Cold Hands, Warm Heart?

I may have mentioned before that I'm pretty sure I experience Raynaud's Phenomenon: according to Wikipedia "...excessively reduced blood flow in response to cold or emotional stress, causing discoloration of the fingers, toes, and occasionally other areas." My fingers often stay cold and white for some time after going indoors from the cold. Today, though, it took long enough for color to come back to one of my fingers to make me nervous. After twenty minutes of periodically flexing my hand and massaging my finger, I still had a white right forefinger with no feeling. Finally I had the idea of swinging my arm around in a big windmill for a while. That seems to have done the trick. I'm getting the pins and needles of returning sensation, which I'll definitely take over apparent frostbite!

When I went out to my bike after school, I had to break a layer of ice off of the saddle and handlebars. Then it tipped over, and the brittle plastic catch on my clip on headlight broke. Good thing I have the bolted on, dynamo-powered one now! I think some ice might have gotten inside the cable housings at the same time; my gearshift got stuck and I rode home in fourth gear the whole way. It was a little annoying, given that the internally-geared hug was supposed to solve the issue of frozen drivetrain components.

It's nice to be home and eating some warm dinner!

Bedtime Photo

I've got enough done on my Tunguska paper. I need to not overthink; remind myself that it's only three to four pages. I don't need to thoroughly understand the pros and cons of the comet hypotheses versus the asteroid/meteor hypothesis. I just need to summarize them next to the aliens hypothesis and explain why one is less likely than the others....

I was going to post another Baltimore picture, but I realized that figuring out where I was in the process of that set would take more time than I want to spend before lying down. So here's a shot of my bike all loaded up with explorin' gear for Pike Creek.





This cropped down almost square. Maybe I should use it as a user icon somewhere....

I may drive to school the next couple of days until I can figure out what's up with my other bike and ensure I feel safe on it. Disappointing, but at least I rode through the snow today! Which was a little hectic, let me tell you, with cables acting wonky!