Resounding defeats; bicycles
May. 1st, 2015 09:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rebeccmeisterA week ago, S and I played a game of Skype-Scrabble on a game interface he wrote. He lost, so he challenged me to a rematch, which happened last night. Normally, none of this is really cause for comment, but I suffered a resounding defeat. First, he played FRANKED, and then I challenged it and learned that it means to cancel out postage on a piece of mail (at least, according to the OSPD v 5.0). Sometime thereafter, he played JOLTER, which I also challenged and lost. And then even later on, he played CHLORINE, which I didn't challenge, but which was his second bingo of the game. I don't feel especially terrible about losing, given that my final score was higher than my final score from the previous game, but man, that was an interesting time. Apparently OSPD v 5.0 contains 5,000 new words. It still doesn't contain profanity - I checked for you.
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Towards the end of May, I am going to give a presentation on randonneuring at one of the local bike shops. In preparation, I've started looking some stuff up, and came across this story by Sheldon Brown's wife, from riding PBP in 1975. What a story. I love her commentary on the French meals in particular, and how she carried a whole roast chicken with her all the way to Brest.
People in this town are really gung-ho about the National Bike Challenge. Hopefully logging my cycling mileage won't become too tedious, sigh. On the other hand, this morning I learned that the route I take along the bike path is actually 3.5 miles long. A bit longer than the one-mile straight-shot route, eh?
Edited to add... It took me a few minutes to remember why I wanted to write about the National Bike Challenge. The reason why is because the site asked me to choose whether I ride primarily for transportation or for recreation. I had to scratch my head over that. Eventually, I chose "transportation," because that's what gets me on the bike every single day, and it came well before the "recreation" part started, I suppose (although this seems to presuppose that riding to get somewhere isn't fun). All miles get logged as either transportation or recreation, too. If I ride my bike out to the start of a brevet, should I log that as a separate ride and call it transportation, I wonder.
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Towards the end of May, I am going to give a presentation on randonneuring at one of the local bike shops. In preparation, I've started looking some stuff up, and came across this story by Sheldon Brown's wife, from riding PBP in 1975. What a story. I love her commentary on the French meals in particular, and how she carried a whole roast chicken with her all the way to Brest.
People in this town are really gung-ho about the National Bike Challenge. Hopefully logging my cycling mileage won't become too tedious, sigh. On the other hand, this morning I learned that the route I take along the bike path is actually 3.5 miles long. A bit longer than the one-mile straight-shot route, eh?
Edited to add... It took me a few minutes to remember why I wanted to write about the National Bike Challenge. The reason why is because the site asked me to choose whether I ride primarily for transportation or for recreation. I had to scratch my head over that. Eventually, I chose "transportation," because that's what gets me on the bike every single day, and it came well before the "recreation" part started, I suppose (although this seems to presuppose that riding to get somewhere isn't fun). All miles get logged as either transportation or recreation, too. If I ride my bike out to the start of a brevet, should I log that as a separate ride and call it transportation, I wonder.
