On Lake Ouachita, and Naps

By the middle of May, I was pretty much worn out.  For the past couple of weeks, I've been kind of ragged.  It was a tough end to the semester, and we've been shorthanded at work, and I've overcommitted myself on bike projects, and I just needed a break.  Bryan and I decided that, after Mandy left for Tulsa on Friday evening, we'd just disappear for a couple of days.  We chose Lake Ouachita for our getaway, since we thought it would be the quietest of the nearby lakes on a busy holiday weekend, and we put in at Buckville since it's a faraway boat launch.


We didn't get the quiet lake we'd hoped for, but we did manage to find our own private island on the edge of it.

 

National Bike Week - Rocktown Trackdown

Since last summer, Bryan and I had been thinking that a bike/walk scavenger hunt in Little Rock would be fun.  Vinny's alleycats are great fun for a handful of people, but what if somebody did a race that was a little less competitive and a little easier to navigate?  If participants were given a map, it'd be easier to plan a route.  If people just had to answer questions, we wouldn't need many volunteers.

National Bike Week - Bike to Work Day

Sometime in February, a coworker from upstairs said that she'd like to do Bike to Work Day as an 'employee wellness program.'  She's the one who does Walk Across Arkansas, and a number of other wellness things - she's a gerontologist - and she thought we should do Bike to Work again.

In the past, Extension has done Bike to Work Day as part of the 4H program, with really limited success.  LaVona and I decided that we'd do better.  Against my better judgment, we formed a Committee.  I hate committees.  But this one was pretty good, because we picked people we liked, and every month we'd ride across town to eat lunch someplace and talk about what we were going to do about Bike to Work Day.

Early on, we understood that we couldn't very well expect our coworkers to ride several miles across town without teaching them anything, or encouraging them to build up to the event.  So we planned out a series of little 'workshops' on Fridays, at lunch.  We borrowed some bikes from the 4H Center.  We expected two people and we got twenty.  We started out with NOTHING - truly, the first Friday we just told people to get on bikes and ride around the parking lot, to remember that they COULD still ride a bike, that they WOULD still have fun.  And they could.  And they did.  And those who had forgotten were taught again.

Photo by Mary Hightower

National Bike Week - Ride of Silence

Photo by Judy Lansky

In May, every year, there's an international event honoring those cyclists killed while riding.  This year's local event saw about 75 local cyclists riding silently, in pairs, from the Clinton Library to the state Capitol.  We wore white shirts, and on our backs we pinned cards with the name and age of a fallen bike rider.

I rode for a young man killed just this last month, run over in anger.  He'd made a mistake but he didn't deserve to be killed for it.  My friend Lisa wore the name of a six year old girl.  We don't know her story, but we know her life ended far too soon.  Others rode in memory of friends - Marilyn Fulper, who was killed by a car at the top of River Mountain Road a couple of years ago; Sam Avery, a hit and run while on a group ride recently.  Others rode bearing the names of people we don't know, and never will.

At some point, we're all cyclists.  We all start out as little kids, teetering down neighborhood streets on our first two wheelers.  Some of us end up as serious racers, and others ride to improve health.  Some just need a bike to get to work or to the grocery.  We all ride because it makes us feel good.  We're willing to take the risk.  We know it's there.  We're all out on the street, vulnerable, and it's fitting that we rode tonight to remember those who have been killed. 

I've always wanted Little Rock's Ride of Silence to be a more visible event.  This year's was a little better than we've done in the past, and I hope that trend of higher visibility and meaning continues.

National Bike Week - Cyclofemme Womens' Ride

One thing I brought back from the National Bike Summit this spring has to do with women in cycling.  Only 25% of cyclists in the US are women.  Why is that?  Because, as a group, we really do need different things than men in order to be comfortable riding bikes.  Women like to ride as a social thing, I learned.  Women like to feel clean and safe.  Women like to feel accepted when they ride.  And if women can be encouraged to ride more, more kids will grow up on bikes.  It's worth working on.  I hadn't realized it before.

So when my friend Lisa over at ArkansasOutside.com announced that she was going to host a local ride as part of an international Women's Cycling Day, I figured that I should support her efforts. 

The Maiden Voyage

Our new boats had been sitting in the garage, teasing us all week.  Bryan and Mandy have new crossover kayaks and I have a hybrid (a kayak that looks a lot like a canoe).  Jarion has a greenish fishing-ready sit-on-top, and Kathy chose an orange sit-on-top that's now outfitted with a yoga mat trimmed to fit Ivy's special sitting spot.

Little Maumelle River

We borrowed boats from our friends over at Arkansas Outside to try out a stretch of the Little Maumelle River.  There are so many things I love about central Arkansas.  Imagine being able to paddle a kayak for eight plus miles down a river, within the city limits of the largest city in your state.  We began at Pinnacle Mountain State Park and floated through a forest of cypress trees, ending our trip just past Two Rivers park, at the boat launch at the bottom of River Mountain Road.

Ivydog was nearly perfect.  Hayduke was terrible.  He and I ended up in a single kayak, hanging back out of sight of the rest of the group.  When he can't see anyone else, he's a lot calmer about being in the boat.

I wish I'd had a camera, because he was extremely excited today about lily pads.  We floated through big stretches of water that's so still and shallow that lilies grow in big 'fields.'  Hayduke thought it was great fun to hang his big head out of the boat and try to snatch the flat leaves in his mouth.  Once he grabbed a lily bud and pulled it up, four foot stalk and all.  He looked at me as if to say "well, I caught it, but now I don't know what to do with it."  We left a trail of leaves with bites taken out of them.

Hayduke is a nightmare on the water but he has so much fun it'd be sad to leave him at home.

Adventures in Dog Boating

In preparation of a future Buffalo River trip, we decided to spend the morning on Lake Ouachita.  We could try different kinds of kayaks and canoes, we figured, and we could check out how well the dogs would do on the water.

Ivy likes water but not too much, and she's a little afraid of riding in cars, and she generally likes to sit up straight and be admired.  I predicted that Ivy would sit still in the middle of a boat and allow herself to be paddled around the lake like the princess that she is.  I was right.

Falling Water Gravel Tour

Mandy's shaping up to be a singlespeed rigid mountain bike girl.  She wears plaid and she smells bad and she says she has three speeds:  pedal, pedal harder, and walk.

 

We spent some miles last weekend on gravel roads up near Sand Gap.  Jarion decided to play SAG wagon / fisherman, which meant we could ride light and put our gear in his Jeepett.  It was a great weekend of grinding up gravel hills, flying down them, wading in the creek, eating steaks in the rain, and playing cards in the middle of gravel roads.

The Rebel Alliance

BACA, our local bike advocacy group, has been pretty stagnant for awhile.  Membership's sort of gone flat (click here to sign up).  Lots of clubs and groups don't feel represented.  Lots of minor events are sponsored, without much effect.  Meetings felt useless to most cyclists, and people stopped coming.  The most recent board tended to get into shouting matches at their meetings.

Major local issues went unnoticed, or worse, BACA board members said the wrong thing in public and other cyclists and groups spoke up to disagree.  The city and county government stopped listening because they didn't know who to listen to.  BACA could have an enormous impact, but it doesn't.

Or it didn't.  Some of us got together to talk about it.  It turned out that a lot of cycling families and groups felt the same way we did.  We extended some olive branches to teams that have been feeling like outsiders.  The sort of vague, leaderless group ended up hatching  a group volunteers excited about serving on the board to make it a wider, louder, more active advocacy organization.

I managed to get a spot on the nominating committee, and four days after that committee was established, we had a full slate of officers to nominate - mountain bikers, road racers, blog writers, trail builders.  The April BACA meeting saw that group voted in, amid angry confusion and loudish cheering. It makes me smile to watch people do what they care about, and I'm looking forward to this year.  I'm looking forward to having an advocacy group here in LR.  I think they'll accomplish great things, starting right about now.

Slackline

Bryan got me a Mother's Day present, but he couldn't bear to wait until May to give it to me. 

It's a slackline!  It's a lot like a truck tiedown strap, made of heavy yellow synthetic webbing with a burly buckle to pull it tight.  It's supposed to be looped around a tree at each end and tightened to take out as much sag and wiggle as possible.  And we're supposed to walk on it.

Slackline contests are popular with climbers, and I can see why - it's fun.  But also really, really hard.  The first time my foot pushed down on the line, it waggled uncontrollably back and forth.  I looked down, feeling a little betrayed- what was wrong with my foot and ankle, that they were behaving so unpredictably?  I tried looking forward, but it didn't help.  I actually grabbed my knee and calf, hoping to steady my foot, but it continued flailing back and forth wildly.

Bryan took a turn, then Mitch, then Monkey and Nick.  I think they all thought 'oh, I can do a ton better than that.' But we were all equally awful at it.  Finally, after some practice, we got better.  'Better' meaning "can sort of stand on one foot for about two seconds."

Maybe by Mother's Day I'll actually be able to walk on the damn thing.

The Tall Bike Project

Our friend Mitch got a welder for Christmas, and ever since then, we've been thinking about that welder.  He doesn't know how to weld but he's got a book.  Bryan doesn't know how to weld but he's been around his dad who can weld.  I don't know how to weld, which makes no sense because all the guys in my family can, but they never taught me, which I've always been slightly offended about.

We've all been thinking about tall bikes for awhile.  And we have this lovely welder.  Welding can't be that hard, right?  You just wear a funny hat, put pieces of metal near each other, and poke them with that stick thing. 

New Mountain Bike

In the back of my head, I've thought that mountain biking would be interesting to try but over the years I've never gotten closer than riding my Long Haul Trucker (LHT) touring bike on gravel roads near Lake Sylvia or in Newton County or riding my polo bike on a very flat beginner mountain bike trail while my daughter rode her mountain unicycle.  My LHT is pretty nice on gravel roads because of Surly's "fatties fit fine" policy that allows me to fit fenders and 50mm tires.

Photo by Cliff Li

Tweed Ride

Our friend Vinny decided that we should have a tweed ride.  He'd seen photos and stories from tweed rides in other cities, of people in old-timey woolen clothes smoking pipes and riding bikes, and he thought we should have one in Little Rock, too.

Dog House Project

Hayduke has a pretty good life.  That little stray puppy huddled in the tree roots, hungry and scared, has made a fine life for himself in the house across the street.  He gets good dog food and an endless supply of toys and treats and belly scratches and long hikes in the woods.  It's his first winter here, and even though he sleeps inside at night, he needs a doghouse for the cold mornings and evenings he stays outside during the winter, or during the rainy parts of the year.

But will any old doghouse do?  No, it will not.  No doghouses we can buy locally are insulated.  No doghouses we can order online review well.  Most dogs in Arkansas do just fine with a non-insulated doghouse.  Most dogs don't read online reviews.  

We're BUILDING a doghouse.  We ordered plans online from doghouseplans.com and gathered ideas from reviewing hundreds of doghouse photos.  We've gone to Home Depot a half dozen times.  We've spent good money and large parts of four days building this doghouse. 

New Years Hike

Happy New Year!  The last supper of 2011 was Jarion's excellent steak and veggies, eaten by the light of a camp lantern on a picnic table.  We spent the last night of 2011 in a tent near the top of Mount Magazine.  It's a windy, windy place.  

We were up early, in the cold.  Jarion had lost the lighter the night before, so I loaded up the early risers to obtain a replacement (and coffee) at the Lodge.  Then we drove back to camp for pancakes and eggs and sausage before loading up the dogs and the gear and driving back down the mountain.

Petit Jean Campout

This is our niece, Emma.  What a sweet face! Who wouldn't agree to a post-Christmas campout with these eyes?

Bryan's brother Kevin, his wife Julie, and their little girl had plans to camp at Petit Jean State Park over the holiday break, so we joined them.  We had short dayhikes, lazy afternoon naps in camp, and good Dutch oven food.  It was a nice break from rougher weekend trips.

Festivus

This year we added an official Festivus celebration to our holiday calendar. (Wikipedia has a well-written and comprehensive article about Festivus, and you should read it if you're unfamiliar with this winter holiday.)  Bryan made a Festivus pole for the house (under $10 DIY or you can buy one here --Bryan), and our friends Kathy and Jarion went with us to a movie (Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol; worth the IMAX surcharge --Bryan).  After the movie, we ate supper at our house and participated in an extended Airing of Grievances session (she's holding a Grievance form against his chest, above.)  We went to their house for carrot cake for dessert, and the dogs took care of the Feats of Strength portion of the customary Festivus celebration.

Guest Bathroom

When we bought our house, we knew that our second bathroom was sort of terrible.  The fixtures were nice, but the room was painted bright yellow with a sort of multi-layer brown/gold spongy finish.  I suppose the previous owners had thought that the effect would be rich and elegant.  I thought that the effect led one to believe that a large mammal had been smeared in its own poop and then had seizures in the room, blotting the excrement all over the walls.

Holiday Decorating 2011

When we pulled up in front of Bradbury's Christmas Tree Farm, a boy in a red ball cap met us at the truck with a smile and a saw.   Bryan and Mandy choose our tree based on height, color and even-ness; I have veto power because I'm the one who notices when a tree's trunk is so crooked it won't fit well in the tree base.