Sep 27, 2020
Stopping at Water Tower Park (in Milwaukie) on the (indirect) way back from Trader Joe’s.
—orc Sun Sep 27 18:53:31 2020
Sep 26, 2020
I was coming back from QFC (via a short but scenic route) when this train of S70s passed me as I was coming up the ramp towards Fuller Road station.
—orc Sat Sep 26 21:39:08 2020
Sep 25, 2020
Dust Mite inspects a broken IndyFab Club Racer that I’m considering repairing and 650bifying.
—orc Fri Sep 25 20:10:05 2020
Sep 19, 2020
Harvesting about 10 pounds of figs from one of the giant street fig trees near our house. Street figs are not quite as good as farmed figs, but they (a) are figs and (b) $free, so we’ll just eat the super ripe ones and convert the rest of them into jam or quick bread ingredients.
—orc Sat Sep 19 15:36:46 2020
Sep 18, 2020
I spent 5 minutes taking a saw to the rs32 snoot that’s going on 578 so I could shorten it by the ~10" needed to reduce the deathtrappedness of the front walkways. The first step of many tiny steps I need to do to make this model a closer replica of the platonic ideal of a diesel road switcher.
—orc Fri Sep 18 23:46:45 2020
Dust Mite helps me clean the rust and remaining bits of flux off the traditional randonneuse’s frame & fork so I can primer it tomorrow. (I’m going to try for a split block paint job in pink & green, where the pink panels on one side have matching green panels on the other. fluorescent pink & green, of course, for that added touch of “OH MY GOD MY EYES ARE BURNING OUT” :-)
—orc Fri Sep 18 22:36:13 2020
Sep 16, 2020
Not everything is on fire, but enough is so that the entire Willamette Valley is filled with smoke.
—orc Wed Sep 16 18:10:53 2020
Sep 14, 2020
576 sits in the (now-vanished) Milwaukee shop/yard complex not more than a year after coming back from Schenectady with a new 251, cab, and short hood.
—orc Mon Sep 14 12:52:01 2020
I had to run out to home depot yesterday to get some plumbing tools and supplies for our thrice-damned kitchen plumbing, and the visibility was like this all the way there and back. Why, yes, my lungs have been curled up weeping on the floor ever since then, thank you for asking.
—orc Mon Sep 14 08:44:03 2020
Sep 11, 2020
Dust Mite goes out for a bike ride
—orc Fri Sep 11 22:02:47 2020
Sep 10, 2020
… there’s enough smoke in the air so I can point the camera directly at the sun and not have it be a white-hot ball of flame blowing out the film.
—orc Thu Sep 10 20:38:07 2020
Portland isn’t on fire (at least not yet) but a huge part of western Oregon is, and now that the windstorm from earlier this week has died down there’s nothing pushing the smoke away. It makes going out for a bike ride a little more difficult, but nevertheless I persevered.
This is a photo of Powell Butte, which is about a mile away from where I took this photo. Ain’t global warming just grand?
—orc Thu Sep 10 17:46:14 2020
Sep 08, 2020
Is this the wildfires that are burning out the Santiam River gorge, or the wildfires that are burning near Estacada or Molalla, or the fires that are going in the Warm Springs nation? Or maybe it’s some other fires that I am currently unaware of. At least it’s not the Columbia River gorge, or at least not yet.
—orc Tue Sep 8 22:48:59 2020
577 & 576 taking a train south to Viroqua as the Milwaukee Road implodes around their ears.
—orc Tue Sep 8 22:39:36 2020
Sep 06, 2020
You don’t realize just how fast it is to take the Springwater Trail out to Boring until you try to avoid it because of the plague. My choices were to take side streets (including Holgate Lane, which is a mile of 4-6% uphill on cobbles – possibly not the best routing choice, but very scenic!) or roads like Powell Blvd and highway 212, which are somewhat flatter but not particularly scenic (though the east end of Sunnyside Road is really nice because it’s evenly graded and has little enough traffic so that I never felt like I was in danger of being shoved off the pavement onto the massively eroded shoulder.
~38 miles RT, at a whopping 13.3 mph with my body complaining bitterly for the last 15 miles of the loop :-)
—orc Sun Sep 6 22:31:58 2020
Sep 04, 2020
A bedtime snack for a Dust Mite
—orc Fri Sep 4 23:55:05 2020
Stopping for a photograph on the new(ish) Carver bridge over the Clackamas River. The bridge was mainly finished years ago, but the south side was left blocked off until Clackamas County could get around to repaving Clackamas River Road (and maybe Springwater Road? I turned back north at Carver, so I don’t know what improvements were made south of the bridge) and could redo the western approach to the bridge.
—orc Fri Sep 4 20:34:41 2020
Sep 03, 2020
577 & an F7, maybe in La Crosse, maybe elsewhere. It’s possible that this is looking north across the shop yard in North La Crosse, but it’s equally possible that they’re in the Twin Cities or elsewhere.
—orc Thu Sep 3 22:19:08 2020
Sep 01, 2020
EPT #100 sits sandwiched by mechanical reefers on the McBrod Ave lead while the McBrod Ave road reconstruction project continues alongside it.
—orc Tue Sep 1 15:07:10 2020
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