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adventures / cycling / Monday / photo / video — Comments Off on The week in between
28
Dec 20

The week in between

And how was your Christmas? And your weekend? And what does this null week look like for you?

We didn’t travel for the holidays, being safety conscious and risk adverse and all of that. The first Christmas I’ve spent in my own house, I was a newborn. The second, we were stuck in an ice storm. This, the third, I’m frozen in place by a pandemic.

So it was weird, and sad in some respects and empty and quiet in those same respects. But it was simple, and quiet, and lovely. The Yankee made cookies for Santa.

I picked us up some stocking stuffers — I think this was the first time I’d ever done that — and my mother-in-law mailed stockings, as well. So the two of us had four stockings, plus lovely presents.

The only downside being what could be shared in person. Had a nice long conversation with my mom. We had an amazing prime rib dinner, in keeping with tradition.

Here’s the before:

Here’s the during:

For the after, imagine two empty plates. Also, there were green beans and sweet potato casserole and a shrimp cocktail.

After all of that we had a video chat with The Yankee’s parents. Just add hugs. And we’ve all decided to keep track of how we’re going to make up for it when we can visit in person again. The best part is that everyone is healthy and safe, even if we can’t all be together. One of my relatives got out of the hospital yesterday after spending several days of Covid treatments. Hopefully they’ll continue to follow medical advice and stay away from others. More of the family should be following the now repetitive and obvious advice, but not everyone gets it, even if some of them get it.

But I sigh and digress.

I sighress.

The cats also had a fine Christmas. Their presents, which were wrapped, were kept in a closed closet to help them avoid temptation. One present’s wrapping paper did get chewed on a bit overnight. Added to the character of the day.

Poseidon is enjoying his toys immensely:

That little thing was covered in cat spit. Covered. I couldn’t put it in the creek out back and get it any wetter. Hours later it was still damp.

Phoebe is a much more thoughtful player:

On Saturday we rode through a bit of London.

Yesterday afternoon we toured the French countryside in Normandy.

And those were just the highlights. The normal stuff, the regular things, those are what really makes a great weekend.

adventures / cycling / Thursday / video — Comments Off on Christmas Eve
24
Dec 20

Christmas Eve

I’m told a day’s worth of non-stick flurries don’t qualify for a white Christmas.

This would be the time for it, of course. Nowhere to go. No one coming here. If it can’t be warm it may as well be warm. Let it snow, I say this one year.

Had a nice morning walk — indoors, it was 27 degrees before the black night sky turned to the regular daily gray, after which the temperature fell to 23.

Wrapped a few presents, rode the bike through France.

Watched cookies being made — where the real magic happens! — and had a delicious dinner of pasta shells. Then we went out to see some Christmas lights. Drove through the courthouse square, went through a neighborhood celebrating a 30-year anniversary of luminaries. It was quite lovely.

Santa didn’t appear while we were gone. So we’ll just have to go to bed early tonight.

Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

books / cycling / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off on Lightly browned, but only just barely
23
Dec 20

Lightly browned, but only just barely

I’m going to try something different. Sitting still isn’t getting it done. Maybe moving around will mean something.

So I rode my bicycle through London.

On Zwift, of course. No one is traveling to London right now. People are still trying to get out of there, last I checked. New York is clamping down on visiting Brits, and we’re not allowed anywhere right now either.

But an hour in The Big Smoke gets the heart rate up and loosens all the muscles. It’s a good thing.

I had three little sprints, as you can see in the spikes of the graphic details the watts. Maybe, for a half a second, I could have turned on part of a toaster.

I’m not a big watts guy, because I don’t produce a lot of watts, but maybe I could learn.

Anyway, felt better after an hour on the bike. I’ll have to try that again tomorrow.

Elsewhere, not a lot going on. I am working on a image for Christmas, and I’m looking forward to wrapping up a book this evening. I’ve almost taken a mid-day nap two days in a row. So, that’s the pace of things, which is a lovely, lovely pace of things.

So … look forward to a brief book mention tomorrow. Which reminds me I forget to mention one two back. On Sunday night I finished McCullough’s book on the Wright Brothers, and mentioned it here on Monday. But, before that, at some point last week, I finally finished Richard Hughes’ Reviving The Ancient Faith.

I say finally because I started reading this, according to the traditional receipt bookmark, in 2006. I put it down about a third of the way through. And I never give up on books. It’s also as thorough as can be — and Hughes discusses, effectively and believably, why it isn’t more thorough. It’s an issue of source material, and even still, he churns out a cool 385 pages. The style was the problem. It’s almost a monograph, and it makes for dense reading, but its a serious treatment of serious people and their most serious subject matter.

I wrote a little about one person on Twitter last week.

It’s a good book about the Church of Christ, and it traces its way through the last few hundred years of people trying to figure out the belief system. I got this book wanting to learn about people to compliment what I’ve always learned about the Bible. This book does that, at the broadest level. The top review on Amazon says all the necessary things:

After forty plus years attending the Church of Christ, I am just now hearing the names of Alexander Campbell and Barton Stone. This is a very hard book to read for those of us who were raised Church of Christ and were never told of our origins or early leaders. Your belief that you are a member of the Church founded in 33 AD will be shattered. Here the curtain is pulled back and the leaders, editors, college administrators, who have formed Church of Christ doctrine over the years are exposed. The amount of debate, fighting, and bickering among the leaders through our short history is very disturbing. If you are happy in the Church of Christ and are looking for material to strengthen your faith, this book is not you. If you want to see how the Churches of Christ have developed by reading history that has been hidden away, this book may change you life.

In that light, I suspect it would be a disconcerting read for some. But history isn’t always easily palatable, which is one of the things that can sometimes make it fun.

The human parts are what really make it work. I learned that when I finally got a history teacher in school who made it about those people and emotions, and not just names and dates. And, so, here, one of the most interesting things I read in this book wasn’t even in this book. That Philip Mulkey, Sr. character, the 18th century preacher excommunicated for adultery, perfidy and falsehood, wasn’t in the book. That one description of Nancy Mulkey, near the end of the book, where it finally had the opportunity to talk about women in the church, had the one brief passage, which, in turn, led me to a late-night search which intrigued me. A long family line of preachers. And then Philip Mulkey, Sr. had his difficulties, whatever they really were. A person’s weaknesses and bad choices aren’t automatically amusing, but there’s a personal story there. It’d be worth learning more about, I’d bet.

But Mulkey isn’t in the book I’m wrapping up tonight, which I’ll briefly mention here soon. And he likely won’t be in the one after that, either. I may never know more about him than what a few genealogy websites can tell me.

Makes you think, and wonder, and worry, doesn’t it?

adventures / books / cycling / history / Instagram / Monday / photo — Comments Off on Look! Up in the air!
21
Dec 20

Look! Up in the air!

I got setup on Zwift and a new indoor trainer this weekend, a gift from my lovely bride. Let’s see how bad this can hurt me.

Quite a bit, it turns out. That was a Saturday afternoon introduction ride, and for the next several rides, I’m sure, I’ll try to formulate the way that this style of riding is similar, and completely different, to being on the road. And I can’t wait to try to get better next week!

We had a nice walk on Sunday. The park nearest us was closed for surfacing repairs, said the sign. But the swings were open. And she is excellent at flying through the air.

She got that high because I helped push a little. We agreed that the days of high-altitude ejections was behind us. Knees and age and all that. But you’re always a kid again on a proper swing set.

Speaking of flying through the air, I finished up the David McCullough book, The Wright Brothers, last night. This was certainly one way to end a chapter on a down note.

I enjoy McCullough’s work, and have read about half of his immensely well-regarded catalog. This book seemed a bit rushed in the back-half, however. Having worked through the significant achievement of flight, the book glosses over training of Walter Brookins in Montgomery, Alabama and others elsewhere, the barnstorming and so on. It’s not the authoritative text, and is hardly extant, but it’s a good opening read on the Wright family.

Speaking of up in the sky, saw this cloud on this evening’s walk. I guess I was thinking about antique flight because, in the few moments before I could to a clear view of it, the shape reminded me of a dirigible.

Clouds being some of the most ephemeral and over-observed items available to us, it probably looked like a dozen things to a dozen different sets of eyes while it was lazing about today’s calm sky. What was your bunny was someone else’s turtle and my steampunk airship.

Planetary movement being predictable in ways that clouds are not, we all knew to go outside and look this evening. And, here, we had a good glimpse of the mislabeled Christmas Star.

I was sure, when I first read of the Great Conjuction a month or so ago, that we wouldn’t be able to see it because of the season’s regular dose of cloud cover — almost as predictable as the planets! — but we had a brilliantly clear and cool night.

And if you, like me, wondered if this or a similar planetary conjunction might have been central to the Christmas story, some astronomers who know how to calculate those things did the math and said, maybe, possibly, but also perhaps not.

cycling / Friday / IU / video — Comments Off on Progressive video and circumstance
18
Dec 20

Progressive video and circumstance

We had a graduation today. This is what that looked like.

It was a live production and went off without a hitch, owing to the good work of some talented people, and also me. It’s probably a dry run for the spring commencement. While some 100 people became graduates today, we’ll have 600 students moving the virtual tassel from one side of the mortar board to the other.

If anything, I said, we should do all the future commencement ceremonies like this. It went faster. After, you could just come in for the cookies and punch and socializing, which is where the real fun is, anyway.

Came home to spend about 75 minutes with this view.

And a few more miles were ticked off on the trainer, glancing through the blinds, listening to old music and feeling the burn. It’s an interesting series of experiences. You go in there in a light jacket, get ready to ride, climb on the bike and take the jacket off. Once your heart rate gets up a bit you are, of course, comfortable. It doesn’t take long at all, because the chill is only just barely a chill. It’s the buffer between the inside world and the outside world, the temperature re-configuration chamber. What, you’re not thinking of your house in these terms this year?

When you really get your trainer-mounted bike going you get the flush cheeks and the other familiar precursors to sweating. And suddenly there’s a drip, and you begin reminding yourself this doesn’t happen on the road because of the evaporative qualities of nature and the wind wicking away your perspiration. Which it is most decidedly not doing here.

Before long, you’re no longer just sweating, you are now actively hot and that first chill is a far-off memory. There’s a ceiling fan, and turning that on makes some magical atmospherics happen. Your heart rate is up, you are wondering whether you should question these decisions, and the fan is circulating just enough cold air to null this whole thing out. So long as you keep going.

As soon as you stop, being soaked through and under a fan in a chilled room, you have to leave, leave now or never get control of your core temperature again.

This is that time of year where I’m always concerned about the temperature getting into my bones. There are no amount of blankets or hot beverages, no appropriate number of layers of socks, to get warm again. There are some particular experiences, like time itself, which you can never escape. Especially when the bike isn’t going anywhere.

We can outrun this semester, though. Another one, thankfully, in the books.

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