OK. We’ve traveled, by plane. And we arrived at our hotel, where we will stay for two nights. And this is the first night or the second night, depending on where you are in the world. And I have no idea what is going on, so scrambled are my brains and biorhythms. That’s your next hint. So this is the Wednesday post, which could also be on Tuesday, depending on where you are. That’s a hint. And here’s the final hint, a quick shot from a hop-on/hop-off bus tour we took to see the area, and ward off jet lag. And, as it turns out, to get a little breeze on the skin. It is unexpectedly warm here, despite forecasts. Anyway, that last hint.
That photo hint probably is only a little help. If you stare it closely it might help you eliminate several possibilities, but probably won’t give you a precise location. I’ll offer you that tomorrow; if I’m awake for it.
Yep, that’s me. I’m sitting over a wing. The better to ensure there are no monsters out there. You might be asking yourself how I got here — by car. You might be asking yourself why I am referring to “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” which turns 62 years old this fall — it is still terrifying, but for different reasons. But the questions you should be asking: Where are you going? And: “What did you watch along the way?”
I’ll give you a day or two to figure out the answer to the first question. And I’ll give you a very small and indirect hint with the answers to the second question.
First, I watched “Captain America: Brave New World.”
It could have been better, but they were working from a thin comic book concept here. Anthony Mackie deserves better. And how Harrison Ford got involved will remain a mystery. Indeed, it is the copy book of MCU movies.
So, in other words, a good airplane movie. Passed the time. Filed it away. Pleased I didn’t spend time that could have been better spent doing or watching anything else.
Which brings us to our second film of the flight. And, again, Honest Trailer nails it.
There are pumpkins in North Africa, expressions some 1700 years before the technology that prompted them was invented and a newspaper in ancient Rome, where no history is observed.
Look, there are several reasons one makes a movie. Fan service, the box office, high art, or marketing overreach. Others are misguided movie execs, to right a wrong or wrong a right. One of those reasons is “to give Ridley Scott something to do,” and this film is that.
Anyway, the plane has safely landed. And if you’re plotting runtime to try to determine where I am, or otherwise trying to glean some information from the photo above, let me tell you I also watched the first episode of 1923 to complete the flight. We have arrived at our lodgings. Now we fight off the temptation to sleep — didn’t do that on the plane, as usual — so that we may laughingly ward off jet lag.
Last meeting of the school year today. An informal thing. A small celebration. A planning session. An AI conversation. A gabfest. It was an afternoon of chatting and fun, not work. But it’s the last thing on the calendar for a bit.
So we celebrate. Inspired by the collective encore of Sunday night’s show, I give you, the summer of singing in no particular key.
I’d like to share with you this Hemerocallis daylily. Native to parts of Asia, beautiful anywhere in the world. This one is holding down the corner by our garage.
There are always wonders in the yard. I just have to go outside to find them.
Daylillies require almost no care. I wonder why the people that used to live here didn’t have them planted everywhere. But, I suppose, you could ask that of any beautiful thing. And we have quite a few lovely things in the yard — have I noticed this daylily before? — but most of them are quite singular. And most of it takes care of itself pretty well. The rest, well, they’re stuck with us.
There’s a grapevine, and we are trying to rework it over its trellis. Nearby, the honeysuckle seems to be rebounding well from the early springtime work we did on it. Other things are coming along nicely. We had to recently remove a few bushes that had died. I view this as a personal shortcoming, a promise I never made to the sellers of our home, not that I’ve done a lot to help those planted things that struggled and died, even while others have thrived. Everything grows here (weeds best of all!), but some things stopped last year. Maybe it was that drought. Maybe it was something else.
Anyway, the daylily is lovely.
We had a nice bike ride Saturday morning with our neighbor. It’s great. He rides around the loop and right up our driveway. Then he set us out on a course that included a few roads we know, and a few we haven’t been on before. It sprinkled a bit, and the conversation was nice, and the roads were quite empty at that time of the day.
This was soon after I’d done my big turn on a Strava segment, which I felt like I managed quite well if I must say, but did not set a new PR. Our neighbor just sat patiently behind me after the sprint, through the left turn and then the quick right that turned me back up hill. As soon as it pointed up, he went around me.
I was going to sit up, but I had to keep up. And so I tried, and did.
He’s a nice guy, our neighbor, and it’s nice that we have the chance to take the occasional ride with him. You need a few people like that from time-to-time.
When I went out today — a perfectly pleasant solo ride of some of the standard routes ridden backward — I rode alongside a little boy on his BMX bike for a moment. We met at the road that enters-exits the subdivision, but from opposite directions. And that guy was fast. So I had that to think about on my perfectly average pace 27-miler. If he suggests a ride in a few years, when he’s a bit older, I’m probably going to be busy that day.
We went to a concert last night, and I’ll share tiny little clips of that to help fill up our week. Here’s the opening act. You might remember Fastball from the 1990s. A bunch of guys from Texas who scored two Grammy nominations and two or three songs at or neat the top of the charts in 1998. They also went platinum on that record. Later they had trouble because what genre even is this? But musical genres in general, and their style of rock in particular, was struggling at that same time.
I never actually liked this band. They’ve been at it all these years, honing their touring craft, and it shows. I liked their performance. They had a tight 25 minute set and held a crowd like you don’t often see for a warm up. Also, they threw in a bit of Steve Miller, just for fun, as a medley.
Maurice, by the way, means “Gangster of Love.” That was mixed in with their minor 2013 hit, which is peppy.
These days, Fastball says they “combined a fondness for melodic, Beatles-inspired pop with the alternative aesthetic of late-’90s mainstream rock,” in which case everyone should love them, right? But I just never got into them. I did enjoy this mini-set, though.
And, tomorrow, we’ll see a clip for the feature act.
On the way to the show, we passed this U-Haul truck. We passed it, it passed us back, like this photograph was meant to be. Of all of those little bits of Americana that they could share …
I just saw a television reference to that fungi. And, as I look at it now, I find I can learn more about fungi on the website, but U-Haul is of … questionable credibility on this issue.
Probably no one who’s rented that truck has thought about it, or tried to look that up on the site. When you’re trying to move, you’re on a mission: minimize the effort and aggravation of the move.
And you hope there are daylilies where you are going.
Things are looking lovely in the yard. This is out front, because we like to give a nice impression to all of the people who pull up the drive. So many people don’t. And they’re missing out. But that’s OK. More flowers for us.
We’ve been running a gag with a friend about bad photo composition. This is my contribution to the joke.
But, lurking up above, the promise of early August.
The ripening is underway.
Does anyone want some peaches?
In the fall of 2020 I was interviewed by a student working up a profile of my lovely bride for a class project.
He asked me what’s it like being married to an All-American, D-1 athlete, FINA Masters World Championships swimmer, three-time USA Triathlon national championship-qualified triathlete and two-time Ironman finisher.
(Except now she’s a six time USA Triathlon national championship qualifier and a three-time Ironman.)
This, I noted on social media, is what it’s like.
A few days after that 2020 interview I said “I’m going to go spin out my bike for a bit in the bike room.”
She said, “I’ll join you for an easy ride,” and then I watched her put out about 230 watts going uphill for an hour on Zwift. Sometime soon after that we were on a group ride and she was out front. She sat up and re-did her braid while we were chasing back on to her wheel. At the first sprint point on that ride she was laughing as I tried to go by her. She was LAUGHING during a full sprint. I didn’t win that one. So we got really, really serious about the five sprints after that.
But all of that was five years ago.
Today, I set a hard pace for eight miles, and then she went around me. Then she went away from me. And so I had to chase on for about six miles, hard, to get back. Thinking about that 2020 interview the whole way.
And here is when I finally caught her. We were going up a little hill, and I was doing 26 miles per hour up the long slow hill just to stay on her wheel. Look at how casual she is here, as she’s about to get to the top of the thing.
All told, Strava says this was the fastest 30K I’ve ever recorded.
What’s it like being married to someone like that?
