Say Hello To My Little Friend…

This is my single-speed converted, old (mid-80’s-mid-90’s) Schwinn World 27″ road bike. Stripped to the bare essentials and tricked out with 5-inch rise cruiser bars, a mount for my headlight that doubles as a camera mount, and a new paint job (flat, primer white). Me and my little friend coast along the streets of Rochester with effortless joy. I can’t wait to bring him on a road trip. Note: he does sleep at the foot of my bed, just like another of man’s best friends…

My Little Horse

From Robert Frost’s poem, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

And then there’s this frequency diagram (also known as a histogram):

which shows my increasingly perilous behavior towards pushing the boundary between fill-ups and the necessary desire to buy cheap gas whenever possible, where’s the break even point?

Gas Consumption Update 2008

Well, not the entire 2008, but a significant portion. This is an update to previous posts (Gas Consumption, I washed my car the other day, oh boy!, and Gas Mileage (a comparison between my 1990 Jeep Cherokee and my 2006 Ford Escape)), of particular note: in one post I found the periodic trend in gas prices with a period of one year, armed with that I forecasted an optimistic downward trend in prices. That trend is depicted below (green line), the data since then are the yellow points.

Ha! Clearly, I was wrong. When I saw this plot, the phrase exponential growth came to mind.

In the figure below, I give my total mileage with time. Note the tale-tell signatures of a road trip (Anywhere but Pittsburgh). The gaps from prolonged absences (Location, Location, Location). Overall, when accounting for the outlier features, I am still driving about 23 miles per day, which is unchanged from last time (which was down from 34 miles per day), suggesting that either I’ve found my minimum, or I haven’t tried hard enough to get the rate lower.

My vehicle is still getting 22-24 miles per gallon (city-highway). I am no longer on track to get to my car dealer’s warranty mileage limit, I’ll hit the three years before I hit 36,000 miles. Unless I drive US-50 across the US… tempting.

People of Springfield…

Please, be my…

netflix friend.

The Girl with the Smiling Eyes

In my world there exists a girl whose smile is not even remotely defined by the state of her lips, instead, it is the expression in her eyes that determines the nature, the essence, of her smile. The enveloping warmth of those smiling eyes can make any creature in its embrace crumble. I was reduced to crumbs by those eyes, years ago, and it has taken years to rebuild myself. As a consequence, even now, during our brief, passing glances, the residue of that dismantling smile causes loose crumbs to break free. Such is the nature of infatuation and such is one aspect of the world I inhabit.