Saturday

I didn't not do much all day, at least until the afternoon, when I installed the new brake shoes on the Twenty.  Also cleaned and polished it a bit.  Took it for a short test ride up and down the street, too.

I need to read up on how to center the brakes, but it's good enough for now.

I need a pair of white stem covers, and maybe a Brooks leather tool pouch? Sadly, they cost more than the bike may be worth.  Maybe I'll have to make my own?

Friday Done

I replaced a missing button this morning.

I followed the manly instructions on The Art Of Manliness.

This is it, before I wrapped the shank and tied it off.

First button I've had to do since before (late) 1972.

Cleaned out the birdbath, tiny pieces of tortillas, but no big ones! Now I'm washing the clothes and watering the yard.

Received the Kool-Stop Continental All-Weather High-Performance Brake Pads For Urban Riders I ordered from Harris Cyclery in MA (for a pretty penny).  For the Raleigh Twenty. Now all I gots to do is put 'em on!

Food!

Birthday cake made by S. for last Sunday.  It was really delicious!

Cookies made by M. for last Sunday, being held by D.

Closeup of said cookies.  Gaze well upon them, you shall see them not again, not in THIS world!

Can I share this on FB?  We shall see!

That is all for THIS post!

Un-Fun Day

I went out this morning to check on the bird bath, the tortilla pieces seem to have GROWN!  What other explanation could there be?

I cleaned out the bird bath when I got home, so it looks OKer now.

Today was fairly miserable at work due to physical reasons that I thought I had solved by eliminating the ingestion of pretzels, but it seems not.

I am reading Rain Of Gold by Victor Villasenor. It's pretty good, but I'm losing track of just who is who, even with the helpful family trees the author has included.

That's all for today!

Low Light Situation

Every morning when I arrive at work I see the light shining in through the gap under the door.  I wonder how many mice and lizards and rats and bugs are hiding behind the books!

I checked the birdbath this afternoon.  Tortilla pieces?  Really?

I promised myself to make a panorama of the living room.  A low light situation so there is not a lot of definition.  It's a wonder it works at all!

Surely I do not have to remind YOU that these are are thumbnails.  Click the image to see the larger version.  The panorama is file size is around 750kb.

That seems to be all I have for today.  Have a good evening!


dgdf

Of This And That

The other day I came home and found broccoli in the bird bath.  Here's a pic.  This isn't even the piece I first noticed, I put that one in the garbage can, this is the one I found when I decided to take a picture!

I went to the Home Depot today and got a piece of 3/4 inch EMT and a couple of hose clamps. Of course the hose clamps are the wrong size, by far.  Of course the spray can of black paint I used to camo the EMT ran out half way.  But at least now the weather station is a bit higher in the air and catches more of the breeze.

That is about it for today!

The Week In Review

Birthday morning I came out of the door to find these floating.  What a surprise!

My former Librarian came by to give me a new coffee cup.  Now I have one to match my socks!

Mrs. K. gave me an EXTREMELY nifty flashlight, MISS P. gave me the BelVita, Mrs. B. gave me MORE BelVita, and Mrs. K. gave me the Life Savers, I think. Very spearminty!

Mrs. K. and Ms. S. brought pizza and cake!

Them balloons!

Yesterday I had a bee on the windshield for a couple of miles.  I guess that does not bode well for her.

This morning, Saturday, there was a geocaching CITO (Cache In, Trash Out) event at the Spruce Steet suspension bridge.  I managed to find my way there.

Several people noted a pair of baby skunks.  I did NOT investigate, myself.  Mama was nowhere to be seen, but I suspect she was around.

Here is the East end of the bridge, if you have never been there.  No, that is not my bicycle!

A drawing was held after an hour of so of picking up trash in the canyon.  I did not win anything, though.

Stuff I found included:  Lots of glass; an intact beer bottle (Corona); a five-strand piece of wire rope, one foot long; a one-inch (approx.) diameter bolt (off the bridge above??); many cigarettes; beer bottle caps; two pop tops; and lastly, some well-used underwear, sex undetermined.  Also, a Darth Vader water bottle, missing its top.

 That is about all for today, so far. Thanks for reading!

A Couple Of Sprinkles

April 4th

I don't know if I posted this one before, but once again I found that guard rails on the side of the road often have a large threaded bolt sticking out just below knee level.  Often covered by tall weeds.  Be wary!

The Big Swede was fantasying about putting a cobble road across his yard.  I found I didn't have a picture of my Paris-Roubaix hat to show him.  Now I do.

On the morning of the 9th I went down to Sweetwater River to find a couple of caches that had been replaced.  I noticed this 'biner hanging on a branch.   Nothing to do with the cache, as it turned out.  Just...odd.

In the afternoon of the 9th I made a spur-of-the-moment trip to Wildwood Glen Lane to look for a couple of caches I had not found in previous trips.  This being the old Highway 80 it's kind of interesting.  This is not too far from the abrupt end of the road, and on the way back to the vehicle.

Google Aerial View

Those white things in the road are chunks of concrete from the highway.  Most of the highway is under a foot of rocks and dirt washed down from the hill side over the years.

Not a lot of contents here, so you get a bunch of pictures I took of ME!

That's the "new" freeway down there.

The walking stick kept bumping the helmet.  Bonk!

I rode about 3 miles.  I didn't start the trip odometer until I had ridden a piece.

Finding the two caches that I had not found on previous trips was rather anticlimactic, they were pretty much right out in the open.  I concealed them a little bit better than they were.  I also found three other caches along the Lane while driving to the parking spot. I had been too shy to look for them before.  One of them was very near to one of the oldest bridges in San Diego County(1917)

I found one more cache just east of Descanso.  Also found a nifty purple pen that the previous finder had dropped.  My gain!

Thanks for reading!

Oh, No, Back To Work!!

April 1st -- Friday

I visited a spot for a geocache today that was pretty unusual. It is actually a house that burnt down, probably in the big fire they had in 1986.  Yes, I just checked it, the house is mentioned in an article in the LA Times.  That is pretty sad, it is a pretty cool spot.  I didn't find the geocache, but I found these binoculars, which I left there.

There was lots of broken concrete and bricks and other stuff.  There was melted glass, too, which I kinda wanted to take. Can't find the cache, did I mention that?

You may have seen this on Facebook, a view of Missing Valley from near the, foundation...

This decorated tree is near the entrance.  I found some (empty) medicinal marijuana bottles tossed in the bushes.

This oddly decorated pill bottle was in the tree, was that the cache container?

As I was leaving I took a picture of the view looking down into the valley/ravine below. Lots of flowers, and it felt odd to be looking down on the power lines.  Can you imagine that all burning?

When I got home I found that fark.com, a news aggregator site, had changed its look a tad...

And geocaching.com had a piece of geo-art that one could "find".

April 2nd -- Saturday

I did not do ANYTHING all day, but I had company from this bug, which I believe is a Gypsy Moth Caterpillar.

April 3rd -- Sunday

Today ended up going to several places.  One was back to Poison Oak Canyon, also know as The River of Rocks, at least by me.

Looks like poison oak to me.  Glad I don't have to fetch those PVC pipes back there!

Someone left their sunglasses there, and they are STILL there, too!

 I found three of the caches I was looking for, and didn't find one.

Next I went up to look for a newly replaced cache in the UC area.  I got there and fired up the phone app, but, no cache!  The cache owner had posted a note that he had replaced it, but neglected to un-disable it.  So it doesn't show up on the app!  Well, I KNEW where it was supposed to be, and it was, and I used the web browser to log my find.  Which is something I don't normally do, as I don't like typing on the phone.

Next I popped over to a cache a couple of miles away, another one that someone had replaced.  I got there and could not find it anywhere, and there were NOT a whole bunch of wheres for it to be in. Or at. Or something.  So I was sitting there reading the past logs and surreptitiously examining a sprinkler head when a woman ask if I had a cigarette, or even one she could buy for a buck.  Sorry, says I, thinking I'd like to have one myself at this point. 

Then a fellow and his dog came over to ask if I was OK, he not having noticed I had the phone in my hand, it blending in, color-wise, with my shirt of the day.  Green.  And that was how I met Scott and Neil (a cocker spaniel). I told him about geocaching and he helped  me look around for a while, and then we talked for a long time, then we talked to a guy who had a drone.  And that was VERY cool.

And then, about twenty minutes later, we were looking around again and I looked in one last place and there the darn thing was.  I completely had overthought the hide.  Scott was very impressed.

I next drove down to Marian Bear Park and was gonna hit the string of caches in the canyon, but the phone battery was way low and I had not pre-loaded them, so I just did a search for three in the area, and found them.  Here is one:

Altoids containers are very pretty and handy for caches, but they are very NOT waterproof, and they rust.  But this one seems pretty sturdy...

Next I headed over to Kearny Mesa and found three caches, and DNFed one.  But can you see this one?

And that was about it for the day, I came home and have spent more time organizing the images and writing this, not to mention logging the finds on geocaching.com, then I did looking for them!

Have a good week!