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adventures / books / cycling / I do not know what is happening. / Monday / music / New Jersey / photo / swimming / video — Comments Off
28
Aug 23

‘Just like children sleepin’, we could dream this night away’

I swam 2,000 yards this evening. It was that or go stumble through a run, and my knees said: swim, why don’t ya? So I dove in, donned the ol’ goggles and started the freestyle stroke, with the occasional kick when I could remember to, counting laps along the way. Somewhere around 360 or 400 yards, my arms stopped complaining and just carried on with the effort. That’s my longest swim since 2015, where one fine September day I put 2,900 yards in the books. It is my 10th swim of the summer, and I did it all uninterrupted. I’m pleased with what seems like an impressive progression, and wondering what I’m doing poorly if I’m not a.) super winded or b.) exhausted or c.) both, after the fact, and if I have enough time to get to two miles this season.

Three, four, more swims, right? Surely that’s outrageous and feasible, all at the same time.

I do not know what is happening.

This has been a nice exercise. Something about the rhythm, even for an inconsistent water splasher as I am, becomes meditative enough. If you’re concentrating on keeping the lap count right or, occasionally, focusing on your technique, all of the other things can go out of your mind.

This lets the other things come back into your mind, because when you splash the water away at the wall, more water moves back through.

I don’t know what that means, either. Not really. I didn’t spend my time in the pool writing this. Clearly, that’s the oversight here.

Anyway, laps, time spent not writing this in my mind, because time was spent thinking about class preparation, instead. Not every day is a day full of deliverables, and this was one of those days. But! Two thousand yards!

Phoebe was not impressed. But, then, she’s a classic sidestroker, swimming on the carpet as she does throughout the day.

On Friday, she was very cuddly.

Some days, kitty needs dictate events. And part of Friday morning was one of those days.

Poseidon continues to maintain a watchful eye over his kingdom. He’s lately improved his approach to climbing up the narrow scratching post. What was once a chaotic effort to get up there for “Now what?” has become a confident, measured attack for “Where else should I be?”

I expect he’ll be leaping directly on top of it before long. When, that is, he’s not on the top of the refrigerator.

“No peektures, please.”

So the cats are doing just fine. So are their talons, as you can see a bit there.

We had an interesting bike ride on Saturday. We started too late. My fault. It was already quite warm. But we started with a tailwind. (Which is counterintuitive.) And so we had some impressive splits in the first half of the ride.

It was all I could do to hang on, so there’s no video, no shadow selfies or other cool camera tricks this time. Even still, we had the wonderful opportunity to see a few cool barns. This one was between here and there.

And this one we rode past just after our turnaround about halfway into the ride. (But more about our halfway destination at a later time.)

Soon after, we got back to a place that was more familiar, which meant my lovely bride could drop me. I was dead, but knew my way back, at least. I went a longer way, just for the spite of extra mileage. And, right at the end of that, I blew another inner tube.

They come in bunches for me, and that’s not frustrating at all, getting to break out a tire lever on your rear wheel twice in two weeks.

I suggested a lovely and romantic night out. There’s a winery nearby and they serve upscale pizzas on the weekend and it’s supposed to be lovely. Reservations were made, and 3.6 miles down the road we went. We timed it such that we caught last bit of the sunset creating a bokeh effect of the cars making the drive down the last dirt road. By the time we parked and got onto the property the sun was gone. A three-piece band was playing, mellow strains floating over the rows of grapes on the still August air being our introduction. This was the view.

We were sat right away. And the group played “Harvest Moon” as if on cue.

The only Neil Young song you need, really.

Some time passed and the hostess came by to see where our waiter was. You could tell there was some back-of-the-house drama going on. Someone else came to take our order. She did not know the special pizza of the day. A third person, then, stopped by to tell us about that creation, which was when our actual waiter turned up.

This was the special pizza of the day. They called it a Cubano, something or other. And though I have little need for dill pickles in general and no need for them on my pizza, you had me at Cubano.

Being the special, I reasoned, must mean that it was good. And it was good. Somehow those pickles worked.

They also had a lot of pizzas they put honey on. The Yankee’s had honey, and it was delicious, and maybe honey is one of those things, like bacon, that’s good on everything.

What if you put honey on bacon?

After an hour our pizza showed up, which is great, because I was about to launch into my whole “… and this is why I don’t pick restaurants” bit, which is absolutely why I don’t pick restaurants. We didn’t have a waiter. The place that is serving only pizza was struggling to get pizzas out. But it was tasty. The music was fine. The singer had a terrific Jeff Tweedy vibe, but judged his audience not-yet-ready for the Uncle Tupelo or Wilco catalogs. He mumbled when he talked. Couldn’t make out a single word. Sang wonderfully.

Our waiter, our real one, brought our pizza and … that’s about it. It brought up questions about who gets the tip, which is really just a question about why we use a tipping system, anyway.

After pizza we got a little ice cream, a nice end to a lovely day.

Yesterday afternoon we sat outside, as has been our recent custom, and read. I breezed through the second section of Eudora Welty’s memoir, One Writer’s Beginnings (1984). As I don’t read a lot of fiction, I’ve never read her work, but she’s a marvelous writer, and she delivers it with the most deft touch, when she’s talking about her bygone days. This second section — all of this book adapted from a series of lectures she delivered late in life — is about traveling as a young girl with her parents to see the extended family. Traveling from Jackson, Mississippi to West Virginia and Ohio was a week, one-way, in the car. At times they were ferried over creeks and rivers. Sometimes the ferry was powered by a man pulling on a rope. It was the 19-teens, and the same world, but harder.

The whole section dives into her grandparents, and deeper parts of the family roots as she understood them. And the people here are developed with the depth and care you would expect of a keen observer and a more-than-able writer. The very last part, after they’ve gotten home from the long summer journey …

“The events in our lives happen in a sequence of time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarily — perhaps not possibly — chronological. The time as we know it subjectively is often the chronology that stories and novels follow: it is the continuous thread of revelation.”

I bet even that paragraph means different things to people at different points in their lives. Looking back and marinating in it all, re-playing and re-rationalizing things, putting a narrative to it all. It would be different to a woman of 74, as she was when she delivered that lecture at Harvard, than it would have been to the students in the audience. And the professors and middle-aged people in the room that nodded along sagely, they’d have another understanding, too.

It’ll probably mean something different to me, next Sunday, when I finish the book.

Friday / memories / photo / site / swimming — Comments Off
25
Aug 23

32 gallons can take it right out of you

It is garbage day here on the inner coastal plain. As I’ve mentioned, the garbage people don’t pick up our garbage. They don’t service the area, despite almost all of our customers using the service. Despite them picking up the discards from the previous owners. Despite my having timed this such as to see the garbage truck rumble down the street as I was gathering things together. It’s a weird thing, this small inconvenience. It makes you feel a little vulnerable, somehow.

And it’s a small inconvenience, to be sure. The problem is solved by simply ~~catapulting our refuse into a neighbor’s yard~~ putting a small garbage can or two into the car, sliding a tub of recyclables in there somewhere, and driving them the 7.3 miles to the drop off place.

So I did that. One over-filled, smelly garbage can into the trunk. Plastics, steel, glass and aluminum into the back seat. Turn left, drive awhile, turn right, go around a curve, turn right and then left again, and you’re there. If you do this in the middle of the day, as I did, you might be the only one there, as I almost was.

A woman pulled in just after me and, even though this place should probably suit four or five people setting about the busy work of getting rid of things, I managed to get in her way. She smiled, I smiled. I got out of her way, and then drove away, back through town, and I took this photo.

Two-and-a-half weeks ago, I published a photo of the front door of a local historic bank as part of the We Learn Wednesdays feature. Here’s a better look.

Back at the house, the plastic recycling tub returned to its spot, the garbage can dealt with, I returned to the computer to do computer-type things. I plugged away at this site and that, dealing with tech support from two separate parts of the country on two separate issues. All but the last little bit of what the university requires for their administrative work has now been completed, and the last thing, something of a redundancy if I recall correctly, is now out of my hands. All of which means there will soon be real work to do.

But at quitting time, I quit, and went for a swim. Today I counted out 1,760 yards, which is a fair amount for me. My longest swim since October 29, 2015. I only wrote one throwaway sentence about it here that day; maybe it felt common to do long swims at the time. Most anything can feel ordinary after a time. And then ordinary can, of course, change with the simple demands of the day.

My swims aren’t very pretty, or fast, or efficient. I’ve been in the pull next to incredible swimmers — varsity swimmers, All Americans, Olympians — and it’s simply a gorgeous demonstration of the human form. What you see on TV does not do justice to what you see when you’re in the next lane. And you’ll forget to “swim” altogether as you watch the poet slicing through the water next to you. Or, at least, I do. I don’t swim like that. The only thing we’d have in common is being in the water. But over your lap time, you get to think about things, and today I considered what legendary coach David Marsh — he was himself five times an All-American, coached 12 teams to national championships and has coached more than four dozen Olympians — once told me. “You have to respect someone willing to spend hours and hours, swimming hundreds of laps, to shave a thousandth of a second off of their best time.”

Every now and then, during my swim, a part of one lap felt better than the last. Maybe I was almost finding the right technique, just in time to reach the wall and throw the whole thing off. I’m not good at it, is what I’m saying, and also inconsistent. But it was a long swim, and it felt mostly comfortable. The metric I’m using: I only stopped twice.

After that, my lovely bride and I talked about sports and classes. For the second time in a week or so someone has mentioned to her a study idea I suggested a few weeks back. We might be on to something there. These are the conversations that are the most fun. Sometimes they go somewhere.

By dinner time, which was soon after that conversation, I could already feel that swim in my shoulders. I wonder, what would Marsh say about that?

“Blame it on the garbage cans,” probably.

cycling / photo / video — Comments Off
24
Aug 23

Alliteration with the letter Q

The peaches are all gone. Most were brought in or given away. The deer got their share. The last fell to the ground. And now it’s just leaves. We have … many pounds of peaches in the freezer, but you don’t know how much you want one until you can’t have one. That’s what I realized when I walked out to grab one this evening.

I hope our neighbor also got her share. We’d invited them over at peak peach to gather all they could stand. A few days later she brought us over a peach dessert. We were trying to get rid of them, but she brought them back!

She’s a grandmother, and at least one of her granddaughters is about to graduate from college. She’s lived around here, she said, all her life and she’s never had better peaches than what comes from our tree. Given the produce produced here, that’s a good endorsement. Our peaches are small, but they are juicy and tasty, and plentiful. Walking by the peaches in the produce section of the grocery store Tuesday I realized how small ours are. The ones at the store are gigantic!

Maybe I should buy a few and bring them home as a joke.

We returned our neighbor’s dish to her last weekend, trying to think of a thing we can bring to her as a gift. She sent us back across the street with some freshly canned salsa, tomatoes from her sister’s garden.

We also have tomatoes. Our tomatoes are plentiful. It took two trips this afternoon to get in all the ripe ones. And there are a great many still waiting on the vine. There is a giant bowl of currant and cherry tomatoes in the kitchen. Every time I pass by I grab a few, just to try to keep them under control, or under more control than I did with the peaches. But, really, you can only eat a half dozen peaches at a time so many times.

Elsewhere today, progress was made on some fronts. On others, not so much. It’s all quite quixotically quotidian.

I went for a bike ride this evening, just to stretch my legs, and to understand a few new roads. Here’s a video.

I looked at a map and saw that I could ride in one big square and that’d amount to about nine miles. And then I looked a little more closely at the map and saw that there were two roads going across that square, one almost perfectly diagonal, which is where some of these shots came from, I think.

So I did half the square once, and cut the diagonal. And then I did the full square. This was very instructive. Four times in that little 20 mile exploration I sat up and said, “Oh, so that’s how this lays out.” In this case, it meant I’d been there before, from a different direction. Except for the last realization, which was when I figured out how one house showed up on the route twice. It was right at that diagonal road. Things made sense.

Anyway, it was a lovely experience. The weather was mild, the sky had some dramatic clouds, as you can see.

There was no real hurry to it at all. And the roads were quiet. On one road, I traveled for a fair amount of time in the wrong lane, just looking and recording the stuff going the other direction. (Fortunately, the terrain was flat and the roads there were wide open, so this was easy to safely do.) And some of the things look more than familiar because you’ve been by them a few times, they seem perfectly natural.

Soon, perhaps, I’ll come to anticipate the features of the road and the scenery. Because I just went past this bad section of asphalt, that means the stately house is coming up on the left. Since that store went by on the right, I need to watch out for the trees growing too far over the road. It’s just the natural progression of things, I guess. You’ve got to learn the roads, much better than staring at a map, or glancing at one when you get to what feels like a prominent intersection. And after you do that, you start plotting lines because you know where the dips are, where the sand gathers, and you know exactly how to approach that next little roller. That’s when it becomes really, really fun, when it all just clicks into place without too much thinking, which lets your thinking wander, just a bit, when the real thinking begins.

Not there yet, not with all of these new roads, but this was a pleasant kind of ride, with no eye toward the time or zones or anything else. When you want to, you go slow. When you’ve caught your breath and your heart rate is ready and the road is favorable, you lean over the headset and drill it for a while. Aimless, but with at least a little purpose. And my purpose, today, was just to stretch my legs and eat up a few miles. It’s a kind of ride I always look forward to; a kind I’m planning on doing a lot of in the near future.

adventures / cycling / photo / Rowan / We Learn Wednesdays / Wednesday — Comments Off
23
Aug 23

We don’t talk only about the weather

Much of the country is under a heat dome, because heat wave just doesn’t focus group well. One of the local broadcast meteorologists here pointed out that we were at seasonal averages, and a change was in the air. I called him many, many names for the implication, but he’s used to that, being a broadcast meteorologist.

I’ve admired those people, worked with some of them, taught some more of them, and I feel for all of them. They make models and they’re sometimes wrong. It happens so much they are common jokes. You’re doing the punchlines right now. They work at all hours. And when the weather is really bad, it’s all hands on deck, and the greats stay on until the weather has moved on. Most stations will send out their reporters on days like that for the cliched stand up, but it’s the meteorologist who has to help find a place their friends and colleagues can get the story, but stay safe. That’s a huge responsibility, to say nothing of the way they all mentally take on that role for their community. But pity the poor meteorologist who sees something on the radar that justifies breaking into the soap operas or the big game.

I try to be understanding and appreciative of meteorologists, especially the really good ones, in most every thing they do on air. If you can name every small county road across the DMA, I’ll talk about you with the reverent tones a legend deserves. There’s just two things you can’t do. One of them is this: you can’t, in the summer, talk about the change of seasons.

Longtime readers will be able to figure out the second thing easily enough.

Anyway, the high today was 82 degrees.

My cycling computer is a Garmin 705, which is now pushing 15 years old. I bought it, used, a few years back, because it did all of the things I wanted at the time and it has basic maps, which could be useful. That could be a very useful feature just now since so many of the roads are new to me.

I tried to get to the maps part of the device a few days ago, mid-ride, but couldn’t remember how. Another day, I figured. I’ll only think of it when I’m well and truly lost. But, he said with confidence, there’s always the map on my phone. Problem with that is, I’d have to hold my phone. And the computer is right there, attached to the headset.

Anyway, something I noticed for the first time a ride or two ago is that while the unit of measure is tenths of a mile, the first tenth of a mile is displayed as feet. It ticks up 10 feet at a time, through the first 520 feet.

So it was that on today’s ride, while I was watching those numbers tick up 280, 290, 300, 310, that I knew right away that my legs didn’t have “it.” So little “it” did my legs have that I chased my lovely bride the whole time. So little “it” that she sat up and waited for me once. So little “it” that I decided to add on more miles to the ride, because I keep saying I need more rides, but I also need more miles. I will get my legs out of this unproductive funk.

So little “it” that I didn’t even take any photos or videos of the whole ride, but I did get a shot of the Garmin during those extra miles.

I’d just passed the grocery store and was about to go through the roundabout, just plodding along.

Somehow, despite having dead legs, I set PRs on two Strava segments. They were on roads I’ve only been on twice, and they only shaved a few seconds off the first ride.

I had a nice long Zoom chat with a new colleague this evening. The goal was to help get me up to speed on a class I’ll be teaching this fall. She was very kind to share the time, and generous with her thoughts and materials. Answered a bunch of questions, helped put me at ease and offered to help me throughout the semester. She invited me to come visit her classes, which was especially considerate.

The class will be even better because of that conversation, and I was grateful for the help.

Also, the chat gave me my first look at how my home office will play as a Zoom background. I’ve got nice evening light and a great depth of field. I just need to fix a few things in the background. But I’ve got ideas about that.

While I was considering those, after the chat, I noticed the last light falling on the door.

It stayed like that just long enough for me to turn around, grab my phone, pull up the camera app and compose a quick shot. Seconds later, the clouds rolled in front of the sun, and, disheartened, the sun slipped behind the trees. The meteorologist was off tonight. A different guy was on, and I couldn’t bear to hear it again. I’ll also pretend not to notice that the time stamp on the photo said 6:27 p.m.

This is the fourth installment in my tracking down the local historical markers. There’s an online database with 115 markers in the county, so we’ll be at this for a good while.

You can find them all under the blog category, We Learn Wednesdays. What will we learn about today?

The first stop is the Friends Cemetery, which is a few blocks up the road from the Friends Meeting House. The marker says …

Three African Americans are interred in this Friends cemetery.
From the records:

“Rachel Mintiss (Colored), wife of Andrew Mintiss was buried 5th mo. 8th 1846 on the hillside, near the 1st Row of the 2nd purchase.

Andrew Mintiss was buried 28th of 8th mo. 18?? on the left of his wife. Aged about 82 years.

Abigail Mintiss, widow of Andrew Mintiss was buried 31st of 1st month 1850 next to her husband.”

Andrew Mintiss and Abigail Atlee were married 16 September 1846. He died between then and late January 1850. The location of these unmarked graves remains unknown.

Find A Grave thinks Andrew Mintiss died somewhere between 1846 and 1852.

Some 2,500 others are buried there, including at least one Civil War veteran, a militia captain. In his portrait, he’s seated, bearded, holding a sheathed sword.

The Bassetts came over on the ship right after the Mayflower, and a few hundred years later, there was Howard. He studied dentistry, but became a farmer. He married Clemence not too long after the war. They had seven children.

The oldest recorded grave was a Quaker who lived and died a British subject. He was interred in 1773. It’s still an active cemetery.

Not too far away is the Russell G. Garrison Memorial Park. It was rededicated as a memorial and environmental park in 2017.

All of those men were locals who died in Vietnam.

One of the town’s busier thoroughfares runs right by the park, but there’s something tranquil about the place despite the road noise. There’s a large rain garden that features hundreds of native plants helping collect storm water and prevent run off. The parking lot has a porous asphalt and the whole place has an underground filtering system to deal with chronic flooding. There are signs explaining all of this, the rain garden and the owl houses.

The mayor says the park is part of a growing greenbelt around the town. I kinda want to see the rain garden in action. I guess I’ll have to pay closer attention to the meteorologist.

photo / Rowan / Tuesday — Comments Off
22
Aug 23

Fraught of feather, talk of talons, enchant of eyes

The mascot at Rowan is The Prof. He comes to life in the form of an owl named Whoo RU … because owls say “Who” and RU are the initials. Imagined in 1957, brought to life in 1959, and not made official until the 1990s — the idea of an underground mascot encouraging and antagonizing people for almost 30 years is hilarious — he is, like all costumed mascots, as dynamic or mediocre as the people involved with the project make him. But this, the first line about the mascot from the athletic department’s page, seems like a missed opportunity.

The Rowan University “Professorial Owl” has been a misunderstood yet deeply dynamic figure for 50 years. Not only does Rowan’s Prof promote the sports teams, but he has also, over the years, become a proud endorser of the student publications, campus events and all-around Rowan pride.

The biggest question from people, linked academically to Rowan or not, would have to be “What is a Prof?”

I’m not sure who named the character, or when, but I assume they were big fans of The Who.

(I really wanna know.)

Anyway, I decided today, on day two of orientation, that I would ask some big questions about this. Whoo RU, where are you?

That one was on a little handbill with useful contact information we received in one of the many sessions. This version was on, well, you can tell what he was on.

Whoo RU, where are you?

What’s going to happen a lot is that we’ll see a bunch of different owl logos meant to be evocative of Whoo RU, but only specific instances of the actual character because he’s limited to athletics. There are reasons for that, but I wonder if it diffuses, or reinforces, the brand in the long run.

Do you see a lot of alternate versions of Georgia’s Hairy Dawg or Florida’s Albert, or Puddles, the duck at Oregon? I don’t think so, but I could be wrong. Maybe you see them, but the costumed mascots are so iconic that your brain makes the leap without thinking about it. Call it “The mental shortcuts of things that don’t matter overmuch, not really.”

So I guess the question is, does the mascot have to be iconic to overcome that? Or is it enough that a mascot that is locally iconic? Or can a mascot that’s long been deeply misunderstood do it, too?

For what it’s worth, having not met Whoo RU yet, the cartoon owl holding a stack of books is pretty great. Is that meant to be Whoo RU, or an owl cousin with a backstory we just aren’t supposed to question? Whooever — see what I did there? –that library-going owl is, he looks ready to be the lead in a classic kids book.

Anyway, more orienting today. Full of truths, allusions to truths, helpful information and stuff that blows right by you. The thing is, if you gather a group of 50-some incredibly well trained people in disciplines representing all different disciplines that a college campus can offer, and those people are also at different stages in their careers, you’re going to find that they need different information. It’s a difficult event to program, but the programmers did a pretty nice job with it.

I didn’t have a welcome packet for some reason yesterday. The lady who does this sort of thing was a bit upset, concerned that I would be upset. I was deeply, passionately moved by this first impression. And I let her have it.

I said, “This is not my first impression, but I really must tell you, this leaves an impression. And the impression that it leaves is, I am not … ”

I didn’t say any of that, of course. It’s an easy oversight. There are a lot of moving parts. You don’t know how much goes into programming a three-day event that involves seven rooms in three-to-five buildings a day across a campus, involving dozens of people who watch their schedules like ~~a hawk~~ an owl, to say nothing of the catering and technology until you’ve done something remotely similar.

Several times, because it happens in medium-sized group dynamics, I ran into this nice lady. Each time she was apologetic. Finally, I made a joke that it was OK; I don’t need a name tag because I am working undercover.

She came up to me at lunch today with my gift bag and name tag. Inside the bag — a quality reusable bag which will haul groceries for me soon — was a water bottle, a folder with the schedule of events, a pen and a cool lapel pin. The name tag was blank. This, I thought, was a terrific joke in reply. I wore it with pride, that blank name tag.

Another good day, a long day. But the people were nice, the catered food was perfectly passable and the sessions were useful.

It brings the start of the fall semester another day closer, but this is the thing I’ve learned: I need more sleep. So, seeing that it is late, I’m going to give that a try.