cycling « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

cycling

A mechanic, two hours of exercise, and music that still holds up

Took my lovely bride’s car to the shop yesterday and got it back the same afternoon. Regular maintenance sort of stuff. But things are better, she said.

The guy has a shop in the middle of a neighborhood. It’s a two-bay shop, with a slab that’s not big enough for the cars he has on the property. His office is all the way in the back, it’s a … careworn sort of place. That isn’t ordinarily the right word for this sort of thing, but it fits. No one is especially happy when they have to see their mechanic. You take a little angst and stress and — depending on your pocketbook or what’s going on — maybe a little anxiety to your mechanic. People bring in the things that make something careworn.

The couple of times we’ve been there, I’ve seen a few fishing poles in the front room. They’re just sitting there, on a pile of stuff that looks like it hasn’t been moved in a long time. Two rooms back, there’s the guy. A bit on the tall side, thick all the way around. Always wears a bandana. He strikes you as a time-is-money guy. He’s economical with his words, because if he’s talking with you he isn’t making money elsewhere.

I’m not even sure what the guy did to her car given the small amount of money he charged. I asked him to look into something about my car, too. And maybe he will. If he does, maybe he’ll charge me a low, low price, too.

It’ll cost more.

Monday was a beautiful, mild, sunny day. Today was perpetually overcast, but Monday was just lovely. The sort of day where you could unassumingly spend too much time indoors. The sort of day where you wouldn’t even notice it. I spent too much of it inside.

I did go for a little 30-mile bike ride, my first in eight days. I felt like I needed a few days after my last one, and then other things come along and fill your days and before you know it, you wonder if you’ll remember how to balance the thing. It’s embarrassing.

They closed a road while I wasn’t riding. The first sign I saw said the bridge was out. It’s an overpass over the freeway, and I figured it couldn’t be really out, because that would have inconvenienced the motorists below and surely I would have learned about this. So I ignored the signs and the barrels, rode right around them and up to the bridge. And only when I was on the thing did I worry, but the bridge is an engineering marvel and, halfway over, I rationalized that if it could hold itself up then whatever was going on wouldn’t be challenged too much by one guy and a bike.

Only nothing was going on with the bridge. The issue was a little further down the road. This was the issue.

Once I got around that I had, of course, another little stretch of road that was closed from the other direction for the same reason. Almost a mile guaranteed with no traffic. It was lovely! I should just go back and ride that over and over and over again, for as long as it lasts.

Meanwhile, last night was the night the local volunteer fire department … practices driving their trucks around? They actually closed down one road, and a volunteer who takes his traffic directing duties very seriously waved me onto this road.

I’ve never been on this road before! A new road! This particular area is laid out in a wide country grid, so I knew exactly where it would go. It was almost like being lost, but not nearly as fun. Being lost when your legs feel good is just about the most fun thing you can do on a bike. The other day The Yankee was telling me about a ride she had without me where she got turned around for a while and I said, “Really!?” a little excited, and a little jealous. So when I’m not haunting that closed road I need to find more new roads. (I have one in mind just now.)

I saw some beautiful cattle enjoying their evening graze.

Soon after, a fire truck passed me. And I met that rig two more times. I’m not at all certain what they were practicing. (And I know for certain it was VFD practice because they’d deployed signs in some of the areas that were impacted.) Maybe they have new drivers.

Early this afternoon I went for a swim. I put my camera on the bottom of the pool to document the experience.

The experience was laps. I swam, slowly, 1,250 yards. All part of the build up. The build up to swimming more, later. As usual, it took a while for my arms to feel like doing laps. The first 50 yards or so felt great. The next 600 and change felt sluggish. Somewhere between 700 and 735 yards, though, I felt like a champion swimmer. Long build ups, short peaks. Typical.

Actually it felt like a nice swim from about 700 yards through to the end, though I was ready to be done at the end.

Ever since I was a little boy, I said in my best Robert Redford voice, I’ve always gotten hungry around the water. Playing in it, splashing around in a lake, wading in a pool or swimming medium distances, they would all create the same deep hunger. It’s a familiar feeling that a lot of little boys and girls get. Only it never left me. I came to think of it as a physical and a mental need. I can just look at the water and get hungry, was a joke I told my friends. And so I had a second lunch today.

Which was great because, in the later afternoon, and into the early evening, I went out for a casual little 25-mile bike ride. I saw this tractor, which, if you look carefully, is dripping something on the road.

And I set three PRs this evening, all on (little) hills. I am not at all sure how that came to be, but I’ll take it.

Let us return, once more, to the Re-Listening project. As you may know, I’ve been listening to all of my old CDs in the order of their acquisition. I’m also writing a bit about them here, just to pad the site, share some good music and maybe stir up a memory or two.

And today we reach back to 2005, to listen to a CD that was released in 1995, Son Volt’s debut, “Trace.” Uncle Tupelo’s Jay Farrar left the band and that lead to the creation of Son Volt and Wilco (Uncle Tupelo sans Farrar). Wilco’s debut was released first, by a few months, but Son Volt’s debut, in September of 1995, was a bigger hit. Either way, listeners one. (Both bands were, and are, terrific. Two alt-rock, alt-country bands are better than one.)

“Trace” was a reasonable commercial hit, peaking at number 166 on the Billboard 200 chart and soaring to number 7 on the Billboard Heatseekers Albums chart. Perhaps even more importantly, it was a critical success.

“Windfall” was the first single, and the first track. This was the first Son Volt sound most of us heard.

Something about Farrar’s voice that conveys a desperate, lonely, honky tonk feel that you didn’t get a lot of at that time. It was the nineties! And this, for me, was a library pickup to help fill an important gap in the collection.

Here’s the thing, though. These guys could absolutely rock.

The first time I saw them live was at Midtown Music Festival, in Atlanta, in 1998. It was a three-day, seven-stage show. There were more than 100 bands there, absurdly good acts, and you could see the whole weekend’s worth of music — if you were willing to sweat and stand for the whole thing — for just $30 bucks. Son Volt played early Friday. Just after that we saw the Indigo Girls and in between songs Amy Ray said they’d been over to see Son Volt, too. “God bless those guys,” she said.

I saw them once more, the next year. On Valentine’s Day, in fact. I took a girl to a first date to see them. I’d met her in a record store — and somehow it seemed that we knew each other, or the same people, or people thought we knew one another — and music was important to her. Soon after, we worked together. I got tickets to the show and she decided to call it a date, which was unexpected, at least by me. We had a nice time, and I am came to find out later that I passed many tests that night. We dated for four months after that.

She’s manages a big construction company and is married to a realtor. They live close to the beaches where she grew up, close to her family. It looks pretty perfect for her. I wonder what sort of music she’s listening to these days.

If Son Volt is somehow on the list, she’ll have to travel to see them this summer. They are playing a few festivals. Still rocking.

adventures / cycling / Monday / photo / television / video — Comments Off
3
Jun 24

What a fine start to June

We had a party for the god nephews and niece in-law (just go with it) yesterday evening. The boys are at the age of physicality and not understanding the ability to hurt one another. How they don’t devolve in any waking moment to the most charismatic wrestling move now on television is a mystery. But they wail on each other, as kids do, in just about every other way. It’s fun for them both, of course, until it is not. They are both insanely careful around their sister, which is cute. I am still bigger than them, so I can use the news anchor voice or go stand over one when he is being a little too much. Sometimes it’s the little brother that has to be called to heel.

In other words, they’re boys.

So we recreated famous football catches and toured the basement. They were very interested in our basement, which is not nearly as cool as their grandfather’s basement, and I told them so, but they could not be dissuaded. We had pizza and macaroni and cheese for dinner. We played basketball as a last-ditch stalling effort before they finally left.

The youngest, by the way, has a girlfriend and they have kissed at school and he says they both liked it, and he is in the NBA. He is also graduating kindergarten in a few days.

Oddly enough, I wasn’t completely sapped of energy when they left last night. Must have been that real-strawberry popsicle.

The cats hid upstairs during all of this. They are not used to little people, is the best we can figure. Lately they are both quite friendly when an adult comes by for whatever reason. But these half-sized types are no good for them. They don’t really have a reason for this fear, they just know it on a run-upstairs-and-hide level, and they aren’t wrong.

When they weren’t dodging loud, smelly, pokey, little people, they’ve had a great week. Phoebe is anticipating the sun’s movement.

And she keeps a close watch on the front yard.

Poseidon, meanwhile, has the backyard under close and near constant supervision.

When he’s not taking some Poe-time under a blanket somewhere.

Goofball.

So the cats are doing just great, thanks for asking, and so are we!

I only got in 70 miles on the bike this weekend, mostly because Saturday, which I had imagined as a longer ride, was the day my body said “Hey, feet, aren’t you tired?” And my feet said, “Sure am. And what about you, back? A little stiff aren’t you?” And my back said, “Now that you mention it, yeah. And I just bet those hands are numb, too.” And my hands said “Pkkwbo fiwo iwbefnwne.” So I called it at 32 miles.

Most disappointing. It was slow, and I was well behind my lovely bride, and nothing felt especially good. And that’s why I shouldn’t ride a hard, fast, short ride the day before my longer ride, according to the hypothesis I came up with Saturday evening.

And since I was going slow, I decided to shot this hay storage. There are cow pastures on either side of the road, and that’s the leftover hay from the winter, and that should tell you how mild things were.

A version of that photo will probably wind up as one of the banners on the blog eventually.

Yesterday, I did a little recovery ride, designed to not tax myself too much. And my legs felt great on the out part of my out-and-back route. On the and-back portion I realized, Oh, there was a barely perceptible, but nonetheless helpful tailwind working in my fair a moment ago. That, of course, meant I had an insurmountable headwind on the way back in.

Anyway, today, I’m taking off, and I’ll get back to it tomorrow. In the meantime, since we’re here, let’s check on the month’s progress. May was a light month, in terms of mileage, but it’s still a productive (for me) year so far.

The green line is a projection, where I’d be if I rode an average of 10 miles per day. The ride line is where I was this time last year. The blue line charts my 2024 progress. So it’s been a productive, so far, and should be another record-breaking year.

No one is happier than my spreadsheets.

Yes, I have multiple pages of cycling spreadsheets. Never start doing this. Down this path lies madness, and mystery, and sometimes satisfaction, but usually a squinty-eyed, “How are these the data points I’m fixated on?” sort of feeling of “Huh?”

Our next door neighbor is a 1-year-old. And his parents, of course. But mostly the kid. His parents put a swing out under a tree, it is one of those four rope numbers, and it leads down to a plastic swing that looks like the manufacturer just messed up on the high seat molds and decided they could make something work out of it anyway. The boy is starting to come around to the idea of the swing, a little bit. It takes time, but it is a good swing and his parents are determined and, eventually, this will be a wonderful experience and future swings under that tree will be in the blur of memories he carries forward his whole life.

It’s an amazing tree. Huge, wide crown. Thick lush grass underneath. There’s going to be so much fun and imagination that comes to life as he continues to grow.

And he doesn’t even know yet that helicopters live in it.

Things continue to look beautiful in our backyard beds.

No jets or choppers are emerging from our greenery, though.

We are going to have some grapes again this year, though. If we can keep the pests away. (We’ll fail at that miserably.)

But it is fun to try!

I had a student ask me in the spring if I was excited that Jon Stewart was returning to The Daily Show. I’d mentioned some research we did on the program way, way back when and soon after that announcement came down and he remembered that. And afterward he asked me once or twice what I thought about the new episode.

Since it was a new media class, it seemed viable, even if these students have never even seen the product, let alone the Jon Stewart version. Somewhere along the way there was a good injection point and I said, what people forget is that, at its core, this show is a satirical critique of the media, rather than a commentary on society as a whole. And as I watched tonight’s episode I thought, This is the episode that proves my point.

His guest was Ken Buck, most recently the resigning Congressman from Colorado. And he … was not ready for this.

At the end of the interview, my lovely bride said, “He’s not happy right now, is he?” The question allowed me to return to my central thesis about the show. No, he’s not. He was expecting still another softball interview, but the difference is that Stewart came prepared, and was ready with real-time rejoinders, and names and facts. He doesn’t let things slide, which is what political operators are fundamentally trained for now.

Yes, Stewart has a staff. Yes they do four half-hour shows a week, and yes, he is only, himself, doing the one show a week and, sadly, for this limited run, but what he brings to this highly specific interview is different than every other interview you’ll see on TV, which is largely about cheaply, effectively (with conflict, if possible) filling time and getting to the next commercial break. There’s no substance in that formula. No opportunity for push back, even if you were so inclined. And many aren’t inclined. That’s one of the big problems of contemporary media, an issue Stewart has been pointing out for decades now, and perhaps never more clearly than in the A-block of this episode.

Buck wasn’t always pleased with how that went, even though it wasn’t, at all, adversarial. It could have been even less to his liking. Watch the interview, you see that Stewart bailed him out, or let a moment pass, three or four times. (Frustratingly, Stewart let one go that I wish he’d stuck with.)

It was a brilliant piece of television.

adventures / cycling / errands / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off
29
May 24

Every item achieved — though there were only a few

I did that thing this afternoon where you leave the house in order to accomplish a series of goals. I believe this has a name, but it escapes me. Whatever it may be, I bundled up three items together, because they were more-or-less convenient to the route.

First, I drove a short distance to a place that repairs cameras, for I have one in need of repair. You fill out the form and get a standard reply: mail your camera to the address below. Serendipitously, their office was only a half hour away. Cut out the middleman, I say. So I found myself in a nondescript industrial center, you know the type. The map got me close, and a second try got me a bit closer, still. I asked some guys hanging out around their office about the address and they had no idea what I was talking about. This is an area for work, and not personal investment. And most of the work from the many companies leasing space, you imagine, is done off-site. This is a place for morning meetings, day old donuts and misapplied Tony Robbins quotes. And sales reports. You know the sort.

So I dropped off the camera, and then visited a nearby retail store, a giant place named after an object that is used to test accuracy. Granted, it was the middle of a work day, but that place looked and felt dead. Circuit City dead. Open, but unaware of it’s demise. The only thing that wasn’t there was a scent of musty despair. And some items on shelves. And employees. The last three times I’ve been in one of these stores it felt like that, but it could be a question of timing.

I found the thing I wanted, thanks website, but decide it wasn’t what I wanted, so I left.

And then I went to the grocery store. I needed to get some granola and, of course, once I’ve found one I like they seemed to have stopped carrying it. This is the height of first world problems, hilarious in its predictability. There was also a small list of other things we needed, Ketchup, aluminum foil, corn meal and the like. And this probably says as much about our house as possible, grated cheese was on the list twice.

When we consolidated our houses when we married, we had a lot of extra things. Each of us had a house full of stuff, of course, and in some respects we had more than one copy of things. Somehow, our two houses became stocked like three homes. When it came to consolidating refrigerators we had five or six different canisters of the grated cheese. (She brought most of it.) It took ages to use it all, and we still laugh about it. I’m sure that’s why it was on the shopping list at the top and bottom. I only purchased one container, because we don’t need surplus everything.

I got home in time for a bike ride. My lovely bride was off for a ride with a friend and I decided to ride over to the friend’s house with her. I just needed a recovery ride, anyway after several hours in the saddle yesterday.

The science is still up in the air, but the suggestion is that the benefit is minimal, though people do feel better after the effort, which is meant to be short and low-intensity. They are meant to be almost casual, flat. Zone 1 or Zone 2, with a reasonably high cadence. Easy. You’re not stressing yourself.

It should be so, I’ve read, that you wind up feeling almost guilty about how easy you went.

Let me tell you about trying to stay in Zone 1 or Zone 2 when you’re following someone in Zone Infinity over here.

She gets in her aero bars, puts her nose in the wind and will drop you, or me, in a hurry.

Anyway, they went off one way and I doubled back for home. It was a 15-mile recovery ride, one where I found myself sprinting through intersections because it felt good. I blame her for that, somehow.

And so here is one of the views I saw along the way.

Tomorrow, I’ll just go for a swim.

cycling / photo / swimming / Tuesday — Comments Off
28
May 24

Medium ride day

Today was the day. I did my first swim of the year. It was just 500 yards, which is not even a warmup. It was simply a test to see what part of me would complain first. And the answer was: everything.

Then we pulled up some flowerbed liner and installed some new one. An experiment! A no-going-back experiment!

There’s no going back because I took the old liners to the inconvenience center with a few bags of garbage, a couple of boxes and a giant tub full of recycling. That, somehow, takes about an hour, from start to finish. But it was a warm and beautiful and sunny afternoon.

When I got back home I discovered an iris I didn’t know we had.

It’s flourishing next to this peony.

And not far away from this beautiful little rose bush.

All of which live under the peach tree.

And that looks like another great crop coming later this summer. Which only serves to make me want some peaches, which is good, because we have a lot still in the freezer from last summer!

It is a lot of fun to watch all of these things grow and flourish.

In the early evening I set out for a bike ride, all on familiar roads, but some of them in an unusual order. I love this little tree tunnel.

You only go about three-tenths of a mile under this verdant canopy, but it is a magical stretch of road nonetheless. It is the stuff of childhood fantasy, idle imagination and endless wonder. You just go faster and faster in there.

Also it has to be three or four degrees cooler in there than a stretch of road exposed to the sun. It was a mild 84 today, though, so that wasn’t the biggest concern.

I met some nice horses near the end of my ride.

This pair live nearby, but they were a bit more shy and I had no sugar cubes with which to win them over.

It was intended to be a 40-mile ride, but the map said it’d be 42 miles by the time I got home. In actuality, it was 45 miles when I got back. It was a fine ride.

After dinner, I went out to water some plants, and check on this little light. We have a tiny little structure that holds a few gardening tools next to the greenhouse, and I am enamored with the light fixture on top of it. It feels like a full size miniature, if there’s such a thing.

Plus, it comes in handy for late night summertime projects. So I just need to come up with some late night summertime projects.

books / cycling / Monday / photo — Comments Off
27
May 24

This is mostly about books, and I’m good with that

It’s been since roughly early March, but I feel like I’m catching up on things around here. Which means this is the week I will catch up on things. Which mean something important and pressing will come along to distract me. Something will make me realize this is a false feeling, and that I am, in fact, behind on all of the chores and hobbies and other things I’m just behind on. I will find that note on my phone that has the list of things I want to do, and things I should do, and things I need to do, and then I’m instantly behind the eight ball once more. This is the way of things. But, for the next day or two, this is a good feeling.

So, please, no one write anything on the web. If I’m caught up, I don’t need you adding anything to the To Do stack.

Aaaaaaand … there it is, I just realized something I’m behind on. Oh well, I’ll get to it Thursday, maybe.

Besides, these guys demand all of my attention anyway. Demand it.

We’ve created monsters.

I wonder how long we will leave this box on the kitchen island since Phoebe has made it her own.

After an afternoon of box-sitting, she was ready to quietly sit next to us and take a little nap.

What, in the world, is cuter than that?

Not to be outdone, Poseidon would like to show you his sleeping technique.

How is that comfortable? And it’s easy to say “He’s a cat,” as if that explains anything. But that guy is as spoiled as can be. Not, his cat cave is sitting on the ottoman, because the cat cave alone wasn’t good enough.

So the cats are doing just fine, thanks for asking. And, once again, it is self evident why their weekly check-in is the most popular regular feature on the site.

This weekend, I discovered we have berries.

Who knew? Not me.

This, I assure you, is the moon.

The timestamp says I took that at 11:09 p.m. on Friday night.

Also, I had a 35-mile bike ride, but we’re just going to treat that it’s not even a big deal, in an effort to normalize longer bike rides. I’ll just say this, 35 is sort of the mental barrier. Once I get through that, I’m ready to go out on actual longer rides, and that’s the plan. I’ll continue increasing the mileage because the goal, as ever, is to take nice, long, enjoyable, bike rides. Tomorrow’s ride will be longer than Saturday’s, and so on, for a while.

This weekend we also returned to our best summer weekend system: reading in the shade on Sunday afternoon. Yesterday I read the great Willie Morris’ Yazoo. Morris was from Yazoo, Mississippi, but while he was working as the editor of Harper’s Magazine he made several trips back to his hometown to follow along with how his unique small town was handling integration.

(Most small towns think they are unique. Some of them are. Yazoo may be. How they handled integration, at least in those early stages, was different from most.)

Morris, being a liberal Southern Democrat, and more so while he was living in the north, was hopeful about those early days, as you might imagine one would be about a place he loved. He became haunted by what happened in the longer term. None of that is an author’s fault, when you expand on a longform article to turn it into a book, the book becomes a bit of amber, and the stuff frozen inside of it can be right, or wrong. What we get, from our modern vantage point, is a glimpse of a particular moment in time, 1970, and just more of Morris, the tremendous reporter and writer.

As I’m sitting there, a little insect flew onto the left margin of the page, sat there for an eyeblink, and then hopped-zipped into the pages. It was eager to be in the book. Perhaps it was eager to be a part of the book. One with the book. Or maybe it wanted to fly to Mississippi, and then thought better of it, because it quickly zipped away.

It’s a musty old book, in that delightful, yellow-paged pulp way. Probably the insect’s impulse had something to do with the paper’s aging process. And, almost as quickly, it thought better of it, and flew away. It was one of those things in life that seemed important, important enough that you wanted to share it, even as you knew, in real time, you had no way to do it, or the feeling, justice. And so here I am.

Anyway, I started it yesterday, I finished it yesterday. I’m pleased to have done so, as part of my quest to read pretty much everything possible that Willie Morris wrote. It isn’t all grand, but if you read Terrains of the Heart, you’ll understand the impulse.

I forgot to mention this entirely, but since we’re on the subject of books, last week I finished Marching Home. The subhead is “Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War.” Subtitles are a terrible modern publishing necessity, but they hit the nail on the head in terms of the thesis.

It turns out, we’ve never been especially good at supporting veterans. I knew that. It goes back to the Revolutionary War and has been a shame and sometimes downright shameful part of the American condition. These guys had it no different.

One part was physical, and one part was the rest of the north wanted to get on with it. Another part was, psychological therapy just wasn’t a thing yet. That’s seeing a 19th century problem through a 21st century lens. It is a thing we caution people about when reading about historical periods, but it’s easy to do, and easy to return to.

Another one would be: 19th century alcohol might have been less than helpful. The descriptions of some of the people in this book beggars belief. But the whole thing really does seem a shame. And while this is, of course, a book about the Union army, reading it makes the humanist wonder how these same real, gritty, daily problems impacted the soldiers who fought for the Confederacy, too. As lousy as some of the northern infrastructure was for dealing with these problems en masse, it would have necessarily been hard for those guys, too.

After I finished that book, which was well-written and seemingly exhaustively researched — almost 40 percent of it were footnotes and other after matter — I asked the random number generator to pick another book from my Kindle queue, and I started in on Rising Tide. Again, the subtitle, “The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America” tells the tale. (Why not just use that as the title?)

Where I am, as of this writing, is still about 50 years prior to the flood, but it has been a fine read, and very digestible. These two pages are the bulk of what has been offered in terms of hydrology.

Even something like the movement of water is written in a lean-in style, to author John Barry‘s immense credit. And if these two pages intrigue you, even a little bit, this is a book for you.

I’m five chapters, I think, in. We’ve met three main players. Two of them were surveyor-engineers. One of them was fast, and the other fastidiously, obsessively thorough. The former died in the Civil War. The later did not, and, thus far, has proven to be something of a megalomaniac who becomes the head of the Army Corps of Engineers. And he’s just about to run, head-first, into the third main character, a captain of industry who Barry has thus far portrayed as an irresistible object.

Speaking of which, I think I’ll go back and continue on. When I last looked in, they were just getting to the problem of the legendary sandbars.