In passing, about a month ago? No?

Oh.

Anway, here are the procedural elements of said Crazy Stunt:

1. Sell house.
2. Put worldly possessions in storage.
3. Stash Bob the Cat in friend's apartment.
4. Pedal tricycle across America.

No, really. I'm serious. I put a down payment on the trike on Saturday

Here...maybe a diagram will help get the drift of my gist across to you, the reader:

OK? No?

All right then. You and your damnable word-style explanations.

My girlfriend and I are selling Peapod, and, alas, parting ways. This means that I will be without mortgage or rent, and will have a small wad of cash.

I am going to take part of that small wad of cash and use it to purchase a Greenspeed GTO and a Windwrap fairing to go with it. The GTO is a recumbent touring trike designed for long-distance trips, and it will tow my Burley Nomad trailer containing (hopefully) all of the gear I will need.

I will be cycling the TransAmerica trail, a 4,247-mile route mapped out by the good folks at Adventure Cycling. I'll be leaving from Yorktown, Virginia, and with luck and unexploded knees I'll dip my front wheels in the Pacific when I reach Astoria, Oregon. Then, I will head south from Oregon to Santa Barbara, California, traveling along part of the Pacific Coast Route. The total journey will be a bit over five thousand miles, and I'm going to give myself about five months to do it.

The plan is to find shelter where I can, "diving in" to set up camp in unfenced, unposted areas, using the occasional bona-fide campground for when I can't manage that and, when I need a shower and a night indoors, staying at hostels or motels. You can read more about this sort of thing at the late Ken Kifer's site.

What will happen to this site? I'm glad you asked.

I will be carrying two folding 32-watt solar panels, designed and built by Connecticut Solar. When in use, these panels will deploy across the top of the Burley trailer, and will provide power and charging capacity for the following devices:

• Dell Inspiron 700m laptop
• iRiver iFP-799 MP3 player/recorder
• Apple 60GB iPod
• Samsung SPH-i700 cellphone/PDA
• A yet-to-be-purchased digital camera
• A similarly unpurchased GPS unit

While I am crossing the country, I will be updating this site on a regular basis. My laptop is equipped with a Kyocera KPC650 cellular EVDO modem that will provide at least a 14.4 kbps connection across large swatches of the United States, and when I can't get a cell signal, the laptop has an ordinary 56K modem.

I will be creating and uploading podcasts using the iRiver recorder and Giant Squid Audio Lab's omnidirectional stereo microphone. I'll edit and produce the podcasts on the laptop using Audacity.

Visitors will be able to find out where I am by clicking a link on the site and opening a Google Map populated with my latest GPS data.

So...that's the what and the how, with a generous dollop of the old techy-geeky.

And here's the why, or as much of it as I can figure out at the moment.

To begin with: I've been thinking about doing something like this for five years. I'm at a point in my life where I'm more than a little fed up with my own neuroses, my own continual sense of "not fitting in," square peg, round hole, so on and so forth blah blah that's our fifty minutes. Despite Buckaroo Banzai's sage observation, it is my opinion that becoming a technological pedal-powered vagrant will yield the kind of self-knowledge that will allow me to relate to the world with a bit more grace and a lot less nonsense.

Second: for the past several years, I've been listening to various pundits, loudmouths, and idiots both domestic and foreign expound at great lengths and with enormous conviction about what America is, who Americans are, and what we all think about everything. I'm tired of listening to these people. So, I'm going to find out for myself. I'll be crossing eleven of these United States, and I'll be listening, watching, and learning as I go. Hopefully, you will, too.

When I'm done with all of this, there will be a book.

And I will look fabulous.

The plan is to leave sometime around May of 2006. Until then, I've got a house to sell, physical training to do, and a life to "unplug" from all of the things that come with having a fixed address. I'll be posting about these activities occasionally, because getting ready for the journey is as much a part of the process as pedaling.

There you have it: Astonished Head Does America.

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I'm in the process of bulding up my legs while babying my knees, in preparation for my cross-country trip. In March, I somehow tore the medial meniscus of my left knee - I say "somehow" because it wasn't an acute injury from falling down the steps or Tangoing off a balcony; it presented as a deep, deep ache in the knee whenever it was flexed at 90 degrees for more than five minutes or so. A few months later, my right knee started to feel somewhat similar, so the recumbent bike became a prime suspect.

The injury was probably the result of riding my recumbent with the front boom too far in (the boom extends out in front, and it's where the pedals are). This is the equivalent of having your seat too low on an upright bike. But doing this is even worse on a recumbent, because it creates much greater pressure on the knees than a standard bike. This, combined with my legs' tendency to "flop outwards" at the hips because of the laid-back recumbent position and the fact that I was mashing gears instead of spinning at higher RPMs, added up to a mess o' bad mojo for my cartilage.

It's much improved, now, but it means that I have to be extra careful with both knees, and train up gently.

That injury, paradoxically, is one of the motivators for making this journey. I'm only 34, but my body is letting me know that it might not always be able to pedal 5,000 miles, so if I'm going to do such a thing, now is the time. It also adds a certain frisson to the whole endeavor: will he make it? Will his knees burst somewhere in the Rocky Mountains? Tune in and find out!

On Monday, I extended the boom out two inches. Normally, you're "supposed" to do these adjustments in increments, a quarter or half inch at a time. But: when I rode the 2.48 miles to physical therapy, my knees didn't hurt. It was the first time I've been on the bike that I didn't immediately wonder how the hell I thought I was going to get all the way to the West coast under my own aching power.

All because of a simple readjustment. The boom had been in that same position for at least 800 of the 1,300 miles I've ridden that bike, and during all that time it was causing me unnecessary pain. It was, in fact, injuring me. And in a moment of "What the hell"-ness, I lengthened the boom, which in turn improved my leg extension and, it seems, solved a biomechanical problem that's been plaguing me for almost a year.

There are a number of routes that we ride around here: a little loop that's about eight miles, a medium loop that's twelve, a big loop that's about twenty-two. After awhile, they get kind of dull...here's this hill, shift for it, here's this downhill, you can coast now, here's this spot where the fields look nice when the sun sets.

So today, instead of just pedaling the 2.48 miles back from the PT office to the house, I decided to do the little loop. But I did it backwards, turning onto the street that normally marks the end of the loop, and heading around in the other direction.

It was a revelation. The hills were new and interesting. The views of the snow-covered fields were familiar, but different enough to prompt me to stop and snap a photo with my cellphone/PDA/camera/pneumatic jack while Leadbelly sang the Relax Your Mind blues on my iPod (a blues which is, incidentally, about how to drive and pay attention so that you don't run over chickens or, say, cyclists).

Now I'm feeling fine. Invigorated, even! All because I did a couple of small things differently.

I can't help but wonder about the obvious: how will I feel when I'm doing everything differently? When I'm completely disconnected from my fixed address, my schedule, and my couch?

My guess is pretty damn good.

I'm getting the Big Adventure on, friends, and I can't wait. This will rock the House of Me, no mistake!

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Expressing an envy that conflicts with her desire to avoid falling into ditches, Andrea Harris comments on my Big Adventure-Style Doings:

...actually, there-and-back-again vacation-type travel isn’t really my cup of tea. I consider it a torment: go to some place different from your dull, dreary life and have a wonderful time, then leave to go back to your dull, dreary life — what was the point, other than to make you realize how dull and dreary your life is and how tired you are of waking up to the same four walls, the same streets, etc.? Also, the logistics of getting to the vacation destination — the frantic need to hurry, the planning, the timetable, the rush-hour aspect of everything makes a vacation seem more like work than work. To me the actual journey itself is as important, if not more so, than the destination (the destination being often somewhat of a let-down — “well, we’re finally here”).

I've never been a good vacationer myself (as Pea will attest), which is why this here cycling madness is perfect for me. I've got maps, sure, and I've got a starting point and an ending point, but the middle bits are wide open and ill-defined. If I feel like detouring somewhere in Kansas to go commune with the World's Largest Ball of Twine then I'll do so.

Part of what makes this journey appealing to me is that won't be an escape from my "dull, dreary life," it will be my life. I caught a glimpse of this reality last Saturday when I was in the shop with Johannes, spec'ing out my new trike's options while sitting on the showroom GTO. "This is like ordering my next apartment," I told him.

The danger in speculating ahead of time about a journey like this is that too much emphasis on its Mighty Transformative Power can result in vast disappointment when encountering the mundanity of, for example, having to change a flat tire for the third time in a day because you're in goathead country and discovering that you quite recently rolled through a dog pile.

However, I can't avoid at least some speculation. My life's usual pattern, when moving from one dwelling to another, is to engage in a search for a new dwelling. But I'm not doing that now. I am selling my house, and moving to...a tricycle, with a trailer. No new bank accounts, no calling the telephone and cable company for new hookups, no first-last-deposit payments. No discovering where the closest grocery store is, no unpacking, no arranging of rooms, no hanging of curtains. No laughing at Bob the Cat as she cowers under the bed for three days. In fact: no bed.

Andrea says she has "recurrent urges to drop everything and just run until I get to, I don’t know, Idaho, but fortunately (?) [I] am too lazy and broke for this to be a realistic impulse." But "realistic" isn't really a word I've been paying much attention to, lately. It's actually on my list of Avoided Concepts, along with "career," "fiscally sound," and "knee cartilage." I've already had one person make the "must be nice to be independently wealthy" comment, and yes, it certainly would be, but I'm not. I don't need to be to do this...but that doesn't stop me from wondering what, exactly, I will do when this is over. I'll have some money from the house sale, but not a mountain of it. I'll be on the West Coast with no home or job waiting for me back East, no life - dull, dreary, or otherwise - to plug back into.

I'm trusting that Something Will Happen. I'm hoping.

I feel like the little kid on a tricycle in The Incredibles who keeps showing up at the end of Bob Parr's driveway after he sees Bob lift his car up over his head at the end of a particularly bad day at work.

"Well?" Bob demands. "What are you waiting for?"

"I don't know," the kid says. "Something amazing, I guess."

Me too, kid.

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What you are looking at here is the solar heart of my as-yet-unnamed "tricycle plus trailer" rig. I purchased the first panel earlier this year, but as the list of devices I'll be taking with me grew I decided that I would need more power. The second panel and the converter arrived from Connecticut Solar yesterday.

There are two 32-watt folding solar panels, for a total potential output of 4.6 amps at 13.8 volts. The small black box in between the two panels is the DC-DC converter, which converts the panels' output to a steady 13.8 volts at varying levels of amperage. For those of you new to the whole volt/amp thing: in terms of wattage, 10 volts at 1 amp is equivalent to 1 volt at 10 amps (Watts=Volts x Amps). The converter ensures that I always have a smoothly regulated 13.8 volts, even if it's an overcast day and the panels can only crank out a couple of amps. 13.8 volts is what a car battery produces, and all of my voltage-sensitive electronics (laptop, cell phone, iPod, GPS, etc.) have adapters that are designed to plug into a car's cigarette lighter and run off of DC power.

Instead of a car battery, I've got the sun. The sun is much better than a battery, because it is in outer space and I don't have to carry it in my trailer. Also, I can bet people that my trike is nuclear-powered and win drinks in bars.

When folded, the solar panels will hang along either side of the trike's rear luggage rack. When deployed, they will fold out on swing arms I'm building from PVC pipe, and extend behind me across the luggage rack on top of the Nomad trailer (there will be pictures when I've built all this, of course). This will allow me to charge or run my electronics as I pedal along.

I've received a number of supportive e-mails since I started posting about this, for which I thank the senders. I think I should mention, though, that my proposed journey is not really unique. The route that I am taking was first cycled and mapped out by the Adventure Cycling organization back in 1976, when it was known as "Bikecentennial." Since then, thousands of cyclists have used Adventure Cycling maps to cross the United States, from west to east and vice-versa. Without their nearly-30 years' worth of work maintaining and updating these maps, I might not be going on this journey at all. The organization's development of national cycling routes - including the Pacific Coast route that will be the last leg of my trip - helps make it possible for me to do what I'm doing.

I also owe a significant debt of inspiration to Steve Roberts. 22 years ago, he asked himself:

Where had all my passions gone? One afternoon I listed them: writing, adventure, computer design, ham radio, bicycling, romance, learning, networking, publishing... each of these things had at one time or another kept me up all night in a delicious frenzy of fun and giddy intellectual growth. Yet my reality had become one of performing decreasingly interesting tasks for the sole purpose of paying bills, supporting a lifestyle I didn't like in a house I didn't like in a city I didn't like. I had forgotten how to play. Could it still be possible to construct a lifestyle entirely of passions, or was losing the spark a sadly inevitable part of growing up?

Combining the passions in my list and abandoning all "rational thought," the obvious solution was to simply equip a recumbent bicycle with ham radio and computer gear, establish a virtual home in the nascent online networks, and travel full-time while writing and consulting for a living.

The results of this were Winnebiko I, Winnebiko II, and the 580-pound BEHEMOTH (Big Electronic Human-Energized Machine... Only Too Heavy), shown here. Among other equipment, this massive recumbent and trailer rig sported three computers, two ham radio transceivers, a bubble-jet printer, a satellite terminal, a motion-activated burglar alarm, and hydraulically-deployed training wheels to balance its weight. It took "3.5 years of development with about 160 corporate sponsors and 45 volunteers" to build.

If I didn't know that some crazy person had already done something similar, I can't honestly say that I would've thought to do it myself. Technology has advanced so far in the past fifteen years that I can buy, off-the-shelf, many of the capabilities that Roberts had to design and build from scratch. I encourage you to browse through his Nomad Research Labs site, to see what a true pioneer looks like.

Why is he a pioneer? He unplugged himself from land-based information streams and fixed geographic locations in 1983, the same year that Motorola's 1.75-pound DynaTAC 8000X became the first cellphone licensed for commercial use, and a year before William Gibson published Neuromancer. He sent and received e-mail from acoustically-coupled modems at payphones before most people had e-mail addresses. He had mobile, wireless Internet access before most people even knew what the Internet was, let alone got text messages and porn on their cell phones. He lived his life and ran his business off the grid, traveling over 16,000 miles under his own power in the process.

I can't remember where or when I first read about Steve Roberts and his tech-nomadness. But he clearly made an impression.

As for me...I'm just drafting him.

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If the solar power plant is the heart of my rig, these items right here form its voice. The tall skinny thing is a Wilson Dual Band Trucker Antenna, and the bright flashy thing is a Lightman Visibility Systems Amber Xenon Strobe. Both arrived today, from Alternative Wireless and Southwest Public Safety, respectively.

The antenna is a dual-band omnidirectional antenna designed for use in the analog (800 MHz) and digital (1900 MHz) cell phone radio spectrum. It was originally created for long-haul truckers, who found that cell phones didn't always work very well in the metal cabs of their trucks. I will attach to it my trike and use it to improve the send and receive signal strength of both my cell phone and my computer's cellular EVDO modem. The manufacturer promises a "10 to 15db gain (10 times the signal)," and it does look impressive, with its six little radials arrayed at the base and its fat black tuning coil. I'm sure it will be an improvement over the little stub on my cellphone and the slightly larger swiveling stub on my modem...how much of an improvement remains to be seen.

I'm probably going to attach the strobe light to the antenna pole, because the pole will end up being about five feet high and my trike will only be about six inches off the road. Xenon strobes are visible in daylight - you've seen them on construction vehicles - and this one is especially nifty because it comes with a ruggedized remote toggle switch. I chose amber because that's the only color that is definitively legal for use by cyclists in all 50 states.

I got the strobe with Missouri in mind. That state has a reputation among cross-country cyclists for blind hills, narrow curving roads, and antagonistic logging truck drivers who apparently believe that anyone on a bicycle is a tree-hugging hippy sumbitch and a threat to their livelihood, and therefore must be intimidated with air horns and close passes at high speed. Whenever I feel unsafe on a road, I will flick the handy switch on my Xenon strobe. This might not stop me from getting flattened beneath the wheels of a truck driven by a psychotic lumberjack, but it will make me feel better.

In addition to occupying the same physical space on the trike (up in the air), both of these items are communicative: the antenna will allow me to keep in touch with all you good people, and the strobe will shout photonically at car and truck drivers, saying, Do not crush this hapless tricyclist!

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Kate sends this CNN article by Calvin Woodward, who biked across the country last year using part of the TransAmerica route:

Over three months on roads less traveled, I didn't hear America singing, as poet Walt Whitman did in his exuberant 1855 tribute to a rising nation and its confident workers.

I didn't hear it whining, either, as cynics do today.

I saw America going about its business without fuss.

It waved from front porches, fixed up houses, talked about the day and the times in little coffeehouses.

Grew fields of soybeans and sunflowers, saw the sun come up and go down in the same sky each time, ran trains that thundered and wailed.

Downloaded gospel songs.

Dreamed.

One of the reasons I quit drinking (as opposed to just having a drink), is that a deep drunk pulls the serotonin rug out from beneath my brain for days afterwards, and leaves me a quivering mass, full of dread. That's about where I am at the moment...the house is a mess, there are eight billion things that need doing before it goes on the market, Pea's away in the city so it's quiet and empty, I still haven't got work, and I woke up at 2:30PM covered with dark thoughts, what the hell am I thinking?

So, instead of taking the CNN article as another experience to study in advance of my own, I'm immediately bursting with negatives: Great, CNN's picked TransAmerica up now everybody will do it/nobody will want to publish a book about it/blah blah blah.

Once upon a time, my usual response to this state of gelatinous neurochemical constipation was to go out and get more booze, immediately, and partake of said booze as soon as possible, if not sooner. Today, I'll go to physical therapy instead, get my heart rate up a bit, and be around people.

I just heard back from Paul, the production manager at Greenspeed in Australia - he estimates that I'll probably have my trike at the end of January. Which is good and bad. Good, because I'll have my trike!, and it's always good to have a new set of wheels, especially when there's three of them. Bad, because back when I ordered it, the production delay was going to be a bit longer. I would (hopefully) have some work by the time it arrived, so that I wouldn't have to put the remaining purchase balance on a credit card in advance of getting the proceeds from the house sale. I'll do my usual 0% balance transfer shell game, but I'll still be piling up more debt.

Someday, I will be entirely out of debt. And on that day there will be much rejoicing, and the eating of fattened bankers, and the best portions of the banker's fatty flanks will be retained for the gods.

In the waning week of 2005, reader Carrie e-mailed:

I think a trip like this is by nature transformative. If the object is self-knowledge. And feeling powerful as Zeus (I imagine that will come at the end of the trip, as when changing the same tire repeatedly in goathead country, you will likely be the one railing to the gods) probably also a perk, once you get some distance into it. No wusses on this trip. Something amazing, by definition, will come of it.

On days like today, when I can feel the very organ of my brain in my skull as though it's outlined in camphor, the object of the trip seems to be escape, as thought there's nothing left to do but what I'm doing: minimize, put the head down, and barrel off into the wilderness. Think of all the things I won't have to do next: find an apartment, move, find a car, get new work that's pretty much exactly like the old work, etc. Through the prism of a somewhat wobbly psyche the journey seems more like an easy way out than anything else.

Fortunately, I have some small grasp of that prism's nature, and I know that this will pass. The journey will again seem like a Journey, and if I'm lucky, I'll be able to use the very thought of it as motivation for all the practical tasks that must be done. It's starting already - a kind of half-assed positive feeling!

Calvin Woodward took three months off to bike across the U.S.; then he had to go back to Washington and keep doing whatever it was he did there before he left.

Me? I won't be "due back" anywhere.

Which is reassuring, in a terrifying sort of way.

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What you're looking at right here is a pair of Rocket7 custom mountain bike shoes. These are the shoes that will carry me across 5,000+ miles of American roads.

The foot-pedal interface is the most important part of the whole cycle-human cyborg. It's where the power of your organic legs is transferred to the mechanical gears of your drivetrain. If the footbed of your shoe is too squishy, you lose power, spending it in compressing the soft foamishness instead of pushing the pedal. If it's too stiff and unyielding or not shaped properly, you'll end up with foot pain. I've got some weird nerve thing that happens in my patooties, and after a round of visits to various podiatrists and orthopedists, and experimentation with various "stock" footwear and pedal platform combinations, the custom footwear option was the last resort.

"Clipless" pedals, for those who need to know, actually clip onto the shoes you're wearing (the terminology is a holdover from the days when Tour de France riders raced on wooden rims, smoked cigarettes after long climbs, and sometimes raced drunk). This direct connection to the drivetrain gives you a more efficient power transfer, because you can "pull up" on the pedals as well as push down on them. Switching to clipless pedals on my commuter cycle in New York City was a revelation! My bike and I were one.

I justified the expense of these shoes the same way I justified the expense of the trike: I will be traveling across the continent under my own power, and I damn well better be comfortable doing it. Getting these shoes made involved a soft foam casting, tracing, and three-point "girth" measurement of each foot. The first go-round wasn't quite right - the arch in the right shoe was way too high, resulting in the big big pain while pedaling. So the shoes went back to Rocket7 for modification in mid-November, and I've just got them back now.

They're sweet cycling footwear: hand-made, with close-grained synthetic leathers that resist decay, and a custom carbon-fiber footbed. 230 grams per shoe, which is important: reducing the weight of anything that "spins" (wheels, pedals, cranks, shoes, etc.) provides a significant performance gain over weight reduction in static parts, such as frame elements or handlebars. Which means I really should lose a bit more belly before I leave.

It's a little scary spending this much on an item like this, because even if it's made perfectly, it will still be uncomfortable when you first put it on, and will stay that way for a couple of weeks. That's because the leather and the foam insole need time to mold to the foot in the course of normal use. I'm wearing them now to speed up that process a bit, as I sit on the couch watching "The Road Warrior"...getting all the moldable bits used to my feet while I contemplate an apocalyptic future wherein the suckers kill each other for gazzoline and black leather assless chaps while I pedal on my merry solar-powered way.

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You wouldn't know it to look at me, or the Wolaver's IPA I'm nursing, but I am a person of athletic inclination. I suspect that my early diagnosis of "hyperactivity" was actually an attempt by the Normals to suppress my mutant powers.

My experience with physical therapy for my meniscally-challenged knee is starting to bring these powers forth. Attitudinally, that is. Physically, I'm still something of a lump, remarkably sedentary considering that in four months or so I'll be leaving on a long, leg-powered journey. But my physical therapists keep using terms like potential and performance and strength training, so I'm beginning to think of the trip in terms of athletic endeavor in addition to personal growth and life experience. This here body has to power me across the Rocky Mountains! That means I need to get it off its beer-soaked ass and onto the bike.

As always, practicalities intrude: winter, for starters. My Street Machine has no fairing, so it's a tough to work up the motivation for what is certain to be a liver-chilling ride. That will change a bit once the trike actually gets here, because it does have a fairing. It will keep my poorly-insulated feet out of the frigid airflow and shield my chest from its warmth-sucking impact. There's also the strong New Wheels! motivation...and this is a must-ride-me trike, low to the ground, with two steerable wheels in the front, creating the big zoomy fun-style riding experience.

There's also work: I start my new project gig tomorrow, and that means my days of unlimited free time are now over. I have to fit training, physical therapy, and selling a house into evenings and weekends.

Today, though, I truly became a performance-oriented individual. The left knee, which originally prompted this course of physical therapy, is progressing nicely. The right knee, which was on its way to developing a meniscal tear that mirrored the left, has developed some sort of inflammation in the medial hamstring, coupled with some bursitis at the top of the tibia where the tendon connects. I could keep working it in therapy, but it's gotten worse since I started. The solution? Steroid injection! A big fat needle right into the tendon sheath, like a warhorse quarterback in the locker room at half-time.

Sort of.

The idea is to reduce the swelling and sensitivity so that I can properly build up the muscles in the leg and thus stabilize the entire knee. If it works - which it probably will, it already feels better - I'm probably going to get shots in both knees a couple of weeks before I leave in May. I'll also be carrying a supply of the anti-inflammatory Mobic, which was so effective when I injured my knee back in April. Hopefully, I won't need it.

Today the journey seems more like a reality, and less like a mere plan. My orthopedist and my physical therapists are like support staff, helping me prepare the machinery of my body. I'm working on tuning up my legs, I'm being injected with steroids, and in a couple of weeks I'll start my regular riding regimen. Today, finding myself unaccountably annoyed with painting the dining room, I started visualizing: each brush stroke brought me that much closer to the day when I'll pedal away from the beach in Yorktown, Virginia, starting off on a bona-fide adventure.

And that made minty green paint adventurous, too.

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That guy right there...he's an athlete. That's Joseba Beloki after he broke his leg, wrist, and elbow in a nasty high-speed crash during stage 9 of the 2003 Tour de France. It took many shattered bones to take that guy out of the race.

We had unseasonably good weather today, so I hitched the trailer to the Street Machine and hauled about fifty pounds' worth of clothing to the donation dumpsters about three miles outside of town. The legs, they were working fine (especially the right one, with its steroid-enhanced knee). The shoes, they hurt my arches, which could be a problem unless they mold to my feet a bit more. And my heart...ugh. Apparently I now have the cardiovascular development of a veal calf.

Not surprising, really. I haven't been on the bike much, and the physical therapy has been mainly focused on strengthening my legs and stabilizing my knees. But it's disconcerting to reach the top of a long, gentle hill with little protest from your legs, but with your heart pounding and your breath hot and gaspy. Winter or no, I must get on the bike as often as possible. Given my new consulting project, that means either night rides in the February dark, or getting up absurdly early to do frigid morning rides.

I'm sort of attracted to the morning ride idea: I would feel productive and dedicated. And I know that once I hit the road, I'll be waking up with the sun as it illuminates my tent, so I might as well get used to starting the day earlier. In fact, I'm very attracted to the concept...it has the same what the hell are you thinking? vibe as the entire cross-country trip. So it must be a good idea.

We'll see. Right now, all I know is that some time around June or July, I'll be pedalling a fully-loaded trike across the Rocky Mountains, and I damn well better be up to it.

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According to Paul Sims - Production, Tech, R&D and Web Guy at Greenspeed - my trike left Australia* today, bound for America!

This is good news. I'm at the point where most of the equipment that I'm going to be taking with me on my voyage has either arrived or is on its way, and I need to have the trike so I can start the final build of the solar and communications systems.

This week saw the arrival of the tinted Windwrap fairing that will shield me from headwinds and the sun's baking rays, as well as the Wilson 3-watt dual-band amplifer that will significantly improve my cellular voice and data signal strength.

Soon, I will be pedaling around the countryside on a sweet, three-wheeled ride, and when I'm not doing that, I'll be stripping wire and nursing solder burns on my fingers. Joy!

*From Ascot Vale, in Victoria...which conjures up images of a dale filled with rough and ready outback-style men frolicking in a stream wearing nothing but brightly-colored scarves.

But I'm almost completely certain that I am alone in such imaginings.

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For me, the primary of effect of anti-depressant medication was a great leveling. No lows, but no highs, either...everything became a sort of washed-out sepia, which was neither alarming nor comforting. It also turned off my emotional response to music, so that it no longer served as my audio madeline, and I was no longer transported into reverie.

The medication served its purpose. I've been off it for quite awhile, now, and I'm better able to manage my emotional state, mostly because I can usually recognize when it is my body, rather than my mind or spirit, that is driving that state. I no longer worry that something is wrong! just because my adrenals have kicked in and there's a leaden ball in my chest. I'm able to analyze my current circumstances, compare them to my physiological activity, and decide that my body is simply mistaken.

Lately, my corpus has been doing its damndest to panic me. The thought of coming in to work will cause an elevator-drop in my gut, and I will soothe myself: You're there for three months, hired gun. In and out, no sweat, with a bundle of cash. Confronted with emptying out and cleaning my home office in advance of visits by prospective buyers, I will become suffused with an annoyance that thinly masks the overwhelming fear that I just can't get it all done, and I will tell myself: one shelf at a time, one bag of trash, and soon it will be done. I have to carefully limit myself to one or two ales at the most on weeknights, lest I slip back into the habit of soothing my bodyfear with the anesthesia of alcohol.

In the morning, when the alarm goes off, my chest instantly constricts and tightens, and I lay there trying to snooze for fifteen or twenty minutes, to push off the terrible experience of being awake and aware of the pressures and demands of my life.

Then, I realize: you are leaving all of this. In two months, three weeks, and four days, you will be embarking on a long journey, where the greatest pressures you face will be finding a place to camp and deciding if you want to detour and see the World's Largest Ball of Twine. This is your body panicking, not you.

That helps. But, as Pea said last night, the fact that potential buyers are finally coming to see the house next Saturday makes all of this real.

We're really selling this place, really parting ways.

Everything will change.

Maybe my body is on to something, here!

The fear! The fear is upon me! I claw my own eyes out to spare them from the horror of of its tentacled visage, its glistening maw, its baleful eye, its keening banshee cries! What madness was it that drove me to surrender my morphine syringe for this: hated, crawling reality! Agh! Yuargh! Blauugh!!!

And so on.

I am fully aware: in the category of "sources of stress in life," getting out of bed to get to a well-paying job and making my house ready for sale at a not-insubstantial tax-free profit so I that can galavant across the country on an expensive imported three-wheeled toy doesn't really rank up there with, say, folks who walk ten miles each way for drinking water full of guinea worm larvae that eventually exit as fettucine-looking adults through excruciatingly bloody holes in their legs and feet. Believe me: whenever I come up for air from the navel pool, I thank Whomever that I am where I am and able to do what I do.

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My trike has arrived at my dealer's shop. But I've got such a bad case of brain-jackassery that my only comment is meh. Folks are coming to view the house tomorrow, which means that after a nice few hours of office work wackiness I get to go home and finish off all the house prep work I've been nibbling away at all week.

Meh.

And mrrrgh, too.

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UPDATE:
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Just what is brain-jackassery? I'm glad you asked.

Medical opinion is divided. However, speaking as the world's leading expert on my own head, "brain-jackassery" is the mental state that results when the bottom falls out of my neurochemical soup pot. Key levels of certain neurotransmitters - dopamine, say, or the ever-popular serotonin - drop below an ill-defined threshold, leaving me with a bad case of the heebie-jeebies, a feeling of impending doom, general malaise, depression, and so on.

I blame the ale. I thought I could get away with two in an evening; apparently I can't. Probably even one a night for too many nights in a row is too much. This isn't a hangover, not at all. It's just that the Belgian monk's brew upsets my mental state more than is tolerable.

Which means I can't enjoy a simple evening libation as often as I'd like.

It's a little self-corrective mechanism, I think: hey, beer-boy! Getting a little too friendly with the fermented beet sugars there, aren't you?

I've said it before, I'll say it again: at times like this that I cannot believe I used to drink as much as I did. Idiot.

Anyway: my mood has lifted a bit since this morning, and I'm not quite as convinced that I am a wretched fool who has blown his only chance for happiness and is attempting to fix his self-shattered life by pedaling off on an ill-advised journey of avoidance that will almost certainly end badly.

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Apparently I have entered the zone where coffee and heroin intersect. I wake up with a headache that feels like my brain has been replaced by a homunculus that crouches in my skull and has its tiny hands wrapped firmly around the back of each eyeball, squeezing...squeezing...and I know that if I don't get If I don't get a cup of the browned juicings of the naughty bean soon, I'll be stealing televisions and turning tricks for Japanese businessman.

Fortunately, I've got a big jar of satin-sheened dark-roasted beans, a grinder, and a brewing machine, so I just stumble into the kitchen and make some coffee.

I had a very involved dream last night wherein I was "apprenticed" to an Orthodox rabbi, who was teaching me how to make bread. Not challah, or any Jewish-specific baked product, but all kinds...sourdough, Italian-style, rye, you name it. We worked in the basement of his house, which seemed to be somewhere in a Brooklyn-like setting.

I was baking with the rabbi because it was an experience that I had sought out for myself. His attitude towards the endeavor was somewhat gruff, and utterly competent. One day, though, he left me alone in the basement bakery, and although I had the skills to do what was required, I either chose not to, or lacked confidence. I couldn't make the dough properly, and if I managed to make some, I couldn't bake it properly. I thought about going upstairs into his house to use the residential oven in his kitchen, but was ashamed to do so...I thought of so many ways to either shorten the labor involved in the task at hand, or to avoid it entirely.

Now, if I were a Mondo Mystic of some kind, I might interpret this dream as, say, a condemnation of the newly-fashionable study of Kabbalah. Those seeking to avoid the labor of studying Torah and Talmud prior to studying Kabbalah will never be able to stand on their own in the community. Seeking to understand Torah and Talmud through Kabbalah is like trying to understand how to bake bread by studying a finished loaf.

But I'm not a Mondo Mystic of any kind, and I do remember, back in 1995, actually talking to someone at Union Theological Seminary - a graduate-level institution - about whether it might be possible to attend without a completed BA. Because I knew, see, that I was so smart that I didn't really need that BA, and I could just skip over that and head right into the advanced study of theology. A similar pattern repeated itself in my various attempts to study Koine Greek. The idea of knowing the ancient language was so very compelling, but the actual study of it, the memorizing of the stems and their multitudinous declensions, created some weird psychological reverberation within my lazy mind that almost literally prohibited me from undertaking the activity. It was all very neurotic, and my most recent attempt at studying Greek, among other things, was cut short by the terrorist attacks of 2001: I decided (secretly, almost thankfully) that I could not wrestle with my inner intellectual demons, look for a house, and cope with the aftermath of the attacks at the same time, so I withdrew from school, bought a house, and fled New York.

Now, that particular epicycle of consequence is almost complete: the For Sale sign went up in front of the house on Friday. I'll be embarking on a months-long journey during which, I expect, I'll have a fair amount of time to Think About Things. One of those Things, perhaps, might be deciding whether I actually want to learn to bake bread, or just eat it.

Meanwhile: my heroin is done, so I'm going to go pour a cup of it, and read a book.

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...to pick up the trike.

Pictures and other goodies to follow.




[Here are the brackets that contain my little Happy Dance.]

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OK- here's just one photo from Johannes' shop, demonstrating my Chuck Mangione-style attitude towards my trike, my impending journey, and the Universe in general. Note the warp field exuding from the tires.

I've only had the briefest of rides on the trike but: it is a sweet ride. There is unexpected chrome involved, which I'll explain later. Right now it's in the dining room, with its newly-installed fairing. This is the tradition in my house: new pedaled conveyances spend a few days indoors, where they can be coveted and fawned over. More pictures in a bit.

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I will have more (and better) pics later on, but for now, feast yer eyes:

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This is a view I'll be seeing quite a lot of. Fortunately, the scenery will change. I won't be paid well or allowed to use explosives, though (10 Astonished Points to anyone who can peg that reference. Hint: "He's got space dementia!").

Right now, the entire idea of the trip seems like bad craziness. I've got the kind of jitters that knock down forests, and the fact that we're about to go to contract on the house makes it worse. Yep: I'm really trading a roof over my head for a nylon tent. Some days that makes all kinds of sense to me. Lately, it's been completely unreal. So I'm having bouts of the Big Unreality at the moment. Big bouts, landing on my face! It's all laughs until someone loses their lunch.

Working on the build helps a bit. I've been designing and re-designing the various systems in my mind for months - where to put the solar panels, how to carry the batteries, what switches to use, and so on. Now that I've actually got the trike, and can see just how laughably impractical some of my ideas are, I can really...no, wait, that sucks! I have to build all this stuff in less than two months! Agh!!! To the Bat Medicine Cabinet, Boy Wonder! Bring me the Bat Benzodiazepines!

Sort of. I am having to scale a couple of things back - no portable amateur radio transceiver, because 1) the sunspot cycle is at its ebb, which means that radio wave propagation on the 10-meter band sucks and the transceiver would be useless weight, and 2) I don't have enough time to study for the exams that would allow me to upgrade my license so I can use other, better bands. The switching system for the various solar panel and battery power options will be less complex, because the installation of the cellular antenna mast means that I don't have as much room on the trike's rear rack as I thought I would, so everything has to fit into a smaller box.

Today, I hitched the trailer up and laid the folding solar panels out across its rack to see what options I have for deploying them while I'm riding.

That's what you're looking at here - viewed from the back, across the solar panels. When I get them properly strung up with cunning bungie cords, they'll be stretched flat, ready to suck up the sun's photons and use them to power my gadgets and my forward-mounted anti-jerk laser cannon.

The times when this wacky scheme of mine seem the most real are when I'm actually on the trike, which is a good thing, because it'd be bad news indeed if it felt like an impossible task while I was pedaling.

If I manage to pull this off, even I'll be impressed. However, I am fully anticipating that, at some early point in the trip - maybe even the first day - I will roll to a stop by the side of a road I've never been on before, lean over, and heave my most recent meal into the ditch.

I expect I'll feel better afterwards, though, so I'm kind of looking forward to it.

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This sucks.

Actually, it's really cool.

But I need an ultra-compact methanol-fueled powercell that will run my laptop for two days now, not at the end of the year!

[Via OhGizmo!, which got it from Engadget.]

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Tornadoes in southern Missouri and southern Illinois killed two people whose pickup truck was blown into a propane tank as the twisters flattened homes along a 20-mile path, officials said. Several others were injured.

The worst damage was along a rural stretch Highway 61 in Perry County, about 80 miles south of St. Louis, where the victims had been driving, emergency management director Jack Lakenan said. The force of the wind wedged the truck beneath the propane tank, he said.

The tornado also split a brick ranch home in half, tossed mobile homes, caved in garages and snapped dozens of trees. Several people were hurt; two were taken to a hospital in St. Louis.

Part of my route is a 405-mile stretch from Murphysboro, Illinois to Girard, Kansas that cuts across the entirety of Southern Missouri. I do hope they're done with all their tornadoeing by the time I get there.

In other, less death-defying news, I took the trike out for another ride on Saturday, which wasn't quite as nice as Friday, when I was stuck in a cubicle being irradiated by my monitor while the temperature-measuring devices outside topped 70 degrees. But Saturday put in a a good effort. The stray patches of undissolved salt in the winter-dead grass and the vast bolus of incipient leaf-mulch drying by the curb were the only evidence that municipal plows had recently ground their way down our street, leaving filthy snow and rotting autumn debris mixed together in convenient piles at the end of the driveway.

Whenever possible I'm putting myself in less than ideal riding situations, to see how I can handle them on the trike: narrow or rough shoulders, high traffic, steep downhills with curves in them. So far, the "steep downhill with curve" scenario is the one that gets my heart racing. Supposedly, the increased rolling resistance from the third wheel and the heavier weight of a trike slow it down quite a bit. I don't have a bike computer mounted yet, so I have no real data about how fast I'm going...but when you're barely eight inches off the road, it doesn't feel very slow at all.

The faster the trike goes, the more sensitive it becomes to steering corrections. Johannes, my recumbent dealer, warned me about that, saying that first-time trike riders have a tendency to overcorrect at high speeds, causing a loss of control.

So: I pedaled downhill in my fastest gear until I reached its limit (called "spinning out"), and then clicked the internally-geared rear hub up to 3, which is the trike equivalent of hitting the nitrous button on a car. I was now pedaling with a much bigger gear, and my speed increased substantially...wind hitting my face, the fairing and trailer bouncing and rattling along, my six-foot rainbow Kiri Kard snapping and crackling straight out from the antenna mast.

Every pedal stroke resulted in a slight swerve, because I was gripping the handlebars at my sides too tightly. At any moment I might careen across the road, hit the special hidden jump ramp, then sail through the air in a slow-motion spiral before I crashed into a ditch and exploded. I experimented with a looser grip on the controls, but soon realized that the best solution was to just stop pedaling and coast. Even then: I caught up with an Infiniti SUV that had passed me earlier, and I had to slow down to avoid rear-ending it. This made me angry, so I launched a fusillade from my anti-jerk cannons, and the trucklet swerved off the road, hit the special hidden jump ramp, spun through the air in slow motion, then hit the ground and exploded.

All right, maybe not so much with the "less death-defying."

From what I've read, the portion of my Missouri route that cuts through the Ozarks has lots of short, steep hills...up-and-down sort of riding. Hoosier Pass (11,450 ft.) in Colorado is going to be a different experience - mile after mile of steady downhill, the sort of riding that can make disc brake rotors heat up until the fluid in the brake lines boils and locks the brakes, so that you skid out of control, crash through the guardrail, and tumble over the cliff's edge. Then you have to jettison the trailer and deploy the parasail.

That would suck - all my stuff is in the trailer.

So I'd better hone my mad trike-handling skills now, while I'm closer to sea-level.

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Arkel Overdesigns is a Canadian manufacturer of bicycle panniers. As their name implies, their products are overbuilt, tough-as-nails, and designed for people like me who plan to live out of them for months at a time.

I'm going to be traveling with a number of small, expensive gadgets - a laptop, an iPod, a digital camera, a GPS unit, etc. When I'm off the trike, they'll need to come with me. What you're looking at here in Super 3-Dee Omniview™ is the Arkel Bug. It's a pannier that converts into a backpack, and is perfect for my needs.

I know quality when I see it, and this thing reeks of it. It has the same waterproof zippers as my Gore-Tex rainsuit. The mounting hardware is solid machined aluminum. When I pulled it out of the box, I was puzzled by a swatch of Cordura nylon fabric among the various manufacturer's tags, with a slice halfway through it. Was it included for repairs? Then I saw the tag next to it. RIP ME! DÉCHIREZ MOI! it demanded. Do other bags measure up to this test? Est-ce que les autres sacs résistent à ce test? Other bags might, but I could not rip that swatch, despite the slice. The whole bag is made of the same stuff.

Fitting panniers to a trike with 20-inch wheels can be a tricky business, and I wasn't at all sure that the Bug would work. But it fit onto the rack and cleared the ground with room to spare. The lower potion of the Bug's backplate is angled outward so that it won't interfere with the operation of the rear derailleur, which is just plain smart. The straps stow away behind velcro-secured panels when it's on the rack, and they're comfortable when wearing it as a backpack.

The Bug rocks! I only wish it came in black with blue highlights, to match the trike...and my shoes...

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On a personal level, Freaking Out is a process whereby an individual casts off outmoded and restricting standards of thinking, dress, and social etiquette in order to express CREATIVELY his relationship to his immediate environment and the social structure as a whole.

-Frank Zappa

Once, back when I was stealing a room from someone I went to high school with, I got this "job" that had to do with setting up an alternative economy on behalf of these two old guys who had rented a townhouse on the outskirts of Princeton for this purpose. It was a barter system: they intended to establish a network of people who sold various products and services, and set it up so that the people in the network could easily connect with each other to trade their products and services without the intermediary use of what the Guvmint calls "money." My job was to cold-call potential network people and talk to them about it. I cut all my hair off for that job. I didn't need to - I successfully interviewed with my freak flag flying - but I was bored with it and my ends were split at an atomic level.

I spent three days in an upstairs room of this rented townhouse, staring at the phone. Could. Not. Do. It. So I told them that I had a family emergency in Virginia, and had to leave, and didn't know if I was coming back to New Jersey. Ever. Then, I packed up a bag of nuts and two gallons of water, and drove down to the Delaware Water Gap, to Yards Creek Scout Camp (yes, I was a Boy Scout. That's where I learned how to drink). I hiked up to the ridge above Troop 43's now-deserted campsite, and walked a bit along the Appalachian trail. I spent a sleepless night under a tarp, wrote angsty things in a journal, and found an onion on a rock. It was obviously a sacred onion, so I made soup out of it and ate it.

That was in 1992 or thereabouts. One night in 1996, I got myself all hopped down on Xanax, muscle relaxants, and a jug of wine, and shaved my head entirely. The next morning I woke up as a bald amnesiac, so I called up the Major Corporation where I was a Temporary Staff Member and explained to my manager that I'd been under alot of stress and that something "had broken," so I wouldn't be in to work that day. She understood. It's one of my mutant powers - I know how to turn I've lost my mind and can no longer function into phrases that will elicit sympathy and understanding from managers. It generally works better with women (sorry, that's just how it is), and yeah, it's manipulative, but sometimes I have an acute need to weasel out of my adult-style obligations and tend to the freaky morass that is my self.

Which, of course, brings us up to the here-and-now, right on and so forth. Such repeated tending has finally led to the five-wheeled pedal-powered solar-energized freakmobile, upon which I will sit my slightly-thinning ass and head out into wild America, free of most every external thing that doesn't harmonize well with the strange frequency at which I seem to vibrate.

Other than pedaling from place to place, there will be nothing for me to do except think, read, write, and generally get my CREATIVE freak on. This, I think, is a situation much more conducive to harmonious vibratory weedley-wee than, say, working in an office and schlepping downstairs to the cafeteria for the same damn sandwich every day.

And, through your pixellated fishtank glass, all you lovely people get to observe what happens to me as I become unfettered. Will I spin the captivating tale of a bold journey? Or will I be just another wacko on a tricycle?

Watch this space!

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My right knee, which apparently really wants to be all injured like its brother knee was last March, has been subdued with another spike of steroid to the tendon. So, after an evening of knocking over convenience stores and starting fistfights, it's a bit bruised at the injection site and a little achey, but that will pass. The problem, it seems, was a persistent inflammation of the bursa on the medial side of the knee. Not crippling or especially painful, but considering I'm going to be flexing that knee repeatedly for about 5,000 miles it seemed best to knock the inflammation back a bit and give the little sac o'fluid time to calm down.

As the orthopedist's assistant remarked, it's really time to start logging the miles on that Five-Wheeled Freakmobile. I'm leaving in six weeks, and that's just barely enough time to train up a bit. Cold weather and a lack of sunlight after work have made it tough to get out there and pedal. But if my knees are going to explode and shower passing cars with bits of bone and cartilage, I'd rather it happened now instead of somewhere in the Ozarks, because I'd prefer not get captured by mountain people who would cauterize my stumps with a hot poker and keep me shackled to a bedframe in a small dark cabin, where I'd periodically get corn mush, a jigger of likker, and nocturnal visits from Cousin Randolph, who ain't been right since Mama died and the still blew up in his face.

I now have 95% of the items I need to build the electronics pod for the solar batteries and the cellular amplifier...Arkel (because they rock so hard) actually sells their machined aluminum pannier-mounting hardware as a separate kit, so I can use that to mount the pod to the rack. I still have to weatherproof the box and wire the whole thing up, but it's coming together, conceptually at least. The last major hurdle is figuring out a way to securely deploy the solar panels while I'm riding, which is proving to be trickier than I anticipated. The final design may involve some carbon rod, which is always good. You can never have too much carbon rod.

The key is to build something that will be sturd but not too heavy, and won't rely on unique parts that I might lose in the course of a bear attack or tornado. My first idea used many bungie cords, which are multipurpose objects, but proved inadequate. Now I need something that will keep the panels spread out flat atop the trailer, and will stow easily when not in use. So: some sort of lightweight rod. With maybe some hooks. Or hose clamps. Hose clamps are good, too. With hooks, hose clamps, and carbon rod, you can build almost anything.

Except a way to exit a meandering post.

For that, you need tape of some kind.

And baggies.

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If it weren't for the fact that I'm shortly going to be getting several months' worth of great riding, I'd say that I'm really going to miss the riding around here.

Today: a ride down onto the floor of the valley, with the trailer hitched up, a couple of folded solar panels in it for weight, and my new fiberglass antenna mast which, although bright ANSI yellow, is much too tall and needs about a foot and a half sawn off of it.

I also gave the troublesome shoes another test. I ordered them in December of last year, which should have been plenty of time for a May departure. But they've been back to the manufacturer twice to correct a problem with the arch casting in the right footbed, which caused the same foot pain that I got custom shoes to avoid. I got them back (again) on Friday, after they had shaved another 1.75 millimeters off of the top of the arch. Just standing around in them, they felt better. But on Saturday: more pain while pedaling.

Today, though, my foot seemed to just give in. The bones in the arch relaxed, and by the end of the ride both shoes were showing signs of an incipient glove-like fit. I'll have to put more miles on them, to let the leather stretch and the foam compress, before I'm sure. If necessary I can always fall back on a new pair of the Cannondale mountain shoes I've been using for the past couple of years, knowing that they'll fit well until the plastic soles warp into painful curves after 1,000 miles or so. That will mean acquiring new shoes on the road, and logistical hassle. So I'm hoping for continued good signs from the Rocket7s.

The other bit of good news is that the winter weight training really seems to have paid off. The knees are good, the muscles are loose and responsive. Usually, getting back in the saddle after a winter's hibernation is fairly painful; not so this year. So I'm not nearly as concerned as I would be if, say, I spent all winter on the couch at the bottom of a bag of Doritos.

The challenge is going to be fitting back-to-back higher mileage days in between now and departure day. Fortunately, I don't have to do consecutive centuries or anything extreme on this trip. If I want to do thirty-mile days for the first few weeks, I can do that. If I want to take several days off to give the legs time to rebound, I can do that too. I'm leaving early enough in the year that weather won't be a problem if I take my time - I'll be crossing the Rockies at some point during the summer.

Riding the trike is an altogether different experience than riding my upright or my two-wheeled recumbent. With the seat about eight inches off of the road, the perspective is different: instead of the details of overhanging tree branches, I notice the architecture of corn stubble in the fields. The road surface is a more immediate sensory input. And with the fairing, the wind is much less adversarial. The gusting headwind in the valley was neatly shunted aside by the tinted polycarbonate, which made me grin: no endless grind into Kansas prairie winds for me!

At the turnaround point, I paused for a few minutes, stepping off the trike to take in the quiet road, the fields, the swatches of browning snow still clinging to the hillside, and the distant sound of a flock of geese.

I will miss this place. But I'll have one new place after another to take my mind off it.

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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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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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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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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 tu