Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Commuting And Weather

So, yesterday, I was out and about over lunch and saw this atrocity hanging from the side of my office.


All I can think is that it's some huge rapper necklace that's supposed to slightly resemble the KC Skyline, mirrored four ways. Check out the massive chains, yo.


Taking a closer look, the chains are fake and made of plastic. Lame. I was going to steal some of it and use it to lock my bike up with, but I guess that's a bad idea.


This police officer actually made eye contact with us. Although his door was cracked open a bit, he let us pass without giving us the door prize. Personally, I still took a wide berth.


It was brutally humid and windy last night. I stopped under a tree and leaned my bike against a lamp post for a bit to let the wind cool me down while I sipped from my Polar Bottle.



Warning: Animated .GIF might take a while to load.

I woke up this morning to this:
jun4-am

I used CHDK with an intervalometer script to snap a 4 second-long exposure every 15 seconds while I went back up to my apartment to get stuff together. You can see some of last night's clouds rolling in with a longer animation here.

I didn't need the rain covers this morning but the skies were ominous enough that I used them just in case.


I broke a spoke about a mile from home. I'm not 100% convinced that it's from riding it around the parking lot last night with 50 pounds of extra weight on the back. I just bent the broken spoke around another spoke to hold it out of the way. I'll replace it when I get home. I think this is the first non-drive-side spoke I've ever broken. I won't even need to remove the cassette to fix this one.


After bending the spoke out of the way, I was off to work again.


It's hard to see here, but the smoke from KC's newest BBQ pit is visible here.


I rode up Summit again (UGH!) to get some better photos of the carnage.


Looks like dark storm clouds, doesn't it?


Until you see that there's a fire...


What you're seeing is the end result of lightning hitting a container that was holding 1.2 Million gallons of unleaded gasoline at a local refinery. 1.2 million gallons. Retail cost on that is about $5M at 3.93 per gallon (current price of regular 87 octane I saw on the ride in this morning).


Oh, and Praise Beef!


I saw this bike outside Starbucks today, too.


Random Tunage:
Way Out West - Mindcircus (You've GOT to give this a listen if you haven't heard it)
Quivver - One Last Tim

5 comments:

sallymander said...

That's one of the few animated gifs I've actually liked. Nicely done.

Anonymous said...

Darn you and your references to CHDK. Now I'm $135.00 poorer after picking up a used Canon a630 off ebay today...

TP - a fellow Bicyclist and Geekophile.

Unknown said...

My wife and kids are in DeSoto KS visiting parents. They have nothing good to say about the weather there right now. She also told me about the explosion. Smoke could be seen for miles.

Anonymous said...

Ditto to Sallymander.
I too am a fan of the Spycow.

Anonymous said...

I'm glad I found your blog! I'm hoping to become a bicycle commuter. I just picked up my bike form the shop today. Your blog is encouragement and fuel to my pedal-power!

Can you believe the smoke was still pouring out at 1pm today?

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