4th of July 2009
Apparently I hit the shoot button as I put my iPhone back into the mesh pocket on the back of my jersey. When I got home and transferred my pictures I found this picture of the trail:
And here's another picture of mesh I took from my office desk last week. A grasshopper stopped by for a visit.
Capital Criterium
The race in the shadow of the capitol.
The cyclists came around a corner to climb up a hill. In this lap Vandevelde was way ahead of the pack
Vandevelde by himself early on and the group that scrambled for the win. The guy in red and blue won.
Vandevelde signing autographs and a participant in the children's race.
A white building against a beautiful blue sky and our lunch.
Photo Credit: The photos that look like they might have been taken by someone who knows how to work the camera settings were taken by Joe.
That Cone Thing That Dogs Wear
And in other animal news, Dana's sweet dog Pico hurt his leg and has to wear a cone to keep him from licking, biting, irritating the wound. I felt so bad laughing at him but could not help it.
And here are some neighborhood pictures.
One of the Chinese construction workers building the new embassy has pimped out his hard hat.
And we found some plum trees.
And finally I tried something new this week. My dance friends, Brooke and Marcia, and I went to a great Indian restaurant called Indique and I had appam, a rice flour pancake, with chicken curry. It really was delicious. Appam is from the Kerala region in southern India which is somewhat familiar to me because it is where one of my favorite books The God of Small Things is set and where Vasanth, the most talented dancer we met on our trip to India, is from.
A New Hill of Hell and Humiliation
Here are some miscellaneous pictures I took recently:
More new balcony
flowers
A blouse I made in the sewing class I took. It
turned out pretty well!
And here's a fun little scene in the local
grocery store.
And Lynda had a pink flamingo friend join in on
our video chat tonight.
And all of a sudden there was Tracy too!
More Beer
reviews
Clipper City Red Sky at Night
Saison Ale and Loose Cannon Hop3 Ale are
from a local Baltimore brewery. I really like
the Red Sky at Night Saison Ale. It has a nice
full taste, just slightly sweet. The web site
lists the ingredients. I had no idea there are
so many different types of hops but I do know
there is a world-wide hops shortage. Oh no!
Hops: Magnum and Styrian Goldings
Malts: Pils, Carapils, and wheat malts, Belgian
candi sugar
The Hop3 ale is OK.
Hops: Magnum, Centennial, Chinook, Amarillo
and Palisade
Malts: Crisp English Pale, Carapils, and
Munich
I will definitely buy the Saison Ale again.
Databases and bike rides
So I exercised my brain Saturday and the rest of me on Sunday. We took a 33 mile bike ride on the Four Mile Run and W&OD bike trails in Virginia. The weather was perfect . The prettiest part was actually near the water treatment plant where the late summer wild flowers are at their peak. The most unusual part was the guy riding a low-riding recumbent bike pimped out with an aerodynamic shield and red and black zebra print spandex. Joe has seen him an number of times over the last couple of years. It used to be Captain America-themed This was the sort of bike he was riding. Picture the black and white part as red and black zebra print spandex:
And as a reward for reading my blog here is an advance copy of the Christmas Contest announcement.
Triathalon, The Tour and YouTube
The Tour de France has started and I am very interested to see what happens. There are a couple of good riders that I like left after 2 years of doping scandal to root for. Allez Tom Boonen! Allez Jens Voigt and the whole CSC Team! Allez George Hincapie!
Although i understand the appeal of youtube i always groan when I see a youtube link because i know that the quality of the video i want to see will be crap. Which is too bad because I have been thinking it would be nice for Dana to have some videos on youtube. Well after seeing that some youtube videos actually do look good I did some investigating and found a page that has suggestions for good quality video. youtube takes what you send it and re-encodes it to their format, size, etc so this if you can upload a video that is close to youtube's format you have a better chance of good quality.
So after about 15 minutes of playing around and 8 hours of rendering I uploaded my first youtube video. It seems to look better (less choppy) if you actually go to the site but here it is embedded:
Miss Red, White and Blue
And there were interesting sites along the trail. Nice flowers, a quarry, and Old Dominion Brewery (unfortunately they were closed).
Catch Up
So what did we miss? Joe and I went to the CSC Invitational Cycling race that was held June 2 across the river in Arlington.The riders do a 1km circuit 100 times. The beginning and the ending circuits are very exciting but the 50 or so in the middle, not so much. So we went walked around a bit and ate lunch at Baja Fresh. Here's a movie of the cyclists going by. The sounds of all those fast bikes traveling so close together was pretty cool.
Last weekend was Spoleto and the big birthday party. Mom, Lynda, Graeme and I went to see Philip Glass's latest work Book of Longing which was marvelous. We met Glass and several of his musicians and singers at an after-performance party - didn't talk much with Glass but had nice conversations with the other performers.
Before the performance Glass talked with a local critic on the set of his new work. It was interesting to hear about his background, his teachers (Ravi Shankar!), his work with young musicians and the artistic development of Book of Longing.
Here are pictures from the very elegant after performance party.
Now to the party. I made a little video and for now you have several choices. Below you should see a small 2.9MB version.
Your other choices (all Quicktime) are:
- Check out this 22.2MB version for those with bandwidth to spare
- Here's a 6MB streaming version
- And finally an 8.7MB version
Pet Food Bunny
My sonnet is coming along but I am still finding it very hard. I've changed themes a couple of times. I heard rumors that Lenore finished hers while lounging in her chemotherapy comfy chair and that Paula has already written 2 sonnets.
A neighborhood picture:
Some more movie/DVD reviews
Good Bye
Lenin!
A nice little movie about a son trying to hide
the fact that the Berlin wall has fallen from his
mother after she wakes up from a coma. It is an
interesting portrayal of that time and place.
Vintage Blue
heading down the hill to the park but after we got on flatter terrain and the sun warmed me up a bit it was perfect.
Joe took this picture when we got back so I am still somewhat red in the face and Cardassian headed.
The other picture is of me with my new laundry cart which has changed my life. The cart seems to also fit in with the new interior design of our building which is better than what was there before but it resembles a prison. It seems like laundry always plays an important part in movies and TV shows that involve prisons.
To The Limit
Joe and I took a longer than usual (for me) bike ride this morning. It was great. The weather was nice and the trails were fairly uncrowded for holiday weekend (well, holiday for some. I have to work on Monday). We rode from National Airport to Mount Vernon, through marshes, under the Wilson Bridge, through Old Town Alexandria to the RV parking lot at the home of George Washington. Here are some pics.
Some more movie/DVD
reviews
Initial
D This is a nice Hong Kong movie about car
racing based on a Japanese comic book series. It
is a story about a tofu delivery boy who gets
involved with professional and street racers. It
is also a story about friendship, fathers and
sons and first love. There is no
testosterone-fueled violence, only
testosterone-fueled car racing.
Spending Other People's Money
The Tour de France is going on and without Lance Armstrong (due to retirement) and other big names (due to suspician of doping) the race is very interesting.
A recent picture I took:
Ice Cream Update
The bread machine has been put away and the ice
cream machine is out. We've made two delicious
batches so far - vanilla and cinnamon.
Heat Wave
There was some sort of incident at work and we have been cut off from any system outside of the gsfc.gov domain since yesterday and it may continue through the week. It has been so hard for both work and play. Whenever I have a computer code syntax question or get some sort of error message I go to Google. I usually get my "home" email at work and that's not happening. And during the Tour de France I check the day's outcome in late afternoon. I still am not sure what happened today on the Tour's toughest mountain day ending with the legendary L'Alpe d'Huez.
We rented season 1 of Project Runway. It's a reality show like other reality shows but it seems to be more about the fashion and less about the bickering. I've been enjoying it. Season 3 has just started and it is being shown on NBC as well as cable which is great except for the commercials and the inconvenience of not being able to go on to the next episode right away.
More neighborhood pictures: