Apr 03, 2026
Shopping for some of the material components for red beans no rice
—orc Fri Apr 3 23:17:38 2026
Apr 01, 2026
It’s been a while, but NASA has managed a perfect launch of a trip around the moon! And it’s with a NASA-designed rocket that uses designs from the Space Shuttle (solid fuel boosters, first stage nozzles, probably much more) instead of one of the stupid big rockets from the usual crop of fascist billionaires.
—orc Wed Apr 1 21:28:20 2026
Mar 31, 2026
Still it pretty rough shape, but it now has a new layer of sheathing across most of it to protect it from the weather.
—orc Tue Mar 31 14:14:44 2026
Mar 27, 2026
Dust Mite & I went out for a short loop around east Portland this afternoon. My legs still haven’t recovered from climbing Cape Perpetua on Wednesday afternoon, so it was a slower and more painful loop than I expected, even taking into consideration that my labia still think that riding a bicycle is an intolerable indignity.
Still not gonna stop riding. Nor taking pictures of Dust Mite.
—orc Fri Mar 27 23:01:12 2026
Mar 20, 2026
Dust Mite is on the phone
—orc Fri Mar 20 23:57:53 2026
Mar 14, 2026
I’m grinding through my family tree trying to find someone who was born in Canada (1, maybe, so far) and oh boy the wonders I’ve found:
- My great9 grandmother is a Powhaten (aaand if the computer is not lying to me, descended from You Know Who) and by repeated dilution that makes me approximately 0.025% Powhatan.
- Another great9 grandmother is a (grr!) unnamed Rapahannock woman, so also 0.025%
- My father’s side of the family were such homebodies that after 7(!) of them arrived on the Mayflower, the braiding of my family tree has – so far that I’ve found! – 13(!) lines running back to them.
- One of my grandbignum grandfathers came over in 1632, but died while the ship was in harbor at Plymouth!
I’m trying to find another Loyalist thread of my family (my grandmother mentioned to us, around the same time she made up a genealogy tree showing a line back to the thug that came along for the ride, that some of the family lived in New Brunswick, so I’m pretty confident the one I’ve found is okay) just as an emergency spare for getting Canadian citizenship, and the less documented branches of my father’s family are sure to contain m a n y surprises.
—orc Sat Mar 14 22:16:29 2026
Mar 13, 2026
Dust Mite is helping me bail out the basement.
—orc Fri Mar 13 23:49:37 2026
Mar 06, 2026
Self portrait with Dust Mite & new eyeglasses
—orc Fri Mar 6 22:58:29 2026
Feb 27, 2026
Dust Mite sits with my father’s mechanical calendar.
—orc Fri Feb 27 23:08:45 2026
Feb 20, 2026
Dust Mite tries to get cozy on a cold February evening.
—orc Fri Feb 20 23:49:29 2026
Feb 14, 2026
I was going to post this last night, but with one thing or another I went to bed early (I went out on a slow 80k loop today and wanted to at least pretend I would get enough sleep beforehand) and forgot to do dust mite blogging.
Consider this to be a very long friday :-)
—orc Sat Feb 14 22:43:28 2026
Feb 10, 2026
Ozymandias makes himself cozy on the back of the comfy chair.
—orc Tue Feb 10 23:49:31 2026
Feb 06, 2026
Dust Mite has a pallet!
—orc Fri Feb 6 21:18:46 2026
Jan 30, 2026
New (shorter) stems for my bikes; a 90mm & 100mm mutant to pull the handlebars back enough to compensate for shrinking 40mm after correcting my hormone balance. Dust Mite is doing quality control before I start fitting these stems to my bicycles.
—orc Fri Jan 30 22:08:03 2026
Jan 23, 2026
A late dinner for Dust Mite
—orc Fri Jan 23 23:20:07 2026
Jan 21, 2026
The Type 1 deathwatch continues :-(
—orc Wed Jan 21 14:13:25 2026
Jan 17, 2026
Some of the Type 1 cars are still running, and I spotted 122 leading an Oak Grove-bound train just as the sun was starting to go down this afternoon.
Still need to win the lottery so I can buy Tri-Met’s remaining stock of Type 1 cars and build a carbarn for them (I wonder of the ORHF – or whoever owns Portland Traction these days – would allow me to underwrite electrifying the remaining line?)
—orc Sat Jan 17 23:20:42 2026
Jan 16, 2026
Dust Mite takes advantage of the holiday candy clearance sales
—orc Fri Jan 16 23:54:28 2026
Jan 09, 2026
Dust Mite & I went out – for the first time in 3 months and a day – on the bicycle, and stopped by the Big Big Store on the way back.
—orc Fri Jan 9 19:40:29 2026
Jan 02, 2026
An eastbound train pulls into Gateway Transit Center earlier this afternoon.
—orc Fri Jan 2 23:56:24 2026
Dust Mite poses with a Lego vase of flowers
—orc Fri Jan 2 23:45:46 2026
—30—
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