cycling « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

cycling

Wheels and bolts and things

My bike at rest. It deserves it.

Not because I’ve been riding a lot, but because yesterday was just hills.

Lots of hills. I rode this one over and over again, finally quitting when my times stopped improving.

So I did 15 miles of hills yesterday. That’s a lot of stomping on the bike for a guy with big feet like me. Thirty more miles today. Just as I got back home I glanced down at the odometer.

That’s for the year. So I’m only about 450 miles behind where I want to be on the year. I’ll catch up eventually.

The story about the faucet: This would be a great entry to the running page on fixing things in our house. I don’t have a category for it. It is too late to add one now and I’d probably just name it something hateful anyway. But we can now add to a list of repair jobs that include the air conditioner (twice), the shower, refrigerator, dish washer (twice), washing machine, the toilets (three times between them) and more.

We’ve lived here for less than two years.

So the kitchen faucet developed a drip. We found a certain way that you could turn the nozzle and the handle to minimize the problem. This worked for a while. And then it stopped working. And earlier this week the drip almost became a stream.

I’ve tried to take the faucet apart before so I could replace the washers, but the water is so hard here that all of the innards (plumbing term!) were fused together. I tried this for a few days. I tried this with WD-40 and various other things found in the cabinets and garage.

Having failed at this simple task I decided to just replace the entire faucet. So out from the cabinet came all of the cleaning supplies. Under the sink went my head. The supply lines, I discovered, were also fused on the faucet end. OK, then. I’ll just take it apart and pull the supply lines up from the top and buy new stinking supply lines with my brand new faucet that has to be installed because I can’t take the old one apart to install $.75 worth of rubber gaskets to it.

I’m thrilled.

The supply lines were disconnected from the bottom. I disconnected the sprayer nozzle. I freed one of the nuts that attaches the faucet to the sink from underneath.

The sink, you’ll notice if you spend enough time in the cabinets, is a great two tub cast iron deal. This is the most sturdy thing we own, I’m certain of it. That and the other nut that is attaching the faucet to the sink. That joker was fused with the bolt in the worst way. But underneath that nut was a concave washer type thing (more plumbing terminology!). It, too, was rusting.

And so it was that I found myself donning goggles, grabbing a screwdriver and just stabbing the crap out of that washer type thing. The plan was to punch out so much of that rust-crusted impediment and then just pull everything out from the top.

Which, eventually, I did.

So we went to Lowe’s and bought a new faucet. Nothing they had matched exactly, but that’s OK because we needed a working sink.

And we got in trouble at Lowe’s too! They have those rolling ladder step things and we moved one into the aisle to inspect the faucets above our line of sight. An old guy with a ponytail and a red vest took exception to this. I understood his point — safety is important — but he also understood mine. There is no one around in the store to give you any help. I know this because I’d done this exact same thing on this exact same aisle for more than 10 minutes last night. There were no red vests to be found. So I went to Home Depot, which is literally right across the street. And I stayed on their faucet aisle for even longer, and there were no orange aprons to be found.

Which brought up a great conversation about all of this online. In the middle of which came the Home Depot social media person with the “Oh no! Sorry to hear that! Which store were you in?” It might have been rude, but I said “Is it unfair to say “All of them”? Based on the responses I received from others the rep on floor help is staggeringly poor.”

The social media person did not write back to that.

The Lowe’s red vest with the ponytail came back later, as we were wrapping up our choices, and commiserated on the faucet problem. He knew they had a floor problem. I’m sure the Lowe’s managers do too; they just don’t care. Home Depot? Same thing.

But it gave me time to see things like this, the paper towel holder!

You’ve never seen such excitement for such a prosaic tool! It holds your paper towels! Above the countertop! It holds! Paper towels!

This, at a glance, is simply disturbing:

A jaundiced hand emerging from the wall, holding some sort of Matrix device. Or is it from Alien? Or is it Elvis’ alternative universe microphone. Don’t sing into this one though, you’ll just drown.

Or you could go into our backyard:

It rained a lot today.

Oh, and I installed the new faucet. Took eight minutes. It better work for years.

cycling / food / iPhone / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
7
Jun 12

The cat is mad at us, and I might not be pleased myself

We’re back home. I unpack the laundry — Not clothes. You do not take dirty clothes to someone else’s place to clean, of course. You leave with clothes; you return with laundry. Home, if you’ve ever wondered, is where you do your laundry. — and throw it in the basket or, sometimes, in the washing machine as soon as I arrive home.

The Yankee … she does something. I am usually too fixated to notice. Unload car. Unpack suitcase. Hide suitcase from myself so as to trick the eye that there are no more trips, no more windshields, insulting airport experiences or unusual pillows.

Typically this works. She’s petting the cat, I’m distributing the suitcases, the backpacks and whatever else we have going on. Eventually Allie comes to me, we’ve missed each other, but I want to have these things out of the way. And she’ll camp out in the suitcases if they’re left sitting around for too long.

We’ve been gone a while, but we have someone who is kind enough to spend some time with Allie every day. Check the food and the water and pet her. You’ve never seen a cat crave more from “hoomans” than this one. And so all night last night it was stamp, stomp, meow, head butt, yowl, stamp, stomp.

We don’t have the heart, yet, to tell her we’re leaving again tomorrow. The suitcases, it turns out, didn’t go very far.

At least all of our trips are really great trips!

This is the scene at the Crepe Myrtle Cafe, the local market where we get a lot of healthy food. This is some sort of onion flower:

We get this entire basket of fresh fruits and vegetables every Thursday. Most of them are grown very nearby. The girl that sold them to me today asked if I needed help carrying them to my car. Time to get that hair coloring product, apparently.

I mean, this basket is packed solid and gets hefty after a while, but really. I can handle it. And if I can’t, I’ll be in a commercial for one of those Rascal scooters. Delicious veggies, though:

Finally, got a chance to ride my bike again. Did 28 miles today, working on the backside of the big hill in town. There’s less traffic there, it has two great bends and is nicely shaded in the afternoon. I was timing my speed up it, going up and then down, up and then down. When the time started falling I moved on.

Elsewhere in my ride, I found a new personal best. I’ll have to double check, but I think I might have been speeding:

I believe I could get another mile or so out of that stretch, actually. Something else to shoot for.

FInally, my grandmother is feeling a bit under the weather. We went card shopping. This is the one I did not get:

The inside:

cycling / links / Tuesday — Comments Off
5
Jun 12

There is no metaphor, or metonymy

Rode part of something called Savage Revenge today. Oh it was delightfully horrible. Burned my quads, started a good sweat, stretched my lungs. Got up to the highest part of the midpoint and realized I didn’t have time to go through the entire thing, but I rode far enough to realize this might be a little more than I wanted today.

Beth Newell knows about Savage Revenge. She gave herself a do-over. There should be a metaphor for that:

don’t judge me. i wanted to school SAVAGE REVENGE. and five minutes into the new round, i was already 3 minutes behind. i finished a just little bit off the leader board…..in 1 hour 39 minutes, slightly behind the record of 0 hours 55 minutes.

My friend Will Collier writes about an entry for Worst Reporting of the Year:

David G. Savage of the Los Angeles Times’ Washington Bureau took a deep left turn into flyover country last week, churning out an appallingly inaccurate article on former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman. Siegelman was convicted on felony bribery charges in 2006 (after being voted out of office in 2003). Siegelman, whose prior appeals had been largely denied (two minor counts were thrown out by the Eleventh Circuit while the major bribery convictions remained intact), appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. SCOTUS declined to hear that appeal on Monday. Siegelman, who served nine months of a seven-year prison term before being released on bond in 2008 pending appeals, will now go back to federal court in Alabama for re-sentencing.

Much of Savage’s article should be downright amusing to those familiar with either Siegelman or Alabama. In attempting to explain the strange creatures from this mysterious hinterland to his La-La Land readership, Savage presents this:

Siegelman was the rare Democrat who could win in Alabama. He had also won election as Alabama’s secretary of state, attorney general, and lieutenant governor. But his career ended when Republican-appointed U.S. attorneys charged him with corruption.

That’s one way to put it, if you either don’t know a thing about the political history of Alabama or are anxious to put a pro-Siegelman spin on the whole affair. While all of Alabama’s statewide offices did flip — by significant margins — to the GOP in the 2010 elections, prior to that year “Dirty Don” was far from being a “rare” Democratic officeholder.

How far? The state legislature had been majority Democrat for an astonishing 136 consecutive years prior to 2010.

The reporting actually gets worse throughout the piece. (Update: days later the piece’s many inaccuracies would not be corrected only. This is shoddy or deliberate.)

Want to see Venus go across the sun? The Internet can do that. Wired has links. So does NASA. It was cloudy here. Wikipedia:

Transits of Venus are among the rarest of predictable astronomical phenomena. They occur in a pattern that generally repeats every 243 years, with pairs of transits eight years apart separated by long gaps of 121.5 years and 105.5 years. The periodicity is a reflection of the fact that the orbital periods of Earth and Venus are close to 8:13 and 243:395 commensurabilities.

We watched it on a Netbook, which was something that at least made sense to people in the 2004 transit. What will they watch it on during the next passage, in the year 2117?

If you like reading comments, which is something for all of you masochists in the crowd, you might appreciate the ones added to John Archibald’s column today. He writes:

I’ve heard the questions all day.

Why are people protesting the new printing schedule at the New Orleans Times-Picayune, but not at the Birmingham News and other affected cities?

I hear that it is because we are too far right, or that we are too far left. I’ve heard that we are only interested in black people, and that we hate black people. I have heard we have outlived our usefulness, and that we don’t dig hard enough.

[…]

But if you want to look at why New Orleans protests and why all these other cities don’t, look at the nature of the cities.

New Orleans has identity and pride. Birmingham has division and hostility.

We can’t get together to “save” anything, because we can’t agree that anything is worth saving.

The comments are perhaps some of the more cogent — from almost every perspective– on the subject of Alabama’s shifting media landscape.

I keep my personal inbox as something of an electronic do list. There’s always a lot to do, of course, but I try to keep the size of that one low. You write me, I write you back. Here are some interesting things to read, or some research to consider, I’ll email myself the links until I can work through it. Important errands and tasks, that’s an email.

I had 11 in my inbox tonight when I somehow managed to delete them all. Every last one gone down into the memory hole of trash folders and cross-tabbed folders.

I spent the better part of an hour trying to remember the subject of all of those emails. Some of them came to mind more easily than others. Finally I dug through the cobwebs of both my brain and the trash folder to find them all.

When I finished my lovely bride said “There’s an undo button at the top of the page.”

I’m sure there’s a metaphor in there for some.

adventures / cycling / Monday / movies / video — Comments Off
4
Jun 12

Burned lots of watts, ate lots of pizza

I rode a spin bike today with a device that measures wattage, the true indicator of how badly the people in front are punishing you. The more watts you’re putting out the more you’re working.

It seems I can generate enough power to turn a very small turbine. But only for a few moments.

My bike’s computer doesn’t register watts, which is probably good, because I’d start concentrating on my lack of power and do who knows what. Besides, I mean, pedal harder.

But, res firma mitescere nescit, and all that.

So I tried reading up on watts, at least to the point where the formulas kick in. If you get enough formulae elsewhere in your life you really don’t want it in your recreation. So I tried to find things like your typical cycling wattage, just to see how far human physiology — by which I mean someone else’s, not mine — can go. This, like so much of everything, is variable, which is the firma part of the Latin, I guess.

And since I had to look up American Flyer to get the expression right, and since someone made a spoof trailer about the movie:

Which is not especially a spoof since that’s the precise plot of the movie. But, look: Kevin Costner! WIth something under his nose!

We had dinner with our friends Kate and John last night. Pizza. A big table of hungry people devouring smallish sized thin crust pizzas. And then ordering another one. Or maybe two more.

They were good.

cycling / iPhone / journalism / links / photo / things to read / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
30
May 12

A video to watch and links to read

I love this road. Good quality asphalt, a bike lane basically the entire way from beginning to end. It is quiet because the business of this road is down near the other end. Up here, for the time being at least, it is still undeveloped. It is the victory lap of some of my routes. A fair amount of it is downhill.

I did an easy 20-miler this evening. I’m looking forward to longer rides, which will start back next week.

And if you need a bit of inspiration for, well, just about anything, here’s a video destined to go big. Only 250,000 views so far, but that will change. Tune out the music, and wade through the first two-and-a-half minutes. The reward comes soon after that:

Things to read: Local boy is a good speller. Samford and UAB baseball both make the NCAA regionals. Auburn and Alabama did not.

New York tries to cut down on soft drinks:

New York City plans to enact a far-reaching ban on the sale of large sodas and other sugary drinks at restaurants, movie theaters and street carts, in the most ambitious effort yet by the Bloomberg administration to combat rising obesity.

The proposed ban would affect virtually the entire menu of popular sugary drinks found in delis, fast-food franchises and even sports arenas, from energy drinks to pre-sweetened iced teas. The sale of any cup or bottle of sweetened drink larger than 16 fluid ounces — about the size of a medium coffee, and smaller than a common soda bottle — would be prohibited under the first-in-the-nation plan, which could take effect as soon as next March.

That’s a sticky slope, friends.

Two years after the oil spill, the fishing is bad down on the Gulf:

The long-term prognosis for the Gulf’s health remains uncertain.

Recent studies have found higher numbers of sick fish close to where BP’s well blew out and genome studies of bait fish in Barataria have identified abnormalities. Meanwhile, vast areas of the cold and dark Gulf seafloor are oiled, scientists say.

And many fishermen are convinced something’s amiss.

[…]

“We was there to work, but couldn’t,” said Lawrence Salvato, 49, as he stopped for lunch on a dock where he moors a shrimp skiff he runs his wife, Lisa. “Usually people are excited and they can’t wait to get out there. This year, there’s no real incentive.”

He said he made about $10,000 in seafood sales last year compared to $75,000 in 2009. He said his family made do with a $40,000 interim payment they got from BP. Fishermen who haven’t settled legally yet with BP over damages continue to survive on periodic payments from a $20 billion trust fund set up by BP.

“We’re afraid,” Salvato said. “A lot of people are getting out of fishing. They’re afraid.”

Meanwhile, up in Chicago:

“We are no longer a newspaper company,” Sun-Times Media Holdings LLC Editor-in-chief Jim Kirk said in a memo to staff. “We are a technology company that happens to publish a newspaper. We deliver content. And we will deliver content on many platforms and in ways that we haven’t yet fully considered.”

The times, they have already changed.