I didn't see you Monday, and I am sure that your suffering was immense. Unlike some people, I am not a creature of habit. That means that occasionally I just don't write anything. It also means that I don't have a huge collection of random crap and a year's supply of my favorite shampoo in the basement, so it's actually not a bad thing.

The weekend's attempt at building the sidepod resulted in a brief fight with the laws of physics, which I lost. I was, unfortunately, unable to acquire a small TARDIS to strap to my trike's rear rack, which means that I can only fit as much stuff into the box as there is space inside the box. Despite my best efforts, there just wasn't enough room to reliably mount two sealed-lead acid batteries, a charge controller, a DC-DC converter, a cellular amplifier, and a mess o' switches, sockets, and wiring. So, I had the design team taken out back and shot. Then I ordered one of these, in blue. With a bit of mucking about and the careful application of hammers, it should do the trick. It's more stylish, and it has a lock on it. It was also nowhere to be found when I Googled "scooter trunk" last month, otherwise I'd already have one.

Other than a longer ride with about 65% of full touring weight in the trailer, the weekend was unremarkable, except for the pall of incipient change clinging to everything. Soon the house will be ours no longer, and Bob the Cat will be wondering why she can't go outside where all the yummy grass and crunchy moles are. Julep the Cat will be undergoing her first major life crisis since the Cardboard Cat Carrier Incident. Pea will be in a new apartment doing new apartment things, and, if all goes well, I will be hurtling downhill at 50mph yelling something about bats.

This order of change, I think, is usually a point-A-to-point-B affair. Sell dwelling, move to new dwelling, quit job, get new job, destroy Death Star, form new non-evil intergalactic government, no big deal. What's giving me this delightful frisson of excitement-bordering-on-panic is that I'm leaping from point A to point x, point x being the Life's Algebra variable for no frickin' idea what's next.

But it's not the sort of uncertainty that comes from being out of control or smacked upside the head, it's the uncertainty of adventure and enterprise. I'm guessing that the only way to find out whether that's something you actually want more of in your life -- as opposed to just thinking you want more of it -- is to go out and do it.

I'll have to get back to you on whether those are pithy words to live by or evidence of creeping lunacy.

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As in, it's time for some, but don't expect much. I used up most of my ability to be interesting in the process of having a brainstorm about how, exactly, I'm going to mount the folding solar panels onto the Nomad's rack so that I can charge batteries while I ride. The scheme I was working on involved some sort of collapsible framework made from kite spars, but when the mental design work got increasingly complicated I went out to the garage and stared at the trailer until ping! it came to me: two simple gizmos made out of PVC pipe, attached to the rack, that will be sturdy, simple, and difficult to lose important bits of. I love PVC pipe. With PVC pipe and some epoxy you can build almost anything, as engineers in the old Soviet space program will attest.

Looking at all of the kite frame building materials reminded me of my first kite - a little sled kite I bought in Cape May seven or eight years ago. Eventually I gave it away to a small black child in Queens.

No, really - I was in Flushing Meadows park trying to get my recalcitrant rokaku into the air (a rokaku is a six-sided Chinese kite; mine was about 4' by 5'). I couldn't get the long bridle set up correctly, so the kite wouldn't angle into the wind and generate lift. Eventually I gave up and flew the sled kite, which I always carried with me. It folded up into itself, forming a pocket-sized package, and was a reliable flyer. This kid had been watching me struggle with the rokaku for awhile, just far enough away to avoid conversation, but not far enough to hide his interest. With no parents or siblings around, there was no one to hold him back when the sled kite went up - he came over and shyly asked, "Can I try that?" So I gave him the string and he took off running, to make it go as high as he could. I packed up the rokaku while he tore around the ball field, and when I was ready to leave I told him he could keep it. His eyes got all wide: "For real?" For real, I said, and showed him how the kite folded up. Then he unfolded it and ran off again.

I always wondered about what happened next...were his parents suspicious of the strange white guy who gave their kid a kite in the park? Or did they not notice, or care? He seemed a bit young to be in the park all on his own, so I always suspected the latter.

Some time later at Liberty State Park, across the water from downtown Manhattan, I was flying one of my parafoil stunt kites -- an older version of the Prism Stylus. It was a good windy day, and on a day like that the parafoil turned into a sixty-foot hammer, as I used the dual lines to whip it around in a broad arc just a few feet off the ground, leaning back on my heels to keep from getting pulled onto my face. There was yet another small black child there, with his mother this time, and he marched right up to me and said, "Let me try!" He looked like he might've weighed seventy pounds. So I told him no, sorry, but with these winds he wouldn't be able to control it, and might even get hurt.

His mother's response? "C'mon, let's go, he's prejudiced."

I was pretty irritated by this, but said nothing. Some ignorance you can't really combat. But, mostly, I felt bad for that kid: every time he didn't get what he wanted, he would think it was because he was black. Every failure would be someone else's fault.

The point being that nonsense like this is learned. It's even more apparent when you know that Rep. McKinney's father famously blamed her 2002 defeat in the Georgia primaries on "The Jews: J-E-W-S."

See how I did that? Kites and current events!

Now, if I had the energy, I would present my solution for solving America's racial problems with PVC pipe and epoxy, which would really wrap things up all nice and symmetrical-like.

But I don't, so good night and so on.

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When I ordered one of these (in blue), I was violating my never buy anything from Florida rule. There's a reason that state has its own tag on Fark. The last thing I bought from Florida was a 61-key Casio CZ-1 keyboard, which arrived "packed" in two mangled cardboard boxes that had been ill-taped together and filled with a couple of handfuls of styrofoam peanuts. Turned out the youth who packed it that way checked it out with his dad, who thought it was perfectly fine to ship a 30-pound item in mangled boxes that probably didn't survive the trip to the UPS store.

Thus: being from Florida, when the scooter trunk arrived it was a) too small and b) smashed. Still haven't heard back from the shop, but fortunately I have a powerful ally in my credit card company.

Still, it was my own fault for ordering the thing, in a bit of engineering panic mode once I realized that my original scheme wasn't going to fly. Very sad.

But, pressing forward, I've located yet another case that might do the trick.

And if it doesn't, I'll just rivet the equipment to my femurs.

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My contract gig is done with. From now until May 1: riding, packing, more riding.

And maybe some packing.

But for now...uh...nothing, actually.

That's right: no free ice cream today!

(And there was much rejoicing)

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First of the higher mileage days today. It was overcast, and the wind kicked up shortly after I left, so I spent much of the ride wondering if I was going to get rained on. Which would have been fine, actually - I'm curious about how the fairing will handle rain.

But it didn't. The organic and inorganic machines performed well. I'm now in the tired slump that happens at the beginning of every riding season...for the next couple of days it'll be tough to get on the trike. After that I'll be on the upswing and I'll have to lengthen my rides to keep training up. When I've done two fully-loaded six-hour days back-to-back and I'm looking forward to the third day (instead of dreading it like ebola), I'll be ready. Mostly.

And now, an Unrelated Pop Culture Aside™. Have you seen these M-azing candy bar things they're peddling? ("They," of course, being the vast undifferentiated Candy Conglomerate that makes all of the sugary fat-laden crap that drives up health insurance premiums). Product synopsis: M&Ms mixed into a chocolate bar. The accompanying advertising campaign uses a chocolate bar/M&M love story theme. Piles of M&Ms next to a chocolate bar in front of a fire, or in the back of a station wagon parked at Makeout Point.

Which immediately makes me think that an M-azing bar is the result of hot liquid M&M-on-chocolate bar action. And I don't want that in my mouth.

With that: I must now commence to resembling a vegetable.

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I was wrong.

Now I'm in the tired slump that happens at the beginning of every riding season.

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There are some riding days when the great dome of the sky conspires with the budding trees of Spring and the sun -driven breezes to create a symphony of overstretched metaphors that makes the ride a harmonious union of man, machine, and the goddish world.

Then there are days where you just get coated with topsoil.

The riding itself was fine - a light day, just 20 miles, without the trailer. But windy. Many of the broad valleys around here were once at the bottom of a lake, and have a thick layer of rich, black soil in them. For reasons beyond my knowledge of agriculture, they mostly use that soil to grow onions. The straight, flat roads in the valleys are littered with road onions that have bounced off the trucks - red, white, yellow, Vidalia. These roads are also subject to wicked crosswinds, which explains why many of the telephone poles lining them are canted east at a 30-degree angle.

I saw it from about a half mile away: a dark plume billowing off of one of the unplanted fields. Nothing from the neighboring acreage; just this one field that hadn't been furrowed or watered or whatever it is you do to a field when you want to grow onions in it.

Nothing for it but to keep going. Just as I reached the field, the wind gusted up to around 30 mph, and the road was obscured by a rich fertile cloud of black dirt, which I rode directly into. It hissed off the fairing and blasted the right side of my face, getting into my eyes, my nose. Then, after pedaling a dozen yards half-blind while squinting down at the road between my feet, the air was clear again. I rode into the next small town and scored a phat Rice Krispies bar and a small keg of Gatorade at the local gasoline and food concession, then headed back home.

I burst out laughing when I saw my face in the bathroom mirror: I had expected some grime, but the whole right side of my face was swathed with thick black splotches of fecund, onion-friendly soil, with pale circles where my stylin' cycle shades had done their best to protect me glazzies. I took a shower, and then used up four Q-tips and a clump of toilet paper getting a window box's worth of the stuff out of my right ear and my right nostril. At that point Woodie Guthrie jumped out of the closet and twanged "Dust Bowl Refugee." He's always doing that, but for once it was appropriate.

The nostril thing puzzled me: why just the right one? I understood the ear, because that was facing the cloud, but don't I breathe through both nostrils?

Such are the mysteries of nature and of noses.

I'm sure the nice Indian gentlemen at the Citgo Food Mart were equally bemused.

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...and, thus, a great day for us all.

Ladies and gentlemen: I present to you the Model WT-166, from the aptly-named Cases Galore. At 11.5” by 7.5” by 4.4”, it is exactly the right size to snugly hold two Hawker Cyclon six-volt batteries placed end to end, their accompanying charge controller, plus the DC-DC converter, the 3-watt cellular amplifier, and the antenna/power junction box for the CB radio. The PVC sides of the case are easy to work with, so I can drill holes and place all my switches. Finally, the whole thing is just narrow enough to ride securely on the rear rack of the trike, held in place with two bungies.

Only took me three tries to get it right.

In other trike tech news, the Cobra CB had its first test today. This involved kludging together something resembling the final installation so that I could try out the antenna setup. (Those of you not technically-inclined should maybe just skip this part, and head on down to the paragraph with maple syrup in it.) The basic problem with running a CB or any other transmitting radio on a trike is the lack of a ground plane. When you put a CB antenna on a car or a truck, there's usually lots of ferrous metal that the vertical antenna can use as its near-field reflection point. But my trike doesn't have enough conductive surfaces, which means that the standing wave ratio (the ratio of the maximum radio-frequency (RF) voltage to the minimum RF voltage along the transmission line) would be unacceptably high. An SWR that's too much above 1:1.5 or so means that you won't transmit much power, and you can even damage the radio.

But the clever folks at Firestik have a solution: the Firestik II "no ground plane" antenna. Instead of using a vehicle's body panel as a ground plane, the antenna uses eighteen feet of coaxial cable, which the manufacturer insists must not be cut. Not even half an inch.

And I believe them: my maximum SWR on channel 20 was about 1:1.5, which is perfectly respectable, and on channel one it was an almost perfect 1:1. I got the CB primarily for the NOAA weather channels, which I will use to avoid tornadoes and meteorite showers. But it'll be nice to be able to chat with people for the few minutes that they'll be in range, and maybe call for help if I fall into a canyon.

After verifying all this with the SWR meter and doing a happy geeky dance, it was off to get some food for our bare pantry. The number of "This is the last time I'll do x" moments has been steadily increasing, but with less than three weeks before we close on the house, it's become a regular nostalgia-fest, even affecting mundane errands. No point in buying the usual Canadian-style plastic jug of gen-yu-wine maple syrup, is there? The smaller glass bottle will do. Are there too many onions in the double-pack bag of reds and yellows? Probably, but it's only $3.50. I accidentally bought three more cans of tuna than I meant to, but still fewer than the normal month's supply.

Yessir, change is a-commin', and other platitudes.

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...with a routine that will remain a routine for a very short time, which I suppose makes it more of an aberration. Wake up, inhale oatmeal, and haul Large Items out to the curb in preparation for that most blessed of days, Large Item Trash Pickup Day. Ordinarily this happens every September, but last year the village moved it to Spring, which meant that they didn't have to pay for a Large Item day in 2005 and left us on tenterhooks, wondering if we'd get the chance to get rid of all of the Large Items that we didn't want to haul with us when we moved. And, if you're wondering just what a tenterhook is (I know I am), look here. Such hooks were, of course, used to secure cloth to tenters, which these days look like this. The whole idea was to prevent shrinkage as the cloth dried.

So, while we waited to see whether the village would indeed take away our expired Large Items at no cost to us, we were very uncomfortable, but also unshrunk, which would be a fair trade-off except for the tetanus.

We have one of the more impressive piles of Large Items on the street: two televisions, a dresser, a two-drawered nightstand, two single-drawered nightstands, two beat-to-crap Bucky-built screen doors, a weight bench, a weight rack, a freestanding metal closet, the last few slaughtered remains of a gas dryer that I didn't manage to sneak out with the regular trash and am now attempting to sneak out with the Large Items, three smashed bookshelves, a sewing table, and a strange purple plastic-and-wire gizmoid wobbling toy that I bought three years ago at the same time I bought some exceptionally bad sausage and onion pizza from the shop next to the toy store, which has ever since reminded me of said pizza, and which, furthermore (thereunto) has already been nicked from the Large Item pile by someone who is free to enjoy it without such unpleasant gastronomic associations.

There will be more added to our pile, as we have a large quantity of wood and other home-repair style items that never made it beyond the planning stage, plus two couches on Death Row that may or may not get reprieves. Soon I will pop popcorn and watch them take all of our Large Items away, and I will be glad.

After adding to the pile it was off on a trike ride, the long, stop-and-go sort of ride that happens when your leg muscles would really rather be at home watching television. Ride a few miles, stop and eat a banana while wondering about who lives in that small, run-down farm-style shack across the road that has roofing shingles for siding and looks like it will melt into a bubbling puddle of asphalt in the summer. Ride a few more miles, stop in a barn's driveway, drink some water, watch the clouds. A few more miles, stop beneath the shade of a pine tree in a church parking lot and fuel up on wholesome Mi-Del graham crackers. Then slog it home, with the small reward of legs that feel like they might go another ten miles if you really needed them to, but you don't, so it's time for pasta and Icy Hot.

Tomorrow: repeat, until leg muscles are transformed into steel cables and lungs are suitable for zeppelin storage.

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Oh!

Look at that, I've dropped my new entry and broken it.

Hmm.

I'm going to go find some...post glue.

Or some Velcro.

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I know I've said it before; this time I mean it. A last-minute design-change meant ordering a new batch of switches and returning the old, inadequate, downright unAmerican last batch, along with a couple of other components that I, uh, forgot I'd need. All that will arrive tomorrow, and I get to start turning that wren's nest of wires into a great pod o' electronics wizardry that will run all my various back-to-nature electronic gizmos.

The basic concept: a single black box that you plug solar panels into which will provide DC output for six items, with the option to power each item from a 12-volt battery charged by the panels, or directly from the panels via a 13.8-volt DC-DC converter. In addition, each solar panel can be individually routed to the converter or the battery's charge controller.

I have two devices that have no batteries of their own: the CB and the Wilson cellular phone amplifier. These will run off of the 12-volt battery or the solar panels. The laptop, iPod, and cell phone have their own batteries that can be charged up using the DC-DC converter. The GPS has its own AA batteries, but sucks them down quickly, so it will be wired to run off the 12-volt battery or the panels, with the AAs for backup. The "problem child" of this build is the digital camera: it uses AAs, and eats them up like Saturn snackin' on his chilluns, but doesn't have a 12-volt adapter available. So, I'm still scoping out the possibility of getting ahold of a 12-volt charger for AA rechargeables, so I won't spend a fortune in batteries as I pedal across the US of A.

Because this camera? Takes video. And, after I saw the overpriced 512MB SD cards at Best Buy, I took my newly-purchased camera outside, sat down on the curb in front of the store, fired up my laptop with its cellular modem, and grabbed a 2GB SD card off eBay with four times the capacity at half the price. So the camera will take lots of video. Which means I need reliable power! That's right: you'll be getting the full-on multimedia onslaught as I travel.

I will pause to let you salivate.

Or whatever it is you do when you come here.

The choice I'm having to make is essentially weight vs. cost: it will cost quite a bit to feed the camera with AA alkalines. Carrying a AA-charger and a set of batteries to rotate through it will add more weight. I haven't yet done the usual "lay out all your gear, and don't bring half of it" ritual for normal bicycle touring...but the fact that I'm bringing along my own multi-purposed custom-built solar power supply and a 27-inch television makes being a weight weenie rather like ordering the two-cheeseburger meal, a Big Mac, a five-piece Chicken Selects and a Diet Coke.

Still, every ounce does matter...shave a few off here and there and before you know it you've shaved a couple of pounds, for which your quadriceps will thank you as you crawl up the side of a mountain. This is why my French press and my Sierra cup are made out of titanium. Solar panels can only get so light before they become too fragile to travel with, so the weight has to come off of other things. Such as the cyclist, for example.

As near as I can figure, I've dropped just shy of twenty pounds since my top Winter weight. And somewhere in Kansas, I'm going to have to find a Target or a (shudder) Wal-Mart and replace a few of my clothing items, which by that point will have become voluminous and useless. (This is one advantage of the chain-storing of America: I know that I will be able to find what I need at a store somewhere in the Midwest that will be very much like a store here in New York.)

So, I while I'm pondering the whole ounce-ish weenieness of it all, I should probably take that into account.

Nearer, nearer, nearer...the house appraisal is tomorrow. The pile of Big Trash on the curb grows daily, as we shed superfluous items like a destroyer about to make the jump to light speed, thus providing cover for the scoundrel-hero and his rebel buddies to escape the clutches of our evil geek empire...for now.

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I spent most of the day fitting nearly everything on this table into the small black box in its center. Of course, any significant build-a-thing project must be accompanied by a decent bottle of wine, and so: although the work proceeded apace, at the thin end of the evening I had basically assembled a small squid-like object composed of wires, switches, and a pair of 2.5mm plugs which immediately flew out the window in pursuit of the Nebuchadnezzar. I had also installed a half-dozen switches in the box, drilled the anchor points for the DC-DC converter, the cellular amplifier, and the charge controller, and replaced the fragile glass-tube style fuse on the converter's input line with a tough and manly automotive spade-style fuse. But the bulk of the black box consists of various lengths of 16-gauge wire with spade terminals on one end and quarter-inch female disconnects on the other...almost 60 of them. Each one individually measured, snipped, crimped, and fit to a switch or a #6 terminal stud. Focused, repetitive work.

Which is why there's wine!

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I am so very glad that I am leaving this place and going traveling, instead of leaving and holing up in a rented Habitrail somewhere in yet another gum-stuck concrete urban expanse. That would be difficult, and depressing.

The fields that recently covered me with a fine coating of themselves have since been dampened and planted, and the first small onion sprouts are already poking up, so that the deep black soil is peppered with a stubble of chlorophyll. The crosswinds were kicking up today, but all of that topsoil stayed put, so I was not exposed to another onslaught of powdered fecundity.

Mmmm...powdered fecundity.

There are still many hidden little treasures in this area, although given the pace of development much of that will probably be gone in another few years. I've always been curious about Simpsonville, for example. I passed by 5.8% of its population mulching some flowerbeds, but she didn't seem entirely open to a "So what's this about, anyway?" conversation, so we just exchanged greetings as I passed by, and two minutes later I was no longer in Simpsonville. At some point before I leave, though, I will have its secrets. I suspect Freemasonry.

People around here seem to be into the whole trike thing: I get thumbs-ups, waves, and this afternoon a minivan-driving lady was so enthusiastic about my tri-wheeled steed that she pulled up next to me, called out "I love it!" then pulled up next to Pea, riding a few hundred feet ahead, asked her if she was with me, and told her she loved it. So I think she liked the trike.

I don't expect everyone to be like that across the country, and I'm sure the first thrown bottle (it's happened to a friend of mine here) will be an occasion to contemplate mouth-breathing evil and the ending of Easy Rider. But until then, I remain optimistic. At the very least, there is some comfort in knowing that people who habitually abuse cyclists may be thrown off by the weirdness of my rig so that by the time they decide that yes, I am in fact deserving of a thrown object, they will have passed me.

Today was a near-fully loaded ride. The trailer, with most of its gear and the solar panels stowed on its rack, weighs in at about 50 pounds. With the addition of a few remaining bits of gear and clothing, it will probably weigh in at about 60 pounds or so. The black box will add another ten pounds, but that will ride on the trike's rack. Aside from my technological indulgences, I've been fairly judicious with the gear...it's all the fastest-and-lightest camping gear I could afford. But if I have to, say, fill up the water bladder to get through s stretch of road without services, it'll tip the scales at 70 pounds, which is on the heavy side. But this is all guesstimation. I'll see if my neighbor has a deer carcass scale that I can hang my trailer on.

And now: a shower, the ritual slathering of an inch-thick layer of Icy Hot upon my lower extremities, and dinner.

---
UPDATE:

Icy Hot + scrotum = bad craziness.

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When I read something described as "Durable black PVC diamond embossed panels surrounded by sturdy aluminum frame," I expect said durable black panels to be made out of PVC. Stupid human!

When I drilled into my WT-166, I was rewarded with the toasty smell of curly wood shavings instead of the healthy fumes of friction-heated plastic. Turns out the panels are a thin layer of rubbery PVC over high-density particle board. The case was going to spend its life traveling on the trike rack, and puncturing the PVC layer meant the particle board would be vulnerable to moisture and, therefore, to rot.

I decided to go ahead with the build and make liberal use of silicone sealant...and the case turned out to be too small. It's perfectly-sized for all the components, but there wasn't quite enough room for all the thick bundles of 16-gauge wire that I need to run.

After more research, I finally discovered the blow-molded cases made by Platt. Many sizes, all constructed of double-walled, "prime, high-density polyethylene." None of that peasant-grade thermoplastic, no sir! Model 406 gives me another 33 square inches of panel surface to work with, so that's the one I've ordered.

Still...it's a blow to the program. I'd be perfect for a Government technology project: four attempts to find the perfect enclosure, each attempt costing more than the last one and putting everything else further behind schedule, so that I'll be hitting the road with an inadequately-tested unit that will probably explode and kill everyone within a twelve-block radius.

This afternoon, Pea discovered that her brand-new space-saving all-in-one HP printer/fax/scanner/cappucino machine is incapable of printing binary-encoded .EPS images, thus making it useless for her purposes. ("Binary?" I asked. "Isn't that the fundamental language of all computers?" Apparently Hewlett-Packard has dispensed with such primitive bullshit.) So Luddite revolution is in the air, and we've hired us a Mentat to do all our calculatin'.

And...well, no "and," really, that's pretty much the whole day in a few vaguely-proofread paragraphs.

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Today was an errand day. That's the general impression that I have of it, ay any rate...I paused for a moment to remember what I did first today, and couldn't. I think I might've rented a car. That sounds about right.

With less than two weeks until closing, the days are achieving a kind of momentum. Each day, another task gets done, another chunk of stuff gets packed or put into storage, another task gets crossed off the venerable To-Do spreadsheet. Much of it is the small stuff - I am now shorn, for example, sporting my travel-haircut - but it's a great big pile of small stuff, so chipping away at a bit of it every day is the only way to prevent the whole running-down-the-street-gibbering-wrapped-in-tin-foil-and-Pop-Tarts scenario.

I did manage to squeeze a small ride in, and was gratified to see that I eked out a whopping 8.7 miles per hour average speed. That might not sound like much, but when I first hitched up the fully loaded trailer that figure was 7.4, so things are improving. Trikes, being heavier, and with three wheels to offer rolling resistance instead of just two, aren't the speediest of pedaled conveyances. Adding a load of gear doesn't help matters. But: that's 8.7 mph average over hilly terrain, and it's only 1.3 mph away from the much-desired 10 mph. And on the flats, I kept it at 13 mph with only a small cardiac arrest. So I should make decent time in Kansas.

Then I will hit the Rockies, where I fully expect to have days where I spend seven hours in the saddle and cover twenty miles. That will suck. There's probably some suck to be found in the Missouri Ozarks, as well.

But it's the suck that makes it an adventure! Or something!

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