matilija

Thanks! Mine is still a work in progress.

That’s really poor of State Farm, though unsurprising. And yet I’m still glad that they haven’t dropped my wildfire-adjacent home. The FAIR plan would be far more expensive, and no other insurer will write a policy that satisfies my mortgage company. FAIR is also underpriced at that, having already gone bankrupt once.

It’s kind of a disgusting capitalism-bootlicking for me to be grateful to State Farm, but they’re my least-bad option at the moment. I expect the private insurers as a group to convince Ricardo Lara that rates need to go way up, or the state will end up being the only insurer in an abandoned market. There’s no other way with the climate change reality and atrocious political conditions for action. The potential mortgage failures if the insurance market fails will threaten a financial crisis on top of whatever other government financial havoc has been wreaked by then.

It’s lovely! Can you describe a bit about technical aspects of building and maintaining it? How often do you replenish evaporation, and do you do anything to balance the water?

When I last bought Freerider Pros directly from Adidas in October 2023, they had a list price of $88 but were on sale for $62. Now Adidas is asking $160 for them, which sounds like a combination of inflation and tariffs. They’re great shoes, but not $160 great, and I don’t expect you’ll find a good enough sale any time soon. I think you’d get more bang for your buck by ensuring you have great pedals with great pins. My favorite is the Stamp 1 Gen 2 by Crankbrothers. I love them whether I’m wearing FiveTens or hiking boots, because of the really meaty pins and large platform.

That’s great to hear. I only have experience with a few finishes, but a little reading tells me your combo is popular for wooden food contact surfaces. What else do you like about it?

It’s oak (Q. agrifolia), pruned from an old tree on private land in a mature forest. It’s a struggle to find branches of an appropriate thickness and length that are generally straight enough, at least when considering only what actually needs pruning. So that one isn’t the best shape for a walking stick, but I had slim pickings and was motivated to find a piece to work with. It’s strong enough to be a serviceable walking stick and hold weight while flexing only slightly.

I like the look of keeping most of the bark on, though I hit all the smaller branch points with the belt sander. I only stripped bark in the area where it’s likely to be held, and sanded only lightly. The apparent striations aren’t perceivable by touch as grooves - they’re filled with inner bark that was incompletely scraped, and the color contrast is accentuated by the finish. I put multiple coats of tung oil over the entire stick, including saturating some moss on the outer bark. It cures to a nice finish, although I’ve never seen any instructions that suggest using it on rough bark.

I might see shrinkage and bark separation from the wood over time, but I’m hopeful it will last several years without substantial deterioration. I think the stick dried for over a year before I finished it.

It’s the most curved but it’s oak and so far it has been strong enough for my hiking use.

Only one of them features a piece of quartz at the top to concentrate the wielder’s magical energy.

I, however, have no such power, so it’s functionally just a stick.

Thanks, that one is my favorite! It does have some curve to it, but only in one dimension so it hides when leaning against a wall like this. But it does feel like the heftiest choice to fight off a coyote that wants my little dog for a snack.

What features do you use? Their website seems pretty slim but makes it appear that their apps are primarily about home fitness training, not necessarily trail mapping. Being a Polish company might help as they would have designed everything with GDPR in mind, even if they’re not required to avoid invasive tracking of international users.

Thanks for the recommendation, but I’ll have to pass on it. I’m sure Gaia GPS is great for hiking, especially with offline topographic maps, and presumably good for MTB as well. However, it’s owned by the same folks as Trailforks. They started with a bunch of venture capital in 2020 and went on a tear buying other companies in 2021 and 2022 including Trailforks, Pinkbike, and Gaia. It took a couple years for them to start enshittifying Trailforks, but now that the process has begun I have little doubt that I want to avoid giving them data through any of their other brands as well.

I had a model year 2002 as well, and it went through head gaskets pretty reliably every 30-35k miles. The failure mode wasn’t catastrophic damage every time, but it wasn’t pretty. I think exhaust gases would start getting into the coolant especially when the engine got hot, so I’d be maybe going uphill and notice the temperature spiking. Then I could pull off to the side of the freeway and wait for 30 minutes, start out again and drive home slowly.

Subaru admitted a gasket design fault for something like model years 1998 through 2000, but claimed for a while that everything was fine in 2001 and 2002, jerking me around and generally being awful.

It’s too bad. It was my second car and I was excited for the reputation of reliability and capability of Subaru, but it left such a sour taste in my mouth that I’ll never buy one again.