Weekend

This weekend, my buddy John came up from S.F. to visit. Tina, John and I went biking on Saturday morning from home, going down along the esplanade to Saturday Market. Where we ate elephant ears, or if you're from the East Coast, "fried dough". Ours is much better. We rode along the new Spring Water Corridor, along with a million other people and their kids. It was nice, except for the path is too narrow and I'm sure there's going to be an accident soon. That night we had burgers at Stanichs, the best burger place in anywhere.

Today John and I went for a hike up in the Columbia River Gorge, after taking a look at Multnomah Falls and all the people who were there. I thought it was in the shade and didn't put on any block, but I got burnt just like yesterday. Our hike was up Eagle Creek. It was a great little hike, I waded in the river while John went swimming. He must be a little nutso.

Beginning of Eagle Creek

John at Low Bridge

John at Punch Bowl Falls

Trail at Low Bridge

Punch Bowl water

Punch Bowl

Multnomah Falls

First crash of the season

I went biking after work up in Forest park. I rode up firelane 3 and then up Springville road - which I usually do pretty well at. I got dusted by some older guy with a belly of love, which was sad. I figure I was tired and had ridden from downtown and did #3, so it's okay to be slow.
After that, I rode to Newton road, just north of Germantown. It was a fun downhill and I walked the sections where the f***up factor was high (where Trey had biffed it before.) So in the last 10 yards of the ride my front wheel slid to the right in the rocks and down I went. Here are some pictures that don't do my wounds justice. :)

many books

After sorting through the large pile of books lying on the living room floor I finally took them all to Powells. And Powells rejected 160 of them, taking 3 for a grand total of $6.50 cash or $8.00 store credit. I was a little surprised that they didn't even want the Grisham or Tom Clancy books. So Goodwill got a bunch of books laid on their doorstep.

Crown Point

This weekend, Tina and I rode our bikes up to Crown Point, in preparations for the Seattle to Portland. It got kinda wet and I regreted not having my booties with me and remembered that we have to get some for Tina, as her shoes were squirting water with every pedal. It was a pretty view on top and wetreated ourselves to some hot cocoa on the ride down from the point.

Elevator

I was taking the elevator down stairs to snag some bagel grub and a pregnant woman go on at floor 7 to go down 2 flights. She said she gets unbalanced going down stairs (because of her pregnancy) and I said "I hear ya". Like I've been pregnant and understand how it is.

Biking in Forest Park

I went biking with my buddy Vince yesterday up in Forest park. I was using my old Klein, which is not as much fun as my new Trek. It felt like a cast iron skillet compared to my new one. Plus the brakes are loud as I squeak down the firelanes.

Near the gate at Thurman was a note from a woman who had lost her Honda keys on firelane #3. When we were at the top of #3 I saw that someone had left her keys on the gate right by the sign that says "No loitering, grouping, resting or fixing of bikes allowed. Please be quiet." So I picked up the keys after I fixed my seat and loitered for a bit.

Vince and I hung out at the 23rd Mcmenamins and had some grub after our strenous ride. He locked his keys in his rig, so we drank some more (ok, it was hot cocoa for me) while his wife drove down from Washington with the spare keys.

Today I gave the keyless woman a call and returned her keys. That was my good deed for the week.

HP Servers

We have an extremely slow HP machine that we use for development at work. I'm doing unit testing - finding the bugs I've made - and each compilation takes on the order of 3 minutes. What can one do with 3 minutes? Not much time to do anything useful.
I ended up falling asleep.

St. Helens Mountain Biking

This weekend we went mountain biking up at Mt. St. Helens. We did Falls Creek and then the Ape Canyon that went out onto the plains of Abraham on Mt. St. Helens. It was pretty bad ass.

Ron got hurt flying over his bike from a jump, and I got attacked by a large tree (might have been an angry Ent) as I tried to go around it.

Ape Death

Ape Canyon




Plains of Abraham



Plains of Abraham (2)



Plains of Abraham (3)



Falls Creek Trail



Ron Jumping

Renee Zellweger

For her upcoming movie, Renee Zellweger has to add some pounds. Sounds like a job I'd like (if I could take them back off.)

From Dark Horizons: Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason: Renee Zellweger is packing on the pounds again for the role with a six-week, 4,700 calorie a day diet of donuts, burgers, pizzas and cake.

175 books

Yesterday I picked up 175 books from a woman on craigslist for 25 dollars. There are a bunch of Windows books, some programming, some Henry David Thoreau, some self help, cook books. All sorts of stuff.

Now I just have to get rid of it all. Want any books?

New Camelback

I just bought a new Camelback backpack. My old one didn't hold my camera when I was mountain biking, so I went for the big ass TransAlp bag. Used it this morning biking in on my Trek. Pretty comfy and holds more than you'd want to carry.

Grilling fish

I found out that you shouldn't grill Halibut on my new grill. It seems to turn into a scramble and get stuck everywhere.

Doctor visit

I've decided to take advantage of health care and get a doctor's appt. set up. I'm looking on my BlueCross/BlueShield webpage to find a traditional doctor.

Over one half of the doctors are for Mental Health and Chemical Dependency . That must say something for the area I live in.

Web Account

I just got a new web account, over at digitalspace.net, to host my little Java Servlet projects. A website with it's own IP address, shell, Servlets, and mySql database is only $3 a month. Not too bad. I was using mycgiserver.com but their connection is pretty slow and the deployment is a little bit non-standard.

The new site only reloads it's Tomcat Server every morning, which makes it hard to develop servlets (as a new program won't get loaded.) So I did some research and it turns out you can create your own ClassLoader in Java.

I'm creating some facade Servlet classes that will load the real class for each request. This way when I recompile my classes, they'll be loaded by the server and the webpages will be updated.

pretty slick

meiofauna

I've heard that there are little monsters living in the sand with grappling hooks and big chomping teeth. Turns out they're actually good for cleaning things up, like ringworm.

Biking to work

kinda gross

I was riding into work today and had to blow my nose - cos of allergies and stuff. I used the old farmer blow and ended up with a long trail attached to my face as I was coasting down Salmon st.

ok, really gross.

that's all

Mckenzie river bike ride

Last weekend we went biking on the Mckenzie river, east on Hwy 126 from Eugene. We did some car camping and then hit the trail on Saturday. We didn't do the whole trail, just the section from the resevoir down to Paradise campground. It was mainly downhill on pretty smooth dirt singletrack with some sections where you're just bombing through the tall trees and moss. Quite cool stuff.

I took a few pictures of us all biking, but it's on film so the pictures will have to wait. I took a few with my digital Nikon, here is one of them from the bottom section. It doesn't do it justice, but you get a sense of how the trail is.

Seattle To Portland (STP)

Tina and I decided to do the STP next month. I just have to send in the forms and get my butt in shape. I looked at the suggested mileage and had to laugh. I should be riding 140 miles on the weekends and I'm probably up to 30. hah. But it's all downhill since Seattle is up from Portland on the map, right?