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adventures / Friday / friends / iPhone / photo — Comments Off
8
Jun 12

Travel day

A random billboard:

I did not mean to suggest yesterday that I dislike travel. We do it a lot, and while I enjoy being at home there is a great deal to be said about being on the road.

The lower Appalachian Mountains, for example, are so beautiful. There’s just such a verdant and pastoral feeling, and so it was not a bad thing that the GPS took us off of the interstate and sent us through tiny towns that most people a county over had never heard of. The hills and mountains are majestic, and we could only think of seeing this in the fall, in those four or six pitch-perfect days of leaf turn that we get in the South, and how bad it would hurt to ride up these roads on our bikes.

It is beautiful country. And then you drive in front of some of the worst highway kitsch on this side of the Mississippi. But what can you do. Mountains, like the autumn they inspired today, are on that list of things a photograph can’t share. No matter how wide or tight, no matter the filter or the Photoshop technique, they’re just too powerful for a lens.

We’re visiting friends for the weekend — there’s a wedding. Also, our hotel has freshly made cookies. See? Another great thing about travel.

A small group of us found our way to some bad local pizza joint tonight. Apparently, the locals later told us, you don’t go there for the pizza. (Or the calzones, as I can now tell you.)

They do have what is apparently the most impressive beer selection in town. I couldn’t say, but they did have an entire page worth of brands. And their gimmick was that if you drank each in a 30-day period you got some sort of silly little reward. I can’t imagine eating that many bad calzones in a month, even if I was thirsty for 40 pints of beer.

We said we were from out of town, which only started the server in on the other promotional gimmick. You could get a four-ounce sample of each brand. And if you can drink them all in an hour, and not throw up, or otherwise cause a scene (it was very important that she told us this part) then you got the drinks free.

One presumes you’d pay for the eventual alcohol poisoning.

I can’t imagine trying that. I had a hard time imagining the person who would try that. She said one person had successfully completed the sample-sized challenge. A short person. I’m not sure what his size had to do with it. I’m fairly sure he wasn’t eating, though. Later we heard from someone that others have tried it and created an embarrassing situation for themselves, which finally explained the importance of the waitress’ caveat. You get kicked out, the deal is off and you have to pay. Again, in more ways than one.

Why would a person do this to themselves?

So we met the bride tonight. Lovely lady. We went to school at Alabama with the groom. We saw his brother and father again. We met his mother. They are lovely people. There was a small group up from the groom’s undergraduate days and we listened to them tell now ancient stories, which have surely gotten better in time.

The best stories always do. I hope they get a story or two like that out of their big weekend.

cycling / food / iPhone / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
7
Jun 12

The cat is mad at us, and I might not be pleased myself

We’re back home. I unpack the laundry — Not clothes. You do not take dirty clothes to someone else’s place to clean, of course. You leave with clothes; you return with laundry. Home, if you’ve ever wondered, is where you do your laundry. — and throw it in the basket or, sometimes, in the washing machine as soon as I arrive home.

The Yankee … she does something. I am usually too fixated to notice. Unload car. Unpack suitcase. Hide suitcase from myself so as to trick the eye that there are no more trips, no more windshields, insulting airport experiences or unusual pillows.

Typically this works. She’s petting the cat, I’m distributing the suitcases, the backpacks and whatever else we have going on. Eventually Allie comes to me, we’ve missed each other, but I want to have these things out of the way. And she’ll camp out in the suitcases if they’re left sitting around for too long.

We’ve been gone a while, but we have someone who is kind enough to spend some time with Allie every day. Check the food and the water and pet her. You’ve never seen a cat crave more from “hoomans” than this one. And so all night last night it was stamp, stomp, meow, head butt, yowl, stamp, stomp.

We don’t have the heart, yet, to tell her we’re leaving again tomorrow. The suitcases, it turns out, didn’t go very far.

At least all of our trips are really great trips!

This is the scene at the Crepe Myrtle Cafe, the local market where we get a lot of healthy food. This is some sort of onion flower:

We get this entire basket of fresh fruits and vegetables every Thursday. Most of them are grown very nearby. The girl that sold them to me today asked if I needed help carrying them to my car. Time to get that hair coloring product, apparently.

I mean, this basket is packed solid and gets hefty after a while, but really. I can handle it. And if I can’t, I’ll be in a commercial for one of those Rascal scooters. Delicious veggies, though:

Finally, got a chance to ride my bike again. Did 28 miles today, working on the backside of the big hill in town. There’s less traffic there, it has two great bends and is nicely shaded in the afternoon. I was timing my speed up it, going up and then down, up and then down. When the time started falling I moved on.

Elsewhere in my ride, I found a new personal best. I’ll have to double check, but I think I might have been speeding:

I believe I could get another mile or so out of that stretch, actually. Something else to shoot for.

FInally, my grandmother is feeling a bit under the weather. We went card shopping. This is the one I did not get:

The inside:

adventures / food / iPhone / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off
6
Jun 12

Travel day

Heading home today. On the one hand it is amazing that you can travel across something like 1,000 miles and nine states in an evening. On the other hand it is amazing that it takes the better part of a day to get home.

Also, I got my first freedom rub today. I passed the time humming Lee Greenwood. Not sure the ~~security guard~~ federal agent got the joke.

We had lunch at Overton’s, where you can get four fried shrimp on a bun for $4.75.

The sunny, stormy view:

And now he’s playing coy:

But, really, they are after your french fries:

Flying out of White Plains:

I have the best travel companion:

She just reads and reads:

Sunset over … let’s call it Tennessee:

On the descent into Atlanta:

We got home around 11 p.m.

adventures / baseball / food / Friday / friends / iPhone / memories / photo / Samford / Tumblr / Twitter — Comments Off
1
Jun 12

But, hey, this will be quick

We had dinner with our friend Paige tonight. Drove up to her house.

She let me take a picture of the famous Rory:

This is only slightly intimidating. I was shooting her cat with my phone. Paige is a photographer on the side. In fact, she shot our engagement:

It was 17 degrees with about nine inches of snow on the ground. Maybe more. We shot those at a park up the street from The Yankee’s parents’ home, a park where she’d played as a child. There’s a pavilion there. Under that roof, there was six inches of snow covering everything.

The next year she shot our wedding in Savannah.

It was well into the triple-digits that day.

It seems we can’t all get together without severe weather, so naturally it rained tonight.

By the time we got back home there was lots of rain.

We ate dinner at a Thai place called Somewhere in Bangkok. Good food, lousy website. The server was … well, she was as American as could be.

Today I fixed a printer problem, which is a piece of equipment normally beyond me. Samford won a huge baseball game in NCAA regional play. I uploaded three pictures to the Tumblr blog.

Also, don’t forget to check out Twitter.

Yeah it is thin. I’m not spending a lot of time on the computer just now.

cycling / iPhone / journalism / links / photo / things to read / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
30
May 12

A video to watch and links to read

I love this road. Good quality asphalt, a bike lane basically the entire way from beginning to end. It is quiet because the business of this road is down near the other end. Up here, for the time being at least, it is still undeveloped. It is the victory lap of some of my routes. A fair amount of it is downhill.

I did an easy 20-miler this evening. I’m looking forward to longer rides, which will start back next week.

And if you need a bit of inspiration for, well, just about anything, here’s a video destined to go big. Only 250,000 views so far, but that will change. Tune out the music, and wade through the first two-and-a-half minutes. The reward comes soon after that:

Things to read: Local boy is a good speller. Samford and UAB baseball both make the NCAA regionals. Auburn and Alabama did not.

New York tries to cut down on soft drinks:

New York City plans to enact a far-reaching ban on the sale of large sodas and other sugary drinks at restaurants, movie theaters and street carts, in the most ambitious effort yet by the Bloomberg administration to combat rising obesity.

The proposed ban would affect virtually the entire menu of popular sugary drinks found in delis, fast-food franchises and even sports arenas, from energy drinks to pre-sweetened iced teas. The sale of any cup or bottle of sweetened drink larger than 16 fluid ounces — about the size of a medium coffee, and smaller than a common soda bottle — would be prohibited under the first-in-the-nation plan, which could take effect as soon as next March.

That’s a sticky slope, friends.

Two years after the oil spill, the fishing is bad down on the Gulf:

The long-term prognosis for the Gulf’s health remains uncertain.

Recent studies have found higher numbers of sick fish close to where BP’s well blew out and genome studies of bait fish in Barataria have identified abnormalities. Meanwhile, vast areas of the cold and dark Gulf seafloor are oiled, scientists say.

And many fishermen are convinced something’s amiss.

[…]

“We was there to work, but couldn’t,” said Lawrence Salvato, 49, as he stopped for lunch on a dock where he moors a shrimp skiff he runs his wife, Lisa. “Usually people are excited and they can’t wait to get out there. This year, there’s no real incentive.”

He said he made about $10,000 in seafood sales last year compared to $75,000 in 2009. He said his family made do with a $40,000 interim payment they got from BP. Fishermen who haven’t settled legally yet with BP over damages continue to survive on periodic payments from a $20 billion trust fund set up by BP.

“We’re afraid,” Salvato said. “A lot of people are getting out of fishing. They’re afraid.”

Meanwhile, up in Chicago:

“We are no longer a newspaper company,” Sun-Times Media Holdings LLC Editor-in-chief Jim Kirk said in a memo to staff. “We are a technology company that happens to publish a newspaper. We deliver content. And we will deliver content on many platforms and in ways that we haven’t yet fully considered.”

The times, they have already changed.