The Blasphemous Bicycler

Those crazy fuckers over at Beyond Belief Media are up to no good again….

By the way, the Blue Mountain Lotus Society (a local Buddhist group) is having a book discussion group on The End of Faith on May 8th at the East Shore Borders. I think I might go. I don’t actually think Buddhism runs afoul of any of Harris’ critiques of religion generally, so it might be interesting to get a Buddhist perspective of the book.

When Brandi was a little girl, she had some sort of horrible bicycling accident, and she refuses to ride them anymore. This poses a problem, because if I go off on one of my bike rides, she doesn’t come with me. Since both of us work different schedules, my rides eat into what little time we have to do stuff together.By way of compromise, we decided to go for a smallish hike after work today. We went to Wildwood Lake. Neither of us even knew it was there before today (I found it while doing some gmaps exploration for bicycle routes).

Anyways, the place is very nice, and it’s pretty close by.

We got there and were greeted with a prophetic sign warning us of impending turtles.

_{Turtle Crossing}

I’m happy that things are starting to turn green. I have a touch of the seasonal affective funk, and seeing green stuff seems to pull me right out of it.

_{I’m all about the chloroplasts}

We saw a beaver swimming around, and I assume this is his house.

_{A beaver house}

The lake was full of all sorts of ducks and geese and those long-legged white birds (Egrets?) I don’t know much about birds, but I’m pretty sure this is a goose’s arse.

_{A goose’s arse}

More signs of life. The trees are busy getting thier leaves ready.


_Buds

At last, the long awaited turtle parade. I have seen turtles all lined up on a log like this on TV, but never in real life.

_{Turtles in the sun}

We also saw a deer and some gigantic snapping turtles, but I didn’t get any picures of them. I was amazed at how much wildlife there was basically in downtown Harrisburg. It’s a 3.1 mile hike around the whole lake, and we were back to the starting point in about an hour. Not a bad way to kill a Friday afternoon.

I came across a pretty nice podcast the other day. I’ts done by Rev. Kusala Bhikshu. Rev. Kusala is a Buddhist monk who plays a mean blues harmonica and does interviews of other monks and nuns, and talks to Catholic School children about Buddhism.The interview with the Abbott gets into stuff you don’t often think about, like how does the monestary provide health care coverage for the monks?

I’ve always been fascinated by monasticism, especially Buddhist. (Probably watched too many Kung-Fu movies as a kid.)

Anyhow, if you’re into that sort of thing, it’s worth a listen.

http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma9/dharmatalks.html

It appears that I’ll be in Wausau, Wisconsin the week of April 17th. If I have any readers in Wausau (unlikely) who want to catch a beer, let me know.As much as I’d love to, I don’t think I’ll be able to do the 372 mile drive to Minneapolis.

Girtong² and I went out for a grueling 33 mile ride on the Stony Valley Trail yesterday.

_Trail

We got out just past the Appalachian Trail where a dude was talking to some hikers about an abandoned coal mining town (Rausch Gap) that used to be here. We broke the cardinal rule, and rode bikes on the AT. I was very pleased with the moustache bars’ performance on what was essentially fairly rocky singletrack.

So, we found this town’s cemetery, and I tried to take some pictures of it, but my camera started getting all flakey and wierd on me. The LCD started turning on and off all by itself, and the none of the pictures turned out.

Very Blair Witch. Kind of freaked me out.

Anyways, we did get a few pictures of some other stuff. It was a beautiful day to be on the trail, and the traffic was pretty heavy.

_{An old bridge}

Now that I look through some of the other pictures I took, I think my camera may be starting to die. It probably wasn’t the ghosts of long-dead coal miners after all. I bought the thing in 2001, and I suppose it has outlasted it’s intended life span. Maybe it’s time to upgrade.

This was a really nice weekend. I rode to work on Friday, I went Kayaking on Saturday, and had a supernatural bike ride on Sunday. It’s finally spring! W00t!

Update:

I found a page documenting the St. Anthony’s Wilderness area, which contained the ghost town. Lots of nice pictures. Check it out.

http://mywebpages.comcast.net/StAnthonyWilderness/picpage.htm