I’ve bored the — smart, beautiful, talented — readers of this space aplenty with my hypothesis about how spring in Bloomington doesn’t actually begin until the bike races take place. The women raced Friday in the rain. The men raced Saturday in a drizzle and under overcast skies. This photo, I figured, would be the punchline: this was as blue as it got this weekend.
But later, late on Sunday afternoon, the skies actually improved.
That was as spring-like as it got this weekend, the first weekend of IU’s spring.
But enough about that, because we must quickly pivot to the site’s most popular weekly feature. And, dear friends? Dear — smart, beautiful, talented — friends, today I get to share with you the most absolutely adorable photo ever captured in any context.
Phoebe was sleeping on her paws. She doesn’t normally do this, but it was so cute I had to resist the urge to wake her up with a bunch of big pets.
Do you ever wonder what animals are thinking? I wonder that all of the time.
And then they do something that perfectly encapsulates our understanding of what it means to be insert animal here and I realize I might be over-anthropomorphizing. Anyway, Poseidon remains happily curious about everything, and in-trouble with everything. It’s a good thing, we tell him, that he’s charming. We only wonder why he doesn’t choose to behave that way more often.
The cats are doing just fine.
Three or four or five times a year I have to re-learn the same lesson about taking too many days off my bike. I have now learned it twice this year so far: the first ride back after a too-long break is a little stiff. And so it was, today, when I put my feet on the pedals for the first time in five days. But, I got in the London Pretzel on Zwift, and 35 miles before dinner.
I like how the Union Jack is rippling on that lamp post. This route spends a lot of time in the game’s version of London, but sends you into the Surrey Hills twice. They aren’t the biggest or the hardest climbs in the game, but sometimes they feel like it. The part in the city was pretty fast, but I gave all that speed back on the hills. But once I (finally) got to the top of one of those hills, I got a nice view of the moon. The moon is always full on Zwift, never mind the issues of physical oceanography that would present.
But! I finished sixth in one sprint. I am not a sprinter. And I clocked in a time that was 16th in one of the two climbs. I am also, most definitely, not a climber.
The 2023 Zwift route tracker: 100 routes down, 29 to go.
The cats demanded to be at the top of the post. The cats know, I’m sure, that they’re the most popular thing going on here. And so Phoebe was happy to pose with a little playful sass.
(And if you think that’s cute, just wait until you see her next photo here. I took it tonight. It’s the most adorable thing in kitty world.)
Poseidon, meantime, is practicing his impersonation of a statue … while we bounce his bouncy ball all around the house.
I’m about half convinced he only plays to make us play, so he can stare at us. Anyway, the cats are doing just great, thanks for asking, and they’re happy with the extra sun and warmer temperatures they’re experiencing lately.
I had a nice 30-mile ride this weekend. It was hard, in that it didn’t feel easy. But it was the sort of hard that made the overall time a bit faster. The sort that made the legs hurt, that made me a little bit delirious, apparently. This was the best picture.
The Yankee said I must be riding well, because I dropped her twice, and she said she was riding hard. Then again, she caught me, twice, while I fought through the teensiest headwind. So she is riding well, which spells trouble for me in keeping up with her the rest of the year.
Anyway, that was a part of the weekend’s exercise, and not at all the part that makes for sore muscles today. Something in that area between the bicep and the forearm — what’s that called, the elbow? — is protesting mightily today. I am in that phase of a new ache and/or pain where I am still learning the motions that hurt, so if you see me moving slowly to starboard, that’s why.
One of the trees outside the building has reached full bloom, the full I’ll-miss-this-when-they’re-gone stage. The blooms are funny things. You can spend all winter looking at sticks pointing this way and that, waiting. One day you see those little bulbs, those hopeful signals of the future. And then you see the blooms — or the buds if you’re really slow and careful — a few at first, and then the entire symphony.
Just in time for you get used to the inevitability, the persistence of those beautiful colors, it all turns green. Then there’s that day or two required to get used to seeing all of that bright, bright green again.
It’d be nice to have trees that bloomed at different times, is all. And if I had a field carefully arranged with all of them on display in a way that always shows color. I wonder what that would look like. I imagine a gentle incline and spiraling trees, and mounds and mounds of upkeep. That’d really aggravate the arm.
Meanwhile, back over in the Re-Listening project, where I’m enjoying all of my old CDs in the order of acquisition, we are now in January (or February) of 1999. I remember being excited about this, I remember looking forward to playing this for friends, and having some of these songs appear on the radio. It was my second live double-album, which just wasn’t something that came out a lot by then.
It was Dave Matthews fourth album, but this wasn’t the Dave Matthews Band, it was Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds, in the first of their third album, and before Reynolds formally joined DMB. (Everybody caught up in all of that?)
Anyway, Live at Luther College at number two debuted on the Billboard Hot 200 in February, Silkk the Shocker kept it out of the top spot, with Brittney Spears climbing fast. Despite all of that, it stayed on the chart for 51 weeks.
This was recorded in 1996, so by the time fans had this disc in their hands in 1999 six or seven of the new songs were comfortable, familiar, hits. But there was still some new stuff to explore.
I liked this one right away, it’s a jam band experiment of acoustic guitar jazz masquerading as a pop tune deep cut.
And the other song that blew our minds, the one I played for everyone, was this one.
That’s what a virtuoso sounds like. I don’t know anything about anything about playing a guitar, but I put this on a lot, and for a long time, wondering what it must have looked like. Clearly, there’s a loop machine in there, but there’s still a lot of mastery to observe.
Fortunately, decades later, Tim Reynolds is still playing with the form, and people started recording it on their phones.
I saw Dave Matthews Band later that summer, the last time I caught them live — just before all of the tickets got outrageous. They have 5 North American dates coming up this summer, and I’m sure they’ll be great shows full of the truly devoted. Reynolds will be at those shows according to his website. Matthews and Reynolds, meanwhile, released two more live double discs, in 2007 and 2010. I had no idea about that until just now, but there should be one or two more DMB CDs coming up in the Re-Listening project. But we have to get through a few more fillers this week.
Happy Monday from the cats. Phoebe is enjoying the sun. We’ve had our share of clear skies the last few days and they’re both taking full advantage. A sun-warmed furry cat sits in her own realm of indulgence.
Poseidon also wishes you a Happy Monday. And he would like you to know that, for all of the times I tell him I outwit him because I am bigger and smarter, he is now taller than me. Way, way taller than me.
He’ll rub it in for days.
So the cats are doing great, thanks.
We went out for a bike ride this weekend. Twice, actually. Two of my three weekend rides, were outside.
These were rides two and three outdoors this year. Still low enough to count, and a late start owing to a combination of weather, my schedule(s) and my lovely bride working her way back into riding outside. These were her second and third rides on the road since her horrific crash last September.
So rare and novel, it still feels like going outside is getting away with something.
I remember, just after her surgery at the end of September, after a week of zero sleep for either of us, the surgeon came out to tell me she did well. He taught me a new word and said they’d send for me when I could go back to sit with her. While I waited, I called my mother-in-law, giving the good news, trying to reassure, being chipper. I called my mom, too. Both of them, being thoughtful moms, asked me how I was doing. I told her mom I was great: all systems go, taking care of your daughter, looking forward to seeing you soon. To my mother, I heard myself, a bit more candidly, say that, after a week of worry and sympathetic grimacing and no sleep and a fair amount of stress that “I could really use a bike ride.” Seemed selfish then, and in retrospect. My mom took the ‘You have to take care of yourself too,’ approach, which was welcome.
That was on September 29th of last year. I spent the next two weeks and change hovering over the convalescing patient. Three-and-a-half weeks after her crash I got on my bike again — riding part of the same route she’d been on — which wasn’t spooky at all. Between the rest of October and November, recovery, catching up on stuff and so on, I got in four more road rides before the weather turned. (I looked that up on the app and I am surprised the count was that high.)
Last month, on a picturesque weekend day, she wanted to ride outside. We pedaled around the neighborhood for a few minutes, going slowly, averaging just 10 miles per hour. A tentative toe in tepid water.
Saturday, after months of rehab — her ribs and shoulder blade are much better and her collarbone is finally starting to heal six months later — she decided to try riding on asphalt again. I can speak to this firsthand. As much as the physical, it’s a mental progression from riding on a trainer to dealing with wind and noise and cars and bumps. It takes a while to feel like yourself, and some more time after that to approach comfortable. She’s right on schedule, which is to say her schedule.
So Saturday, after I’d already spun out 33 miles on the trainer, we went out for a rambling 17-mile ride around the neighborhood. This is odd, because she always knows where she’s riding, but it was great, because there’s something magically freeing about riding aimlessly. No timers, no zones, no watts, just a bike ride.
Then, yesterday, another beautiful afternoon, we rode the winery route, doing four circuits of the 6.6 mile lap. It’s a quiet set of roads, loosely rectangular, with the interstate running alongside. It’s a good place to stretch out your legs. I asked her, after the first lap, how she was doing. She knew I was asking how it felt and how comfortable she was. She said she was doing OK. There weren’t a lot of cars around to bother us, just as we’d hoped, so she could concentrate on all of the rest of it. So she was concentrating on how her legs were feeling. She was frustrated, feeling sluggish, despite riding on her trainer all winter.
Reaching for an explanation, I said “You rode yesterday. And you know it’s always a little different, going from the trainer to the road. Plus this wind is everywhere.”
There’s a windmill at the top end of that route, and I watched it go around and around each time we went by. We were in a cross-head-cross-wind all the way around.
Then, for a few moments on the second lap, she found her legs. Her form straightened out, her legs took on the familiar form, the one that tells me I have to chase. And so I did, setting a two-lap PR for my efforts.
And now my legs are a bit tired.
I am now three CDs behind on the Re-Listening project. We’ve just worked our way through a stretch of really good jazz, and this next little bit is a comparative step down. An embarrassing step down, perhaps. Let’s just grin and get it over with it.
These guys got discovered in Australia at 15. Their five studio albums have moved more than 10 million units over the years. Their second record got a lot of play on MTV and alt radio, and Neon Ballroom is their third release, at the ripe old age of … 19. It topped the chart in Australia, where it went platinum three times. It also went to number one on the UK rock and metal chart. It climbed all the way to the 50th slot on the Billboard Hot 200 here, and is certified gold. It is one of those efforts that defines a little slice of 1999.
Also, and again, they were 19.
The very pointy tip of the millennial angst spear, we just didn’t think about them in marketing terms at the time.
I’m not sure I ever listened to this much, for whatever reason. A lot of it still feels new, even if it is a little dated two decades later.
Those guys went through some stuff, sadly unsurprising, perhaps, considering the attention they earned so young. They released two more records in the next seven years. After some on-again, off-again the guys split up for good in 2011.
And then there’s Sugar Ray, which was a station giveaway. I never listened to this thing. It was … not for me when I got it, and I was glad it was a freebie. That the three singles got nearly maximum plays across 1999 didn’t help.
Though this track did feature KRS-One.
And they covered a Steve Miller classic.
I’d entirely forgotten that track was on here until I played this disc the other day. As I said, I never listened to this.
Up next in the Re-Listening project, something I actually purchased, and enjoyed!
Today was the first of four, no, perhaps, five late days in a row. It’ll be a long week. But it won’t feel like it, until it does, which will probably be … Wednesday.
I walked outside twice today. Once, in the middle of the day for a reason I’ve already forgotten. And then, in the evening at about 7:45. (As I said, long week.) This was the first day of the year I’ve been surprised by how warm it was when I took that step across the threshold. And then I wondered why I couldn’t conduct today’s meetings, and emails and all of the rest, outdoors, under a tree.
Tomorrow it will be a mind-boggling sunny and 82 degrees. Wednesday, rainy and 72. Then the 50s and 60s into next week.
Spring officially begins in 16 days.
Time to return to the most popular feature on the site, the weekly check with the kitties.
Phoebe has re-discovered the guest room, and a great place to hide from me before I head out in the morning.
What doesn’t make so much sense is how habitual she is. This is the time of morning when she should be sunning herself in a window — she will wait in our bedroom until we open the heavy curtains, because she knows where the sun is — but this room, the guest room, faces the west.
Poseidon was cold this weekend. And shy.
He also was able to wriggle his way into forcing me out of that chair, which was an impressive feat for a 10-pound cat.
I finished the Willie Morris memoir this weekend. He took a plane from New York back to Texas, to speak at his alma mater, and then drove over to his home in Mississippi. His little boy in tow, seeing the old places with his mother and grandmother, and then, the next morning, he caught a plane back to New York. An altogether unsatisfying ending, but that’s a memoir at 31, for you.
Still, some 36 pages before the end, this is the part that has stuck with me.
So I started, yesterday, a journal by the poet May Sarton. A local author I know quoted her last summer on the anniversary of her death. “Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember nothing stays the same for long, not even pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.” I did a little research and bought four of her books, her journals, just on the basis of that quote. I’m now on the second of those four books, a year of dear diary of a woman trying to figure out life, herself, her poetry and her gardening. But around all of that she will make you sit up and re-read a passage now and again, like this one.
I figure I should read a month at a time, and in two weeks I’ll need another book.
Another book to go with Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, which I also started this weekend. This is a 2000 Pulitzer Prize winner, and I am reading it on my Kindle, where I have a collection of dozens of books waiting for me.
I need to read more books, and so I will.
Believe it or not, we are still playing catch up on the Re-Listening project. I am playing all of my CDs, in order, in the car, and I am woefully behind in writing about them here. These aren’t reviews, just for fun and, sometimes, memories. And, at this point in 1997, we are entering a jazz phase.
And there’s some really good jazz in here. Up first, is a 1993 record from Jay Thomas, a multi-instrumentalist, with, now, 50 years of music on the books. Even back then, he’d been at it for a long time. You can hear him playing trumpet or flugelhorn or alto, tenor, or soprano, or flutes on more than 100 records. He’s fronted almost two dozen of his own. And you may not know his work, if you, like me, aren’t deep into jazz, but you’ve heard it. He shows up in commercials and movie scores quite a bit, too.
That’s the title track Blues for McVoughty. I wish I could say I had a good ear for jazz as a young guy, but I picked this up by chance off the giveaway table.
Somehow, sadly, most of this record hasn’t been uploaded to YouTube, but if you need an entry point to jazz, or easy atmosphere, or need to know what all the cool jazz aficionados were listening to in the 1990s, this is a fine place to start.
I am sure I picked this up to add something more sophisticated and mature to my collection. Can’t imagine why, though. And we’ll have two more jazz records back-to-back in our next installment(s) of the Re-Listening project.
For now, enjoy some of this nice weather, before it grows stormy again mid-week.
Our friend Sally Ann came up from Nashville this weekend. She brought an agenda, and I am pleased to report that each of the items on it were discussed. No one entered new business in a Robert’s Rules of Order sort of way because, honestly, it was nerdy enough.
Every now and then I do some obscure Robert Rules of Order thing in the hopes that someone will call me on it, so I can walk into my home library, pull my tattered edition — the August 1986, 17th printing of Jove Books’ edition — of Robert’s Rules off the third shelf of my first book case and point to to the appropriate passage.
I made it to the state finals in a parliamentary contest in high school, because I knew how to have fun.
Anyway, I’m feeling much better, thanks. Feel just like myself, in fact, except for the cough that won’t quit.
On Sunday afternoon we took Sally Ann to the Exotic Feline Rescue Center, which is about an hour away. This was our third trip, and her first, and it’s still a great time. Also, you can get a few nice pictures.
This is Tiger Lilly … or Tiger Jilly. I can’t yet tell them apart. They are sisters, and they live in the same giant enclosure. They came to the rescue by way of an Amish farmer who owned a roadside zoo. He had to find them a new home in 2017, and they’re now the first big stars of the walking tour.
This lion is Cera. She’s from Pennsylvania, where a vet there had an exotic animal rescue center, but he got to a point where he physically couldn’t take care of the animals there, so several of them are at EFRC now.
I think this was Jade. I didn’t take careful note of the enclosures this time. It had rained recently and I was trying to avoid the mud. Let’s assume I have that right: Jade and nine other cats came here from an Oklahoma traveling animal show in 2009 when the Okie lost his federal licenses.
All of the cats here are here to stay. They’re well-cared for, regularly attended and live in carefully planned
spaces. Over the years, EFRC, one of just a few such places in the country, has cared for more than a dozen different species. Today, more than 100 big and small exotic cats, are living out their lives there.
Rocky has been here since 2008. His owners lost their license, and he’s been here ever since, always watching the people passing by.
You think “Cute!” But these guys are all thinking, “If this fence wasn’t between us … ”
I’ve never been to Africa, or seen any of these sorts of animals in the wild, and this might be as close as I can get, but it’s difficult not to be humbled by the power of a lion’s roar.
You don’t even have to be near him to hear him. In fact, each time we’ve heard Zeus get chatty we’ve been around some other cats. They say, though, that neighbors two miles away can hear him.
An animal trainer in Peru, IN retired from the circus and just put all of his animals — lions, horses, an elephant — in a barn. The cats were kept in circus cages, their manes matted from sitting in their urine and feces. For nine years Zeus and his brother, Thor, lived like this. They could barely walk in 2010 when they came to this rescue, but both recovered well. Thor died a few years ago, but Zeus still rules the place, and he runs all over his great big yard. They say he will lose his patience with visitors, though, and that he’ll let you know when it is time to move on.
You go on this walking tour with a volunteer. It lasts about an hour. Though if you are there when it is slow, as we were last Thanksgiving, they will walk you through as slowly as you like. Our volunteer on this trip was a lady who works here when she’s not volunteering at a humane shelter. She’s very pleased and excited about doing all of this, as you might imagine, though some of it involves continually telling people to step back fro the fence. Which is a good idea because, while chain link is a useful invention, it would just serve to slow down a properly motivated tiger. That fence gives you a little head start and a false sense of security, that’s all.
This is Beaux. He’s not an albino, it’s just an exceedingly rare genetic trait. It seems that research points back to one particular line for all of the white cats in the U.S. Three of them live here. And, like a lot of the cats here, he has a ridiculous story.
Beaux arrived, at 14 months old, in 2016. A preacher in Virginia took in unwanted tigers from the circus and used them … to teach Sunday school. Three tigers came to this rescue when the preacher’s health began to fail him.
Beaux was pacing around because as we walked the one way, his friends, the people who are feeding the cats, were working their way toward us. Beaux was hungry, and it was quite something to see all of the cats get fed.
Just as hearing a lion roar is a humbling experience, hearing these powerful jaws snap bones is another reason to glance down to make sure your shoelaces are tied … just in case.
Our guide told us about the recent Big Cat Safety Act, which was signed into law in December. Essentially, this law prohibits the private ownership of big cats and makes it illegal for exhibitors to allow direct contact with cubs. The second half of that, once you hear all the details of how those normally work, is a good development. The first part should, effectively reduce the need for large cat refuges in the United States in the next 20 years or so. If people can’t own them, they can’t abuse them, can’t be outgrown by the cats, can’t need to give them to a rescue center. This should be a good thing.
I got in a little ride Saturday morning, before our company arrived. It was just 20 miles, and a little slow, but it felt a lot more comfortable than I did on Wednesday, when I was still recovering from my cold.
The 2023 Zwift route tracker: 75 routes down, 44 to go.
Time for a quick pass through the Re-Listening project. I’m listening to all of my old CDs, in the order that I picked them up, and writing a bit about them here, and I’m well behind. These aren’t reviews, but they can be fun, or prompt some nice memory, or, really, just an excuse to put some music in here.
Which is what we’re doing today, as we do a quick scan through a compilation, Son of Frat Rock that was, I am sure, desperately desired in 1988. This one was part of a trilogy, it seems, and this was the second one, which has some great old tunes, and some fun one-hit wonders. This was a giveaway, I’m sure of it. And I’ve probably listened to the whole thing four or five times. Mostly, it was good for a quick tune here or there. But for the Re-Listening project, everything gets heard.
And this is a good policy because, wouldn’t you know it, there’s some fun stuff on here. This one cracked the top 20 in 1964, and I am only vaguely familiar with it.
The Music Explosion, The Kinks, Tommy James and the Shondells are on the front half of this thing, and then there’s the timeless Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels.
And then Bill Deal & The Rhondels comes on and you think, “that sits at the intersection of doowop and big band, and, thus, that’s rock ‘n’ roll.”
Which is silly, that’s blue eyed soul and the beach, and it works.
At which point this huge blind spot in my musical education is unavoidably apparent. (My in-laws will be aghast. I’m going to play them a few of these songs on our next visit, and see how long it takes them to name the groups.)
This one they’ll nail. It isn’t the same on the computer, but in the much-better speakers in my car I found myself thinking, “This is a Rev. Horton Heat song, 30 years too early.”
That’s Ernest Maresca, he was a songwriter first, a record exec second, and then a reluctant singer. He wrote some of Dion’s biggest hits, like “Runaround Sue” and “The Wanderer,” but never thought much of his own singing. That one made it to number six in 1962. He also wrote hits for acts like The Regents, Dean & Jean, Bernadette Carroll and Jimmie Rodgers.
All of which makes part of the experience, here. I’ve had this CD for a quarter century, I’m discovering music almost ready to retire, finding mostly positive things to say about it. And then a song pops up and think, “I see here why we were so ripe for the British Invasion in 64 …”
I’m a generation behind this stuff, and there’s no fault in that, but about half of it was new to me when I picked this up in the late 90s, and some of them still feel new to me, today. Like this cover of a young Stevie Wonder song.
Who knows about The Blendells without using Wikipedia? And when does there music come into the public domain? After running across this in the Re-Listening project I started searching for some of their other stuff, this was a good band. Mexican American brown-eyed soul from the 1960s in East LA. It certainly fits a tunes, probably helped define a place, and there’s still some life in these tunes.
The next song was La Bamba. If I play that here I’ll have to watch the movie again. It’s a rule or something.
Gary U.S. Bonds is 83 and is still playing shows. He’s got one coming up at the end of this week in New York, and that’s worth playing the gold record. He sold a million units of this after it was released in 1961, when it sat atop the charts for two weeks, and here we are, 62 years later … dancing to a quarter to three.
A lot of ink has been spilled about the recorded quality of that song. Accidental, deliberate, whatever it was, the lower fidelity is a signature part of it, at least these days. There are a lot of people trying to do the same sort of thing now.
This is less a gloss over than I intended, but we’re going to make up for it tomorrow, when the Re-Listening project continues with a record that … just wasn’t for me. Maybe it’s for you though. Come back and find out.
