September 9, 2009

September is here and the days are getting shorter.  It was dark when I went to work this morning.  It is getting dark as I write this at 9:09 PM.  A little over 12 hours ago I was signing in at a remote onshore facility on the west side of Cook Inlet.  I laughed as I looked at my watch to fill in the date and time columns on the sign-in sheet.  I just put 9-9-9 and 9.

Jim and Joyce are in Alaska.  They arrived on Saturday evening.  That means that we spent Saturday cleaning up.  We did take an afternoon bike ride, a nice 17 mile loop on the commuter bikes up to the Chester Creek trail, out to the Coastal Trail, and back home around the airport.   It was a lovely fall day, cool and sunny.

On Sunday we went to Whittier for a hike up and over Portage Pass.  Kris and I had hiked the trail before and really enjoyed it.  We knew it wouldn’t kill any of us, although it has the joy of a little route finding through thick brush.  We hiked down to the lake.  Jim and I waded in the icy water.  The lake was jammed with icebergs.  The glacier must have been pretty active earlier in the day.  It made a few thunderous sounds while we hung out for several hours, but no large pieces crashed into the water.

Monday was a holiday so we continued in vacation mode.  We crammed four bikes into their rental minivan and drove to Hope.  We rode up the Resurrection Trail about seven miles and were rewarded with a mostly downhill exit.  We didn’t encounter any wildlife, but we did see some bear prints.  The Resurrection Creek was lined with rotting pink salmon which added an obnoxious odor to the first mile of the trail.

We haven’t ridden our mountain bikes in a long time so it was nice to get back on them.  We gave Joyce and Jim our commuter bikes so that we could play a little on our big bikes.  The commuter bikes were probably a little more efficient on the ride as most of the trail was pretty smooth, but the downhill was quite fun in stretches on the full suspension bike.

Last night we arrived home to a broken garage door spring.  Every experience in life can come back to help.  I installed new garage doors in our house in Newbury so I remembered how to convert from torsion springs to extension springs.  I even remembered that I could use the pulley on the torsion spring axle so that I didn’t have to install a new pulley.  I managed to install a new spring on one side of the door in less than an hour.  I didn’t replace the other side because I figured it would be safer to wait for the other torsion spring to fail rather than try to release the tension.  I understand many people have been severely injured dealing with torsion springs so that is probably why you can’t find them in a store.