Early morning. Bad night of sleep. Comfortable hotel bed, but I’m lately struggling. Shoulder, other shoulder, neck, old age, perhaps. It’ll get better. But that doesn’t keep me from being tired today. But what a day!
This is at the largest sand beach in Georgia (non-ocean category), at John Tanner Park. We were here for a race earlier in the year, and this time The Yankee was out to show an even better time than she did on this same course in the late spring.
Here she is starting the 600 meter swim. She’s one of the pink dots. If this were video you’d know her from the almost perfect stroke. A lot of people are flailing around in these things.
You can just see some canoes and jet skis out there for the just-in-cases-of life. I only saw them fish out one person today. Everyone else did well, including this girl, who came out of the water third in her division:
And then off through the transition with an incredible time and then out to the 14 mile bike course. I rode this course the last time we were here. It has some hills. And they are different hills than we have at home. (You can have different kinds of hills.) These hills require you to keep working over the top of them, which is sometimes easier said than done. And yet, her she was, blowing away her previous time, sneaking inside the goal that she had set up.
And at the end of it all, there was great success. She finished second, and fairly close to the winner, time-wise. There will be a great rivalry at these events when they start up again next season.
Today the sky was bright and the sun was mild through the morning and everyone had a lovely time. I saw a man and a woman each lay down their bike right by the transition area. An older gentleman wrecked his bike coming back into the park. There is a speed bump and he tried to go over it, instead he twisted his ankle and scrapped up his shoulder and put his bicycle in every condition except the one he liked.
I saw him after the race. He was moving a little gingerly, but in good spirits.
One of the first emails I received this morning was the first I’ve received on the Affordable Health Care Act. It included this line: “Unfortunately, we do not have details on the exchange coverage or the rates to share with you at this time.”
And this starts in October.
Though, right off the top, there are $65 in fees, and “we do not yet know what the rate increase will be.”
Thanks, Congress.
So I wrote our hard working and now long suffering HR director and asked a few specific questions. You can imagine the stress that gentleman is under.
In the evening I received this tweet:
Was so scared to drive within 20 ft of a biker today in fear that it was @kennysmith because MY GRADE IS IN HIS HANDS. #heholdsgrudges
I tell my students “One of the perks of being in the front of the class is having your pet issues. Here’s mine. Be careful of cyclists. Move over three feet,” and so on. Be careful when you pass them, I say, because you never know when it will be me and I get to grade you.
This joke always does pretty well. And she laughed at it, too.
Someone asked me on Facebook one day how to pass a cyclist. I got it down to five hints:
First: Wait. Just a second. Let a little road get out in front of him or her. She has the same rights the car does, etc.
Second: Know that waiting for 15 seconds until oncoming traffic doesn’t exist isn’t going to make you late.
Third: Just ease over to your left and pass, when clear. Some cities have a three-foot law. Think of that: that’s an arm length, but do err on the side of wider berths when you can. (Not everyone is a champion bike handler.)
Fourth: You don’t have to honk your horn. Unless you are driving an electric, I can hear you.
The programming director at Shoals Radio Group said he is puzzled how a promotional for a local radio station managed to excite many students and parents into believing bombs would be exploding today at area schools.
Rumors of school safety being in jeopardy have steadily increased since promotionals began Monday to bring attention to a format change at Star 94.9. The rumors prompted some parents to keep their children at home today instead of having them attend class as usual. Police and school officials also increased patrols in some schools in an effort to ease fears.
[…]
The promotional, which will continue until Friday when the format change is officially announced, is built around the thought that aliens have taken over the radio station and are trying to figure out what type music appeals to humans.
You can hear the promos here. How people got worked up about them remains a mystery. “Aliens with perfect diction!”
Every now and thenSpencer Hall feels the need to prove he’s a better writer than the rest of us. Give the guy a good story and watch him work. Read this (too long) excerpt and you’ll need to know the rest:
Kurt Vonnegut said that his chief objection to life in general was that it was “too easy, when alive, to make horrible mistakes.” This is what offensive line coaches live with: the notion that for every five simple circles drawn on a board, there are a nearly infinite number of possible threats looming out in the theoretical white space. Offensive plays give skill players arrows. Those arrows point down the field toward an endzone, a stopping point, a celebration. Those five simple circles stay on the board in the same place, and are on duty forever.
They are rough men in the business of protection.
Herb Hand is an offensive line coach at Vanderbilt University, where he might not even be were it not for a long line of random events. Hand got a job at Glenville State under Rich Rodriguez in 1994, a team whose base offense–the spread option that redefined modern football–depended on a play that in itself was the result of an accident, the zone read. A quarterback simply pulled the handoff from the running back, read the defensive end, and turned a mistake into deliberate and deadly strategy. Other coaches might have dismissed it entirely. Rodriguez did not, and now it is run at every level of the game from Pop Warner to the NFL.
Hand would work under Rodriguez at Clemson, and then followed him to West Virginia when Rodriguez was hired to replace Don Nehlen. Hand would recruit, coach tight ends, and recruit, and do all of that in exactly that order, because recruiting is an important activity that sometimes is interrupted by bouts of college football. One of the places Hand recruited was the talent-glutted state of Florida, including Orlando, where on April 27th, 2006 something would hit him in the back of the head with an axe.
The axe blow to the back of the head was a different kind of pain than normal.
And then you finish that story and you think: Great, that’s how we start football season. With teary eyes.
Which is fine, I guess, because we have football. You know, I’ve waited almost my entire life to enjoy picture-in-picture. The technology was rolled out in 1983. I’ve had two televisions that had the tech, but never had the necessary cable setup. Now, on this second television to feature PIP we finally have the opportunity to use it — and during football season! — and I can only manage to watch the same game twice.
But Gatorade ads look great when you see them in double vision!
So picture in picture is, so far, disappointing. And the New Directv setup lasted seven quarters of football, watching and switching between channels, before quitting. So there was a call to tech support. They flipped the magic switch and unkinked the hose on their end. A reset and a reboot later and it works again. Hope we’re not doing that all fall.
Even if we are they’re already proving more competent than Charter ever was.
The weather was incredible for an August Saturday. Sunny, clear and bright and the mercury never got more bold than 81. This has, so far, been the year of the anti-seasons. So far, there’s nothing to complain about any of it, really.
We had a nice and easy 25 mile ride today. Even with the milder August weather you have to plan ahead. I had 64 ounces of water on the bike. I had 16 ounces of electrolytes and a giant cup of chocolate milk when we got home. And I don’t hydrate enough.
I think I’d have to drink my body weight.
We visited Target, where we bought Target things like household items like frames and cat toys. Because Allie has no toys. Just ask her.
Fortunately she likes the new toy. It is a couple of pieces of vinyl wrapped around a flexible frame. It opens up to a square size, and the top has four holes in it. On two of the sides there are also holes. Inside are two toys — and we put in a few more. The cat then roots around for the bits of fur that smell like catnip and the globs of plastic that make ringing and tingling noises.
Within a few minutes she’d gotten so fixated that she was attacking her own foot. Also, it looks like a game of Feline Twister.
Why hasn’t some disreputable huckster tried to sale that yet?
We visited the grocery store, where I remain convinced the seafood counter is manned by a moonlighting Chris Isaak. He told us this particular type of Alaska salmon isn’t as fishy. We didn’t believe him when we put it on the grill later in the evening, but by the time it landed on your plate he was proved right.
I bonded with the cashier about picking and shelling purple hulled peas. It was obvious that no one listening in on that conversation had any frame of reference. Some of them were mortified.
Spent part of the evening watching NFL preseason coverage. You forget, in the offseason, that the NFL isn’t terribly exciting at all. But in August, any football will do.
The first college games are next Thursday. Everyone is counting the days.
I think I’ve seen someone do this before. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t done as well as this:
Saving much? I’m thinking of stuffing mattresses. On the same day that Nasdaq just … broke … there was this news.
After a lifetime of working, the median Boomer household has managed to accumulate $12,000 of retirement savings.
That means that 50% have even less than $12,000 for their retirement. These 55 to 64 year olds are up shits creek without a paddle. No wonder the percentage of over 55 people working is at an all-time high. Every age bracket has been living in a land of delusion.
So I went out for a ride. I’m trying to build miles back into the faux-training almost-routine for a couple of century ride possibilities that are coming up. I’ve fallen into a lull of short rides and so today hurt. And it was only a 42-mile route. But, still, that was my biggest ride since April 1st.
Of course you’re right in the middle, the perfect halfway point, when you wonder if you feel like doing it. Stopped at a gas station to buy a Gatorade. It was August, so I’d already had 64 ounces of water. Enjoyed my 32-ounces of fake electrolyte beverage and then re-filled one of my bottles at the gas station. That’s another 24 ounces.
You’re supposed to have some chocolate milk after long rides to repair your muscles. Honestly, I couldn’t drink another thing.
Four new things on Tumblr. More on Twitter. And something tomorrow, too!
