Today was full of challenges. Short staff, early morning in the yoke, people not showing up to meetings, delays; you know “challenges”. Nearing ten hours of this voluntary self-abuse I decided that I’d had enough. I needed an honest to goodness physical challenge, and I needed it before the sun went down on this day of crappiness.

I packed my bag and a water bottle, put some shoes on and invited the dogs into the truck. Off we went, south bound to Mile Post 22. Something much taller than myself waiting to be climbed as fast as I could manage, bottom to top today was about 30 minutes of huffing and puffing. The cloud base obscured the top third of the ridge. It was cold, moist, and kind of dark. My lungs burned from the use. And yes, my blood was boiling with the happiness which I can only seem to find running up something much larger than myself.

I just got off the phone with my benighted internet service provider (I’m writing this message off-line in the hopes that my connectivity will return) and sure enough there is a “major” outage affecting approximately 50,000 subscribers in Oregon and Washington. “Oh joy” he says as he struggles to download the manual for his new phone via G3 network. When that’s done perhaps I can use it as a tethered connection until the main line is restored.

All things considered the network outage couldn’t have happened at a nicer time … if you’re a dog. They were driving me nuts today with their pay attention to me eyes and stealthy crotchings from under the desk. The sun was out and there was a nice breeze so without much of a second thought I grabbed a jacket, the leashes and we headed out.

Originally my intent was to just take them over to the Iron Horse Trail and walk them around the water tower. We arrived there and they ran around like insane canines with V8 engines supercharged with nitrous oxide. There were rooster tails of muddy clay kicked up behind as they rampaged around in circles flying between the sage. They did laps for some time, but I could see that this wasn’t really doing the trick.

“Well let’s head … east!” I proclaimed to two dogs that would be happy to go where the smells happened to be.

We walked to Kittitas and back.

For those of you who don’t know this is quite a stroll. The Iron Horse maintains the easement that was part of the original Chicago-Milwaukee-St. Paul-Pacific Railroad route so there is plenty of area between the hay fields on either side for the dogs to find and smell interesting things. This they did with great enthusiasm although the photo of Gigi shows that she was getting tired near the end.

I was treated to a very nice “rest day” under the blue sky (with limited clouds). My skin feels a little dry from the sunshine indeed and it’s been a while since there’s been enough UV to approximate that sensation.

In other news today two books arrived via UPS. This has additionally provided much entertainment and enlightenment in the absence of a network connection.

First up, Carfree Design Manual by J.H. Crawford. So far, so good! I’m not very far into this lexicon of design ideas yet, but, as usual, this manual is a well described and presented vision of what a functional urban future might be for us. I’m really looking forward to reading this book and already the images that are included are astounding and attractive. In particular I really like the image of Woonerf, Delft on page 128, but I’m struggling to imagine what the guy near the bike is up to at that window. Additionally, I’m very interested to see what Crawford has to say on the subject of bicycle integration within a baseline design.

Also in the box from my favorite book seller was a work of fiction which I have not had the opportunity to crack yet. World Made by Hand only recently hit the market and J.H. Kunstler is a regular blog stop for me on any given day. He also wrote the forward for J.H. Crawford’s first book Carfree Cities.

Finally, I got Scout down from storage today. Pumped up her tires and dusted off the horizontals. After that I plugged in the headlamps and headed off down the road to get some wine for dinner and a couple of supplies. First impressions, what was I thinking about with that rash notion of changing the perfect ride? I mean seriously, minus a couple of pounds of air in the rubber there was *nothing* wrong with this machine. I mounted the saddle and it still fit my butt perfectly. Maybe I could use a new pair of fenders and a chain guard, but I think I’m sticking with the gear that’s on there for a while longer.

The ride to the store (not a long one) was chilly, but there is a new moon tonight. Even with the scattered cloud cover above the Milky Way looked like silver river in the black. Saturn was so bright that it was showing ice rings all the way around it (think of what it’s like to see the moon through high altitude atmospheric ice crystals only smaller and from much further away).

Had I had any more energy I think I might have just continued to peddle right out of town.

I store things in piles, and I move things in boxes, I know how to bucket sort a data set and my files names are all comprised of the meta data concerning their content. Ultimately, categorization has been a friend and companion. So today, I lunch the newest category of blog entry here at the Sanity Factory. Shallow Waters will be used to collect all those little thoughts I need to jot down somewhere, but be warned they by definition lack depth.