Razors Edge

And why would anyone think towel - bath or kitchen - wouldn't have gotten dirty at some point in their journey to your home? I'm gonna wash those just as a precaution.

I'm in the ALL unscented column, so even if a fabric softener or dryer sheet was used, at least I wouldn't have to smell it!

...on Florida and its evolving building code. I imagine California is the same but first with earthquakes (decades ago) and now wildfires. When @Wilbur discusses digging out his bosses home, this article shows how that comes to be. And, the point being, it can be built and built well enough to sustain most (nearly all?) hurricanes, but that cost makes it so the folks who have long lived along the coast in Florida - an insane amount of coastline and much pretty great - would be unlikely to be the ones who do the upgrades or rebuilding to their homes. Hard to imagine your retirement home where you hoped to live out your golden years being washed or blown away and knowing you'd have no chance to rebuild. Same for non-retired folks in lower income brackets. If it goes, it's gone, and they're not likely to have the money or insurance to rebuild and remain. Fort Meyers is in the center right with the darkest red is the worst damage (destroyed): Darkest blue is the deepest flooding levels (10'+):

Heck, this moran didn't even realize it's easier to FLY! Duh! Spring Break is about MAXIMIZING booze drinking and meeting ladies!!! There are 2445 miles stretching between the loblolly pine trees around Jacksonville, Fla., and the waves crashing upon Imperial Beach south of San Diego, Calif. Between lies the rolling white dunes of the Gulf Islands National Seashore, elegant saguaro cacti of the Southwest, and the towering In-Ko-Pah Mountains in Southern California. To make it from Jacksonville to San Diego in two weeks, one would have to travel an average of 175 miles a day, so while it is a long trip, it would be relatively easy in a car. But when Artie Carpenter ’25 made the trip over spring break, it wasn’t in a car; it was on the back of what he described as his “trusted steed”: his bicycle. While this cross-continental ride isn’t Carpenter’s longest trip — that title goes to the 3100-mile trip he took on his gap year in September 2020 from Brooklyn, N.Y., to Marin County, Calif. — it is his most intense, since he needed to bike for more miles per day to make it in time. This trip was the latest of a series of biking adventures that extend all the way back to his childhood. In ninth grade, Carpenter went on his first long-distance bike trip. Together with a friend, he decided to bike 50 miles north of his home in Brooklyn to Bear Mountain State Park, N.Y. It was disastrous, to the point where the two ended up taking a full day to reach the park when it should have only taken them a few hours. Despite the unexpected detour, Carpenter was hooked. “It was still a lot of fun,” he said. “It was the longest I’d been on a bike in one day, and then it just continued from there.” Trips these days for Carpenter range from cross-country voyages to casual rides up into Vermont or down Route 43 to something in between, like a trip he took to the border of Canada during reading period last fall. “I set these kinds of destinations for myself that don’t really matter,” he said. “They give me enough time where I can really have a fun, memorable journey there.” Carpenter barely does any planning for his trips, either, preferring instead to explore whatever place he finds himself in while on the road. “In general, it’s extremely simple,” he said, speaking about his most recent bike ride to San Diego. “You just wake up, and you bike west. That’s it.” That mindset has taken Carpenter to some interesting places, like a lively restaurant in Lufkin, Texas. With his biking gear and attire, he naturally drew the attention of the patrons, who asked him what he was doing. From there, he was sucked into conversation, and they even bought him a second dinner. “It puts people in a good mood to hear about something that they don’t encounter in everyday life,” he said. According to Carpenter, this kindness isn’t an uncommon occurrence. “They see [me] and [my] position, and the kind of mileage [I’m] doing, and they want to help out,” he said. “Whenever I’m buying more Clif bars at a grocery store, often people ask me what I’m doing, and I tell them, and then they’ll say, ‘I’m gonna pray for you’ or things like that.” Of course, not everything goes perfectly. Because of the distance he had to travel every day on his trip from Florida to California, maintaining his energy was a challenge. “It was two weeks, but it felt like two months, just because I was awake for so long,” Carpenter said. “I was getting six hours of sleep a night.” This was made worse in West Texas and New Mexico, where strong headwinds slowed him down, and he had to stay on the bike for longer to make up for lost time. The weather also wasn’t always nice; Carpenter recalled a day when the temperature jumped from the upper 30s to the mid 90s in the span of half a day. He also had to deal with multiple flat tires, once because he ran through a patch of thorns that took out both tires until he could repair them. Perhaps the most extreme aspect of these long bike rides was the lack of human interaction for hours on end, but Carpenter said that he took it all in stride. “You can’t expect it to be seamless, doing that distance in two weeks,” he said. “And so it was just kind of like another challenge that you deal with.” “That’s one of the elements that makes it memorable, and that makes you really feel like you’re doing something that you’re not gonna forget and be able to tell stories from it,” he added. To get through the hardest parts of the journey, Carpenter said that he developed a strategy. “I see a signpost, and I say, ‘Alright, get to there,’ then make it to the next little feature in the road, and you just kind of keep building,” he said. “You build on small wins in that way. And then eventually, the miles just tick by, and you’re able to make pretty long distances.” At the end of the two weeks, Carpenter had made it to the shores of Southern California. It was cold and cloudy, and he couldn’t see the ocean until he was 20 seconds away from his destination, but that didn’t take away from his feeling of celebration and accomplishment. “You’ve done something crazy, and now, you can just rest and take a break, and you don’t need to get back on the bike the next day,” he said. For now, Carpenter said that he hopes to bike more often around campus as the days get warmer and continue competing with the cycling team. But once summer arrives, it’s practically guaranteed that he will be back on his bike for hours on end again. “These big trips are like an ode to a bicycle,” he said. “It’s just like an amazing piece of machinery. The more I go, the more I’m like, ‘Holy crap’… The more people [bike], the better off we’ll be.”

1 & 2 only. And 2 is "loose", but I'd consider what that "Inventing Anna" woman did to be a bit of social engineering.

You really can't go wrong with that combination of ingredients and flavors.

I think Miami and Ft Lauderdale are fine. And the Keys.

I've got no idea!!!! Maxx's link gives a whole process that seems pretty legit, but would it be overkill?

...in Montana, no less! In a warming world, who wins: goats or sheep? As the namesake ice of Glacier National Park in Montana recedes, it is exposing once unavailable salt deposits coveted by animals far and wide. Both mountain goats and bighorn sheep are flocking to lick up sodium and other crucial nutrients they need to survive. But where there’s a feast, there’s a fight. A study published Monday in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution reveals how new winners and losers are emerging in the animal kingdom as rising temperatures alter the abundance and distribution of food, water and shade. Those crucial resources include salt licks. Many animals — including bats, primates and rodents — all go to great lengths for minerals they do not get from the rest of their diet. In Glacier National Park, months of observation reveal an undisputed victor in the Salt Wars: The goat. “We were surprised that mountain goats won,” said Joel Berger, a professor at Colorado State University and a senior scientist for the Wildlife Conservation Society who co-wrote the paper, in a phone interview. “Naively, I was just thinking, we’ve got two similar-sized species and they both live in these mountains,” he added. “And if everything was equal, then half the time we’d expect one to win and half the time the other.” But that’s not what happened. In the vast majority of these high-altitude conflicts in Glacier, goats bullied sheep, the research team found. Most of the time, goats didn’t need to do much: Their presence alone was enough to shoo away the more passive herbivores. The difference came down to attitude: Goats are simply more ornery. When warranted, the snowy-colored animals were willing to drop their heads and rush with their saber-like horns to get their way. “They are characteristically more aggressive,” said Forest P. Hayes, an ecologist and co-author who is pursuing a Ph.D. at Colorado State. In other battles over limited resources, size often does matter. Elephants in Namibia, for instance, usually get their way at watering holes, Berger’s past research shows. These kinds of fights are likely to intensify. As deserts dry and forests dwindle, water and shade will become scarcer in many corners of the world. Yet conflict between species over resources altered by climate change and other human disturbances “is a really poorly investigated arena,” Hayes said. “As we’re seeing potential shifts in resource availability and increases in scarcity, it’s increasingly likely that this is going to happen more often,” he added. “So understanding these conflicts and ramifications for interacting species is really important.”

...and had your name stricken from the voting roll? Fair trade!

But how's you altitude? Sometimes that is more important.

I'd wash towels (or, toss them in the laundry bin), but socks? Nah. I'll wear them "new".

Oh, don't think your pup doesn't wish someone would "kidnap" him!

Can you imagine the joy one gets slicing into the pie with a sharp knife????

Oh boy! You looked at it I hear all your accounts being drained!!

That was one point that tea "scored" on! Me? Caffeine doesn't matter as I'm neither regularly drinking tea nor coffee in the late afternoon or evening. Factor that point out, and coffee is even further ahead!

That's Squares' tire size (maybe can even go 32), so he might be willing to give it a whirl!

...unless ass tastes like a musty dishrag???

...so maybe we can just get some updated photos (and VIDEO!) of Ylva having a blast with other cool pups!

It's the big beagle rescue from the breeding-for-research purposes facility. Thousands of dogs saved - a great thing. Thousands of dogs killed before then - a sad thing.

I have Shimano GRX hydraulic disc brakes, and I'd like to move regular maintenance or even upgrades "in house". Since my MTB is rim brakes as is my road bike, I have zero experience and no tools for working on them. I'd think there must be a core set of tools that make sense for maintenance but also other brake work. What do folks suggest be in my toolbox? What is overkill?

I'm betting - if Square was local - you'd have him set up and educated in under an hour. I think I could get him set up and educated in a couple hours. On his own - if he's like me - it's likely a weekend thing. Day one, go in optimistically, try to do all the different things the YouTube videos tell you too, and fail. STEP AWAY. Return the next day, and it clicks. Sure, it still takes a bit of time or effort, but it will get done. After that, it's pretty similar to any other bike maintenance where you just get the hang of it. Between road with tubes, and road tubeless, what size tires is your GF running and at what pressures? I feel like that's the main reason I never thought about changing to road tubeless as my 25mm tires run relatively low (for tubes), but I don't know how much "more" (or "less") I would get from going tubeless. If it's 10psi, that seems not worth it, but 30 psi (say 85 too 55), I'd probably be pretty darn happy.

Can you sort out that last bit??? A guarantee would be great!

How many bikes, in total, have you run tubeless over the years? I've only done my gravel bike, and I treated it as a learning opportunity and a challenge. It was both, but also, a relative "easy" process once I actually had my mind wrapped around it. Definitely something almost anyone could do - with the right combination of equipment and willingness to keep at it.

...this is a tough read. but From Uno to Fin.