Three doubles

Two Sundays ago, we biked Mary's Loop, our usual tandem trail. After a great ride, we were driving out of the parking lot when we saw someone unloading a mountain bike tandem and getting ready to ride. It was the same model as ours, so we had to stop, compare notes, see what kind of front suspension they had, that kind of thing. They had even bought the bike from the same dealer we did. I think this brings the number of times we have randomly encountered another off-road tandem team out on the trail to a total of 3.

Bob and Karen were in Fruita for a week-long hiking and biking vacation, so we exchanged phone numbers and planned to get together for a ride. They had friends joining them later in the week, another couple who ride a mountain tandem, so on Saturday the six of us rode together at Mary's Loop. It was great fun to ride with other tandem teams. Bob and Karen showed us how to climb a couple of rock obstacles we'd never cleaned before. They also took a few photos of us riding, which is a rare treat for us:





The top picture is one of those 'not as bad as it looks' descents - it's steep, but the landing is smooth, and it's actually easier to ride down than walk down, especially on a tandem with the reduced chance of going over the handlebars.









That's one of the harder pieces of Horsethief Bench. We were hoping to get a picture of the tandem going over the big rock drop, but the timing is just a bit off, so we see the approach and the departure: one bike intact and two smiling riders.

Duet

Last week, Cailan and I were looking at pictures of musical instruments. We saw a clarinet, and I told him that I have a clarinet, and that sometime I would get it out and play it for him.

Over the weekend, we picked up some fresh reeds and last night I brought the clarinet case down from the closet shelf where it has been silently languishing since we moved in August. I showed Cailan how to open up the case, put some cork grease on, put the clarinet together, and put the reed on. I played a few notes (which surprisingly didn't sound that bad, considering how long it's been) and then he wanted to try.

It turns out that a clarinet is much more difficult for a 3-year-old to get any sound out of than a piano, guitar, or drum. Biting back the thought "But this is a brand new reed" I held the clarinet up to his mouth and he tried to play it like a kazoo, by humming a tune into it. Didn't work so well. We also tried letting him press some of the keys while I played, and he was able to get a few different notes out.

Then I got the idea that we could have a duet. I took the music book from his Music Together class out to the sun porch and played some tunes on the clarinet while Cailan played the drums. Mostly we were playing in two completely separate musical worlds, but every now and then we'd get a few measures where our beats lined up together, and that was pretty fun.

Cailan had a great time. After we put the clarinet away and were putting his pajamas on, he kept asking if we could do that again on Tuesday night. Yeah, buddy, I think we can.

*****

Coming soon: tales from a triple tandem trail trek!

We like our Mike

There is a page in One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish that goes

We like our bike
It's made for three.
Our Mike sits up in back you see.
We like our Mike and this is why:
Mike does all the work when the hills get high.

This weekend we were out riding a bike built for two at Mary's Loop, and I got a chance to play Mike. We were having a great ride. The weather was perfect, just a hint of chill in the air but wonderful warm sunshine. Technically, the ride was going well - we were clearing a lot of the obstacles, we weren't making the dumb mistakes that so often plague early season rides, which was amazing considering this was our first ride on the mountain tandem since November.

We got to a kind of tough stretch of trail, where the trail is narrow and rocky and has several short but steep climbs. Here's a picture from last September of me on my single, just before this section of trail. The trail drops pretty sharply in the foreground of the picture.


So on Sunday, we were going up that steep part. We knew it would be a tough climb on the tandem, but we charged up it and things were going pretty well. Chris was managing to pick lines between the rocks that we could actually maneuver the tandem through. Then we came to a narrow chasm, with large rocks on both sides. I hit my right foot on one rock and came unclipped from my pedal. It seemed like the bike was stopping so I unclipped my left foot as well and put my feet down, so that my feet ended up atop rocks on opposite sides of the trail.

I was quite surprised, as I stood up, to watch the bike inching forward out from under me. Chris, now alone on the tandem, was muscling over the rocks and up the hill. I was running along behind the bike trying to catch up. He went about 10 feet up the trail, then turned around and said "Are you okay back there?"

No, I wasn't okay, because I had collapsed on the trail from laughing so hard. In almost 10 years of riding an off-road tandem, we've never pulled that stunt before, and I don't think we could do it again if we tried. But the really funny part was a bit further down the trail, when we met up with some folks who had been watching from behind as we tackled that hill and had seen my rear dismount. They thought I had jumped off the back of the bike in order to push it up the hill!

Just call me Mike.

*****

The rest of our weekend was great, also. Saturday we painted the dining room, finally covering up all the spots of colors that we tried but didn't like, and Chris and I are both really tickled with how it came out. We also worked in the gardens, putting in new landscape timbers at the edge of the garden by the driveway and building a path of pavers to get between the driveway and the front porch. Sunday after the ride Cailan and I made chocolate chip cookies. Here he is after eating one fresh from the oven.


And here's Cailan, showing us how he squints to see the laser lights.

Little drummer boy

He was very very happy.

We set up the drums on the sun porch Thursday night after Cailan went to sleep. Then we closed the curtains over the the doors that go from the dining room to the sun porch, so he wouldn't see the drums before breakfast.

After oatmeal and getting dressed Friday morning, Chris told Cailan we had a surprise for him. "I'm ready to go see my surprise!"

We took him out to the sun porch and showed him the drums. HHe didn't scream or squeal or jump up and down. He just said, "That's my set!" Then he walked over to it, picked up the sticks, and started playing.

He did take a break long enough to give me a hug and a kiss and wave good-bye as I left for work, but then it was back to the music. He started working on his CD right away and by 9 A.M. he was up to track 23.

Laser lights

We had a small disaster this week at our house. Our kitchen sink fell off.

That's right. On Wednesday evening, Chris was washing some dishes while I was finishing our falafel preparations for dinner. He exclaimed something we probably would have preferred that Cailan not hear, and I looked over to see that the kitchen sink was about 3 inches lower than it used to be, leaving a strange and unsettling gap between the countertop and the top of the sink.

Apparently, the sink, which is mounted below the countertop, was only being held up by expoxy. It was glued to the countertop, with no other mounting hardware or braces or brackets or any other support. Wednesday night was when the epoxy gave out.

The sink fell a few inches and stopped when the garbage disposal came to rest on the pull-out shelf where we store our dish soap and scrub brushes. Fortunately, none of the pipes broke, so we didn't have any messes to clean up or water spraying out all over the kitchen. Chris went out to the garage and came back with some 2 by 4s. We managed to lift the sink a couple inches and wedge the boards under it to hold it up, then finished our dinner.

This bit about the kitchen sink, though, is really just an explanation for why we went out to dinner on Thursday. Thursday is a jam-packed day for Chris and I so we didn't have a chance to do anything about the sink, and we didn't want to make dinner with our kitchen in disarray, so we went out for burritos and then to Home Depot to look for sink-attaching parts.

It was dark on the way home. I looked at Cailan in his back seat, and he was squinting and tilting his head from side to side. "I see laser lights! There's a white one! There's a yellow one! There's a red laser light!"

He had just discovered how, when you squint your eyes and look at a traffic light or a street light, you seem to see a beam of light shooting up from the light source, and when you tilt your head back and forth, that beam of light moves around. It was enthralling to him. When we got home, he wouldn't come inside, because he wanted to look at the street lights. "Mommy, will you please play the laser light game with me?"

How could I resist that?

Who could ask for anything more?

Cailan’s got rhythm. I’m not sure how this happened.

For the past week or so, dinosaurs have been pushed to the back burner as Cailan’s inner drummer has re-emerged. Anything in the house can instantly morph into a pair of drumsticks: antennae from the ExoBonz sets, two pieces of driftwood from a beach in Washington, utensils at the dining table, the remotes for the TV and receiver… And much of the time, he doesn’t use any sticks at all, just his hands. They are in constant motion.

Anything in the house could serve as a drum, too. The ExoBonz containers are a particular favorite: turned upside-down, they make a nice set of tom-toms, and their lids become cymbals. There are several paint cans in the garage that are now arranged as a semi-circular drum kit, with a roller tray beside them as the crash cymbal. The magazine rack in the living room, made of black metal slats, is a xylophone. The lid of the kitchen trashcan, which is right at shoulder height for Cailan, is now covered with little dimples from his mallets. The stools at the kitchen counter are actually tall bongos.


The thing is, he’s really pretty good. A favorite mealtime pastime (his favorite, not ours, because it interferes with eating and can make a simple bowl of cereal drag on for hours) is banging out rhythms with his hands on his placemat. He likes to play rhythms from CDs that we listen to, especially the songs from his Music Together class, and see if we can recognize them. And we often do:

Trot old Joe, trot old Joe
You’re the best horse in the country oh -

Diddle diddle dumpling my son John
Went to bed with his breeches on.

Saturday, he was playing a rhythm over and over that we couldn’t place. He told us it was from the blue George Winston CD, track number one. Chris turned that on, and we could hear the line that Cailan had been playing.

And for some reason, though I swear we don’t have Westside Story playing, the rhythm I hear from him most often is

I like to be in A-mer-i-ca
OK for me in A-mer-i-ca

Where he got this, how he navigates the switch from 6/8 to 3/4, is a mystery to me. But a bigger mystery is, what made Chris and I respond to an ad on Craigslist and pick this up:


Cailan doesn’t know about them yet. I’ll update after the weekend.

Cailanism 3

Sometimes when I walk I sometimes fly.