Beer, bikes, and ice cream

I just finished off a great IPA: Ninkasi (Eugene, OR) Total Domination IPA, which I found on sale at QFC (owned by Krogers for those WVians, and I still use my parents' Kroger card). I might have to try and find that brewery on the weekend of my sister-in-law's wedding, which is down, outside of Eugene. Hooray beer!
This weekend, I did the Vance Creek Road race, which I truthfully think is the longest race that I have ever finished at a whopping 52 miles or so. I actually finished behind the pack (DFL, in fact) but had been in a small break for a bit (a couple miles) and did a fair amount of other work, so I actually feel pretty good about it. It looks like I'll do Longbranch this weekend, which is a civilized 45-ish, and I will pray for track to come sooner so I can get my short-attention-span racing in. 2+ hours is just a pain (quite literally) in the ass.
Oh, and I had a Seattle first: I finally got to Molly Moon's (homemade ice cream), which I haven't been to yet even though it's IN my neighborhood and only about a 10 minute walk away. It definitely wasn't the cheapest ice cream, but the serving sizes were HUGE! I had the balsamic strawberry and the ginger ice cream, and they were both amazing. The balsamic strawberry was just really different, but it was amazing. And the ginger was perfect in that it was not in-your-face ginger but a bit subtle. Chris raved about the coffee and also had the scout mint, which I think is adorable because they bought their thin mints from local girl scouts. Hooray ice cream!

Things I have done

This weekend has not only been marked with amazing weather and awesome lenticular (which blogger does not recognize as a real word and gives me "testicular" as the first option) clouds on Rainer, but it has also seen an uptick in productivity on my part. I went to see Mates of State at Neumos on Friday evening, along with a bit of "my birthday was last week but I was bike racing and didn't do anything" celebration at Big Time beforehand.
Then the biking began. As I was not at Walla Walla, I had to amuse myself here. After a late start on Saturday, I did just shy of 40 miles, then I went out Sunday to do May Valley in AMAZING weather for about 60 miles. That's the most I've done in one weekend in a really long time. Maybe I will be able to survive Vance Creek this coming weekend.
And then there was the knitting: I actually started the Central Park Hoodie, which I have been thinking about for ages. It should be pretty awesome, and it's coming along nicely, though I really have only finished one pattern repeat on the back.
And I also learned more than I ever wanted to know about supercooling in overdeepenings of glaciers. Oh, science, you can be excruciating sometimes.

Yarn computations

I played my first game of ultimate frisbee last night. I was confused
about everything for about 80% of the game, but other than that it was
fun. We were the gimp team with tons of knee braces and me with a
wrapped calf because it's been sore from cramping at Volunteer Park and
Boat Street.

Anyway, here's a paraphrased discussion Chris (C) and I (R) had last night:
C: Do you think knitting could be used for computations?
R: Do you mean like an abacus? I think there are some cultures that
have used knots as a method of calculation, so I'm sure it could.
C: Well, I mean for higher-level functions. Since you have different
patterns and repetition, I wonder if you could make iterative functions
with different inputs.
R: Hmm.
C: You could have the yarn (he's been mystified by
self-striping/patterning sock yarn) be an input and the pattern be
another input and see how they develop.
R: Yeah, I think that could work. You'd have to actually have them
representing something mathematical, though.
C: Well, it would probably be faster to just do it by pen and pencil.
I'm sure someone has tried this, anyway.
R: There is some pretty nerdy knitting out there.

WV in the news

Morgantown is apparently rocking during the recession.  Apparently the population has jumped from just over 30000 to over 80000.  I love how it changes when WVU is included versus the pure census information.

More to come

Some stuff has happened, nothing exciting. I have finished some more knitting, done some research-y stuff, and so on. I think my motivation might be on the up-swing, so hopefully life will be awesome soon. It's been super-nice to have a week without being awakened at 5am (spring break! Wooo!).
I'm in Chicago this weekend for my mom's b-day. Maybe pictures? Maybe not. I will put some of my mom's present up, as one of them is cool but not before her b-day.