Over the weekend I picked up a complete, original 1971 Iverson Road Runner, a classic rat rod bike style that brought me right back to my childhood days on a banana seat Schwinn my dad repainted and named “The Streaker.”

This Maine barn find is the coolest thing. Stickers on the double-crown fork give it the look of a sprung front suspension. Ape hanger bars are each mounted in their own posts, affording maximum flexibility in positioning the bars. The chainguard is in great shape, and both fenders are solid, original, and nearly perfect.

Sure there’s rust all over the chromed bars, the rims, and even the chainring. And the foam in the seat is, well, nonexistent. But the seat has no tears in it and the tires held air when we got it home and pumped them up for a test ride.

Why did I get this thing? Over a couple weeks, I had been eyeballing it beside a barn during my commute. It looked like it was going to the trash, but I couldn’t tell for sure. Jess could tell that it pained me to see it out in the weather. When I saw the homeowner outside, I pulled over, made some inquiries, and loaded up the bike (and one more that isn’t nearly as cool).

I’m not sure what I want to do with the bike.  It’s an excellent resto candidate since it is, quite literally, complete. But I almost think it’s just more fun the way it is. For now, it’s just really cool to see my own kids taking a spin on the kind of bike I rode back in the day.

Oh, the Price? Free!

This summer we finally made the move to Maine. After a year of weekly 500-mile commutes, we threw in the towel on selling the house, rented it out and made the move up to Maine. It’s a wonderful thing!

One of the first things our daughter Emma wanted to do was make jam with the berries growing all around the property. She and I collected about a half gallon of black raspberries one morning. The next morning we got up early and started cooking. Amazingly delicious stuff!

Then Will wanted to do the same thing with the wild Maine blueberries around the house. Those are harder to collect because they’re so small, but the jam he and I made is just as tasty

What a simple, yet pleasant experience. Walk around the yard with a bucket, pluck ripe fruit, boil it down and add sugar, seal it in jars, and spread on a good toast.

We’re about done on the blueberries since the season is almost over. But the raspberries look like they’ll be ripening for a couple more weeks. Perhaps another batch is in order. And we’ll need it since the kids insist that we mail a bunch out to family.

Last week my wife and I made the move from Palm to Android. It was sad to see my venerable Treo go, but it really wasn’t cutting it any longer. No wi-fi or GPS (in 2010!). And while it had good bluetooth functionality, the IR port on it just screamed retro. (People in IT literally laughed when I pulled it out of my pocket to schedule a meeting or check an email.) While I have yet to box it up and sell it back to Sprint (for $10 – ouch!), it’s done.

The new hotness (for me) is the HTC Evo, a candy bar of a phone with a 1 ghz processor and a 4.3″ display. It would seem huge to just about anyone in the market these days.  But it’s actually about 2/3 as thick as my Treo and not all that much larger. HD video, 8 megapixel camera,  GPS, wi-fi, and so, so much more. I’m still working my way around this beast, but it is so nice and super responsive.  I used the GPS (my first GPS experience, really) on a Maine trip and I might as well have a Garmin since the screen is about the same size.  Spoken turn-by-turn directions courtesy of Google.

And today, after discovering that my wi-fi will be a bit spotty in my Maine residence, I decided to try to use the phone to establish a wi-fi connection via USB tether. June Fabrics’ PDAnet on the Mac and on the Android. 5 minutes of installation and setup. Voila! (The image in this post comes from the June Fabrics site.)

You’re reading a blog post made from the Mac via USB tether. How’s that for cool? (Yes, I have the WordPress app for my phone and  I can post that way. But the point here is to test my ability to conduct “real” work from a 15″ screen  via my phone’s data connection. Done.)

Looks like it won’t last through the next OS update. I’ll have to think about that data plan add on, or find a reliable hotspot.

While in Maine last week, I took the opportunity to check out some of the single-track available in the Portland area. A quick search turned up Bradbury Mountain State Park in Pownal, Maine. Online discussion boards suggested a really nice, well-maintained network of challenging single-track. The boards were right!

Bradbury is a really nice place for either a short or long ride, and it’s full of multi-use trails (horseback riding, mountain biking, snowmobiling, x-country skiing, and, of course, hiking).

I took the advice of a couple people in the parking lot and rode the east side of the park, on the side with the campground. I found some really nice, technical trail full of little ups and downs, swithchbacks, rocks, roots, and more.

Then, on Sunday evening at my local riding spot, I ran into a guy who was talking about racing in Maine. I told him about the ride and he went on to describe for me the races he’s done at Bradbury. I guess I picked a good spot to check out the single track!

The ranger and park volunteers I talked with were really pleasant and helpful, and the riders were all eager to share their knowledge of the park. I’m thinking this will be a very nice place to go for camping, and for some less technical family rides on the snowmobile trails.

I was watching TV with the kids one evening and a Dos Equis commercial came on.  You know the series featuring “the most interesting man alive.” Anyway, there’s an ad in this series featuring what appears to be a younger “most interesting man.” When we saw the commercial the kids noticed that the guy looked like me.

I took it as an opportunity to play a joke on them. I insisted that I had indeed done the commercial.  It’s ridiculous, unbelievable, and yet almost credible.

I’m not sure what I think about the narration that accompanies the clip.

Snow day all around! The call was for 6-20″ of snow in the NY Metro area.  I think we had perhaps 6″, though it was probably more like 4. But the college closed its doors for the day, and so did the kids’ school.

I managed to get out of the office, away from the computer, and into the backyard for an hour or two to help the kids build a monster snow fort. It looks a little like a white chocolate Hershey’s Kiss from the front and it stands about 7 feet tall at the peak.

The snow was pretty wet and heavy, which perhaps explains the limited accumulation and our ability to shape a fort out of it using giant snowman-like snowballs.

The great thing about winter is that it brings out the kid in everyone, or it should. We didn’t hit the sledding hill today because of the roads and the wind, though we talked about it.

The challenge with a snow project on this scale is the cold and the kids’ interest. Snowball-fight breaks and general shenanigans help a lot. But by the time the fort was built we were pretty much ready to head in to warm up! And then it was back upstairs to the desk for me.