running

Monday / photo / running / swimming — Comments Off on So June, huh? That’s one way to start.
1
Jun 20

So June, huh? That’s one way to start.

Well hello there and happy Junevembertoberuary. I’m working on wrapping up week 12 at home. And this is where I would say I am doing well and we are blessed and all of that is true. All of that is very true. I’ve been to a grocery store a few times and we visit the drive through at Chick-fil-A on Saturdays and had some nice bike rides, but otherwise it has been right here. And I won’t complain! I can’t complain. Everything within our immediate reach is peachy keen while so many things beyond our grasp seem so far beyond our grasp.

There’s a lot to write and a lot of questions and worry and anger today, and there should be. A badly hurting world became something altogether worse tonight while we were on a one-hour bike ride. So quickly were things moving that I asked a friend what exactly was taking place that I managed to get caught up before he did. And then we sat aghast and in worry the rest of the night, as many people did. These next few weeks will try us. We must not be found wanting, when clearly so many people are.

The other day Poseidon help me work on a ceiling fan. He’s big on team efforts:

Did the fan get fixed? No. I blame the cat.

The fan is fine, but it does make a nice creaking nose. So we will continue to try to balance the thing. It’s only a problem for the few minutes when you’re really trying to go to sleep. And when it isn’t a problem it is really out of your mind. It’s a metaphor for life!

Phoebe does not care about your literary tricks. She is only concerned about getting in your path of travel and getting pets. And trying to stick her head through the spindles on the handrail for some reason.

This was a custom photo. The Yankee wanted one of her hiding and in preparation of attacking the laser. The dot can’t see her, you see, on account of her incredibly low profile. Laser dots, traditionally, scan the horizon as their primary form of enemy detection …

Between Thursday and Saturday morning a tree fell on a nearby path. It is a tree that had been waiting for some time to fall. I noticed a week or two ago that it had a serious lean and was braced against other trees that were still doing their part. This guy was rotted and exhausted. And now he’s just in the way.

But you don’t let that stop you, not when you’re running. You turn obstacles into hurdles. And that’s what we did. And then I used the saturation features on my phone to really jazz up this photo.

You gotta just look up. That’s the lesson here. This is a view on our Sunday walk.

And we played in the stream partway through that walk. It’s a peaceful little thing, watching the world’s tiniest waterfall in the valley between two quiet hills.

We went back to the lake. The Yankee went for a swim, her second swim since the pools closed in March, and so her second one in the lake. I sat on the shore to make sure the shore stayed in good shape. There was a bobber hanging from a tree:

And there was a log that was drifting in:

And she had a good swim!

I mean, look at that form! Such technique!

That’s a tow along buoy. Three quick puffs of air inflate it, and then you strap it around your waist and it swims behind you. They are designed to be visible for other people out on the water. Safety first, because low profiles and silhouettes and what not.

I could see this big pink dot about 150 yards away, or so, it is definitely high-viz. She says there’s no drag. She doesn’t even notice it behind her.

Other stuff? There’s more on Twitter, check me out on Instagram and more On Topic with IU podcasts as well.

photo / running / video / Wednesday — Comments Off on I almost had to use the “overwriting” category here. Almost.
27
May 20

I almost had to use the “overwriting” category here. Almost.

Here’s a little video clip I shot on a walk last weekend. Things just land in your phone and it’s easy to forget about them amid the rapidly accumulated photos and duplicates and, who are we kidding, we’re never trimming these things down to manageable numbers.

While you watched that I removed 15 photos from my camera roll.

There are now 3,958 photos on my camera roll. Even if I could, even if I wanted to delete 15 shots a day — and after a few days you start talking about some real choices, right? — I’d have an empty phone in just under 10 months.

Still, phones are better than wallet photos. And there’s just so many you can scroll through!

The next time you’re with some people, whenever that is, time how long it takes for someone to whip out a phone for kid or pet pics or to show you the meme they found on the way over. It’s startling. Phones come out much faster than wallets ever did. We are a visual society in almost every respect.

Pro tip: Words? Written words are visuals too.

See?

Now, you could say the word quickly loses all meaning, and you’d be right. I would say there was a severe oxygen deprivation going on yesterday’s run and that, furthermore, it is bad design to prove a point. There are 10 different fonts there, which is seven to 10 more than necessary, depending on who you ask. They are thrown together all slapdash just so I could flesh this out with another paragraph or two. I would also be correct.

We’re into the silly season now — a season we never seem to leave anymore — and so we’d do well to remind ourselves that two people can disagree with one another but still share common cause, find ourselves with different ranked priorities, but still behave with common accord and that there are often times degrees or even kinds of accuracy. It’s not a question of whether the sky is blue or the grass is mauve, but how many fonts you see there.

And if you see 10, you are also mistaken, because that doesn’t allow for the national triathlon championship fonts on the hat, which are blurry to the point of being obscure. Sometimes, when we are right, we are wrong, because we don’t know or see it all. It’s a difficult thing to acknowledge, one’s impenetrable personal surety. It’s a pride thing, a fear of weakness thing, an inability to show vulnerability thing, a tedious thing.

Sort of like this run was tedious!

(Phew! That was a close one, no?)

I didn’t even record the run in my app, because my app failed. We can both agree that the app was not right. We can also agree, because I will bear to you this testimony: it was not a good run on my part, but it did complete the standard issue neighborhood 5K and change.

Today I had a fast bike ride, so I’ve got that going for me.

Covid-19 / IU / photo / podcast / running / Tuesday — Comments Off on I apologize for the rant below
19
May 20

I apologize for the rant below

Today I ran four miles. Fourth run in a week, following almost four weeks of not running. So this, I guess, is brought to you by the number four. It’s interesting how quickly you can come into and out of phase with running. And I am not, by nature, a runner.

Or a model. Or a photographer. But my hair game is on point.

Last weekend I noted that the night before I celebrated the 45 minutes where my hair was at it’s most presentable peak of long-short. Now we enter into the short-medium phase which lasts an inordinate amount of time and offers no good looks. But you’ll wish for those days when medium-medium arrives, should it come to that.

Yes, I too need a haircut. No, it isn’t really bothering me that much at all. Mileage varies, and I’m fine with that. We can all roll our eyes at one another, which is a great way to take in the grandeur of our sans-haircuts, our home-haircuts and our “I just couldn’t wait another minute to see my barber/stylist” contemporaries.

One day I realized that, despite my lights and my green screen and everything else my webcam still shoots at a pitiful 720, and that meant that slightly longer hair and formerly nice shirts with tiny spots on them were back in play again. That’ll do for now. I’m not even ironing the shirts. Oh, you see wrinkles? No, my wifi is just seizing up.

Besides, no one is looking at my hair, they’re concentrating on that typo from my last email. I dashed off a note last night related to one of today’s Zoom calls. I consulted it this morning to make sure I had the meeting topic well in hand. And that’s when I found the typo. It was one of those where there are two words that sound the same, but mean wholly different things and when you use the wrong one you look feral and uneducated. Never mind that I was still corresponding at 8:01 p.m. There was an obvious error and it will now shame me for all of my days.

I talked with a history professor who has built out a food program at the university and, this summer, they’ve collaborated on creating a meal and delivery service. There’s a lot you can’t get to in an interview like this, but if you look up Carl Ipsen‘s research interests this all make sense.

And it’s a small scale effort, relative to these big food banks staffed out by the National Guard. But the man brought two or three different units of the university together, even as it scaled down in a pandemic. And from that they created an effort that feeds 70 or so meals a day, and counting, to members of the campus community? That’s something.

People doing things, like the famed chef who’s creating that menu that Ipsen talks about, the people preparing the food, the drivers bringing things in from farms and food plants … people taking the initiative of the moment and making it productive, they’re going to be the unheralded glue of all of this. We’ll talk nurses and doctors and truck drivers and shelf stockers, and we should. There are also a lot of other people doing a lot of good, big and small. We’d all do well to acknowledge them.

That’s much more inspiring than the tiresome binary argument over Covid etiquette.

Decency is not in short supply, the mention of it just doesn’t get the lift that jerks do. This is not a new phenomenon, and we’d do well to think of that, too.

hobby / photo / running / Thursday — Comments Off on This is for the birds
14
May 20

This is for the birds

I do believe spring and summer showed up on the same day, making themselves unmistakably known during today’s little jog. It was a simple and persperific 5K, and the first time this year that has felt actually warm during a ride or run. Oh, I’ll sweat in almost any temperature. We are, however, now suddenly, and without any proper build-up befitting it’s importance, flirting with that time when you wonder if the concept of sweat does, in fact, cool you down like you were always told.

Which sounds like I can’t be pleased by the weather. Too cold. Too gray. Too damp. Too hot. And for the first two those your analysis is correct. For the third, no such thing. For the fourth, I just need a week or two of acclimation, that’s all. And that’s where we find ourselves today, wishing there’d been a proper subtle transition. But sometimes you aren’t allowed nice things, meteorologically speaking.

Sometimes we complain just because we can.

Hey, 77 felt fantastic. And then I elevated my heart rate a little and the sweat started stinging my eyes and that was fine, I guess. Later I got to that point where the ol’ internal thermostat decides to flip on over and there’s a signal from the engine room: all pores answering. And that’s how my run ended, doing planks, sweating a lot, laughing at the idea of a spring, missed.

It sounds like a mid-20th American novel: The Spring Season Lost.

None were concerned at the bird feeders. The blackbird least of all:

Fun tidbit about the House Finch. It was originally a western bird. Someone took them east to try to sell them in the early 1940s, but eventually set them free in disgust. (“I just knew these people were going to want them as caged birds!”) And they’ve spread to be seen across the country and southern Canada since.

That’d be an annoying caged bird, if you ask me. But rare is the bird that isn’t. And they should all be flying free, filling their role in the ecosystem, not cluttering up the house.

Now this guy isn’t judging me, at all:

It took a long while to win over this blue jay for pictures. But at least he didn’t attack me:

I got a few nice shots of him. And I think I understand his hesitancy.

He’s conscientious about his combover!

cycling / Instagram / Monday / photo / running — Comments Off on Look at my pretty pictures
6
Apr 20

Look at my pretty pictures

How was your weekend? You just had one. Did you notice that? I notice my weekend by three things. Friday as afternoon turns into the evening I have a little ceremony and close my email. Then, that same night, I have an even better ceremony which culminates me in turning off the alarm so it doesn’t go off on Saturday morning. That’s how I know the weekend is here. For lunch on Saturday we go get Chic-fil-A. These days it is strictly a drive thru affair. Three weekends ago we sat in the restaurant, and it was almost empty and odd. The change was coming, and we all knew we were in the midst of it, even if we weren’t quite yet sure what that might be.

Now the young people are standing in the drive thru wearing gloves and hanging out near hand sanitizer and it is certainly different. But at least they are still able to work, and at least we are able to get a sandwich, and at least it is one indicator of the weekend.

So how was yours?

Let’s check in on the cats. Phoebe found herself a new spot on which to sit:

And since we’ve had a bit of sun lately we’re opening more curtains and she’s finding more spots.

Poseidon … I must give him this. When he knocks things over, he owns it.

I wasn’t even in the room when he decided the cup that was on the kitchen island should be on the kitchen floor. I thought The Yankee had come downstairs and had dropped something, so I wasn’t in a big hurry to go check out the sound. When I got into the kitchen a few moments later, he was patiently waiting to be found out.

More flowering trees I saw on my Saturday run:

It was five miles, but the run itself was nothing special. I slowed down, I told myself, to enjoy the sunshine and the warm day. And the budding trees:

And there was a fast ride this evening, which was of the Monday variety, I think.

I even threw in a nice long sprint just at the end, to finally pass her. (She didn’t know we were racing, which has a lot to do with why I won the spring.

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