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Too much of what we like

You start off with the best of intentions. You’re going to settle in and get all the grading done. Finished, finito and kaput. From there, you can take a deep breath, rub your eyes and do other things until it is time to get geared up for the next lecture and class notes.

That’s what you want to do, with the 51 things you have to grade, but when it comes down to it, you’ve come into 51 things to read and think about and give some useful feedback and, ultimately, grade.

It’s the grading part, you see. These are good assignments, but ultimately subjective. So, each time, with each assignment, you have to make sure you’re comfortable with the rubric and that you can deliver it equitably. All of this takes a little time and then there’s just the regular daily stuff and should that really be an 80? Or was it a 70? Should I call it 75? Was that a typo in the feedback?

It goes on and on. The mind goes round and round. And when I grade in bulk I am mindful of two things. First, I have to stay consistent throughout the process. Rubrics help with that, but you keep it at the forefront. The other thing is that I have to stop before I get blurry eyed. The grading must come in stages.

So much for the plan of knocking all of this out in one sitting. And that’s a big part of how Tuesday turns into Wednesday and Wednesday will turn into Thursday.

Time, once again, for We Learn Wednesdays. This is the 26th installment, so you are familiar with the idea. These are the local historical markers, as found by bike rides across the county. This is the 47th marker in the effort, which presently consists of photos I grabbed last fall.

Last week, we saw this building, and several of the colonial-era names we’ve learned in the last several months start to fit together. The courthouse is going on 400 years old, and sits near the center of downtown, even today.

Around the left side of the building, you find this small plaque.

John Fenwick fought, as a cavalry officer, for Oliver Cromwell in the Second English Civil War. (This one was about the Scots, King Charles and a parliament, including Cromwell, that didn’t like him killing his subjects, among other things.) Sometime around that same year he got married. In 1665 he left the Church of England and became a Quaker.

When he came to the new world in 1675 he created the first Quaker colony in North America, seven years before Philadelphia, even. The Salem Tenth was 1/10th of this region of the state. Basically the resolution of a convoluted and contentious series of business dealings, it was a 350-square mile county, making up most of two modern counties. Native Americans lived here, as did the children of earlier Swedish, English and Finnish settlers, people of modest means, merchants, farmers and craftsmen among the forests, meadows, bogs and waterways. The farms ranged from 50 to 300 acres.

It was Fenwick that recorded a land deed with the local Lenape Indian tribe. It was a deed and treaty with indigenous residents that was actually honored. You might remember reading about this in a history class somewhere along the way. The deal was made, the story goes, under the Salem Oak, which died in 2019, at almost 600 years old. Saplings were shipped to every town in the state.

Just a few of the modern allusions I’ve found to Fenwick refer to him as hapless, troublesome and eccentric.

The bottom of the plaque says “That my said colony and all the planters within the same may be settled in the Love of God – and in that peace which becomes all our great professions of being Christians.” Presumably that’s Fenwick, which doesn’t sound so bad a dream.

The Quaker still had some fight in him. It seems the colonial governor of New York, a man named Edmund Andros, wanted Fenwick to stop running his little area. These guys were political rivals. The governor obviously had power. Fenwick felt the same way.

Fenwick regarded himself the political equal of Governor Andros that he was the head of a small, but rapidly increasing colony that he was Patroon by purchase; was Governor by choice of the people. He had pledged his allegiance to the King and taken an oath to discharge the duties of his office faithfully, and to the interests of the people without fear or affection, and hence could not recognize any power greater that his own, save when the prerogative of the King should be exercised.

Andros, obviously, didn’t see it that way. Couldn’t see it that way. He had Fenwick tossed in jail a few times. Once, the governor’s men came down and Fenwick …

bolted himself in his house and refused to go “without he was carried away either dead or alive, and if anyone dare to come to take him it was at their peril, and he would do their business” (New Jersey Archives, I, 190).

He had two homes in the area, was looked upon as a possessor of valuable belongings by his peers. Having been a cavalry officer, he maintained good horses. He was a successful enough farmer for his time. He made furniture, and then became a barber and a phlebotomist. When he was about 65, his health failing, he moved in with his daughter, and died that same year.

He’s buried in an old family cemetery, but we don’t know precisely where his grave is. In the 1920s a marker was put nearby, but there’s not a specific marker for his grave. I’ll have to go by there sometime.

Next week, we’ll visit a 19th century fire house. If you’ve missed any markers so far, you can find them all right here.

Here I am on the descent of Box Hill, in the Surrey Hills, in the Zwift cycling video game, exercise program and winter base mileage accumulator. Yesterday I did the PRL Half, which features Box Hill, a 1.9 mile climb with an average gradient of 4.4 percent, though in places it sneaks quite a bit higher. Right after the primary climb, each time, is a maddening extra climb, a short leg breaker that isn’t happy until you’re going uphill at 9 and 11 percent. But all of that is behind me right here, on my last descent of the day.

Box Hill is said to be a GPS-accurate climb of the real Box Hill that figures into the actual Prudential RideLondon-Surrey route and was featured prominently in the 2012 Olympics. It isn’t the hardest hill, in the real world or on Zwift, but there enough to it to make for an interesting mental obstacle. In yesterday’s route, I had to go over it four times.

This route is the PRL Half which copies the distanced of the Prudential RideLondon-Surrey. I don’t know if I’ll do the PRL Full. I tried the half a few days ago, completed two circuits and decided I’d rather go eat. I’ve never decided anything that quickly, in one heartbeat I was going under the banner, ready to start lap three and in the next I said, “Nah,” and pressed the exit button.

That was the right decision, but sometimes even the right decisions can ring in your ears. So, yesterday, it was back to the half. Four laps, each anchored with that Box Hill climb. I had a plan. Go out slow the first time, slow-ish for the second lap, do whatever felt right on lap three and drag myself over the climb on the final loop. It seemed a wise plan.

This is what happened. On Zwift there are ghost riders, representations of your effort the last time you were on that particular route. Sometimes they fall behind you because you’re stronger, today, than you were the last time. Sometimes they dance just ahead of you for reasons unknown to man and science. Some days they disappear ahead of you because you’re tired. On my first lap I kept pace with the ghost rider, even as I was telling myself to go slow. This particular route gives you two ghost riders. One for the whole lap, and the segment for the Box Hill climb. So, at one point on that first lap, I had two ghost riders ahead of me. And then I was ahead of them, and so on. At the top of the 1.9-mile climb, I was in between them. I had to chase the first ghost down the hill.

When we got back to the starting banner I was able to follow my go slow-ish strategy for lap two. First the initial ghost rider and then the second would dangle just ahead of me, until nearing the top of the hill. The full lap ghost rider finished just ahead of me, and that was fine, because I was in this for the duration, not the time. At these speeds, duration was a thing.

Now I had to get over the climb on the third lap and let my legs rest on the descent. The ghost riders, again, only riding at my previous pace, but they easily dispatched me. That’s good for the morale on lap four.

On lap four, I found a nice little burst. I dropped the first ghost rider right away and when I linked up with the second ghost rider on the climb, he too fell behind. I hit the peak of Box Hill some 42 seconds ahead of both of them, and had about three minutes on the full-lap ghost by the time I finished the loop.

Which meant I had to continue on for nine more miles. And then sprint! Anyway, that’s 42 miles in the basement. The effort helped turn this February into the fourth most prolific month I’ve ever had on the bike. Before the week is out this should become my most productive month. There will be several spreadsheets to update.

I cut 100 words from the Box Hill story so I could include the most salient details of tonight’s late night ride. It was a flat course, but it featured five sprints. The Zwift timer shows two data points. One is your performances over the last 90 days in that particular sprint segment. The other is your time, relative to everyone else in that Zwift world at the moment. So you can see your times historically, but also your results compared to the 2,500 peers currently pedaling away around the world.

In those five sprints, I finished 2nd, 2nd, 1st, 5th and 1st.

My avatar wearing the coveted green sprinter’s jersey means simply this: all of the real fast people were already fast asleep.

Something you’ll like even more: a few more photos from last month’s SCUBA diving trip. The most important element, of course, being my dive buddy, and the best fish in all of the world’s seas.

Here’s another decent photo of a giant tortuga. She was big, and very patient with us.

And here’s a random photo I managed to take at the end of the dive. It seems I was juuuuust about to break the surface.

But who wants to do that?

Cozumel / cycling / photo / SCUBA / site / Thursday — Comments Off
15
Feb 24

It’s Spanish for “shark” (there’s a shark in the photos below)

Site news! I just sold this place! Some joker is buying it for $1.3 million and I’m cashing out! See ya, suckers!

That would be about what I’d say if that were true. And if Kenny “The Jet” Smith’s people want to call me — as we have a longstanding social relationship — which earned me a piece in a textbook a few years back …

Worth a shot.

No, here is the actual site news. The front page photos have been updated. It is now diving-themed once again. For example, a larger version of this photo is there.

There are 10 images in the current rotation. I’ll three rotations of 10 each for a while. That should keep us until the front page needs re-freshening with some other amazing photographs, or when The Jet buys me out, whichever comes first.

That was one of the things on the day’s list. Updating the front of the site, not selling out.

(Seriously, Jet, my number is 555 …)

There were eight things on that list when I closed my computer last night. And I managed to do six of those things today, and did some other work prep besides, so I am satisfied with the effort.

One thing I did, of course, was take a little bike ride down in the Smith Indoor Training Center. I did 66 minutes, which is about where my enthusiasm has dwindled the past few rides, come to think of it.

I did an actual training ride, today, an anaerobic capacity into VO2 exercise. I did this because I read a site recently which said that, without a training plan, I was just doing junk miles. Miles for miles’ sake. I was fine with that, of course, until someone put that particular name to it. My base miles are not junk. And they’ve come with some real exertion. But today I did this interval workout with five sets above my wattage threshold and set some new Strava PRs in the process. Behold! My phone!

I took Tuesday off from riding, opting for quality time, instead. It must have been the right choice because I didn’t feel bad about it, or second guess myself in the moment. Even still, today was my 20th ride in the last 21 days, which is a fair amount for a duffer like me.

On my cycling spreadsheet — everyone has one — I have a page that shows the best of each month. So I know what my most prolific July is, which year had the most miles in August, which September saw the most pedal strokes, and so on. (2011, 2023, 2014, respectively.) I have a separate column for February, because it’s February. And February of 2023 is my most successful year, for now. But that mark is going to get crushed, probably before the end of this week.

We’ll look back on this month and see the asterisk, but the asterisk will be about the leap day, definitely not about junk miles.

Meanwhile, back under water, since I told you about the front page updates and we’re still working our way through the photos from our last dive trip. I found one where my lovely dive buddy is actually demonstrating evidence of breathing.

The first rule of diving is just keep breathing. That’s actually a rule. I got quizzed on one of the dive boats because, someone has to be the fall guy and the divemaster asked me about the first rule. I said, “To make sure my partner comes back up. And also to keep breathing.”

I started diving at the beginning of the George H.W. Bush administration. That guy was just going to have to overlook my flip little joke.

Tortuga!

That’s Jennifer, one of the famous turtles of Palancar Reef. I believe she was trying to introduce us to her friend. Do you see that little overhang she seems to be working her way to there? Can you see what is underneath it?

Now you can.

Tiburón!

If you’ve been enjoying views from under the sea just off the coast of Cozumel, not to worry. I have a few dozen more photographs, and a lot of videos to work through.

Cozumel / cycling / friends / markers / photo / We Learn Wednesdays / Wednesday — Comments Off
7
Feb 24

An old friend, a much older building, and modern fish

I spent part of my free time today emailing with an old friend. We worked together for a few years, used to be geographically close enough to have the occasional family dinner with them when they were all in town. We chat about once a year or so now. It’s a pretty regular clockwork.

And I think, on my part, it is because I don’t always have new amazing things to tell my most discerning friends and colleagues about. Oh sure, there’s always the new thing in the yard, or a clever solution to a problem chore or something funny one of us said to the other, and don’t forget the latest cat antic. But the really cosmopolitan types … you need a special story for them.

So I did the big swipes. These are the concerts and shows we’ve seen. This is a museum I’m hoping to visit soon, and so on. All three of his adult children now live in the same town in Florida, and my friend and his wife are both from Florida and so it sounds like they may be looking to move back down there sooner than later. Also, they’re going to Iceland this fall.

I should go to Iceland. But maybe not in October.

Also, today, I came up with a clever solution to a problem chore. And let me tell you about this joke we shared last night …

This afternoon, on the bike, I rode the volcano circuit on Zwift. It’s a short loop, and a central point of fixation for some people on Zwift. Some people are there to chase the badges, and there’s one badge that you earn when you’ve completed 25 loops around the volcano in one ride. Until very recently, I thought this was a route involving going both around and up the volcano. This would be a 355-mile ride with more than 15,000 feet of climbing that destroyed more than your most romantic metaphors of suffering. But, no, the volcano circuit is a different route. A flatter route, and shorter. Completing 25 laps would be only 63.5 miles. This would take about three hours, which is a long time to be on a stationary bike.

I earned the 10-lap badge today. I don’t care at all about the badges. I’m interested in three things on the bike. Going as fast as I can — which is never that fast. I also want to ride as long and as much as I can — which is also relative, of course. And, to have fun.

You can’t spreadsheet fun. And trying to document the much more quantifiable speed would be demoralizing. So I concert a lot on the miles.

I’m not really sure why, but I do.

The other thing I’m concentrating on, at the moment, is consecutive days in the saddle. I wonder how long I can keep this current streak alive.

Speaking of the bike, it is time for another installment of We Learn Wednesdays. I ride my bike across the county to find the local historical markers. This is the 24th installment! And, lately, we’ve been checking out many of the markers I banked late in the fall. This is the 44th marker we’ve seen in this series. And it has to do with this 19th century building that looks not at all out of place in this downtown area.

Surrogate has the traditional “one who takes the place of another” definition in this instance. It’s been an office around here since 1710, when the Archbishop of London granted the colonial governor authority to act as the Archbishop’s Ordinary, or Surrogate General. The governor then localized that to the county level, and the surrogates looked after things like probate wills, marriage licenses, and other things that, today, we think of as county records.

Which is why this building looks out of place as it does. As the sign notes.

Today, the state has an elected surrogate in each county. That person is elected to a five-year term. A man named Smith Dorman, or another man, Benjamin N. Smith (of the Whig party) was the first to staff this building. Fifteen others have filled the role since then, including the woman currently in office, who has been there since 2006.

The surrogate court has moved down the street, and the clerk’s office is elsewhere these days, too. Maybe there are some wonderful renovations taking place inside those special fire-proof walls.

Next time, we’ll see the ancient courthouse. If you’ve missed any markers so far, you can find them all right here.

Let us return to the water! Why can’t we be in the water today? We should definitely be in clear blue water today …

My dive buddy agrees.

Sometimes you get lucky with the sponges and the coral in one shot. A version of this one is definitely going on the front page rotation when I finally get around to updating it. (Next week.)

At other times, you just can’t decide which fish to fixate on, so you stay wide, try to keep them all in the viewfinder and hope it all works out.

This is where, in the selection and editing today, I’d used the next shot because it looks like a world class photo-bombing by a wide-eyed reef fish. Alas, the exposure was lacking.

Instead, I offer you this much better photo, which will also make the front page of the site. It has the added bonus of making you wonder if I was just diving in an aquarium. (I was not.)

And this isn’t the best composition, but it is the best shot this Atlantic blue tang gave me. Look at those incredible colors!

OK, that’s enough for now. I’ll have more diving photos and something from ground-level, as well. (Which is to say it is sunny and mild, and you should go wander around outside for a few minutes when that happens.)

Cozumel / cycling / Monday / photo / SCUBA / video — Comments Off
5
Feb 24

For a brief moment, I was ahead, and now I’m behind

On Saturday, a finer day was never made, I tried the Cascadian Farms blueberry granola with a box of store brand raisins. Once again, the raisins were undefeated in augmenting the flavor profile of what I put in the blue breakfast bowl.

This morning, I tried mixing the first two varieties, Bob’s Red Mill Honey Oat and Bob’s Maple Sea Salt. I added raisins, of course. And, so far, the mix of these two have been my favorite. But I have also learned something uninteresting today.

Basically, photos of granola in a bowl all look the same. So my breakfast experiment will continue — this week I have to try other mixes and then soon I’ll perhaps go pick up some other brands and flavors to try.

You’re broken up by this decision, I know, but the kennysmith.org visual editor has sent out memos. Memos.

Another memo has just come down, in fact, reminding me to get on with the most popular weekly feature on the site. So let’s check in with the kitties.

It’s so cute when Phoebe covers up her eyes to go to sleep. She’s very serious about her relaxation.

Poseidon does it, too. Though, lately, he’s been interested in balancing on legs and feet.

We have a joke about the two of them, siblings. My lovely bride notes when they’re doing the same thing.

Come play with us. Come play with us.

Then I say, “You’re freaking me out!” Because it’s weird when they do the same things together. And she laughs. The cats are unimpressed, because they’re cats.

But, as you can see, they’re doing just fine.

We’d all be doing better if we were diving, I’m sure. Today’s feature from our recent trip to Cozumel is a video. There’s some great footage here, including a closeup of a turtle.

And, of course, we’ve many more photos and videos to enjoy in the days to come.

I’m now on a nice little streak of consecutive days in a row on the bike. This weekend I set a personal best in that regard. Today, unrelated to that entirely useless notation, I received the monthly email from Strava. I always love this part.

That’s about right.

On Saturday I had a big ride. A long climb from virtual sea level up beyond the virtual snow line. This, Zwift calls the Epic KOM. It’s 5.9 virtual miles up hill. None of it is particularly steep, but it does not relent. About five miles in, you get above the virtual hot air balloons.

And then you reach the top of the climb. After that, there’s a bonus climb, a .68 mile ascent averaging 13.6 degrees. If i am not mistaken, that’s still the steepest climb on Zwift. Strava tells me I’ve done it seven times now, and regret each visit. Saturday was my second time up that climb in a week, and perhaps my third best effort up the thing. (In January of 2021 I was minutes faster, according to my ride notes.) Also, the view at the top is pretty nice. If you can still see straight when you get there.

So that was 30 miles Saturday. I got in 28 miles late last night. And I did 22 miles this afternoon. Somehow, this is how the day got away from me. So, now, I must return to campus.

If you’ll excuse me …

Cozumel / cycling / photo / SCUBA / Thursday — Comments Off
1
Feb 24

There are only 29 days, so let’s get through February quickly

Here’s that three berry granola — “sweet strawberries” and “bold blueberries” and plain ol’ no modifier needed “cranberries” — that I tried yesterday. It was maybe almost too sweet. So, today, I added raisins. The raisins helped.

So now I’m wondering if raisins should be added to the list of highly versatile foods that make most anything better. Should they?

Right now the list is bacon, honey and … maybe raisins? Their universality is probably ranked in that order, too.

Anyway, tomorrow’s new granola is the fourth in the series, the final new variety in this first round of the experiment. The key ingredient is the humble, yet exotic, blueberry.

Today, I did the first-of-the-month computer chores. The Desktop needs to be cleaned. And so does the Download folder. I updated the website’s spreadsheet, which I only get around to doing every four or five months or so. It’s more satisfying that way, watching the hits climb more quickly.

The original version of this spreadsheet was just one column of monthly data points, but this is a column recording almost 20 years of numbers, and has become unwieldy. So I broke this up into years. It’s easier to do pointless comparisons that way.

For instance, now I can easily see that 689,000+ visits rolled into the site last year. (For reasons that will always escape me.) Last year was my best year yet! And my third consecutive years of a half-million plus. I can quickly see that 2021 was better than 2022. I guess everyone got busy again when they stopped pretending Covid was behind them. I can also see that I’ve been over a quarter-million every year of the last decade. And my three best months all took place last year, October, July and November, respectively.

Would you like to know which January was the best January of all time around here? Last January, of course. January 2024 was the third best January. And now I can determine all of that at a glance because I spent a few moments formatting the cells of the spreadsheet to include commas.

All of those things I learned in a class somewhere along the way in high school or college are coming right back to me.

Speaking of statistics, spreadsheets and numbers that don’t matter to anyone but me — and to me, only barely — it’s time to tabulate what I did on the bike for January. This chart represents simple mileage accumulation.

That red line shows what I did in January of last year. Last year was my most prolific year in terms of miles. And January 2023, the output ever so humble, was my second most prolific month ever. (Bested only by November, of last year …) The green line represents a simple projection: the mileage I’d accrue if I rode 10 miles a day.

The blue line is reality. As you can tell, I’m well above the 10 miles per day average, and charging toward the 2023 trend line.

I wonder what this ridiculous little chart will look like at the end of the year.

I don’t have 11 more months of photos from our recent trip to Cozumel. But I still have quite a few that we’ll see together. And, then, I suppose we’ll just have to go diving again. Maybe she’ll breathe on the next dive.

But, before that, another filefish on the Palancar Reef.

Here’s some coral that is, sadly, dying.

Staghorn coral is some of the fastest growing coral in the western Atlantic, up to eight inches a year, and there have been some encouraging restoration projects underway. While we’ve lost a great deal of their population in the last 40 years, there is some encouragement that they can repopulate, with careful attention.

Here’s another great stoplight parrotfish, or, as I like to think of them, the inspiration for 1990s sneakers.

If I knew anything, anything at all, about that industry, I would absolutely start a line of shoes that were reproductions of reef fish color schemes.

I call this one “Sand.”

I’m not sure why I took that, but it’s near the end of a shallow dive, and there was nothing there. So, you see, it was a profound statement on a day without diving.

Is it time to go diving yet?