The suitcase was looking a little green after some turbulence on the flight home.

There are some things you just don’t expect to see, and a bicycle gracing the cover of the Canadian Automobile Association’s quarterly magazine ranks right up there. Not only is cycling included in the cover story (although the online summary doesn’t say much about cycing, the original in the magazine includes several paragraphs and a sidebar about cycle touring), there’s also a second article extolling the virtues of public bike sharing programs like Montreal’s Bixi.

Rice Lake lit by the full moon.

Following a decades-old dream, Dodgeville expanded to the northeast last week, annexing a plot of land on the north shore of Rice Lake to be used by all Dodgeville residents for year-round recreational purposes. Risa and I just spent our first (cold!) weekend there, unpacking and fixing and getting things into order.

With a door-to-door non-highway route totalling just 110 km, it’s well within my single-day cycling range, even pulling a loaded trailer. That said, I’d be travelling with both wife and cat, neither of whom is likely to appreciate such a long ride, so we’ll be sticking to the car for now.

Of course, there are differences between this cottage and the old family cottage from my youth: TV, phone, high-speed Internet, running water, and an indoor bathroom chief among them. We’re looking forward to visiting the local towns, exploring the local backroads, hiking the local trails (both the Ganaraska and Oak Ridges trails pass nearby), and just generally relaxing.

I’m used to receiving “free” offers in the mail, but rarely is a company—especially one as large as Direct Energy—as upfront about just how much free is going to cost me. I’m not even sure why they bothered putting the asterisk there; it seems pretty clear even from the large print that I’d have to be pretty daft to take advantage of this offer.

Bonus: I have no idea what Bucknuts are or how they allow Direct Energy to offer “competitive energy solutions.” They really don’t sound like something I’d want to burn for heat in the winter.

This brake (of the metal-bending, not car-stopping, variety) wags its tongue at visitors to the metal shop.

Overall distance travelled (km): 18,685

• by airplane: 6,083
• by bike: 5,395
• by car: 4,840
• by foot 1,319
• by train: 688
• by TTC: 294
• by non-TTC transit: 49
• by horse: 8
• by Ice Explorer: 6
• by canoe: 3

Days I walked: 319
Days I rode my bike: 275
Days I was a passenger in a car: 41
Days I drove a car: 25
Longest ride ( km): 154.4
Shortest ride (km): 2.22
Times I needed rescue by car: 1
Rides longer than 100 km: 5
Rides 10-20 km: 184
Rides shorter than 10 km: 18
Days I rode without a helmet: 1
Flat tires: 2
Tire blowouts: 1
Broken chains: 1
Broken derailleurs: 1
Broken bells: 2
Broken pedals: 2
New wheels: 3
New drivetrains: 2
New brake pads: 6
Bottles of Ice Wax lube: 3
Bikes I currently own: 7
Bikes I actually rode last year: 5
More bikes I want to buy: 2
Chance that I’ll convince Risa that I need to buy more bikes: 0

At the beginning of 2009, I embarked on a year-long project to record the distances I travelled by various means of transportation. I expected cycling to come out on top by a wide margin. My mileage estimates a year ago were 5000 km by bike, 2000 km by car, 1000 km on foot, and 500 by TTC. I got the order right, but some of the numbers were way off. In particular, I hadn’t anticipated flying anywhere, and my car mileage was bumped up considerably by our (ultimately successful) hunt for a cottage this fall; two months accounted for more than 2600 km of the 4840 km total I spent sitting in cars, and 1300 km of that came in just four days of visiting, revisiting, and inspecting.

It’s a lot of work keeping track of everywhere you go for a year. The spreadsheet I used to record every trip is 787 lines long, with calculations being done on a separate sheet before being uploaded automatically every night to my web server. My cycling log will continue to survive into the new year (as it has every year since 1991), but I think I’ll be dropping the rest of the tracking.

The things you find when you venture just a bit further up the dial than your usual turnaround point.

I guess this means that I don’t have to run out and buy the Fireplace DVD.

So I was riding along and could see two car drivers getting ready to pull out of their street parking spaces and directly into my path. One driver had the good sense to wait, but the other didn’t and just pulled into the traffic lane directly in front of me. I’d been anticipating the boneheaded move, so I was already in position to avoid the car if necessary, but it’s still pretty annoying to be either unseen or ignored in broad daylight. To cap the annoyance, after the driver cut me off and then slowed down in front of me, he held his hand up to thank me for letting him in. I started swearing at him under my breath. “Don’t wave at me, jerk. I didn’t let you in, I just avoided being hit. There’s a difference you know.”

And then for the first time ever in my many years of riding in the city, something almost perfect happened: the paid-duty officer at the Summerhill Market flagged the driver down and gave him a lecture. I couldn’t hear the driver’s protestations from my spot behind the car, but the officer’s half of the conversation went something like this:

You know you almost hit that cyclist, right?

[...]

It’s not his fault. He’s just riding along the street.

[...]

It’s on you to look for traffic before you pull out of your parking spot. It’s dangerous.

[...]

You have to be more careful. You could kill someone if you don’t look.

The officer eventually waved the driver on and I thanked him as I rode past, feeling quite a bit better than I had 30 seconds earlier. Overall, not a bad start to my ride.

What would have made the moment perfect instead of merely almost perfect? If the officer had pulled out a ticket book and given the driver a summons under the Highway Traffic Act, I would have had time to pull out my camera and take pictures. Oh well. It still made my day to have someone other than me lecture a driver for cutting me off.

The spill on this pedestrian bridge may have started out accidentally, but I’m sure it didn’t finish up that way.

It’s funny how weekend projects always seem to take longer than you expect. This one started in October, when I saw a xylophone kit at Lee Valley and decided that it would make a good gift for my nephew’s upcoming seventh birthday. One weekend stretched into three partial weekends and a couple of early mornings and late nights, but these things always do.

I’m not normally the kind of woodworker who plans in advance: I usually have an idea in my head and just dive madly into the project, making up the details as I go. But for things that I’m giving away or that have deadlines, I try to be a little more careful. I even did sketches and a full-scale model for this one. The sketches helped me come up with what I think is a much better design than the one I initially had, and the model allowed me to identify a weak point in my initial plan and improve the final piece accordingly.

Check out the gallery after the jump to see the whole project.

Although this particular design is original, I’m obviously not the first to think that fish and xylophones are natural partners.