Ploafmaster General

Took a break from riding today to give some love to my All City Space Horse. Since I snapped a crank arm in October it made sense to finally convert this to a 2X setup. I now have the same gearing as my Crust Bombora: 42/26 up front and 11-speed, 11-42 in the rear. I kept the Deore derailleur in the rear (this particular one is supposed to work with a reduced range in 2X) and managed to find a clamp-on 105 front derailleur pretty cheap last year.

The main component I splurged on is probably obvious to the bike dorks: White Industries cranks and their updated VBC chainrings. I’m sure folks have snapped cranks of all sorts, but I have a little more faith in these than the cheaper dudes I broke.

Rear shifts with the Ene Ciclo 11-speed friction shifter and I have a microSHIFT in friction mode for the front. I’ve run the cabling and adjusted the derailleurs, so all that remains is waxing fresh chain and zip-tying the cables in place. Then it’s ready to hit the streets again!

Look, I know “prebiotic” sodas are mostly junk science, but here’s the deal: some of them taste pretty dang good and only have a few grams of sugar per can. So let’s not throw the baby out with the fizzy water, m’kay?

If we don’t get some newspaper headline like “WINSOME LOSE ALL” tomorrow, what are we even doing?

Seriously, the weather on today’s ride was like a birthday gift from nature. I had a helluva time on the bike, too. I feel like I’m nearly back to where I was before my injury.

Oh, also, I voted early so I didn’t have to on my birthday 😉

Just an astonishingly beautiful autumn day for my 44th birthday. Started off meeting my family for coffee, then some seriously climby new miles in the Southside (I had to stop halfway up a hill in my lowest gear for a break). I’m writing this from my second coffee stop, and then I’m riding some more until I meet my family for lunch at The Cask!

Pretty sure I’ll get in at least 50 miles today, but I’m trying to take it easy and just soak it all in.

While I was pleased to see Richmond police checking speed on the Belvedere Bridge, I would’ve preferred to see them not sitting in the bike lane in order to do so.

Agritourism while the kids have the day off

I think I’m nearly fully healed after my crash and injury. Even with a rest day earlier in the week (when it was raining) I still managed nearly 205 miles through today. Still too sore to sleep on the injured side or lay down on my stomach, but I’m getting there!

Went to Hardywood West Creek to have family pictures taken and showed up at the end of a massive corgi festival (Splootfest 2025). Easily over a hundred very good dogs still remained, and my kids were losing their minds with glee.

Glorious fall weather out in RVA. Perfect for time outside.

Pretty glorious autumnal weather out there, Richmond.

This year for Halloween my son wanted to dress up as a ring wraith from The Lord of the Rings. In order to make him stand out from say, Dementors or The Grim Reaper, I suggested he specifically go as The Witch King of Angmar. My wife has made some killer costumes for the kids in the past, but I really wanted to help out this time. I tracked down various cosplay templates and figured out how to both scale it down for a child and simplify parts of it so it would hold up to a night of trick-or-treating.

I don’t typically craft anything, but I’m really pleased with how well this turned out for an amateur costume job. I used cereal box cardboard for the gloves and hot-glued them (first time hot glue gun user—and no burns! I used a foil-covered drumstick in each finger to keep them from sticking to themselves!), and sturdier corrugated stuff for the helmet/crown. Everything was painted in two stages with silver metallic base and spattered “antique bronze” hammer finish paint. The underlying fabric is a super cheap Grim Reaper costume because it provided gloves and a see-through full face cover (and he gets a plastic scythe toy as a bonus). He loves it, and I’m super pumped about how it all turned out. Now it’s time to terrify people into filling up his candy bucket :-D

Seriously, Henrico, what is up with this cycle track?

If you like chill bike and bike camping vibes, but en français, then Summer Mixtape Fanclub has you covered.

I’ve mentioned him before, but I’m a huge fan of Daniel Yang’s YouTube channel. He’s affable, doesn’t take himself too seriously, but is also a total nerd who just loves designing and riding bikes. This is a video of riding and his appearance on Silca’s Marginal Gains podcast to talk about 32" wheels for bikes. Yang is part of Neuhaus Metalworks and Artefact, so he brings a small frame builder’s insight blended with his engineering education. Always a joy to hear him talk about bikes, and I think he has a balance perspective on this emerging wheel standard.

Alright, I think I’ve finally recovered from the humiliation of losing my long time domain. I have embraced the Ploaf, and you can now find my dang website at ploafmaster.com

There’s a new bagel joint in town, and it’s less than a mile from my house! And it’s from one of the people behind the excellent Pizza Bones in Church Hill.

I’m talking about Julio’s Bagels on Brookland Park Boulevard in the Northside. They just opened up on Tuesday, but I headed over this morning after a coworker told me about it last night. I stepped into the back of a healthy line around 8:06 (they opened at 8)and was out the door with my bagels at about 8:40. It’s a new shop, so I’m sure they’re sorting out production, but that’s the biggest difference between Richmond’s bagel shops and pretty much any generic place up north. Shops in NYC or Jersey are so fast they leave you wondering how folks make it through a shift without slicing off their fingers.

So the bagels? They made a great first impression. They were still warm (not toasted—I’m not an animal) when I got home. Valerie’s and my bagels were crisp on the outside, and dense yet chewy on the inside. I could taste that sourdough flavor on the interior (I would characterize it as “just right”), and there seemed to be maybe a little less salt on top (I had a salt bagel, duh) than I would prefer, but I already want to go back. These bagels strike a balance between the almost crunchy, more bready bagels of Chewy’s and the kinda dense pedestrian bagels of the tristate area (excluding the better examples which are in a league of their own). I think the size could be more consistent, but that can be worked out in time. This is a very promising start and can’t wait to give them a second try.

Bonus points: they’re using Recluse coffee. There’s a full service coffee bar at the counter, but I grabbed some cold brew this morning. Only after finishing half of this delicious cup while waiting on my order did I see the sign over a kegerator indicating it was a single-origin, natural process Honduran coffee. Dang! Great stuff. Tasty bagels and coffee in the same spot, so close to home? Sign me up.

Security system bro-dude salesperson knocks on my door.

“‘Sup. Are you the king of this castle?”

His self-balancing scoot-scoot idles behind him on my walkway.

I politely dismiss him.

NEW TRACK/VIDEO FROM THE BETHS!!!

Gonna be listening to “Metal” all day, probably:

youtu.be/YrVEgP0Lk…

I never watched ER, but my wife and I just finished tearing through The Pitt. I feel like it’s a really good, but not great, show. Not great mostly because it’s about as subtle as bombshell, but there are a few things about this show that I really enjoy:

• I love a good ensemble show—the kind where you end up loving nearly every character. Sure, there are leads, but the supporting cast is so well-constructed and performed that you can’t help rooting for everybody to win. I usually think about this with comedies (e.g. anything from Mike Schur, or Veep), but The Pitt has a fantastic cast of characters from nurses to student doctors to patients.
• When my wife was actively watching Parenthood I noticed that everybody seemed to have a crisis in every episode. In retrospect that’s nearly the case with The Pitt as well, but the structure of each story, the chaos of the ER, and the shows editing do a terrific job of masking the heightened reality.
• And about that writing - the dialog, the stories within each episode and across the season…just a pleasure to watch.
• The cast! Whitaker! Dr. Mel King! Too many good folks on this show.

I’m pleased to see the show getting a second season. And as for ER…is it worth me taking a look after all these years? Go back years ago and watch George Clooney play doctor?

Feeling so resentful about doing my taxes this evening that I almost don’t want to, except I know it isn’t regular folks who will benefit from reduced staff and oversight at the IRS…

Woo—it’s been a while, huh? Well my family just returned from a family trip to New York City. We stopped in Toms River, NJ heading up and back to visit my aunt and uncle, but most of our time was spent in Manhattan. Valerie and I hadn’t been to the city since late 2019, and the kids hadn’t been since the year before (too young to remember anything at this point), so everything on the trip was new to them and some was new to all of us.

New York was a hit with my children, and Valerie and I already love it, but there were some really outstanding bits this time around. The Transit Museum in Brooklyn and the Tenement Museum in Manhattan were each fantastic New York-centric attractions. The cheap-as-free trip on the Staten Island Ferry to get a close-enough view of the Statue of Liberty and city skyline was excellent, and we were able to catch the immediate return ferry. We splurged on tickets to the top of 30 Rock (see that photo at the top) and lucked out with incredible weather and expansive visibility in all directions. And my kids handled our miles of walking with aplomb, whether it was schlepping through NOLITA so mom and dad could get some coffee or walking most of the high line from Hudson Yards down to the Standard Hotel Biergarten.

It wouldn’t be a trip with me without some mention of food, but I’ll keep it to an important highlight: we had lunch at Scarr’s Pizza in the Lower East Side. I’ve had plenty of slices in NYC and elsewhere, but this may have been some of the best pizza I’ve eaten. The balance of ingredients, the flavor of the crust (let alone the perfect texture), and holy lort the sauce. Everyone agreed about this perfect pie.

We were mostly fortunate with the weather; warmer than expected on some days and a little chilly on one day. The rain mostly stayed away excepting one heavy shower as we were 10 minutes from the hotel but we had rain gear at the ready!

I think the only part of the trip that didn’t work was kind of expected: Times Square. Valerie wanted the kids to see it, and at night no less, so they could experience the chaos and lights and mass of people. Well, we all did and didn’t care for it. I already know that I hate Times Square, but now the kids are on my side as well. We also had hoped to see at least some of Central Park but never made it. Next time!

I didn’t take as many photographs as I usually like since a) I’m more careful about getting my kids' consent for pics (and separately for posting them online) and b) we had a few gray and drizzly days that didn’t lend themselves well to my photo mood at the time. But I’m still happy with a few them, and I hope you enjoy them as well.

Oh, hey, just me over here playing around with some video while riding my bike: www.youtube.com/watch

If some folks are exploring Instagram alternatives, is it worth me dusting off that Pixelfed account I spun up back in 2023? pxlmo.com/ploafmast…