So I had my first taste of cyclocross this weekend on Saturday. Cyclocross is, lets just call it offroad bike racing. It is apparently very popular in the Chicago area. 

My first race was in the Dan Ryan Woods yesterday. I was placed in the 4/5 Men's Group, which is basically the beginners group for the race. Races last about 30 minutes and the laps are determined by the pace of the top riders. So basically, that means that the race will end right around 30 minutes, not after a set number of laps. 

I was the only rider using a mountain bike for the race. Most people were utilizing cyclocross bikes, which are basically a road bike with a few modifications to allow for some off road wheels. Let me state that cyclocross is hard. I feel like I am in pretty good shape, but this was just brutal. It is full out as fast as you can for 30 minutes straight. The course has significant climbs on it and my lungs were literally burning. I could not get enough oxygen to my body through this race. 

So I finished in basically third to last place. There were a couple of people behind me and then I think three or four who did not finish. I have to say I am proud of myself, because there was a point there where I wasn't sure if I would be able to push forward. I think I'll definitely go out and do some more cross races. They are fun, but I don't see myself going and spending $800+ on a cyclocross bike. There are some people out there with just way to crazy of physical conditioning.

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Last Saturday we did our first Cook Book recipe from our new endeavor to begin cooking more recipes out of all of the cook books that we own. This first recipe came out of the Marshall Fields Cook Book.

Overall results on this one were great. The soup was easy to make in about forty minutes and it was rich and creamy. It was made a bit easier by the use of a rotisserie chicken from the grocery store. It saved on some additional cooking time and the rotisserie chicken added some great flavor. 

We did almost have a mishap on this one because we didn't notice that the wild rice package called for the rice to cook on its own for about an hour. We disregarded that and threw the rice into the pot while the soup was simmering. I think it resulted in quite a bit more starch than was anticipated but for the first dishing up of the soup it worked out great. Reheating though wasn't quite as fantastic. Between the cream and the starch the soup reheated a bit too thick and that could in part be because of our mess up with the rice. 

Overall, a great recipe that you could totally make for a group of people for dinner. 

While eating lunch this past weekend I commented to Megan that we have a whole bunch of cookbooks on our shelf that we almost never crack open to get recipes from. We consistently get recipes from the internet, which is great for making meal planning easy. But we have some great cook books sitting on the shelf collecting dust. 

So I figured we should start working our way through each book. One book a week, one recipe from each book and we will just work through all of the recipes in the books. It probably gives us several years worth of cooking hear, but I figured it could make for a good blog series. 

The first recouped coming up this week is the Marshall Field's Cookbook; Boundary Waters Wild Rice Soup. We'll see how this series turns out. 

So yesterday I attended a two hour cyclocross introductory class. It was hosted at Caldwell Park downtown. I have to say that after just a couple of hours, that I find the whole thing to be awesome. It was a very similar excitement level that I had when I first started riding my motorcycle. 

The course had about fourteen people attending it. I would say that the bikes there were a an even mix between people who had cyclocross bikes, those who had mountain bikes and those who had road bikes. The clinic was put on by the BFF Bikes riding team and they ran us through three exercises that covered the basics of cyclocross. 

We started off by working on the start line. All of the riders lined up close together to simulate a real race and we practiced getting off of the line in an explosive manner. 

The second exercise was dismount, and carrying your bike over obstacles and the third exercise was a cornering exercise. For each exercise they gradually worked the group of to faster and faster speeds and forced us to ride tighter and tighter together. We ended the day of with a follow the leader exercise where we gradually sped up to riding as fast as we could. We did have one crash during the course when a woman riding next to me passed me and then low-sided in a corner. I inevitably ran into her unfortunately. She was fine, but she might have a bruise on her back where my tire ran over her. 

Overall I had a blast and it is something I will have to get into this fall. I did note that I definitely have to get some SPD pedals and a pair of more rugged MTB shoes to do this though as my feet were slipping off my pedals all over the place. 

As some of you may know, I have been getting more and more involved into biking over the past couple of years. I am not really into traditional road biking, but some of the longer touring stuff and off road biking definitely interests me. 

A couple of summers ago I got my old Trek 820 mountain bike out and was doing some trail riding out at the Palos Triangle. Unfortunately due to rain, most of the trails have been closed for a good portion of this past summer. There has been a lot of talk online about Cyclocross riding, which appears to be a big up and coming growth area in the biking sport. 

Cyclocross is basically offroad biking, but it is structured around a race course that has some defined obstacles on it, which usually include some sections of sand and obstacles that require to you dismount from the bike. The bikes themselves are surprisingly road bike looking. They have drop bars and 700 cc wheels and they are all hard frame. 

After doing some initial research online it does appear that I don't need to go out and buy a $800+ cyclocross bike and I can in fact use my existing mountain bike for the races. This looks really fun and appealing to me since cyclocross races in the Chicago area are focused around the fall and winter. 

I have ordered a pair of 26" cyclocross tires for my trek, since it is due for new tires anyways and I am planning on attending an introductory course this weekend to see if this is something that I might find interesting. 

Hopefully it will be a good time. The video above from the Chicago Cross Cup looks fun, doesn't it?

I have been reinvigorated recently with the idea of creating music on my iPad. I have attempted this process before, but it fell by the wayside, in part because I think I failed to take the time to really learn some of the applications and work with in their limitations. I have been looking at wanting to do some music creation in software again recently, and was looking at purchasing a DAW again for my computer. 

Propellerhead's Reason was the top candidate due to its all inclusive nature, but I couldn't really justify the price of the software ($400), plus the price of a new midi controller (another $300) to then sit down and work in the same environment that I work with my hardware studio in. I have instead taken a hard look again at Retronym's Tabletop and also Korg's Gadget. Some new developments with a feature called Audiocopy have matured since I last looked at these apps and look appears that sharing audio and samples between these apps on iOS has improved dramatically and I feel with more midi hardware out in the wild now, I can get a more fully functional music creation environment that takes up a lot less space. 

Retronyms is developing a base for the iPad called Wej, which looks like a nice way to integrate multiple controllers and iRig looks to have a nice portable keys and pads bundle that is affordable as well. I like the idea of something small that I can sketch ideas on in the living room or something I can hook up to the PC and stream to Twitch while working on some music. 

It was a beautiful day on Saturday and Megan suggested we get out of the house. One of the things I wanted to do this summer was to get our bikes into the city and bike around for lunch, so we ended up doing that. 

We took our bikes in and parked at a Park District parking lot next to La Rabida Children's hospital. The goal was to bike our way along the lake front trail north into the city. 

The problems though started immediately upon our arrival. Megan's bike had a flat tire on the rear wheel and we didn't have a spare with us. "No big deal", I though. We are in the city so there are bike shops every few blocks. I pulled out my phone and went off to find the nearest shop. My first stop was at the "Bike Clinic" which was just south of where we were. Unfortunately they were closed. There was a sign on their door written in Sharpie that they would not open until 1:00pm. Well off I went to the next stop on my Google search, which was Blackstone Bicycle Works. Getting there was not an easy task. Streets seemed to be closed all over the place and I was constantly re-routed try to find my way there. At one point I got stuck down a one way street that had a barrier curb erected in the middle of it. I had to back out of the street back onto the main road. 

I finally found my way to Blackstone, but at first I was not sure if I was at the right place. As I walked up all I saw were a few dozen bikes sitting outside what looked to be an abandoned building. A few moments later though someone came out to greet me and they took me round back to the main shop where I bought our tubes. Turned out the place was pretty cool and is a youth mentoring type of facility. 

Well, we finally got Megan's bike fixed and we were off and running and we soon made our first stop after that.

Hyde Park Records

Hyde Park Records was our first stop. It was a very "hole in the wall" sort of record store. They had a lot of rock and soul music, but not much else. I personally was in the mood to find some jazz or classical. Megan made a great find while going through their bins with

Reckless Records 

The Slurping Turtle

Not a record store, but our pit-stop for lunch we wanted to have Ramen and we hit up the Slurping Turtle which is north across the river. I had a basic Ramen Bowl and Megan ordered a sort of ramen cold salad, which was pretty good for such a hot day. 

Jazz Record Mart

Our final stop was at the Jazz Mart which is located near Illinois and State Street. If you are into jazz music this store is really cool. Almost entirely jazz it has a completely a different vibe than the other two stores. They have a nice selection of world music as well so if you want to go bin diving, I would highly recommend this place. 

A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to goto the ESRI User Conference in San Diego. It was quite an impressive conference with approximately 15,000 people in attendance. 

This is the second time that I have been able to goto San Diego, before was when my wife had a conference of her own there. I won't get into all the geeky details of the ESRI conference, but I think there are two things that were cool from the conference that the general public can enjoy. Most of ESRI's tools are geared towards enterprise solutions so they are paid accounts, but there are a couple of free things out there for people to try. 

ArcGIS Online.

The first one is ArcGIS online. This is basically an online mapping interface for people to create maps. Most of us are experienced with using Google Maps, perhaps even some of us out there have done some line or polygon drawing in Google. Over the past couple of years I think Google has basically ruined their mapping interface and while it is still good for routing, creating custom maps is a nightmare. 

ESRI thankfully has a pretty easy and robust solution. Over at ArcGIS.com you can setup a free account that gives you 2GB of storage space to upload files, data, images or whatever for map creation. They have really done a nice job and their embed and creation tools are really robust. Plus they have a fantastic community of "base maps" from census.gov, the USGS, etc. that people can use. It really blows Google Maps out of the water so if you do any sort of tracking with GPS for hiking, biking or whatever, I would highly recommend people check it out. 

Story Maps

The second tool thatI saw was Story Maps. This is essentially an interface for loading your maps and photos into a cool interactive web program. Have you seen those cook New York Times or National Geographic articles that use mapping and images? This does that. You'll need an ArcGIS.com account, which I noted above, but from there they have templates you can use for telling a story. Simply upload your geotagged photos from your phone, or if you have a map already made use that. There are some wonderful examples on their website in their featured content section. Here is a great example they created: http://storymaps.esri.com/stories/2015/river-reborn/

Finally....

Finally we did have a bit of fun while in San Diego. The food there is always wonderful and we had an opportunity to visit the zoo one day.