Airstream - Curtains

With the weather warming up, it is time to get the Airstream finished up and ready for use.  There are a handful of things to get done but fortunately nothing too overwhelming.  I installed new curtain sliders on the port side window and the curtains mix in well with the current color scheme/theme.

The front side is also coming together:

Big Thanks to the mother-in-law for doing such a bang up job on the curtains - they really turned out great!  We don't currently have curtains for the galley or the bathroom yet but more to come...
The cushions/bedding are at the upholsterer getting a facelift - we hope to have those back either this weekend or the following.

The galley has gotten some love too - cabinets stained/painted with hardware:

Next items on the agenda on the airstream is to re-do the fold out table to match the countertop formica pattern and also cut out a piece of that pattern for the fridge door.  There is still a lot of 'tinkering' to do, but the big visual items are more or less done.  It will be close to looking close to done once the bedding/foam is back in.  With a little luck and planning, this should wrap up in the next couple of weeks!

Album Releases / Review

Album you ask?  yes indeed, some of us grew up with vinyl (and I am not talking rubber unders) and loved every moment of holding album covers in our hands and reading all the liners, notes, pictures as we heard the needle scratch and claw its way through the grooves going round and round.

It seems like music releases come in cycles and we are now entering some great up-swings with releases - both quality and quantity.

Some of the recent releases that I have been getting through are:

Beastie Boys - Hot Sauce Committee Part 2 : my rating is a 9 out of 10 (a 10 being Paul's Boutique since nothing can really compare to the FUNK and sampling that was allowed during the time period)... HSC Pt 2 is just an awesome CD that references some earlier work that is just classic - then you have the vid that goes along with the CD that is classic beasties with great cameos

Plan B - The Defamation of Strickland Banks.  I give this a solid 7.5 of10.  It took me a couple of listens to figure out what to think but a solid effort with a couple of stand out tracks.

Foo Fighters - Wasting Light:  8 of 10.  This is one of the better Foo efforts!  Every song is great and the single released with it is a sweet hard rocking tune that brings out their edge.  They are just a good solid old school rock n roll band without gimmicks.

Sade - Ultimate Collection...I can't give ratings to compilations or best of series...

My Morning Jacket - Circuital - still getting through this and have not really decided...so far, so it is good

Raphael Saadiq - Stone Rollin'.  7 of 10 for me.  A good solid CD and if you saw the NPR tiny concert series with Raphael, it makes you realize it is not all just studio editing...he got some skills!

Gorillaz - The Fall - still deciding

TV On The Radio - Nine Types Of Light:  8 of 10 for me.  There are a couple of great tracks on the CD and he definitely has a unique style/sound.

Blu - Her Favorite Color:  6.5 of 10.  A good down tempo CD with some filler in there...never a big fan of a CD starting out with a bunch of talking to start the CD...it might be interesting the first time through it but hard to be surprised after the first listen.  

Pipestone Ride

Yesterday might have just been our finest spring day yet...although the cloudy & rainy stuff is back today through the weekend.  When a window of decent weather opens up, it is time to take full advantage of it and play.

I loaded the rig up and headed out to Pipestone to try to catch some sunshine.  I rode for about two hours and can slowly feel the legs getting used to riding outside again.  It was great to be able to get out and not worry about digits being cold - quite the contrary, it almost felt warm!   As usual, there were great views of the snow capped Highlands:

The trails were in good condition until you hit around 6,000 ft where there were some muddy spots and an occasional patch of snow.   The trails that had moto or 4 wheeler traffic were already starting to loosen up, although it just means being a little more of an explorer and finding the more hard to find trails that have not been too tracked out yet.  I took a couple of road spurs that I don't usually take to find out where stuff went or whether they linked in to prior trails.   Slowly, but surely this maze and network of trails is starting to come together in my mind.  There are still a couple of gaps to link a couple of areas up but considering all the moto traffic in the area, I would suspect they exist.

The weather looked a little ominous off in the distance but held out just fine for the area while riding.  It did look like the Tobaccy's were getting some action though:

Mini Mac(k)

The transition from PC to Mac is pretty much a done deal!  The last piece was getting another external hard drive to act as the data store for all docs, music, vids, pictures.  We have two external hard drives hooked up to the Mac.  One is the hard drive for the Mac, and the other is the backup to the root external drive.

The internal hard drive of the Mac stays clean this way.  We are using Chronosync as the vehicle to run backups from the root external drive to the backup external drive once a week.  Once it is all set up, it is great because there is little to think about as the backups happen as frequently (or infrequently)  as you schedule them with the Chronosync SW.  I had originally thought of mirroring the drives but then thought a scheduled backup would be better so that in the event of a drive failure, the backup drive would not mirror that data loss!

My overall impressions of the Mac are very positive.  The OS seems a lot more stable, and generally much faster (some of that can be attributed to the memory and processor).  It is taking a little time to learn how to navigate through Mac-land but I am slowly figuring out where to customize things and just how powerful this OS is.

One of the most impressive things with the Mac is the speed of the Firewire 800!!!  I transferred about 120G of data from the Mac to the external drive in about 1 hour!  That is just unbelievable.  That is part of the reason I wanted the external drive option - there is no loss in speed compared to the internal drive when editing music, pictures, movies, etc.

So far, big thumbs up!!!  

Getting Through Hump Day

How did mid-week get here so quickly?  I am happy to see that we have a couple of days of sunshine slated for the area as it will definitely help in getting 'over the hump' this week.  Is it time to officially start thinking of riding outside with some semblance of consistency yet?  ahhhhhh, but a boy can dream....

Local Trail Conditions:
There won't be any riding in the upper trails anywhere yet...Missoula, Helena, Butte...all the lower trails are  rideable but nothing doing on the upper elevation trails yet.  All of these areas show promise until yu start to get into the higher elevation where you run into snow drifts - we are getting closer though!  At least we are on the downhill slope of that bigger hump called winter (I refrain from lumping spring in there as we have not yet had one despite what the calendar says).

I hear the tick tock of the calendar getting whacked away as the BC Bike Race approaches.  The scary thing is we are 2 months away from the event and I have yet to get out on the bike with any consistency.  With a little luck, the next 6 weeks will turn for the better weather wise so I lay down some mileage.  If not, then it will just be some suffering during the week of the BC stage race  - c'est la vie...can a guy ride himself into shape over a week?

Compex - switching up programs:
In keeping up with prepping for the BC event, I switched up the e-stim workouts and moved from the 'strength' program to the 'resistance' program that I will stay on for about 3 wks before switching over to the 'endurance' setting on the Compex.   There is a marked difference between the two settings (strength vs resistance).  The strength programs are settings where the muscles are stimulated for around 20 seconds with lower energy and then there is a sudden surge for a few seconds until it subsides back into lower twitching - I am taking the leap of faith that these would be similar to a sprint where it is a quick sudden burst of energy and engagement.

The resistance program engages the muscles more frequently where it seems to be equal amounts of 'resting twitching' and 'engaged twitching' - something like 7-10 seconds on each cycle, so the muscles are engaged  more frequently without feeling so harsh a contraction compared to the strength programs.  My muscles don't feel nearly as tired/sore today after running the resistance program compared to the strength program. I continue to run active recovery sessions after any e-stim session in an effort to help flush out the legs a little and help with the soreness.

I definitely plan on taking the Compex with me to BC to run active recovery after each day so it will be interesting to watch how the legs feel on back to back to back to back to back to back to back days.  The more I think about it, the more psyched I get about this BC stage race!!!  Soon enough, it will be time to start mentally prepping for it and looking at each day's profile, etc!

Essplorin'

I decided to get out and enjoy our spring like temps yesterday after work and decided to do some exploring on local dirt.  It was fun to not have much of an agenda and just ride and see where dirt roads went and whether or not little spurs off those roads that looked like trails, actually were trails.

90 mins, 1200 ft elevation gain, around 16 miles on the singlespeed fatty and all was well for a Monday...There were even a couple of nice views along the way...looking towards the Highlands:

looking towards the Pintlers:

Beasties - Make Some Noise

just brilliant!!