Cycle into Autumn

Another month, autumn develops and the clocks go back here. It's pumpkin season, and I've been making soup (I've got enough pumpkin left for pumpkin pie but haven't got around to it yet). The weather's cooler too, it got down to 19° a few days ago, brrrr!

The project is coming along nicely; I did a bunch of testing and think I know some of the major problems (and how to solve them), now I just need to simulate everything like a 'proper' engineer, rather than work through trial and error, though that's much easier. Simulating's not as fun though, I had a good time waving a big coil of wire around the machinery (and my head) looking for errant electrical fields, initial testing is fun because it's all discovery. Modelling is basically a software version of join the dots: I know what it's supposed to look like, I just need to get the lines in the right place so it looks pretty.

Anyway, I shall persevere. I've been having business lunches with my supervisor Andrew Nafalski during the week, and business bike trips (do those exist?) at the weekend, which is great as I haven't used my bike since early summer, now I'm going roughly 40k each day at the weekends, to the beach or hills. Last Saturday we took the train to Belair way up in the hills, and cycled (alright, mostly freewheeled) back down. The views were spectacular, so much so that I decided to get pictures, and for a time was hurtling down the road one handed at 60kph getting my camera out of my pocket for a few snaps. Probably not sensible, and took me so long I missed the views, but I have a few good pics of my face at arms length, which I'll get posted to picasa.

The cycling last Sunday may have been a bad idea though, I've caught a cold from somewhere, and the exhaustion of going to the beach and back (cycling furiously alongside a galloping horse at one point) put me to sleep at about 7pm that night. Probably good for the recovery, but I spent Monday drinking chicken soup and litres of orange juice, not getting much work done. Missed out on fencing too.

The cold's pretty much gone now, but I still have a nasty cough, which makes playing my new instrument a little more challenging. I bought it on eBay last week from a guy down the road so I didn't have to pay postage, a bit of an impulse buy. It takes a lot of puff, and it's so noisy that I have to drive to empty car parks to play it, but I'm getting some good sounds out of it. A good addition to my collection.