And In Other News.....

...there's been a recent sighting of the infamous "Special Olympics Cartman" in the southern Rhode Island area. We'll keep posted as the story develops...

GUDG reporting.

Ingrid NO!

Hey, It's been awhile since the last post.. sorry about that. Mrs 40 and I have been pretty busy getting the new casa pulled together and ready for the holidays. We have tons of company coming over the next week.

We had a party this weekend to kick things off for thanksgiving week, and the entire Pandapas gang was there with the exception of Mr and Mrs GUDG....unfortunately they had a family commitment and couldn't make it.

BBW and I spent the day before raking up leaves and getting the house in order. We had to drag all the scrap wood to a pile for CTLP to light with his flamethrower:



In addition to the Pandapas folks, we had some work friends over to hang out around the fire and consume some fine barley beverages. Some of us had a few more than others with varying results.



We rode mtbikes around the yard, through the woods and then Sleepy busted out a really cool housewarming present.... flying discs that have LEDs built in so you can play Frisbee in the dark. This got things really going with a round of Night Disc Golf. Seriously, a HUGE hit. We wandered all over the place, smashing them through the woods and into other people (oops.. my fault)... having a blast.

Later, Mr and Mrs FlatTires joined the party and brought the latest addition to their family, a 2 year old puppy, Ingrid. Ingrid is part Great Dane, part Bull Mastiff. She's awesome and very friendly. She was very curious to BBWs "results" from overconsumption of barley beverages, prompting all of us to scream... "Ingrid NO! Don't eat that!". Nuff said.

The party started to wind down after that as we all were getting tired. BBW, CTLP, and Sleepy all stayed over to go mtbiking on Sunday. I was *dragging* Sunday morning from my own over-indulging on malted beverages.... until Sleepy cured us all with 3 egg omelets and blood mary's. Yum!.

We went for a quick ride down to the river this afternoon, and that helped shake out the cobwebs. Nothing cures a hangover like a bike ride.



Anyhow.. I'm planning on taking some time off next week to catch up on... well... everything. Hopefully I can post some progress on the BFB, and other projects I've been working on. My sisters and their husbands are coming to stay with us later in the week, and on Tuesday I'm heading to Jersey to see Mr and Mrs KungFooFish and the latest addition to their family, Young KungFoo. I hear he's adorable.

Anyhow.. Have a good week if I don't talk to ya... -40.

Riding on Election Day

So tomorrow we get to vote. I'm not going to get all political, but just go vote.

Vote for anything, whatever you want.

I'm going to ride my bike to the polling place before work. In a sense, voting twice.

This past weekend Bald Boy Wonder headed to the RI Alps to help dig firewood out of the woods around my house. Our very generous neighbors let us drag dead wood off their land...so we do. CTLP headed over to help out. Thanks!

After that we built a HUGE firepit in the backyard. Check it out:





Tomorrow night is the local mountain bike club meeting at Famous Pizza in West Warwick at 7:30. We'll be riding before the meeting. Cya there.

-40

Trick or Treat...

I feel bad for my dog sometimes. Yeah- she gets to sleep most the day, run around outside and sniff things, roll in/eat fecal matter, get fed regularly and gets plenty of affection. But she is also subjected to humiliating things like unwarranted BBW affection and being dressed-up around Halloween. I think this started with my mother's willingness to dress up my parent's dogs for each holiday. Mrs. CTLP thought that it would be a good idea to pick that tradition up. Hence poor Maggie goes through this ritual every year. I thought a recap would be in order.

Halloween 2004:



Halloween 2005:



Halloween 2006, the home made version:



Hey- all I know is, it is not me being dressed up. This time... I'll save those for later...

Making the world a better place.

One thing I try to do is volunteer my time to change things for the better.

I have posted on eelgrass planting already, but among other activities I also volunteer on the fire department and (along with 40 and GUDG) also am a NEMBA member, trying to keep places available and open to mountain biking in New England.

The other day I was thinking to myself- what can I do to really lift up my fellow human beings? Bring him or her a little joy, a lot of hope, and perhaps a big smile? Then it came to me. Get 'em loaded.





Yep. So I gave my boss a call last night and told him that I needed half of Thursday off so that I could head down to Cottrell Brewery and help Newport Storm bottle up pallets of yummy Hurricane Amber Ale. Here are some of the empties waiting to receive their frosty golden deliciousness:





For my day job, I get to sit on my ass all day. Actually DOING something felt pretty damn good. Especially when I was informed that, "it is never too early to sample...". And that was at 9am. Hells yeah. My kind of job. I had been thinking to myself that operating a brewery would be a fantastic career- were it not for huge weight gain I would undoubtedly accrue. Well- I'm here to tell you- these guys work- and probably work much of those calories off. I know I did... Hence there not being a picture of me smiling surrounded by hundreds of fresh, full soldiers. No time to take a person off the line to pose a picture.

For my efforts, I was rewarded with some take home items to sample:





So, to try my theory out, I took some of my new friends with me to the Thursday night Bat Patrol ride in Big River. After a couple hours pounding the trails (By the way- night riding is fabulous. That ride should be a weekly event), we got back to the parking lot and each cracked one open.

I saw smiles. I think we have found the path to world peace.

Random Bits of Junk

Hey hey.
Man.. what a nice weekend. Cold at night and crispy during the day. You know.. the kind of weekend up here that gets you freaked that it's going to be *cold* soon.

This time of year it seems that every idiot with a gun was out in the woods making me think I was in Platoon or something. That's right... Hunting Season.

Two tips... 1) cover your ass with Day-Glo Orange and 2) pray that that a-hole in the tree stand isn't *that* drunk at 9am. I'm serious.. I was out in Big River this weekend and couldn't wait to get the hell outta the woods. Man. Spooky.

Not related....I found this and was LMAO: People Who Suck

I don't miss the GhettoTrack bikepath at all.

BFB Part 2

So a while back I told you about the BFB. Yeah it still looks rough but the basics are there: Simple, cheap, sturdy as hell, capable of carrying a ridiculous load. I reduced the size of the rack to a more reasonable size to carry two plastic tubs for grocery and beach runs, and made rack extensions if I ever need to haul two more tubs. Yes, the gas grill fits on top of the rack.

I took some closeups of my fancy fillet brazes on the custom rack before I painted it, but lost them when this computer crapped out over the summer.

Tangent: Fillet brazing is hard. I always had a real tough time getting the nice whoops in the brass I've seen on some people's fillet brazed joints until I read somewhere (lost all my links in the hard drive crash too) that I should get a smaller brazing tip. So, very unlike me, I *special ordered* a 00 (say "Double Ought") tip for my torch. OMG.. it was like I was trying to braze with a rocket engine before. The smaller tip allowed for a much cleaner joint, and I stopped f'ing up the fillet joints. So, if you're having trouble getting a good fillet, go find a smaller tip. Yup. Back to the BFB story....

While the bike has been done(-ish) for a while I haven't had a chance with packing/moving/working to tell you about the master plan. If you look real close at that original picture
on the whiteboard of Pandapas Skunkworks # 1, you'll notice a red circle in the middle of the rear triangle. Hmmm what could that have possibly been for? More on that later...

Part of the idea behind this bike was to be a poor man's Xtracycle/Longtail. A cheap, durable, load hauling, monster... and that is what is has become. There is a revolution of sorts happening in the US of bikes becoming more utility than the toy status they were relagated to and have begun to wriggle into the mainstream. Evidence of this is the recent WSJ article that mentioned a couple of my favorite developments.. the Monster Truck of bikes, the Surly Pugsley, and the electric assist.

Time to let you in on my plan...in order to meet the goal of a possible car displacement, the BFB had to have the ability to tow a trailer for the kayak, a second seat for a passenger, and definitely be able carry a surfboard. Well, I dunno if you ever tried riding a loaded bike up a hill, but it sucks. I've been reading about electric assist for a looooooong time, scouring the web for developments in homebuilts, commercial kits and such. Until now I hadn't found one that I thought was durable, fast or simple enough to plunk down any cash on. The red circle in the picture was where I was going to put the StokeMonkey motor.

I found the CleverChimp blog by accident while reading the Xtracycle blog over the winter. Here was a guy out west pulling together a reasonable electric assist kit for real cyclists. He uses the idea of a stoker on a tandem driving the power through the left side of the bottom bracket, taking advantage of the gears! Brilliant! (Electric motors are efficient over a limited rpm range, a fact most other kit mfgs ignore, either driving the front or rear wheel without gearing...)

Anyhow.... I started emailing Todd back in February to find out how to get one. At that time he was in the beta testing phase, and not quite setup for mainstream consumption. The test reports on the blog were encouraging, so I got Todd to get me on the "Wants One" list. In August Todd announced limited availability, and since I had a "custom" (*ahem*... I mean.. *hacked*) Longtail ready to go, Todd gave me a call and hooked me up with one of the first full production run kits! Whoo Hoo! Check out the shipping method... From the date on the blog I think one of the kits in this load was mine... Talk about proof of a good thing. Each kit is ~50lbs, plus his son, all on one Stokemonkey'd bike.

Anyhow.. the concepts of Longbikes and Stokemonkeys as practical load hauling transportation alternatives are exploding in the bike world(by exploding I mean I've read about three... Todd's Xtravois, the Vanilla(f'ing Gorgeous as anything they built), and Curtis Inglis's Xtrabike). Surly recently wrote about a StokeMonkey'd Xtracycled Instigator(hauling a keg), and then announced they were developing the world's first production LongTail, the Big Dummy.

I think we're reaching the point... Gas prices are high, traffic sucks, oil is for running out, and forward thinking entrepreneurs are starting companies with smart products like the StokeMonkey. Encouraging indeed.

Airline Trail

This weekend BBW and I were planning on a lake and mtbike weekend. We were going to ride on Sunday at an organized ride.. but the weather was looking iffy. So, we decided to move the ride to Saturday. BBW had been reading about this trail in CT... the Air Line trail. So-called because it follows a "line through the air from boston to new haven". Really.

So.. he did his homework, found a place to start, a place to end, and we stashed some camping gear about midway along the trail. We parked my veggie car at the end then met BBW at the beginning. We brought a bunch of trail food and full camelbacks.

The trail is multi-use. Bikes, hiking, horses, all that. We came across a MONSTER steamer in the first few miles. I mean.. this thing was HUGE. BBW knew what he needed to do:



We did pretty well... we didn't know how long the ride was going to be. We were pretty lucky we didn't have too many mechanical problems. The trail was in great shape in some sections, others were horrible. Some of the better sections were long, straight, level or downhill, and in pretty good shape.



Others were covered in trap-rock, uphill for miles, dug up by horses, or super muddy.

We got to one section that crossed old barbed wire. We didn't think much of it... much of the trail was abandoned. There were no signs that it was private, or closed, etc... so we hoisted the bikes over and found this crazy, groomed, trail through the woods:



Turns out, the barbed wire was there to keep animals in. We came to the end of this freaky section and right into the middle of a herd of cattle. I didn't think much of it until BBW pointed out the freaking BULL lowering his horns and stomping the ground. So picture this.... we're standing in the back pasture of an old New England farm, super tired from 30+ miles of mountain biking, dressed like bike geeks, and staring down a real live bull. I decided I would take my chances with a pissed-off farmer and headed for the gate. Lifted my bike over and rode out to the road. BBW was right behind.
On the OTHER side of the trail we saw a tiny 8"x11" sign saying to go around the farm. Great.... that would have been nice on the trail leading INTO the farm. wtf.

Overall it was a great weekend... the trail turns out to be 44 miles from Putnam to East Hampton... we didn't need to split it in two day but it was surprisingly tough. I was expecting a somewhat easy ride, since it follows an old rail bed. But... it wasn't. I'm thinking it'll be a good spring two day ride, with camping halfway.

The lake was pretty calm sunday after the rain. Not too many more days this year like this:



40-

RAMHADAB Vol 3... Recovery Day (part 2)

In the middle of the crochet battle, Maggie found a baby turtle crawling across the field. These are yummy this time of year...I couldn't help myself.



Of course I'm kidding.... we let the little guy go down by the brook.

After a short break we switched over to disc golf. For those of you not in the know, disc golf is like real golf except it's played with frisbees. (whamo please don't sue). Someone picks a target, and everyone tries to hit it with the minimum throws. Of course, it's a requisite that it be played with beer and the ibucket cranking away.



Some of the 'holes' were brutal... check out GUDG pulling out his best stuff.



It was a good time, but all this effort was wearing us out.



Time for some beer-die.





The rest of the day turned into a blur. Beverages, disc golf, beer die, grilled meat, beverages, and of course, at some point the keg ran out.



That was it. The weekend wound down and we all went back to reality on Monday.

Sorry again it took so long to get these posted. I fixed my computer tonight so I'll be back on track with posting. I've got lots to post about.
Mrs. 40 and I moved out to the woods, I got a StokeMonkey for the BFB(it kicks ass!), and BBW and I rode the length of the Airline Trail this weekend. More on all that later!

RAMHADAB Vol 3... Recovery Day (part 1)

Yeah... the posts are slow and far between lately. Sorry. My home computer is broken and I have to fit these posts in when and where I can. I've been dragging around a disk that CTLP made me with all these pictures so I could do this. So far its only taken a month! Arggg.. sorry. Hopefully *someone* out there is still reading this.

Without further ado... here is the summary of the day after RAMHADAB: relaxation and beer. Lots of both.

So, after multi-tens of mountain bike miles on saturday, we spend saturday night burning things, playing with fireworks, and putting a hurting on the keg. Not so good for recovery from lots of exercise, but a great way to end a long day. Sunday morning always starts pretty slow. Sleepy always prepares a fancy breakfast... this year was no different. Sleepy Gonzalez created *massive* custom breakfast burritos. I mean.. these things were about 4lbs a piece! Yummy! And of course, we whipped up some tasty bloody marys.

After that we went out to brave the drizzly fog to play some rounds of crochet. Yes, crochet. F you... it's cool when you're drinking.





The action got pretty heated. Sleepy had to strip down to cool off. (*WARNING: Picture NSFW)










....to be continued....