Bicycle Tires

Sep. 29th, 2025 11:02 pm
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[personal profile] hrj
I have this mental block about actually "fixing" leaky bicycle tubes. Swap in a new one and move on. But tubes aren't exactly cheap (especially since both my regular bicycles have odd size wheels and I have to mail order), so the last several flats I've kept the tubes, meaning to patch them. Eventually.

Last week I had a flat on the right front of the tricycle, removed a small thorn from the tire, and put in a new tube. That made three leaky tubes waiting for a fix. This morning, the same wheel was soft, so I assumed I'd missed the actual culprit. Figured this was my cue to actually patch all the tubes, so I filled up the kitchen sink to locate the leaks. The three older tubes had clear leak sites, though the most recent of those was very small and slow.

But I couldn't find any leak in the newest tube. I suppose it's possible I didn't have the valve tightened completely and it was leaking slightly through the stem. (The tricycle uses Presta valves.) So I checked the tire carefully for possible causes and put it back on. We'll see tomorrow if it's gone soft again. Which would be annoying.

But at least I've gotten a bit more practice in getting the tire on and off, which requires a high level of believing that it can be done plus significant hand strength. (The front wheels on the tricycle can be worked on without removing them from the frame. The rear wheel is...more complicated. But not quite as complicated as the rear wheel of the Brompton fold-up, which involves a lot of keeping track of which small item goes where.)

Given how many miles I put on the bike, I probably have a relatively low rate of flats. I got heavy duty tires because the rec trails have some vegetation hazards. (Star thistles can serve as surprisingly functional caltrops.) Glass is less common. One flat was due to a small, short wire that I only found by running my finger around the inside of the tire. (Ouch!)

Rosh Hashana at my new synagogue

Sep. 25th, 2025 05:36 pm
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I joined Beth Shalom in August. I'm still time-sharing Shabbat between there and my minyan, though that's winding down. (Sorry, minyan, I love my friends, but I'm settling into my new religious home.) Beth Shalom's Shabbat services are very comfortable and I'm seeing what I've been missing in the Reform movement. So I looked forward to Rosh Hashana this year.

It was great! Also, uh, long, but still a big win. I noticed that a lot of people drifted in over the course of the morning; there were not many people at the beginning and I could get a good seat, it was filling up by the torah service, and filled up more on the way to the sermon and then Musaf. On Rosh Hashana all the "big action" is in Musaf.

In addition to the Unataneh Tokef prayer, Musaf contains the themes of malchuyot (kingship), zichronot (memory), and shofarot (the shofar's call). For each of these three, the machzor (prayerbook) includes relevant passages from torah and prophets, piyutim (liturgical poems), and the sounding of the shofar. I've presumably heard some of those piyutim before, as I did go to Chabad for Rosh Hashana during the pandemic lockdown, but some of them stood out as if new to me this year. One in particular, Melech Elyon (king on high), stood out with some choreography -- this is sung in front of the open ark, except for one verse that talks, in contrast, about earthly kings, where we close the ark (and then open it again for the next verse). Neat, I thought -- as if to say, we will not trouble the king on high with stuff about mere human kings. And maybe that verse also stood out this year because of what is going on with our would-be earthly king, but I'll have to get a copy of the text before I can say more about that. (I do plan to buy both the siddur and machzor used by my new congregation, but haven't yet.)

The Reform services I have attended do basically none of this. The core part of Unataneh Tokef is sung, some other parts are read in English, and I think some of those biblical passages are included in the machzor. I never knew why they were there, and we usually didn't read them. And of course the shofar was sounded, along with the song after each set of blasts, but again, I didn't really grok the structure. And it wasn't in the Musaf service because Reform doesn't do Musaf; it was spread around in other places. I always thought my lack of connection with Temple Sinai's Rosh Hashana service came from an abundance of fluffy alternative English readings where liturgy should be -- and yes, that too, but not only that, I don't think. This year I felt like there was an integrated whole and that I was coming home to something I hadn't realized I was missing.

I knew that Rosh Hashana morning is the longest service of the year, but was still a little surprised by this one. (I expected four hours; it was more like four and a half.) Nonetheless, I appreciate that when we got to the silent repetition of the Musaf Amidah, they allowed us time to really do it. At other times I can't do the silent Amidah (any of them) in the time they leave for it; I'm just not that fast. But for this, we had space. That made a big difference to me.

During the public repetition (which is what takes up most of the time in Rosh Hashana Musaf), there were places where the congregation sang along, so it wasn't just "stand and listen to the leader". And some of those piyutim had lively, uplifting melodies.

I'm looking forward to Yom Kippur. (And Shabbat before then.)

On Reading in Retirement

Sep. 24th, 2025 09:30 am
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Perhaps the odd thing is that my overall reading patterns *haven't* changed that much in retirement, although I do have more time for it. A substantial amount of my reading continues to be non-fiction for the Lesbian Historic Motif Project, and that continues. In fact, I have to fight the temptation to spend most of my productive time working on that. But today I wanted to talk more about fiction.

Pre-retirement, my pattern was to have an audiobook going for commuting and my lunchtime bike ride (though bike rides were also for podcasts, since they fit better). If an audiobook really grabbed me, I'd find excuses to do things (like house or yard work) to continue listening. I generally also had one print book in progress at any given time, but they took a long time to finish because I didn't have a fixed context for reading. (Sometimes I'd read them during the break in my weekend bike rides.) Despite doing most of my buying via ebooks, they mostly just piled up because by the time I was done with work and other things, I didn't want to stare at a screen any more.

So what's changed? Well, for one thing, I cancelled my Audible subscription as part of paring down fixed expenses while I get settled into my new budgeting. But I decided it was well past time to actually get a local library card, and now I'm discovering the joys of Libby for audiobooks. I can't necessarily get the instant gratification (and there are plenty of audiobooks they just don't have), but I always have something going. And the borrowing logistics mean that once I've borrowed an audiobook, I make sure to prioritize it.

Print books aren't making any more of a dent on my time than they did previously, in part because my bike ride breaks are pretty much all LHMP all the time. So consumption is about the same.

Ebooks are getting a bit more of my attention. I'm trying to keep the iPad with the books (long story, two iPads for different purposes) charged up so that I can grab it when I'm in the mood. I'm gradually capitulating to the need to track about four different ebook apps, since Apple Books can get weird about showing me non-Apple books that I've side-loaded via the laptop. (It's not all-or-nothing. Some non-Apple books show up on my phone but not the iPad. And some do show up on the iPad.)

That brings us to reading during my recent New Zealand trip. Part of the trip plan was to include lots of relaxation time, and I cued up a bunch of books I'd been wanted to get to. One thing I found (when giving myself time and context for reading) was that I want to be more hard-nosed about DNFing when a book just isn't working for me. And one of the things that more and more doesn't work for me is books with blah prose.

There were several of those during the NZ trip. Stories that had a good premise, and themes that should be appealing to me, but the writing was just...not good. Not bad. Not awful. Just not *good*. Stories where if felt like the author was explaining the story to me rather than telling it. Stories where there were too many WTF moments in the plotting. Stories where the prose was relentlessly pedestrian. And because I started half a dozen novels in quick succession on the trip, it was easy to compare the ones that *did* work for me. Books with singing prose. Books with solid plot and character work. Books where I didn't want to get up from the couch until I'd finished them.

I need to get caught up with my "things I've read" posts, which will have more specifics.

Birds and Bits

Sep. 18th, 2025 01:39 pm
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I've posted the birdwatching report from my New Zealand trip on my Alpennia blog (https://alpennia.com/blog/new-zealand-birding). The non-bird parts to come.

Today's rhythm was thrown off by the need to check in at 11:30 on my potential jury duty service. Which also meant that when I went online to set up an optometry appointment, I didn't think I could commit to the "earliest possible" slot next Tuesday, with the next options starting in late October. And then when I checked in and found I was excused from jury duty, that next Tuesday slot had been snapped up.

It became clear to me on the NZ trip that I really needed to update my vision prescriptions, though in part this was because I was doing a lot more close-distance reading than usual and it became clear that one of my eyes has drifted more than the other. Then coincidentally, yesterday I got a note from Kaiser saying that my current glasses prescription was about to expire (it's been two years) and I should make an appointment.

But anyway, since I didn't want to go off on the bike this morning because of the check-in, I wrote up my birding notes. And now I'm thinking that since my routine is already off, I could just go off script entirely for the rest of the day. (Yes, yes, I have a fixed routine in retirement. What can I say?) Maybe I'll do something wild and crazy like pick rose hips. I have three or four bushes that have a lot of hips--enough to do something interesting with, anyway--and it might be fun to try some comparisons.

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