cycling

adventures / cycling / Monday / photo / video — Comments Off on Happy May
2
May 22

Happy May

We went for a bike ride on Saturday. Lovely day for it, but a bit of a breeze, by which I mean a headwind in every direction. Also, she’s well on her way back to being fast again, just five weeks removed from leg surgery.

Which means it’ll be difficult to keep up with her in a week or two. Which means I’ll be in trouble in a month or so.

I must go faster. Somehow.

If it isn’t a fast ride, though, I just linger off the back and turn it into a scenic spin. There’s always some way to win.

We went to the softball game on Sunday afternoon. (At least it was breezy!) It was a good one to see.

Scoreless after seven, Indiana and Illinois went to extra innings in an excellent pitchers’ duel. IU had a chance to win in the 10th, but couldn’t score on a squeeze after finally advancing their first baserunner to third.

In the top of the 11th the Illini scored on two RBI singles to right, but IU was ready for their moment. Suddenly the bases were loaded and senior Brittany Ford drove one to the warning track in center.

Indiana won 3-2 in 11, avoiding the sweep at home and improving to 26-19. IU will wrap up the regular season at Nebraska next weekend.

Let’s check on the kitties, which remains our most popular weekly feature. They’re doing great, enjoying the actual sunshine we’re experiencing now, and yet still cuddling for warmth like we’re in the depths of winter. (I was even able to wear shorts this weekend, at the beginning of May.)

Phoebe likes walls … for some reason right now.

And if a wall isn’t available, there’s always a bit of furniture she can swim up to.

Isn’t she cute?

Poseidon likes the weekends because The Yankee makes a late breakfast and that gets the oven warm and he can take naps on this stovetop cover and enjoy the radiating heat.

That’s the routine.

“WE WANT SOME MEATLOAF!”

“THE MEATLOAF! WE WANT IT NOW!”

adventures / Cozumel / cycling / IU / memories / television / Thursday / video — Comments Off on The ways we fill our days
14
Apr 22

The ways we fill our days

I washed my car this evening, because winter is over — I hath proclaimed it, he proclaimed — and because there was still daylight left after my work day.

And by “I washed my car” I mean I took it to one of those middle-of-the-road drive through car wash companies and spent $11 to get dust and salt and grime off the car.

This one doesn’t have the dryer jets with the big wheel that descends onto the car as you drive out. Those always concerned me as a child. The wheel landed right there on the windshield, and then rolled over the car. Why is this not a problem for anyone else? Instead, this one has two vertically mounted dryers on either side of the exit. There’s a helpful clock in blue lights, telling you how long until these things stop blowing hot air which, as I type this, seems like a feature we should all be required to carry.

You try to time it just right, the whole of the car deserves the same amount of time in the drying phase. Except you’ve no real idea when the front of your car begins to really feel the warm air, so it’s just a guess. The experience will likely be uneven. And then you try to rationalize it. Why shouldn’t this part of the car get more drying time? Then you wonder if you’re somehow distributing the air flow unevenly, as you creep through the blow zone, because of driver bias, or a misperception of the precise size of the passenger compartment, or something. Finally, you’re thinking, I paid for it, you should use the whole of the 60 seconds. Don’t give any of the air back for free!

Anyway, my car is clean. And, for the moment, the exterior smells nice. I was going to vacuum the inside, but this place charges for that air, too, and I have vacuums I can use at home on some future nice day. And I will! I like a clean carpet.

When I got to the house a spontaneous bike ride occurred. Why not do 20 miles! It’s a lovely way to spend a few minutes.

I wasn’t intending to ride today, but riding is fun, plus it was a bonus after the 25-miler I had yesterday morning!

And these are the ways we fill our days.

Here are some sports shows that the IUSTV crew produced last night. All the local stuff from IU is in this highlight show.

And on the talk show they discussed the upcoming NFL draft.

By now, if you’ve been here every day over the last two weeks and change, you’ve seen 130 photos from our recent dive trip to Cozumel. (My next chore is building a proper photo gallery for them. Perhaps that’ll get done in the next day or so.) Maybe, perhaps, you missed the larger videos. I’ve got you covered. Day-by-day, the best footage from 13 dives on the beautiful reefs of the Caribbean Sea. Check these out.

This is our second day, when we got in five days. Four of them are represented here.

And this video was shot on a Thursday, not that the day of the week matters to the fish in the sea, or the turtle, which appears right at the beginning of this dive experience.

And everything you haven’t seen so far, you’ll see in this great video.

Now, about that photo gallery …

cycling / Friday / IU / photo / video — Comments Off on Everybody has to have a moment
25
Mar 22

Everybody has to have a moment

At 4:30 this morning … and for the rest of the morning …

And today, it was Poseidon’s moment. He made the most of it.

The riding game chimed in.

So it was a long day, with little rest. At work, I wrapped up a three-month long project, and wrote my way out of the entire thing. It was a planned, and good thing.

I left right on time, and my lovely bride and I took a nice little walk.

She just had surgery on her leg on Tuesday, and she’s making great progress, as we expected.

The nice thing about our current walks is that she isn’t walking faster than me. This will last for two or three weeks, tops.

We have started noting signs of spring on the path behind our house. Here are some of the lush blooming things coming back to life for the new year.

I am eagerly looking forward to this becoming routine, and not something upon which we remark. (It’s the end of March and “spring” is finally coming upon us. Note the jacket. Not pictured: the gloves I’m wearing at the end of March.)

This shrub is in our yard. No idea what to do with it this year.

For now, we’ll just admire it. And the weekend, which is now upon us! Happy weekend to you! And you and you! Happy weekend to all of us.

adventures / cycling / Monday / photo / television / video — Comments Off on The third half of winter
21
Feb 22

The third half of winter

It is about time I thought on my walk from the car to the building this morning, to see a fake signal. And as I walked by one of the little patches of soil that separates the parking lot from the sidewalk, I saw it. Right on time, just like every other year we’ve been here, trying to trick me.

Even though I misinterpret it (“Spring!”) I will not be tricked. We have more cold and some snow flurries and ice this week and who knows what else in the next … six or eight weeks.

He said with the world’s most predictable sigh.

But, hey, the days are getting longer. The coats are getting lighter. And the cold is, for now, a bit milder.

This was the sun on our walk yesterday. I was only wearing a medium-weight coat.

And here are two more pictures from that walk, because I am fascinated by the idea that so many things look better in real life than they do in photographs. For instance, this sycamore is really popping in the late-day sun. And, yet …

Same with this tree, which I think is just dead. The sun is playful, the limbs are colorful, but the photographic result leaves something to be desired.

You know what else leaves something to be desired? My ability to keep things up-to-date. This show is from Wednesday night and went online Thursday and I forgot to post it here. Shame on me.

And here’s the talk show, where they focused on baseball and softball.

Which brings us to today, and here are the shows the entertainment division released today. And it seems like the late night show was evicted after a troublesome conclusion to their last episode.

That show continues to evolve in the most fascinating ways. One day they’re going to invent their own genre, I’m pretty sure.

And here’s the morning show, a production which I missed entirely, unfortunately.

I walked in from a meeting just as the students were breaking down the studio. And I am lesser for it. Watch it now, and you will be justly enriched.

I tried a new Zwift route on Saturday. I quickly regretted it. But at least I got a nice shot of my avatar in an aerotuck.

It was one of the fictional routes, and required a lot of climbing which I am clearly not good at or prepared for. But at the end of it all there’s a map. This is always amusing to me. It’s a fictional route. This is a real island in the South Pacific.

Two islands, actually. I mentioned one of them, Teanu, which is the bulk of the route you see in the graphic above, last Monday. But that part where it dips south, is Vanikoro. Apparently about 1,300 people live there, two distinct groups, in different villages, but you can’t see much from Google Maps.

Google Reviews, though … someone wrote “There is no TV 3 stars.”

That settles it for me.

cycling / Friday / IU / photo — Comments Off on Come, let us weekend!
18
Feb 22

Come, let us weekend!

It was sunny. But it was cold. We’ll take it because it is Friday.

But only for so much longer, by which I mean about a week, a week-and-a-half.

These are the stages of winter for me: resignation, ignoring it, wearied by it, a brief sense of optimism, and then a sort of disbelieving vexation which is where I will say, more than once, “When will this end?”

The answer is About seven weeks too late.

If it seems like I’ve said this before, that’s because I have. If it seems like I’ve said it this winter, that’s because I most assuredly hav.

I did go outside for a few minutes today. I decided to walk across part of the campus to take a Covid test. This was entirely an excuse to get outside and under the sunshine for a few minutes in between hours under florescent lights. So on with the big jacket, and I walked the four-tenths of a mile from our building to a gym in the School of Public Health, where all of the spitting takes place. Swipe your ID card, answer the three questions — they used to ask about whether you’d eaten anything in the last half hour, whether you had symptoms or had been asked to quarantine, now the staffer there just points to the sign. Only then do they give you permission to move on to the next table where a modern printer with ancient software eventually spits out the little ID label. You must recite the high holy numbers, your birthday, to get the little plastic tube. Then, go around the corner, stand in this converted gym and fill the container. Saliva, not foam, if you please.

And then the walk back. See! The proof of being outdoors in the middle of the day!

I’m still negative. They do the lab work here on campus and the turnaround is usually around four hours. It’s an impressive set up, really.

This is my ride through the northern English countryside. I’m in Yorkshire. This is part of the 2019 world championship course.

An hour doing this was a great way to start the weekend. Usually when I share these silly things I’ve cropped out the graphics, but this is the normal screen view.

That’s a lot to look through, and you can’t make changes. There’s always a chat feature, and for the life of me I don’t know how people can pedal fast and type at the same time. It’s all I can do to sing along to the music.

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