Biking and Hiking and Kayaking: Be Careful Out There

Savoring Silent Movies, Strolling Sites of Skirmishes that Saved the States, Supermodel Spousal Success

The movie "The Artist" was lacking in car chases, explosions, frontal nudity and Mike Tyson - oh, and not much speaking either, as it was mostly a silent move. So, not generally the type of movie I'd enjoy. But Friday Carole and I saw it with Jim and Jacqui at the restored Silver Theatre, a fitting venue for an old fashioned movie - and it was just an old fashioned, good movie. 

Friday night/Saturday morning snow and freezing rain moved in, totally obliterating the Washington DC area, turning the previous lush Maryland landscape into a frozen tundra and quickly leading to the return of wild buffalo to the area. My purchase of a generator back in December and my proactively testing it, gassing it up and moving it into the screened porch worked like a charm: despite ice and freezing rain, we never lost power.

Sunday Carl and I decided to hike locally and revisited the snow-covered Monocacy Battlefield trail system. Allegedly, back in 1864 there was a big battle here that the North won which save the Union. I dunno - the "saved the Union" thing is sorta like "world's hottest coffee:" claimed a lot but hard to prove. One interesting historical tidbit is that agents of the B&O railroad apparently first learned of General Jubal Early's troop movements and told their CEO, who told Union Major General Lew Wallace, who mobilized the troops early enough to defeat Early. Sort of a 150 year old example of private industry doing a better job of military intelligence than the military...

On the western side of the battlefield areas, the trail system loops along the Monocacy River, through farmland and then into the woods. The four mile or so loop is pretty easy hiking and in the snow you can see an amazing amount of deer tracks - since around here the only predator deer have are automobiles, this is a big safety zone right next to I-270 for them. The trail then heads up to small ridge for a decent bit of climbing and then back down to farm level. You come out of the woods at the old (1850's vintage, old for the US anyway) Worthington Farm house, with its purty porch with the sky blue ceiling. 

Later that day we watched the end of the exciting Ravens/Patriots NFC championship game, where the Ravens missed a chance to tie the game with a field goal at the end and Giselle Bundchen's husband got rewarded with yet another trip to the Superbowl...

Winter Arrives, Oella Opens, Meeting Meat Killers

Well, April did not last long - the climate jumped to early February this past weekend. Which I guess meant the Super Bowl should have been played yesterday, so apparently the Baltimore Ravens are now Super Bowl champs, having defeated some team from Houston.

Friday night was a Biker Chicks birthday dinner for vegetarian Sue, so we enjoyed a fine meal at Andie's house made from the many parts of a pine tree that are edible. I'm not a big fan of asparagus, or of cream soups, but Christine's cream o' asparagus cream soup was the least disgusting I've ever tasted. I ate as much as I could without going all Exorcist all over anyone and then when Christine wasn't looking I tried to sneak my bowl into the kitchen - but the eyes in the back of those Biker Chicks' heads apparently work even when they are talking a mile a minute and apparently I was busted.

The below 0 degrees C temperatures did put the ixnay on ikingbay outdoors the next day, so I did a sweaty indoor spin class instead. That night Carole, Lauren and I went to Sage for yet another vegetarian meal, but I made sure there wasn't an asparagus in sight. I avoided temptation to order anything from the menu in quotes: I've found in the past that "chicken," "cheese" and "tasty" on a vegetarian menu generally mean "tofu," "tofu" and "you don't want to know/Exorcist warning."

Sunday am Carl and I decided to brave the temperature and hike around Oella, MD and explore some extensions to the standard 4 mile loop. We took a side trail to Banneker Park, then had to do some road walking where we passed a small butcher shop with a very honest sign - it is not often anyone admits they actually kill the animals before they sell the meat to us. With all that vegetarian food in me, I tried to buy some raw meat to gnaw on but the Treuthys don't open on Sunday. We wandered around through Upper Oella Heights until we found our way back to the old Oella Mill Race Trail and headed upstream along the Patapsco.

They blew up the old dam here a few years ago and are now working on replacing the crumbling bridge over Route 40, which appears to have made Carl quite grumpy. However, all that construction meant there was a temporary bridge over the Patapsco River which we could have trespassed on to get to the other side of the River and walk back along the rail road tracks to make a loop, but that would have been illegal.

As we walked along the railroad tracks on the other side of the River, we had a nice view of the tunnel. This is an active railroad track so we would never walk on the tracks, even though some odd optical illusion makes this shot appear to be taken from on the tracks - the cold weather does funny things to frames of reference. 

From there it was a few miles of crunching on the railroad trail ballast back to the picturesque town of Ellicott City, where I just missed taking a full picture of a giant thumb that floated across the street - I only got a piece of it, as you can see. While Carl's fakakta GPS claimed we had done a 7.2 mile loop, my more accurate internal odometer says we added about 2 miles to the standard hike to reach about 6 miles.

Biking Around BWI, Hiking the Sweathouse Trail, Donkey Racing Looks Like Fun

Global warming has caused 2012 in the Baltimore-Washington area to start directly with April - it went up to the high 60's on Saturday, so Lauren, Carole and I threw the bikes on the Subaru and biked around the BWI airport trail. As we were getting the bikes off the car, a rather odd, ZZ Top-bearded guy with two small dogs came over and started chatting up Lauren and Carole. Carole immediately tried to set him up with Lauren, pointing out that Lauren not only loved cats but she could learn to love dogs, too. Lauren hopped on her bike and pedalled faster than I've ever seen before.

On Sunday, Carl and I decided to explore the trail system on the Big Gunpowder Falls River trail system north of Baltimore. We did about a 5.4 mile loop over the Sweathouse, Wildlands and Stocksdale trails. A lot of mud along the river, some nice views of the valley carved out by the Sweathouse Branch but overall not a very exciting area to hike when the leaves are off the trees. On the way back, we drove by the former site of one of Carl's former employers - after getting bought by Rockwell Collins they apparently shut down the White Marsh facility(which is now TIC Gums, where you can find the famous "Gum Gurus") and moved everything to Texas.

After getting back from hiking, I played around a bit in a ham radio teletype (RTTY) contest, where among many others I worked a guy from Hungary who sent me an electronic confirmation (QSL) of our contact, pointing out that radio-contesting is only one of the many exciting sports practiced in Hungary by the cool and hip.

 

Starting Off 2012 With No Work and Lots of Play

We started off the holidays with about 15 people over our house for Christmas Eve, then driving up to Carole's Mom's senior facility on Christmas Day with a portable feast, followed by a house full of Carole's relatives on the day after Christmas. Carole was pretty much kitchen bound the entire time, while I made sure Giant Foods, Harris Teeter and the Montgomery County Liquor Authority all had very profitable end of year revenues. 

After the Christmas craziness, Carl and I did the Maryland Heights hike near Harper's Ferry. This is basically a loop that goes up for 3 miles, then down for 3 miles. On the way up you have a sad view of the Hilltop House hotel, a landmark above Harper's Ferry that is apparently closed indefinitely and in a state of disrepair.

A few more miles of slogging up hill to the old gun placement areas at the top of the mountain and you are rewarded with the traditional beeyootiful view of the Potomac River looking towards Brunswick. That is Sugarloaf Mountain off in the distance. On the drive back it actually started to snow and continued to flurry for the rest of the day.

The rest of the week was planning for our New Year's Party. We had about 20 people over, 7 of whom stayed overnight, despite all of our efforts to explain that all the concern over driving after drinking was just media hype. We split the attendees into three teams and (after a few hours of eating and drinking) each had to design a marketing campaign for a new wine, based on some blindly chosen attributes, such as "Bouquet", "Origin of Grapes".' "Essence" and "Celebrity Spokesperson". The three teams ended up having to deal with selections such as:

• Stinkbug, rutabaga, Perth Amboy, Charles Manson
• Gym clothes, liver, Dundalk, Amy Winehouse
• Chicken coop, Brussels sprouts, Chernobyl, Elmer Fudd

The Amy Winehouse team seemed to really, really need a trip to rehab (yes, yes, yes) The Charles Manson team had the most impressive campaign and the most artistic label, but the spokesperson (June) for the Elmer Fudd team was the cutest of them all, and the What Would Donald Trump Do criteria steered the ultimate decision to award first prize to the Elmer Fudd team.

After finally getting to bed at about 0230, at 0830 I got all the Things That Wouldn't Leave moving for the traditional New Year's Day hike, this time on the Wincopin trail in Savage, MD. From there it was off to Jim and Jacqui's house for an elegant New Year's Day brunch, where Jim showed he could get a high paying job operating the waffle iron at a Hampton Inn.

Rick and Maggie turned into The Things That Really, Really Wouldn't Leave and somehow managed to follow us home once again. So, New Year's Day evening Carole cooked them up a fine meal of manicotti made from Angelo's authentic light and airy  Italian crepes. The next day (finally...) Rick and Maggie headed back to Columbus. After all that cooking and entertaining, Carole was fresh as a - well, a picture is worth a thousand words:

Hams Are Always Ahead of the Technology Curve: Hacking Telegraphy in 1903

I got interested in radio when I was about 8 years old and Santa Claus gave me a 27 mhz walkie talkie for Christmas. Luckily, Santa also  gave the same thing to a few other kids in the neighborhood, so there was someone to talk to - that Santa really knows what he is doing.

Fun to talk to my local friends but I immediately wanted to talk far away, so I opened up the back of the hand held radio and figured out how to disconnect the telescoping whip antenna and connect a wire to the inside of it. I then unscrewed the twin-lead connection my father had for our TV antenna, and connected the walkie talkie to our TV antenna. I could immediately here fishing boats out in the Middle Bay and out in the Atlantic off of Jones Beach. None of them would talk to me, but I did annoy a bunch of cab drivers I found on other frequencies - who said "turn off your Christmas present and shut up kid" when I tried to order a taxi.

I also annoyed my father, who climbed up on the roof to see what was wrong with the TV antenna... From there I could have easily moved towards a life of crime and hacking but I fought off the dark side and went the ham radio path.

New Scientist magazine has a neat piece on how another radio-enthusiast hacked one of the earliest demonstrations of wireless by Marconi - all the way back in 1903: here.