Feats of Enginering

Homework

Got some curtain rods yesterday, or as they call them these days, 'window treatments', for the sliding glass doors & the bay window. So, this morning, I hopped to it soon after getting up. All was going well till I noticed the system of attaching it together.

Enter: baseplate, funky piece that holds rods, & the screws to slap it all together. OK, this don't look like it's gonna be fun. Attach the baseplate to the funky rod holder, then screw the entire setup into the anchors I put in....

Here's a view of it, where you can see how the bottom screw is easily accessible, but the head of the top one is snug tightly against the rod-holder mechanism.

After cursing engineers, present & past experiences, for a few seconds, I figured I'd just jam it in ham-fisted like.

Just made it take a bit longer than necessary, but they're in & look all fancy like.

Velocipedes

Earlier in the week I was thinking a 2hr trip south was gonna happen, but fortunately Pueblo got more whiteness than we did here, so got to go local. Rolled outta the garage @8am to meet Kevin at the Florida lot of GM, then do some climbing, which my legs haven 't done much of all winter.

We went straight up my usual; following GM trail, then Hayden.

Hopped on the road till we jumped on Rooney Valley for a bit. Instead of dropping to the bottom, we rolled over to Box o' Rox to have some fun going down. We stopped at the bog to take a look at what can be done to improve this section, which'll hopefully be job #1 when the T.I.T.S. crew gets it adopted. Decided to head up Zorro & play on a little bit of Dakota Ridge. It's been awhile since I've ridden anything techie, & my (lack of) skills showed. Usually just bl'ast this section with no problem, but not today!

Back over to GM & I told Kevin that we should head to the top once more, taking Rooney Valley this time. Wrong move, for my legs/lungs, cuz I was sucking wind big time! Somehow survived it & we wound our way back down Hayden, which was the suckiest part of the ride. All the mud/slop was hanging out in that section of trail.

Ended up with 2,520' of climbing, in addition to my 500' of road to get there. Not bad for a Saturday morning in January in CO.