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cycling

We can at least agree that the Aggie War Hymn is an ear worm

I had the weirdest dream this morning. But no one cares about your dreams. If you’re writing a blog, or someplace that’s not your own dream journal, or the Journal of Altered Conscious Mental, Emotional, and Sensory Experiences, no one will. This should be a lesson to you. Don’t write it out for others, because no one is reading about your dreams (and Freud isn’t coming along to analyze you in the comments.)

Simply do this instead. Point out you had a dream or dreams. This signals that you have not only slept recently, but done so to the extent that you could enter REM sleep. And then, share that you, too, are dismissive of the dreams, that you know that no one cares. And then, by definition, you are hip.

Not only are you hip, but you, my friend, are a dreamer.

And this is the sort of thing I normally charge $84.95 for down at the airport Ramada, where the lonely, bored, and vaguely motivated will fall all over themselves to see my latest slide decks.

No one cares about your slide decks. All the above? You can apply that to your presentations, too. Oh, sure, you put in a lot of work and they’re interesting, noteworthy, sometimes even compelling. But, and this is the key, they are those things in the moment, not in the re-telling.

Pick your spots.

No one cares about your spots.

Except for infectious disease specialists. Tell them everything. Do not charge them Ramada rates.

Here’s the view from the 6th floor almost-corner office. Not bad out there. Most of the streets on the way in were in great shape. Just one, screen by trees and hills and houses, looked a bit rough. At least for our commute. Quite a few people didn’t make it in today. Not everyone has the same snow experience. You can also see that, below, just by carefully observing which people have shoveled their sidewalks 48-plus hours after the snow stopped and who hasn’t.

In my Rituals and Traditions class today I tried to frame things so that we start thinking of these things more like a team, a league or a school, and not like a fan. I presented them with some research on rituals from a marketing perspective. (Rituals have staying power and create conditions where highly identified fans want to come back, take part, and come back again. Also, most of them spend more money on other stuff at the venue than the ticket price itself.) The lecture got us through about a decade of marketing of fandom research and a few more years on sports fan sociology. Also, I showed them the Aggie War Hymn at weddings, with which I made a point about things in, and out, of context.

And then I explained the song. It’s a song about hating your rivals. I explained the history of the song. J.V. “Pinky” Wilson wrote the song in a trench in France during World War I. He came home to College Station, finished his degree, and sang the song in a quarter. Some of the A&M yell leaders heard it, and convinced him to enter it into a campus song contest. It won, and since 1920 it has been an integral part of Texas A&M fandom. I mean, they sing it at weddings.

At which point I paused, and deadpanned, “White people weddings, man.”

Then I said, there are a lot of these videos on YouTube.

We also considered the shared affiliation of rituals, as in the example of the running of the Gumps. Look at that zeal! And the footspeed!

And then we considered what it means to be a part of 61,000 people singing to your favorite team.

I was also able to cite to them a study that told us some 98 percent of fans engage in sports rituals. Most of them have to do with wearing the team gear and colors, but that study broke out 15 other criteria, and quite a few make the cut for people.

On Thursday, my students’ surveys will be completed. We’re asking questions of our study body. Hopefully some of the information will be help to our class as we try to help find and or develop things our athletic department might work on.

In Criticism, we discussed baseball, beginning with this story about one of the Phillies recent relievers. As a young man he caused a terrible car accident that killed one man, badly injured a teenager and almost derailed his own life. But then one of the truly selfless and remarkable things about humanity happens. It’s a terrific story.

I asked the group what they would like to know at the end of the story. What’s not here that’d you like to see in a followup. Someone said they’d like to see what happened if the pitcher and the family met. Just you wait for Thursday.

We also talked about a museum piece — meaning copy from the Smithsonian — about Jackie Robinson. It didn’t really fit the bill, but we were able to discuss why, and also story curation and, again, what’s not in this piece. What wasn’t there was what Robinson did after he walked away from baseball, and that’s every bit, or more as important, as his time with the Dodgers.

In the evening, as the day is getting later everything felt sunny and cheery, even if it was cold, and it looks like Hoth.

We’re right at the point where 12 hours of the day is in daylight. Right at the point where it seems we might make it once again. Right at the moment that should have happened two weeks ago, but will take place three or four weeks from now: it’ll finally feel like winter is behind us.

Since it isn’t, I rode in the basement this evening. I’ve been suffering through the little riding I’ve done of late. Everything got out of whack around the holidays and my cardio slipped and nothing has helped and it just felt like a big chore — a big painful chore.

But this brief ride, for the first time in a long while, things finally felt good. I don’t know why it seemed to click back into place, physically or mentally, but it was about time. Also, Spain. And I went up a hill prominent enough that it got its own little graphic in the heads up display.

I’m sure that’s useful for climbers, so that they might time their exertion to perfection. But it does something else for the rest of us.

Anyway, 30-some minutes over a lumpy area of Tossa de Mar, with two little Cat 5 climbs according to the profile, way off in the northeast of Spain. I hope I get a few more rides in a row that feel as decent as this one.

There’s a lot of riding to do.

And a lot of work to do. So … back at it.

cycling / Monday / photo / video — Comments Off
2
Feb 26

When you rebrand the weather, I am over the weather

Monday. February. Groundhog’s Day and all of that. Still snow and ice on the ground. Hasn’t budged a micro, hasn’t melted a gram. In a group chat the other day I pointed out that none of my friends back home could say anything to me about their weather until we’d been above freezing for two days in a row. As it happens, tomorrow might be the second day. It did hit 32 today. We are promised 35 for tomorrow. And so, now, another post about how the weather has impacted everything. (This snow fell 10 days ago. I’ve not had too many snows in my life where the stuff just … stayed around. I can think of two. And, quite frankly, it has lost its appeal.

Saturday around midday I was out trying to widen the driveway a bit. We’d carved out a path last week just wide enough for a vehicle and, somehow, it was only just wide enough. Well, finally I got tired of that and so I gripped the shovel firmly and determinedly, and went to work. In that time I dug out the spot behind where my car is parked in the garage, and what I estimate the space necessary behind it to do the back and turn maneuver. I also tried to chip away at a few other places that were troubling. Working up a sweat in a long-sleeved t-shirt, I used our biggest shovel to bend the ice to my will for an hour. Until, that is, my back was bent against my will.

About that time my lovely bride returned home from her morning activities and midday grocery run. We did the grocery system. She carries in an arm full of groceries and I try to carry everything else in, so she can pretend to fuss at me. In the kitchen, with all of the bags on the island, I hand her things for the refrigerator. And then I hand her the things going into the freezer. And then I hand her the things going in the pantry. Finally, I stack up the bags and put them back out in the garage for her car. There’s nothing to it, but we do this every week and it’s also important.

Speaking of the kitchen island, I happened to be in just the right place to catch this bit of anarchistic artistry.

It was how Poseidon brought the spatula to the floor, looked around and walked off. Usually, when he does cat stuff like this, he owns it. He will sit by the thing he has knocked over or broken and wait until you see it, and him with it. It’s admirable, even as it is frustrating. But, here, he just walked off. Maybe it was because a rubber spatula can’t shatter, and there’s nothing to leak.

Somehow, we both managed to stifle our laughter until he’d left the scene of the his vandalism. We wouldn’t want him to feel he was being praised for all of this, after all.

To get away from the snow and the ice — snowcrete they are calling it — I went to Tokyo for an hour or so. Saturday night, I renamed the basement “Tokyo.”

The thing about Rouvy I haven’t figured out yet is everything. This was a flat route, according to the ride profile I saw before I started pedaling. There were was a tiny bit of climbing, but nothing to write home about. The profile I saw after the ride was … lumpy.

It was 26 miles through the various parts of Tokyo. Whoever recorded this most have done so in the very early morning. There was almost no one on the roads, as you can see from that image. Also, there were a lot of red lights, and the video seemed to catch them all. It is not at all demoralizing to be pedaling your little heart out, to see your avatar pedaling his little digital heart out, but you’re not going anywhere.

Anyway, it was a good sweat. I just have to do it more. Someone motivate me.

The weather is absolutely not motivating me. It is not motivating me precisely when it should be. One day this weather will not be our weather. One day we’ll emerge from the ice age. It will not be this day, for we are still solidly, firmly, in the Pleistocene Epoch.

Right in the middle, I would assume.

Here’s the view of yesterday’s sunset from my office window.

I think I spent all day at my desk. I’m not sure what I did with all of that time. Some work was done. But there was more work to be done today. We’ll get into that tomorrow, though.

cycling / maps / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off
28
Jan 26

I am so far ahead I can see tomorrow

Lovely day, if you like living at a pole, and the color white, and ice everywhere. I’ve been trying to count how many times I’ve experienced a snow that persisted — this snow came down Sunday and will be with us for at least another week. It is a small number of experiences. And now there’s talk of another snow system this weekend.

I’d like to just … not. I still have shovel shoulders from Sunday and Monday.

Productive day, today. Emails were fired off with abandon. I prepared two lectures. This was made all the trickier because we did not have classes on Tuesday, and because we are right at the beginning of the term, where I am trying to set up the definitions and paradigms we’ll be using throughout the semester.

For my Criticism class, where I told them I would lecture this week and they would see why the rest of the semester is conversation-based, I’ll have 75 minutes to try to make the points that should take up about two hours worth of material. Also, I am Frankensteining two lectures to do that. Duct tape and PowerPoint presentations will see me through. What could go wrong? In my Rituals and Traditions class I will combine a brief guest appearance with some further elaboration on the slides I sent them online on Tuesday. Again, two days in one, just to set the tone for the entire class. What could go wrong?

Students in my online class received the second of three notes they’ll get from me this week. This one was a 791-word, tightly written, well-edited walkthrough of a sequence of the course that amounts to 20 percent of their grade. I put a lot of time into that letter because I know how much students are inclined to read these days. And I’ve been working on it over the course of three semesters now. (Given my process for these messages, that means it’s gone through at least nine editing passes at this point.) It is a good letter. Helpful, expressive, detailed, precisely to the point at hand. I send it to their inbox and post it on our class CMS. Now I just have to hope they’ll give it a look.

Perhaps the most productive thing I did today, though, was lay out the rest of my week. The least productive thing I’ll do the rest of the week is ignore most of that plan.

The best thing I’ll do is highlight the kitties, because they’re famous and popular, just ask them. So let’s do that.

If you like belly rubs, raise your paw.

Phoebe really likes belly rubs. She held her paw up for a good long while … just so long as the belly rubs continued.

The birds are feasting at the feeder, because, I think, several of their food sources are under a lot of snow and ice.
And so BirbTV has been a big hit around here. So much so that Poseidon doesn’t even care what he’s standing on, so long as he gets a closer look.

The cats are doing just fine. Though they would also like it to be just a bit warmer.

I wonder how it registers when they look out of the windows and see how different things are with so much white stuff on the ground. Lately, though, I’ve noticed they’re not as keen on trying to get outside as normal. It feels like four below out as I write this.

This evening I got away from the cold and went to Torano, Italy, where it is somehow 30 degrees warmer than here. I’m not saying we’re packing up and moving, but this was a delightful little valley ride. You can see it here.

Rouvy puts you in a video that someone recorded, and layers your avatar over the footage. As you can see from this screengrab, I was riding in the Italian summer.

And look at that mountain up ahead, there’s still snow up there. Here’s a few of that same feature, a few miles farther along in my ride.

Those cyclists are not a part of my ride. They are real people that were captured on the video. If I rode this route again, I suspect I’d seem them at pretty much the same spot, no matter how slow or fast I’d gone. (I averaged about 24 miles per hour on this ride (it had some nice downhills), which is the best ride I’ve had in a while. I churned out almost 600 watts for a bit, and regretted it the rest of the way.) Same for the other two people I caught up to, who I caught at a left-hand turn. They put out their hands to signal the turn and it looked like they were waving at me as I went by. I’ll see them in that valley again, should I visit. Or so I suppose. And my avatar would catch the same red light in Grosotto, or Lovero, whichever little village I was breezing through. My avatar just disappeared for a moment, while the video (and the car or whatever was shooting the footage) worked through the stop. A blip that felt like a Twilight Zone moment, which would be fun, if everyday didn’t already have a hefty dose of them.

Tomorrow, we’ll go to campus. I wonder what the roads will be like.

adventures / cycling / errands / photo / Rowan / Wednesday — Comments Off
21
Jan 26

From my well to Norway

Got around to calling the well guy today. Your well is due an inspection every two years, turns out. I’m only a few weeks behind. We had them out to do the inspect in 2023, and not a minute too soon. The old one was about to rust out and explode. What had started as a well inspection appointment grew a bit alarming for me in the days running up to the actual visit. When the crew got here the guy said I could replace the tank now, or wait until it exploded, which would, he said, be soon.

Thanks for the options, pal.

The guy had a new one right there on the truck. These, he assured me, are much better. Fiberglass never rusts. Well sign me up, and keep the water off my floor. And you might think this sounds like a very sophisticated confidence game from the well guy, but the rust that was everywhere looked plenty authentic.

Anyway, time marches on. The well provides water. Many showers were enjoyed, dishes washed, water bowls filled, etc. Everything behaves more or less as it should. We are pleased with this sequence of events. We made the right choice in replacing it that November day.

But now I have to call to set up that inspection. Because they don’t have a service calling to remind people, which seems like an opportunity lost, if you ask me. Also, the water running through our house is making an odd noise just now, which seems like the beginning of a problem, if you ask me. Also, as I noticed this morning when I went down to the well to verify I had the right phone number, I noticed that there was suddenly an error code on the water softener device. Error 102, which I’ve since looked up, could mean any number of things.

So I called the guy.

And he’s a genial fellow. He is also slammed because of the snowpacolypse rolling in this weekend, and can we schedule something next week?

Sure, I say, but first you have to convince me that these problems I’m telling you about aren’t going to do me in between now and then. He assures me with the practiced, steady tone of a man who’s been dealing with all of this for too long.

And what he’s dealing with here is that fiberglass tank. He said he bought a bunch of those. All but two of them went back to the manufacturer, because they’re krep. Guess who has one of the two. The guy said he’s taken it in the teeth on these things, and he’s going to again. This is under warranty.

He tells me we can live our lives for a few more days and nothing we’ll go wrong and I guess we’ll see. He’s getting another phone call as soon as the roads clear.

I had a checkup at the dermatologist late this morning. Good thing I took all of my skin with me. This was a simple follow-up after they carved a little piece of my back off last fall. I think it took longer for me to take off and put on clothes again than the whole of the appointment.

I got the once over, under a flashlight. He froze one little mark off my shin. It’s nothing, probably stays a nothing, but just in case. Would that all of life’s problems could be dispatched so quickly. But if you can avoid getting that frozen spray in life, do that. That stayed with me for most of the afternoon.

Turns out they left a sliver’s worth of stitching in the skin on my shoulder The assistant tweezed that out before I even realized she was back there.

I set up another appointment for the summer. Because of the spot they took off last fall they want me back every six months to study my alabaster skin. The doctor would not commit to how long we’ll be running at this pace. You’d get the sense from talking with them that being dismissive of it all is SOP.

Guess what conversation we’ll be having with them at my July appointment.

My lovely bride and I then had a nice lunch date. We enjoyed a few minutes of not doing other things at Chick-fil-A. It seems a good prescriptive. I’m glad I thought of it.

Since we were there, we stopped at Lowe’s. I picked up some 4SL 5W-30 oil for the snow blower. “Everyone’s getting ready,” said the woman who was working in the outdoors section.

I thought she could put that perfunctory cheer away, put a little panic in her voice, and help goose this week’s sales figures.

We cruised the light fixture aisle, because that’s what one does when one goes to a place with many fixtures and bulbs, but one also did not think to bring the TWO different specialty bulbs (for comparison) that need replacing. Then we went to the tool section. Brad nails, if you please. And hey, since I’m here, a few new fine-toothed jig saw blades.

One impulse purchase isn’t terribly impulsive, particularly if it A.) won’t spoil and B.) you have an eventual need for it’s use. (Just as soon as the weather turns.)

Then we headed to campus for a late afternoon faculty meeting. While working in the office, I received this email.

I wondered How far from the base of the building can I fling my computer? A good way, I’d imagine. My office is on the 6th floor.

Look, it’s one thing for young people and/or whining adults to mangle the language, turning an adjective into a present participle, but I am going to demand a little more from the marketing whizzes hired by the health system.

And don’t think I won’t bring that up to them, the next time I go to see my doctor and run into the direct mail tech team.

At our faculty meeting, well, faculty met. Things were discussed. Successes celebrated, grievances distributed. New policies were announced.

Then at home, in the driveway, I just missed the sunset, and the Canada geese.

Oh, they honk and they honk, they can’t help themselves. But while you can discern the direction, at that time of night you can’t get everything to work just right, camera-wise. I have a cool blurry one though, if anyone is interested.

I decided to take an FTP test. Your classic functional threshold power test, a ramp test, is a way to gauge your current level of fitness. I don’t really need to take this because my current level is: unfit. On a ramp test, and this is oh-so-interesting, you add power every minute and keep riding until you can’t. I sat up a bit early, I could have done more, maybe a little bit more, but I wanted to also cover some casual miles. Besides, this test showed an increase of 15 percent in my recent FTP.

I was riding somewhere in Norway.

Not very well, mind you, because, again, see above, unfit. But a January baseline is established. And now I can ride and see if it will improve.

And then I did the 10 miles or so around Plum Island, Massachusetts. Wikipedia:

The island is named for the wild beach plum shrubs that grow on its dunes, but is also famous for the purple sands at high tide, which derive their color from tiny crystals of pink pyrope garnet.

And it all sounds lovely. Looks it, too!

A bit farther down the Wikipedia page, there’s a list of beach and dune pests. And while, just a moment ago I wanted to go to northeaster Massachusetts and see this barrier island, I have now realized that things are so bad that each of these have subheadings on Wikipedia: Greenhead flies, ticks, mosquitoes, poison ivy.

That same place on the island, on Google Maps.

Want to see where I was on the FTP test? Somewhere just outside of Hjelle.

My avatar is riding in the Strynefjellet Mountains:

Here you will find a true wilderness, inhabited only by birds and animals adapted to an arctic climate, perhaps a predator in search of prey, a wild reindeer, a golden eagle, or sheep in summer pastures. Here there is plenty of space – and plenty of time. Change down to a lower gear and head into the mountains.

You think, “Norway in January, brr and no thank you.” Their weekend forecast and mine is about the same temperature. We’re expecting all of that snow — or maybe some of it, truly, no one knows, because who needs robust weather forecasting capabilities in the 21st century? — but in the Strynefjellet Mountains, they are under a Yellow Warning for Avalanches. I clicked that, and I am left to conclude that this is so commonplace that they don’t even include details. The blurb basically says, Don’t do it if you don’t have experience.

Not to worry, Norway, not to worry.

bluesky / Cozumel / cycling / Monday / photo / Rowan — Comments Off
19
Jan 26

Words everywhere today

It snowed a lot this weekend, but never amounted to much. Which is to say snow fell, and snow melted. Then more fell, and it, too, failed to cause much of a stir. Then more of its precipitory brethren swirled and twirled and danced and fell to the ground and made it just a little more soggy. Eventually, the ground started to catch on.

Oh, we’re supposed to let this stuff stay?

Those mounds beneath the trees held the snow first. I suppose it is always that way. So much mulch, so little insulation.

The second thing to catch the snow was this door mat. This is a mat with a warm greeting. But, just now, and since Saturday afternoon, it is neither warm, nor greeting.

By then, the snow was slowing.

When it stopped, or at least paused for a few hours, I thought I should get out and make use of the time. There was recycling to be done, earth to be save, habits to be fulfilled. So I loaded up the car. A big bin in the trunk, and a garbage can in the back seat. Both were filled with the mixed items, glass, aluminum, plastic. And in the front seat, and the rest of the back, cardboard.

The inconvenience center is on the other side of town, but late Saturday afternoon might be the time to make this trip. Two stop signs, and a red light. My memory of it is already unremarkable. But the inconvenience center was remarkable. The huge container for the cardboard sits in one spot, but the guy that runs the place had put some sort of netting over the top, which is their out of order signal. He was off down the hill in his loader, doing light machinery work, and, from that great distance, he read the confusion on my face. From inside the cab he gestured broadly — and he needed to, because he was far enough away I could barely see him. I had to walk all of this cardboard from over here to all the way over there.

We go to some lengths to save the earth around here.

This was the view from the road.

I went a town or two over and met an older couple. The man had some sort of light stroke, he said, so he had to move some of his tools that he can’t use well anymore. We were out in his oversized shed and I told him I was jealous. He has this whole place to work and if I want to turn wood into sawdust I have to rearrange the entire garage. I spend more time moving equipment around than cutting things up. He laughed, but didn’t offer me his whole shed.

He did sell me this wonderful little router table.

It’s obviously handmade, and done perfectly well for shop duty. There are a few joints in there that are more elaborate than necessary. I asked him if he made it. He said no. He named the man who did, as if I would know the name, but I do not. That man gave it to his friend, who gave it to this guy. And now he’s sold it to me. I’m the fourth owner of the table. Mounted to it is a Craftsman router.

I got it home, put the top back on the legs, tinkered with the router for a minute and put a piece of scrap wood through it, and it works. You can see the sawdust!

Pretty good deal, for $30.

And then, just as I said, I spent several minutes finding a way to fit it in the garage, and cleaning up a bit of sawdust. It was ridiculously cold, but when it warms up, some weeks from now, I’ll go out and experiment with it some more.

We were forecast for snow through the early afternoon on Sunday, and it snowed all day and into the night. When I took out the garbage last night, we had about two inches on the ground.

Or, as I put it on Bluesky …

I think I’m due a series of long hot steamy nights where the stars twinkle in time with the crickets and the bullfrogs. The sort of night that begins at about 10 p.m. and runs into the tomorrow after forever.

Anyway, I had to put on a coat and some light gloves and boots to take out the garbage.

[image or embed]

— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.bsky.social) January 18, 2026 at 11:28 PM

All day today I spent on the work stuff, wrapping up the pre-term emotional roller coaster. The creative process for course development is just about as intense as anything else you can make. There’s curious excitement, then some real enthusiasm and joy, and then the self-doubt sneaks in as you continue on. This is a weeks- and months-long process. But all of that is behind us, because class is before us.

This weekend, then, I prepared my first message for the online class, where I will be teaching about the structures of social media. Yesterday I locked down the changes I am making to my criticism in sports media class. I am working in a bit of e-sports and trying to find a place to slip in some social media. I am changing up some of the assignment structures. It was an easy series of changes, but I find myself staring at calendars and lists and counting weeks and items over and over and over. You want to get the small things right.

So you can imagine how many times I reworked the smallest things, trying to comb out every error today. And, somehow, the more of that the did, the more of the roller coaster changed direction. Today, as I locked up the brand new Rituals and Traditions course I found myself very intrigued again by what this class might become. I added the last details of the assignment structure last week. Today I spend a good chunk of the morning and pretty much all of the afternoon building the page where all of this will reside.

Which is where the worry comes back in. Will it land with students? Will it work? Is it enough if I like the class? Will they learn as much as I will? Will they like it if they do?

Can I get this in a regular rotation?

Anyway, I need one more important thing to click into place for that class, and then we’re set. Starting tomorrow, we’ll ease into all of these classes. They’ll be off and running next week. A few days after that, this little break will be forgotten, we’ll be in the regular rhythm, and focusing on all of this fun learning until May.

It’s a lot of fun, even when it is a lot.

And this evening I got in a little ride. I chose an 18-mile ride around part of the island of Cozumel. We’ve been there, in real life, three times. I know this road well.

But I’ve never been on that side of the island. Never been on a bike there, with the ocean off my shoulder. It is difficult to imagine the desert island air, the stiff breeze, and the crashing waves in my coolish little basement setup. At least I had a fan in my face. I wonder where I’ll ride tomorrow, after three hours of dancing in front of classes. It’s funny how simply being underway frees the mind and opportunity.