I knit. I don’t crochet. But when I saw a particularly fetching temperature blanket design online, I figured I could learn how to make a hexagon. Almost four hundred hexagons, actually.
A temperature blanket uses colours to represent daily temperatures, typically over the course of a year. Mine is a 2025 record of local temperatures: the low represented in the centre of each hexagon, and the high surrounding it. Because 365 isn’t divisible by two similar factors, I am including a month-marker hexagon at the start of each month, and one at the end. By including those extra thirteen hexagons, my total will be 378, and that number can be factored by 18 and 21. So my blanket has 18 hexagons per row, and 21 rows, and because of the efficient packing of hexagons that bees know about, it’ll end up being roughly square and a perfect (large) lap blanket.
I used divisions of 5 degrees Celsius with my coldest colour being “below minus 10” and my hottest one “above 35.” I went with Berocco Vintage yarn because of its (relative) affordability, ready availability and large colour range.
Grey-white (8 o’clock on the wheel-of-skeins) is the coldest colour. From there they proceed clockwise through the blues, past the freezing mark to the greens, into the spring-like yellows, then the summery orange-reds, and up into the uncomfortable dog-days of the maroon and purple skeins.
Most mornings I get up and the first thing I do upon coming downstairs is to check the Environment Canada temperature record for the previous day. Then I make my coffee, grab my yarn and make yesterday’s hex while sipping my coffee. It’s a nice twelve-minute ritual.
The summer this year has been cooler and wetter than the past few years – thankfully! – but we did get one day with a high over 35 degrees, so I am happy that I have been able to use all the colours I planned out at least once. It has been so fun watching the design and the colour-shifts take shape, and my awareness of the back-and-forth shuffle of the seasonal temperature changes has been piqued.
I suppose it’ll be a little less exciting as the year heads towards its conclusion, cycling through colour combinations I’ve already used. But so far my interest and energy for this project has continued. The only times I’ve gotten behind on my hexes are when we’ve been away, and I’ve caught up easily upon returning.
Coincidentally a local friend of mine is sewing a temperature quilt. We had both started our projects before we discovered what the other was doing. It has been fun trading photos and sharing excitement as the temperature in February dipped to a previously-unseen low, or the afternoon high broke 25 for the first time in April.
When I was about 16 I was part of a chamber group in my home Suzuki program. As the senior-most violinist I was looking for additional challenge, so my teacher handed me his 17″ viola and suggested I give it a whirl. It was ridiculously huge for me but I used it at rehearsals for a few months (did I have a crappy little viola to practice on? I can’t recall but I must have) and that experience planted a seed. I loved the sound, the range, the timbre, and the quirky alto clef was a good fit for quirky me.
But I was a violinist, and I only had a violin, so I stuck with that. I played a couple of semi-professional orchestra seasons, first with the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony and then (during my medical internship, when I could fit the services around my call schedule) with the Newfoundland Symphony. When I moved to the middle of nowhere I continued playing violin and started doing some teaching. Then my mom moved to the area, and we found a cellist friend and began playing chamber music locally. My mom had a cheap viola that she lent me, and gradually viola became my preferred instrument.
When Noah switched to viola, I bought a better-quality 16″ viola for me to use, figuring he could grow into it. He did, and then he grew in new directions (he now plays an electric 5-string), so it came back to me. And the vast majority of my freelancing has been on viola for the past 6 or 7 years.
But it wasn’t a great viola for me. It was still too big, the tone quality was only in the “decent student instrument” category, it wasn’t very responsive and it had some quirks that made it hard to play, especially for someone fairly small. I was feeling kind of demoralized by my inability to play up to the standard I had set for myself for my orchestra gigs. I was thinking of resigning because it was hard to feel like I sometimes dragged the section down.
I had an epiphany one day rehearsing with my mostly-amateur local group, realizing that I had the lowest quality instrument of anyone in the room. I had just received some money from my mom’s estate and I knew that she would have unreservedly supported me spending it on a decent professional instrument.
So I started asking around about small high-quality ergonomic violas that might be available for sale. “Around” meaning scouring western Canada over a period of months for anything that might conceivably be coming up for sale.
And then it landed in my lap. There was an email chain with friend, a former student of hers in another city a few hours from me, a John Newton viola languishing at her mother’s place in yet another city, some intervening forest fires and delays, a long drive, a two-week trial and … I bought it!
I have to say it has changed my life. For the first time I actually enjoy practicing and love the sound I make. I can hear myself improving.
I’ve been a member of the local trails Society for years, and have volunteered at a lot of trail-work days, but I’ve always resisted invitations to become part of the board. Three years ago, though, I learned that they had become the keeper of the legacy of another Society, one that had tried unsuccessfully to create a trail between our neighbouring twin villages.
I got interested.
I didn’t join the board but I did ask to be appointed the head of a committee charged with this initiative. I have ignored it for months at a time, but I have hamstered away at various aspects of it on and off. Now happens to be an on time, so I’ve put a lot of energy into it over the past month or two.
Our two villages are, largely speaking, two neighbourhoods comprising one community. Although they have separate village councils, the businesses and services that comprise a functional community are shared between them. There is one post office, one ER, one credit union, one grocery store (located in New Denver). There is one dental clinic, one health food store, one laundromat, one hardware & building supply store, one performance hall (located in Silverton). Between the village is a single two-lane highway. This stretch of road is just over 3 km long, and has an 80 km/h speed limit, negligible to entirely absent shoulders, poor sight-lines and steep drop-offs. There is no sidewalk, no adjacent pathway, no back road or gravel track to offer an alternative. And of course there is no public transit: a bus runs through three times a week but depending on the schedule and direction of travel you will wait between 8 hours and several days for a return trip
I bike it, but I don’t feel entirely safe doing so, and I’m one of only about 10% of the area population who feel even passably okay walking or biking the highway. So most people feel like they have no choice but to use a private motor vehicle for their daily commutes or errands.
While I am willing to accept — as the previous Society decided — that a scenic lakefront trail is a no-go due to private property interests along the foreshore, I am not willing to accept that there is no active transportation solution whatsoever for connecting two interdependent neighbourhoods. In the late 1800s people living in this area were able to push railroads through mountain passes in the space of a few months with little more than hand tools and dynamite. A rock face or scree slope here or there was not a deal-breaker.
With some governmental money floating around to support the development of Active Transportation projects, I decided the time was right to resurrect the pathway idea and try to push it forward with less of a scenic/recreational spin and more of a eco-conscious/active transportation spin. I had a co-conspirator early on, but he stepped back for personal reasons, and so I’ve been carrying the torch mostly on my own.
The inter-Community Active Transportation (i-CAT) Link now has its own webpage (because I maintain the Trails Society website). I have done a large community engagement survey, put together a twenty-page white paper laying out the case for the link, explored land title issues, done an informal survey of the existing road bed, and have learned more than I ever expected to need to know about historical public roadway statutes, Ministry of Transportation construction and maintenance standards.
The i-CAT Link has now been picked up by a regional Citizens’ Advisory Group on Rural Mobility as a supported project, which gives me a foot in the door with the regional district government and the Ministry of the Transportation. Queue lots of meetings.
I also applied for a small community grant under the Trails Society umbrella, so later this year I should be able to hire a planning consultant to start a bit of a scoping plan. I’m not kidding myself: this three-kilometre stretch contains within it almost every geotechnical and jurisdictional challenge possible. Ultimately big grant money, likely to the tune of several million dollars, will be required to build a separated shared mobility pathway. But even if I can smooth the way a little bit, I think it will be worth the work. Until motor vehicles are banned, we need an alternative, and this project makes so much sense. I am convinced it is inexorably moving towards fruition, albeit on a geologic time-scale, and I am happy to play whatever role I can.
Four years ago I joined the board of the Silverton Co-work Society. They were a group working towards the creation of a co-work space in the area, and had just married that idea to another long-term community goal: of a food hub. It was a long, twisty road we trod, but the result is that we are now the Fireweed Hub Society and successfully managed a million dollars in grant money to renovate a heritage building on Main Street, transforming it into and absolutely amazing community resource.
We opened in May 2024 and two months later the area was hit with a massive wildfire event. Our still-wet-behind-the-ears facility became the de facto community hub. Amidst all the evacuations and business closures, we were able to accept donated food, purchase what we could from businesses with excess produce to help feed people in need, rally dozens and dozens of volunteers to do useful things, employ laid-off food workers, feed firefighter and structure protection crews, welcome evacuees and those on alert to hang out, to connect, to eat, to destress, and act as the information hub and meeting space.
It was the ultimate proof of concept: we manage a multi-purpose community space that can quickly adapt to serve almost any need. The emergency situation demonstrated to community members the breadth needs that we can serve: we are not just a pop-up restaurant venue! And we enjoyed a lot of positive press coverage and a huge boost to our reputation throughout the region.
Thank goodness things settled down by mid-August, giving us the chance to better find our feet. The remainder of our inaugural year has included pop-up restaurant and café offerings provided by chefs who rent our space, weekly social / recreational / educational gatherings for community elders, a lot of use by non-profit and other groups for in-person, remote and hybrid meetings, meal preparation for the local food bank, occasional use by value-added food producers, and a steady rota of food-related workshops and cooking bees.
Our Society is comprised a great “working board” of directors and some great staffers; we have fun and enjoy and trust each other. My role is as the lead on the co-working operations, I sit on the fund-raising committee, I manage the website and the technology solutions within the space, and am the communications and publicity person. I also do a lot of volunteer dishwashing and food prep for the programming our society offers.
I probably do 5-10 hours of Fireweed work in a typical week, but some weeks are just an hour or two while others more like half-time or even full-time. It’s gratifying, because we have created a community-informed tangible facility that is unique, and is already serving a range of important roles.
I’ve now been car-free (locally, meaning for distances of under about 40 km one-way) for more than two years. The second anniversary slipped by without me even noticing. I no longer feel like I’m out to prove something; it’s just become second nature that this is how I live my life.
I ordered studded tires for the new bike and I think these will work much better in the snow than the noisy somewhat finicky chains I had to use on the Rad Mini’s non-standard tire size. Incidentally, the Rad Mini has been passed along to a local friend who is not a winter rider and who rides mostly flat terrain around the village. With a new wiring harness it seems to be running well for her and I’m sure happy that it hasn’t had to go directly to a landfill.
The other day I decided to try out a newly rehabilitated trail in the northwest corner of Kokanee Glacier Park using a recently reopened forestry road for access. To get to the forestry road I had to ride about 20 km from home along the highway to the top of a long hill. I had been assured that the gravel forestry road, just over 12 km long from that point, was in great shape, so there was no reason not to use the e-bike to get to the trailhead. As it turned out it was a great choice.
The 32 km of mostly climbing did give me a twinge of range anxiety. Adding in four hours of alpine hiking, I knew that the climb up the hill back to my house would come at the end of a 7-hour day of non-stop exertion, and I did not want to be running out of bike battery at that point. Having not done a lot of really long rides on the new e-bike I wasn’t sure how much of a cushion I would have, so I kept the power assist either off or — when climbing — on the lowest setting. As it turned out, there was plenty of juice, but I didn’t know that in the morning. Better safe than sorry.
The Roadster turned out to be a very capable Logging-Roadster too. Nice gravel-style tires with a fair bit of volume, some front-fork suspension and a suspension seat-post kept me very comfortable. The hike itself was amazing, though fairly steep, meaning I used muscles on the descent that I don’t stress very often, and I’m a bit sore 36 hours later. But it was worth it to spend a crisp sunny day getting into a beautiful alpine basin that will like get snowed in within a couple of weeks.
Because I was away from home and e-bike for half the summer, it took me until this week to clock 1000 km on the Roadster, and the moment came along the forestry road leading toward Blue Grouse Basin. A great location and a great day for a first major milestone for this bike. Looking forward to many more thousands.
Made for an online friend who “published” a series of haiku during the early phase of the pandemic, interspersed with countless other Facebook posts, so that only the observant noticed the pattern.
In spring did they notice that alone among the conifers you were fully cloaked trunk to twig in feathery tassels of new green? While other trees merely added pale buds to branch-tips , did they see that you lacked their staid dark under-cladding?
Perhaps they did but in summer you stood in the copse like one of the rest, an apparent evergreen, your trunk driving towards the mountain sky, needles dark and firm like any proper pine or fir. Any suspicions they’d had were put to rest as you set about the photosynthetic business of being a tree. Making roots and cones and twigs, you exhaled oxygen, and soon you too forgot your odd feathery spring.
Yet as the nights grew crisp your suspicions grew that you were not, after all, the same as the rest. Your mid-summer energy spent your needles slowly brittled.
And suddenly one cold morning you were certain that you were not to be ever green after all. You burst into the frost-days of autumn a fiery yellow larch, starkly different, unapologetically so, shouting your gold across the high mountain slopes to others of your kind: I’m here! I’m not like the rest! See me!
I put a lot of thought into my recent e-bike purchase, informed by two years of all-season riding of my previous e-bike. Those two years also made it clear that I was not just purchasing a bike, but a car replacement. Because of that, I recalibrated my budget upwards. I ended up buying a German-made urban-style bike with a mid-drive Bosch motor, internal hub gearing, and a carbon belt drive. I test-rode it in Toronto and had it shipped to meet me back home. My 2022 Riese&Müller Roadster arrived a couple of days after my 60th birthday. Being last year’s model and bike shops generally having too much inventory, I got a great deal on it, but it still cost approximately three times what we paid for the Rad Mini!
I’ve had the new bike for a couple of weeks now, and with 200 km on the odometer under a variety of conditions, here are my impressions so far:
It feels like a piece of modern German engineering: sleek and efficient and powerful. Although its peak power is actually a little lower than the Rad’s, it feels more powerful, and it functions beautifully under load. That’s the magic of a mid-drive motor as opposed to the hub-based motor the Rad had. Just as a person without a lot of strength can pedal up a hill by shifting to a lower gear, a mid-drive motor enjoys the same gearing advantage. The bike doesn’t necessarily go all that fast up hills especially while heavily laden, but the motor happily hums along, rather than moaning at low RPM and ultra-high torque like the Rad used to. So I love the mid-drive motor and I am sure it will last for ages.
The next big difference is in the way the assistive power is calculated and applied. The Rad’s power assist was simple and additive. In Eco mode, you would receive an additional 100 watts of power as soon as the pedals started turning. One notch up would give you 200 extra watts, and so on. There wasn’t much finesse to it and there would be a bit of a lurch as the assist kicked in or notched up: kind of an on/off-switch effect.
With the R&M Bosch system, the power assist is scaled and responsive. The harder you pedal, the more the bike assists you, thanks to a torque sensor and some math. I would estimate that the scale probably results in about 1.5 times your pedaling power in Eco mode, 2 times in Tour mode, 2.5 in Sport and 3 in Turbo. There’s some nuance to it thanks to additional sensors: when the wheel is turning very slowly at start-up, you get a couple of seconds of greater assist, and when you change your gearing to increase your pedaling cadence, there’s also a wee bit of extra juice provided.
The upshot of the responsive assist isn’t just a more natural feel and less lurching, though it certainly does give that. It also seems to have a really useful psychological effect, at least for me. On the Roadster, pedaling harder is an easy and intuitive way to ask the motor for more help. I don’t have to change assist level settings if I hit a hill: I just pedal harder, and the bike magically provides more help. And so this is what happens when I am mindlessly riding along: I work a lot harder than I used to on the Rad. Not that I have to work harder; it’s just that I tend to naturally and intuitively choose to do so.
The other really noticeable difference is in the geometry of the bike. The Roadster is, as its name implies, designed for roads rather for trails and it’s an upright bike intended to let you see and be seen on the road. The wheels are 650B, so pretty large diameter, and the tires are inflated to higher pressure and lacking the knobby tread you’d need to handle loose dirt and mud. With the weight of the motor low down in the centre of the bike, its handling is much more stable at high speeds. As I typically hit 60-65 km/h coasting down the hill that connects my home to the village, I love that I no longer have to apply the brakes to quell the dangerous front-wheel shimmying I used to experience on the Rad. Additionally, the much lower rolling resistance and lighter weight of the Roadster mean that it coasts beautifully, and on flatter terrain I don’t usually use any assist at all. It feels like a marvelous and efficient normal bicycle.
A few other features I love:
front and rear lights are both bright, and integrated with the battery and the controls
proper mudguards: I no longer end up with road spray and grit between my teeth!
the Snapit connectors for the Racktime rack that allows me to swap out different cargo configurations
the Abus frame lock and chain, since I finally have a bike that I feel I should be locking up even here in our wee village
the incredibly quiet belt drive
the “little guy” on the grip-shift gear controller: instead of a numerical gear system, there’s a pictogram of a little guy riding up a hill and the steepness of the hill changes mechanically as you shift
Overall the Rad felt like a motor with wheels, but the Riese & Müller Roadster feels like a bicycle, with superpowers. Since I love bicycles a lot more than I love motors, I’m in heaven.
The hydraulic brakes, the belt drive and the internal hub gearing are the features that will really come into their own next winter, so in-depth thoughts on those will have to wait.
After two years of making do with the Rad Mini I’ve decided to upgrade my e-bike. The Rad is the inexpensive hub-drive bike we bought to help Fiona get around Nelson on her own. After she graduated from high school it languished for a year or so until I took it over in 2021, making it my primary means of local transportation.
But not only is it ridiculously heavy, it has also been very difficult to use and maintain in winter. The weirdly small-but-fat wheels don’t have any studded tires available to fit them. I bought tire chains, but wore them out. The exposed drivetrain (chain and gearing sprockets) are always wet and coated in the sand and salt that are used on the roads here in the winter. The mechanical brakes and exposed shifting mechanism are prone to icing up. And while I spend ten minutes every time I arrive home spraying, wiping, lubing and wiping the moving components (yes, even at night when it’s ten below in the garage) rust and corrosion continue because I can’t get the bike dry. With the rack and other extras it weighs 85 lbs, and bringing it into the mud room would involve stairs, so that doesn’t happen. And obviously I can’t do the cleaning and lubing when I’m away from home, say for a meeting or a shopping trip. So oxidation and abrasion continued to have their way…
With hundreds and hundreds of charge cycles, the battery had reached its end of life as well. While I got nowhere near the lifetime mileage out of the battery that the manufacturer claimed was possible, this was no doubt down to the hard use I have put it through: a three-kilometer 5-13% uphill grade every time it returns home, typically laden with cargo, and using it at for a good part of the year at temperatures well below optimal. Recently the battery had been acting strange, suddenly slipping to half or a quarter of its charge, occasionally leaving me entirely in the lurch, playing random games with the headlight (and boy-oh-boy are the nights dark here when the headlight quits!).
I had been pining for something more suited to my needs, and so a few months ago I made a list of attributes my next e-bike should have:
Removable battery (batteries need to be charged at room temperature)
~ 70+ nM of torque for my climb home with groceries i.e. a powerful mid-drive motor
Torque-sensor assist rather than simple pedal-rotation-sensor (much more natural)
Carbon belt drive (no corrosion, no lube/grease on clothes)
Internal hub with wide gearing range (ditto)
Hydraulic brakes (no cables icing up like with mechanical brakes)
Standard-sized wheels (not small, not fat) for use with studded tires, and for better stability on fast descents (the Rad picks up a wobble at 35 km/h)
Available small frame size (most e-bikes are best suited to people over 5’7″ which I’m definitely not!)
Bonus items:
heavy-duty rack
integrated headlight/taillight
fenders, kickstand
lighter weight
With the Rad’s battery nearing its end of life, rather than spending far more than the residual value of the bike itself on a replacement, I decided that since for me an e-bike is my primary means of transportation year-round, it was time to buy a bike for me, and for my style of use. I started researching early in 2023.
Sadly most of the bikes produced for the North American market are sport- and recreation-focused, rather than being optimized for all-weather transportation. The belt drive / internal hub gearing in particular was a very difficult feature to find domestically.
But eventually I found a couple of Canadian shops specializing in importing European bikes. One of the shops is situated less than a 30-minute walk from where Fiona lives in Toronto, so the last time I visited her, I made a stop at Curbside Cycle. I was thrilled to discover that they still had the bike I had had my eye on: a size-small Riese & Müller hybrid commuter-style bike left over from last year and heavily discounted. One very short and very thrilling test-ride later, it had my name on it and was put in the queue for shipment to BC.
Then last week the Rad’s battery spat and popped and that was the end. Goodbye, battery. Thank goodness my replacement bike had already been identified, sourced, bought and paid for!
The R&M bike is still on its way across Canada to me, expected in about a week. It’s been challenging getting by with only my ‘acoustic’ bike or on foot in the cold end-of-winter rains. Walking the route from town takes an hour, non-electrified cycling half an hour, and both of them call for a shower afterwards because of the exertion required to get up the hill to home. But soon … sooooonnn…
During the summer of 2021, Fiona was offered a job working as a veterinary assistant at a clinic 50 km away. It was a super opportunity, so I told her she should take it, and she could use my car for the commute. I would use the e-bike. We had bought a Rad Mini in 2018 to help Sophie and Fiona get around for work, school and groceries in Nelson while they were living semi-independently. They mostly walked but the bike was occasionally a huge help.
Once Fiona moved away to university in the fall of 2020, the e-bike came home to live in the garage in New Denver and only occasionally got used. But the following spring, with my car leaving town 5 days a week, the e-bike became my primary vehicle for errands. It was suprisingly enjoyable. It could pack a fair bit of payload, and I felt much less guilty making my little runs up and down the hill to the post office or grocery store most days. So when she went back to Toronto for her second year of university, I decided to see if I could keep using the bike for local trips, at least until the cold rain started in October.
I decided that for every tank of gas I didn’t have to buy, I would flesh out my cycle-commuter kit. I got myself some rain pants and I made it through October. I figured I’d keep going until the snow was flying. I was surprised to discover that the tire tread was pretty good in the first skiff of snow. I added an under-helmet balaclava, a set of warm waterproof gloves, some goggles, and a hi-vis jacket.
Suddenly it was April. I had ridden through the whole winter.
And so I kept going. I lent my car out to people who needed a car. I used it myself for trips of over 100 km (for orchestra gigs, to retrieve various children from airports to bring them home or to dispatch them, for appointments in Nelson) but for everything local, meaning everything within 15-20 kilometres, I used the bike.
It was addictive! I was thrilled with how fun and easy it was. And then I discovered NotJustBikes and swallowed the orange pill for once and for all.
NJB is a YouTube channel by a Canadian guy who grew up in the same general area of the country that I did, and who now lives in Amsterdam. His dryly sarcastic video essays talk about the differences in transportation norms and urban design between North American cities and those in the area he now lives.
Spoiler: we don’t come out looking very good.
I fell down the rabbit hole of his YouTube channel and found myself alternately inspired and frustrated by the contrasts. It was a sort of “I never thought about it, but the way we live really sucks, and there is no good reason we can’t radically change things” experience. And a lot of “omg, why do we still insist on doing things so stupidly, when so much of the rest of the world has been doing them so much better?” And repeated sentiments of “why do we just accept this shit?” This is the orange (Dutch) pill.
I don’t know what the magic sauce is that makes the orange pill go down so smoothly, but I cannot recommend his channel highly enough. It is definitely a gateway drug.
So here I am another winter later, still only using the bike for local transportation. I now have a cargo trailer, made out of the old kids’ Burley D-Lite trailer, which I can hook on for bulky loads. I have pogies (bar mitts) and a better high-visibility winter jacket. I have the bike tricked out with a go-mug holder, tire chains for the icy days, slick tires for the summer, a phone mount and rear blinkies that function as turn signals. It’s getting close to the 4000-kilometre point on the odometer, which isn’t all that much compared to the mileage I put on my road bike, but it is a ton of riding when you take into account that it is made up almost entirely of 3.5-kilometre trips up and down the hill between our property and town.
And I am now a passionate advocate for active transportation options. I organized an e-bike event at the local market last summer to encourage other people to look to e-bikes as a transportation option. (Several have since done so!)
I have also taken on the challenge of trying to develop a shared-use active transportation trail between our village and the next one over, something that has been tried repeatedly over the years. They’re only 4 km apart but the highway is so dangerous for anything but motor vehicles that everyone is car dependent as a result. I’ve waded into the worlds of municipal politics, public advocacy and grant applications as a result, places I would ordinarily avoid like the plague, but the orange pill is making me do it.
Although I’ve kept herbs and occasional greens growing next to the deck, I haven’t grown a proper garden since (checks blog archives… ) 2008. That must have been the point at which the water line broke, and I started taking on more of the summer Suzuki institute administration, and the kids were losing interest in growing things.
A lot can happen in 11 years. Especially in the realm of goutweed. Somehow this vegetation from hell sneaked onto our property with the gift of some rhubarb about 20 years ago, and with me not beating it back on an annual basis it has taken over. It’s not quite kudzu or Japanese knotweed, but it’s got to be close.
The effort to reclaim some sort of a garden began months ago when I started digging a trench for a replacement water line. It had to be deep enough to facilitate winterizing, and it had to go under and through countless tree roots because … well, the forest. So it was quite a slog.
Next, the fence. I figured I could do the first bits of planting and fence immediately afterwards, but the dog-who-digs had other ideas. So the fence had to be completed first. I dug a few posts, stretched some salvaged fencing, banged things together.
And then one day at the end of April, with a few tomato and pepper starts languishing on the dining room table, I looked out at the frame from the old trampoline and the liner from the ice rink and thought “those could be a greenhouse!” So I set to work. Within 48 hours I had a passable greenhouse. I used some scrap poles and lumber, and bits of garbage ABS pipe, and some rebar scraps and a webbing tie-down strap and some 3M house tape.
The only money I (eventually) spent was $15 on a zipwall doorway that I cut into one side of the tarp. The greenhouse is definitely not pro-quality: it’s fairly large and not insulated or at all air-tight and therefore doesn’t really do much to protect plants from the cold at night. And because the tarp is white rather than clear, on overcast days it doesn’t get all that warm. But it has been so much better than nothing, and it took my little tomato-starts from spindly 3″ sprouts to bursting out of gallon pots begging to be planted in the space of three weeks.
I’m especially pleased with my eggplant since I had never tried to grow one before, knowing they need a long warm season. I bought it as a seedling as I hadn’t had the forethought to plant one in late March, not having had my greenhouse epiphany by the point. I’ve nurtured it along, and it is doing really well. It is now setting fruit. In June already!
The goutweed is still the bane of my existence. I’ve dug out kilos of rhizomes, double-screened a lot of soil, organic-mulched large areas to a depth of 6 inches (only to have the damned stuff grow through without a second thought), plastic-mulched the crap out these same areas, and in this year’s reclaimed beds I’ve dug and pulled and weeded and mowed and mulched and yanked and mowed and pulled. And still I feel like I’m only making minor headway. I have two small beds for my (very crowded) tomatoes and peppers, and another for some horseradish, and that’s it. And every day I pull dozens of goutweed sprouts from those same beds that I’ve dug over and screened so meticulously. Although the sprouts are looking increasingly anemic, which I take solace in.
Because I didn’t imagine my way to a greenhouse until almost May, I missed the boat a bit this year. And the fencing, goutweed-from-hell and water line slowed things down a bit. Hopefully next year I’ll be that much further ahead and will be able to make more of a go of things. For this year it looks like we’ll get some fruiting nightshades, that blueberry tart and not a whole lot else. But it’s pretty. And it’s progress.
I bought a little spinning wheel. It’s about the size of an SLR camera and weighs a fraction as much. It came from a Kickstarter campaign I backed. I paid about $50 and like my other favourite Kickstarter reward, it delivered not just on time but early! It runs off DC power with a tiny little motor. Years ago I spent a couple of days experimenting with a borrowed treadle spinning wheel and some (in retrospect) appallingly poor-quality fleece. The result was some ‘rustic yarn,’ and the sense of gratification was short-lived. This time around I have used proper spinning-quality roving I purchased, and have made more of an effort to finesse my skills. I am doing much better, and am entirely smitten with the process. What’s most fascinating to me is the way the colours meld.
The photo above shows the first stages of the progression. I start with a big pillow of fleece dyed in swaths of different colours, some quite bright and prominent. As I spin one strand at a time onto the bobbin the colours take turns, sometimes blending a bit as they do. Then, when I ply the strands together into a ball of yarn, the dark and light colours entwine each other as often as not, and the brights become tempered.
And then, finally, when the yarn is knitted up into a small project, the knitting creates even more blending and muting. This Scrunchable Scarf ended up being an amazing dapple of forest colours: moss, leaves, humus, lichen, bark and twigs. I would never have guessed how muted it would turn out from looking at the bold brights in the original roving.
When I chose fleece for my second project, I decided to try for something a bit lighter and brighter. I found some fun glittery stuff, but I could tell from my previous experience that the purples were likely to overwhelm the lighter oranges, pinks and silvers. So I paired it with half as much plain sunflower fleece. Here are the pre- and post-spinning results. It looks like an awful lot of yellow:
But here’s the result: still predominantly purple-pink, but with proper yellows peeking out from time to time. It is just about what I was expecting!
Here’s another thing: I YouTube-taught myself to solder, in order to install a reverse switch. The original way to reverse the direction (necessary for plying) was to put a figure-eight in the drive belt, but that was causing a fair bit of friction and was unnecessarily fiddly. So I Amazon’d me a DPTP switch and got all the wires going to the right places. And … it worked!
But I burned the motor out after just a few weeks. It’s a known issue with this little wheel if the uptake tension isn’t kept very low, exacerbated by the figure-eight drive belt issue I mentioned. They’re sending me a free replacement which is great, and I think I can avoid problems now that I have the reverse switch and know to minimize the tension. I hope it gets here soon; I’m missing the daily meditative colour-play.
Also, it’s obvious I need a full-size traditional wheel as well. Need. Yeah.
I’ve become whatever the female equivalent of the mamil (middle-aged man in lycra) is. I am obsessed with cycling. There’s been a lot of water under the bridge since my last cycling-related post exactly a year ago. At that point I was all set up on Zwift and enjoying riding my aluminum tri-bike regularly, noting improvements in strength and endurance. I was hooked, but it was early days.
As usual my fitness program took a nosedive in July and August when the routine of the school year falls away and SVI work kicks into high gear, but with the exception of peak summer, I’ve been riding consistently, and hard. Although I did a bunch of fun big outdoor rides in the spring and late summer, the structured workouts and training programs I’ve done have been indoors. They have been based, as everything cycling is these days, around watts. My Stac trainer has a power meter which measures the work I’m putting out moment by moment and also allows me to derive the all-important FTP (functional threshold power), a measurement of the maximum watts I can average over an hour. Watts per kilogram of body weight is the most useful metric for estimating cycling performance potential. See how wonderfully geeky this is? A perfect fit for me!
Power output now (dark purple) vs. 9 months ago (light purple). My biggest improvements in sprinting (high power, short duration) but there are other gains too.
My FTP was about 130 watts when I started on Zwift, which at the time worked out to 2.24 w/kg. Now I’m at 176 watts, and being a bit lighter, that works out to 3.20 w/kg. This isn’t an amazing improvement compared to some people, as I was actually pretty fit when I started on the bike thanks to my running, but it’s a significant change. It has moved me from the lowest quartile among the Zwift women’s community to somewhere just above the middle overall. Which I figure isn’t bad for someone who is almost 55.
I’ve done a 6-week beginner FTP improvement program, bits and pieces of a 12-week program, a ton of semi-competitive group rides and group workouts, a 6-week time-trial team challenge and I’m almost done a challenging 4-week FTP booster program for more advanced cyclists. The most fun though was the Zwift Women’s Academy program during September and October. For the really talented but as-yet-undiscovered cyclists, Zwift Academy gave them a shot at a spot on a pro team. But the larger group of lesser mortals were welcome to participate as well. The program had a series of prescribed workouts, as well as the requirement that you participate in a couple of races and a bunch of group workouts.
The ratio of men to women on Zwift is probably still almost 10 to 1. There was a Zwift Men’s Academy running concurrently, but it didn’t get as much uptake: only about 4 times as many participants signed up in the Men’s Academy as the Women’s. And the men’s graduation rate was only half as high as the women’s (13% vs. 26%). There was some kind of magic at work amongst the women. The sense of community and mutual support that sprang up was pretty awesome and motivating. I earned my graduation cap and ZWA sparked my biggest improvements in power.
I upgraded my bike last spring to a used custom-built carbon-frame Norco Valence. (I sold the cute Felt tri-bike to a friend to help fund the upgrade.) And gradually I’ve kitted myself out with a bunch of other stuff that makes cycling even more fun, comfortable and enjoyable. I now have multiple sets of bibshorts, real road-biking shoes, a smart little Wahoo Bolt cycling computer mounted on my handlebars, an under-seat bag of tools and parts, prescription cycling sunglasses and a couple of nice jackets for wind and rain protection. I ordered a fair bit of stuff from AliExpress, so it hasn’t been insanely expensive. Rather than paying close to $200 for a pair of bibshorts for example I’m paying $25. Since I ride several days in a row, and they’re worn without undergarments during a wickedly-sweaty activity, I need 5 or 6 pairs to avoid having to do laundry every night and to ensure that when I do run a load of sportswear laundry, I have an extra pair while the rest are hang-drying their thick gel-chamois. I’ve also discovered Nuu-Muu dresses which I love for outdoor rides (indoors I’m less modest) … and they work for almost anything: music performances, XC skiing, running, casual wear. They aren’t cheap, but I’ve gradually accumulated a collection.
The rocker plate
I also built myself a rocker plate for my indoor trainer. Since I’m putting 6000+ kilometres a year on my indoor trainer, I was persuaded by the rocker-plate aficionados in the Zwift community that from a comfort, realism and frame-strain standpoint allowing bike and trainer to sway just a little side to side like when it’s is being ridden outdoors was a good thing. I braved the lumber yard on my own, tied some decent rope knots to get two half-sheets of plywood home on the roof of my little Subaru, ordered pillow bearings (yeah, I had no idea what they were either until I started this) and sourced a hardened steel rod, and then set to work in the basement of the Nelson place with just a jigsaw and a hand drill. After a quick trip to Walmart for truck-bed spray paint and two playground balls, it was done. I’m pretty pleased with how it feels: it’s definitely more comfortable and realistic, something I appreciate for rides of more than an hour.
On an even more exciting note, the geeky Canadian engineers who invented and produced my Stac bike trainer have come up with an upgrade that will convert it to a controllable trainer. This is the feature that most Zwifters swear by. It means that when the virtual world presents you with a hill, the trainer automatically increases resistance proportionally, and the experience becomes, as they say, “truly immersive.” They tell me there is no going back once you’ve ridden a controllable trainer. They say Zwift (which I love as-is, as you might have guessed, even though all that happens when my avatar hits a hill is that her speed drops dramatically) is nothing without a controllable trainer. So I am really excited. I’ve pre-ordered the upgrade, and it should arrive sometime in the summer or early fall.
Throughout the past two winters I’ve also been XC skiing regularly, having bought a season pass at the club just outside of Nelson. Finally, after more than 20 years of wishing, I found some cheap (ex-rental) skate-ski gear and did a set of beginner skate-ski technique clinics. I still ski classic when terrain and conditions are more conducive to that style, but I do love skate-skiing. I’m not all that good at it yet, though I feel like the latter half of this season I’ve made some real progress. But I do love it! The feeling is so flowy and enjoyable.
Hello “spring!” Is it time for shorts yet?
So, running. My knee, which flared up for no particular reason in November 2016, had basically stopped me from running entirely by January 2017. The focus on cycling was an effort to deal with my grief and frustration over that reality. I finally went and saw the sports med doc in September and the verdict was as expected: age-related wear and tear with probably a bit of cartilage damage that might or might not get better spontaneously but wasn’t likely to benefit from arthroscopy (thankfully the big study that cast arthroscopy out of favour for knees like mine had just been published). So I pretty much stopped running. Maybe once every week or two I’d do an easy 5k, but the knee was always a bit sore and swollen for a couple of days afterward. I knew it would be foolish to do more.
During my first winter of skate-skiing, I could tell my knee was not all that happy with that motion either. This year, though, it didn’t seem to mind. I have a lot more strength in my upper leg muscles thanks to all the cycling work (my slim jeans don’t fit comfortably over my thighs any more, even though I’ve lost weight). So I started running semi-regularly again: twice a week, sometimes two days in a row, sometimes 10k instead of 5, sometimes a bit faster than “easy pace.”
Wonder of wonders, I think my knee is okay! Not perfect, but much improved, such that I can run regularly again. With winter abating I’ve gone out and run my old route near home recently and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how fast I am. Without even pushing myself hard I have bested two of the times I set during the months I was training for the Vancouver Marathon that qualified me for Boston, when I was, I thought, in the best running shape of my life.
So maybe there’s hope that I can be a runner again, rather than an ex-runner. I love cycling too much to give it up so I imagine I’ll just mix the two.
The Boston Marathon has turned out not to be possible for me. I spent three months babying my knee (after just barely beginning to run regularly in the fall) and still, within a month of starting marathon training it was as bad as ever. I was living on ibuprofen, and most mornings it was so swollen I couldn’t bend it past 90 degrees.
I really need some form of regular self-directed exercise though. I miss it when I don’t have it. Cycling doesn’t seem to bother my knee to any appreciable extent, so it has been filling the hole left by running.
I’ve also been doing some cross-country skiing. I did a series of three introductory skate-skiing clinics in January. I had snapped up a set of skate-length poles out of the sale bin in 1991 when we were living in Iroquois Falls, ON, thinking “I’ll gradually accumulate what I need on sale, and then I’ll learn to skate.” I never expected that it would take me 25 years to gather the rest of the gear, the time, the opportunity and the momentum to make it happen. I have loved being able to mix classic and skate-skiing depending on conditions, but overall I prefer skating!
Biking in the big screen
But biking has become my new obsession, especially since I brought my bike and trainer to Nelson for Zwifting. I’m there from Monday to Friday, and I can use the projector and the pull-down big screen to get the sort of immersive experience that leaves my stomach lurching when I crest a rolling hill at speed. Even though I have to move everything (laptop, water bottle, side table, bike, trainer, wheel block, portable fan) into and out of the living room every time I want to do a ride, it’s worth it!
The lookout at the top of Watopia mountain, just after sunset. Days on Watopia take a couple of hours; nights last half an hour. But the sunsets are spectacular, so no one minds.
Although I haven’t felt compelled to sign up for a race yet, I’ve been joining group rides several times a week, following friends’ progress, chatting through text or voice and hanging out on Facebook groups to exchange tips, ideas and enthusiasm.
Pretty consistent exercise log over the past while: as much exercise as during my peak marathon training weeks last year.
Group rides are usually oriented around a particular level of difficulty, and most are “no-drop,” which means that the group works together to stick to the advertised pace, stick together to create a good drafting effect, and support riders who may have slowed through encouragement, dropping the pace for a while, and by ‘offering a wheel’ (one or two stronger riders slowing down to meet the dropped rider and providing a draft effect to lead them back onto the peloton).
Some group rides have a bit of a training focus, with the leader encouraging changes of pace or occasional sprints followed by regrouping. The TGIF ride is an easy ride where beer is the encouraged source of hydration, and is followed by an optional After Party harder challenge.
In case the fitness stats, social life and achievement badges aren’t enough, there are additional challenges. After climbing the equivalent of 5 Everests, I will be awarded the glowing Zwift Concept bike, a.k.a. the Tron bike.
I started out doing the gentlest of group rides, the eternally friendly and polite PAC rides. These are well-organized and well-led. Rider power (scaled in watts of pedalling power per kilogram of body weight, the metric which is then combined with Zwift’s terrain to produce virtual speed) is held to less than 1.5 or 2.0w/kg.
Strava’s crude but affirming graph of my changing fitness level (baseline mid-December, when I started on Zwift).
As I got braver and stronger, I began venturing into other types of rides, including stepped laps which have gradually increasing paces as high as 3.0w/kg. I can now sustain this for ten minutes or so.
As a distance runner, I was never strong: I could just keep going. When I started Zwifting I knew strength was something I would have to build. I think it’s coming, though very slowly. I’ve done a set of two dozen workouts as part of a six-week program for beginners designed to improve FTP or Functional Threshold Power. I haven’t tested my FTP since finishing (it’s a nasty test you don’t want to do too often: essentially ‘go as hard as you can for twenty minutes, hopefully, though not necessarily, without puking) but my FTP has gone up from 141 watts to at least the mid-160s.
To most Zwift cyclists, runners are still a novelty
On the weekends, back in New Denver, I run on the treadmill. If I stay there, on the controlled even surface, and don’t exceed 10 kilometres per run, my knee doesn’t flare up. Recently I have been using Zwift in running mode. A cheap foot pod, some beta firmware, a secret easter-egg click in the Zwift welcome screen and pretty soon my avatar is running in the Zwift virtual cycling world. Running doesn’t have nearly the realism of cycling (no drafting, no group events, no change in speed based on virtual grade) but it’s better than staring at a treadmill console.
There is still snow and ice and sand and slush all over the roads, and half a metre of snow on the rest of the ground. Last year I did a lovely spring ride up the pass towards Kaslo on March 20th. There is no way that is going to be possible this year. But I am looking forward to trying out my nicely-primed cycling muscles in the real world as soon as the snow goes. I will have to remind myself to steer, and to use my brakes, and to unclip from my pedals when I stop.
Yeah, a couple of years ago I wouldn’t have had any idea what the title of this post meant either. But for the past week, after more than a year of waiting, it’s become a part of my daily life. Well, at least part of my daily life in New Denver.
There are two bits of magic involved here. The first is Zwift, a virtual cycling app running on my laptop. By riding stationary on a trainer in my basement with Zwift, I am thrust into a virtual world complete with sights, sounds, terrain variation and scenery, as well as other cyclists (all in their own basements, presumably). The app offers a data-geek’s playground of stats, challenges, logs, rankings, customizations and file-portability. I can ride for fun, I can draft in a peloton on a group ride, I can push myself through particular sprints or climbing challenges, trying to rank as well as possible against all the day’s riders, I can compare my PRs, run tests of Functional Threshold Power (shorthand for one’s maximal aerobic strength), take part in structured training workouts or simply sight-see. Most days the Zwift map puts me in the mythical Pacific island of Watopia, where I can choose from various routes and directions, anything from a fairly flat 10 km to an epic double mountain pass route of 72 km. Like on a real ride, I can turn back early, decide to take a different turn-off and change my route, extend a ride or quit part way through. I can wave at fellow riders, chat with them or cheer them on.
I always feel like I should open the basement door to let winter air in when I’m riding above Watopia’s snow line.
It all sounds pretty gimmicky and video-game-like, but as someone who has plugged through a lot of boring hours on her bike trainer over the past year and a half thanks only to daydreams and podcasts, the way this app transforms that experience is impressive. It takes you about 80% of the way from sweating and going nowhere in your basement to enjoying a real outdoor ride with a bunch of people. Even if I am planning to simply crank off some easy miles, even though nothing changes with respect to my bike which continues to spin on the level in the basement, I find myself pushing towards the summit of a climb and then dialing it back as I crest and start the descent. I huff and puff towards the finish line of a sprint, I try and keep up with likely-looking fellow riders. It’s almost dangerous: I often get lulled into pushing myself much harder than I need to, just because of the realism, the social aspect and the variability of the ride.
Whale-watching on Ocean Boulevard.
Zwift has been around for about 18 months and has evolved from a beta version with only a couple of tropical routes to an increasingly robust training platform with a variety of maps, including urban routes through London, UK and Richmond, VA. The worlds are only modelled on the real world, which allows the developers to create scenery and experiences in the realm of the fantastic. Ocean Boulevard takes you along a 2-kilometer submarine tunnel where fish and marine mammals swim around you. And yet the data files of a ride push through to Strava, the online log where I tally up all my miles, and look just like my real rides, complete with Google maps of the route. Yes, the Strava software engine has been talked into believing that Watopia is real.
I bought a third-hand CycleOps Fluid2 trainer last year for $100. It had a nice road-like feel, but unfortunately because my bike is a ‘petite’ bike with 650c wheels, Zwift wasn’t able to accurately estimate power (or actually power per kilogram of body weight, from which it generates somewhat-rider-equalized virtual speed on whatever terrain you’re on). I tried the beta version of Zwift when it was first being rolled out in 2015, and my smaller faster-rolling wheels confused Zwift into thinking I was faster and stronger than I was. The near-freezing temperature of the garage where I was riding at the time reduced the viscosity of the resistance fluid in my trainer, and further caused my power to be over-estimated. Normally I would have been content to simply work for relative improvements in my power and speed, not worrying about the absolute accuracy. But the social nature of Zwift meant this was problematic: on a moderate ride I could wup the yellow jersey off even the elite riders, and they weren’t all that impressed. They had worked hard for those jerseys.
Slapping a power meter on my bike would have got rid of the need for Zwift to (poorly) estimate power. But power meters are $500-1000. Yup, really.
That’s where the Stac Zero comes in. My third-hand CycleOps trainer had two issues. It had been leaking small amounts of fluid, and it had caused a fair bit of tire wear. So when I saw a Kickstarter campaign and a glowing prototype review of the Stac Zero trainer, I jumped aboard and backed the version with the integrated power meter. The Stac, made in Canada, uses eddy current magnetic braking to slow the spinning of the aluminum rear wheel of my bike. This video shows the magnetic drag effect using electromagnets that are switched on to stop a swinging pendulum. In the case of the Stac Zero trainer, the pendulum is replaced by the rim of a bicycle wheel and the electromagnets with a bunch of always-on rare earth magnets. There is no contact between tire and the trainer, so there is no tire wear and no sound from the resistance mechanism. The only sound is that of my bike’s drivetrain itself. A no-calibration-needed power meter integrated into the trainer completes the set-up, transmitting to my laptop. Zwift gets accurate numbers, and puts me properly in the back half of the pack where I should be.
It is so quiet that it doesn’t matter that I’ve put it in the basement right beneath Fiona’s bedroom. For me that beats the garage: it’s warm enough for my laptop and cool enough for me. And Fiona doesn’t even hear it.
Unlike almost every other Kickstarter project I’ve backed, the Stac delivered on time. That was a pleasant surprise, and it helped propel me out of the depressing spiral of inactivity that has plagued me this fall. I’m supposed to be training for the Boston Marathon but my knees have been inflamed for mysterious reason and the swelling, by pushing tendons and ligaments out of alignment, is producing pain whenever I run. Boston may or may not be off the table in April, but at least with the bike trainer to play with in New Denver and the Nelson Nordic Ski Club tracks to ski in during my time in Nelson, I can stay fit and active.
