No pressure, bike is back, driving data, Sportsvb, new way to celebrate New Year, double day
Yesterday the guy from the water company came out. His name was Danny, a good ole Florida cracker whom installed our water equipment originally. He let me know that the pressure tank was indeed bad. He said he would hook me up with a new tank, a new pressure switch and service my sulfur cleaner while he was there. Cindy got to meet Danny as well and gave him a dozen fresh eggs as a tip for his good work. Last night when I showered I could feel the pressure felt higher than I was accustomed to, something Danny said might be a positive side effect of the work.
On Tuesday Cindy took my brand new mountain bike back to Dick’s Sporting Goods for me. When I got the bike home over the weekend I immediately noticed the brake stopping power was very poor, the opposite of what you expect with a disc brake set up. After doing some quick research on how they are adjusted I discovered the adjustment fitting for one one of the pads was seized, almost like it was cross threaded. Well since it is a brand new bike I wasn’t going to fck with it, let them fix it.
Cindy told me yesterday she got the call it was fixed so I grabbed it on the way home. A quick squeeze of the brake levers verified I now had over the handlebars stopping power if I need it.
Yesterday I had my first data from my Automatic dongle collected. The app collects a lot of trip data as well as detecting if you have hard accelerations or decelerations that negatively impact gas mileage. I think it will be very interesting to get more insight into my driving activity as a larger data sampling over time accumulates.
Yesterday I received an email from the SportsVb Yahoo group, wishing me Happy New Year. I get this wish every year and every year it makes me laugh, because I am the one that set it up. When I lived in PA I used to participate in volleyball tournaments run by a guy named Paul. He badged the events as “SportsVB”.
Not only did Paul run conventional outdoor grass tournaments, in the winter he ran indoors doubles tournaments, something very unique. Indoor volleyball is almost always played in groups of 6 per side, not doubles. We would use heavier outdoor balls and play with outdoor rules. The other unique aspect was these indoor tournaments would start at night. Quite often they did not finish up until midnight or later. It was kind of nuts but a lot of fun.
Well Paul did not have any web site expertise and I had a little bit. As I often did around that time of my life I volunteered my services to not only create the Yahoo group for him to get tournament info out to players, I also made him a website that was online for a period of time. Technically, the website is still alive, hosted on Tripod one of the original free web hosts. I was surprised to see they still had the lights turned on.
So anyway I put a lot of time into the website and thought I made a pretty snazzy site for the 1999-2000 era. Of course I did all of this work gratis. I considered using a picture of myself as the focal graphic of the site as payment enough. SportsVb faded away shortly after I moved to Florida but my late nights in the Lancaster gym were some of my favorite volleyball memories of all time.
I have never been one to actively pursue doing anything much to celebrate the New Year. It just never appealed to me. Out of my 25 or so years as an adult I bet I only formally celebrated it in a group 10 times or less. Most years I am quite content to watch a movie on New Years Eve and then flip over to ABC to watch the ball drop.
Well this year is definitely going to be different. We were invited to the wedding of some running club friends of ours which goes down tonight. Combining a New Years Eve and wedding celebration on the same night is more than likely a once in a lifetime occurrence so I may as well enjoy it.
Of course I will be doing my traditional year long recap entry but as always it demands it’s own space.