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18
Jul 11

Tractors count

Pedaled 35.8 miles this morning. And, as I told The Yankee (who beat me home today) I bonked so hard I physically felt it. There I was, struggling along, wondering if it was too early to start trying to count the remaining hills in my head when it felt as if a 10 pound weight had been dropped upon each shoulder.

The last six miles were done in sheer defiance.

But it was a lovely day for a ride. Bright, quiet, few cars on the road as I moved away from town before “rush hour” and stayed in the country for most of the ride.

One of my goals is to pass a moving car. Just getting up from a redlight doesn’t count. Waiting for a safe path to turn doesn’t count. I almost had one in the neighborhood once. He was adhering strictly to the speed limit and if I’d only had a little more juice left in my legs I might have made it a compelling race. Thought I had another one today:

Yes, tractors would count. He turned off just before I caught up to him. Chicken. I’d entertained the notion of following him, but he went down a gravel road. I, too, am a chicken. The fun of it was that, had I not slowed to compose a photograph I might have overtaken him.

Tractors would count.

One of the nice parts about the route we took this morning is that much of it is so far out in the middle of nowhere you can go miles without seeing a car. You also have great scenery:

I love that stuff, and this area is full of fields that used to feature working houses or barns that are now storage or little more than rusty, rotting windbreaks. Occasionally you get to see things you aren’t really sure about:

Maybe it isn’t a mirage. Couldn’t say. This was on a stretch of road I’ve pedaled on once before, notable for the calm, quiet pastureland and that there is no store for miles and miles around. You instinctively nurse your water through here, even on a hot July day, because you don’t know when you’ll find a place with more to sell you.

Near that house:

I’m always on the lookout for a flat field with a lone tree and nothing in the background but horizon. The parts of the world I live in are too hilly and too covered in trees to see it, but somewhere on the great plains this place exists. I don’t know why I look for that setting, but I have an urge to take a photograph of it. I look and I look, and I find neat little places like that. You probably wouldn’t even notice that from a car. I speak from experience, having spent countless hours on sleepy country roads driving from one family dream to another family event.

I thought of this on my ride today. I have a list of questions I’m going to ask should I ever get to speak with someone in Management in Heaven. One question is “How close did I get to walking over buried treasure?” Another is “Was my purpose something small, like not letting someone off the phone so that they could not leave their home and narrowly miss a horrible accident? Or was it bigger, like eating all of the Little Debbie snack cakes?” I have a whole list. And now this: “How much time did I spend on little two lane country roads?” I wouldn’t ask that out of despair, at least not anymore, but out of wonder. There can be a great joy that can be found in getting from here to there, even on paths you’ve taken your entire life.

Or on new paths. Today I found myself at an intersection that featured an old country dining restaurant, a decrepit fireworks stand, a Dollar General, a stand-alone ice dispenser and a random country grocery store. I’m going back with a fistful of dollars.

The Yankee took me to lunch today. She wanted salad, so we visited Panera, where they now give you a pager, ask for your social security number, blood type, mother’s maiden name and the lotto numbers you play. When your food is ready they call your name.

I had a brief chat with the guy at the pickup counter.

Are the pagers broken?

“No … “

And that was it. They don’t use them, his voice trailed off as if he hadn’t considered being asked such a question, as if the local franchise had been unsure, all this time, about how to use those big chunks of black plastic. How does the home office know what is happening in all of the various satellites operating under their signage near and far?

I liked Panera better before the prices went up and the cups got tiny, back when there was a little craft on display in their sandwich making process. Today I had warm soup dipped from a warming vase and a sandwich with cold cuts. This will run you about seven bucks. The cups, though, are the thing that get you. The Panera drink glass is now the size of most people’s water cups. The Panera water cup is a diminutive thimble. As if they have a staff member, the guy who’s on this mysterious “Pager Duty” walking the floor making sure no one ordered a water and pumped in a little carbonated lemonade instead.

Give the place credit, though. This particular Panera actually has seating, a concept which is as foreign in most of their restaurants as the pagers. This is a happy accident. This Panera is in a strip mall and was previously a … my memory and the Internet don’t recall what it was, let’s call it a specialty boutique retail store of indistinct origin or business model. They’ve capitalized on the space, and there are plenty of tabletops. In fact the room segments itself nicely, along the front are the college kids, in the back are the silver foxes.

We try to sit in the middle.

Links and stuff: Students at the University of Alabama put this little video together on life after the April tornado. Do check it out:

There’s plenty still to do around the state in recovery. A lot of that has been done so far by way of social media, and no one has been more prominently centered than James Spann. He’s a humble guy who downplays his role, but if ever a meteorologist was a hero before, during and after a storm, he’s your guy. He’s talking here at the recent TedxRedMountain event.

You want pictures? The Atlantic is running a deep photo essay on World War II. Good stuff.

You want words? Brooks Conrad is a baseball player, the kind you might celebrate because he came up the hard way and made it through grit and perseverance. And then there was the night when his life all but came unglued. You don’t have to be a huge baseball fan or even a Braves fan (I’m neither.) for this story.

When in doubt, blame it on your mother.

Auburn / cycling / football / history / iPhone / memories / photo / weekend / World Cup — Comments Off
17
Jul 11

Sport, sport, sport, steak, ice cream

We are watching the 1989 Iron Bowl, it is like giving an education, really. The Yankee, you see, was up north and not yet interested in football. When she moved to the South she said her allegiance was for sale. Whatever big time football game someone took her to first would be the team she’d cheer for.

I took her to an Auburn game, and she was hooked.

Here’s Carl Stephens with some of the best words in the world. I recorded that at the game that night. We sat in the upper deck, on the west side over the 20 yard line. As we’d only been dating a few short months by that time I was trying to play it cool and not sound too overwhelming, but there’s so many things you have to know about this place. How Auburn played that night wasn’t one of them, as the Tigers came out flat in their season opener. But that was 2005.

This is about 1989. For some lovely reason the local television stations have taken to filling weekend programming with old Auburn football games this summer. This is brilliant television, really, and there’s no better choice than the first Iron Bowl in Auburn. Pat Dye called it the most emotional moment in school history. David Housel, who’s never been shy about bad historical hyperbole, likened it to reaching the promised land. The players that played there that day said the place has never been louder or more crazed or desperately intense.

Take it away, Jim Nantz:

Is it football season yet?

So we’ve watched the first three quarters, and it is great to see Reggie Slack — who’s selling insurance these days after a cup of coffee in the NFL and a Grey Cup appearance in the CFL. The third play of the game:

It is nice to see Keith McCants again, who was just an incredibly talented, scary good football player.

He’s had some legal problems, but by all accounts is the guy you root for. And he’s lobbying, on his Facebook page, to be on the next season of Dances With the Stars. Seems that his career is now mostly Retired Star Football player, but becoming a star in the South may let you do that. The best part is just hearing the crowd and the marching bands, before the stadium was filled with piped in music. You can forget the original atmosphere if you aren’t careful.

Haven’t shown her this yet:

Seriously. Can it be football season now?

Rode 38.5 miles on the bike today. Felt very nice and the sun only came out late in the journey. Saw this:

It is like they are saying “A payphone! Use me!” This now costs $.50. I couldn’t tell you the last time I used a pay phone, so this $.15 increase was a novel surprise. Perhaps the calls should get cheaper as demand has gone down …

I would say pay phones, perhaps like pawn shops and check cashing stores, should be a status indicator, but that phone was at a nice gas station in a fine part of town. We got Gatorade there and pedaled on.

Great soccer game today. The U.S. women’s side was quite good, but not great. The Japanese played solid, but not spectacular. The Americans couldn’t close the deal and the Japanese ladies would not quit, coming from behind twice to force penalty kicks. And from there the sense of inevitability gave way to a little disbelief. But the Japanese were great and deserving winners.

More to the point, that was 120 minutes of great, clean sport, played well by two teams. It was wonderful see a contest about the game, not about some scandal or overwrought subtext — the healing of Japan thing got overplayed, but that was unavoidable. This was 11 a side playing hard and, for the most part, playing very well. Great experience, even if the other team won.

Now if only the spectators and media would be more interested prior to the Big Game, but perhaps one of these days. What was intriguing was how the narrative for the Americans was not about gender or equality, but about sport and competition. There’s a subtle shift that started taking place in the televised coverage that is worth noting.

Steaks on the grill tonight. We low-grilled the meat, baked potatoes and fried some okra. After dinner we commemoration National Ice Cream Day by buying a pint on a cone at Bruster’s. They close at 10. They aren’t really amused when you show up at 9:45, but we got the obligatory ice cream celebration in just under the gun.

It is a tough life, I tell you.

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16
Jul 11

Soggy, crab cakes and “big hair, dread-a-locks”

“Hurry, so we can ride before the rain.”

Didn’t quite work out that way. On the other hand, the silver lining of those drunken, soggy, incontinent clouds, is that I think I discovered the secret. Somehow it seemed easier to go up hills with three pounds of water in my shoes.

I think the weight helped push the pedals.

So we rode 17.19 miles. The temperature when we got home was a brilliant 73 — we saw a guy in a hoodie, in Alabama in July — so that was grand. For a time it was hard to see. The rain was actually refreshing and cool. It was patently dumb, so I called an end to the ride. The Yankee said “It will stop by the time we get home.” It did. She is very smart.

But by then we were home. And we resolved that this better be a pause, and the heavens better populate our fine community with feral cats and dogs learning about gravity, or else we would kick ourselves for packing it in.

It rained more.

We made shrimp and crab cakes from Whitey’s in Florida, and corn and tomato salad from Ajax Diner in Mississippi as this week’s experiment from the Off the Eaten Path book. Both tasty, but I think there’s only so many ways a corn and tomato side can turn out. Now, the shrimp and crab cakes were almost divine. Not bad for two people who’ve never made them before.

How long did it say to fry them? I asked this after taking over, because the oil was popping and burning my now very upset, in pain co-chef. On one of the last crab cakes a bit of oil jumped out of the skillet and headed directly to my face. My flinching to the left — and truly, it was only a flinch — meant the dollop of hot burning sulfurous dripping sauce landed on the bridge of my nose, rather than in my left eye. Next time I’m breaking out the shop goggles.

Shop goggles, I say. I probably have some from my high school in a box somewhere. Everyone hated the shop goggles, but we were teenagers:we hated everything that had to do with safety and responsibility and sanity. It is amazing all of those people graduated with ten fingers.

I believe our teachers — fine, fine gentlemen — would have built a XX Days Without An Accident sign if only their students wouldn’t have interpreted it as a challenge. I’d tell you stories, but OSHA’s statute of limitations has not yet expired, and I graduated from high school 16 years ago.

Anyway, I am now the only person in North America to have eaten crab cakes with a dollop of aloe vera on just the bridge of his nose. If we’d made them earlier in the day I could have been the only person in North America to have eaten crab cakes with a dollop of aloe vera on just the bridge of his nose and wet socks, a feat that may never be duplicated.

We’re aiming high around here; it is the weekend.

Oh, need a tune stuck in your head?

Don’t even pretend to be upset. You’re sharing that with everyone in your office come Monday.

cycling / errands / Friday / video — Comments Off
15
Jul 11

No, we need the small shrimp

The good people at the grocery store must think we are trouble, or in trouble. It doesn’t take long before we are playfully picking on one another there. I fuss about the bill, the size of the box, why we are there two days in a row. And on and on. Today, the cashier a nice older lady who just liked to be out working and around people, did not exactly know what to make of us.

She should have seen us pondering the bananas, or looking for the quinoa.

Not sure what that is, but there are precisely two options for the grain, just down the aisle from an entire United Nations of rice selections. Perhaps it is the failed supply that could not go into Grape Nuts. There was a cereal I always wanted to try.

Maybe at an early age it was the Seinfeldian paradox that interested me. You open the box, there’s no grapes, no nuts. What gives?

Maybe it was the notion of breakfast on the beach, or the punctual milk man. Perhaps it was the poor man’s Sally Kellerman, or the guy who was the first person in his circle to hear Michael Bolton AND got the Grape Nuts jingle.

So, yeah. At the store again. We’re making dinner from a recipe book tomorrow night and that requires the precise amount of vegetables and seafood treats, and also a spice called Old Bay, which seems like something that should be discovered in your great uncle’s medicine cabinet. (I was informed we had the Old Bay. Good, I thought, I’m not spending $2.26 on that.

Grape Nuts is still around, but struggling. Wikipedia blames the many owners of Post. I think it was this spot:

It is an SNL bit with no soundtrack, a bad idea with a microwave, and a repudiation of every suburban Aspen thing the entertainment industry would dare imagine about the rest of the country.

You can imagine how that conversation started.

“We’ll need flannel, frost on the windows, a woman undisturbed by a studio in her kitchen and quiet kids who know when to shut up and just eat their cereal or they will go to school hungry!”

That was shot in 1993, and it comes off like everyone in the frame is over-medicated before it became the raison de-pharm. And it was all downhill from there. Microwave your milk? Again, Mom?

Anyway. It was raining when we were ready to leave the grocery store. We’d packed along the save the earth bags and then forgot them in the car. I’d offered to fetch them, but felines and canines were demonstrating terminal velocity in the parking lot. The nice, clean cut young man who helpful packed our plastic bags and secretly loathes the chore of it offered to carry them out. I laughed and said, Good for you. I didn’t think you’d offer to get rained on. But no need, sir.

These people have no use for conversation with you. They seem surprised that you’d try. Their dynamic is groceries? Outside? Are you sure?

One guy chatted me up last fall, one of the guys who would not take no for an answer. He was one of those types of people you meet and, later, you have a tinge of relief that door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen are no longer working your neighborhood. He would be this man. He wished to talk football. And also washing dishes.

He would have been marvelous at selling the first six volumes of the set, but you’d have trouble maintaining the pretense of needing books H through Z.

We need rain. We are in a severe drought. And it has looked all day as if it would rain. Really, I don’t recall a summer with more of a threat of rain, but less actual precipitation. One eye spent most of the day watching the radar, studying little blips moving in every direction, wondering if the famous Southern boomers would develop from nowhere.

Finally, after hours of this, I grew frustrated with waiting for the rain and hit the bike. My plan was to make a big loop around the neighborhood. It gives me two entrances toward home and one area with stores that can be a refuge if necessary. This was a bad ride, even by my considerably low standards. Cramped my calf, burned up my quads and couldn’t hold a pace. I did only 12 miles and the rain was the only thing I paced. I am surprised and disappointed by how poorly I feel on the bike after just a week off. But i’ll lower the saddle a bit again tomorrow and see how that feels.

Mostly, I have to remind myself, I am not these guys:

Tour all weekend, the 1989 Iron Bowl tomorrow, the Women’s World Cup final on Sunday. Great weekend of sports. Also there will be riding and crabcakes and coding. Oh, yes, we’re doing work this weekend! I’ll be coding and staring at magazines and spreadsheets until my eyes hurt.

Much like riding the bike, or visiting the grocery store, this doesn’t take long.

Auburn / cycling / history / links / photo / Thursday — 1 Comment
14
Jul 11

Stuck in the 1930s

Rode my bike today for the first time in eight days. Rode Wednesday of last week, overslept Thursday, broke the bike on Friday, got it back Tuesday, was rainish Wednesday and here we are.

So we set out and I pedaled on for about three miles. Hit a stop sign to wait for The Yankee — and make adjustments to my saddle — when a fine little wave of nausea rolled over me. The sun is shining, the heat is blaring and I’m hunched over like the guy who might have had the bad borscht. Oh I was fine, it was just the dizzies and the light headedness that got me. I’m blaming the eight days off.

Figuring the last thing anyone needed was an embarrassing blackout incident I called it a ride and, slowly, pedaled my way back home. So, after watched three days of wonderful Tour de France coverage, my triumphant return was just shy of nine miles. That’s just disappointing.

But I’m fine, thanks.

Spent a little bit of time tracking this guy down:

That’s Earle Smith, Alabama Polytechnic class of 1930. He’s a 2nd lieutenant in the University’s ROTC in this photograph. He was also a baseball player, the football team manager, a member of the literary society and other things during his time in school.

He’s important because The War Eagle Reader was running a feature on him. Seems that just before the war came to him in North Africa, he took a tour of the deserts of Egypt. His guide walked him up to the Sphinx and, as the story was retold goes, he paid the guide to look away and hand over a chisel. Smith (no relation) chiseled War Eagle into the old monument.

And then he got his nose bloodied by Rommel before ultimately defeating Hitler.

What happened to the army captain after his sandy vandalism is a modern mystery. The story made its way into the student paper in 1944, so one presumes he came home from the war. He’d majored in secondary education so I assume he taught for 10 years or so before the war got in his way. Maybe he came home and was able to easily get back to the business of raising his kids and wondering how his students got such wacky thoughts in their heads. He would have been teaching right up until the mid-1960s, after all.

But that’s just speculation. The Internet doesn’t know what became of the man.

I’ve been having this conversation with a guy out west about a relative he had who fought, and died, in the Pacific. Maj. Adam Hallmark is the modern military man. His fourth cousin was Dean Hallmark, who I wrote about earlier this year. Interesting little story.

Anyway, Adam has come across big stores of new information since we first talked and he sent me some pictures this week.

This is thought to be Auburn, possibly campus, in 1936:

Dean Hallmark would recognize just 15 buildings on campus today, not counting the president’s mansion and the chapel.

This is Glenn Avenue:

I haven’t driven the length of it yet for the express purpose of comparing it to this photograph, but I’m betting nothing in this picture remains. And it is a shame about that motorcycle.

UPDATE (Sept 13, 2011): Adam just forwarded along pictures of the ticket books athletes received to attend sporting events back in the 1930s. This is his fourth-cousin’s and, as you can see, is in excellent condition:

It was also never used:

Before magnetic strips and photo IDs they had a funny way of making sure you weren’t stealing someone else’s ticket:

General appearance? I bet you couldn’t say that today.