just cleaned my chain

just cleaned a whole winter's worth of gunk and grease and grime from my chain. i should've taken a before pic so you can tell that this IS clean (comparatively).

add baconfitter to my resume

the vegetarian gets meat duty again at the church breakfast. i think i need a church that understands me.

dave's lock

it's dave's lock, but not dave's bike. some itinerant biker with no lock must've just grabbed a spot on the rack that had a lock and just draped it over his bike.

choppers

choppers are the most awesomist winter cycling hand apparel.

birdhouse in my soul

played around with another picture in gimp. selected the birdhouse and applied a filter just to it.

here it is with the birdhouse gone all "cartoony."

well, since i had the birdhouse selected, i tried to play with the colors a little more.

a mediocre photo gets a makeover

on my ride to work the other day, i wanted to catch the tops of the buildings in st. paul just peeking out of the haze covering downtown, but the camera on my phone just didn't capture that. after the fact, though, i felt the line of the road flowing diagonally across the scene and the in-focus elements that framed it vs. out-of-focus elements in the middle gave it a lonely feel.

on the first one, i gave it a "cubist" filter in gimp.


for the second, i applied the "cartoon" filter.


and here's the original.

faces everywhere

my muffins are saying "eat me"!

fred can't get his ball

poor dog. maybe i'll help him out.

rare january sunlight commute

not that it's rare for me to ride my bike outdoors in january, it's rare for me to be have good enough sunlight to cast shadows. and even more rare for me to want to slow down enough to take pics.

where's the edge of the driveway?

cover art for your next vampire-themed emo album

if i hibernated, i'd miss this

just when i was nearly overcome with despair over this weather (-2F) and humanity (some guy tried to scare me and my bike off the road with his truck), i crested the hill into downtown st. paul and saw this. it appears that, despite how i feel there will be beautiful and inspiring things around me, i just have to keep my eyes open. thanks, God.

protein in cheesecake, right?

ice candles

over the last couple of days we took on a decidedly low-tech--but totally nerdy--activity. anything that involves flames and ice is pretty darned cool. (literally!)

a detour in the snow

last bike commute home of 2009 (and day of the snownami), so i took a detour through the woods. it was nice to exchange the road noise for the crunch of my tires on the path and the sounds of the brittle snowflakes falling through the tree branches.

at work coffee conundrum solved

duh!

funniest webfilter violation ever

was looking at the website of one of the local churches we attend to see when they'd scheduled their Christmas eve services and it came up, at work, as a webfilter violation. what was the cause of that violation? pornography. ha! no... this site is not pornographic, but by waving this webfilter violation in front of a few of my coworkers, i might convince them to attend :-P

aerodynamics???

i got home and found i had this superawesome faring attached to the downtube of my bike. i don't think it made me go any faster, though...

flowers quietly whispering from the windowsill

the break of the day

our view out the back window this morning. yes... very, very cold.