/dev/mull

since we were starting at the southern end of the park, we'd thought we'd try a hike almost as far south as one can get: turk mountain, which the park service breezily describes as "easiest". um, not really, and that unhelpful advice led the mountain to defeat us.

in short, maximum slope matters. the park service's rating system is simply a function of horizontal distance and elevation gain. it's not a bad zeroth-order approximation – longer hikes with greater elevation change are generally harder than short ones that are nearly flat – but ultimately wrong. don't believe me? consider the difference between scaling a 100 foot tall cliff and taking the stairs in a 100 foot tall building. the latter has a greater horizontal distance, and so oddly rates more as difficult. it's a a strange edge case, but one that bit us us firmly on the ass.

so, having been assured that the hike was "easiest", we didn't pace ourselves. overall, the grade should be nearly flat: gaining 700 feet in a little over two miles is about a 6% grade. yeah, we can take that at close to a walking pace.

but as the picture on the park's web site makes clear, that's not how it works. there's a slight descent along a ridge to turk mountain, and then a climb. and the climb is pretty steep in places. as far as i can tell from a topo map and an elevation profile of the hike – both of which i looked at afterwards – there's a section where we gained about 200 feet in something between 400 and 600 feet of horizontal distance. a 1:2 slope is a shallow staircase, and 1:3 is a moderately steep climb. but we took them too fast, and wore ourselves out.¹

all the way, i was cursing myself for being woefully out of shape, since we'd climbed 400 feet up switchbacks getting onto the shira plateau on kilimanjaro just four years earlier... while sick as dogs. but we did that very, very slowly.

so, when we got to what seemed like the top – a rocky place with a view, where other people were sitting and talking – we stopped there. but when were were leaving, i saw a boulder with a blaze indicating that the trail turned right. where we'd turned left to go admire the view is essentially a landing for the trail nearly doubling back on itself to climb higher. we said to hell with it and started back down. that we missed such an obvious blaze is an indication of how tired we were.

1: we went out and back in 1:42, according to dïe überblønde's timer, including flopping around at the overlook. the park service estimates 2:15 for the hike, and the guide we should have looked at says 2-4 hours.

the trip improved almost immediately thereafter. i pulled over at the simmons gap overlook, which has a view we'd never seen before.



( more places, more pictures )

soon: compton peak, the other mountain that defeated us.

first, have a couple of panoramas from the drive to our last hike in shenandoah national park. generally, the sky was pretty hazy – just humidity,¹ not smoke – so i didn't take many landscape pictures. also, other than our first and last hikes, we've been to all the peaks previously, so the views wouldn't be much different than what i've photographed before.

1: and a touch of isoprene. they ain't called the blue ridge mountains for nothing.

i'm pretty sure these are from signal knob overlook, which is near the north entrance to the park.



the mountains in the distance are the massanuttens, though the tree on the right blocks my view of signal knob, an isolated peak on the more distant range. the mountains near the left side of the photo are gimlet ridge, an extension of blue ridge mountains.



this view looks towards gimlet ridge and browntown, so roughly south.

this trip, we wanted to see the whole length of the park. the park is a little more than 100 miles long, so the southern end is pretty far from us; about six hours' drive. we'd never been there before. and we rarely visit the northern end, since we stay in fancy accommodations in the central section. (i was a boy sprout long enough to figure out that while i like the outdoors, i want to sleep in a bed... and i've become increasingly insistent on electricity and running water too.)

the drives both ways were messes, but different sorts: torrential rain going, glacial traffic coming. and planning the drives revealed that apple's map program is on acid, or more likely, AI. it gives bizarre directions now – perhaps it always did; i so rarely need directions that i can't remember – that are actively unhelpful.

the route from here to charlottesville, virginia, where we spent the night after driving down, is just i-95 to i-495 (the DC beltway) to i-66 to us-29. it's hard to screw that up, and i was pretty sure that was the optimal route. but i checked anyway. according to pear-shaped maps, the route is something like 95 to 495 to sudley road (for a couple of miles) to va-234 (for a few furlongs) to i-66 to i-29 (for a while) to eastern bypass to seminole trail to va-15 to...

the problem? sudley road and va-234 are the same as i-66, and the last bunch are all synonyms for i-29. and in fact, no map i can find mentions "eastern bypass". none of these other names (other than va-15) are used more than once on any of the roads, and some don't appear at all. typical AI slop.

regardless, we got off to a late start heading south, so we ran into an expected thunderstorm while on the elevated baltimore spaghetti highway. the rain was so heavy i could barely figure out where the lanes were. the car was having the same problem, jittering from side to side like a squirrel on amphetamines. if i hadn't had the car's fancy automation, i'd have pulled over.

and i wouldn't have bothered making such a long drive anyway. it's just too tiring. but the automation makes it merely boring. since we were running late, we stopped for dinner just after turning onto i-29. much to our surprise, there's a very good indian restaurant just off the highway, called pakwaan. we recommend it. good spicy food, a bit mild for my taste, but dïe überblønde was happy that they had himalayan naan, which she really likes.

we reached charlottesville around 10pm and promptly collapsed.

on our way home, we were leaving from the northern end of the park, which abuts front royal. so, the obvious route home is i-66 to i-495 to i-95. as i expect at least one of my readers will know, taking that route during the workweek is a fool's errand. but the other possible routes home would take us far to the west, so we foolishly set off anyway. despite taking another dinner break at pakwaan,² it would have been faster to jog the distance from i-66 and i-29 to the potomac river; the traffic was literally that slow. at least the car will handle traffic jams for me, though it does need to be reminded to go again if it's been stopped too long.

2: we left the park straight from our last hike, but we're not complete barbarians. the northern entrance to the park has a visitor center, so we got hobo showers in the "family" bathroom and changed into clean clothes for dinner.

so, what was notionally a four-hour drive became another six-hour drive (or seven, including dinner). we got home after 10pm, exhausted. at least that was last thursday, so we had the weekend to recover.

last night's concert was music from science fiction movies and TV shows, with a few other things thrown in. but it seemed that the music director tried to do everything on the cheap. so, rather than playing main themes, the music was nearly all incidental music or end credits.

so, for example, we heard a couple of different versions of the star trek end credits, and triumph of the will: the SFX edition "star wars: throne room and end credits", along with some random suites from interstellar and back to the future. um, yay? if this is maestra di russo's idea of playing popular music, the DSO is in trouble.

but the performance wasn't a complete loss. the DSO did play the new doctor who main theme -- a north american premier! -- which is a march. it's still clearly the same theme it's been for ages, though. they also played the theme from the avengers and the incredibles, which are both better as stand-alone music than as part of movies. they reminded me of when supers movies were entertaining, not CGI-heavy extruded spandex products.

there was also a tiny bit of high culture. apparently, a few minutes from howard hanson's symphony number 2 were used for the closing credits of alien.

i spent an hour's quality time with our small, electric snowblower and the driveway. i cleared 6-8" of heavy snow and sleet. it would have taken us hours to do that by hand. there's more coming down; this was just pass one.

our walking tour of vienna was longer than the one in bratislava, about an hour long. it was also cleverly planned so that we'd end up back where we started, so we could find our ways back to the ship after being turned loose.

a consequence of that is that i sometimes took pictures of the same thing a couple of times. worse, the timestamps on my phone's camera, which picked up the time from the local phone network, disagreed with the timestamps on my real camera, which was off by a random amount from that. so, i've given up trying to put the pictures in any sensible order.

( many viennese pictures )

this morning, the temperature was unseasonably warm – the high was 55° – for a few hours, ahead of a powerful cold front. so i got in a little more gardening.

i brought in some anti-antler-rat netting i'd forgotten to bring in before, and went back to pruning the broken bush. once the cold front arrived, the winds were expected to pick up – they did, they're gusting to 40 kts – and i wanted to clear out any more damaged branches and dead wood before the wind brought it down.

now that i got into the center of the bush, i found that there was even more dead wood than my previously-raised estimate. so, most of that was cut out. i also trimmed a bit more live wood that was shading another bush.

fundamentally, this bush matches the pollyanna-ish definition that a weed is a plant out of place. it's a vigorous bush with small evergreen leaves. it's a fine architectural plant.

10% of it being out of place is due to company that built our house. they planted it next to the house on the west wall, with shade to the south of it. so, the bush, like most of the plants in that garden, wants to grow away from the wall. this makes it grow over a slow-growing pine tree and an azalea.

the other 90% i attribute to me just not keeping up with pruning the shrubbery. there's always more pressing outdoor tasks here: sowing, weeding, watering, mowing the lawn. and they get out of hand quickly. an overgrown bush? not really. it took 25 years for the bush to get this way. but now i think i've got it under control: i'll do as much pruning after the first frost and before the last as i can.

– – –

one of the seed pushers i buy from mainly sells to large gardeners and small farmers. their catalog just arrived. they seem to have realized that flowers are a high-margin crop that their clientele grows, but that they don't grow them by the acre.

so, not only have they greatly expanded the variety of flowers they sell, they're now selling flower seed by the ounce or half-ounce in addition to by the packet and quarter-pound and up. a packet of seed contains tens to hundreds of seeds, and might fill 10-20 square feet. a quarter-pound is usually tens of thousands of seeds, and will fill a good fraction of an acre. an ounce is high hundreds to thousands of seeds, and tens to hundreds of square feet. that's a much better match for my gardens.

also, because of labor costs/economies of scale, a packet of seeds is typically around $5 these days. but a (half-)ounce is only $10. much better. so, i'm going to order seeds for next spring and the spring thereafter, or for some of the short-season flowers, sow successive waves of seeds next spring.

another part of trying to catch up on posting pictures: things from our portland-seattle trip this past august.

during our flight to portland, we saw these peaks. no idea what they are, but the sunset made them look good:



while we spent a few days in portland, i think the only photogenic thing we saw was a garden:





the seattle convention center wasn't that interesting to photograph, but there was a wildflower garden on a terrace. these flowers look like foxgloves, but the leaves are wrong for that. still pretty.



the paramount, apparently a building of some note to local musicians, is across the street:



i like the detailing on the upper stories, even though it can't be seen from the street.



art museums are always good for pictures:

chinese porcelain with coral growing on it. clearly from a shipwreck, but we don't know which one. the coast guard seized this stuff from smugglers.



the folks living in the tigris-euphrates river valley in antiquity were really into frogs:





a glass vase, showing what one can do with the medium if one works at it:



some surreal things from one of ai wei wei's exhibits protesting the "great leap forward" and the brutal oppression of artists during it.





the chinese government lets him persist because this stuff gives certain westerners warm fuzzies about the "resistance" he's putting up, but his efforts achieve nothing. it's not like the commies have gone anywhere, or even been slightly tamed.

i don't have many pictures from the worldcon. panels and lectures aren't that interesting to photograph, and, sadly, neither was the class on making a movie in a weekend. (more on that with the worldcon posts, also running way behind.)

also, i somehow missed the memo on where and when the worldcon posed photography was, so i have only two pictures of costumed people worth showing.

somebody dressed up as baba yaga's hut:



and i really liked this steampunk adventurer:



i did get to talk to him for a while during the photography. while the leather parts of his costume are made for it, most of the rest is random recycled bits and pieces. the green light is part of a broken toy; i think he said it was a buzz lightyear.

this is the view from the nosebleed seats in the kimmel center's small theater:



we're in the last row center. the view is great, as are the acoustics. there's two balconies, and they're relatively small.

and this is the main theater:



it's cavernous, but still manages great acoustics. the three balconies are large, and we're all the way at the back of the uppermost one. it's a substantial climb from the main floor to where we were since the balconies are so tall.

yes, there's a pipe organ above the chorus.

i now have both a headlamp and a pocket flashlight that run on the same, standard li-ion batteries, rather than weird proprietary batteries. the batteries are 16340s -- 16 mm diameter, 34 mm tall, which is a little thicker than a AAA battery -- which are relatively commmon.

batteries are one place i go much further than the right to repair folks, and i want the government to make companies pick/create one or more standard batteries to use in phones, cameras, etc, on pain of the government making a standard for them. that worked magic when the EU threatened them about charging cables.

but i now i have a new first-world problem: i'd like to get a few more of the batteries to put in storage, but all the brands i see online are no-name chinese brands. literally: the brands are just strings of three or four random letters, presumably the initials of the chinese names of the manufacturers.

i'm kinda down on exploding batteries, so i'd like to get some from a reputable outfit. does anybody have any recommendations?