Another day, another man, another machine

The current front runner for replacement tree is the eastern white pine.  It is an attractive tree with a softer green than the Norway pine.  When planted in plantations it stretches for the sky and gradually loses its lower branches.  We have seen several examples around and about here where the tree is a single planting and forms a symmetrical and attractive tree.

According to Wikipedia the tree is the Iroquois nation tree of peace.  Native Americans (both the Iroquois and the Anishinabe) used the tree for medicinal purposes and also as a source of food.  The Iroquois used a pounding of the inner bark as an emergency source of starch when starvation threatened, apparently the Anishinabe stewed the young cones with meat producing something described as sweet and not pitchy.  The pine needles contain five times the amount of vitamin C as lemons (by weight) and apparently can be used to brew an herbal tea.  

That is only the current front runner though, who knows?  It seems possible that we might at some point investigate the tea but probably not the emergency starch use.

Another man showed up today with a machine I had never seen in action before.  One of the primary benefits of having no actual job is that you can stand around your front yard and watch machines that in your previous life you had only seen the results of their work but now you can watch them actually in the process.

Go ahead and replace you with I at every usage in that last sentence.

I got to stand around and watch it work.

I believe it was Larry the stump grinder but that seems too easy, can every workman actually be named Larry?

We eventually got out to ride.  This only happens once every thousand miles so I tried to get a picture yet again.

The focus is better than usual but I somehow got a glare obscuring that key first number.  Today was the eighth time I have passed a thousand mile milestone.  To recount, three bicycles all with at least eight thousand miles, total mileage for the three bicycles currently more than 38,000 miles.

I had to do most of the ride alone because within about four tenths of a mile of home the GRider experienced her FIRST FLAT TIRE EVER.

It comes to every single bicyclist sooner or later.

She walked the bicycle home, we decided that there wasn't time to fix the flat and for her to still have enough time before work (a job?) to finish the ride.  I didn't get it all done before she got home but by shortly after dinner she is again operational.  I found the hole in the tube and easily cross referenced it to a piercing of the outer tire but found no physical remnant of whatever it was that caused the flat.

So tomorrow she will be riding around for the first time ever with a patch on her inner tube.

Do I feel any pressure?

Of course I do.