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Monday

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9
Dec 24

Weekend shots

The problem with photography is that some of the best images come in the early morning, when the sun is low in the sky. And that, frankly, does not coincide with my lifestyle choices.

But on days when I am up, and I’m outside, the world looks lovely again, especially when it’s frost-covered anew.

This was waiting for a run to start, which is why I was up and outside early. They began about 20 minutes late for reasons that were not explained, but let us assume it was for our safety on the roads, and not because of general disorder. So I had time to take some extra photos, before shuffling through an easy 5K.

One stretch I was doing a 5:30 pace, but then I remembered this was maybe my fourth or fifth run of the fall, so I did the rest of it slowly and sensibly. Never you mind my time, which was somewhere between Olympian and walking.

My lovely bride did a 10K Saturday morning, which is why I was there at the finish line to take this poorly composed shot.

They didn’t really have a setup that was conducive to quality finish line photos, which more people should consider when laying these courses out. Begin with the family photos in mind, I always say, ever since I started saying it, which was just a few seconds ago.

Maybe that was the reason for the delay.

At any rate we got to hang out with our friends’ son, Sammy. He did not run, though I tried for months to get his dad to convert the stroller to an e-scooter, and bolt on some foot pedals so he could just ride on. Sammy decided to stay cozy and warm, because he’s smarter than those other kids who were out doing their stroller 5 and 10Ks this weekend.

Also, this guy is The Mayor, and he knows it.

But he’s the cool guy mayor, you know? He doesn’t flaunt it, doesn’t need to hold it over people’s head, he’s not bored of it or use it to his advantage. He just lets you be charmed by his natural charisma. How could he not be?

We had Cuban food for dinner Saturday night. I just wanted to memorialize this, for the next occasion I get Cuban food.

Roasted chicken, lechón asado, ropa vieja and the only problem was that they didn’t offer me seconds. (That ropa vieja was so good, they could have offered me thirds!)

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2
Dec 24

And so we start December, and the mad dash

Took mom to the airport for the sad and tearful goodbyes today. Drove home in the late afternoon’s dying sunlight. I was back inside before she was on the plane, but she has safely returned home and I have turned back to work, and the grading of things.

Before I began that, however, I did the monthly computer rituals. Cleaning old files from the desktop, adding the site’s page visits into a useless spreadsheet, updated a few other running files, and so on. I also updated the November cycling chart, which always amuses me and bores you.

The blue line is this year, and you can see that, compared to 2023’s red line, I’ve had a successful increase in my mileage, be it ever so humble. For some reason, in 2021 or so, I added a 10 mile per day projection line to the spreadsheet, and it seems to have outlived its usefulness.

It appears I’ll handily accomplish those two goals, of besting last year and the 10 miles per average, so I’ll turn myself to other, slightly more impressive goals. Goals which I most likely won’t achieve, because of the holidays. But they are out there, nevertheless, and we shall approach them with vigor, and alternating days of tired and enthusiastic legs, I’m sure.

This is funny to me because these are small numbers, really, but they seem YUGE.

Also today, I have updated the banners here on the blog. (You know those rotate, right? The one on the top and the one on the bottom change each time you load or refresh the page. You knew that, right? You also knew there was a banner on the bottom too, right? Because you read the entire page every time you come by. There’s only five posts per page, and that’s not too much to ask of you. I mean, come on.)

So now there are 116 banners randomly loaded across the top of the page, and 118 randomly loaded banners populating the bottom of the page. I should probably cull those two lists. That sounds like a great winter project. So click reload a lot between now and sometime in February to see them all. And don’t forget to scroll down to the see the ones at the bottom, either.

Poseidon always checks out the bottoms of the page. He’s very diligent and curious about the goings on around here.

(When it’s typed well, he caught the errors. When there are typos, he was off the clock.)

Phoebe, on the other hand, is much smarter, and she doesn’t care about any of this. Just so long as her picture makes the site, so that the week’s most popular feature is here every week.

We’re going to finish the year with something like three-quarters of a million visitors, according to the site statistics I looked up today. Why, I have no idea. The cats have it figured out, and they thank you.

As for me, I am now in the home stretch of two classes, so things will be light in the next few weeks. And after those two classes wrap up I’ll be finishing with two other classes. So there are liable to be some thin days in here this December. But there will be something more often than not, and we’ll of course always have the weekly check in on the cats. It is the most popular weekly feature on the site. (They know it, and they make me type it, too. Marketing geniuses, these kittehs.)

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25
Nov 24

We sit and stand and play and dream beneath them

I received a memo from the desk of the Office of Kitteh Complaints, and such memos are always to be urgently read and promptly acted upon. Previous memos have explained and, again, reiterated the process. Cat photos are expected on Mondays as part of the site’s most popular weekly feature. Their Insta drives a lot of traffic, it turns out.

And, as the weekend memo pointed out, they did not feature into the site last week. It was a serious memo. The subject line was was terse.

So here are the cats.

Not too long ago we ordered pizzas. It was a coolish night, and so they availed themselves of the boxes.

We have, you can see, created two monsters.

Here’s Phoebe taking her afternoon sun in the dining room.

And here’s Poseidon and you can almost see his little mind thinking “PILLOW FORT! PILLOW FORT!”

So the cats, as you can see, are doing well. And now I have to fulfill the rest of their tasks on the memo. They are very particular.

Some time back we had a limb fall from a tree. I cut away a lot of the small stuff by hand soon after it fell, then waited a while and bought myself a chainsaw. This weekend, finally, I got around to cutting it up. I don’t know why I waited so long. This was fast and easy and awesome.

I cut it into firewood-sized sections. The limb was still partially attached to the tree, so eventually I had to break all of the chainsaw rules, fetched the ladder, climbed up, firmly established my balance, reeeeeeeached up, closed my eyes and did what needed to be done for that last bit of the wood.

Felt quite macho.

First time using a chainsaw, as you can probably tell.

We inherited that wheelbarrow in the move, and I’ve come to value it. I had to put some air in the tire, but it works just fine. And the crickets were loving it when I evicted them for these chores.

I could replace that handle, which has been snapped to a little nub, but that’s become part of its charm as I have used it from time to time. It reminds me of what Amity Shales wrote about Calvin Coolidge’s maple sap bucket.

“It had been quaint, it had lived within the painful limits of its self-sufficiency, but it had also yielded all the rest.”

You can see that sap bucket here. And now, for some reason, I want to get stencils for everything.

Things still look properly festive on the front porch. Pay no attention to the dirty floor in need of a fresh coat of paint.

That’s coming in the spring. I am making a list of things to do and that’s well up the list.

My lovely bride has broken out all of the Christmas paraphernalia this weekend and we have deployed it strategically throughout the house and yard. When it was done, we wandered outside and down to the street to see the effect.

Festive, but not overstated. She did a nice job.

The candles in the window are always my favorite.

The tree I was working on earlier? This is it, in the early evening.

The people that we inherited the wheelbarrow from had three kids. Maybe they climbed that tree. I hope so. I hope they had a lot of fun in that part of the yard. It’s easy to be romantic about a place when it gives you shots like that.

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18
Nov 24

We tried Malaysian, that was delicious

This weekend I improved my bike hipster cred with this new-to-me vintage belt buckle. I’d prefer that it was blue or orange or red, but the green will, I’m sure, grow on me.

I haven’t spent a lot of time looking, but I hadn’t run across a buckle like that before, rear derailleur looking all abstract, looking ready to climb. And when you know, you know, you know? So I bought it, and now it’s daily wear.

I have three daily wear belt buckles, which means I’m dangerously close to starting a collection. If I add three or four more I’d have a complete biographical collection. But I probably shouldn’t do that.

We went over the river on Friday night. A friend of almost 20 years from back home was in town. He used to live up here, too. And he was back for a conference, and heading up to New York to see his family. So we ventured over to pick him up for dinner.

And before we got there, we saw this sign.

Hmmmm …

We drove right beneath city hall. Built using brick, white marble and limestone, it is the world’s largest free-standing masonry building and was the world’s tallest habitable building when it opened in 1894.

Designed to be the world’s tallest building, it was surpassed during the phase of construction by the Washington Monument, the Eiffel Tower, and Turin, Italy’s Mole Antonelliana. The Mole Antonelliana, a few feet taller, suffered a spire collapse in a storm, and so this building stands a bit taller.

I’m sure we’ll discover more about it at some point in the future.

Our friend, Andre, suggested we try a Malaysian restaurant, Kampar, which has been shortlisted for a James Beard Award. While we waited the hostess gave me a new way to ask restaurant staff about their favorite dishes. She said the rendang daging was the reason she worked there. So we ordered that, and several other family-style dishes. And I’d work there for the rendang daging, too. It was a sweet, tender, slow-cooked meat. It offset the pickled vegetables well. Then, opposite that was a fried chicken done in a style that, by rights, I should not have enjoyed as much as I did. (But I want some more, even now, just thinking about it.)

So everything was great. We had about three bites before my lovely bride and I looked at each other and said, almost simultaneously, that my mother would like to try this place. So we’ll bring her when she comes up.

The weather is holding up. I got in 65 miles of riding this weekend, all of it just around the familiar neighborhoods. I’m trying to squeeze in every mile possible. You know the feeling, I’m sure, chasing the thing to forestall the thing.

That made sense right about here.

Now if this mild weather will just last until spring …

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11
Nov 24

It rained!

I had to document this, because no one would believe it. It rained last night. This is the first rain since September 27th. I have read that we are in the worst drought in 130 years of record local meteorological observations.

It didn’t rain long enough to break the drought. Probably it couldn’t rain that much at one time. In fact, you don’t want it to do that, because it invites other problems. We need several good soakings, but none are in the forecast at the moment. Standing out in the rain last night, though, was a delight.

The farmers have been out in their fields just moving dust around. We saw some examples of that on our Friday afternoon ride.

This guy’s just playing around, just getting outside. I’m sure of it. What could he possibly be accomplishing over there?

My lovely bride and I did one part of one of our regular routes on Friday, only we did it backward. And then we took a different road which was not the best idea. But we had a nice day out, it was bright and warm and lovely and that was the beginning of the second week of November.

We went right by this guy on Friday, and I couldn’t have timed that much better if I’d asked that guy to coordinate his laps around the field.

It was colder on Sunday, and then nice and mild for today’s ride, when I saw a combine out of it’s natural environment. Look at the treads on this guy.

And here’s my shadow, riding off to the side as the sun started to dip in the west.

Two-hour bike rides in November? They’re a gift.