Category: Fighting Dharma

Sunshine and Blue Water

On Sunday, I joined the Sunday Paddle, a tour run out of Pacifica Paddlesports. I had a wonderful day. I should have done this weeks ago. The conditions were great. On Saturday, we had gale force winds down in the Strait of Juan de Fuca. It was windy again this morning, and we hit a day in between, with relatively light winds, and a clear sky. Unfortunately, I left the camera at home. Next time I will take it in a Pelican box.

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Kayaking again

When I arrived in Victoria, I kept the Thule Tornado roof box on my car. When I moved into my house I took it off the car and secured it by a steel cable to the back fence. When my possesions arrived, I secured my kayak the same way.
Last weekend I went to lumber yard, bought two 8 foot 4×4 posts, and to an equipment rental store where I rented a manual auger. I drilled a couple of post holes in the sandy soil, and used some 2×4’s left in the house by past tenants to built a rack to hold the roof box and the kayak:
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That took a chunk of last Saturday. It needs some more work to cradle the kayak – some plywood to the cross pieces, cut in a curve, and some foam noodle should do it. It needs something to secure a tarp to keep the sun and UV off the boat, but that should be easy.
I went shopping for some books on kayaking on salt (tidal!) water and found the Easykayaker books to be useful. On Sunday afternoon, on a slack low tide, I paddled the Gorge from the Kinsmen Park to the Selkirk trestle and then back up the Gorge to the bridge at Admiral’s Road, and back to the park. No pictures – it was enough to get organized and back on the water, without worrying about the camera. I have only been on the water once since 2002. I have missed it, and I am in good place to make up for the lost time.

Baking Bread

Over the last couple of weeks, I have started to bake bread. It started with a resolution to pack a lunch, which I have not done consistently since University. It brings back memories of Men into Space (see also the Wikipedia entry) and the lunch box I carried to grade school. I was not consistently eating the bread I bought at the supermarkets. The slices are light, suited for toast, not necessarily for hearty sandwiches.
Jean Paré’s “Company’s Coming” cookbooks are becoming like Louis L’Amour’s gunslinger romances. They are sold in grocery stores, kitchen ware stores and hardware stores like Canadian Tire more than in regular bookstores. Most of the books are bound in with plastic combs or coils, which means the books lay flat on a counter – a huge convenience in my opinion. I had a couple already and found them handy, and simple. More on that another time. Her books are being released in a new printing and I leafed through a copy of the 38th printing Muffins and More, the third book in the original series, which was first released in July 1983. The emphasis in the title should be the “and More” because it has recipes for bread, fruit and flavoured bread, buns and rolls, as well as muffins.
Her recipes all use baking powder and baking soda, rather than yeast. This means mixing dry ingredients and wet ingredients, pouring it into a baking pan and baking. This avoids the kneading and rising involved in baking a yeasted bread. The results are good in my experience. The wheat bread is good, the raisin bread is very good. My first impression is that the chemical leaveners have sodium, and bread most recipes for yeast bread suggest using salt.
The Paré book is good enough, but there are other options. I found the new edition of the Tassajara Bread Book to be quite useful, with detailed instructions and good illustrations of a process that was unfamiliar to me (I swallowed my indifference to the Zen proselytizing to read the book). The results are good, but there is a lot of time and a fair amount of work involved in kneading and triple rising. It works well on a morning devoted to chores or reading, where I can work around the requirements of coming back to the loaf several times over several hours.
There is no clear financial advantage or disadvantage. A 2 kg bag of flour runs around $5.00 and can produce about 5-6 loaves, but the cost of other ingredients, energy and hardware has to be taken into account. If you buy larger bags of flour, there are savings. The bread, if one avoids the pitfalls of the process, is worthwhile.

Diamond Lanes & Hills

Yesterday Colleen called. She was about the only person I knew in Victoria before I moved and she had agreed to take my forwarded mail. Canada Post wouldn’t let me rent a Victoria box from Winnipeg. She lives near Oak Bay, she had to leave for a squash game by 6:15. She gave me directions involving riding downtown on Douglas or Blanshard, then riding on Fort and turning on Oak Bay Road.
I road on Blanshard – a major arterial road, in a diamond lane for cyclists. On Fort, another major artery, the diamond lane is actually between the curb lane – which is for parking – and the 2 middle lanes. I was able to ride major routes without getting pinched by traffic.
The hills in the east end of Victoria are murder though. I am spending a lot of time on the middle ring, and shifting a lot. I think the rear shift cable was pinched on the trip because the shifts at 3-4-5 on the back cassette sometimes just hang. But I got another 15 k and my third ride in 4 days.
The next few days are forecast for rain and I should start looking at houses for rent.

First Rides in Victoria

It’s Sunday night. I arrived in Victoria Friday night and I have managed to clean up my bike and to ride Saturday and today. The weather was good – sunny and 10 degrees. I didn’t find my odometer/computer yesterday, and I didn’t get a precise record of my distance. I found it today and to my relief it worked after the sending unit and wires had been exposed to wind and spray for 2,500 kilometers.

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Fenders

Really, I still have better things to do. Yesterday I accomplished quite a bit toward packing and cleaning up. Today I put fenders on my bike – my Giant Yukon- , to anticipate riding in the rain and on wet roads.
I’ll still get wet, but I won’t be spraying my crotch and my face with my front tire and my neck and back with my rear tire. It was originally a hard frame mountain bike and over the last three years has been transformed, by tires, gears and other adaptations into a hardy urban cruiser. One of the benefits of my new job in Victoria is that the employer has a bike lockup, showers and change rooms to accommodate people who want to cycle to work. Victoria has dedicated trails including the Galloping Goose, and I should be able to cycle to work without having to travel on major roads. The Yukon is going to become my commuter bike.

2005 Weather

Randy mentioned the untypical weather in Alberta in one of his Christmas posts, Christmas 2005 (5). Winnipeg has had a strange December. Lots of snow, but very warm for the most part. The explanation for Winnipeg, as far as it goes, according to a story in the Free Press today is that a moist low pressure system off the West coast is tied to the jet stream and feeding warm moist air that is blowing across Canada, in a twisty kind of way. There has been enough snow to ski, but the snow has transformed, and I have not wanted to play with klister. It is like putting glue on skis, and I probably have to shop to get the right waxes for these unusual conditions.
It has been a strange weather year. The Environment Canada site has the Weather stories of the year now – see Top Ten Canadian Weather Stories for 2005. The steady rain in southern Manitoba in May and June and the flooding was the number two story in the list.