[cvcalhoun]

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! I’m still recovering from the trauma of using British toilet paper for a couple of years of my life. Things have apparently changed now to the point that British consumers are more demanding than other nations about their toilet paper. But at the time (1967-8 and 1972-3), public restrooms in Britain offered what my grandmother referred to as “wax paper, brown paper, or sandpaper.” None of the three was exactly famous for comfort or absorbency.

@vern 89525 wrote:

It’s dry leaves and grass for you!

[cvcalhoun]

So, why do we still have no prize announcement for June? I’m waiting with bated breath to see whether I got the toilet paper this month!

[cvcalhoun]

Still showing as $700 here, $600 on Craigslist.

@ejwillis62 89406 wrote:

First time

[cvcalhoun]

There are currently LOTS of downed trees on the CCT. Not only are they a nuisance to get around, but they suggest to me that they may recently have been struck by lightning. Rather than risk getting struck by lightning myself—or getting hit by future falling trees—I’m sheltering in the tunnel until this dies down a bit.

[cvcalhoun]

I think you’re going to have an issue if MMR is syncing to Strava and Strava is syncing to MMR. The problem is that the program does not check for duplicates. So the rides synced from MMR to Strava will then get synced back to MMR, causing duplicates of each ride.

I am doing fine with the program just having it sync from Strava to MMR, so that all rides will count for the NBC. But if you have it syncing both ways, you may need to check and delete any duplicates that are created.

@Emm 89400 wrote:

So it wouldn’t sync either way when I tried an hour ago (I kept getting error messages). I logged in a min ago to check and…MMR synched to Strava within the last hour while I wasn’t logged in. Strava still hasn’t synced to MMR though, but I’ll keep trying. I also have to manually change all my MMR activities to bike rides in Strava since they got imported as “workouts”, but otherwise it’s working.

Thank you for the website–this will make things easier, once I get the kinks sorted out

[cvcalhoun]

If you’d like to get those snaps repaired, check your PMs. I have the snap kit, and would be happy to help a fellow forum member out (no charge or obligation).

[cvcalhoun]

FWIW, I used to have chronic bachache from bicycling. (I could tell because it got better when I couldn’t bicycle, and worse when I could.) What worked for me was core strengthening exercises. I use one weight machine at the Y that focuses on the abdominals, and one that focuses on the paraspinal muscles.

[cvcalhoun]

But I repeat myself…

@Dickie 89262 wrote:

a clueless 16 year old?

[cvcalhoun]

Oh, and canopies for cargo bikes:

[ATTACH=CONFIG]6068[/ATTACH]

Of course, one of the issues with any kind of bicycle canopy is that if you cover only the top, rain can get blown in from the sides. If you also cover the sides, it can be hard to maintain control of the bike if there is a brisk crosswind.

[cvcalhoun]

To be fair, the only part of the Move DC plan AAA opposed was tolls on commuter roads, which I also find horrifying. I would actually favor a straightforward commuter tax (i.e., imposing DC income taxes on people who work in DC, who would then take a credit against their Maryland or Virginia taxes if they lived outside of DC). Every state government has the right to do this, and DC should have the same right. But imposing tolls constitutes a severely regressive tax, and would disproportionately affect those who can’t afford to live in the District (or even close enough to it to bike in), and those who are disabled and can’t bike. And it would make the already awful traffic in this area worse, as tourists who didn’t have passes for the tolls had to stop and pay the tolls.

Yes, it would have been nice if AAA had had good things to say about other portions of the Move DC plan. But AAA is really a single-interest organization, and bicycles and pedestrians are not part of its charter. So it’s not like AAA opposed the other parts; they are just not part of what it can speak to.

I actually find the comments regarding David Alpert (and the fake apology) much more despicable.

[cvcalhoun]

This guy came up with a canopy for an Extracycle, and posted instructions for making it.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]6066[/ATTACH]

@dbb 89046 wrote:

how come nobody has developed a Bimini for an Extracycle or box bike?

[cvcalhoun]

Just sent you a PM.

[cvcalhoun]

After a couple of days to recover, here are the positives and negatives of Tuesday’s stint as a Chief Election Judge:

+ We had the best and most plentiful food (from corporate donors) that I’ve ever seen as a election judge. Particular shout-out to Balducci’s Food Lover’s Market, which donated crab cakes, chicken Wellington in puff pastries, stuffed mushrooms, and a variety of other gourmet treats. We had so much that none of the election judges bothered to bring their own food, we canceled our pizza order for dinner, and we still ended up taking home leftovers at the end of the day.
– One of our election judges failed to show, and sent an e-mail only an hour and a half after he was supposed to be there.
+ An election judge who was supposed to be there only for the morning volunteered to stay for the whole day to make up the deficiency.
– Several of our election judges lacked either the physical mobility or the confidence to handle escorting voters to the voting booths. As a result, I ended up having to take on that duty myself for almost all of the day, leading to a lot of soreness by the end. I was fearful I’d triggered a recurrence of my plantar fasciitis with 17.5 hours of being on my feet, but the feet seem to be recovering, so I’m hoping it was just a temporary thing. But two days later, my calves are still seriously sore!
+ I do seem to be healing gradually, so I doubt there will be any long-term physical effects.
– There was some confusion about whether one person was supposed to be an election judge or just a student volunteer. He had trained as an election judge, but was only 17 and wanted to receive student service learning credit rather than pay for his service.
+ We decided to treat the person mentioned above as an election judge for all purposes other than payroll, and were well rewarded for our efforts. He was magnificent at every task assigned, and at taking on new tasks on his own initiative.
– There is supposed to be one Chief Election Judge from each party. However, my Republican counterpart was not appointed until 3 days before the election, leaving me to complete the duties of both Chief Election Judges until then. And when they did finally appoint someone, it was someone who had never done this before, so there was a learning curve involved.
+ The other Chief Election Judge (once he was appointed) proved to be dedicated and detail oriented, and really helped keep us on track in the course of a very long day.
– Two voting machines broke during the course of the day. One was a particular problem, because it was the one with the modem that we had to use to transmit voting results back to the Board of Elections. We sort of had to dissect it to get the modem out so that we could use a different voting machine for the transmission. Of course, we discovered that we would need to do this only after the machine in question had been placed on the cart, and a bunch of other machines stacked on top of it, so we had to pull all the other machines off it before we began the dissection.
+ Turn-out was light enough so that we managed with just the voting machines we had.
– One of the candidates for governor voted in our precinct. I was instructed to keep the media from taking an photos near the voting machines. Ever tried to keep 15 or so major media outlets at once from pointing their cameras the way they aren’t supposed to? I don’t think it’s possible.
+ We had the voting machines set up in such a way that there was absolutely no way for any of the media to take pictures of someone’s actual votes on the touch screen of the voting machine.
– The Democratic and Republican precinct chairs were supposed to give us certificates showing that they were authorized to be in the polling place as poll watchers/challengers. At least one of them was unable to produce the required certificate.
+ All of the Democratic and Republican precinct chairs are a minimum of 98 years old, and have been working that precinct since the dawn of time. So I was able to tell the Board of Elections that I recognized them all, and got permission to let them in anyway. Since these people primarily stay outside to engage in electioneering, and really come into the polling place only to leave food in the kitchen and then come back to get it later, I was glad not to have to ban them from doing so.
– We had the usual difficult cases: the one who always tears her “I Voted” sticker in half to remove the Spanish language version (because she doesn’t think it should be there); the ones that haven’t grasped the concept of a closed primary and don’t register with a party, and then are mad when they can vote in only one race in the primary; the one with dementia who lost the slip entitling him to vote in the few seconds between when it was issued and when he was sent in to vote; the ones who can’t remember which precinct they are supposed to vote in; etc.
+++++++ The actual voting went smoothly. Everyone was able to get in, vote, and get out in under 15 minutes. Most of them didn’t even have to wait in line for more than a minute. The League of Women Voters person sent to verify that we were following all correct procedures was very impressed with our operations. And we completed all of the detailed and complicated forms necessary to verify the security procedures.

Just keeping my fingers crossed that the other Chief Elections Judge will come back in November, and that we’ll have the experience to cope with the much larger turn-out we can expect then.

[cvcalhoun]

I don’t have goals as such. However, I’ve biked 1,929.9 miles so far in 2014. This compares with 1,880.8 miles biked in all of 2013. Apparently, my total has spiked due to Freezing Saddles, the National Bike Challenge, and the fact that I’ve become active in local community theater (and am thus often biking to rehearsals).

[cvcalhoun]

After being harassed by my doctor to start eating breakfast (most important meal of the day and all that), I’ve ended up needing to take a thyroid medicine which has to be taken at least a half hour before eating breakfast. This is a royal nuisance, as it often means I’ve got to delay breakfast for at least a half hour after waking up, which is often the time I’m trying to head out of the house. I’ve therefore started taking the medication the first time in the morning I wake for a trip to the bathroom, so that the half hour will have passed before I get up for the day.

Getting old is a royal pain!

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