I’ve reached the point where less is more when it comes to gym time. I’m shifting to twice weekly for that and four days cycling. I’ll tell you it’s all about my calling to the mission, and that I sense I’m quite close to it, and that fitness has long been a part of that calling. Whatever I can do with the gym has reached it’s crescendo and I’m now focused more on riding. No, I have no idea how it matters, only that God tells me it does, so here I am.
(Click any image to enlarge.)
Today I rode to Draper. While I had thought about a run out east toward Dale and Shawnee, my heart said it was time to grab a few pictures around Draper last night. Today the wisdom of that choice was manifested in storms that howled where I had first wanted to go. By heading south on Hiwasee, I got just a few sprinkles, enough to dampen my clothes but not my enthusiasm.
It seemed a good idea to have just one more visit to that lovely valley on SE 134th between Hiwasee and Anderson Road. This house on the right is one of those “old money” houses that have been there quite some years. I tried to get one on the other side, but the camera malfunctioned and gave me something awful, as if something was interfering with the camera function electronically. I’ve heard of government agencies using jammers like that, but those tend to prevent any image at all; this was just a totally unnatural color balance.
So I went on and hit the lake drive clockwise. On the far side of the dam I found a better place for capturing images of the construction on new facilities. I made sure to capture some of those 60″ pipes next to vehicles for scale. That’s the size pipe that runs 100 miles to Atoka Lake in one direction and toward Oklahoma City in the other. I laid my bike at the bottom of the hill and climbed up for a better angle.
Then I took this panoramic quartet of the current plant from about the same spot but off to the left of the previous shot. Because WordPress does such a crappy job with aligning multiple images like that, I had to use Hugin to turn them into a genuine panoramic shot. Hugin did it all pretty much automatically, but I had to make sure to add each image separately because they weren’t in alphabetical order. The software is part of the standard Debian pool, but if you need to download it yourself, it’s still hosted on Sourceforge and some browsers block that site. You can use other sources like Softpedia or CNet, etc. The current version is 2015.0, but 2014 will work. Anything older will be missing some of the automated features.
Click to enlarge
The rest of the ride was just staying on it against the headwinds, which were northerly today. Apparently the adjustments I’ve made to the bike are working well because I got home in less than 2.5 hours for just less than thirty miles.
