, humped gear up the sandy hill to pack it into the car, to take it home and unpack it again (a pattern is emerging). Back to Moab for aforementioned ice cream, very nice, and trundle on home for six hours. The boys went to school on Tuesday without having had a bath since Thursday night. Luckily they'd swum a lot, and boys are supposed to be muddy, so it wasn't too noticeable.

Many thanks to Dave Allured, who put the whole trip together with his usual calm efficiency.