Well, I'm spending my third full day here in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, due to a busted belt. The belt SHOULD arrive today, but as it didn't arrive by 11 a.m., the timing won't work out to get on the road today; not safely at any rate. The belt should arrive this afternoon and I'll have my bike back tonight; I'm hoping to leave this one-horse town (no pun intended) by 5 a.m. tomorrow.
In the meantime, the weather has done a 180 from grey and rainy to breezy, sunny, glorious perfection. I can see the attraction to living in this area - for about twelve weeks of the year.
The problem I face now is in getting to Minneapolis on time for a teaching gig. I am rather upset about this gig and having accepted it at all, on the timing I did. I am going to have to have a talk with my boss when all this is over; a talk about when my calendar says "unavailable" for a particular block of time, there are to be no questions about that, period. What my boss has a habit of doing is asking very reasonable questions about what that "unavailable" means - where I'll be and what I'll be doing - and then finding a logical way of using any extra time. I should not have revealed that I was going to back in NY for a week decompressing between trips - he pounced and I got scheduled for a gig. I did bring up on the phone the possibility of a serious delay such as this one, but that didn't concern him nearly as much as ME conforming to the client's calendar. Well, no more of this shit. I will do these gigs, but as I discussed when I originally went to work doing this, the gigs MUST fit with my calendar, not mine with theirs. We broke that rule this time, and I'll be paying for it in 800-mile days starting tomorrow. Frankly, if I keep thinking about it, I'll become so pissed off, I'll have a severe asthma attack (it's happened before), so I'll just leave this topic now.
My run today was another one up Two Mile Hill, which is a lot closer to two miles than I reckoned earlier - I found out that what I ran Sunday is only the FIRST PART of the hill; that it crests slightly, then continues up. It was still not two miles - maybe 1.75 - and I think I put in 4.5 to 5 miles today. It was a well-paced run, with a half dozen walking-and-coughing moments on the way up the hill, but smooth and continuous in the downhill and flat parts. The air up here is nice and clean and that really helps, I think.
Yes, Joe, I've got a camera and have been taking pictures, but have no way of uploading them on borrowed computers. Maybe next trip I'll take a USB cable and see what I can do, but it usually requires Windows recognizing the camera as a drive - something I don't count on Windows to do with an install CD. I will eventually post my pictures - perhaps as revisions to these last few posts - and will highlight that fact I've made changes, so you can go back in the posts and see the pictures. I don't know if the camera will give me quality pics, actually - I chose this one for this trip based on convenience - size, AA batteries, SD card (swappable with my GPS), etc. But as I am an expert in Photoshop, I think I can manage to use whatever comes out of the camera. Many shots I've been taking multiple exposures, using various parts of the composition to meter from, so that in Photoshop I can make the correct adjustments. This is an area of image processing that gets close to creating HDRIs - High Dynamic Range Images - in which pixel information is stored like it looks in reality. (i.e. If a sky pixel is 10 million times as bright as a ground pixel, then the HDRI stores it as such, even though a computer screen can't display that. But you then get an image which you can adjust exposure levels on to the nth degree and see all the actual relative lights and darks. Thus, you can choose different areas of the image to be different exposure settings and end up with a single image where the sky looks blue and your friend in the foreground isn't a silhouette.)
Having all this time has not been without benefit. I washed the grey shit out of my stuff, as I noted before, and today took my bags and Aerostitch outside and spent a can of waterproofing/UV coating on them, to increase their water resistance, like they used to be when new.
I also saw a whole group of restored Model A Fords. The owners are a whole club and they ship their cars to various places and drive around. Got pictures of a couple of them that were left (by the time I got back to them with my camera). Nicely restored, all of them, though the CB antennas on the bumpers were a strange addition. (CBs are a good idea, though, when travelling in packs.)
Well, I may take a long walk and see if I can get some of the chowder I missed on my first pass through this town - it's about a mile away if I'm looking at the maps correctly. And I will keep praying the dealer gets the drive belt in today and that I can get back on the road tomorrow.
No comments:
Post a Comment