running

Instagram / running / Wednesday — Comments Off on To shine a light on my thinking
4
Dec 19

To shine a light on my thinking

This is where I am on running, on having to sit it out for most of the year: I can now move around a bit. I am not always winded. I have to re-remember how to run uphill. I’m still slow, but then I haven’t been fast since high school, but I can manufacture a little burst every now and then. My foot feels much better, which is the best part of it all. I haven’t taped it up in a few days in a row, and I’m running without binding the thing, too.

And while I’m probably still months removed from wanting to run — it’s funny, I see people riding their bikes and I think “I’m jealous,” I’ve never seen a person running and thought “I wish I could be doing that right now — there is a certain meditative quality of a good run, when you can move the body without too much suffering.

Maybe it was the evening or the circumstance, but I remembered that this evening.

The light is great, mind you. The photo is blurry because I took that, mid-stride, running downhill. Even with all of those limitations, you can still easily see your way. The view is even cleaner with the eye.

The light is this one. You wear it on your head. It’s lightweight, has an adjustable strap and all that. You don’t forget it is there, but it isn’t an encumbrance. I don’t think I could ride a bike with it, which I’d like to do, because you’d probably outrun the light. But it’s perfect for night runs. They cast a brilliant light to see where your feet are going, and it makes you visible to people coming your way — as if they couldn’t hear me huffing and shuffling from a great distance.

Where I also am on running: I’m not yet back to doing great distances. Oh tonight I was going to run four miles. Four whole miles! But then precisely at the 5K mark, or 3.1 miles, my knee felt a twinge. And as I am trying to get my various joints to work happily and, perchance to dream, in harmony, I called it a run. It didn’t hurt — my rationale, that is — that I came to this conclusion just in front of the neighborhood. So I finished my run at the 5K mark, turned off the head lamp and walked home by porch light. It was in the low 40s, which felt like a slight chill after a little run. The crickets are gone, the bullfrogs are quiet, the kids are all inside. That’s also meditative.

I focus on spring, when I won’t have to miss the sound of insects and the aural landscape that comes with a happier season, when the sun sticks around longer, when I can a bike or run, or both!

Monday / photo / running / woodworking — Comments Off on Typing with wood stain on my fingers
26
Nov 19

Typing with wood stain on my fingers

Here’s the progress on the recent project. This weekend we glued all the pieces together. So it is assembled:

Gluing doesn’t take a long time, thankfully. But you have to come to terms with the parts that work and don’t work. A good craftsman, I said, does not blame his tools. Fortunately, I continued, I am not a good craftsman. And there’s enough blame to go around.

We’re on to staining. That’s taking a bit longer than necessary because things aren’t drying in the garage quickly enough. Too cool in there just now. So we’ve moved it from the garage to a better, warmer (funny how that works) climate. When the stain dries I will put a coat or two of finish on it. And then I’ll attach some hardware and our work will be done. Hopefully it will make sense and be useful.

Otherwise, I’m going to blame my tools again.

Seriously, I’m working out of my garage. I have to pull the table saw out from under a shelf to use it. I have to pull the miter saw off the same shelf and put it on the table saw to use that. I have a sophisticated cardboard box setup for my belt sander. I sanded individual parts on an old printer hutch. And we’re staining it on a hand-me-down kitchen island because the height it about right.

It’s a delightful shade tree operation, is what I’m saying. This is what I was coming to terms with this weekend.

Not really. It’s fine. The project looks pretty nice. It is the right height, so it will be functional. The color compliments the room — if you’re standing in the right light in one of three previously marked positions — so it will look appealing. You’ll see. The next time it shows up here, it will be in place.

I woke up yesterday to a forecast of “abundant” sunshine. In the sense of it existing or being available in large quantities, that was true yesterday. Here’s a quick shot from my afternoon run:

If we’re discussing abundance in the sense of having plenty, we did not have an abundance. Also, I seemed to be running west the entire way yesterday afternoon:

And it was a fine day. Bright and crisp. A rarity here this time of year, so going for a quick slow four-mile run was the right call.

Here’s the thing. I was just reading about Project Sunroof where you can “discover your solar savings potential.” Like all curious people, I put in several neighbors’ addresses, because Google doesn’t need to know where I live, they can just get close and guess and that’s close enough, man.

The data is really about how much sun your roof gets — because this is about solar panels — the data was disheartening. The calculations on the site suggest that we get about three hours of usable sunlight a day over the course of a year. Solar calculations and energy savings (which appear to be minimal given how our house and its roof are oriented) notwithstanding, that’s not abundant sun.

Also, you can tell this estimate is in the proper vicinity, and know there’s something to that forecast, because the meteorologists at the weather service made the point of saying we’d have abundant sun yesterday. You’d never see such language if it were the norm.

It should be the normal condition, but alas. So far the forecast calls for partly cloudy skies … next Monday. Something to look forward to you.

Instagram / photo / running / Tuesday / video — Comments Off on Where you step
5
Nov 19

Where you step

Last week I was counting grey days. We were moving into winter, after all. I’m not embracing it — Three, four, five days in a row! Hoo-grey! Like that was something to be excited about, other than the morbid curiosity of wondering how long that would last, and what I would one day be able to do with that information. (Nothing.) — but you have to step into it to step back out of it. Maybe. I don’t know. It’s an approach to try, as much as any other.

Then Saturday came, and it was chilly, but the sky was blue and lovely. And Sunday was another beautiful looking day. I mean, consider:

That was during the bike ride, and I was wearing gloves, sure, but shorts and a windbreaker. I wore wool socks, but my toes weren’t frozen, like on Friday when I’d forgotten the rule of cotton.

(The rule of cotton: Is it cold? You’re going to be cold.)

And then Monday, yesterday, was another fine looking day, even if I was inside for the entirety of it. And tonight, I got home just in time to run for a few miles in that moment between the twilight and the gloaming, and into the fullness of the evening:

It was about 5:40.

Today, another fine and crisp day. You can just feel it in this video:

For all the technology available to us, though, you can’t really express fall. The sites are never grand enough and the smell is never there. It isn’t a season for just the one sense.

But before we get ahead of ourselves … we’ll have a lot more grey and winter-like conditions later this week. It’s a touchy time in an intemperate place, meteorologically speaking.

This morning, I finally figured out to take the picture I have been admiring on the parking deck. I park on the second level, in case the little creek a block away sneezes, I guess. And that second floor parking routine means I take two 180-degree turns. And after the second turn there’s this view, which looks lovely through polarized sunglasses and, finally, my pictures looks as it all does in my minds eye.

As ever, the key is in where you do your metering.

You have to step in, then, before you can step back.

history / IU / photo / running / Wednesday — Comments Off on This week we show color
30
Oct 19

This week we show color

Since this week we’re using color as the gimmick here, I suppose this post is in the “These colors don’t run … but I do” category.

So I’m walking in the building today and I just casually pass by the Ernie Pyle display case. And I thought, this shouldn’t be a thing you don’t even think about. It isn’t a shrine, but Ernie is sort of the patron saint of the journalism program here. He grew up not far away, attended school here, dropped out his senior year to go write at a commercial paper and then built, one column at a time, one of the most successful careers of the mid-20th century. He was killed in the Pacific near the end of World War II and he’s venerated here, almost 80 years later.

Just sitting there, is the man’s typewriter.

I believe that’s one of his domestic machines. He perhaps wrote tons of self deprecating letters and some of his better stateside professional work on this. It’s next to his medals and diplomas and books and his action figure — this is a journalist with an action figure — and some other personal effects.

Here’s the left shoulder of his European field jacket. You can still see the sweat and dirts ground into the collar. But the patch is interesting of its own accord.

Someone had to stitch that as a part of the war effort. How many of those did they make? And who sewed that on the jacket? How many of those did they make? And what did the men who saw them on other men’s soldiers think?

We know what they thought of Ernie Pyle. They absolutely loved him. They loved him because he wrote about the men, not the generals, and he endured the unendurable with them. The work he did meant it was an inevitable byproduct.

These colors I saw while running today:

It was the neighborhood 5K. It was cool, but not so bad that you minded once the heart rate got up, but you noticed it when you got the full sweat. In the last mile I saw this balding tree. The winds are coming in tomorrow. None of these trees will look the same by the weekend.

But look what the sky did in that photo. More accurately, look at what my phone’s processor did to the background of the photograph when I stopped for three seconds to frame up the shot in the third mile of my run. It’s a grey sky, but we’ve got a white one here. Which, hey, snow is also in the forecast tomorrow …

Snow. October. People are going to hear about this.

hobby / photo / running / Tuesday — Comments Off on Just add sawdust
22
Oct 19

Just add sawdust

That parking deck, I said to a colleague yesterday, is like a sundial. The topic was how you could tell the time of day just by what floor you wind up parking on. I usually get the second level. Yesterday he barely got the fourth level, and almost had to park in the rain, horror of horrors. The bigger issue was he had to trudge up two more flights of stairs because anyone that rides that parking deck’s elevator will only do it the once.

But that parking is also a clock looking from the outside in, as well. There, at the turnaround onto the second deck, you get this view just before you hang a right:

Those trees are telling us a story and, right now, it is the best part of the morning drive.

This evening I got in just over an hour of sanding, which means I got one piece of the current, and perpetual, project halfway done.

At this rate, in three more hours I’ll be two-thirds of the way through the sanding.

No one likes sanding, but it is acceptable to like the process toward the result. If anything it slows the project down, though, just because you have to work up the morale to sit down and sand the wood that will make the darn thing. (Plus there’s the rest of your life to consider … ) For me, to know you’re going to get an hour here and there doesn’t really fit the workflow. People that can steal a few minutes and make progress, on any project, are geniuses. I need big blocks of time, for any kind of project, it seems. This is a problem with sanding, though, because I am doing this project entirely by hand and you can’t sand for hours at a time without having a shoulder fall off. So the problem is the sanding, really. Which no one likes.

The idea, which is well more than a year old, and which begin in December, picked up steam in April and then lulled its way into a soft summer slumber, is going to gain momentum in the next few weeks just because I am going to grit (Get it? That’s a sandpaper joke!) my teeth and push through.

Why, the next time we talk about this, I might be three-quarters of the way through the sanding.

Sanding, I think, is the part of the project where you really get to know the wood. And this particular lumber, which is a Western White Pine, is telling me a lot about itself.

Here are some photos from yesterday’s run. I got in four miles, which is the longest run since my April injury. I guess I’m on the slow road to recovery. Emphasis on slow.

Like my shutter! She’s both almost in, and definitely out of, focus:

Some years back, whenever they were planning that particular neighborhood, some designer drew these on a map. And a purchasing agent filled in some paperwork and then a delivery guy dropped off the order and a few people dug some holes and put these in the ground, just for moments like these:

So what you do today may take a bit of time to reflect its beauty. We may never see it, other projects and parts of life and all of that, maybe you just forget to go back and check. Other priorities, and all of that. Maybe it just never occurs to you. But there it is, out there, doing their thing, because someone got the thing started.

The trees on the path running behind our house:

That first rain of the fall, the first few leaves:

It’s easy to love the moment. But there will be more leaves, and then perhaps more rain. And that’ll turn to who knows what. Those moments are less easy for me to love. But that’s just me.

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