fidean.net

well, i’m down to the last week of roller girl boot camp. i’ve spent over 40 hours on skates getting knocked on my tush, and knocking others on theirs. the draft is next thursday. there are not enough spots for all 13 recruits, so it will be a sad day when we’re all split up. if you’re not familiar with derby, here’s an idea…

http://www.mnrollergirls.com/

http://clients.sevnthsin.com/mnr/mnr002/presentation/round06/

this morning fiona woke up with a goal in mind - baking cookies. we were out of most of the ingredients (a word she was able to say clearly on the first try), ella and fi and i walked to the brand new super target to get butter, eggs, chocolate chips (got m&m mini kisses instead), flour, and sugar. after we mixed, stirred, baked, and waited, the cookies were ready to eat. fiona came downstairs and took out several plates and cups, filling them all with cookies. i walked into the kitchen and before i could even ask, fi said ‘i don’t know WHAT i’m doing.’ ‘who are all those cookies for?’ ‘i don’t know. i don’t know WHAT i’m doing!’ hee hee.

An unplanned plumbing repair finished tonight - the supply line to the outside faucet. We still had the original faucet on the side of the house, and actually bought a modern anti-siphon non-freezing silcock for it a good two years ago, so this has been on the todo list for a while.

A couple of weeks ago, the morning i was about to leave for my Oregon trip, i heard water running though i was the only person awake in the house. I checked the outside faucet and it wasn’t running, but the foundation blocks there were soaked. I ran back inside and sure enough, there was water running in down the wall, and the floor was soaked in a 10′ circle. When i got back from the trip, i took the lines apart, and the threaded end of the steel pipe connected to the faucet was corroded through on two sides, completely gone where the threads had been.

It took 3 trips to Menards to get all the right parts. The first trip i bought replacement steel lines, which seemed easiest. The problem was that one of the original lines was bent to accomadate the offset connection, and i couldn’t bend the pipe the same way (and the original one was too corroded to reuse). So, back for a copper version of the same thing. It was $13 for 5′ of 3/4″ copper pipe! The third trip was for a threaded fitting i’d forgotten to get on the 2nd trip.

I had to think a bit to make sure i could still screw the one end to the supply valve and the other end to the silcock, but i figured it out eventually. I laid it out with 3 pipes and 2 elbows, 6 joints to sweat in all, with the threaded end fittings. The soldered joints were all water-tight on the first try. I had to remove the silcock because of a 12-second drip at that threaded joint, but a fresh application of thread compound fixed that.

We’re once again able to fill the swimming pool, just in time for another week in the 90s!

Wow, it’s still hard to believe we had a bridge collapse in Minneapolis. I didn’t ride around that area very often, but it’s a huge bridge and a main traffic artery - 120,000 cars every day, apparently. My last trip was actually under the bridge, riding my bike home from a dinner out with friends a couple of weeks ago.

I heard about it between hospital stops unrelated to this. Fiona had a very odd vasovagal-style reaction to a playground injury yesterday (hit her hip on a park bench), and we ran her over to the ER for an ECG test, which turned out fine. She has had similar but much less intense reactions twice before to having splinters - she would get panicky and almost unconsolably upset, pale and a little shocky. The last time was a splinter in her foot, and after about 10 minutes of that she put herself to bed and slept for an hour. She had also been holding her breath for the first minute or so after the injury, and the ER doc said that it’s just a reaction that some kids have to pain or trauma, and some kids will turn blue and pass out (she didn’t). Something to keep an eye on though.

I heard only bits and pieces of the bridge story until i could get to the TV around 10, after the kids were asleep. The news stories were good, though predictably repetitive. Here’s the Strib story on it, hope it doesn’t disappear into the archives too soon. Note that as of last night, it had increased to 7 dead, more injured and some 20 missing, according to the late TV news. More WCCO coverage.

Excellent photo set and commentary here from someone who probably lives in the same apartment building i lived in for one summer while at university. Also, a Flickr page with a great ‘before’ picture of the bridge, and the wikipedia entry, which is naturally evolving as the story unfolds.

I just heard that the brother of a co-worker died on the bridge.

Thank you to everyone who was nearby to pitch in to help. Thank you to all the bloggers for the first-hand coverage and photos.

(all images link to an enlarged version with caption in the photo gallery)

This past Sunday, i spent an excellent day with two good cycling friends on a fun day trip. We departed from St. Paul, MN on the Amtrak, rode the train to Winona, MN, then rode our bikes home.

It was my first century ever, and the first one of the year for the other two, though they’ve each done much tours before. We made a leisurely tour of it this time, making plenty of stops along the way for food (ice cream! pie!) and scenery (eagles! topless teens!), and some interesting detours along the way. We got in a bit later than planned, but the night riding was sublime, and i finished feeling good enough (or was stubborn enough) to ride a final 4 miles around my neighborhood to round the trip up to an even 150 miles (240 kilometers, for a double metric century + 40).

I had a blast, can’t wait to do it again. Click here for the full story and pictures. Even more photos with captions (click on the big version) in the gallery.