Changing tires on Little Nellie is usually brutally hard. The sides of the rim are tall and the rubber on the tire sidewalls is stiff, often resulting in nasty blisters on my thumbs from mounting the tire. Fortunately, Little Nellie hasn’t had a flat in several years. Today I learned why. Until I did a make over on this bike, I had barely ridden it in three years. No ride, no flats. Genius.

This year, after the make over, I have ridden it over 1,800 miles. Today, I went outside to go for a ride and the back tire was all squishy (sorry about the technical terminology). The back tire had a rusty roofing nail in it. The tire was a Schwalbe Marathon, a tire that has a later of green flat-deterrent material in the tread. The nail managed to miss the green stuff by a couple of millimeters.

There was just one thing to do. I flipped the bike over and began surgery. To my surprise, the tire came off with a minimum of hassle. I taped a dollar bill over the hole on the inside of the tire. This tire boot keeps the hole from pinching the new tube and causing a mystery flat after a couple hundred miles. Been there, done that.

I put a new tube in the tire and, as god is my witness, the tire went back on the rim with a minimum of fuss. No blisters. My hands barely got dirty.

The inflated tire held air for a thirty-mile jaunt but the dollar bill caused an annoying bump in the rear tire. Seeing as how the tire was over five years old, I ordered a new tire (and tube) to give me something to do over the weekend.

Before fussing with the tire, I removed my side mirror. Riding without a mirror gives me the creeps. Cars sneak up on me like hungry predatory beasts looking for a fleshy snack. Every time I put Little Nellie in the trunk of my car, the trunk lid would hit the handlebars. To provide clearance, I would rotate the side mirror. After doing this a dozen or so times, the mirror’s mounting hardware started to tear the tape on the handlebar. I removed the mirror and covered the gashed bar tape with duct tape. Next I borrowed a bar-end mirror from Big Nellie, my Tour Easy recumbent. This mirror mounts to the open end of the handlebar, avoiding the bar tape altogether. I can always loosen it with a small allen key when putting the bike in the trunk of the car.

After some fiddling, I oriented the mirror just so. It looks a little odd but at least now I can ride without fear of being attacked by a big metal thing. Not to leave Big Nellie defenseless, I ordered a new replacement mirror.

In the further interest of stimulating the bicycling economy, I recently ordered a new Light and Motion headlight to replace the old light I had that recently died. The new light arrived today. It is twice as bright as the old one so I’ll be sure to singe some retinas on the way to Friday Coffee Club this winter. Bwa ha ha.

This year marked the 11th Cider Ride of the Washington Area Bicyclists Association (WABA). It is the last riding event on my calendar for the year. In 2013 and 2014 the ride was held in early December. After nearly freezing participants, WABA wisely moved it to early November in 2015.

We gathered at the start at 8:30 with temperatures in the 40s. Fortunately the sun was shining and the winds were light. The weather would improve with each passing mile, allowing us to take off layers at each pit stop.

The route starts in the middle of DC and makes its way on streets through Northeast DC to the Anacostia River Trail system. Following various trails we rode north through Hyattsville and College Park, Maryland. In College Park we shifted over to roads that took us through and beyond the Beltsville agriculture preserve before turning around at the Patuxent Research Refuge. We rode back through Beltsville and across the agriculture preserve to Greenbelt. Then it was back to the Anacostia trails on the eastern side of the river to Southeast DC before returning back up the western side of the river to creepy and decrepit RFK Stadium. We took city streets over Capitol Hill, around Union Station and, using the Metropolitan Branch Trail, back to the start. It was 60 miles in all. Mostly the route was flat, with the northern third of the ride featured rolling hills, and one whopper as we rode into Greenbelt.

Our ten-person crew included Michael and Chris who have done more of these rides with me than I can recall. We were joined for the fourth time by Sara and for the third time by Domitille. Monica, having ridden this year’s 50 States Ride, returned for more abuse. She must have amnesia. We were joined by Timothee, Miguel, Katja, and Lisa.

Michael decided to ride the entire route in one gear.

Chris had a shiny, brand new e-bike but he decided to forgo the electric assist.

Sara, as always, took charge of enthusiasm.

Domitille rode remarkably strong despite having knee pain and wearing a brace on her left knee. She complained often. She is from France. She brought two handsome, athletic male friends.

Timothee, Domitille’s French friend, was our ringer, easily outpacing the rest of us escargots. He kindly waited for us whenever he reached a turning point.

Miguel, Domitille friend number two, was pretty quiet. He abandoned the ride because of mechanical problems.

Monica wore blazing pink for much of the ride allowing slow pokes like me to keep visual contact with the group on the confusing trail system. She also called out “HAZARD” whenever we encountered glass or potholes.

Kayja, a skier at heart behind reflective sunglasses, was very quiet until near the end of the ride when she revealed that her college roommate is, like my son, a scuba instructor in southern Thailand. What are the odds?

Lisa is a founding member of Friday Coffee Club. She and I have done many, many rides in the past, but haven’t seen each other since the before times. She stopped and took pictures and fell off the back of the group. Since she rode the route from Hyattsville to the start, she finished at home.

With Timothee going off the front, the pace was a bit faster than usual. The group spread out. I lagged back partly because recent riding binges had left my legs feeling like lead for the first 20 miles. Also, this way I could maintain contact with the core group while keeping Miguel and Lisa nearby. Miguel and I lost the group on a trail in College Park. Rather than check the cue sheet, I asked a walker who pointed Miguel and me in the wrong direction. (Hey, I’ve only done the route eight times. How can I be expected to not get lost?) Then, I stopped to check the cue sheet and lost contact with Miguel so I turned around and caught up to the core group waiting about a half mile along the route. I think Domitille texted Miguel and he was saved from dying a slow, lonely death somewhere along Paint Branch Creek.

There were three formal pit stops. The first at Proteus Bicycles in College Park had donuts. So many donuts. And hot cider. The second in Buddy Atticks Park in Greenbelt had apple pie and hot cider. And a bazillion yellow jackets (always check your cup before drinking!). The final stop was in Bladensburg Waterfront Park on the Anacostia. More donuts and cider and apples as big as softballs.

Our posse was the kind of eclectic group that makes DC life so appealing to me: French, young, female, arthritic, educated, artistic, whiny, and witty. And that’s just Domitille. We were also Hispanic, Asian, male, old, athletic, geeky, balding, vegan, aspiring to mountain mommahood, and, of course, a few spokes shy of a wheel.

We gathered at Metrobar at the finish for post-ride refreshments. I managed to convince Katja to ride next year’s 50 States Ride with us thus demonstrating that we, as a group, are also persuasive and gullible.

As always, thanks to WABA for all the work in staging this event and arranging for good weather. Thanks to the many volunteers who endured long hours and bee stings to keep us riders in good spirits. Thanks to the nine knuckleheads who rode with me.

And, finally, we missed you Kevin!

Clockwise from top left: Katja (with unidentified interloper), Michael, Timothee, Sara, Chris, Monica, and Domitille.

Watching

Baseball playoffs: I watched an absolute ton of baseball this month. It always bothers me that the teams that do best over the course of 162 games often get washed out by lesser teams that get hot just at the right time. I shouldn’t complain. Neither the 2004 Red Sox nor the 2019 Nationals won their divisions.

Ahsoka: We finished watching this Star Wars mini-series. Except for when Ray Stevenson was on screen, it was boring. Sadly, Stevenson died earlier this year and, thus, won’t be back to reprise his role.

Lupin: The third installment of the tales of Arsanne Diop, the gentleman bandit, who uses Arsene Lupin, the hero of a century old series of novels, as his inspiration to steal and thwart bad guys. Well worth watching.

Bleeding

Donating: I made a double red blood donation early in the month. Instead of just taking a unit of whole blood, my blood was transferred to a machine that separated out two units of hemoglobin. It wasn’t painful, but I was a bit off my game for about ten days afterward.

Destroying: I managed not to lose any blood after using a line trimmer to golf an acorn into a storm door, breaking the tempered glass into thousands of pieces. It took the better part of two hours to clean up the tiny pieces that fell all over our front steps. We couldn’t find any paper work indicating when or where we bought the door. A sticker on the door had the name of a distributor as well as some other information including a date from September 2014. I took a photo and sent it to the distributor’s representative. He figured out who the manufacturer was and the manufacturer is sending a replacement under warranty.

Reading

The Last Devil to Die by Richard Osman. This is the fourth installment of the Thursday Murder Club mystery series. Four pensioners solve the case of the murder of their friendly neighborhood antiques dealer. Heroin, antiquities, and a host of baddies make for a very entertaining read.

An Immense World by Ed Yong. This is an intense and remarkably entertaining exploration of animals’ perceptual environment. Yong takes us into how animals experience the world, how they eat, see, hear, smell, and otherwise detect their environs. Nearly every page is mind blowing. (Did you know that dogs noses detect odors when they exhale? Or that barn owls big round eyes act as receiving dishes that channel sounds to their ears which are situated under feathers next to their eyes?) Our human sensory abilities bias us in how we understand and treat or mistreat other creatures.

DIYing

My wife did a big solo road trip from DC to Hartford to Chicago and back, While she was gone, I repaired two prominent cracks in drywall that have been taunting me every time I climbed the stairs. It took several days to complete and made a big mess each time. I ended up having to paint an hallway to avoid having two-tone walls. So far my wife hasn’t noticed I did anything which is only fair since I didn’t notice the painting she did while I was away on my tour this summer.

Riding

It has been a while since I reached a milestone, but this month’s was a whopper. Big Nellie, my 2002 Tour Easy recumbent, cracked the 50,000 mile mark.

I rode the Great Pumpkin Ride in the Virginia Piedmont for the umpteenth time. Like last year, I rode alone this year but with a twist: I brought snacks. This way I could avoid the crowded pit stops and just boogie. The foliage was at its peak, the best I’ve seen in my many years of riding this event. The weather was more like early September than late October. And The Mule rolled like a champ.

I managed to ride 906 miles for the month, ending at 9,980.5 miles for the year. But for a 3 1/2 mile ride to and from the car mechanic, I decided to take the last day of the month off so 10,000 will have to wait a day. The Nellies did the majority of the miles this month. Big Nellie, my Tour Easy recumbent, logged 417.5 miles. Little Nellie, my re-designed Bike Friday New World Tourist, rolled 357.5 miles. The rest was on The Mule. The Tank, my new name for my Surly Cross Check, sat idle.

I started doing the Stu McGill Big 3 core exercises, which help stabilize the lower back. I don’t know if they help my stenosis all that much but my balance is much better. Also, I couldn’t execute a squat before doing the Big 3; now it’s no problem.

Another lawn care disaster

Earlier in the summer, I had let my grass grow quite long. It was long enough to completely obscure a box turtle. As I pushed through a very tall and thick patch, I heard a sickening thud. Bye, bye turtle.

Yesterday, I decided to mow the lawn before it reached turtle depth. The mowing part went fine. Then I took out the line trimmer to neaten things up. I was trimming along the concrete steps that lead to the front door when I heard a “thud” followed immediately by a “whack”.

I had managed, apparently, to whack a small stone which shot like a bullet into the storm door on our front entry. I looked at the glass and it had the coolest looking spider web pattern to it. The stone had it near the upper left corner and the web radiated from the contact point.

Fortunately, the glass was tempered so it didn’t shatter and send shards everywhere. Instead, th glass stayed in place, broken into thousands of tiny pieces. I touched the pane and the pieces rained down onto the front steps. So much for my afternoon nap. I spent the next 90 minutes carefully sweeping up the specks of glass. Once I had them all collected I packed them in a pair of cardboard boxes marked “GLASS” for the trash pick up on Monday.

The frame of the storm window had glass bits all around the inside opening. I used duct tape to keep them in place and put the frame under our sunroom for disposal during our next special trash pickup.

Remarkably, despite being on aspirin therapy for blood thinning, I managed to only incur one pin prick on a knuckle on my left hand during the clean up process. Home free? Nope. Mrs. Rootchopper put a screen panel in the empty space in the storm door. I finished my trimming and opened the screen door to go back inside. The door, lightened by the absence of glass, sprung back and whacked me in the elbow. I ended up with a nasty bloody welt on my elbow.

How’d he do that?

I stayed up late watching the last few episodes of Season 3 of Lupin, a French Netflix series. It’s about a resourceful master thief in Paris. Assane Diop, a Senegalese immigrant who learns his wily craft from a series of 1920s novels about Arsene Lupin, a gentleman thief. It’s funny and clever. Diop, a larcenous magician, pulls off impossible robberies, often taking advantage of his blackness that makes him socially invisible in lily-white upper crust Paris. Jump-cut flashbacks are used to demonstrate how the deeds are done. Despite being dog tired, I slept poorly and managed only about five hours of sleep.

More blood

This morning I donated blood for the second time this summer. This time, instead of a whole blood donation, which involves extracting a pint of blood, I made a power red (or double red) donation. In this procedure, blood is extracted into a machine that separates hemoglobin (oxygen carrying red-blood cells) from the rest of your blood (plasma and platelets). Thus, two units of hemoglobin are donated instead of one. The remaining extracted blood augmented by some saline is returned to your arm via the same needle and tube.

The procedure and my lousy night’s sleep left me a bit groggy. No riding for me today. The morning was cool and rainy, and the rest of the day filled with playoff baseball games so I picked a good day to power down.

I won’t be able to donate again until February. It will take a couple of weeks to build up my hemoglobin to normal levels, just in time for the last two fall bike events: the Great Pumpkin Ride in Warrenton, Virginia and the Cider Ride in DC and suburban Maryland.

Riding

September was my first sub-1,000-mile month since April. 882 miles was plenty. When it wasn’t raining I mostly rode my Tour Easy recumbent for 475 miles. I decided to ride the Tank (a new bike name), my Surly Crosscheck, on rainy days for a total of 181 miles. Little Nellie took a rest at 34 miles. The Mule, equipped at last with a new rear hub and a new Minimoto v-brake, for 191 miles.

My long ride, 62 miles, was my 15th 50 States Ride on The Mule on September 30. The day before, I passed 9,000 miles for the year.

On a ride last week, I ran into Stan, Hebert, and Fabi. Stan was escorting Hebert and Fabi around DC. Hebert and Fabi are in the middle of an on-going, 15-month bike tour, which included several countries in Europe and Africa.

Watching

Little Richard: I Am Everything. This CNN documentary covers the life of Little Richard. He grew up poor and queer in Macon, Georgia in the 1930s and 1940s. After learning to sing in church he turned to singing in clubs, the Chitlin’ Circuit and a series of gay clubs in the deep south. He learned his piano style from Esquerita, a queer performer who served as something of a role model. Like most people, I knew Little Richard helped found rock and roll, what I didn’t know was that he came out of the closet long before most other queer performers. (Not that it wasn’t obvious.) I also didn’t know that his original lyrics to his first hit, Tutti Frutti, were about anal sex.

Heart of Stone. This Netflix movie is intended to make Gal Gadot a female James Bond. The movie is formulaic and not particularly interesting. It is tempting to dismiss Gadot as a serious actress because she is so beautiful but she’s quite good, as she was in the role of Wonder Woman. I feel the same way about Brie Larson who can say more with a turn of her head than most actors can with a page of dialogue.

Ahsotka. I continued to watch this Star Wars miniseries. Its leaden pacing made for many sleep inducing moments. One more episode to go.

Baseball. I went to a couple of Nationals games, once with my daughter and once solo by bike. The Nationals are a work in progress, but wait ’til next year!

Reading

Ancestor Trouble by Maud Newton. This memoir received great reviews from a wide range of publications but it was completely lost on me. The author delves into her ancestry and genome, ad nauseum, extracting often nonsensical conclusions about her own life. At times she came off as witless to me. (For example, she has ancestors who farmed in antebellum Mississippi and seemed surprised that they owned slaves.) Maybe it’s because I have little interest in my ancestry, but I kept thinking as I read: Who cares?

Crooked by Cathryn Jakobson Ramin is two books in one. The first half is a deep dive into the morass that is pain and back care in western medicine, something I’ve been all too familiar with. It turns out that in many if not most cases, back surgery does more harm than good. Failures in back surgery led to a boom in pain management which includes opioid use and other interventions that treat symptoms and not the root cause of back woes. The second half is the author’s exploration of alternatives many of which seem very promising to me. It may very well be that the condition that keeps me from standing or walking without a dull ache can be dealt with using any number of non-surgical interventions. I intend to explore many of these over the winter. Stu McGill’s Big Three exercises is a good place to start.

The Way Out by Alan Gordon with Alon Ziv. This book explores the phenomenon of neuroplastic pain. The authors assert that most chronic pain is caused by the brain misinterpreting signals from the body. The way to get rid of or manage this kind of pain is to re-wire the brain to properly interpret the signals. This process is called Pain Reprocessing Therapy, which applies mindfulness meditation to pain remediation. I’m skeptical but will be exploring this over the winter as well.

The Wager – A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder by David Grann. The subtitle says it all. An epic true tale of an eighteen century expedition on the high seas gone horribly wrong. A great read for a cold, rainy winter’s day with the winds are howling and the tea is hot.

The National Park Service is (finally) replacing some old, damaged bridges on the Mount Vernon Trail near my home. The infamous Bridge 12 between Fort Hunt Park and Collingwood Road was replaced last year. The old bridge was dilapidated. The trail dropped down through a nasty curve on either end to reach the bridge. It was a flawed design from the get go, one that the Park Service incorporated into several other sections of the trail presumably to make the trail a fun meander. Fail. The approach to the new Bridge 12 is straighter and, the bridge deck is considerably wider. Like nearly all bridges on the trail it is made entirely (as far as I can see) from wood. This is not the best choice of decking material for shaded areas but it’s what we got.

This month the Park Service began replacing Bridge 23. This bridge, one of the longest on the trail, pases through Dyke Marsh Nature Preserve. It is where I take sunrise pictures on my early morning excursions to DC. The bridge was heavily damaged twenty years ago by epic storm surge from Hurricane Isabel. The Park Service did a few emergency repairs but it was clear that the decking, once level, was now slanted this way and that in several spots. Over the years, the wood decking has been replaced board-by-board, usually by volunteers.

I, and many others, submitted comments on the replacement bridge last spring. My comments came down to (1) don’t use wood for the decking (it becomes very slick when wet or icy) and (2) raise the decking and the adjacent trail by at least a foot to allow for high water events which have increased in frequency in the last ten years (you ain’t seen nothing yet).

Work began in earnest last week. A detour was set up that uses a lane of the George Washington Memorial Parkway. (This section of the Parkway is also scheduled for replacement. Riding the detour one can see why. There are a couple of nasty potholes and sections of the concrete have lifted at the joints.) As soon as the detour was open, contractors started ripping up some of the bridge decking. Then they started bringing in materials.

The pictures above show some of what’s going on. On the north side of the bridge, there are some pretty serious looking I-beams as shown in the picture on the left,. They have flat metal panels on one side. It’ll be interesting to see where these pieces will fit in the puzzle. Next to the I-beams and not pictured where some beefy looking dark brown wooden posts with holes drilled in the side.

The middle picture shows how some of the deck boards have been ripped up. This work was started last week then stopped. I suspect the contractor saw something it wasn’t expecting. The gizmo in the center looks like a tamper used on the asphalt section of the detour. The rolls on the right (under the plastic) are used to control drainage during construction.

The picture on the right is taken from the south end of the crossing. There are some wooden boards. Boo. Behind them are some mystery materials under wraps. To me the most interesting part is the metal tubing. Hmm.

I am guessing that some sort of temporary structure is going to be built so that the workers don’t have to stand in the marsh. In any case, I am looking forward to how the pieces fit together.

There is an access point to the trail at the southern end of the span where Tulane Drive intersects the Parkway. Originally, the contractors had blocked access to the trail with the jersey barriers that separate the detour lane from Parkway traffic. Last week the contractor put a gap in the barriers to facilitate access to the trial from the Tulane neighborhood.