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9
Aug 11

There is a quiz at the bottom of this post

Visited the financial adviser. She advised that I should have more money. This must become a repetitive part of her day. But, then, the degree of serious intonation could change on grave market days. Now you really need more money.

I am reminded of the line from the country song, some one told the narrator that Wall Street fell, but, he said, he was so poor that he could not discern the problem or understand, really, the implications as it directly related to his hard scrabble lifestyle.

Instead, his father went to work for Roosevelt, moved, and bought appliances. And the middle of the century was born.

Where can people move today? The moon. What a great concept this would be. Now all we need is a catchy name and acronym. Lunar Citizen Division. When they get up there they can build the solar system’s largest LCD screen, which would be perfect. On those clear nights you could watch reruns of Seinfeld, and forget about all of your problems down here. “Sure, the financial adviser said I needed to think about my medium term investments, but Jerry’s date has man hands! No soup for her!”

Our friend the financial adviser is very nice, happy, laughs a lot and complimentary and optimistic. I suppose they all have to be at this point, right? Besides, she works on the second floor of a two-story building. Not a lot of options there like you read about from the 1930s. The Roaring Twenties gave way to the Howlin’, Splattin’ Thirties. No one speaks of these things if they don’t have to. (And, of course, no one wants to see that happen today for a variety of reasons. I only mention it to say the following.) We leave such heavy lifting to Jean Claude Van Damme.

What a terrible movie. But the most recent quote on YouTube is great: “Man, 2004 is going to awesome!”

I suspect that it will, young man, I suspect that it will. Someone else, meanwhile, commented about a plot hole in a Van Damme film. And that’s why you should never read YouTube comments.

He’s still working, by the way. Four movies this year and three next year, so good for him. You’ll see none of them, and they’ll all have a fighting chance of being better than Time Cop.

Mowed the lawn. Specifically the back of the property. The front and sides were shown who is the landscaping boss around here at an earlier date. I was drenched, not from exertion so much as humidity. We will soon need new ways to define area stickiness. Gross, hardened syrup sometimes just doesn’t cover it as a descriptor.

Also cleaned one gutter, pulling some 38 pounds of leaves and sediment from the aluminium tray. This is good news: they are well mounted. If that had been shoddy craftmanship they’d have landed on the ground long ago.

This was the first real exercise of our new ladder. It is one of those folding, finger-pinching modular jobs. One ladder which can take on 35 shapes. You must make your own transformer noises, but I spend a considerable part of my youth in the 1980s, so this is not a problem.

I’m not sure how many of the positions the ladder creates will actually be useful, only that we can reach our largest ceiling, and yet the thing is light enough to be carried by one person and can be stowed without drastically changing any current storage plans. I meticulously work on storage plans, carefully arranging the stacking and order of things on the likelihood that they will be needed in any emergent scenario. Occasionally I realize I’ve mis-prioritized, or worse, mis-judged the odds of a scenario and must reshape the attic, or the garage or some other small area. It doesn’t keep me up nights, but I have had moments of clarity about these things in that fugue before you open your eyes in the morning.

So the ladder fits in the scheme of things nicely. Until it bites off an index finger. And you could see that happening.

Meanwhile, we are still waiting on the coupler for the washing machine. That’s an inconvenience. And I have some words on slides. Now I am memorizing the things I want to say around them. It is an unfortunate waste of your morning to see someone read word-for-word, from a screen. I give one lecture in one class where I do that. And that is the first one. I put up lots of words, speak slowly and repeat them. This is crucial information for that class that should stick with the students for years. And, then, I tell them never to do that in a presentation. But be sure you got the completeness of my very important message.

After that my presentations are usually one or three words each. I have not yet reached that higher level of existences where my PowerPoint presentations are nothing but bad clip art. Perchance to dream.

Today’s pop quiz: What does this butter and the United States economy have in common?

The answer is not: neither one should be left on the counter.

Auburn / cycling / errands / iPhone / Thursday / video — Comments Off
4
Aug 11

All of these things squeak or squawk

This being the first week of August it is time for the annual television programming party. Yes, modern TVs feature the automatic channel surfing feature, which can resolve the situation in a matter of moments. Yes, our television is modern.

Also, we have a DVR with a tuning card the cable company provided rendering this automatic tuning feature useless. They’ve also provided a printed cable pamphlet written by a sugar-addled copywriter and a regularly changing lineup that amazes and confounds simple viewers like me.

So the process begins, ignoring the guide, which is a programming feature, and manually flipping through the channels manually. Writing down the stations that exist, making note of the station and then continuing on to the next one. I worked through the first third of the array today, noting we receive four home shopping networks, more Jersey Shore than any teen needs and, in my Super Digital Ultra Deluxe Package 3000 I can’t have Morgan Freeman educating me about wormholes. Oh, I know the Science Channel exists, I can get the icon in the user interface, but not any of the programming.

When we first moved in we had the Science Channel, and it was soon taken away. For one brief period we could watch the show, and Morgan Freeman narrated the heck out of it. And then it was gone. Through the wormhole, as it were.

Worked. Emailed. Read. We also visited World Market, where I was told to come back on Tuesday, or possibly Thursday, to find the thing I’d wanted on Monday. The young lady at the front walked me through two of the stands at the front, did not find it and made a phone call. “Come back,” she said in a hopeful, helpful way. And so we did.

And we looked, not finding the item du jour again. And then another lady helped me find the proper label. That was a nice service. I like World Market, and you will too.

See? They made it easy for me to spend my money there today.

Then we started birthday shopping. The Yankee has a particular item on her list, and now we must find it. So we’re looking for summer sales, and hit three stores, finding the right size, but the wrong details, or the right details but the wrong size, and so on. We’ll hit a few more stores tomorrow.

In the meantime, the farmers market, where we picked up a watermelon, cantaloupe, okra and peaches. Dropped them off at home and visited one of the neighborhood parks.

The Southeastern Raptor Rehabilitation Center was performing an owl release, and they turned it into a big evening party. Live music, food, raffles, bouncing things for the kids, Aubie, the winged ones. I made a video:

And when we got back home we rode our bikes, a quick seven mile evening.

Very warm, nice summer day, lovely in every way. Hope yours was too.

cycling / errands / Friday / video — Comments Off
15
Jul 11

No, we need the small shrimp

The good people at the grocery store must think we are trouble, or in trouble. It doesn’t take long before we are playfully picking on one another there. I fuss about the bill, the size of the box, why we are there two days in a row. And on and on. Today, the cashier a nice older lady who just liked to be out working and around people, did not exactly know what to make of us.

She should have seen us pondering the bananas, or looking for the quinoa.

Not sure what that is, but there are precisely two options for the grain, just down the aisle from an entire United Nations of rice selections. Perhaps it is the failed supply that could not go into Grape Nuts. There was a cereal I always wanted to try.

Maybe at an early age it was the Seinfeldian paradox that interested me. You open the box, there’s no grapes, no nuts. What gives?

Maybe it was the notion of breakfast on the beach, or the punctual milk man. Perhaps it was the poor man’s Sally Kellerman, or the guy who was the first person in his circle to hear Michael Bolton AND got the Grape Nuts jingle.

So, yeah. At the store again. We’re making dinner from a recipe book tomorrow night and that requires the precise amount of vegetables and seafood treats, and also a spice called Old Bay, which seems like something that should be discovered in your great uncle’s medicine cabinet. (I was informed we had the Old Bay. Good, I thought, I’m not spending $2.26 on that.

Grape Nuts is still around, but struggling. Wikipedia blames the many owners of Post. I think it was this spot:

It is an SNL bit with no soundtrack, a bad idea with a microwave, and a repudiation of every suburban Aspen thing the entertainment industry would dare imagine about the rest of the country.

You can imagine how that conversation started.

“We’ll need flannel, frost on the windows, a woman undisturbed by a studio in her kitchen and quiet kids who know when to shut up and just eat their cereal or they will go to school hungry!”

That was shot in 1993, and it comes off like everyone in the frame is over-medicated before it became the raison de-pharm. And it was all downhill from there. Microwave your milk? Again, Mom?

Anyway. It was raining when we were ready to leave the grocery store. We’d packed along the save the earth bags and then forgot them in the car. I’d offered to fetch them, but felines and canines were demonstrating terminal velocity in the parking lot. The nice, clean cut young man who helpful packed our plastic bags and secretly loathes the chore of it offered to carry them out. I laughed and said, Good for you. I didn’t think you’d offer to get rained on. But no need, sir.

These people have no use for conversation with you. They seem surprised that you’d try. Their dynamic is groceries? Outside? Are you sure?

One guy chatted me up last fall, one of the guys who would not take no for an answer. He was one of those types of people you meet and, later, you have a tinge of relief that door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen are no longer working your neighborhood. He would be this man. He wished to talk football. And also washing dishes.

He would have been marvelous at selling the first six volumes of the set, but you’d have trouble maintaining the pretense of needing books H through Z.

We need rain. We are in a severe drought. And it has looked all day as if it would rain. Really, I don’t recall a summer with more of a threat of rain, but less actual precipitation. One eye spent most of the day watching the radar, studying little blips moving in every direction, wondering if the famous Southern boomers would develop from nowhere.

Finally, after hours of this, I grew frustrated with waiting for the rain and hit the bike. My plan was to make a big loop around the neighborhood. It gives me two entrances toward home and one area with stores that can be a refuge if necessary. This was a bad ride, even by my considerably low standards. Cramped my calf, burned up my quads and couldn’t hold a pace. I did only 12 miles and the rain was the only thing I paced. I am surprised and disappointed by how poorly I feel on the bike after just a week off. But i’ll lower the saddle a bit again tomorrow and see how that feels.

Mostly, I have to remind myself, I am not these guys:

Tour all weekend, the 1989 Iron Bowl tomorrow, the Women’s World Cup final on Sunday. Great weekend of sports. Also there will be riding and crabcakes and coding. Oh, yes, we’re doing work this weekend! I’ll be coding and staring at magazines and spreadsheets until my eyes hurt.

Much like riding the bike, or visiting the grocery store, this doesn’t take long.

cycling / errands / iPhone / photo / weekend — Comments Off
3
Jul 11

Breaking the wall

How’s it going?

“Alright. How are you?”

Good. Beginning to wonder about this ride, though.

“Yeah, I was going to say, it is hot out.”

If I’m not back in three hours send out the search party.

“We’ll send the air conditioning, too!”

That was my neighbor, at the beginning of my ride today. He was pampering a Rolls, so I didn’t have a lot of faith that he’d come looking for me. And there was a moment or two when I could have used the help today. I took a route we’re accustomed to, but then branched off of it and headed out to another wide spot in the road, just to have a different route.

Sometimes you need to see different trees.

So 13 miles in I turned left and pedaled down a round that was closed. Signs and everything. I dislike backtracking on my bike, so I’d determined that I would just become the cyclocross type if I had to negotiate a bad bridge. But the road was fine. Better than fine, really. It was perfect. Newly painted and still without traffic. Made it through the now absent construction and then found that the road turned to dirt.

A lady happened to be checking her mail just then and we discussed the roads. It seems the road I’d mapped out for myself was just gravel the rest of the way. I’m not interested in that, so I had to backtrack. Go to the next intersection back, she said, take a right and then ride that until it ends. Another right will take you to to 280.

Which is what I’d hoped to avoid, but that’s my only option. So I backtracked, passed the Auburn asphalt research center — the roads around it are, unsurprisingly, in pretty decent shape — and ultimately found myself on the road I’d originally hoped to reach. This was about the halfway point.

And now am I’m on roads I’ve never been on. There’s nothing but woods and the occasional house.

I like to know where I’m going. I like to know the roads, the distances and what’s out there so I can meter my pace, ration my water and generally feel like I can tell someone where I am if there’s a problem. But my detour has thrown all of my distances out of whack. There’s not a gas station around for miles. Fourteen miles, in fact. Also it is mid-day. And hot. And I’m by this point thirsty.

So I nursed my water and pedaled on. And, if you passed me, I’m sorry about that.

Here are some of the scenes:

The artist seems to be making a statement of rural life here. Note the overexposure, the storm moving in over the dilapidated farm and the heavy equipment lying in repose beneath the shade tree.

Or it could be that I was trying to not fall off my bike.

Hay!

Where I saw possibly the largest butterfly of my life. Birds thought it intimidating:

When was the last time you saw bunting? Note the very friendly folks who waved me on from the parking lot there.

And, finally:

After that seven mile stretch, which felt more like a test of purgatory — and far more than seven miles because I was limping along for fear of my water situation — I made it back to the home road. After four more familiar miles I was back to a gas station where we frequently stop. It is my goal to carry my bike inside the store and not have them be surprised by it.

While I was picking up a Gatorade it began to rain, so I sipped my drinks under their covered picnic table area. I drank 64-ounces of fluid and didn’t even feel it. (Did I mention the heat index had been around 100 degrees and I’d been outside for several hours?) The rain passed. I got back on my bike, ignored the aching protests from my body, which pretended to not know I had a little way to go, yet.

I pedaled close to home, through the red light and past the drugstore and down the long straightaway that is my sprint. I pushed beyond the subdivision, choosing the longer way home, so up another hill, where I was by now getting a kick from the Gatorade and raisins and pedaling like a maniac, and then onto another road and then two more hills. The last of which was almost the end of me.

Made it home, got cleaned up and deleted the map I’d made for the trip, redrawing instead the route I wound up taking.

When I plugged it into MapMyRide I found good news. I broke through my wall. The last three long rides I’ve hit the physical and mental wall at 42-miles. My first “long ride” was 42 miles, and I was done, physically spent, just as we got home. The second time I’d planned to do 42 miles I made it home and felt better, but there was nothing left in me. The third time I’d planned for 50, but called it off at 42.

This was my fourth try, and my original plan today would have been 47 miles. But there were those changes in my route so I had no real idea. On the bike I felt great, though, so I was worried about the actual distance.

Fifty miles.

Did I mention how hot it was?

We visited the grocery store before dinner, bought the things from the list, made jokes of other things that caught our eye, acted silly and had a nice time of it. The cashier rang us up. Another young man bagged our items. He offered to carry them out for us, which is nice, but silly.

He seemed incredulous, disbelieving that I could handle the last 16 feet. Never mind that I’ve been pushing the cart all over the store. Or that there’s someone in one of the lines who might need more of your strapping young help.

Besides, I wanted to say, I just rode 50 miles in blistering heat. I can do this.

Like I deserve a medal or something.

We had chicken parmesan tonight, which is a tasty dish The Yankee makes. Chicken, cheese, sauce, pasta. I could have eaten another plate or two. I burned some where between 3,400 to 4,600 calories today. I could afford more pasta.

Tomorrow I’ll rest. Tuesday I’ll do more riding and reading and writing … that’s the summer to me.

cycling / errands / iPhone / journalism / links / Monday / photo — Comments Off
27
Jun 11

Doe, John Doe

The out-in-the-country wall post. Saw that on our bike ride this morning, an easy 23 miles out and back. Interesting how hills that once seemed daunting you can work through with comparative ease.

The last time we were out this way there were three names on that sign, but two of them must have settled up. And so I looked up Trey Gunter … and I’m thinking that might be a masterful alias.

What alias would you use? I think I’d cobble together a name from literature, or go with an obscure president.

My name? Cal Coolidge.

Might work.

Visited Walmart because there wasn’t much keeping me from going there. Picked up Miracle Gro. It seems the things that we wish to keep small in the yard grow prolifically. The things we’d like to accentuate need some steroids from Scotts.

Picked up Gorilla tape, which is as strong as sticky duct tape, looks like electrical tape but most certainly is not. I’m going to wrap it on my handlebars, because another over-gripping primate needs to grab hold of my handlebars.

Snacks, more snacks and not any waterproof silicon, which was the actual purpose of the visit. All of the directions instructed you to not apply below the waterline. It is waterproof with conditions. This is not the sort of relationship I wish to begin with sealants.

Links: Your tax dollars, lowest common denominator, governmental humiliator at work in the form of the TSA:

A 95-year-old Barry County woman’s ordeal with airport screening — where a relative says security agents required her adult diaper be removed — has become the latest in a string of national stories on frustrations with TSA procedures.

Lena Reppert, a native of Barry County, was flying from Florida to move home to the Hastings area, where she’s living with relatives who are caring for her, said her daughter, Jean Weber of Destin, Fla.

Instead of a getting a special goodbye moment with her cancer-stricken mother, Weber said the June 18 security check turned in a tearful ordeal because of the lengthy pat down by Transportation Security Administration agents.

“She was subjected to 45 minutes of searching, and I didn’t think that should happen,” Weber said this morning from her home in Destin.

There’s now an update to that story, but the response is thin gruel, but I feel safer already knowing a nonagenarian with leukemia has been ruled out as a threat.

North Korea is starving, perhaps even more than foreign policy guesstimates. Secret footage paints a grim picture:

“This footage is important because it shows that Kim Jong-il’s regime is growing weak,” he said.

“It used to put the military first, but now it can’t even supply food to its soldiers. Rice is being sold in markets but they are starving. This is the most significant thing in this video.”

This sort of thing is not what China and the South Koreans want to hear. When the government falls, or the serfs finally have had enough, those are the two borders and economies that will be directly stressed.

Maybe they should send in these ladies to assess the situation. World War II spy ladies from the OSS have been reunited in their neighborhood:

It was the early 1940s when Bohrer and McIntosh fell into jobs at the Office of Strategic Services, the nation’s first intelligence agency, created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and led by William “Wild Bill” Donovan, a Wall Street lawyer and World War I veteran. They were among the rarest of operatives, women working overseas during World War II.

In China, McIntosh, a “black propaganda” specialist, whipped up fake news stories to undermine the morale of the enemy — including an effort to convince the Japanese emperor’s soldiers that their wives were procreating with other men back home. Stationed in Italy, Bohrer analyzed aerial photographs of Germany, helping select sites to air drop and rescue OSS officers behind enemy lines.

Great story.