Outdoors ARCHIVES
11 May 2008
There's the tiniest of rises on the Memorial Hall Criterium course. It's not even a true slope -- just a change in the camber of the surface, a dip down and back up from the storm drain in the...
31 March 2008
From Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn, a manifesto, of sorts, on user-centered architecture: Home can be about architecture or a place in geography; or it can be about the sense of permanence we come to know through habit: an article...
05 February 2007
A few weeks ago, I skimmed a thread on a cycling email list about a women's bike skills class hosted by a local bike coalition. Then I watched it slip benignly and steadily into doom. It began with a few...
10 April 2006
I was telling my coworker about forthcoming Spain/Morocco trip, and he joked, "So, what, you're going to bike across the Strait of Gibraltar?" Fact: There do, in fact, exist bikes on the water. They are... paddleboats! Fact: The Strait of...
20 November 2005
Lately it seems that all I've been doing is thinking about bicycles, looking at bicycles, talking about bicycles, and riding bicycles. Luckily, between school friends and work friends, I've a whole slew of partners in crime with which to geek...
18 October 2005
I'll admit to having kind of lost steam on the last entry — but hey, Roger was able to read ahead for his dinner party beef Strogonoff, and that's all I was aiming for anyway. Perhaps in a couple of...
10 October 2005
Bevan Barton is an 18-year-old kid from Oakland, California who's taking the year after high school graduation to cycle around the world. Sounds insane and ambitious, but though he's less than a quarter of the way through his trip so...
31 August 2005
One Sunday morning early in my stay in Paris I set out for the flea markets and Montmartre (19th-century artists' neighborhood) for a bit of browsing and just got knocked over by a few too many people (shopkeepers, waiters,...
13 July 2005
Last Thursday, I undertook the Who Needs Hardcore When You Have Hard Rock? bicycle tour. For extra rock, note that I wrote my captain's log out by hand with a fuschia Uni-ball Vision: business on the outside, bidness on the...
13 July 2005
Today's stage 11 is considered one of the toughest in the tour, and its major climb is the Col du Galibier at 6.9% over 17.5km. Hm, you think. That's not far from Kings Mountain. Googling reveals in short order that,...
22 April 2005
My very swank, very cushioned pair acquired on $20 closeout during freshman year at Copeland's in downtown Palo Alto have finally bit it — the whole right side of the right cleat ripped off of the sole at practice last...
06 April 2005
I think I've been getting better at marking handler cuts this year. At the very least, I've come home from the last two weekends (first the Irvine Invite with the team plus a few alums/ringers, where we came in second,...
30 March 2005
...because no matter how carefully I ramp up to the phrase, I can never get it to come out correctly as "handlebar bag". YOU try it. Handlebar bag handlebar bag handlebar bag handlebag bar. Last Sunday we woke up and...
17 March 2005
Two years ago I flew to the Seattle-Tacoma airport, met 3 friends in the baggage claim area, assembled our bicycles, and biked straight out of the airport to the Main Quad. This spring break, we're looking to extend the reach...
17 February 2005
Ten minutes I was fighting off the sleepy, dry-contacts blinkety blink blink when I decided that one eye was blurry enough to merit a lens removal and lens cleaning. It turned out that I had a CLUMP OF MUD IN...
22 August 2003
While I've backpacked a fair amount and bicycled a solid accumulation of miles over the past few years, what I haven't done is combined the two. More specifically, I'm not as confident planning bike trip meals. Unlike any backpacking trip...
22 August 2003
Here's how to reach me by mail over the next few weeks: Michelle Lee c/o General Delivery [Town, State, Zip] Please hold for southbound cyclist Expected arrival [Date] Friday 8/29: Amboy, WA 98601 Wednesday 9/3: Florence, OR 97439 Saturday 9/6:...
21 August 2003
I've been a little absent lately, mostly because for most of the summer I spent most of the working day staring dumbly at the computer screen and in my free time wanted to practice my distance vision as much as...
02 August 2003
Take a whiff, and you think you're breathing pure, clean, unadulterated air. Say, however, that you travel through 114.0 linear miles in one day outside of a car, completely open to the elements of road dust and asphalt flecks. About...
03 December 2002
Between CS and the recent slew of frisbee-related email, I'd had more than enough of sitting at my desk by the time the sun started to set. I was getting pretty jumpy and about to go forage in the kitchen...
20 November 2002
Just before midnight on Monday, two carsful of friends headed up to the Monte Bello Open Space Preserve, about 8 windy miles westward on Page Mill Road, with the intention of Leonids-viewing. The nearly-full moon was so bright that we...
20 October 2002
...and in other news, Kara and I are co-captaining the B-team this year. Cool! A nominal position, essentially, because we're as unhierarchical as is possible for an organization to be, but I'm just excited about tossing some amazing disc with...
14 October 2002
Last night I made a big decision, and ten minutes ago I unmade it. Feels so much better. (And, no, Tory, this has nothing to do with what you might think.) Sophomore year, bring it on. Oh, right, I also...
16 September 2002
I keep my bike seat relatively high even when I'm just commuting; doing so gives me better leverage and makes the whole ride a lot more fun—with the small sacrifice of balance when stopped. I can't quite reach the ground...
03 September 2002
I've fallen into a mild habit of some involved bike trip the day before a quarter starts: last winter it was Molly and I and the Baylands with lots of detours, and in the spring it was Kings Mountain Road....
29 July 2002
Mmm, going to try to squeeze in a couple of last July posts. I've been in the King Range along the Lost Coast, out of electronic communication, for the past few days. Here's the story, or at least as much...
17 July 2002
The lazy old men (and women) with whom I spend Wednesday evenings. We're so bad at adaped-song-lyric cheers that we decided to manifest the Spirit of the Game (tm) in a more physical and backbreaking fashion....
13 July 2002
Just got back from a really long rambly ride, whose 3/4-point was a stop at the Los Altos branch of Chain Reaction. There, I test rode an aluminum road bike for about half an hour. Butter. Droooooool. And siiiigh: it...
02 June 2002
Had a really interesting conversation with some SOOP folk on Friday evening over some pasta and eggplant marinara sauce we'd whipped up after a meeting at Gateway with Kevin. Michael (MikL) mentioned some dissatisfaction with the outdoor community's general attitude...
13 May 2002
I'm pretty darn spoiled. It seems that, whenever I'm about to be well and truly screwed, something spectacular falls into my lap. In this case, I got waylaid by email-checking on my way into Meyer to finish up my E14...
10 May 2002
Yes, I am still alive, but the past few days have been simultaneously really good and really stupid—hence the silence. The latter half, of course, has been entirely my fault and I'll spare you the details. As for the former,...
28 April 2002
Crikey. April's almost over, and the weather here is still a little uncooperative. We had a Regionals for ultimate yesterday and today at UC Santa Cruz, about an hour southwest of here. They have the most beautiful campus ever, nestled...
11 April 2002
The soap dispensers in the McCullough building's bathrooms dispense foam. How cool is that? I was so impressed that I washed my hands twice. Then, I went outside to read in the time I had before Magic Flute rehearsal, but...
29 March 2002
Wan and I woke up on top of a mountain today. I'm in Kentucky right now. I'm not sure which is more of a shocker statement, so I guess I should just start over from the beginning. Today's been quite...
04 March 2002
I woke up early, around 8:30, today. I've been getting rather satisfactory amounts of sleep at the expense of being on top of my work. While nothing major other than a CS program for Wednesday is due this week, the...
18 February 2002
I'd forgotten how cool desert is—any desert. This time, it was the Mojave. More specifically, the western half of Joshua Tree National Park, the destination of our third OEP trip. We left faster than usual on Friday afternoon due to...
23 January 2002
Recent developments—namely, my computer refusing to accept either keyboard or touchpad input, have kept me from updating for quite a while. Granted, I didn't go as hardcore as Roger and remotely change the permissions to my ftp account, but it...
09 January 2002
So I'm back here after having spent the night out on the quad to get one of the eleven spots in GES7B, Introduction to Wilderness Skills. It meets for two hours every Wednesday night, and takes four two-night trips every...
08 December 2001
My left cheekbone is beautifully and hugely swollen, though its volume is gradually diminishing in favor of a bluish-green bruise that resembles a makeup job gone horribly wrong. Ben, I think, was the one who called it the battered woman...
17 November 2001
Tonight, I definitely pulled another "announce that I'm staying in to do work but end up playing Mario Kart and doing other timewasteful things." What I did do was look into some more details for backpacking in Assateague/Chincoteague during winter...
11 November 2001
What a binary year! Though I do believe that this is the last of the bunch. It seems as if Roger's issuing a challenge by promising to update four times a week. Well, bring it! Too bad my life isn't...