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cycling / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
22
Apr 25

I guess distances accurately

The cats have gracefully argued that they haven’t graced the page in almost two weeks. They remind me that they’re almost the sole cause of site traffic around here. I don’t know if they’re right about that, but they are the most popular feature here. Sometimes, they’re the only feature here. So, we should show them off.

I tried to get them to type this up, but they’re a little heavy on the keys. They also don’t have a firm grasp of punctuation, or what the space bar does.

What they lack in keyboard etiquette they make up for in patiently posing.

Phoebe was enjoying a little sunny afternoon time in the dining room.

Poseidon has his choice of boxes on which to sit.

The kitties are doing great, in other words. They are miffed about not landing on the site on Monday, though. And they’ve been letting me hear about it all day.

I had a nice 30 mile-bike ride today, over mostly the usual roads. Out to the river and back from the river and over to town, riding right across on Main Street, and then out past the edge of town. I was on a quiet two-lane road when I saw a woman walking from the other direction. Long pants. Hoodie. It was a warm spring evening. She raised her voice as I went by, asking if this was the way to the next town. Without slowing down, because she was not in distress, I yelled back over my shoulder, “Take this left and you’ll go left again, but it’s 15 miles from here.” It was almost 7 p.m. by then. I looked on a map later, and she was exactly 15 miles away on foot. I hope she made it to an Uber.

I crossed over Yorketown to Pierson, and then crossed Yorktown (there is a place where Yorketown and Yorktown intersect, and I wonder how many people have noticed that outside of this little town). I skirted the west side of the town limits, and then rode through the pastureland to get back home. If it sounds romantic, you don’t know the half of it.

This, though, was only my fifth ride of the month. I waited for forever for new tires to arrive. We traveled. There was work. This is all getting in the way of my accumulation of miles and shouting out directions to random passersby. Like I know where I’m going.

adventures / art / cycling / Monday / photo — Comments Off
21
Apr 25

Scenes since we last talked

Just a few shots that I captured over the last week, in the moments between doing the work that helps keep the lights on.

Walking the grounds, I enjoyed discovering the blooms on this little guy. But the tree refuses to stay in focus. But I almost got close once.

I wonder what this farmer is spreading here. Surely not nitrogen, that field is green a-plenty.

This will be a field full of delicious … something … let’s say strawberries … eventually. I’ll go back by there when the covers are off and try to figure out what they’ve planted.

I bet you never wondered if grazing cattle eat with any more urgency when they notice the sun is going down. I bet you’ll wonder about that now.

I recently got a new helmet. (I was due a new helmet!) And so my mother offered to get one for my birthday. (Wasn’t that nice of her?) This is one of the higher rated models according to the famous Virginia Tech lab that does these things, and, it’s a handsome looking piece of head wear.

It goes with just about anything, and let’s be honest, style matters as much as aerodynamic properties, and at least as much as “safety.”

Here’s the right side view.

And here’s the left side view.

Aero though it may be, it still doesn’t make me faster than my lovely bride. At least it didn’t on this ride. Have you ever been well and truly dropped right after taking a photograph. I have. (Again.)

(Notice her helmet has the name on it. Wear your helmets, kids, no matter if they are fashionable or branded.)

Maybe I’ll be faster on our next ride together.

Speaking of fashion, my Easter look.

adventures / cycling / Delaware / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
1
Apr 25

It’s me, I’m the fool

On Sunday, I took my lovely bride across the river, to charming Wilmington.

It was a Christmas present delivered in March. I got tickets to see Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood doing their improve show. We sat right up front. Right up front. At one point I thought Colin was going to step off the stage, and I had a plan to try to break his fall.

The two of them have been doing this traveling improv show for more than a decade now. Every show different, some of the games familiar, if you know the Whose Line Is It Anyway? format. They did the game where people in the audience had to move them around, and another where people had to make the sound effects. A mother and her young teen daughter made the sound effects, and in that we learned that not every teen knows The Beatles. They played another game where a man and a woman had to play Siri and Alexa.

Finally, they closed a show with their own improvised Broadway tune. The setup was there was a musical titled “Wilmington!” and this was going to be the go home number in the show. So they sought out, from the crowd, the iconic things about the city. It was a short list, and it devolved quickly to “bodies in the river” and “condos with a view.”

We saw another improv show in 2019, with Greg Proops, Jeff Davis, Joel Murray and Dave Foley. I was able to get a line into that show, “She’s from Canada. You don’t know her.” No such luck this time, but it was a good show, if a little overly reliant on audience participation. That’s the high wire part of the show, though, and those guys are great at it. Catch them if you can.

I could tell you about my bike ride … let me tell you about my bike ride. This was the third ride with my new helmet, and the first of those three where I remembered my sunglasses, so the look was complete. But the ride was delayed, because I had a flat on my rear wheel.

It was further delayed when I ruined a second tube trying to fix the problem. But when you don’t rush, and do a thing a second time, you get it ride, and so off I went, content to pedal myself into the evening.

And 4.5 miles later that tube was flat, too. Joke’s on me!

So I gave up. Three in one day is plenty. And I’m buying new tires. It was about time, anyway.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must get ready for a weekend trip.

cycling / friends / memories / photo / Rowan / Wednesday — Comments Off
26
Mar 25

We saw Adam via Zoom

My old friend Adam joined our class via Zoom. He’s recently stepped down from a command of American Forces Network Europe, where he managed dozens of stations on two continents. It seemed a good perspective to add to our international media class. And he had a lot to offer, so I’m glad he took the time.

I was trying to remember, but we met in 2011. I wrote a piece about a distant cousin of his, a World War 2 hero, one of the Doolittle Raiders. Soon after we met in person, and became fast friends. He took a master’s degree and became one of my lovely bride’s students. We’ve toured Alaska and Ireland together.

We are close in age. His hometown is just one or two towns over from my grandparents. Once, we tried to decide if we’d ever been to some event as kids. We decided the most likely place would have been a steakhouse. My grandparents’ church dismissed earlier than his church, so it’s possible that he had to wait on us to leave so he could eat lunch.

I wrote a little bio of him for my students. It’s been an impressive, long career. Multiple deployments, some great experiences and some less than great. He’s now just a few months from retiring from the Army, an exceedingly happy family man, and studying to become a commercial pilot. We’re trying to talk him and his wife into moving close to us. I’m not sure if I’ve sold him on it yet, but you’ve seen the pictures around here. One of my angles is that it is a lot like home.

(Speaking of home … He knew where his ancestor who immigrated from England came from. Adam and I once visited that road in London.)

Speaking of pictures, I took these the other day and I’m cleaning up my phone.

As the weather warms up and the bikes go back on the roads, it is good to see these signs still out there reminding people about the rules of the road.

That one is relatively new. At least I don’t remember seeing it last year.

And here’s a man out there discing that dirt. That field, if it is all his, goes back some ways. He was probably doing that all afternoon.

That was Saturday, because you work every day on a farm. I wonder what they were doing there today. A lot more than me, I’m sure of it.

cycling / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
25
Mar 25

Reading about literacy

Catching up on grading today … seemingly an evergreen phrase … and I ran across a paper where a student wrote “We live through a crisis of critical thinking.”

I may wrap the class on that note — now, not at the end of the term — and spend all of my free time trying to remember the most direct route to get future classes to that same point. Some weeks ago I was trying to summarize our class conversation in the last few moments when I found, around the corner and down the hall, an opportunity to make just this point, and so I steered my riff that way. It was a great go home message, and it must have stuck with that student.

For this paper, I’d asked the class to look a few years into the future and try to project the problems of misinformation and disinformation that we’ll be dealing with, and how we might best cope with, and try to overcome it. Another student wrote, “Media literacy will also be an essential tool … As consumers, we can play a part by using critical thinking skills … Schools and universiti3es should also teach media literacy and teach students how to discern fake news from real news.”

It’s fun to read papers when the authors are trying to make these sorts of connections.

I went for a little bike ride this afternoon. I quickly realized that I need to rest up a little more. Sinuses, or whatever I get, don’t always make for a good experience when you get your heart rate up and start breathing hard. So it was a brief ride. I got in my 16 miles, just to spin the legs and see the sites. Like the irrigation system to infinity.

And the excavator at rest. I wonder what it gets used on around there. There’s not an obvious worksite, no scar in the earth. Just fields waiting to turn green.

If it’s active this year, I imagine it’ll be a sod crop. We’ll see.

Elsewhere, it’s just lovely pastureland, and these two paints enjoying a late lunch.

Now, I’m going to go back to reading the last of those papers.