Friday

books / Friday / photo — Comments Off on The platonic ideal of Fridays
28
Aug 26

The platonic ideal of Fridays

We had rain yesterday. We also had a tornado warning, and while my lovely bride grabbed one of the cats and took shelter in the basement, I looked for the other cat. I kept an eye on the radar, an eye on the windows and a third eye looking for the cat, which explains why I couldn’t find her. She came out promptly when the worst of it passed. And the worst of it was atmospheric rotation. And a lot of rain. The three nearest weather stations recorded totals of 4.49, 5.31, and 7.11 inches. Whatever amount we had it was enough to show you where water can come in. And so Monday we’ll have some people out for quotes on how to keep the rain outside, rather than inside. (We have a slight chimney problem. We also have a slight backwash problem in the basement. Having fixed one of those already I know that one will be easier to correct.)

I watched a garbage can float down the road. Someone up the hill hadn’t retrieved theirs for the day and so the thing, lid open, just drifted down the hill on the water. It lost its balance right near the bottom, and fell onto its side in the road. By the time I went to the window to look at it again it was deep into the neighbors’ driveway.

Someone’s going to miss that in a few days.

I had an abstract due today. OK, it is was due Monday, but we’re in that time of year where you are still trying to be ahead of things. So I wrote a 300 word abstract. This takes more time than you’d imagine, but isn’t overly difficult. The problem, as ever, is anticipating what your audience needs and wants, and figuring out where they can make an inferential leap. If your finished paper is 8,000 words and you have to sum it up and tease it in 300, you’re necessarily leaving some things out. It takes a few drafts, is all. And that takes a little time.

Also, there were emails to navigate. Next week email navigation will turn into email negotiation. Then there’s plea bargaining, desperation, and ‘Won’t you please just leave me alone?’ But, if you stay on top of it, you can avoid that for the most part. I stay on top of it by treating my inbox like a To Do list. If I don’t want to To Do it right now it just To Sits There. Or, sometimes, if I don’t want to To Do it I put a particular email in a To Folder, where it will no doubt sit long past its usefulness or my recollection.

I send more emails to my inbox than anyone else does. It’s littered with links to something that might be useful in this class or that class. My recent innovation has been to sort them all into folders for a given class. Now, when I need a new AI example, or an anecdote about, say, stadium operations, I just have to go into that folder. The problem is my innovation isn’t innovative enough to let me sort the emails in the folder accordingly. There they sit, chronologically, waiting for me to sift through them, often trying to guess the subject matter by URL. Perhaps next summer’s innovation will be organized email folders.

Should I start a list of next summer’s projects already? Should I even have a list of summer projects?

Anyway, there is a lot to do. Now, not just next summer. I did a little of it today. My classes are prepared for next week, I think. (One more pass on Monday, the hustle begins on Tuesday. The hustle actually begins Monday. I have to write my opening note to the online class. I have to print out rosters. I have to make sure everything is squared away for the week. I have to settle into the new weekly schedule I’ve sketched out. Basically, Monday I’ll be an entirely different person.)

Try explaining this to the cats, who just want their weekly feature — the site’s most popular feature — and also pets, and treats. Phoebe has an idea about those treats.

And here she is, in the new tunnel, thinking tunnel thoughts, I’m sure. We have lots of places where the purpose seems to be I hide here but it is never clear on what we’re hiding from. I’m sure it is instinct, and who are any of us to argue with instinct.

Just look at how handsome this face is. If Poseidon put as much effort into not being a jerk as he can put into being charming … well, we wouldn’t think he has personality issues.

He can be very sweet. Very demonstratively sweet and peaceful, which makes his random outbursts seem all the more rude. Also, he’s a big fan of this book. I’m not sure if he’s a fan of my reading it, however.

Here he was, laying on it last week. A book on a lap might be a highlight for a cat. Who are any of us to argue with instinct?

Speaking of that book, we return now to Rick Atkinson’s Fate of the Day, the second installment in his Revolutionary War trilogy. It’s excellent. Highly recommended.

There are reasons some of the disquieting stories from the Northwest Territory don’t make it into school books. You couldn’t tell the story of Fort Sackville and think there are any good guys at all in the Revolution. Good grief.

Another one of those stories would be the Sullivan Expedition against four British-allied tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy. Congress told our man George Wahsington to do something about it and he, who had fought indigenous people before, had ideas on how to do this. He also was probably ready to go on the offensive after having spent so much of the war dodging and daring the British. So in the summer of 1979 he sent Gen. John Sullivan on a particularly grim task.

Sullivan started late and perhaps didn’t fulfill his objectives to the utmost, but was nevertheless effective. The Haudenosaunee, allied with the British, had raided some white settlements in upstate New York. A few doen people were killed in one such raid, some 300 are estimated to have died in another, at the Battle of Wyoming Valley, and late in 1778 some 30 people were killed in a horrific manner at Cherry Valley. and this was in retaliation for that. It had become clear that offense was what was needed on the frontier. In all, funds were appropriated, orders were given, men were mustered, Sullivan (eventually) stepped off with about 4,000 men. When it was over some months later, his force had razed some 40 villages, with thousands of people trying to survive as refugees and no crops to feed themselves. The estimates suggest that a few hundred natives were killed during what we would today call combat operations, but perhaps several thousand more would perish from disease or starvation.

And now historians debate the thing. Was it genocide? Some, but not all, have said as much.

There are monuments to the Sullivan expedition, dozens of them along the route Sullivan’s men marched. There was a stamp issued 140 years later. By the bicentennial, in 1979, things had become more subdued. There are also reenactments.

You can read some of these details here. But you should also rush out and get Atkinson’s book. It’s terrific.

errands / Friday / photo / woodworking, sorta — Comments Off on A day in rebellion
21
Aug 26

A day in rebellion

Because I did not do it yesterday, because I was working, I spent the morning running the weed eater. The backyard needed it. Also, I plucked some giant mutant dandelions. The web will tell you that dandelions can grow two feet tall, and if I knew that before just now I would have taken photos of the three and four-feet tall stalks that were threatening the rose bushes. My plan had been to hit just the edges of the lawn, the high spots at the fence, and the parts that were growing beyond their design intention. But, you know how it is with weeds. One thing leads to another and before long I had built up a decent sweat and a giant lawn bag full of mint and whatnot.

Want some mint? Come get some mint. Be sure you want it first. It’s an opportunistic plant, willing to grow in any free space, and it is all but impossible to eradicated.

Give the mint three pieces of credit, though. It pulls up easy. And it will choke out just about any other weed. It smells pleasant. And now the car smells like mint. I took the recycling and the green things to the county drop off site after my lovely bride did a bit of weed-pulling too. So there I was, two big containers of glass, aluminum, and a bit of plastic to drop. Two bags of weeds. Great armfuls of boxes. I even put them in the car well this time, such that I was a whirl of efficiency at the county site. The one other guy doing his part to save the earth was amazed at my industry. Two trips to the cardboard bin, two long walks to the mixed recycling. The only wasted motion was when when I accidentally closed the trunk too early.

Back home I left the garage open, and broke out some of the tools with which one works wood. I had, by then, just decided I wasn’t going to get in front of a computer today. (Except I am now, but that’s different, somehow.) The weather was just right, in the shade, anyway. And I decided to make a little thing for the garage. One of the few shortcomings in our house is that the garage is awfully crowded. And the wall upon which I store the tools with which one works wood is also where the bikes and various cycling accessories live. There are two problems with this. Last year I got tired of all the helmets and shoes and whatnot sitting on top of my table saw, so I got myself a corner cabinet, made myself some French cleats and now we have two shelves for helmets and shoes. But, still, the sunglasses have worked their way back down to the saw area. I’m the biggest perpetrator. So lately I envisioned a little sunglasses holder that will also go onto the elongated French cleat.

Today, because the weather was nice, in the shade, and I was in a computer rebellion, I decided to take the afternoon and make that happen.

The problems are these. One, I’m not an especially good woodworker. You improve with practice, though. But this brings me to my second problem. Space is limited, and so I don’t practice all that much. I had to go downstairs to fetch the ladder so that I could climb up it to see what scraps of old lumber I’d use. I had to move the miter saw to get to the table saw. I had to pull the table saw into the drive way. I had to run an extension cord. I had to peer through the garage shelves (which desperately need attention, which is my fault, and something I’m looking forward to addressing on a not steamy day) for things like a framing square, pencils, the table saw fence, the orbital sander, and so on.

Once I had all of the right things I proceed to doing the work, breaking down a random bit of plywood I picked up from somewhere, and then ripping a lovely bit of pine for the sides of my shelves. And then gluing one of those sides to the plywood. Then I dug out my brand new brad nailer. I picked this up sometime back and now was the time. The battery was charged, some long brads came in the box (I picked up some others, too, and they’re on that shelf … somewhere.) I drove in my first-ever brad nails today. I felt macho doing it.

With my ear protection on and everything. The brad nailer works well. It is also louder than you’d expect.

Then I ripped some more pine, so that I could crosscut it for the shelves themselves. Here I managed to not hurt myself, but relearned a lot of things about what not to do with your table saw.

(I’ll never hurt myself on the table saw. I fear it enough to respect it. I will hurt myself on pretty much any other thing. Though, today, happily, I didn’t hurt anything.)

I decided to make the shelves larger than I’d envisioned. I figured maybe it will evolve into a storage space for something else one day. Besides, it just didn’t seem like a small project day. I don’t know how to explain that, otherwise, but you should always listen to your gut around power tools.

Plus, I figured, you can never have enough space for the little things you carry.

Anyway, all of the pieces got cut. And I made a little dry fit test. It’s going to look something like this.

I glued up the second side. I’ll drive some brad nails into it this weekend, just for fun. And I’ll develop a process to space out those shelves, too. They’ll be attached all in one go at some point soon. Then we’ll just have to install the cleat on the back.

I sanded all of this down, but decided I’m not going to finish it. It’s garage furniture, after all. The Yankee might want to. She likes staining things. So I’ll leave that up to her.

Anyway, by this point, on a project where I decided to do more thinking than measuring, I realized I was approaching being done for the day. This is an important thing to consider because there’s still the cleaning up and the putting away. I timed this. It took 32 minutes to throw away the little bits, to put the sander and the sand paper and the square and the ladder away, to find a place the shelves can safely sit while the glue fixes, to put the table saw back in its corner, and the miter saw back on the table saw, to roll up the extension cords and, finally, to clean up my sawdust.

Truly, it is the most first world problem that ever existed, but set up and tear down is an investment all its own in my scenario. I need a shop so that I might do more of this, and get better at it. Which is to say, really, I shouldn’t buy any more second hand tools. There’s no room in my non-space. A new space can’t be the basement — too much sawdust and noise. It can’t be the garage — that’s where the cars live. I don’t have an outbuilding for this, nor is ours the sort of neighborhood where that would fit in. And I can’t afford an off-site location. So I’ll dabble, me and my average to poor carpentry skills, when the weather and scheduling and big chunks of available time permit.

The good news is that I have plenty of projects in mind.

This evening I’ve spent chatting with The Yankee, making weekend plans, having dinner, catching up on the day’s news, doing the dishes, doing this … pleased I spent a day doing something that was just for fun. Aside from the weeds, anyway. Backyard looks good, though!

Someday, soon, the sunglasses will, too.

errands / Friday / photo / site — Comments Off on Do you know praying mantis?
14
Aug 26

Do you know praying mantis?

Sometimes strategies that you develop turn out to be accurate. There’s always the possibility you’re wrong, or you misread a situation or a third alternative arises. But sometimes you get it right. In this deliberately obscure case a time management strategy I’ve been employing has worked in my favor. So, go me? The thing about patting yourself on the back about barely referenced strategies is that you can’t count on the next one just because you were right on the last one. That’s just hubris and it will eventually catch up to you. Or me, in this case. And where will you/I be with the much ballyhooed time management choices then, huh?

You’ll spend all of your time searching and stretching for a metaphor that explains the thing without explaining the thing, thinking that one day, some seven or eight years from now, you’ll come across this post again and recall and know exactly what was going on here. You will not. I will not, in this case. I think exactly one time in the decades-long history of the site is there an allusion to something unsaid that I can recall and regard as important. And it was! And you’ll never find it, because I’m not telling.

(I wrote three paragraphs of a personal anecdote I like, one of those recollections-of-a-life-lesson I taught myself in 2003 or so, and I included the phrase “lightning bolt and thunderclap of clarity,” because I’m proud of that realization. It was an important story and a great lesson, but doesn’t fit here, so I deleted it and you are welcome.)

I woke up roughly on time this morning and made my way downstairs and outside. Parts of the southern side of the house and the gardens there are still shaded a bit, and I needed the shade to crawl around on hands and knees and do more weeding. I plucked at grasses and mints for about two hours.

I made a friend.

For a few moments, we did a bob-and-weave dance together. The insect craned its neck this way and that. I did it in response, then the mantis did it again. Then I did it again. Mid-way through the third round the insect got bored of it. But, I felt, we’d bonded in that time.

Then I felt bad about ripping up all of the green things upon which it had been living its best life. But it scurried off, headed for another patch of growth I wasn’t going to pull up. Other insects and greener pastures and all of that.

One year and one day ago I met this guy on the northern side of the house. I wonder if they are related.

How often do various insect groups have family reunions? I only took one entomology course in college and, I must confess, that did not come up. If I had undergrad to do over again, I definitely would not ask about that.

Late this afternoon, after pretending to do some computer work, I took all of the fruits of my weeding, five giant bags over four sweaty hours, and loaded them into the car to take them to the county’s drop off site. I drove there, smelling of decaying green things, and dropped them off. Usually there is a crowd, maybe even a line, but there was only one other vehicle there as the Friday closing hour loomed. I gave the bags the ol’ heave-ho without making a mess of things and then climbed back in the car.

This is my favorite part of the recycling and waste run. There is a little building that sits in the lot and the man that runs the place, when he’s not outside moving stuff around or doing the other things he does, sits in there. You can’t see into the building because of the light and glare, but I also give it a little wave. Here I’ve been working on my uninterested-but-thankful expression. A fixed lip, a nod, a casual wave, and then down the gravel drive, onto the road and that chore is done. Until the next time the chore must be done, and I will try another version of that wave. Maybe three fingers next time.

I went over to one of the local grocery stores, picked up a few things, and then pointed toward home, where I almost got in a tangle with the driver of this vehicle.

It’s a company car, and the driver was rather aggressive. I followed him a bit as he weaved through town and near a school zone at high rates of speed. Soon, I caught him at a light where the road allowed me to go past him and better see the company logo. And don’t you know I looked them up. It’s a local concern. They work on restaurants and businesses and commercial remodels. I sent the family-owned business an email, sharing the license plate, telling them the driver was erratic and dangerous on their insurance and, what’s more, with a great big company log on the side of the van. “That’s probably not the word of mouth you want,” I concluded. “Certainly it isn’t the risk the rest of us should accept from your company.”

That felt like a good way to end a Friday. I hope it is an issue for someone in their office on Monday.

cycling / Friday / Instagram / photo / video — Comments Off on Alien plants have landed
7
Aug 26

Alien plants have landed

I got in some good work today. For about three hours and change I worked on straightening out one of my fall courses. I have the first six weeks of lecture notes all set up. Everything is organized through mid-November. Then it got confusing, because I got blurry-eyed. It happens. I’m surprised I was able to keep it together that much.

It isn’t the material. The material is fine, but rather the organizational part. All of those dates, all of those moving parts.

I did realize that one of my better lectures lines up nicely an important part of the football schedule this year, so there’s that.

After a time, I took a break for lunch, which was my first mistake. Lunch was good. We sat around and talked about this and that, as people do. Then we decided on the thises and delayed the thats. We moved some furniture around. We sat and had a little read. I called my mother for a chat, as people do. And, somehow, that was the day.

Oh, and I checked a few of the growing things in the backyard, where some things are having a great year.

Especially the weeds. As in not here yesterday, embarrassing large today, and pulled this evening. So I pulled a few weeds — I need to get more yard bags, and so I can’t too invested in that.

Besides, I just went to look at the things that were a-blooming.

The things we want to bloom, anyway. I can hear my old teacher, and all of my old friends who studied horticulture even now “a weed is anything undesirable. A rose could be undesirable if you don’t want it where it is growing.”

Well, I don’t know for certain what this is. Stonecrop, I think. And I’m not sure if it has grown in this spot before. Or if we want it there. Good thing I don’t have those yard bags, right?

I’ve said that a lot in the last month or so, which goes a long way to explaining all weeds which must now be addressed. Well, soon, anyway.

This evening watched today’s stage of the Tour de France Femmes. We watch a lot of sports, of course, and more than our share of bike races, as you might imagine. At the risk of testing your patience, this stage had what became one of the greatest climbs in mathematical history. (That phrase has never been written on the web.) Here’s the highlight version.

Kasia Niewiadoma-Phinney, who has previously won the Tour, attacked on the lower stages of Mount Ventoux, one of the sport’s most iconic climbs. This is the first time women have raced up Ventoux in the tour — how you say … patriarcat. The two women in the lead group with her were Demi Vollering and Marlen_Reusser, two of the most accomplished riders in the modern peloton, and they found themselves locked in their own tactical battle behind. As they all progressed up the mountain Vollering and Reusser botched their own responses to the attacking Niewiadoma-Phinney, who stormed up at such a blistering pace that it changed the circumstances for Vollering and Reusser two or three times as they made their way up.

Usually, the circumstance and the interpersonal dynamics of a bike race, and how each determines the other, are what I found most interesting, but Niewiadoma-Phinney’s metrics are what matters here.

In men’s cycling, the greatest road racer of all time, Tadej Pogačar, recorded a 6.98 w/kg performance for 40 minutes on his 2024 rampage up Plateau de Beille. That’s considered the best climb ever, in terms of the data. Here’s one estimate of her data today.

This is all about how much power the ride can generate relative to their mass, which is how the datapoints are equalized among different people. Niewiadoma-Phinney’s averaged that sort of output for 55 minutes, so 37 percent longer than Pogacar did. And, she was pointed into a headwind for most of the climb.

Also, Taylor Phinney — Niewiadoma-Phinney’s husband, my all-time favorite rider and now on the comeback trail to become an Olympian once again — said her number was actually “more like 5.6” w/kg.

It’s an astounding thing. An awesome thing, in the truest sense: that ride should fill one with some awe. And she did it in the big race on the biggest climb on the hardest day. Most of us can’t produce power like that under ideal circumstances. Certainly we can’t hold it for long. Guaranteed a lot of people will be trying this weekend, but a lot of people are going to realize, very quickly, you cannot match one of the greatest rides of all time.

adventures / books / Friday / history / music / photo / video — Comments Off on Fastest July ever
31
Jul 26

Fastest July ever

Happy weekend! I’m making it a long one. There was work, a little, but then my lovely bride and I decided to sit down and read books. First we read inside. Later, we read in the backyard. We know how to party.

The electricians came back to finish the install of the generator. Took them part of a third day to get it done, but at least this time it wasn’t 108 degrees outside. They’ve completed their tasks. Nice guys, unfortunately their shop is a long way away, or I’d call them our local electricians. Maybe they still will be.

And so we have a generator. The local inspector has to come out and inspect all of the gas and the electrical work, and hopefully that will be painless. Our electricians seemed to know what they were doing. The various gas people who’d come out seemed to know what they were doing. I’m sure it’ll all look good.

This is how it works. If the power goes out, the system realizes it, and the generator fires up 10 seconds later. When the power comes back on, the generator set up realizes that, and turns itself off. Our job is to keep the air vents cleared, schedule annual maintenance, and, if the generator has to run for long stretches of time, check the oil.

Since we’ve been in the house the power has gone out three times. Once for about three hours, once for slightly longer. The first time we weren’t home, so I don’t know those details. Always in the back of my mind, though, this is the first time in my life that I’ve not lived on a priority grid — near a hospital or nursing home — and it could take a while to have the power restored if there’s a widespread outage. The neighbors talk about a big storm that came through and famously left them without power for a week. And that’s why we, and the neighbors, both have generators now.

Also, we got a shutter fixed today. Somehow some wind got in behind one, bent it over from the top down, and pulled the two top screws out of the siding. It just dangled there for a few days. It’s too far to reach via ladder alone. Also that roof is steep. Also, once in a while I get the impression that I am not as young and as bulletproof as I used to be. Also, that angle.

Anyway, a guy shimmied up the ladder, pulled out the old one, put up our new one (both are plastic, and look roughly identical) and held up a pleasant conversation the whole time — like he’d done this all before.

I promised to catch him if he fell. He promised to not mess up the gutter. He held up my end of the bargain and decided it wasn’t worth testing whether I meant it. (I meant it.)

Thing is, those shutters, pretty standard aesthetic pieces, come in packages of two. So now we have one extra shutter. Hopefully we won’t need it anytime soon. I put it in the store-it-and-forget-it section.

At the concert last weekend, Train did a curious little medley, the theme of which, if any, escaped me. But the crowd enjoyed themselves an awful lot with it.

  

It’s a party band vibe. A lot of crowd pleasing things, and tons of those local references that make the crowd scream. A lot of energy throughout.

The demographics here make no sense, and that’s probably the best part about it. For every person my age we saw at the show there was one person much older, and three people in their 20s. Age is just a number at a rock ‘n’ roll show. Maybe the demographics never should have mattered.

We continue on with Rick Atkinson’s Fate of the Day, the second in his Revolutionary War trilogy. Sometimes, even writers who have won two Pulitzer Prizers, and/or the editors who edit them, can get punchy.

This is, so far, the only Looney Tunes reference I’ve read.

Col. Donlop was killed at the Battle of Red Bank. It was a poorly conceived assault by the German officer and his British commanders. The Hessians were trying to avenge a previous slight. They thought they had the element of surprise. They did not have the proper tools for a fort siege. They never had the initiative and, ultimately, the battle becomes a big morale win for the Americans.

Some of our colleagues are working at that site even now. Just a few years ago archeologists found the remains of 15 Hessian soldiers there, and the project has become a public and educational dig. Dr. Janofsky is the real sort of archeologist you’d want to meet. The kind that can bring history to life for people who thought they were uninterested. I had the chance to see her speak earlier this year. She’s incredibly passionate about the work and of course steeped in the time she’s studying, but a part of a program that’s using the most modern techniques (isotopic testing of remains!) to further the research. Between the discovery in 2022 and 2024 the researchers have held a few “public dig days” and almost 400 community members have taken part.

Read Atkinson’s book. (If you know how to party like I know how to party, this will be a great start to August for you.

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