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cycling

Incomplete stories on two wheels

It was 80° on Nov. 5th, we have had three-tenths of an inch of rain since the end of August (and all of that in September).

The farmers are merely moving dust around in their fields. Nothing weird at all, here.

That was early in my ride today, and it looks over processed, but it’s an over-processed sort of day, isn’t it? Later in that same ride, when the colors were softer, and the breeze just a tiny bit cooler, and my legs a bit more tired and the sun challenging me to a race …

I’d gone down a road I usually come up, where I was passed by a giant ambulance and, soon after, almost watched a minivan almost drive itself into a head-on collision. I turned right instead of going all the way down that road, cutting across to another road that I went up this afternoon, rather than going down, as I usually do. I crossed a busy intersection and then had one long straight shot with a little breeze at my back. And then I took the longest, most sensible route home.

We won’t have too many more seasonably warm days this fall, best to eek every second out of it if you can. Anyway, that was today’s ride. Let’s talk about what I found on a different ride.

We return once again to We Learn Wednesdays, where the historical markers search continues, because from time-to-time I ride my bicycle around looking for them. This is the 53rd installment, and the 85th marker in the We Learn Wednesdays series. And we’re at the Friends Burial Ground.

We’ll talk about the tree in the next installment. The burial ground dates back almost to the beginning of the white settlement. (A few Dutch had set up nearby, but they got outnumbered pretty quickly.) The English Quakers showed up in 1675, even before William Penn arrived. This was Fenwick’s Colony. A cavalry in Cromwell’s army in England, a Quaker convert and a lawyer, Fenwick advertised this place, “if there be any terrestrial “Canaan” ’tis surely here, where the land floweth with Milk and Honey.”

We learned about Fenwick earlier this year (here and here) and when people back in England learned about his vision, they started pouring in.

It’d take another decade or so for the settlers to build their first meeting house, but the people were firmly rooted. Some of the old names on these markers still have descendants around here. And a lot of the local names are repeated here in the stonework. There are more than 1,000 markers here now sitting behind this low brick walk alongside one of the busy modern downtown streets.

There have been three dozen interments here this century, the most recent in 2020. She was from right nearby, and had worked at Penn State for a quarter of a century. She started as a secretary and eventually became an assistant dean.

Not all of the notable stories are deep in the past.

The next time we return to the marker series, though, we’ll go back to the 17th century one more time, and we’ll learn about that Salem Oak. If you have missed any markers so far, you can find them all right here.

cycling / journalism / memories / photo / site / Tuesday — Comments Off
5
Nov 24

New month stuff to distract you, also a new front page look

It occurred to me yesterday that this is the first presidential election cycle since 1996 when I haven’t spent all day and all night in a newsroom or at a campaign watch party.

So all day I’ve just been doing … normal stuff. Is that what everyone does?

My first election as a cub was a midterm election, where I interviewed a man immediately after he found out he was elected to Congress. You could hear the excitement and hope in his voice. He would become a two-term governor. I also interviewed a man who became a senator, who told me I asked too many questions and hung up on me. I spent some time at a watch party where a mayor spent part of her evening hitting on me. (She’d had a few beverages.)

My first presidential election I spent in the studio, and at two watch parties. A woman who was running for local office, who’d spent the entire campaign deliberately not speaking to me, lost that night. It was fun to catch her eye at the end. But I was also trying to localize the Bush-Gore race. That night I took a brief nap in my car before going back inside the studio to go back on the air the next morning.

I was in the studio for the 2004 election, but I don’t really have any strong memories about the night. By 2008 I was back on campus, and I had to convince the students I was working with that it might be a good idea to talk to people on campus about their votes and hopes, and report on their reactions to a historic night. I’d been on that campus for a little over two months at that point, and it was eye-opening.

In 2012, the initiative in that same campus newsroom was better. They were also putting to bed their paper on that Tuesday night, so they were excited, and it was another long night. All of these were long nights.

In 2016, on a different campus, in brand new facilities, someone got the bright idea that we should try the new equipment, all of it, at the same time, and turn that into a showcase. And, fortunately, most of it worked.

By the time of the 2020 election, we were used to all of that new production equipment, but we were working in a Covid environment, which didn’t make the day any shorter, just still-surreal.

And now I’m filling my day in other ways, which is satisfying.

Anyway, the normal stuff was very normal. I have a lot of grading to do this week. It’s all piped into a CMS and that interface helpful tells you how many documents I have to work your way through. Seeing those numbers pile up, it feels like having a headache in a dream. It’s a disembodied feeling, and you know it is supposed to hurt, but you can’t feel it, which somehow makes it more daunting.

So I have 148 things to read and assess. Most of those 148 things require feedback. You want that to be useful. And since I’m forever saying the word “substantive” it should be feedback that has some significant use to it. In truth, the feedback is a lot of fun. You can make all sorts of connections, try to help students make the next leap, introduce a new concept or two if a student is interested in it. And if a student is interested in it, I find that the feedback might be the most fun part of running a class. It just takes time and care. This batch take three or four more days to get it all in. And then the next round will roll in Monday night.

I’ve also done the monthly cleaning of the computer, deleting a bunch of files I no longer need, updating some templates and updating some statistics.

Oh, and I also updated the images on the front page. They look a lot like this.

Go check them out. We’ll wait here for you.

Those are from Monterey Bay, California. I took those on a March afternoon, while we were waiting for our lunch order to be called. It was quiet, but busy, and the waves were also busily doing their job, and also quiet. At least in my memory, now. It was a beautiful afternoon. We’d driven up the Pacific Coast Highway a bit to be there, in that old cannery-turned-tourist town, and we were about to go visit the aquarium.

That is the third or fourth set of photos I’ve put on the front page from that trip. And, it turns out, I took more photos from that beach than I realized. I could run another set easily enough. In fact I might! I saved those photos of sand and rocks and water until now, to get us through a bit of the colder weather that will be here, eventually, though it felt like a warm summer day here today.

I also need to add some new buttons to the front page. I’ll get to it at some point, when the grading gets done.

Since we’re in a new month, I updated my chart for the year’s bike mileage. This means nothing, but I think about it a lot. After each ride I update the spreadsheets — plural, because why just look at a little data when you can consider it in more than one way. This chart is the main way I consider my progress.

And as you can see from the lines, what I’ve actually done, in that blue line, is well above where I was at the same point last year, which is the red line. That green line is just an arbitrary number I use as a linear measure.

I wonder at the end of each month how legitimate this is. On those last few days I compare the miles again, and compare it to earlier iterations of that same month in previous years. And there’s a list where I have ranked the months I’ve ridden the most. And so near the end of October I saw that the month was my most productive October ever — humble though my productivity be — and it had a real shot to become the second most productive month of all time. There was no way I was going to catch February 2024. At the same time, September 2024, January 2023 and November, 2023 were all ready to be knocked down a peg. And so I started riding with that in mind. It seems disingenuous, somehow. To my brain, that is. The parts of me doing the work would argue it’s quite real.

Like I said, this means nothing.

Anyway, I went out this afternoon for an easy 20-mile ride. And because of the time change I was racing daylight to get home.

That photo is timestamped 4:43 p.m. Bring on the solstice, so the days get longer again.

Though this day and night have been plenty long. So much grading still to do …

cycling / photo / Thursday / video — Comments Off
31
Oct 24

The bow on October

Today’s bike ride became an important and record-breaking bit of effort. Somewhere right in here …

… or probably just before it … October became my second-biggest month of all time, in terms of mileage on the bike. The top month was this last February, and it was all indoors and I’m not sure how I did that other than it was February, and what else was there to do? Also, that was a, for me, ridiculous number and it’s hard to imagine getting back to it again. The gap between my most prolific month and the second month was substantial, but it’s a little more narrow now because of today’s bike ride, a 50-miler, and this lovely, dry, incredibly mild weather we’ve enjoyed all month.

So it was about three hours in the saddle today, enjoying the sun and the warmth and the trees.

And I spent a bit of that time thinking I need to find all of the roads that look like this, and ride up and down them all the livelong day.

I also, as is customary, spent some time wondering about the authenticity of this personal mileage achievement. It is the curse of the foreknowledge, and the spreadsheets. Sure, I rode every mile, turned every pedal crank. But without seeing where the numbers were last night, I wouldn’t have taken the ride I did today. If it is that purposeful, is it still organic? Is it more so?

The things you think about when your mind goes away from the world and comes back to you.

Not too long after that I ran across a woman who was trying to wrangle a dog into her car, which she’d parked in the middle of that road. I asked her if she needed any help. She asked if I had a leash. I did not have a leash. I carry a lot of things on the bike with me — three tubes, a pump, some set of lights, fuel, my phone, a tire lever, a few bucks, two water bottles and one or two other things depending — but never a leash.

So I found myself wondering Should I carry a leash? On the off chance that that, which has never happened in all of the years of riding a bicycle, happens again? And if it doesn’t, what else could I use the leash for, if necessary?

Not all of the things that you find yourself thinking about are particularly deep or useful. But I decided against it. For now, anyway.

So this older lady was struggling with this sickly looking dog. I opened the back door of her car for her, and went on my way and she went the opposite direction to get it some care. Hopefully it is a quick bounce back for the dog, and the lady will be pleased to have helped. I will imagine them being reunited and each loving the other in selfless devotion.

I did a little under half the ride on my own, but circled back to the house to pick up my lovely bride, fresh in from her day of doing things, and she joined me for the rest of the ride. I pulled into the driveway as she was topping off her bottles. I might be getting pretty good at timing these things.

By the time we got back to the road in that video, the same one you see here …

I was ready to be done. On the one hand, I want to do these longer rides, and longer one still. On the other hand, my bike fit isn’t great, and my fitness might be worse.

There’s only one cure for the latter, so I’ll just keep riding.

But not right now. Right now, I have to go write something about riding bikes.

While the miles counted today, this doesn’t count as the writing.

cycling / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
29
Oct 24

It’s a grading day, so here’s a brief story

Yesterday, before the week’s grading began in earnest, I surprisingly went for a bike ride. I spent a few minutes noodling around town, waiting to meet the owner of the local bike shop. On my way, I passed this cornfield, which looked like something that van Gogh might have noticed.

The bike shop guy, Mike, rode with me over to a road planning meeting. He took me on a few roads I’ve not been on before, waving and nodding at everyone between here and there. He might be one of those guys who knows everyone. He also taught me a thing or two about riding bikes along the way.

The meeting was for a county-wide project. They had four posters and a few slides. The idea is that this group is going out looking for grants. They’ve identified, over a five-year period, a series of priorities for intersections and roads around the county.

A few of the county commissioners were there, and they want to know more, and would have preferred to be a part of this planning earlier. They’ll apparently hear about it next month. The plan seems sensible, at least to a lay person like me, but it was concerned more with motorists than cyclists. But that makes sense, too, considering the data in their basic five-year study. This was the last poster.

I hope I didn’t volunteer myself for work on this, but I might have volunteered myself for this. If you talk about awareness and perspectives and all of those things to planners and commissioners, they might think you’re interested.

Using the late hour as an excuse, we ducked out of there, Mike the bike shop owner and I, and pedaled away, talking about what we’d heard, and what we’re doing and how we have to work to make moments like this one more widely available.

This moment in particular. I took this shot right after he said that, because it was beautiful, and he was right. And this was where I realized something else.

You should find someone who knows more about a thing you love, a person who has done it for longer than you have, and do that thing with them. No matter how much you enjoy it, or for how long you’ve been passionate about it. You’ll be energized by an enthusiasm that equals or bests your own.

And then, when you part ways in the semi-darkness, you’ll have something to think about as you make your way home.

There might be something more than a metaphor to that.

adventures / cycling / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
22
Oct 24

Finally got the photo I wanted

Halloween yard decor is a big thing around here. A really big thing. A where-do-you-store-all-this-stuff-year-round thing. But this little yard is my favorite this year. This sits beside a modest house of weathered wood cladding and freshly painted trim, the house’s footprint was cut out of a tree line and farmland. It sits right up on the road, at once out of place and perfectly expected.

Beyond the over-dependence on plastic tchotchkes, this scene has one unique feature. You see it right in front of that standing skeleton.

That human-sized wrapped garbage bag. Wrapped in duct tape.

Each time I pass by, that bag is in a different spot. Cracks me up, every time.

The view from office is not bad.

A little kid plays under those trees. What a magical set of memories are getting made under those big full canopies.

(Update: I took that photo at precisely the right time. Two days later, one of those trees has dropped half of its leaves already.)

I went to campus to give a very brief presentation last night. On the way back home I think I saw the comet.

I was driving, on the phone and it was pure timing, which explains the quality of that photo.

It could be a plane, or a smear on the car’s glass for all you know. (I know it isn’t the latter.)

We went for a nice bike ride this afternoon. Well, the first few miles were nice. I swallowed a bug at about eight miles in, enjoyed a coughing and choking fit, got dropped and never really recovered.

Before that, though, I took this photo. This is the one my lovely bride usually takes, but she’s much better at the composition than I am.

Here’s my question. We’re poking along at 20, 21 miles per hour here. That’s not nothing. How does she look so casual there.

After I got dropped, I enjoyed the scenery.

Have you ever wondered what half a million dollars looks like on a farm? It looks like this combine.

Since I had a nice ride today, and it’s now a record-breaking October, and I’m ahead of my mileage projections, and we went to a cycling safety meeting tonight, I wore this shirt.

I made this a few years ago and it’s sat in my closet since then, because I oddly don’t want to wear the things I like, I guess? Worrying about wear-and-tear and stains probably means something. Anyway, it’s a cool shirt. I thought you should see it. I’m thinking maybe I should design all of my own t-shirts.

Like I have more hangars in the closet.