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27
May 12

Catching up

The weekly post where we slap together a bunch of pictures that didn’t get featured elsewhere among the many treasures of the Internet and show them off with banal commentary for cheap content.

Component kit? Takes the wind out of your sails for deviled eggs a bit, doesn’t it?

I was going to write a lengthy essay about the humble push broom, but decided against it. You’re welcome.

The Fox Theatre marquee in Atlanta. We were there Tuesday to see Jersey Boys. (Great show.)

But does it light up? Why, yes, it does.

Roadside flowers in the heat of a late spring day. I was out wilting, they were thriving. Somewhere around Beauregard, Ala.

I am obliged to put up Allie pictures every so often, or she wakes me up in the middle of the night. We’ve reached an arrangement about this sort of thing.

I hid under this tree for a moment of shade on my bike ride today. It was circled by old cement benches. I bet they don’t get used very often any more, though.

She lived 98 years and, now, I bet almost everyone she knew and loved is gone. Unsurprisingly the Internet knows nothing about her. What is known of the place she’s buried has survived largely based on oral histories, so she might be a complete mystery at this point. But there’s that little lamb, still.

I broke my helmet — thankfully not while I was in it. Guess I need a new one.

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26
May 12

A podge of hodges

I want to tell you that my family is full of good cooks. My mother, when we were young could invent dishes out of random extra things that would make your mouth water. When she has the proper ingredients she’s quite incredible. She may not have a green thumb, but if you grow something and put it in her kitchen she well make you one of the better meals you’ve had in a good long while.

One of my grandmothers is also a good cook. My grandparents raised a large garden that was essentially subsistence farming. Only, when I was young, I got tired of all those vegetables of course. Now I’d love to see that farm back in action for some creamed corn and various other things we pulled out of the ground.

My other grandmother is not a bad cook, either. People disagree on this, but I think she’s a fine cook. But that could be the grandmother, oldest-grandchild thing. (I’m her favorite. Just ask.)

All of this leads me to one of those curious things in life that we never think about until it is forced upon us. What if something you’ve always eaten is not so very good? For instance, God bless the fine cooks in my family, but they will bake a turkey dry as a dusty road at Thanksgiving.

I never knew what turkey was supposed to taste like until The Yankee cooked one the first fall we dated. Sometime after that her father was telling the story of how, as a boy, he didn’t know what a hamburger was supposed to be like. His mother burned them and then cooked them some more. It took eating at a friend’s to learn what he’d been missing.

It is a good tale, and the full version of that story is great, but that seemed silly to me until I considered the turkey example of my own culinary experiences.

Similar to my family’s apparent hatred of delicate turkey meat, there’s also a big bias against pork chops. I’m not sure what it is, maybe my grandmothers thought you needed to cook them at lunch and again at dinner, just to be sure any germs were dead. Perhaps we distracted them too much in the kitchen. Could have been anything, but even as a kid I knew that my lovely, saintly, giving and patient grandmothers respective pork chops didn’t taste good. I think I was in my mid-20s before I had a good one.

All of the above to say, if you’re not grilling your pork chops, friend, your missing out.

Had a too-hot ride yesterday. Last weekend we reversed a route we occasionally take and I found it grueling in the sense that I wanted to do it again. I thought I could easily improve my time on the trip. Only it was much, much warmer and I found myself questioning the wisdom of all of this within about 10 miles.

I struggled through it though, happy to see a gas station about four miles from home. I stopped for a drink, and this must be regular enough now that they don’t even think twice about bikes being walked into the store.

They have a picnic area to one side of the story and a porch swing on the other side. I sat in the swing for a few minutes to have a drink and top off my bottles. I was only four miles from home, but this was the first truly hot riding of the year.

A man walked out of the store and playfully chastised me for stopping. He had the easy, friendly face that makes you think you’ve seen him before. Maybe you’re supposed to know that guy.

“You aren’t supposed to be taking a break,” he said.

“No” I smiled, “but it is warm out here.”

“Yes it is. You’ll fall out!”

The heat index was about 95 at the time. It was not a strain to believe it, either.

So I came home, dropped the last few miles I had in mind because, as I came up the big hill I realized there were no cars behind me. I could move to the center and then duck into the neighborhood without a problem. And that thought made me so happy I leaned on my handlebars and took the 90 degree turn.

It was only 18 miles, but it was hot. But still, I thought, 18 miles.

And then I read this:

Tamae Watanabe, 73, beat her own age record for an Everest climb by a woman set 10 years ago. She also recovered from an accident in 2005 in which she broke her back and feared she would never climb again.

“It was much more difficult for me this time,” Watanabe told reporters Friday after returning to Nepal’s capital, Katmandu, from the mountain. “I felt I was weaker and had less power. This time it was certainly different. I felt that I had gotten old.”

She reached Everest’s summit from the Tibetan side on May 19, at the age of 73 years and 180 days.

That was properly deflating.

Things here are just fine. We’ve finally had to shut the windows and turn the air conditioning on. We’re to the point of the season where you have to start thinking strategically about when you want to do things like, work in the yard, heavy exertion or breathing.

Grilled tonight, watched the second game of the 2010 Auburn football season on DVD. I received the complete championship season as a Christmas gift and they’re becoming regular summer weekend viewing. I hope the Tigers win.

I thought I should take notes to see if and how and when the announcers started trying to talk differently about Cam Newton. So far, after two games against lesser opponents (sorry, State fans) they’ve been properly deferential. The in-game tone may not change, but if you’ll think back the commentary overall got very nasty.

It is great to see this team play though, and as I said tonight, to do so without having to worry about the outcome. There were a few points that season where they were almost defeated. There were moments when you just thought it was all going to come undone because that’s just the way of it. But, knowing they kept it together and defeated everyone, knowing they survived the biggest smear job this side of the classic 1960s Bryant-Butts piece, the feel of it is altogether different.

Watching Cam Newton play in retrospect, I wrote on Twitter, is like knowing the end to the world’s best sonnet.

What I’m saying is that the guy was like poetry. He was pure, violent, graceful poetry. Pure, violent, graceful, championship poetry.

One of the things I have to do this weekend is eat an entire watermelon. We’ll be out of space in the fridge, otherwise. It is ridiculously good, the first of the season and seedless — despite the presence of seeds. I ate a big portion of it last night and the middle of it today.

Still plenty left, if anyone is interested.

adventures / cycling / iPhone / Monday / photo / video — Comments Off
21
May 12

There are no clever title on Mondays

We went for a ride yesterday. Well, I went for a ride. The Yankee is in training and so she did something called a brick. This involves swimming and riding and I’ve no idea at all how bricks have entered into this.

So she swam in the neighborhood pool. The Olympic pool was closed, on account of their being no Olympians there that day. (There usually are. We live in a place where she gets to be drowned in the wake of people showing off Olympic ring tattoos. Not a bad perk to the locale.)

We counted out the laps, measuring and doing math. The neighborhood pool is small; she did a lot of laps. And then she hopped on her bike and I hopped on mine and I chased her through the countryside.

She was moving on well. I had great legs, owing to taking a day or two off, perhaps. But I was also going on the longest ride I’ve been on in a while, so I wanted to pace myself.

I caught her on a hill after about eight miles. I’m a little bit stronger on hills and this was a series of three respectable climbs. She caught me again later, I let her play out in front and then chased her down just before home. She took the direct route and I meandered through the neighborhood. It was a 20.75 mile ride. Felt great.

I’d intended to take a few wide pictures to celebrate the day, but there was too much huffing.

Did take this somewhere along the way though:

Pretty as a roadside wildflower can be, it was the three buds on this one that intrigued me.

And now for something beautiful:

That is the Lyrid meteor shower, from space. Did you catch Florida as it moved by?

Astronaut Don Pettit on the ISS took the shots last month and they were converted into the inspiring quasi-video. The Lyrid meteors, dust trails from the comet Thatcher, have been observed from Earth for thousands of years. I learned all of this from a Huntsville reporter.

Finally: the grading is done. Now on to other things.

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18
May 12

My old self again

I’ve been sneaking in a few rides this week. I huffed through 10 miles yesterday and 15 today, pronouncing myself fully healed from my amazingly persistent neck soreness.

That has been much better for a week and change, actually. The one thing I’ve struggled with since then was riding my bike. Something about being over the bars — in the drops or properly Flemish on the hoods — was giving me aches and pains. The looking up, to keep an eye on the road in front of me, had been bothersome even if I felt normal in pretty much every other way.

So I’ve been stretching my bike chain a bit this week. Whatever fitness I had are gone, but my neck feels better. Limited by time, I scurried around over yesterday’s 10 miles at what is, for me, a respectable pace.

Today I added to that, confident I am OK and just waiting impatiently for my legs to come back.

And so naturally I fell off my bike.

I’m at the top of one side of the hill on which our neighborhood rests upon. This is the largest hill in town — which, again, isn’t saying much compared to places with real elevation, but still. The one slightly tricky thing about it from this approach is that on this particular road you go up from an easy gradient into a slight right curve to a stop sign, which marks the crest of the hill. Now you have a road in front of you that goes from right to left.

I’m turning right, so naturally any oncoming cars from my left are the primary consideration here. Having reached the intersection, l take my right cleat out of the clipless pedal while simultaneously glancing left. There is a car. My shoe goes right back into the pedal. I fell over. (The car did not touch me.)

That was the part that happened the fastest. You know how, when you recount some memorable moment of life or death you have a 45-minute stream of conscious monologue you can return home with? Not this time.

Unclip, car, clip, ground.

And it was faster than that sentence. I landed on my right hip and arm, somehow managing to keep the bike off the ground with my legs. I think I might have gotten my left hand over, too, because that wrist hurt for a few minutes. I have two little scratches on my knee.

I’m fine. My bike is perfectly fine. My pride was slightly wounded.

Then again, I’m not a very good cyclist.

Just like riding a bike? Just like falling off of one, too.

But I got in 15 miles, which is a joke, really. That’s the most time I’ve had in the saddle in five weeks, though, and I finally feel comfortable about building up the distance again. It feels so good to feel good again.

About baseball, ugh.

Beautiful evening to be at the park. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. There were three Florida home runs, though, and plenty of other scores as the Gators beat Auburn 10-1.

At least they’ll be overconfident for tomorrow’s game, the finale of the regular season.

adventures / cycling / Friday / friends — Comments Off
11
May 12

A tale on travel day

Rode my bike yesterday. The Yankee and I set out to ride together, which is rare. Usually our schedules or her regimented training or my desire for long, meandering rides don’t allow us to venture out at the same time and going the same way.

She had trouble with her CatEye, the little computer that measures her speed and distance and time. There is a sensor attached to the bike’s fork and a little magnet attached to a spoke and the revolutions are beamed to the computer on the handlebars which do the math and, there you go, you’re cruising at an admirable speed. But she had problems. And then she fell over. She didn’t crash. She just fell. Still not sure how.

Did you know she was an All-American gymnast and a diver? She’s very graceful.

And so we pointed our wheels down the road chasing one another around the city’s bypass, through the subdivisions that dot the landscape, across the big intersection with the road that slices through the heart of town. After that we hit a new construction zone which covers about six miles of that bypass. Just under halfway around it we turned back in toward the campus.

And then when we hit the bypass on that side of things I called an audible and pointed to home. I did 10 miserable miles. This being the first time I’ve really been on my bike since April 9th. So while my neck and back finally feel better — I’ve tried to change my sleeping posture, which has been a big help — I’ve lost whatever little sliver of fitness I had built up.

Back to square one, then. And if you think that’s frustrating, well, you’re right.

Today is also a travel day. We spent most of the afternoon in the car, headed to Jackson, Ala., a tiny you-can’t get-there-from-here town to the southwest. Our friend Wendy is getting married tomorrow.

Tonight they had a little family get together at the bride’s parents’ home. There was also a shower, which I didn’t have to go to, fortunately. Instead I caught up with friends from Birmingham and Savannah and right there in Jackson.

This is the first time I’ve ever been to Wendy’s hometown. She has, for the entire decade-plus that I’ve known her, complained about how small it is. But they have 3G AND a Walmart. What else could they possibly need?

Tomorrow is the big day, though. We once counted up our friends and thought Wendy’s wedding would be the last one we’d go to for a long time. Never say this. This will be the second wedding we’ve attended in less than a month. We have another in three weeks.

And we’re running out of present ideas.