Ride of the Dorkmobile

Swell... now I have Wagner played on the kazoo going through my head...

I took advantage of the nice weather (high of 49 F/9 C) to give my homemade bike trailer (described here) a final shakedown cruise. I took a similar trip a few weeks ago, and discovered two critical problems: the mounting hitch rotates on the axle, causing the trailer to bump against the rear tire, and one of the wheels started to loosen. Fixed both of these problems--a few lock washers and counter-tightened nuts should keep the wheels from coming off (oh, if only this was true in life in general).

I'm a bit worried that biking around with a homemade trailer puts me near the dude who pedals the adult-size tricycle down the Mass Ave going, "Oh! oh! oh! oh! oh!" in terms of the likelihood-of-getting-laid-on-a-regular-basis metric. Guess that's a risk I'm just gonna have to take [smirk].

Then again, as I was riding down the bike path, I passed a bunch of little kids (2-3, I'd guess) with their mom. One of them looked at the trailer passing by, and said, "Wow! What a cool bike!" Well, at least I play to the preschool crowd.

Incidentally, I am planning on putting this up as an Instructable. Someday. When I don't feel super-guilty about taking that much time away from thesis.

Anyway, I used this ride to stop by my favorite bakery and the local Indian food store. While browsing vegetables, I came across these guys:


Do any of the foodier-than-me folks know what this is? Google is singularly unhelpful for trying to identify things like this ("strange vegetables"? "Indian vegetables"? "strange Indian vegetable"? "chia gourd"?) They are cucumber-sized things with an almost broccoli-like surface texture; I wonder if they're some type of an external seeded-pod or something.