7°C, dull and damp, but that’s as bad as it got.
2 hours, Arrow.
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Author Archives: essiep
Muddy hours on the Mustang.
8°C, grey start turning to rain.
Weather change: we’ve gone from cold and clear to mild and damp. My house hasn’t kept up. The windows were steamed up this morning, remarkably – on the outside! The house must be colder than the air.
The flooding is remarkable, saturated soil and large ponds in any dip a field may have. I put the CX wheels back on the gravel bike. I’m so glad I did that with today’s conditions.
Commute in darkness.
6°C, light SW, dry but flooding everywhere.
I’m impressed with this new light. It offers up to 600 Lumin for only £30. For my needs, the spread of light is a little more than ideal. I want a second light to have plenty of reach. The other lamp illuminates potholes and the road kerb
Hour and a half mudding.
7°C, sunny with light wind
Coming to the end of the wettest autumn I can remember. Black gritty mud coats most roads and puddles hide portholes. When I get time, I’ll put CX tyres on the commuter.
What about this little painting? It’s acrylic onto A5, painted while the others were watching Strictly. That makes it about 1 ½ hours or so. It needs a little work around the left eye and hand; about another half hour.
I found this quite tough in comparison to oil paint.
- Sometimes you go back to a colour on the palette and it has dried up,
- blending is rough when applying new colour to dry paint,
- the colour changes as it dries,
- the surface is chalky,
Most of these problems could be solved by using a slowing agent, the problem they introduce is that they look milky. All of those problems could be solved by using oil paint.
Hour and fifty in the gale.
11°C, gales from the west. Otherwise sunny
This house in Formby is under renovation at last. The designs are on a board by the road and it keeps some of the original. There are big modern metal and glass things to bolt on. They’re not exactly subtle integration, but at.least something is happening.
Ninety minutes at night
6°C, cold and dry.
A 1½ hours after work. This is a return ride after over a week of feeling poorly. I’ve really felt the cold but, unsurprisingly, it’s not noticeable after the ride.
As you can see, the speeds are quite low, partly because of restrictive warm clothing. Ironic that I overheated slightly. A week of no exercise does make the cold air more biting.
Two hours.
I used to keep a measure of my accumulated bike rides by adding up the weekly then annual milage. In a good year, I could total 6,000 miles. As the years go by, this figure has steadily declined to around 5,000. However, I recall doing a survey about a decade ago and worked out that I did about 10 hours a week exercise. Over his last year, it’s somewhere around 9 hours per week. In other words, it has not really gone down much, I’m just slower now.
As for today, what a cold biting wind there is. It’s cold for it’s direction – south East. Two hours was enough and even my legs felt stiff despite me urging them on.
Liverpool night glow
6°C, fresh breeze from NW. Dry.
I still like cycling at night. This is late twilight, about 6pm.
That’s why I bought the Jake.
7°C, quiet and cool.
A fine November day, surface water everywhere after recent downpours. I felt the magic on this ride – so that’s why I bought this bike. The poor machine got caked in mud especially after plunging into a deep rut. It then looked like gravy.
What a satisfying day, the distance is not great but it took 3 ½ hours.
A few days off…
Rain
No cycling because of low energy caused by a quiet cold.
