Cold Frame in the garden

For several years I've been wanting to experiment with a cold frame in the garden, and finally this year I got around to constructing one. Spurred along by having access to Randy's workshop and having dumpster-dived about 99%of the materials used, I dug in just 2 days before the first forecast frosty night. It was hurried, to say the least. A masterpiece, not as much.....


9 lettuces and 3 hearty kales generously donated by way of D.U.G. have become my pets/specimens as we forge ahead into the frigid months to come. The idea here is to cultivate a miniature greenhouse to protect these lucky plants from the inevitable chill of Denver winter. How long it will persevere, remains to be seen.

1st Snow

Got a few inches of snow last night and today... first of the year. Winter's a-comin'. This storms was particularly beautiful because much of the colorful autumn foliage was still on the trees, bedecked in white fluff. Sadly for the trees, though, the extreme weight of the moisture and leaves led to a massive amount of snapped limbs around town.

Georgia Pass via mountain bike

We got one (potentially) last really warm weekend on October before the snows start to sock in the high country. April had prior plans in the city so I packed up the car solo with my mountain bike for one last camping/biking weekend for the season. Headed up to Kenosha Pass southwest of Denver and set up in the dispersed car-camping area east of the pass. So nice and peaceful; this area is packed most of the summer but now in October it was pretty desolate, yet convenient. On Saturday afternoon I rode the Colorado Trail about 6 miles east until it enters the Lost Creek Wilderness area (no bikes allowed in Wilderness Areas.)

After a relaxing evening alone reading next my campfire, on Sunday I rode northwest up to the Continental Divide at Georgia Pass. This was my Big Ride of the season, so happy to get up to the divide via my legs this year. It's been a long summer of recovery, and a huge trophy to regain the continent.

very last of the autumn colors at 10,500ft. Sawatch Range beyond

crossroads of the Colorado Trail and the Continental Divide Scenic Trail

at Georgia Pass on the Continental Divide at 11,600ft... looking west towards Breckenridge

Instead of backtracking, I opted for the Jefferson Creek trail to loop me back down. Plenty of snow on this north facing slope; below tree line I ended up slogging through 2 miles of 8" snowy switchbacks while dropping down into the sweet flowing creekside singletrack along Jefferson Creek. Totally worth the hassle!

 

About 25miles and 5,000ft of climbing today.... wish this was every day of my life!

Mountain biking outside Boulder

My dispatcher had a couple of days off, which meant that I was on office duty up in Boulder. It being my favorite time of year in the Foothills and emboldened by my recent return to mt. biking, I brought the fatty tire bike up both days and took advantage of being next to some great riding.

On Thursday, I cut out of the office a bit early to catch the 4:40pm bus up to Nederland and got in 2hrs of really fun trails in the West Magnolia zone. My most recent trail day up here ended up with me in the hospital, so it was a victory of sorts to revisit my old trail haunt that I've ridden so many times since moving to Boulder--- 8 years ago. Sadly I forgot to pack the camera, and that's especially sad because it was perhaps the most electric and vibrant neon aspen colors that I've ever seen in my life! Sections of these trails duck through full canopies of young aspens, and it felt like a Disneyland ride to pedal through a fully encompassing tunnel of screaming neon yellow.

Friday I pedaled out from the office up to the Batasso Loop just a couple miles up Boulder Canyon, eager to check out the newly built Benjamin Loop addition. Got a late start, rode slow, and found the new spur to be longer than I'd expected. Luckily I had packed my lights and ended up pedaling the last hour in the darkness. This was my first proper singletrack in pitch black with only a headlight, and it was kinda fun. Kinda nerve wracking as well....


Started off well enough with a nice sunset ride outside of town....

But the last hour turned into this....  (Boulder city lights way down below in the distance!)
Made it home safe and sound, very very carefully.... ~4mi in the pitch black, a mile or two on technical singletrack.

"naked" fixed gear

I've been riding my fixed gear track bike for work with the aid of a front brake all summer while my elbow heals. I've managed to not use the brake even once (I've ridden without a brake for about 10 years now) but it's a nice piece of mind knowing it's there with my weaker left arm. However, the front wheel I was using snapped a spoke today at work, so I put my old track wheel back on and took the brake off. Figure if I can ride a mountain bike for 3 hours on the Colorado Trail, I can do without the brake. Every step closer to my old self feels like a big accomplishment.

back to the mountain bike!!

April and I packed up the car and took off for some rustic car-camping outside Buena Vista along the Collegiate Peaks in the Sawatch Range of the Rockies. We found a nice quiet campsite near the dead end of a dirt road in the National Forest and had a fun night by the campfire.

My elbow's feeling stronger and more stable so I brought my mountain bike along to have my first go at riding trails since my accident in June. The Colorado Trail passes through this area just a few hundred yards from our campsite and on Sunday I rode south for a couple of hours to Sand Creek before turning around and heading back to camp. Autumn foliage was spectacular and the aspens were peaking! A really beautiful weekend and a major hurdle cleared in getting back into the woods on my bike. I'm not at 100% by any means, but felt pretty solid once I got into the groove of mountain biking. I can't wait to get back to the trails soon!

Sunday afternoon, April hiked the Colorado Trail north a few miles to Mt. Princeton Hot Springs, and I finished up my bike ride and met her over there with the car. A relaxing soak until dusk came upon us, then stopped off in Leadville for our favorite bargain dinner of filet mignon at Quincy's.

City O' City- installing the chandelier

First off, for a much better expose of the finished work at City O' go to Randy's site!

Last of the major work at City O' City is transporting the custom chandelier (and it's 1000+ individual strands of delicate fiber-optics) from the workshop to the restaurant, and then hanging it from the ceiling beam. It was built while hanging from a custom wooden frame, so we modified that to keep everything in place and then late at night trailored it to City O'.

It made the trek without incident, and we had a team of good guys to help move it into place and install it hanging from the ceiling beam above the large community table in the center of the restaurant.

The finished product resplendent in full effect!

View from the table directly underneath the main chandelier- this is only a small portion of the whole apparatus, but you get an idea of just how much tedious work April did to individually hand-build each and every strand of fiber-optic string.

Chicago!

In a gem of perfect timing, the very next day after City O' City opened for business, I had a flight booked to Chicago where I met up with April. She had been seeing her family in Kentucky, then flew up to Chicago for a few days back in the city that was once both our homes. Perhaps from the delirium that I was recovering from now that I could finally sleep for more than 2 hours a night, I basically forgot to take any photos while in the city. Whoops.

lunch along the annual Renegade Craft Fair

CTA stations no longer offer the amenities they used to

new bike shop along Milwaukee Avenue

After a couple days in the city, I took the train down to Indiana to spend a few days in Saint John with Mom & Dad & Maggie. Again I totally forgot to take any photos but we had a nice time catching up and getting some work done. Dad put me to the task of helping take down a huge limb that had broken in the backyard poplar tree. I miss yardwork like trimming shrubs and trees, so I had fun spending a day with a saw and clippers tidying up the landscaping

more City O' City work

Some critical crunch-time maneuverings with the City O' City project. With only a week until the scheduled opening day (the restaurant has been closed for 6 weeks during the remodel/expansion) Randy and I were working a week of consecutive all-nighters. Weekends we'd be working in the restaurant space from 7pm until 7am. It was a fun routine to experience the city (and Capitol Hill neighborhood in particular) go through it's transition from daytime to dead of night and then back to life as daybreak came to a pair of weary craftsmen. Weekdays I still had to work at the couriers, and never in my life have I managed to survive (barely) on just a couple hours of sleep a night (and sometimes none at all) for almost 2 weeks straight. We got most everything done, and all of the critical things needed to run a restaurant. Still some finishing touches of various degrees to tackle in the coming week or two.

Some photos of the progress:
This will be the coffee service area behind the orange/brown metal. In front will be one of the large barn-beam countertops I've been working on. The metal in the following pics in the sheet metal skin taken from a 1946 semi-truck trailer that Randy bought from an old junkyard and repurposed here as the interior finishings.

The kitchen bar service area will have the second barn-beam countertop and allow patrons to eat while watching into the open kitchen. The wall light fixtures were also salvaged from an old warehouse and retrofitted with ultra-efficient LED bulbs.

Transporting the finished barn-beam coutnertops from Randy's workshop to the restaurant on the top of his old Volvo wagon. I was terrified that they'd slide off en route, dashing my dozens and dozens of hours of work perfectly finishing the antique wood.

Today I learned to use a cut-router! Safety glasses did their job.

Opening night!!!!

Still need to hang the custom chandelier and matching fiber-optic light fixtures, and a few finishing touches. But all the major things got done, the city health inspectors passed our work and there was a line out the door all night long. And I learned an amazing amount of skills from Randy; this has been one of the most rewarding and interesting opportunities I've had in a long time. I'm very grateful to have had the chance to work on this project.

USA Pro Cycling Challenge: Stage 5 @ Swan Mountain

The biggest pro road cycling race ever in the history of the US came tearing through Colorado this week. A 6 stage race through beginning in Colorado Springs and hitting some of the most scenic regions and heinous summit climbs in the state. I was lucky to be invited to join some friends at a swank mountain house outside the town of Silverthorne in Summit County. My visit coincided with Stage 5, which ran through the town on today's route from Steamboat Springs to Breckenridge. A few coworkers and I secured a fantastic spectating point at the top of the Swan Mountain 'king of the mountain' climb on the south side of Dillon Reservoir.

The crowd was huge and merry with lots of time to kill before the racers made their way to our locale. But sipping beers and goofing around with my buddies helped pass the time in a lively way. Finally the race brigade got to us, with a full regalia of police cars, motorcycles, team cars, ambulances, and finally the spry Belgian climber Andy Schleck (2nd in the Tour de France this year) out off the front in a solo breakaway.

Not too far behind with the peloton came the Team BMC boys; here's liftime legend George Hincappie smiling while pulling a less perky Cadel Evans to the top of the climb. Cadel's fresh off this year's Tour de France victory, recovered from his own broken elbow the year prior. Earlier in the week George won the Colorado race's "Queen Stage" from Gunnison to Aspen that conquered two 12,000ft+ passes over the Continental Divide: first Cottonwood Pass into Buena Vista, then over Independence Pass into Aspen.

It was simply amazing how fast all these racers (over 100 passed by us) flew up this climb, especially after 5 days of hard core racing at altitudes well above most of them are conditioned to. Just an amazing day all around. Team Radioshack's Levi Lephiemer ended up taking the overall win when the race concluded in downtown Denver the following day. Organizers, host towns, the politicians and certainly cycling fans all deemed the inaugural race a stunning success and they promise to bring it back again next year. I can't wait!

City O City expansion & remodel project

Busy local vegetarian restaurant / bar / hipster haven City O' City took on the retail space adjoining their original location near the State Capitol building in Denver. Our friends Randy and Sabin at Custom By Rushton were commissioned for the design and finish build of the new, expanded space and they had some awesome ideas. They work almost exclusively with reclaimed, reused and re-purposed materials: everything from using a 1946 semi-truck trailer to build the coffee & kitchen service bars down to the screws holding everything together are salvaged in beautiful and creative ways.

Lucky for me, they enlisted our help with a lot of the construction for this project. Randy is a true master craftsman in the old-school sense and I've been wanting to learn from him ever since I met him several years ago. Deadlines are looming, so while I'm still working full time with the couriers during the day, I head down the block to Randy's warehouse workshop in our neighborhood to work into the night on all sorts of interesting tasks and construction.

Making a curved shelf for the condiments/creamers/etc at the coffee service bar. This started as a single piece of 18" wide pine plank; we were able to cut it into 3 shaped sections, piece them together with the biscuit joiner, and end up with a beautiful single shelf. Here working on perfecting the curved edges; this started with a scrollsaw and eventually I worked all the way down to a 240grit sandpaper by hand.

Randy working on the 8-top table for the dining area. This began as an antique oak circular table that his dad had salvaged years ago from a mountain town bar. Legend has it that Jessie James himself has played poker at this table. It was lacking the 'leaf' insert, so we biscuit-joined four oak planks between the two circular halves to make a table large enough for eight folks to sit around.

We are installing two separate bars: one along the coffee service area and the other facing into the open kitchen. The materials are 100+ year old 3"x12" beams salvaged from an old barn. Two beams are joined together for each countertop, making a sturdy 2ft deep eating/drinking area about 16ft long. With the age, the wood is very weathered with small splits and various holes. Because it's an eating surface, we had to take a lot of care to hand-fill each tiny crack with an epoxy resin. I spent 3-4 hours a day for almost a week doing the finish work before they were ready to stain and seal.

April is helping Sabin with a large custom chandelier for the center of the dining room. This photo is just the beginning of the creation which will eventually have over 1000 individual strands of fiber-optic strings, each with a collection of reused items adorning the ends: Lite Brite pegs, antique typesetting parts, bicycle spokes, test tubes and plastic rings. It will be lit by LED lights shining into the fiber-optics so the entire chandelier will glow and shimmer. Each of the 1000+ strands have to be hand assembled in multiple steps.

Dillon BBQ Fest

One of the larger Colorado BBQ fests was going down in Dillon, so what better excuse for a weekend camping and getting some tasty que.

my hands-down favorite sauce makers, Brook's BBQ from Aurora, CO

.
Afternoon lounging in the sun on the shores of Dillon Reservoir. April made a summer mudman:

 

Lots of folks out sailing on Dillon Reservoir in the feet of the Ten Mile Range (and Continental Divide runs south along that ridge)

Lake Granby / Grand Lake

April had a hankering for being near a lake, so we hit the road to find just that. We got a little lazy and ended up camping at the good old National Forest campground on the south end of Lake Granby. We scored the very last open campsite and $17 later we were getting settled in amongst the RVs, families, motorboats and chugging generators. Not exactly our typical M.O. but kind of fun to take the easy route.

Woke up to unexpected cold- 38 degrees! Sunday we checked out the little tourist town of Grand Lake, next to the actual lake of the same name. To cold to swim (water's about 50 degrees) but took a few fun dives off the pier to jolt the senses.

Friday around the house

Elbow update: 46 days post-op

Back to the hospital today for my first follow up appointment with my orthopedic surgeon, Dr. David Gladu. He says my recovery is coming along very well, the new x-rays show the bone is healing up but still has a few weeks to go before it's completely mended. He says I have a very good prognosis to be back to normal with full range of motion after a few more months. For now, the lingering inflammation and tight ligaments- a result of the trauma from both the injury and surgery- are keeping the elbow from its full range of motion.

Dr. Gladu is an avid cyclist himself and we spent a good deal of our visit chatting about riding in Colorado, huge climbs up Mt. Evans and the Triple Bypass Ride, the Tour de France and my fave Cadel Evans, and the upcoming USA Pro Challenge cycling race right here in Colorado. It's reassuring to know that my surgeon personally understands my desire and insistence to regain strong cycling form. He did, however, suggest I not ride until I'm more fully healed, as a crash could potentially re-break the bone and require another, more difficult, surgery to fix it a second time. I didn't exactly reveal that I've been riding (very carefully) every day for the past 5 weeks. Don't ask, don't tell. I finished my appointments, rode home and went to work. On my bike.

I also saw a physical therapist for the first time today- she also says I'm coming along just fine and everything I've been doing on my own so far is just what I ought to be doing. She measured my range of motion: flexion is 135 degrees, compared to 145 degrees with my right arm. Extension is more problematic, I can currently only straighten it to 25 degrees but am aiming for 0 degrees, fully straight. Lots more stretching in the next few months should really improve this, then focus more heavily on regaining strength.

Here's some interesting photos of my bionic arm nowadays. The first is a diptych of the original break and the repair. The second is other views of the metal hardware (long pins and the tension band wire) holding me together. In all likelihood, this hardware will be removed eventually once the bone is completely healed.

Viva le Cadel "Elbow" Evans

I'm not much of a professional sports fan, not even cycling for the most part. However, like a casual football spectator who only gets excited for the Superbowl, I can't help turning into a geek about the Tour de France each year recently. Last year we actually had cable TV for a few months so I was able to watch the daily coverage and really got into it. Half of why I like watching it is the fantastic scenery and historical gems in old Europe. Each time I see the Tour, I start making plans to spend next summer on my own bike tour of Europe. One of these years it will work out.... whenever it becomes practical to leave the country for 6 or so months.

Last year, I became a huge fan of Australian racer Cadel Evans, who fell and suffered a hairline fracture of his elbow in the 8th Stage while also taking the yellow leader's jersey the same day. Miraculously, although he didn't come close to winning in the end, he still finished the remaining 2 weeks of racing with a broken elbow.

http://www.sikids.com/photos/26226/2011-tour-de-france-contenders/6

He was back in full force this year, all healed up, and in the end took the overall win at the Tour de France. What a comeback! Watching the Tour this year online was extra entertaining since I've been sidelined with my own recovery, and I had my elbow comrad to cheer for all the way through. He also just announced that he'll be racing in Colorado's USA Pro Challenge in a couple of weeks. I'll be rooting for him again... maybe he will autograph my scar?!?

visit from Julie!

I got a phone call from Julie while I was out working on Friday. Some flight problems from Portland were going to leave her with an overnight layover in Denver. Want to host tonight? Sure! It's not everyday (or ever, really) I get a surprise visit from my sister. April & I had no plans and it worked out great. Just a nice evening of grilling dinner and sipping sangria, then brunch at Mona's and visit to Savory Spice Shop before heading back to the airport. A quick stay but really fun.

I wish I'd have remembered to snap a photo of Julie out on the road- we biked all over together and had a blast. But next time she wants a softer seat!