The gateway drug
As the picture says, I’ve still not gotten the free radical attached to this bicycle (it’s down at the LBS having the warranty hacksawed off so I can wedge the tongue into the short short short chainstays.)
What the picture does not say, however, is how bicycling appears to have eaten my brain. It was probably a bad idea to decide that riding my bicycle was the best way to bring down my out of control blood pressure (and it did, just as long as I put 20+ miles a day in on the thing) just as I completely burned out on programming and politics, because this freed up a large block of free time that I could then fill with getting on the Trek and GTFOODing for a few hours.
The pictures of the day have become a lot more homey because I stopped lugging the *istDS around on the bike not very long after the day when my 50/f1.2 prime vibrated itself into two pieces (I’m using a 55/1.8 Super Tak (US$25), a Tamron 28/2.8 (US$20), and an equally ancient Soviet MIR-1 (US$1) [which needs to be adjusted so that infinity is further than 6 meters away] as new workaround lenses, so it’s not as if I’d be out US$350 if any of them failed, but I still don’t want to add more lenses to the pile of broken “I’ll have this fixed when I recover sufficiently to look for a (shudder) computer job” items) and the only time I have to take pictures are when I’m (a) picking the bears up from school or (b) wandering around the house in the evening trying to find something to take a picture of so I won’t miss the picture-a-day routine.
It doesn’t help that the *istDS seems really big and clumsy when I’m wrestling it out of a pannier so I can get a picture of something, or when I’m trying to wedge it back in so it won’t fall out and become a multi-hundred dollar pile of broken plastic, aluminum, stainless steel, and optical glass (and it’s not easy to replace, because as far as I’ve been able to tell the last Pentax cameras that have pentaprisms and support actual TTL flash metering are the *istDSes. The new tiny K-m/K2000 is a pentamirror and doesn’t do TTL flash, which makes it much less useful for my style of “everything manual except for flash metering” photography. If I did have a computer job, a VoigtländerEpson RD1 would make a nice replacement (so, yeah, it’s a rangefinder, and I’d have to buy a used version because Epson decided to stop selling them. But I believe it would be the smallest and lightest digital camera I could find with an optical finder and a non-ridiculous crop factor) but I don’t so the large and relatively fragile *istDS stays home while I take my almost-daily ride out to Gresham and back.
And, anyway, all the free time I’ve got at home these days is filled up with reading about those mad bicyclists who regularly do 200+km rambles, and thinking that it would be really really fun to load up the trekracycle with supplies for a day trip, then ride it to Astoria, Tillamook, or up to Seattle so I could spend a day watching the trolleybusses go by (I’m not exactly sure how I would fit this in between dropping them off at school at 8:05 and picking them up at 14:15, but if I could arrange it I would be one of the healthiest inmates at the asylum.)
So no time for pictures. Or code. Must pedal. (actually, “must get windbreaker because it’s too damn cold in the morning to pedal unless something gets in the way of that nasty wind,” but it’s the thought that counts.)