AG: Aunt Granny's Advice, or How to become an elderly cyclist:

On 7/1/2019 1:03 AM, John B. wrote:

I remember my mother and her three sisters once trying to tell
"Mother" that she ought to get a gas stove, it must have been
thanksgiving as the whole clan was at "Grampa's" house, and I
remember my grandmother telling her daughters that "she'd been cooking
on that stove since she was married and it still worked just fine".

And I bet your mother stuck to toe clips and friction shifting too! ;-)

--
- Frank Krygowski

On Mon, 1 Jul 2019 11:14:19 -0400, Frank Krygowski
wrote:

On 7/1/2019 1:03 AM, John B. wrote:

I remember my mother and her three sisters once trying to tell
"Mother" that she ought to get a gas stove, it must have been
thanksgiving as the whole clan was at "Grampa's" house, and I
remember my grandmother telling her daughters that "she'd been cooking
on that stove since she was married and it still worked just fine".

And I bet your mother stuck to toe clips and friction shifting too! ;-)

Goodness, you must be one of those "young fellows" that can't remember
what it was like back in the days of coaster brakes.
The second verse of the Bicycle Built for Two song was far more
accurate than the first:

Michael, Michael
Here is your answer true.
I'll not cycle
Over the world with you.
If you can't afford a carriage,
There won't be any marriage.
'Cause I'll be switched,
If I'll be hitched
On a bicycle built for two!

--
cheers,

John B.

On Mon, 01 Jul 2019 12:03:59 +0700, John B.
wrote:

But I also remember that in later years she had a kerosene stove on
the back porch for summer.

Grandma had a kerosene stove in their summer cabin; I didn't notice
what she had in the house, but I think it was gas. At least she had a
toaster that sat over the flame, and I don't think one would do that
with kerosene. I don't remember seeing gas bottles outside, but I
wouldn't have thought gas bottles worth noticing.

Dad said that his home place had a "summer kitchen" that was in an
entirely-separate building.

Our neighbor had two stoves in her kitchen; in hindsight, I'm pretty
sure one was a range and the other was for summer use.

Mom cooked on "the old Anderson", a gas stove. Must have bought it
right after the war; the kitchen at the Scircleville place was built
around it. Or it could have been a vestige of the old kitchen that
she kept when we got electricity and running water; she liked that
stove so much that she moved it to the Colfax place after Dad retired.
I don't remember that the deep well ever worked, but oh, that
brick-lined oven! And it had a separate broiler you didn't have to
bend over, which also heated a griddle.

--
joy beeson at comcast dot net
http://wlweather.net/PAGEJOY/
The above message is a Usenet post.
I don't recall having given anyone permission to use it on a Web site.

From a review of _Cyclecraft_ by Robert Hooks:

Nearly all of this is common sense, but reading it gives you an
unnerving sense of just what an uncommon quality that is. Every day,
it seems, I see hoards of cyclists heaving their way off from traffic
lights, wobbling and shuddering with effort because the bike is in too
high a gear. They block traffic and put themselves in jeopardy by
being unstable, and deprive themselves of the option of sprinting away
from danger. Did nobody explain to them that you always change into a
lower gear before you stop?

------------------

I suspect that Mr. Hooks meant "hordes", but the idea of hoarding
cyclists has a certain appeal.


--
joy beeson at comcast dot net
http://wlweather.net/PAGEJOY/
The above message is a Usenet post.
I don't recall having given anyone permission to use it on a Web site.

On 7/6/2019 7:22 PM, Joy Beeson wrote:

From a review of _Cyclecraft_ by Robert Hooks:

Nearly all of this is common sense, but reading it gives you an
unnerving sense of just what an uncommon quality that is. Every day,
it seems, I see hoards of cyclists heaving their way off from traffic
lights, wobbling and shuddering with effort because the bike is in too
high a gear. They block traffic and put themselves in jeopardy by
being unstable, and deprive themselves of the option of sprinting away
from danger. Did nobody explain to them that you always change into a
lower gear before you stop?

------------------

I suspect that Mr. Hooks meant "hordes", but the idea of hoarding
cyclists has a certain appeal.

But regarding his point: I know a few fairly avid cyclists who have
somehow never mastered the skill of getting off to a quick and graceful
start. They repeatedly dab one foot at the ground, trying to push off as
if they were on a kick scooter, instead of pedaling down on the raised
crank at the same time they rise into the saddle.

I've learned it's best to keep well clear of them as they attempt to get
moving.

--
- Frank Krygowski

I was in a discussion once that included a guy who couldn't wrap his
head around the notion of four-way stops. No matter how we explained
it, he replied, "But nobody can ever go because everybody else has to
go first!"

Says here in my notes (I'm at the bottom of the pile stick-pinned to
my monitor stand, and will soon start on the pile picked up off the
floor, then the ones that fell behind the other montor stand)

(Just held the two remaining slips up to the light: hoo, do they ever
have a lot of pinholes! I kept adding the new slip that I intended to
transcribe this very evening to the top of the pile. I would also
unpin it, read it, and put it back.)

It says in my notes that during a ride on Saturday, 25 May 2019, I
thought of a way to explain stop signs that had a chance of getting
through to him.

I'll never find that discussion again. I don't even know that it was
somewhere on Usenet, but none of my Web forums allow discussion as
opposed to one or two rounds of post-and-response, except for the
forum maintained by the author of "How to make Sewing Patterns", and
that one sticks quite firmly to the topic. We don't even discuss ways
of altering ready-made patterns.

So I'll post to the choir here.

And it's very simple:

------------------------------------------------------------------------

At *every* stop sign, you stop and wait until it's your turn.

That's it. You wait until it's your turn.

At the intersection of a minor road and a major one, The person on the
minor road has his turn when nobody on the major road wants the
intersection.

At the intersection of two equal roads, where everybody has a stop
sign, it's your turn when all the vehicles that were there when you
arrived are gone.

When you aren't sure which vehicle arrived first, it's the turn of the
fellow who has the other guy on his left -- that is, yield to the guy
on your right. (I presume, with no evidence, that it's the other way
around where people drive on the left.)

When traffic is backed up, it's the turn of the vehicle to the right
of the vehicle that had the previous turn.

By the general rule that it's your turn when nobody else wants the bit
of road that you want to use, if you and the guy facing you both want
to go straight, when the turn comes to either, both may go.

Likewise, you may turn right after verifying that nobody is coming
from your left, and that nobody facing you wants to turn left.



--
Joy Beeson
joy beeson at comcast dot net
http://wlweather.net/PAGEJOY/

On 14/07/2019 12:02 a.m., Joy Beeson wrote:

I was in a discussion once that included a guy who couldn't wrap his
head around the notion of four-way stops. No matter how we explained
it, he replied, "But nobody can ever go because everybody else has to
go first!"

Says here in my notes (I'm at the bottom of the pile stick-pinned to
my monitor stand, and will soon start on the pile picked up off the
floor, then the ones that fell behind the other montor stand)

(Just held the two remaining slips up to the light: hoo, do they ever
have a lot of pinholes! I kept adding the new slip that I intended to
transcribe this very evening to the top of the pile. I would also
unpin it, read it, and put it back.)

It says in my notes that during a ride on Saturday, 25 May 2019, I
thought of a way to explain stop signs that had a chance of getting
through to him.

I'll never find that discussion again. I don't even know that it was
somewhere on Usenet, but none of my Web forums allow discussion as
opposed to one or two rounds of post-and-response, except for the
forum maintained by the author of "How to make Sewing Patterns", and
that one sticks quite firmly to the topic. We don't even discuss ways
of altering ready-made patterns.

So I'll post to the choir here.

And it's very simple:

------------------------------------------------------------------------

At *every* stop sign, you stop and wait until it's your turn.

That's it. You wait until it's your turn.

At the intersection of a minor road and a major one, The person on the
minor road has his turn when nobody on the major road wants the
intersection.

At the intersection of two equal roads, where everybody has a stop
sign, it's your turn when all the vehicles that were there when you
arrived are gone.

When you aren't sure which vehicle arrived first, it's the turn of the
fellow who has the other guy on his left -- that is, yield to the guy
on your right. (I presume, with no evidence, that it's the other way
around where people drive on the left.)

When traffic is backed up, it's the turn of the vehicle to the right
of the vehicle that had the previous turn.

By the general rule that it's your turn when nobody else wants the bit
of road that you want to use, if you and the guy facing you both want
to go straight, when the turn comes to either, both may go.

Likewise, you may turn right after verifying that nobody is coming
from your left, and that nobody facing you wants to turn left.





I guess it's confusing enough that John Prine wrote a song about it.

Friday, 19 July 2019


I made switchel concentrate yesterday, and I boiled up two bottles of
tea today.

Tomorrow I'm going on my first group ride since the turn of the
millenium, and feeling nervous about it. Partly because it's supposed
to be ninty-five fahrenheit tomorrow, mainly because I don't know
whether the route goes past places where I can buy orange juice. I
seriously considered taking along a sample-size maple-syrup bottle
filled with thawed frozen concentrate, but I've settled on taking
salty meat sticks. And I have put orange juice in the bottle I will
start with.

Surely, surely I can tank up on water -- but I'm filling the pannier
with sandwich bags of ice cubes anyway. Five bags, one weighed nine
ounces -- well over a quart of water. I filled the pannier, then
moved the bags to the insulated bag that was part of a door prize at
the first Taste of Kosciusko I attended, and put the bag in the
freezer. Tomorrow I'll add the bottles and the bag of food and put it
into the car.

I can't remember the last time I was driven to the start of a ride,
group or no. But I'm planning to bail out where the route passes my
house, so driving to the start wouldn't be in the cards even if I were
sure that my rotator cuff could take it.

For the concentrate, I poured a half pint of vinegar syrup off my
home-grown bread-and-butter pickles through a strainer, found nothing
in the strainer but mustard seed and dumped that into the pot too.
Then I filled the jar with cold water twice, added one teaspoon of
gingiver molido and an eighth of a cup of red-wheat flour, and brought
it to a boil while stirring constantly.

Considered adding salt, concluded that orange juice would be better,
ended up adding all my salty "snack sticks" to my bag of food.


Saturday, 20 July 2019

I think that if there had been places where I could lie down for a few
minutes without attracting ambulances, I'd have made it past450 N and
EMS B 41. And it would have helped if I'd annotated my maps, so that
I'd have known that I was approaching Checkpoint Two and looked for
it.

And I think my concentrate had too low a flour to vinegar ratio.

I didn't annotate my maps because I made them just in case I didn't
get a map at registration, and I could compare them with the county
map I aways carry. Turned out that I got a beautiful map that they
must have paid a lot to have made -- to fit on 24" by 32" paper. When
shrunk down to fit on 8 1/2" by 11", the best it could do was to tell
me that the lake should be on my right during the first loop. I
hadn't been able to get the image off the PDF file, so I made my
snippets from a J-PEG file on the Web site -- apparently *they* can
get the image off a PDF, but on the JPG the names of the roads were
too blurry to read even at 100%.

On the other hand, the layers of the tape markers did a splendid job,
except where the route turned onto SR 5. There were markers to say
turn right onto this drive or minor road to cut the corner of the
turn, and the logical thing was to turn right again where the driveway
ended on SR5, but there were no turn markers and I been on SR 5 for an
un-nerving distance before I got to the confirmation marks. I
actually turned around at the junction with SR 5 and went back to look
at the turn marks again.

I could tell that there had been at least two teams putting tape
arrows on the roads.

After the Checkpoint Two error -- which led to the tour director
calling me on my cell phone, but I couldn't get off the road and get
my phone out in time. I fear that my message on his voice mail wasn't
as polite as it might have been. The words were polite, but the tone
was "&*^%# spammer!"

But he called again a few miles later, and I told him I was in my own
briar patch and he should check me in. Which probably gave him the
impression that I was near Winona Lake; I hadn't told him -- we were a
bit rushed at registration -- how slowly I ride.

Turned out we obeyed one of the rules by accident. I checked my phone
as we were rolling out of the driveway of the kind man who had given
me refuge under his oak tree -- and an unsolicited glass of ice water
-- and it was precisely 1600 hours. You have to be off the course by
four o'clock. Which is why I'd told the director to check me off his
list of people he was responsible for even though at the time it
looked as though I'd get to checkpoint Three at the Trailhouse before
four.

Dave said later that I'd sounded so rocky on the phone that he
considered siccing 911 on me. I had, of course, called him as soon as
I found a place to park the bike, before lying down for half an hour.

When I emptied the ice bags on the three-inch rosebush, it didn't get
much of a drink.

I've more to say, but it's bedtime for old ladies.

--
Joy Beeson
joy beeson at comcast dot net
http://wlweather.net/PAGEJOY/

On 7/14/2019 12:02 AM, Joy Beeson wrote:

I was in a discussion once that included a guy who couldn't wrap his
head around the notion of four-way stops. No matter how we explained
it, he replied, "But nobody can ever go because everybody else has to
go first!"

....

And it's very simple:

------------------------------------------------------------------------

At *every* stop sign, you stop and wait until it's your turn.

That's it. You wait until it's your turn.

At the intersection of a minor road and a major one, The person on the
minor road has his turn when nobody on the major road wants the
intersection.

At the intersection of two equal roads, where everybody has a stop
sign, it's your turn when all the vehicles that were there when you
arrived are gone.

When you aren't sure which vehicle arrived first, it's the turn of the
fellow who has the other guy on his left -- that is, yield to the guy
on your right. (I presume, with no evidence, that it's the other way
around where people drive on the left.)

When traffic is backed up, it's the turn of the vehicle to the right
of the vehicle that had the previous turn.

By the general rule that it's your turn when nobody else wants the bit
of road that you want to use, if you and the guy facing you both want
to go straight, when the turn comes to either, both may go.

Likewise, you may turn right after verifying that nobody is coming
from your left, and that nobody facing you wants to turn left.

Your guy's confusion is further evidence that driving is barely, barely
within the capabilities of many people.

The only bike-related thing I'll add to your instructions is this: I
find it very helpful to take charge. That is, when I see there may be
doubt, I'll wave or signal as appropriate. Yesterday, at one four-way
stop, I waved to the driver simultaneously approaching from the right,
telling him to go ahead of me. He waved thanks, and at that isolated
intersection neither of us actually had to do a complete stop.

Also yesterday, as I was in a little roundabout, a motorist approached
fast from the right and looked like he might not yield. I gave him the
policeman's "Halt" with my palm out toward him, and he slowed right down.

Motorists are easily confused. They're often confused by bicyclists. I
tell them what to do when it's helpful.

--
- Frank Krygowski

One unexpected result of coming down with heat exhaustion last week is
that I have brown rectangles on the backs of my hands.

I always renew the sunscreen on my hands before I put my gloves back
on -- but I never had occasion to take my gloves off.

--
Joy Beeson
joy beeson at comcast dot net
http://wlweather.net/PAGEJOY/