A Long Silence.

Well, I've been out of the loop for a while. In my defense, my wife had our first baby, and I took a month off to help her. You might think that I would have a lot of free time to update this poor weblog, but that's really not the way babies work. Even though taking care of a baby only takes a couple of hours per day, it's broken up into 5-minute blocks, occurring right in the middle of any task you wanted to try and perform, and so you end up only being able to do one or two things (if you're lucky!) all day. So I didn't get to work on the couple of programming projects I've been thinking about, and the house fell into a minor state of disrepair, and basically Amy and I didn't do much other than sit around and watch some Sex And The City dvds we borrowed from a friend. Well, we tried to get out of the house at least once a day, so that we didn't go stir-crazy.

In other news, I biked to work today. It went pretty well. If you get a copy of the Toronto Cycling Map, you can follow my path from Mount Pleasant Cemetery, down through Moore Park Ravine, pas the Don Valley Brick Works, out and down to Castle Frank station (I took a wrong turn on Elm), over to Sherbourne street, and down Sherbourne to King Street (on the next map), and finally along King to the big number 37. It was a fairly nice ride, but I think that the next time I try it, I'm going to stick to the roads all the way down. The trail through the ravine was steep and muddy in parts. I had to walk halfway up a hill to get out of the ravine, and I think I swallowed a bug. It was nice and shady, but I think that as long as I can get going at a reasonable speed, the wind will cool me off just as well.

Update: I took the streets going back home, and it took 2/3 the time despite being mainly uphill. (I went up Sherbourne, along Glen, over Summerhill to Welland and then back through the cemetary. The route is composed entirely of bike lanes and side streets, and after I got north of Bloor, I think I only saw about 8 cars in total. Well, until I got to Moore. Crossing Moore was a bit of an adventure, due to the volume of cars coming from the other direction.) All in all, it was a really fun ride, and I think that will be the route I take when I next bike to work.