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cycling / Monday / photo — Comments Off
26
May 25

There’s still something in the dryer

Just a perfectly peaceful weekend around here. I read a lot. I washed, I think, every item of clothing and other fabric we own. At least it feels that way. My normal two loads of laundry turned into six. Some of those were towels, which the cats have since commandeered for their coziness, and sheets. I started all this Saturday and finally finished it today. The whole of the weekend will be remembered as being in the laundry room or reading in the backyard.

Also this. I had a short bike ride on Saturday. Short because I broke my bicycle. More specifically, I messed up my wheel. Most accurately, I destroyed the hub on my rear wheel. Here is the hub. You can see what exploded.

This is what happened: we set out for a ride and I was instantly left behind by my flying wife. She broke out her tri-bike, plus the wind was gusting to 29 miles per hour and my legs felt dead all day. None of those things are recipes for success. Then I sat at a red light for a good solid five minutes. (I have the data to prove this is not hyperbole.

Finally, I got out of the wind and was riding basically OK, and then I heard a great solid POP! The rear end of my bike immediately went wobbly.

It wasn’t a flat. Not quite a spoke. In fact, two or three spokes that belong in that area.

Without spokes your wheel is not in round. And that meant it was rubbing the frame and that’s why it got wobbly. My ride was done.

I was nine miles from the house.

So I summoned my flying wife, who, after setting an incredible record on a Strava segment near the house, came to get me.

Tomorrow, I’ll take my wheel to the bike shop. Maybe I’ll get it repaired quickly, and it won’t cost a million dollars. But it is a bike shop thing, and you never know about bike shop things.

What we do know is I can’t ride that bike until it is fixed.

Other than that, and the laundry, we spent a beautiful weekend sitting in lounge chairs under an umbrella, reading. I got through a book-and-a-half, which will give me something to write about a bit later in the week. But, for now, just look at this view.

That plane is going to Naples, by the way. And in the original, when I zoomed in, it looked like there was a low light/shutter speed problem. The plan had four blurry wings instead of two. Maybe that’s how it gets all the way to Italy.

I was sent to the grocery store last night before dinner to get cupcake wrappers. We were making muffins, and ran out of them. Did you know there are two different sizes? And did you also know that the scale of everything in the grocery is disorienting enough to make you think that the small ones are too small? And so you must need the JUMBO ones. Plus, the brand for the JUMBO wrappers shared the name of our blueberry muffin-maker’s hometown. So I got those.

As I was making this decision, a woman came down the aisle with a smile big enough to light up the right side of the store. From a great distance she looked like a colleague. So I smiled back. As she got closer, her eyes moved away from me, in the center of the aisle, to something over my shoulder, or beyond me. And at the same moment, all of this happened quickly, I realized she was not one of our colleagues, or anyone I knew from elsewhere, and she started talking. On her phone.

That smile was for someone else, which is great, but really.

Those headphone mics are no better than Bluetooth headsets for creating awkward interactions.

There’s a small fireworks display in the grocery store’s foyer. (Sure, this is awfully early for the Fourth, but somewhere nearby some … overzealous person … is lighting fireworks on Memorial Day.) I didn’t notice this at the time, because I was trying to hurry back for dinner, but is there a fireworks sword on the market now? And what does it do?

I’ll have to go back and check that out to be sure.

Anyway, I got the wrong cupcake wrappers and felt awfully bad about that. But the blueberry muffins are good, nevertheless. Also, the laundry is done.

cycling / Friday / photo — Comments Off
23
May 25

I put screws into something and called it a day

Some days are productive in the smallest ways. Maybe those are the best days. My alarm went off promptly, I ignored it for a moment, and then read my way through the morning, had a bite to eat, typed up a few things. Normal stuff. And then I worked on a shelving solution.

We need a place to put bike stuff, and so I picked up a second-hand shelf that will fit in a corner. It’s a two-piece deal, a cheap little MDF fixture that probably belongs in a bathroom. It’s going to hang in a corner in the garage. The first step was today, joining the two shelves together. I think they were designed to just sit on the floor, but one little wooden dowel isn’t going to hold it all together. So I added a second dowel. And then I joined them the old fashioned way, by screwing it all together.

The shelves are rounded, so this took ingenuity; I was immediately out of my league. But, eventually I did it. Two cheap little shelves have been joined into one piece. They’ll hold the weight of shows and elements and things.

And right about here you’re wondering if I’ll go self-deprecating or literary next. The truth is, I’m wondering, too.

To hang the shelf on the wall, I’ll make a french cleat. But I didn’t do that today, because I have the whole weekend ahead of me.

This is where I realized this wonderful little problem. How can I accurately that on two walls simultaneously. And then another, how to do it for the top and bottom shelves, as a little added security. I think I have it all figured out. It doesn’t require ingenuity, not really, but it does require some simple carpentry problem solving where I’m really deficient.

Let’s assume my solutions work. It shouldn’t take too long to make it happen. Then it’ll be on to all of my other little projects. And there are a lot of them. I’m eager to get to them. Well, most of them.

Late in the afternoon, or early this evening, or both, I set out for a little bike ride. I was thinking about how I could find new roads, and this is what I settled on. I did the reverse of one of our regular routes, the first regular route we established here, in fact. It’s a simple rectangle to the southwest. But, instead of turning right to head back home, I decided to find out what would happen if I just kept going.

What happens is you ride in the wind the whole day. Also, I pedaled my way through three-plus miles of empty roads and fields. I slid through an old neighborhood, and then crossed the interstate, which was when I realized where this road wound up. There are two truck stops and a hotel on the outskirts of a little town, and I didn’t want to be around of that today, so I doubled back. There was another promising road to check out.

So instead of turning left on the road that I knew, I turned left on a different road. It took me through four-and-a-half miles of views like this one.

Finally, it dumped me onto a road I knew, and so I took an indirect way home. It was a good ride, except for the wind. It was slow, because of the wind and also my legs. But it was pleasant. The weather was right, the traffic was non-existent, and there was a lot to see.

It was a nice, casual 34-mile ride that I finished with a smile. As I got home there was a car in the drive. Who had come to visit? We weren’t expecting company. As I got closer I realized, it was my lovely bride’s ride. She’d left it out of the garage as I worked on those shelves. So we had company, and it was us. This was a thing I said as a kid, when there was a car in the drive at my grandparents’ home, when the car belonged to us. “We’ve got company.”

Rides take you places. They bring you places. Sometimes the kid-in-you-ride takes back.

I wonder where tomorrow’s ride, and the 29 mph wind forecast, will take me.

So it was a literary allusion, in the smallest way, after all. Who could have seen that coming?

adventures / cycling / memories / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
20
May 25

Thinking of an interview I did almost five years ago

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?

Awesome — unless you’re trying to keep up.

adventures / collarbone / cycling / Wednesday — Comments Off
7
May 25

A group ride

The grading and sharing of notes continues. And it will continue throughout the day, and probably most of tomorrow. So I’m on schedule, I suppose, but this could go faster. Feedback, however, is time intensive. I try to be as specific and useful as possible. And though there are some recurring themes that allow me to, occasionally, use a bit of copy-and-paste boilerplate on How To Fix That Particular Problem, a lot of this is bespoke.

Here’s the real problem. Canvas, our learning management system of choice, shows me a student’s PDF or DOC file or whatever in one frame of a browser, and, in another, it gives me a tiny little box to type in. Experience has taught me that typing in little boxes does wonders for my creative typographical errors. So I spend a decent chunk of time on each one just trying to read through what I wrote — unlike here — in the hopes that it makes sense. That it is applicable. That it is thoughtful and, dare I hope it, professorial.

It’s grimly humorous to me that I’m in a place where I can evaluate and score someone based on their typos, and I’m working in these tiny little text boxes that give me ample opportunity to sound almost literate.

Also, my feedback ranges from 200-600 words. And I have 60-some of these to work through. So, yeah, it takes time.

But I have an advantage today. Our neighor invited us out for an early morning bike ride. It was short, but also early enough that I’ve had more time in front of the computer screen, joy of joys.

Anyway, that’s our neighbor in the front right. He’s also an Ironman. And a bionic man.

Behind him is his friend. This guy had moved away to Florida, but recently returned to spend more time near his grandchildren. So he’s retired, but busier than ever maintaining two homes. He spent most of the ride telling me about the furniture he’s buying online and refinishing, and the work they’re doing to their house here. They seem the sort to buy it and leap right into it. Makes sense, make it yours! I don’t seem to be capable of that. People lived in this house before me, and that’s something to be respectful of and all. But this guy, he and his wife purchased a home from an elderly couple and it obviously needed to have some updating so they’ve just ripped out the floors and are walking around on the slab right now while the flooring people do their work. Also, he can tell you about the table and chairs he bought on Facebook Marketplace, what they’re worth, down to the penny, and what he bought them for.

He was, perhaps he still is, a big time amateur racer. And so as we went over roads he’s known for years and is now getting reacquainted with, he was telling me about things that happened on each of them, including when we crossed over one bridge where he crashed out and broke his collarbone. So naturally I had to tell our collarbone stories. And then we found ourselves on that freshly painted ribbon, zig zagging our way through quiet little neighborhoods from whence people were starting their day.

At the end of it all, we got to a stop sign and the retiree said thanks for the ride, and turned left. The rest of us went straight. When we got to our neighborhood we thanked our friend for the invite and went up our drive as he continued on down to his home.

That’s the way it is, riding with other people. You get to know these specific slices of their life. You could ride with them dozens of times, knowing only these little bits about them. And if you see them in their secret identity clothes around town, you might not even recognize one another. But then you see them on the next ride.

Small groups, like this, make for a fun ride, so I hope we get to do it again soon.

But, now, back to Canvas.

adventures / cycling / Monday / photo — Comments Off
5
May 25

Now we come to it

Final papers are in for my international media class. I’m trying to get ahead of them so I can stay ahead of my other grading. While one class is finished, another has a tight turnaround on some important work. This week, from my perspective then, is about giving good feedback in a timely manner, so that it is useful to the students.

So this is brief. More brief than normal. (You’re welcome?)

Just riding around the neighborhood on Saturday, in reality is about six neighborhoods, gave me an easy bit of exercise, and a brief glimpse of the sheep and one of their faithful companions.

Sometimes that dog is sleeping as I go back. Occasionally I cruise through there and he’s working. Every now and again he races me — usually he lets me win. But, today, they were all huddled together and something behind me caught his interest.

We recently discovered the local creamery. My lovely bride says I found it, but I have absolutely no recollection of that. They have three flavors of custard, and last night, a night that was sticky and warm enough to make it quickly look like a potential drippy mess, I tried the creamsicle.

They only accept cash. And while I respect their stance on traditionalism at this creamery, that will limit my abilities to visit there. Who has cash? Probably this is a good thing. It is only four miles away, and I can’t always be lucky about eating it before it gets everywhere.

The local bike shop does a ride to the creamery in the earliest part of the summer. It’s a neighborhood thing, and we’ll join in. Because there is ice cream.

But, first, there is grading. So let me get back to that.