Anthology of Interest

Tamara and I went over to Sunridge Mazda today to get her a test drive in a Mazda6. Unfortunately, they don't have any of the ones we want on the lot, so she had to drive a touring edition sedan, with all it's luxury appointments. We aren't impressed with the power seat. Manually sliding it back and forth is much faster, and we have to slide it around a lot, due to our height difference. This was Tamara's first test drive (I have been doing all the ones up to now), but we are seriously considering the 6 so she finally drove it.

It turns out that I suck at navigating. Mazda has a test drive route picked out, which we decided to follow even though the sales guy wasn't with us. I was doing well at first, but then I kept missing turns and making her turn around, which pissed her off. A lot. Ultimately, she more or less liked the car, or at least can live with it. She liked that the front passenger seat slides very far forward, so it is possible to get one of the giant three-in-one baby seats in the back. We were a bit concerned about that.

We even did a bit of talk on price with the sales guy, but I couldn't get him to budge very much. It was an interesting experience in a way, dealing with a professional negotiator. He spoke quickly and lumped things together, and it was tough to get him to separate things out. Shell games. I think he answered some of my questions with fibs, so it might be possible to get him to move some more. Unfortunate they don't have the car we want on the lot, so it is harder to get a deal. Maybe we'll have to wait for the 07's. But then we definitely won't get a deal.

Tamara says she likes the part of car buying with the test drives and talking about cars, but the negotiating a price part sucks. I'm inclined to agree.

Anthology should be mostly working...

Rantastic will return to it's full glory tomorrow.

We've been offline for a few days due to a noisy cpu fan in our web server. We will probably be up and down until we either get a new fan or move our sites to a hosting service.

Tamara and I arrived back in Calgary after being in Victoria for the last few days. We flew out on Wednesday evening, and we convocated on Thursday, Tamara and the morning, and me in the afternoon. The rest of the time was spent hanging our with friends, drinking in the grad lounge until they closed (at the ungodly hour of 7 PM), and doing stuff that we used to do when we lived in Victoria, like walking in the dog park and playing golf at the 3 par course down the road from the University.

On Sunday my father-inlaw, a friend of his, and I made a bid for the Highwood pass. I have wanted to ride over Highwood pass for a while, and this trip was partly why I wanted to get a new bike: a fixed gear 42-16 isn't something I want to climb a 7% grade on. My original plan was to get dropped off at the north end, and ride from one gate to the other, either getting picked up there or ride another 40 km to Longview. Riding from the gate to the top and back was a good start. Maybe next time I'll go gate-to-gate and back again or from the north end to Longview or something.

We had originally planned to ride the pass the weekend before, but rain made us reconsider. From the outset it was agreed that we would go at our own pace. After the first hill climb together, I set off at a faster pace. I didn't make as good a time as I would have liked, but it was ok for my first major ride in a long time.

After about 5 km I started thinking to myself that I should stop and go to the bathroom somewhere. But then I would look at my computer and think, I just go to 10 km. Ah, I'll wait until 15 km. And so on. Until I was at the last climb before the pass, and I had to stop and eat a cliff bar because I was running out of energy. That put me back in it though. I did have to chant "almost there" in my head though...

Gallery is having issues, so I'll post the pictures later.

UPDATE: Photos are now available.

Tamara and I have a little boy (90% sure) due to arrive in October, so I've started to think about all kinds of parent related things that I've never worried about before. There's the big philosophical things that are always in the back of my mind, and practical day to day things to deal with now. One of these things is a certain amount of concern over safe and reliable transportation.

My car, a '96 Saturn SL1 that I've owned for about 8 years is starting to show it's age. There are a few relatively minor things, like a wire that broke and prevented the driver's seat from moving (fixed with some wire Dad had in his garage) and the little pull tab the releases the seat back so the rear seat folds down. There are strange electrical things, like the (almost new) battery dieing last on New Years Eve. It was trickle charged over-night and it hasn't been a problem since, but I wonder if there are other electrical gremlins lurking within. Many electrical connections could probably do with a good cleaning.

Lots of stuff has been going on lately. I've started riding to work again, on a Norco CCX cyclocross bike. I ended up getting that one over the Trek or the Devinci because it has a short top tube. I felt really stretched out on the Devinci. The Norco was also cheaper. I'm pretty happy with it so far. It has developed a squeak somewhere in the bottom bracket area, so I've got to try to figure that out, otherwise it's been good.

The ride to work is pretty good, but I have make sure I don't go too fast, because we don't yet have showers at work. I should probably be having bird baths anyway, since it's pretty easy to get sweaty, even on a 4.2 Km ride. Especially when I try to stay ahead of the buses so I don't have to play leap frog with them. When I'm feeling lazy I just hang behind them and breath diesel fumes. Yum.

At the same time I got my new bike, I got parts to replace the things I broke on my fixie. Kona Bulge cranks and bottom bracket (on sale!) from Bowcycle, and a 44 tooth chain ring non ramped chain ring from MEC. Since the Norco came with different pedals (egg beaters), and the fixie has SPD's, I either have to swap pedals or swap cleats, and thus far I've been to lazy to do either, so I haven't really tested the new set up yet. That and I started sanding the frame where the chain ring took a bite out of it, and then started sanding surface rust, so now I should probably paint it or something before I ride it too much....

It feels great to be back on the road!