Up early this morning for a small Italian breakfast, then a short walk to an Italian train station — most of Italy’s transit workers are on strike, we found out two or three days ago and got lucky with a backup plan. Our route looked like this.
We arrived in Interlaken, as planned, in what is almost the center of Switzerland. Definitely it is one of the tourist centers. And who could blame the tourists for coming to places with views like this?
And that’s just on the way there.
After a quick bus ride we arrived at our hotel — a small little place run by a kind, small man and his family, with Swiss efficiency. There are maybe 16 rooms. This is the balcony view we’ll enjoy (but not slow down enough to see often) for the next few days. That view is not bad.
Click to embiggen.
If you just look down at the water, it is awfully inviting in the middle of this heat wave.
We took a ride back into Interlaken for dinner. And by “we,” I mean my lovely bride and her parents. This is an in-laws trip, which I don’t think I’ve mentioned. Here they all are after dinner.
A few years back, 2019 in fact, we decided we should take a trip, and this year we were able to do it. And now here we are, in beautiful Switzerland.
Tomorrow, we go up a mountain.
Friday / photo — Comments Off on I do not know how to pronounce ‘paraskevidekatriaphobic’ 13 Jun 25
An utterly unremarkable day. Some might say forgettable, if they knew of it, thought of it, could recall it. That’s what you want for a Friday, sometimes, and that’s what the universe called for and that’s what I received. I spent the day counting days until other days. What even is that?
It was fair, with a high in the low 80s. Entirely unremarkable. Unremarked upon. The sort that you don’t acknowledge because there will be another like it the next day, and the next day, the the following day.
We will have at least three days of unseasonably cool temperatures and overcast skies to mark our entry into mid-June. Fits the mood, I guess.
I didn’t even realize it was the 13th, and a Friday, until late in the day. Well, problems dodged. Not that I’m paraskevidekatriaphobic — though I might be a little afraid of people who are afraid of Friday the 13th. It says something about the power of suggestion, and, well, the power of learned things.
It’s a learned thing, I just learned. In China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, some people are wary of the number four, tetraphobia. In Italy, it’s 17, heptadecaphobia, owing to the way the Roman numberals can be moved around. In Afghanistan, the number 39 is a concern. That’s triakontenneaphobia.
Anyway, not much transpired today. I read. I wrote. I read. I petted cats. I put off until tomorrow, or the next day, and so on.
Here’s something productive, I today considered buying a new newspaper subscription. An actual paper. Delivery and everything. Sit at the bar. Read part of the fishwrap over breakfast. Finish up at lunchtime. Scan the ads for posterity. Figure out what to do with a mounting mound of mountainous newsprint.
I’ll do that in a few weeks.
If they deliver this far out.
I am to the point where going retro would feel like an upgrade. That might sound like more to do, but think of all the time I would save by not having to click the pop over ads on a news site, or trying to avoid, or navigate through yet another paywall. I’d actually be getting time back in my life! Supporting a local news business! Wondering, each week, how my $3 per week pays their bills.
(I am aware of the model. I teach the model in a few different classes.)
Anyway, that was the day. Things are lovely. Everyone is lovely. Flowers are blooming. And they will be tomorrow, too.
We were standing in the kitchen this evening, it was 6:57 p.m. We were talking about this or that and I looked into the dining room and saw the sun streaming in from one of the windows on the front of the house.
I like when the sun comes in and I just wanted to show you that.
By that time of the evening, at this time of year, the sun is starting to fall over the house across the way. We’ll soon have new neighbors there — the current hypothesis is they have children in school and are waiting to wrap up their school year and whatever else. I hope they enjoy how the sun falls on the woods behind them after a bright day.
Hopefully they’ll have bright days when they move in. This was an overcast one, until just before that time. And by overcast I mean Canada. And by Canada I mean the huge fires raging up there. It reminds me of 2023, when we moved here, when big swaths of Canada were on fire. Since we can’t blame the climate or the Anthropocene era, I guess we’ll just have to clumsily correlate that to people moving into this neighborhood.
Fortunately for Canada, no other houses around here are on the market just now.
I got dropped most droppedly. Mere miles from the house. I blame the wind. And also the nice ride I had yesterday. And that my lovely bride is riding very well right now. Anyway, this was an out and back, and it worked out to just under 20 miles, total. This is when she was coming back after turning around. My computer said I’d ridden 8.48 miles at the time. Which means that she was already almost a mile ahead of me by here.
Most droppedly.
The next shot on my phone is just an empty bit of road and field, because she flew out of the frame. And, then, the third shot was as I whipped the camera back around to my left.
Do you know how if you hold the shutter button down it’ll just keep taking pictures? The burst mode shoots something like 10 frames a second. So this was three-hundredths of a second? She’s riding very well. You’d be dropped, too.
Ehhh, I’ll catch her tomorrow. Or just hold her wheel. Or at least vainly try to do so.
Let us return now to the Re-Listening project, where we are now only seven or eight albums behind. The Re-Listening project, you might recall, is a now years-long effort to listen to all of my old CDs in the order of their acquisition. More or less that order. I’m a little out of order right now, because I mixed up the books. None of that matters. What matters is that I’m listening to music I enjoy and, for our purposes here, am padding out the site with a little more content. Videos, music, and occasionally a memory or two. These aren’t reviews, because no one cares. Anyway, just press the play button.
Anyway, let’s say it’s the summer or fall of 2002. Counting Crows fourth studio album, “Hard Candy,” was released that July. Counting Crows were, and are, a big, but my interest would wane in subsequent years. But this is still quite good. It went to number five on the charts, was certified gold in the U.S. and in three other countries besides. It was lighter, full of pop, and well received.
Anyway, the title track was the first track, and when I played this in the car recently I wondered if I had to reconsider my stance on the band.
They’re not bad. You don’t buy six records across the decades because you dislike an act. I just outgrew this one, is all.
This was the last single they released off the record, about 11 months into the album (you could do that back then). The layers of it are quite intricate and I mostly remember this as a song I played in an empty apartment which was empty because no one was there but me. I wasn’t enough to fill up the space then, so there was a lot of overwrought pop and rock music, I guess. See, outgrew it.
And despite my saying that, for me, these two deep cuts hold up very well.
Hey, we should all be so lucky as to have two or three things we did hold up after 20-plus years, right?
Anyway, the Counting Crows are still doing it, 30-some years later. They released an album, “Butter Miracle, The Complete Sweets!” just last month, and they’re touring the U.S. and Europe this summer and fall in support of it. And, if you can’t wait until they come near to you, Rick Beato recently released a well-done interview with Adam Duritz where they discuss making all of these decades of music.
The next record in this book is from a hardcore punk veteran. Only I didn’t know that at the time. There’s great percussion, and it’s singer-songerwriter pop-rock. Peter Searcy was sitting at the intersection of the Crows and the Replacements. And, if I may say so dismissively, it fits 2000 almost perfectly.
This is one of the tracks that got airplay, and probably caused me to buy the record.
This was on a small southern California punk label that shut down a few years ago. And, again, given how I have always heard this whole record it’s funny to me to think of any punk work at all. If I had to describe it I’d say it’s a high charged coffee house record.
It’s a fine little power pop solo effort. The lyrics do get a bit repetitive. Listening to it today, it feels like there’s a formula at play. Not that anyone was doing that in 2000 or anything.
Here’s the title track.
And, for me, those are the biggest thrusts of the album.
Peter Searcy has returned to groups, he’s in a power trio now called Guilty Birds, with Grant Fitch and Ben Daughtrey, two guys with serious grunge and indie and alt rock credentials. He’s also selling real estate in Georgia. I take that to mean he’s playing music for the fun and creativity of it, which sounds nice after all of these years.
bespoke / Friday / photo — Comments Off on 40 hot dogs or dozens and dozens of cufflinks 30 May 25
Today was a bit of a low powered day. I woke up, did the morning stuff, and immediately took a nap. I woke up in time for lunch. It’s been that sort of day. Also, I’ve been nursing a mild headache.
I’ll make up for all of that this weekend. You’ll have plenty to read about on Monday, I’m sure. Or at some point next week. They can’t all be low power days.
But, hey, hastily made some more cuff links.
I have supplies to make 20 more sets of cuff links this go around.
There are two problems with this process. One of them is the hot dogs / hot dog bun problem. The math never works out. I will never, ever run out of all of the supplies at the same time. And there’s also the issue of storage. I have some nice cheap little jewelry display cases to keep this whole mess organized, but when I make these next 20, I’ll still have space for 60 more. And need a closet full of reasonable shirts for them.
Anyway, more next week, when my batteries are better charged.
cycling / Friday / photo — Comments Off on I put screws into something and called it a day 23 May 25
Some days are productive in the smallest ways. Maybe those are the best days. My alarm went off promptly, I ignored it for a moment, and then read my way through the morning, had a bite to eat, typed up a few things. Normal stuff. And then I worked on a shelving solution.
We need a place to put bike stuff, and so I picked up a second-hand shelf that will fit in a corner. It’s a two-piece deal, a cheap little MDF fixture that probably belongs in a bathroom. It’s going to hang in a corner in the garage. The first step was today, joining the two shelves together. I think they were designed to just sit on the floor, but one little wooden dowel isn’t going to hold it all together. So I added a second dowel. And then I joined them the old fashioned way, by screwing it all together.
The shelves are rounded, so this took ingenuity; I was immediately out of my league. But, eventually I did it. Two cheap little shelves have been joined into one piece. They’ll hold the weight of shows and elements and things.
And right about here you’re wondering if I’ll go self-deprecating or literary next. The truth is, I’m wondering, too.
To hang the shelf on the wall, I’ll make a french cleat. But I didn’t do that today, because I have the whole weekend ahead of me.
This is where I realized this wonderful little problem. How can I accurately that on two walls simultaneously. And then another, how to do it for the top and bottom shelves, as a little added security. I think I have it all figured out. It doesn’t require ingenuity, not really, but it does require some simple carpentry problem solving where I’m really deficient.
Let’s assume my solutions work. It shouldn’t take too long to make it happen. Then it’ll be on to all of my other little projects. And there are a lot of them. I’m eager to get to them. Well, most of them.
Late in the afternoon, or early this evening, or both, I set out for a little bike ride. I was thinking about how I could find new roads, and this is what I settled on. I did the reverse of one of our regular routes, the first regular route we established here, in fact. It’s a simple rectangle to the southwest. But, instead of turning right to head back home, I decided to find out what would happen if I just kept going.
What happens is you ride in the wind the whole day. Also, I pedaled my way through three-plus miles of empty roads and fields. I slid through an old neighborhood, and then crossed the interstate, which was when I realized where this road wound up. There are two truck stops and a hotel on the outskirts of a little town, and I didn’t want to be around of that today, so I doubled back. There was another promising road to check out.
So instead of turning left on the road that I knew, I turned left on a different road. It took me through four-and-a-half miles of views like this one.
Finally, it dumped me onto a road I knew, and so I took an indirect way home. It was a good ride, except for the wind. It was slow, because of the wind and also my legs. But it was pleasant. The weather was right, the traffic was non-existent, and there was a lot to see.
It was a nice, casual 34-mile ride that I finished with a smile. As I got home there was a car in the drive. Who had come to visit? We weren’t expecting company. As I got closer I realized, it was my lovely bride’s ride. She’d left it out of the garage as I worked on those shelves. So we had company, and it was us. This was a thing I said as a kid, when there was a car in the drive at my grandparents’ home, when the car belonged to us. “We’ve got company.”
Rides take you places. They bring you places. Sometimes the kid-in-you-ride takes back.
I wonder where tomorrow’s ride, and the 29 mph wind forecast, will take me.
So it was a literary allusion, in the smallest way, after all. Who could have seen that coming?
