A Great Day On The Rivanna River Trail

The RTF is an organization that has built and maintains a trail that runs all the way around the city of Charlottesville. It's about 20 miles of "urban trail". It's not really single track but it's also not paved rail trail either. Some of it is a bit of a scramble or a sketchy ride through a tunnel but a lot of it is pretty sweet riding. Some buff, some technical.

Kyle and I organized a circumnavigation of the Rivanna River Trail as a sort of birthday celebration. Here's a few pics.

Here's the start of the ride. 15 riders total.


Here's a huge creek crossing/hike-a-bike


Most of the way around, chilling at Bodos for a minute.




Dave making an excellent decision with the egg bagel.


Fellow rider (I think he was drunk) on the Rivanna trail. Apparently his rear D blew apart and Dave was helping him get it back together. Only on the urban trails are you going to run into something like this. I would have been disappointed if this didn't happen. Nolan is the muscle, making sure nothing goes down.


All in all a great day, maybe we'll do it again before 2009.

Dark Hours

So, this is a concept that we came up with in college. One evening when I couldn't sleep my roommate and I tried to account for all of the hours in a week, 168. I don't remember the exact calculations but we allotted time for classes, getting back and forth to class, work, homework, meals, brushing teeth, showering, exercise, etc. As I recall we were fairly generous with the time, overestimating to try and get a realistic count. By the end of our exercise, we had accounted for less than 150 hours, almost a full day that we couldn't account for.

As I was driving to work the other day thinking about all of the things I do (poker, paintball, riding) I started to wonder if I could account for all of the hours in my week and exactly how many "Dark Hours" were left, unaccounted for. Here's my assessment.

Sleep
8-9 hours/day
63 hours/wk
(105 remaining)

Work (including driving to/from)
45 hrs/week
(60 remaining)

Eating
3 hours/day
21 hrs/week
(39 remaining)

Riding
9 hours/week
(30 remaining)

Mini-Z Racing
2.5 hours/week average
(27.5 remaining)

Hygiene - Showering, brushing teeth, etc
1 hr/day
(20.5 remaining)

Food Shopping
1 hour/week
(19.5 remaining)

Email, web-surfing, etc
1 hour/day
(12.5 remaining)

I would say most of those estimates are pretty fair. This leaves about 12 hours/week unaccounted for. Granted, I didn't account for TV which could easily be 2-5 hours for me. I guess my time is just a little more cluttered today than it was 10 years ago. I also find myself working on random pet projects around during my idle time...something that didn't really happen when I lived in one room.

I don't know if I expected to have some huge revelation when I started writing this...but I didn't. I guess I am just curious to know if other people have such "Dark Hours" that get lost little by little in the daily shuffle.

Yes, a new hobby

I am always getting into some new stuff. This time it's paintball. I've been a few times and loved it every time. Maybe except that one time where a few of us got pwned at a speedball field in Jersey but you take what you can get.

I don't know how it happened but I've pretty much jumped in head first. I haven't gone overboard. I've got a decent entry level marker (paintball gun) and a nice mask. I've been hanging out in the paintball shop a bit lately and managed to get invited to a game hosted by a local guy that's got a speedball field that he sets up every once in a while. Anyway, here are a few pics of me looking 2 legit 2 quit.

I only managed to hit one guy that day but it was a sweet one shot headshot. I'll take that for now.

Very Busy Weekend...But Also Very Fun

I spent the previous weekend working on a report for work. Saturday and Sunday were basically full of reading, writing and editing. This past weekend was much different. Saturday started with a short ride on my new road bike. Then I went out for about 4 hours of paintball. I was pretty much wasted Saturday night. After a full night's rest Sunday started with a morning of cooking (tomato-lime soup) then a 2 hour MTB ride, then about an hour of dodgeball. After some Tazo Black Tea at 4bucks, Johanna and I rallied for two bac-to-back superbowl parties.

Unfortunately I don't have any pictures or the new bike, paintball or the new bike...but maybe next time. I have to be less lazy with the camera. Hopefully next weekend will be just as awesome as this one was.

Glider Ride Anyone?

Yeah, that's right...a glider! As in NO ENGINE!

The first pic above is the glider...empty...waiting for a pilot and a passenger. The way it works is that you hook up to a tow plane and get towed to 2,000+ ft. We got towed up to 4,000 and Alec flew us around. I got to steer a little bit.

The video below shows how the takeoff works. What you can't see is that for the first 20 ft or so there's a guy holding up the left wing to keep us level until we get a little bit of speed.



Here's J after the flight. She's not kneeling to look cool, the flight was pretty smooth but she still felt a little sick. You can see me below squeezing myself (and my down jacket) into the little plane.

And It's Done

Just about...

If you look closely you can see that I *should* do some finish work on the base piece just below the padded rail. If I were going to sell this to someone I would tighten a couple of things up. As it is, I will be playing on this for a while and I have plenty of time to get around to the last 2% of the job.

Poker Table Almost Complete

The first game is soon and the table is ready. The only thing I haven't done is cut holes for the cupholders. I have 10 stainless steel cupholders but I think the table will work best with 8 players. I am going to host a few games before I make a final decision.

I am quite pleased with the final result. The racetrack has a nice gloss to it (even though there are some imperfections) and the padded rail looks very uniform with no visible wrinkles. I have to thank Jo for the help with that one. The rail alone took over 600 staples...all done with a hand stapler.

I have some more progress pics that I'll put up later but here's a sample of the (almost) finished product.

Poker Table: Day 4

The final cut to be made today is the most important one of the whole table. This is the only exposed wood edge so it has to be clean. Last night I cut the round sections of the racetrack and I finished the straight sections this morning. This was a little more stresful than the previous cuts because I hadn't used the router against a straight edge before. The previous cuts were made with an edge guide but a minor jug saw debacle left me with an edge that I didn't trust, so I couldn't use the edge guide as I intended. Here are some pics on this morning's progress.

Here's what it looked like this morning before making the straight cuts. I had to lay down some poker chips to check it out. It's really starting to take shape.


I didn't get any shots of the actual cutting but when it was done I set everything up to get a feel for how it would look.

Very exciting

and here's what the stain is going to look like on a test piece.
Not too bad for a morning's work. Hopefully I can prep the racetrack and lay down the stain tonight. I am expecting a lot of the materials to be at my door when I get home.

Poker Table: Day 3 (Rail Complete, Racetrack Started)

I made some pretty good progress today. There will be a padded rail around the playing surface that is made up of two oval pieces. I got the main piece cut this morning and cut the second piece (the rail lip) after work. There was a slight problem with the jig saw but after a little bit of time with the router I had a decent workaround. Once I got that figured out I glued and screwed the two rail piece together and let them dry.

While those piece were drying I started the cuts for the racetrack. I really took my time with this since it will be the one exposed piece of wood and I really don't want to have to buy another sheet of plywood.

I didn't get any pictures of the rail pieces right after they were cut but you can see how they fit over the main playing surface. After three days, it's starting to take shape.

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Legs Legs Legs!!!

The legs showed up today. These were just a little more expensive than those really cheap looking folding legs from Home Depot and they look so much better. The rest of the supplies should show up tomorrow and Tuesday. I hope to have the table done and ready to play on by the middle of next week. Finishing the race track (stain and poly) will take a couple of days though.

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As promised here are a few pictures of the router jig with the router attached.

Poker Table: Day 2

I woke up this morning and decided to try a little bit of sanding with my palm sander. The jigsaw cuts were decent but not perfect. After some deliberation I decided to try and build a jig for my router to make the circle cuts nice and smooth. I haven't really used my router much and I was a little hesitant about trying to make a jig for it. Also didn't want to buy one because I am trying to keep the costs low for this project. With a little help from some router jig references I decided to give it a shot. I had some spare 3/4" ply that I ripped from the full size sheets that was the perfect width. I removed the base plate from my router and used that as a template for the mounting holes. I cut a 2" hole for the router bit to pass through and measured out the radii that I would need for the table . It looks like everything lines up very well with the curves that I already cut with the jig saw so I think I'll be able to use the router for everything else. I don't think it will makes things any faster but it should be a lot more precise...I like precise!

After work I actually had a chance to use the router jig. It was pretty successful. I did have one bit of oversight and measured on the wrong side of the router bit which made my rail cut 1/4" off. I am not going to worry about it...I think it will be fine.

So total progress for today includes building a router jig, cutting all of the pieces to ovals and starting on the 4" (actually 3 3/4") rail piece.

Here are a few shots of the oval pieces...with some closeups before sanding.

Here are a few shots of the router circle jig. Pretty simple. I'll get some pics of it installed later.