I got my second flat tire since I started biking again, last night. It was in what I now think of as the bad part of my ride home, where I got jumped this summer. I hit broken glass from something. I carefully pulled the glass out while out in Oakland last night, and just popped the tire open to fix it tonight. It was large enough to easily find the hole, but it looks small enough to be repairable. I was worried last night that there might be multiple cuts in the tire, but that's apparently not the case.

All of the lights were out under one of the highways between here and Endgame, which I'd never seen before. It was weird & spooky. When I got the flat some time afterward, I wondered briefly if someone had tried to set a trap. But then decided that was rampant paranoia encouraged by the "bad part" of Telegraph.

That's only my second flat since I started riding again last fall. I'm riding less frequently than I used to, 'lo back these many years when I used to bike to Chaosium every day, but the total mileage is similar, probably more including my bike adventures. Given I used to get a flat every month, I'm much happier with my flat-to-biking ratio with my current bike (knock on wood).

And by now by vulcanizing solution is probably dry, so that I can attach the patch, put the tire back together, pump it back up, then see (tomorrow) if it now holds air again.

So we got DirecTV installed this Summer when Comcast proved themselves to be complete assholes with regard to their service and trying to steal every dollar they can from their customers. At the moment, DirectTV isn't looking much better.

This month, when rains began in earnest, we noticed that our DVR recordings via DirecTV started having jumps in them, sometimes frequently. Then on Friday's Dollhouse there was a four-minute hang or so. I did a bit of research on this and found that it was probably "rain fade", which is supposed to only really happen on modern satellite systems if the setup was done wrong.

So I asked K. to call DirectTV to get it fixed and she did. Kind of. They told her that our system had been setup wrong ... but that we were out of the warranty period, and so they wouldn't do anything without $$. Not a lot of money, but it's the principal of the matter. These assholes are trying to charge us for a setup problem that couldn't have possibly been seen until we got to the rainy season and they are trying to ding us for not seeing it until then. I won't say that they're money-grubbing whores yet, like Comcast clearly is, but this isn't a step in the right direction.

Unlike with Comcast, we've got a year and a half of contract left with DirectTV, so I can't just ditch this new company (nor would it necessarily be the right answer after one problem). So I've filed paperwork with the BBB immediately. If they don't play right through the BBB I'll kick it up toward the regulators for California and the Feds to at least do what I can to make them change their business practices.

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At least as frustrating to me as DirectTV is K.'s reaction to this. She says "it's unfortunate", but thinks that we deserve to get screwed because, after all, it was outside the warranty period. Despite the fact that the problem was there from Day 1 and it was impossible for us to see prior to this. I can't believe that she can't understand the concept of "justice" given the amount of jackbooted-law-and-order television she watches. Maybe it's just instilling the wrong ideas about justice.

When I bike to EndGame on a cold night, my hands are inevitably frozen to the bone before I'm halfway there. I can touch them and feel cold emanating off of them. I try and warm them up at every stop light, but never to any avail.

When I bike home it's at best the same temperature but usually 5-10 degrees colder. My hands rarely get cold on the way home. I can touch them and feel that they remain relatively warm despite the temperature outside.

It may not be Scotland cold or American Northeast cold, but we're having some damned cold weather for the Bay Area right now.

It got down to around freezing last night. There's apparently snow in some of the places that I biked over Thanksgiving weekend*. The local weather reports say that we won't get back to the 50s until Saturday.

Brrr.

I've just put a second pair of socks on, something that I can't remember doing since last time I went skiing.

Someone call Alaska and tell them that they can have their air back!**

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* Particularly impressive, because the temperature got up to the mid-70s while I was biking, and I thought, "I'd probably be hot if not for the wind." I did that whole ride in jeans & a t-shirt, until the sun started going down, at which point I put my windbreaker on.

** Their bubble-headed*** quitter-of-an-ex-governor too.

*** "What newspapers and magazines do you regularly read?" "All of them."

I'm afraid that Moe's, our top local used-book store is slowly Amazoning themselves out of business.

Let me explain ...

For years Moe's has been my primary location to sell off used material. Primarily that's meant graphic novels, some portion of which I circulate, and which they're usually happy to have. Their trade slips have always underlined the fact that they don't low-ball people on offers. They claim a 40% trade-in rate. Given that they then turn around and mark things up to 60%, they still make a good profit even for those people who do use up their trade slips.

But for the last few years, they've started low-balling. Sometimes it's worse than others, and I increasingly am certain it's dependent upon who's doing their buying (which honestly is worse than low-balling everything because of the inconsistent rewards ... which are likely to extinguish selling behavior). Nonetheless, I've always accepted their offers before, because it's better than any of the other used book stores in the area.

Today, though, they low-balled so ridiculously that they might as well have been Half-Price Books. I took in a backpack full of trade paperbacks, at least three-quarters of which were high enough quality that they should sell quickly. The buyer cherry-picked about half of the books then for the remaining half, a set which I later learned was $86 worth of books, he offered me $13. (40% of $86 is $34, for those keeping track.)

I was very polite in declining them. When he apologized, I said, "No worries." But I was surely thinking that I might as well give them away if they wanted to give me just enough trade credit (not even cash!) for four books to buy ... one.

And here's where I say they're Amazoning themselves out of business: if you get the wrong buyer (and bald, old guy is apparently the wrong buyer, note to myself), they do a dance with their local computer terminal, checking the price of everything on Amazon, to decide what to buy and what not to.

But, there's two problems here. First, they can't be thinking about shipping, which on a trade-paperback sized book is a pretty large percentage (though less for a hardcover, typically, and one of the books I wanted to sell was that). Second, they clearly don't look deeper to see if the cheapest book is cheap due to poor quality or because it's a library book. (And, also, third, they as often as not don't know a thing about the products they're buying nowadays, which is a shame.)

Looking at Amazon, two of the three actual trade paperbacks that they were trying to buy aren't even available for sale for 60% of cover (including shipping where applicable, since the cheapest prices are inevitably from Marketplace shops who don't offer free shipping). And they tried to low-ball them. Two books that they turned down after looking at Amazon prices also aren't available for 60% of cover online, primarily because they were cheap volumes ($10 and $13). Like I said, they have to not be thinking about shipping costs, but if they're nonetheless using Amazon as a measure of what not to buy, that's not just stupid, it's a suicidal business decision.

Because here's the alternative that they leave me with: I might just give them away, because that's about the same value that they offered. Or, I might sell them through eBay or the Amazon Marketplace, which cuts them out of the loop entirely. And results in me getting money into a PayPal account ... which will probably just be turned back into an electronic purchase.

That's how they're going to Amazon themselves out of business: by offering worse deals than online purchasers, despite the fact that they've got the advantage of not having to charge shipping and thus being de facto a bit cheaper, even after sales tax.

Ah well.

Early in our relationship, Kimberly & I would often read books aloud. I know we read through Fifth Business, The Manticore, and (I think) World of Wonders--at least the first two while we lived in North Berkeley. But, it slowly faded away, because life was busy for a while there, then there were problems, then time passed by. Over the last two years we've returned to the pattern. One of the reasons that we made it work this time, was that we learned that I liked to read more and to some extent Kimberly liked to listen more.

(I don't know how much the roles were an issue for K., but they definitely were for me, because I can
read for quite some time, but the more passive role of listening often left me antsy.)

Xenagia was the impetus for this new round of reading, via March '08s book club reading of The Shadow of the Torturer. It's one of my favorites, and after talking with Kimberly, we agreed to read it aloud.

I think this is everything that we've read together since starting to read aloud again:

1. 03/08: The Shadow of the Torturer, by Gene Wolfe
   
2. 04/08: The Claw of the Conciliator, by Gene Wolfe
   
3. 05/08-06/08: The Sword of the Lictor, by Gene Wolfe
   
4. 07/08: The Citadel of the Autarch, by Gene Wolfe
   
5. 08/08: "The Map" and "The Cat", by Gene Wolfe
   
6. 08/08-09/08: The Urth of the New Sun, by Gene Wolfe
   
7. 10/08-11/08: Watership Down, by Richard Adams
   
8. 12/08: Tales from Watership Down, by Richard Adams
   
9. 01/09-02/09: Nightside the Long Sun, by Gene Wolfe
   
10. 03/09: Lake of the Long Sun, by Gene Wolfe
    
11. 04/09: Calde of the Long Sun, by Gene Wolfe
    
12. 05/09-06/09: Exodus from the Long Sun, by Gene Wolfe
    
13. 07/09: Storm Front, by Jim Butcher
    
14. 08/09: On Blue's Waters, by Gene Wolfe
    
15. 08/09: Fool Moon, by Jim Butcher
    
16. 09/09: In Green's Jungles, by Gene Wolfe
    
17. 10/09: Grave Peril, by Jim Butcher
    
18. 11/09: Return to the Whorl, by Gene Wolfe
    

We finished Return to the Whorl last night, and I'm very sad to have ended a year and a half working through Wolfe's Sun Cycle. I'm especially going to miss characters of the last seven books like Horn, Oreb, and Silk who have been our frequent companions since we started reading about them as this year dawned. I find that I've traveled with those people for so long that I mimic their speech patterns sometimes. "Good cat!" Oreb would say. And "Does she want her dinner? She does!" according to Pig.

Reading aloud also has a weird way of locking in my memories with locations and times. I can distinctly remember reading Nightside the Long Sun at airports, on the way back from Hawaii last January, when two different people commented on the book and its language. I remember reading Lake of the Long Sun on a secluded bench up in the hills in Tilden Regional Park. Similarly, one of Severian's books (probably Shadow) got read up there, on a bench in front of Lake Anza, but we didn't stay there for long, because there was a cold breeze coming off of the lake.

The fourth Harry Dresden is sitting down by the telephone, between my loveseat and Kimberly's couch, and we plan to start reading it tonight. And after that, the first Fables novel, which will also be the first novel that I hadn't previously read, since way back when we read Davies' Deptford novels.

I am deep in Fantasy Land right now.

Still trying to finish my Undead game of Disciples II, though I limited it to just an hour tonight now that I'm off of vacation. I think I've just got a couple of missions left, but that'll take weeks at that rate. I'm very bemused that we happened to talk about it at gaming the other week and Dave W. said it was too short. Maybe I just don't have the stamina for modern computer games ...

I've been working on a review of the board game, Dungeon Twister: Prison. Much of the material is updated from my old Dungeon Twister Base Set review, but I've been playing the Solo Game so that I can thoroughly review that too. I expect to run a third solo game tomorrow and then finish up the review.

I've also started reading a copy of Warhammer Fantasy RPG 3rd Edition which I received for review on Friday or so. I don't review many RPGs, but this one is both innovative enough and board-game-connected enough that I opted to make an exception when it surprisingly showed up.

I've been reading Gardens of the Moon, the first book in the 15-book Malazan Empire cycle (which is 9+2 novels complete at this time). I've been expecting to enjoy it, but I also have troubles with particularly dense fantasies sometimes. Thus far, happy to say I'm enjoying it. My attention is probably helped by the fact that, contrary to my usual pattern, I'm not reading any other novels right now.

Of course, I'm working on the WFRPG rules ....

Wore a hole in my right thumb yesterday, where I tend to rest it against the bottom of my gear shift. Hurts today, so I've neosporinned and bandaged it.

A bit sore, which is a rarity when I bike. My back is a little tight, but what I really notice is my thighs when I walk up the stairs.

But, it's nice to be able to do a 45-mile ride and just be a bit worn down the next day.

K. and I were planning to ride the Iron Horse Trail this weekend, but she was feeling sick both Saturday & Sunday (an ongoing problem these last few months related to food), so today I finally upped and went on my own.

This was my third ride on the Iron Horse Trail. I took it from Dublin BART to just short of Pleasant Hill BART, which is around two-thirds of the total trail. I've gotten pretty familiar with it from my previous rides, so much of the Trail just streamed by.

There was a lot of wind in the first five miles or so north of Dublin, which was also the case when Kimberly and I rode it earlier the year. Every once in a while past that first section the wind picked up again, but for the most part it was better protected and/or less windy past the pit that is San Ramon.

As always, the most beautiful part of the ride was through Danville and Alamo. It surprisingly wasn't as autumnal as it was when I rode it last Thanksgiving. There was a lot more green, I guess due to the torrential downpour we had last month.

Just short of Pleasant Hill BART I headed out west on the Contra Costa Canal Trail. This was totally new ground, and something that had been on my list to do this coming year. The trail diverted from the Canal more than was the case in the east, and there were also some rolling hills that the trail went up and down. Sometimes those put the trail well above the canal. Despite the hilliness, none of the riding was particularly difficult. As often as not there was a big dropoff followed by a climb, so on all but a handful of the hills you could carry the momentum straight over. Even those, you didn't climb more for very long.

The ride was quite pleasant. Parts of it reminded me of Lafayette-Moraga as it goes into the hills (though this didn't ascend as high, because it was all up and down). There was lots of beautiful greenery. No waterfalls though.

Like the Iron Horse Trail, the western Contra Costa Canal Trail ends in the modern wasteland that is highway 4. At some point I need to figure the best path up north to the coast.

I'd decided to continue my explorations for the day by taking the Contra Costa Canal Trail almost back to the Iron Horse Trail, but then diverting on the (partially unpaved) Briones to Mt. Diablo Regional Trail.

Well, that was the plan. I accidentally missed the turnoff and ended up back at the Iron Horse, then had to backtrack (though a series of neat tunnels and underpasses that lie on the first western mile of the Contra Costa Canal Trail). More careful, I found the trail this time, and started heading southwest.

I didn't really know much about the geography along the Briones to Mt. Diablo Regional Trail, other than the fact that right in the middle was the "Acalanes Ridge Open Space" (now the "Walnut Creek Open Space", according to the signs). I figured that meant there was a climb. Sure enough.

I was pretty tuckered out by now, with 35 miles and about three and a half hours of riding behind me. So, when the going got steep, I started walking. My map wasn't entirely accurate through the area, which was good and bad. On the good side, there was a lot more paved trail than my map indicated. Maybe only a quarter of a mile or so that wasn't paved. On the bad side, there's a detour so that trail doesn't go where the map says it does right now (and hasn't for a long time, it looks like), which made it harder figuring out where I was.

The actual Open Space is in a fenced off area--fenced so that the cows don't get out. Yep, cows. There's a very considerable climb within those fences, up a loose dirt trail. It would have been challenging in any case, but being already exhausted I was never quite sure I'd make it to the top (especially since I didn't know where the top was). Though I was dragging my bike up the hill, it was also all that was keeping me vertical at times. At the end I was counting out 10-20 steps between rests. I finally made it to the top though! I could see all the way north across Pleasant Hill and Martinez to the Carquinez Straight, which was by now being dyed red by the setting sun. Very pretty.


Total height is 736 feet above sea level, or something like that, but I opted not to go the last 50 or 100 feet, since the path through (to Lafayette) didn't take me there and I'd had enough climbing by then.

The trip home from there was lots of high-jinks.

First, a trip through the actual pasture with the cows, who seemed non-plussed by my bike and self.

Second, a ride through a private neighborhood in the hills above Lafayette. None of it was on either my map or my iPhone, so it took me a while to find the street that would take me down into Lafayette.

Third, after I dropped down off the hill, I decided to take the front part of the Lafayette-Moraga trail (before it heads into the hills) back toward the Lafayette BART station, figuring it'd keep me off the main streets of Lafayette, which are not particularly bike friendly even when it isn't dark. Problem: there were no lights at all on the trail and it was full night by now. I accidentally fumbled into a parking lot at the start and almost took myself out riding over one of those parking-space-block things. Fortunately it was really slanted on the edges, so I just slammed into it, got some air, and came down. I probably would have given myself a pair of snakebite flats from how hard I hit it if I hadn't filled up the tires this morning.

Fourth, after a (more careful) ride down the actual trail, I ended up on Lafayette neighborhood streets. I got turned around (which I've done before coming off that trail), and ended up heading in the wrong direction. And, it was really hard to see what I was doing because it was pitch dark (other than my bike light). Yep, Lafayette doesn't light their residential streets either. They really need a city government there or something. Thankfully it was a full moon, or near to, so I had some scant light.

I finally figured out what I was doing wrong, turned around, and got back to Lafayette BART, and from there it was a hop, skip, and a jump home.

I'm utterly exhausted now. This was a true bike adventure, both based on the length and the new places explored. Total mileage was 45 miles, though that included some back and forth to the BART stations out here too. It was a pretty comparable length ride to my Iron Horse ride last Thanksgiving, but a lot more strenuous due to the hills on the western Contra Costa Canal Trail and the mountain I scaled on the Briones to Mt. Diablo Regional Trail.

Whew.

Read the first SPQR short today. At 17 pages long, it was scarcely worth getting the book from the library. It was a tight little murder mystery set directly after the previous book, as Decius heads back from Alexandria.

I vaguely considered paging through the huge mass of other stories in Classical Whodunnits and finally decided that I'd do better to look at reviews or recommendations when and if I want another mystery series. So, with the 17 pages read, the book is going back to the Library.