After 3 3/4 years, I finally completed the 50k elevation challenge (for geocaching) in October with my friend Jes. Spoiler alert: Victory! I logged far more than than 50k of elevation over the period, but the challenge had so many rules that many of my hikes didn’t count. In fact, for a while I had kind of given up even tracking gain. I was tantalizingly close after a huge boost in July from Cycle Canada but resigned to completing the official challenge in 2015. In September, Jes mentioned that she wanted to go to Mailbox Peak, and let me tag along. The elevation gain (>4000′) put us both over the cutoff. On that trip, we schemed on how we might finish it off while not completely incurring the wrath of our respective spouses. ...

(Continued from part 1.) Day 5 was a rest day in Jasper. Unlike Day 2, when I really wanted a rest day, I was feeling well enough that I would have preferred continuing. On the other hand, I seriously enjoyed the slow, sit-down meals where I wasn’t swatting mosquitos off my legs. I wandered around town, avoiding the anchovy-loving pizza bears. Anchovies: pizza topping or bear attractant? ...

Lake Louise, AB Cycle Canada – Icefields Parkway trip summary: 9 days, 582 miles, 26k elevation gain, 95 geocaches and a hundred insect bites. Back in the darkest weeks of December, while visiting my parents in the Houston area, I was hunkered down on the couch, enjoying an escape (summer) fantasy with a copy of Adventure Cycling’s smörgåsbord of 2014 rides. While I’d love to do the six week ride down the Pacific Coast (or even a snippet, like the Pacific Coast Central), I couldn’t swing the time away. ...

What I think about when I am having a bad day at work… In the dark world the natives call “January in Seattle,” I was pining for a week-long bike ride as a “carrot” to entice myself to get back to riding. I’ve covered a lot of great spots in Washington, but was looking for something different. That something different – but not too different – was Ride Idaho. For reasons I blame squarely on Ted, I keep mentally thinking of it as Ridaho, and may occasionally lapse into typing it that way, deliberately or otherwise. ...

The Cholesterol Nuclear Option. Source: http://imgur.com/gallery/V2dtI Harvard Health Letter Spreading your way to lower cholesterol? Week 3: Diabetes Defining and Diagnosing Diabetes American Diabetes Association, Standards of Medical Care in Diabetes 2012 MedlinePlus – Diabetes, Diabetes Interactive Tutorial International Diabetes Federation Physical Activity and Weight in Diabetes NIH, Diabetes Prevention Program CDC – Prevent Diabetes WHO – The Cost of Diabetes National Diabetes Information Clearinghouse – What I need to know about Physical Activity and Diabetes Meal Planning for Diabetes ...

During the summer of 2011, I had some mythical Spare Time to blow the centimeter-thick layer of dust off my programming skills and port FizzyCalc, a Windows-based geocoordinate conversion utility that I’ve used for solving several puzzles in my obsessive hobby, geocaching, to the Mac. Mac FizzyCalc celebrated its 2500th download in November, a year after it was released. Cupcakes were served. FizzyCalc is used primarily to precisely project waypoints and convert among the most common geo-coordinate formats. Applied judiciously, it can help you in finding the center of a circle given points on its circumference or the intersection of three circles. (Latitude/longitude is a Cartesian grid superimposed on a spheroid earth. At my latitude, one minute west is far less than the one minute north/south. Thus, my tenth-grade algebra fails.) One of the reasons I wanted to port it is using a Windows virtual machine always takes … a … w-h-i-lllllllllll-e to start because, oh, merde, Adobe Flash has another security update – Reboot to make the changes take effect! ...

I had my gallbladder out Thursday. I’m gonna cut back on the bacon, maybe, but am feeling better. Exactly 365 days after my kidney stone, I was again experiencing similar symptoms. I assumed it was one of the tiny calcite terror pre-stones in the inner part of my left kidney. Kidney stones suck, but for subsequent attacks (in my case), they are not reason to seek medical attention. I took the horse-pill (800mg) of ibuprofen and stayed up all night as my body purged both ends of the digestive tract (including the horse-pill, sigh) to relieve pressure. By 5am, the worst symptoms had abated. ...

Booyah! To add variety to geocaching, “blackouts” challenges are posted whereby one has to find a slice of geocaches in an area. The last one I did was the Bellevue Blackout, which was nicely constrained within the city limits of the town I work. It took me about two years to finish. Other blackouts have included much wider geographical areas like the Delorme challenge, where you find a cache in every page of the Washington Delorme map book. Since they’re so far away from being attained, I’ve been content to ignore them. ...

Despite a concerted effort to keep my inbox tamed, it’s now back above 30 undealt-with emails. While falling behind, I’ve noticed some recurring – and annoying – behavioral patterns. I’m sure the list is incomplete, so feel free to share! “The two-for” – a person who always — always— sends a second mail with the attachment they forgot to include the first time. I can’t tell if the person is genuinely a flake or if they’re just pining for the return of corporate instant messaging. One wants to post a sign on their monitor: always wait at least 30 minutes after eating receiving the first message before swimming responding. “I must copy my manager on everything” – the sender wants to ensure their manager knows they’ve made a token effort to be “proactive.” Note the air quotes. (It’s also possible the sender’s manager “wants to be kept in the loop for minutiae” (cough: micromanages) or needs a high message count to justify her Crackberry.) I used to whittle the Cc list down, but have since decided that it’s best to keep the list going. “I must copy your manager on everything, too.” – If I’m the sole entry on the “To:” list, the sender is implying I won’t respond to their request by overtly creating an audit trail. Their manager is copied, too, as if to say, “See, I warned them to check their blood pressure / Beware of the Ides of March / Soylent Green is people — but they did not listen.” What usually happens is my over-detailed, super-helpful response will usually elicit a walk over for the executive summary. “The Escalating Cc:” – two people in an email discussion have differing opinions. Instead of, like, actually walking down the hall and having a conversation, they start adding additional people to the discussion. Sometimes this will devolve into the passive aggressive tone. Paraphrasing an exchange that might hypothetically have gone out to an entire department: “I don’t want to blame anybody, I want to fix the problem.” [three sentences later] “[…] but Bobwas the last one to touch it. I will ask Bobwhen Bob****comes in what Bobdid to cause the system to become hopelessly broken.” ...

Over the Memorial Day Weekend, I had an opportunity to head down to Pendleton for the tenth annual Century Ride of the Centuries (aka “CROC”). This was my seventh visit in eight years — having skipped last year’s — and especially anticipated because the Bar M Ranch was reopened as a camping option. What a kick Pendleton is! After checking in at Hamley’s, I headed over to the Wildhorse Casino, CROC’s flagship sponsor, where we could set up tents in the field behind the RV park. Setting up my tent the first time each season is always an adventure, but after some creative pole tricks, It Was Done. While basking in my tent setting-up success, I went through the bag o’ information they offered us and decided that I’d forgo Day 1’s Despain Gulch route for the opportunity to head south and see the John Day Fossil Beds “Sheep Rock” unit. JDFB:SRU is really off the beaten track, but this is as close as I was going to get in the foreseeable future. ...