Brews you can use

So, last Thursday the ol’ wisdom teeth started acting up and I finally went to have them out that Friday. I was put under, so “ow, needle!”…”I go sleep now”…”Mr. Mikkelson, you’re done, the recovery room is this way”. After a few minutes laying down, I thought “hey, this is only a few whiskeys level of drunkenness” and sat up and started walking around. One of the doctor’s assistants asked if I wanted to wait out front. I said “sure”, then my lip drooped from all the novocaine, and I felt a little dribble of blood come out. I knew how I would feel sitting in the waiting room next to a large woozy, blood-drooling guy with a mouth full of gauze, and thought better of it, and went back to lay down. Then Jess and the kids came and picked me up, got me some meds, I started on the painkillers, and all was good (if a bit unclear at times).

I thought I was recovering pretty quickly, and went back to work on Tuesday, complete with a couple gently-devoured bagels in the morning. Perhaps that was a bit premature. Today, I had a nice not-so-gently-devoured Gyro for a late lunch and wound up losing quite a bit of it in a hole that shouldn’t be there. Fsck. Dry socket?
So I’ve been worrying about that crap all day, instead of looking forward to a nice kid-free weekend with Jess.

At least the serious pain hasn’t set in. It’s mostly the fear of what may come if I can’t get back to the oral surgeon in time, and how much longer it’ll be until I can eat proper solid food without worry (there goes the idea of a nice dinner out ).

To distract myself from this, and keep me away from the painkillers for a little while longer, I did a little bit of bike stuff. I had bought a nice “just for fun” bike (a Kona Humuhumunukunukua’pua’a deluxe) I off craigslist last week, and dropped it off Monday at County Cycles for a little work (bar swap, chain tension, brake tuneup). We picked it up this morning, along with some new mountain-y tires for the Humu, and some less mountain-y tires and a rack for Jess’s mountain bike. So, I changed tires all this evening rather than freaking about dentistry (yipe!). It was good.

I’m pretty excited about the Humu. It’s a scaled up version of a beach cruiser, but with a very MTB-like frame and components. I swapped out the BMX-y riser bar for a more traditional riser, and the flame-patterned cruiser tires with similar-sized Continental Mountain Kings (earworm alert!). So, now it’s a respectable single speed mountain bike. After all the mountain bikes I’ve owned (ok, two) and turned into utilitarian commuters, I’ve told myself that this one will actually see some dirt sometime.

Or failing that, some snow, as a winter commuter. It’ll be good for that.

Now for some painkillers and the fitful, itchy sleep they bring…. Yay!

Tonight, we saw some of the first session of the Minnesota Fixed Gear Classic at the NSC Velodrome. What a blast! Kids permitting (it was a late night for all) we may catch some of tomorrow’s races, too, or maybe a Thursday night one sometime this summer. I could definitely see going to these semi-regularly, now that I know how darn cool it is we have a Velodrome

It was also a chance to see Roberto Chiappa in action. 42 mph, yikes!

These races were intended to re-invigorate track cycling in Minnesota. They definitely have a good start at doing that. A lot of the people I talked to or overheard in the audience were, like us, first-time attendees and enjoying what they see. It was even exciting enough to hold the kids’ interest for a few events, although they quickly decided to run their own running and “roll down the hill” races behind the bleachers.

I’m being mercilessly held down by this:

so I might as well blog, even though I have only one arm free, on the opposite side of me from the computer. Pqrdin tge typods.

We got a new kitten today, and of course a few cuter pictures than the above. She still doesn’t have a name. We’re kind of trying to get Grace to name her, but she’s not interested. Kitten looks a little like our cat Max, and the math geek in me wants to name her Minimax (or Minnie for short). The computer geek thinks max should have a corresponding Min. The part of me who shut out exactly the wrong parts of the 80s also contributed “Number 5“… (That part of me has resigned to spend more time with its family and pursue other humor opportunities in the future.)

Need more input…. <bang> <bang> urrrgghhhle… <thud>

IMDB has rumors of a remake. God help us all, and damn the perpetrators…

Ah, she awakes! Freedom is at hand!

Oh, false alarm…

The project bike has been sitting in the basement for several weeks waiting for minor tweaks. I swapped out the handlebars a couple weeks ago, and finally got around to re-running the brake cables and wrapping the handlebars (I think I managed about a quarter-assed tape job, but it’s my first try). It’s about where I wanted it, minus:

• re-dishing the rear wheel for perfect chainline (this gets the job done, though it’s about 5mm off)
• putting on a track cog to give fixed gear riding a shot
• getting me in good enough shape to ride single speed.

Now I want to take it on my commute tomorrow.

I’ve only taken the bike to work once so far. That’s frustrating, especially since I haven’t been taking advantage of the beautiful biking weather we’ve had the last couple days (30s, 40s? Toss on a sweater, keep pedaling, and it’s quite pleasant). I did manage a nice mid-20s 20 mile recreational ride on Saturday, though. That was nice. I need to do more rides that don’t begin or end with work :-/

In other news, I think I’m losing my mind:

Exhibit A: It took me almost an hour to send out an already-written word document as an attachment to some people I work with. About 15 minutes to draft a quick two sentence commentary, then 45 minutes of scouring the document, making sure it was the right version, that the previous version had been expunged from change tracking, that no included versions contained disparaging comments, profanity, or said “I made a doody“, and that the word document had not been magically replaced by a pornographic image between the last time I checked it and when I hit “attach”.

I’m seriously in the wrong line of work to be this fscking nervous around computers.

Exhibit B: I’ve been having odd dreams about being dead. Not disturbing, scary, or even really profound dreams, but actually amusing dreams about death. I’m basically going about my day, with everything normal until I eventually figure out that I’m a ghost. I try to pick things up. I think I succeed — the thing is in my hands, but not on the table — but eventually it evaporates from my hand and slowly fades back in at its original location. Aha!, I think, this explains the “ghost paradox” (the effect where ghosts in movies can walk through walls but never fall through the floor).

My brain never tells me how this explains it. I wake up before that part is revealed.

I got a late Christmas present today. Well, not so much a late Christmas present, but a quarter century delayed inheritance.

My Grandpa died almost 25 years ago, and left some nice wristwatches for me and my cousin. I was a kid then, and my cousin was less than a year old, so it’s probably for the best that they took this long to get to us. Mine’s easily the nicest watch I’ve owned, and probably ever will own. I usually go for the sturdy yet disposable inexpensive digital watches, but this is a beautiful mechanical wristwatch made in Switzerland by one of the older Swiss watchmakers. I’ve been wearing it since this morning, listening to its rapid ticking, marveling at the fine mechanisms strapped to my wrist, and thinking of Grandpa.

…

I brewed yesterday, but nothing as odd as I thought I’d need to do. I had the hops to make a decent American IPA, and picked up a few more ingredients to complete the recipe. My last few beers have wound up underhopped, but I don’t think I made that mistake this time — my hops stash is gone now

I also finally got my bike out of the car, assembled, and installed fenders. The weather forecast calls for sub-10°F temps tomorrow, which knocked me out of my bike commuting routine last time. This time around, though, I have a fleece balaclava and a better base layer for the rest of me. I could wait for the higher temps later this week, but I’m itching to get back on the bike…

I have another song stuck in my head. It’s not the annoying kind that runs constantly, but rather the kind which starts up close to breakdown or shut down, like HAL singing “Daisy, Daisy” as Dave removed his cards one by one.

Which is to say, it was running constantly today.

Grace has been requiring two things to go to sleep lately: me, and music. The music for the last … month? … has been Pete Seeger, Children’s Concert at Town Hall, IIRC. Good, classic stuff all around, but what sticks in my head is:

Now that’s the end of him and her
Ding dang dong, go the wedding bells
There’ll be no little tadpoles, covered with fur
Ding dang dong, go the wedding bells

[chorus]
Here’s to Cheshire, here’s to cheese
Here’s to the pear and the apple trees
and here’s to the lovely strawberries
Ding dang dong, go the wedding bells

It’s the last verse of one of the tracks, and the only one I can make out over the fidgeting and chattering of a 4 year old trying to avoid sleep. The furry tadpoles probably have something to do with that.

So, of course I googled for snippets of the song trying to fill in the blanks. The rest of the song doesn’t make much sense either. It’s one of many variants of “Froggy went a’ courting”, an English folk song dating back to 1611 with references as early as the 1580s. In other words, this one’s been running through the collective heads of a decent portion of western civilization for over 400 years. Neat.

It’s also interesting that its a nominally kid-friendly song [Theory: every English-language song over 200 years old has either been forgotten, turned into a hymn, or mellowed into a children's song (if secular)] ending in the deaths of the main characters. It makes me not feel as bad about wanting to have all three little pigs be eaten, because the “smartest” one only had his labor-intensive brick house half-finished before The Big Bad Wolf’s fateful visit.

(Think “Three Little Pigs” as a parable of engineering tradeoffs. No, I don’t tell it that way, although in my version the wolf sometimes heads into town for a ham sandwich after giving up on the fresher pork…)

It completely slipped my mind that tomorrow is Talk Like a Pirate Day.

I (re?)discovered the MAKE Magazine blog last weekend, and stumbled across a post on my favorite science/tech show of all time. The Secret Life of Machines was the creation of British special-effects artists Tim Hunkin and Rex Garrod, and contains some truly superlative “how it works” demos, just the proper amount of wit (British, dry, of course), and none of the modern Discovery channel style overproduction to get in the way/make you want to throw something heavy at the TV.

Because of its quality and brief run, the show became somewhat of an obsession for me: its theme music (”The Russians are Coming” by Val Bennet, a reggae cover of Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five”) was one of the first pieces of music I sought out back in the heady “illegal file sharing is cool” early days of napster, and I convinced Jess to buy the first two seasons on VHS for my birthday one year. The videos were aimed at the educational market and thus hideously expensive; they also left out the third “Secret Life of the Office” series, which includes (among other things), Tim and Rex demonstrating a pair of makeshift fax machines made from lathes.

The first comment on the MAKE blog post pointed out that Tim Hunkin posted a link on his site to a torrent of the full three seasons. Hey, no guilt. Download ctorrent, spend a day or two downloading 3.6GB of AVIs from random overseas hosts (nobody in the US serving it until I was finished), and start watching.

Best of all, Grace seems pretty interested in them. “I want to watch a show on Papa’s computer.” “Let’s watch the Vacuum Cleaner one.” Of course, comprehension/retention may be a little longer in coming. After finishing “The Internal Combustion Engine” she said: “That was a fun show.”

“Yes I thought so, too…. So, do you know how a car engine works now?”

<thoughtful pause> “I did, but I don’t remember. Let’s watch it again tomorrow.”

“Certainly.”

After putting it off for way too long, I finally started biking to work last Tuesday. I’ve car commuted twice since then, to give my legs a break, but I think bike’s the definite preferred commute. The bike commute keeps me awake and my mind engaged, so I just feel more energetic and alert throughout the day. It’s a nice natural high, and I can feel the beginnings of an addiction — I’ve noticed myself getting uncharacteristically cranky when I’d rather be biking.

I still have a bit of learning to do until I really know how to ride a bike, though. I remember it being much simpler as a kid — “pedal this way really fast, if something gets in your way, turn “. Part of that could have been simpler equipment. My first bike was single-speed cruiser, and by the time I moved in to a ten-speed, I didn’t really see the need to shift.

The ride this time around is a decent used Raleigh mountain bike with nice fat (and heavy) tubes and more gears than I know what to do with — 24 nominally, including the way-too-useful-for-me “Granny gear”. I chose it because (a) I liked the sturdy feel of the cruiser I outgrew long, long ago, and (b) I’m nearly 300 pounds, so part of me thinks I would crush a nice sleek (and light) road bike. I could use the exercise, anyway.

No pictures yet, but think:

but only one of me, and not as well-dressed.

I still haven’t gotten the hang of pedaling smoothly, or found a good cadence. One experienced biker at work suggested 90 rpm as a good spinning speed, and I started trying to find that. 90rpm = 3 revs every 2 seconds, or 3 pushes of the pedal every 2 seconds…. Think 3 beats per measure. Accent the first beat, and you’ve got a nice brisk Walz. “Tales from the Vienna woods” would be a good target. Currently, I seem to be dialing in at more “Blue Danube” speed when I can actually maintain a cadence. The usual mode, though is more like “Hall of the Mountain King” followed by panting and coasting.

Well, at least it gets me there…

I took a look out the west window of our house this evening, and saw an uncommonly astronomical sight for a city where lights in the sky are usually taking off or landing. It was the crescent moon with Venus nearby. Beautiful. This iconic image which has inspired generations of painters and, later, photographers sucked me in for quite a while. It wasn’t quite “guy sees crescent moon and Venus, and converts to Islam” — I’m not a joiner — but the cosmos intruding so nicely on an otherwise normal day was almost a mystical experience.

Aside from the obvious religious significance, it reminded me of “the morning star is the evening star”, and many idle conversations in the philosophy of language with a philosophy major friend from college, and the many trivialities too trivial to be trivia I carry about in my head for some reason.

As an example, I was in Boise last week meeting with “the adversary” (the fellow who decided to outsource my favorite job; the trip was for me helping this thoroughly depressing process along…) and about three drinks in at the local distillery-pub (!), the conversation turned to food and drink. I got a surprised look when I described Everclear using the word “azeotrope” — it turns out he was a chemical engineering major, and never expected to hear that word post-college…

On a lark, I asked if anyone at the table was familiar with transfinite cardinals (or countable vs. uncountable inifinity), and struck out. The first question was “what’s the practical use?” Obviously from a non-math type. The closest that has to a practical use is understanding the premise of the novel White Light Frankly, I don’t even remember the full implications; I’ve forgotten more math than I thought I’d ever learn….

Bah, Point? See subject…