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cycling / memories / Monday / photo — Comments Off
16
Jun 25

Gummosis is actually the term for it, yes

I set two alarms, 18 minutes apart. There’s no reason for this. At one point I made an alarm in my phone for the top of the hour and at another moment I had cause to make one for 18 minutes after the hour.

If you had to log an explicative for your alarms, they would be as banal as they are amusing. On this, we can all agree.

So I set an alarm in my phone, doing the math, figuring, “That’s a good solid 8 hours of sleep. That’ll help fix me right up.” And then I stayed awake for the next two-plus hours.

But when the alarm went off, I’d been woken twice. Once by the light, because I did not configure the doors for optimal photonic blockage, and once when my lovely bride began her industrious day. And so it was that I was surprised when the top-of-the-hour alarm finally went off. And doubly so when that next one sounded, 18 minutes later. That was a delightfully long 18 minutes.

And so the morning things. And then the afternoon things. We watched the FedEx man sprint across the yard to hurl a small box on the porch. It was our version of those insurance commercials, when homeowners become their parents. What if he slips and falls?

Simple, we bury the body. Of course you have to do something with the truck. That’s a bigger hole to dig. But, you’d of course pull other people’s deliveries out first. Maybe there’s a shovel — or an excavator, or a front-end loader — in there.

Happily, he did not slip. I fetched the box, one the cats will not enjoy, for it has their medicine in it. It is designed to reduce the thing that cats do that you have to clean up. (I don’t want to be too descriptive, because you are perhaps reading this over a snack.) We administer it twice a week, it’s a gel that is rubbed on the foreleg, which they lick off and, despite it’s pleasant-to-cats odor, it is the worst thing that has ever happened to them, ever. Just ask.

So I opened the small box and put away its contents when they weren’t around. The shipping box is now in the recycling stash, ready for tomorrow morning’s run.

I checked the mail. DirecTV wants me back. We haven’t had DirecTV in several years, never at this house and it wasn’t in my name. But they want me back. I do miss the DVR function and the UX they offered. Well, not the last one we had. They’d just rolled out a new guide system and we dropped them before I had time to adjust to it. Still, in these, our modern times of convenience, after navigating apps for six minutes before waiting to find out if the Internet connection is going to work (pretty solid here, actually) I do miss good old fashioned TV.

Several years ago we had a grad student stop by our house for something, this was a woman in her mid-20s, easily. She walked through the living room, did a double take at the TV and said, “Oh, you have one of those.”

Earlier this year I read a study that argued that people that watch streaming things still think of it as TV. And I was gratified by that, until I remembered I saw an interview with an NBC bigwig from last year who said the same thing, and there’s no way they were both correct, right?

Anyway, we’ve lately been streaming West Wing. Just sort of waiting out time until the next big bike race, which we will also stream on our own delayed schedule.

I can’t remember if that race is taking place on the app that showing you a preview as you scrub through the slower parts of the program, or not. The inconsistency of thoughtful little features like that is just one more argument against a la carte streaming.

Which is funny. People argued for a la carte cable. Cable wouldn’t or couldn’t comply, so there’s another industry taking a 3-iron in the teeth. We, meanwhile, have six dozen apps and, bizarrely, a Samsung TV package we don’t acknowledge.

When I was young, I knew two things about peaches. The first was about that sticky bit of gooey ooze that comes out of the fruit on the tree. Hands should not be sticky, and that impression influenced a lot of my young thoughts about peaches. The second thing I knew was that peaches and chocolate cake make for an excellent pairing. And if you didn’t know that, you’ll need to do a little research. Bake yourself a Betty Crocker cake and crack open a can of peaches and become the person you were meant to be. This will also influence your thoughts about peaches.

Now, we have a peach tree and I have learned several things. I know the three-pronged test for determining ripeness (color, squeeze, and smell). I know this tree will be all-encompassing come August. And I know to recruit peach recipients early, which we have been doing.

So I checked on the peaches. They’re coming along. Another banner crop, I’m sure.

They are a small fruit, but they are delicious. And they are plentiful. And that’s how I have learned so much about this particular stone fruit the last two seasons. We still have some from last year. We might still have some from last year. So long as you stay away from the gummosis.

I set out for a haircut today. I have tried this once before, last week, which isn’t unusual. It often takes several attempts. Mostly because everyone needs haircuts, everyone seems to go to the same cheap place I go to, and they all go at the same time I want to. And the only worse than sitting in the big chair is sitting in the waiting area.

The last time I went I just told the woman that cut my hair: I don’t like to be here. She was cool with it. Of course, she was deep into her shift and on her feet that whole time and probably felt the same way. She was very nice. Gave me a good cut. Did not, however, remove all of the silver hair.

It was a different person this time, of course, because more than 15 minutes have elapsed. And she picked up on my pleasant style of chatty silence quickly. She asked if they’d thinned this part the last time. I, a guy, said Maybe? It gets poofy and I probably complained about that, and it didn’t seem to get so poofy. So maybe. She said it felt like her colleague had thinned it.

I wanted to ask why it all grows at different speeds out of my head. Why are some parts of my scalp more exceptional than others? Just look at this discrepancy. I could not help but look as she held it up, appraising the problem, arriving at the solution and sharing my shame with all of the world, or at least the old man behind me and the fidgety little kid to my left.

Anyway, haircut done. The various layers are trimmed and shaped and “My! What thick hair you have!”

I don’t mind that part. I like that part. Everything else, not so much a fan.

Our neighbor invited us for a group ride this evening. The three of us went out with another who was, apparently, on her second road ride — today, she figured out her shifting. She’s training for her first triathlon, a sprint, in August, and tonight we took her on a 17-mile lollipop.

She’s a runner and a swimmer. Her parents did tris. Now our neighbor and the Yankee, both Ironmen, are giving her tips and advice. She’ll be just fine. Best of all, we found another person to ride nearby. This is going to turn into a full-on group ride before long.

Just when I got out of the echelon, they pulled me right back in. Only kidding, I haven’t done a proper group ride since 2019. I’m OK with that. You’re never last when you ride solo.

Friday / photo — Comments Off
13
Jun 25

I do not know how to pronounce ‘paraskevidekatriaphobic’

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.

cycling / memories / music / photo / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
10
Jun 25

How do you hold an aerosol?

Sunday was the sixth time we’ve seen Guster in the last two years. (Proximity has its advantages.) Twice we saw their “We Also Have Eras” tour, which they now call a play. We saw them once in a standing venue. We caught a lunch set they put on for a local radio station. We also saw the second night of their weekend at the Kennedy Center.

I was trying to count how many times, overall, I’ve seen them now, and finally decided to just count the states. It’s at least five. To be fair, I guess, to me, that’s over almost 30 years now. (That is in no way fair to me. Or to them, really.)

Anyway, Ryan did a little crowd work, as has lately become the custom, and he came right by us.

Guster as the feature act, did a tight, nine song, 40 minute set. Which gets us to the headliner, which we’ll play tomorrow.

I had a pretty crisp bike ride this evening. And for 26.7 miles (or 42 kilometers, because it sounds more impressive to the American audience) I held my average speed throughout. That includes when I had to stop to take this photo.

That section of road has been closed for several months now. Ordinarily we turn left there anyway, but the closure has made the nearby stretch even nicer. But today I turned right, just to see what was going on with that bridge. And, yep, the road crews really don’t want you going through there right now.

This was about 20 miles in, and you can clearly see I was going fast by how blurry the asphalt appears.

And now, a reminder about how stop signs work.

There’s a four way stop near our house. I need to turn left to go home. An SUV approached from my right, and stopped, as it should. A car then approached from my left, and stopped, as it should. And then I completed my stop. And waited.

And waited some more.

Finally I shook my head, lowered my eyes and waved on the SUV coming from the right, a driver so flummoxed by car brain and the presence of a person on a two wheel self-propelled bicycle that they did not know what to do at the intersection.

So I ask you, who, really, is making roads dangerous?

This configuration of vehicles is sure to stymie anyone who has forgotten how stop signs work. This is how they work. The person that arrives, and completes their stop, first, is the first to go. In this case, I was last. Also in this case, people had no idea how to behave.

I went out this evening to put the cover on the grill and water a few plants. The air was still. The night was quiet. The moon shone brightly, peering at us through a thin skin of clouds, who’s main contribution to the atmosphere was, well, atmosphere. The clouds had a “We’re here!” vibe. And I wanted to take a photo. Only my phone was inside.

So I finished covering the grill, watered the four plants I set out to water, and then went inside to retrieve the image capturing device. It all took about as long as reading about it, I’m sure.

But when I came back outside, the clouds were gone.

Nobody needs spooky night sky stuff in June, I said to the moon. She had no reply, because she’s an orbiting satellite, and not a character than I can dialog with.

But if it were, the moon would probably say, “I can’t hold those in place, I’m a quarter of a million miles away from your clouds.”

Guess I’m doing it by myself.

How do you hold on to clouds?

adventures / cycling / Monday / music / photo / video — Comments Off
9
Jun 25

An entrance to eternal summer slacking

I’d like to share with you this Hemerocallis daylily. Native to parts of Asia, beautiful anywhere in the world. This one is holding down the corner by our garage.

There are always wonders in the yard. I just have to go outside to find them.

Daylillies require almost no care. I wonder why the people that used to live here didn’t have them planted everywhere. But, I suppose, you could ask that of any beautiful thing. And we have quite a few lovely things in the yard — have I noticed this daylily before? — but most of them are quite singular. And most of it takes care of itself pretty well. The rest, well, they’re stuck with us.

There’s a grapevine, and we are trying to rework it over its trellis. Nearby, the honeysuckle seems to be rebounding well from the early springtime work we did on it. Other things are coming along nicely. We had to recently remove a few bushes that had died. I view this as a personal shortcoming, a promise I never made to the sellers of our home, not that I’ve done a lot to help those planted things that struggled and died, even while others have thrived. Everything grows here (weeds best of all!), but some things stopped last year. Maybe it was that drought. Maybe it was something else.

Anyway, the daylily is lovely.

We had a nice bike ride Saturday morning with our neighbor. It’s great. He rides around the loop and right up our driveway. Then he set us out on a course that included a few roads we know, and a few we haven’t been on before. It sprinkled a bit, and the conversation was nice, and the roads were quite empty at that time of the day.

This was soon after I’d done my big turn on a Strava segment, which I felt like I managed quite well if I must say, but did not set a new PR. Our neighbor just sat patiently behind me after the sprint, through the left turn and then the quick right that turned me back up hill. As soon as it pointed up, he went around me.

I was going to sit up, but I had to keep up. And so I tried, and did.

He’s a nice guy, our neighbor, and it’s nice that we have the chance to take the occasional ride with him. You need a few people like that from time-to-time.

When I went out today — a perfectly pleasant solo ride of some of the standard routes ridden backward — I rode alongside a little boy on his BMX bike for a moment. We met at the road that enters-exits the subdivision, but from opposite directions. And that guy was fast. So I had that to think about on my perfectly average pace 27-miler. If he suggests a ride in a few years, when he’s a bit older, I’m probably going to be busy that day.

We went to a concert last night, and I’ll share tiny little clips of that to help fill up our week. Here’s the opening act. You might remember Fastball from the 1990s. A bunch of guys from Texas who scored two Grammy nominations and two or three songs at or neat the top of the charts in 1998. They also went platinum on that record. Later they had trouble because what genre even is this? But musical genres in general, and their style of rock in particular, was struggling at that same time.

I never actually liked this band. They’ve been at it all these years, honing their touring craft, and it shows. I liked their performance. They had a tight 25 minute set and held a crowd like you don’t often see for a warm up. Also, they threw in a bit of Steve Miller, just for fun, as a medley.

Maurice, by the way, means “Gangster of Love.” That was mixed in with their minor 2013 hit, which is peppy.

These days, Fastball says they “combined a fondness for melodic, Beatles-inspired pop with the alternative aesthetic of late-’90s mainstream rock,” in which case everyone should love them, right? But I just never got into them. I did enjoy this mini-set, though.

And, tomorrow, we’ll see a clip for the feature act.

On the way to the show, we passed this U-Haul truck. We passed it, it passed us back, like this photograph was meant to be. Of all of those little bits of Americana that they could share …

I just saw a television reference to that fungi. And, as I look at it now, I find I can learn more about fungi on the website, but U-Haul is of … questionable credibility on this issue.

Probably no one who’s rented that truck has thought about it, or tried to look that up on the site. When you’re trying to move, you’re on a mission: minimize the effort and aggravation of the move.

And you hope there are daylilies where you are going.

cycling / Friday / music / photo / Re-Listening / video — Comments Off
6
Jun 25

Gaining light late

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.