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cycling / Monday / photo / video — Comments Off
4
Dec 23

Cat character analyses

As we start the week off with the site’s most popular weekly feature, I offer you something of a character analysis.

First, we’ll take a glimpse at Phoebe, in one her mid-day favorites, the stairs, enjoying the sun that comes in from the northern windows.

On a different day this week, at a similar time of day according to the photo’s time stamp, Phoebe takes a turn at modeling.

Not to be outdone, on still a different day, Poseidon gives it a try.

Note how they each use their tail in those last two photos.

And on a fourth different day, in the same part of the day, and in the same spot.

The kitties are doing just fine.

Something else that’s doing well is this little rose bush, which I moved into the basement a while back. I have seven plants down there now, and the rose is the best performer.

This is a plant the previous owners left. They had it sitting on the back stairs. We hadn’t moved it from there prior to sliding it indoors for the weather. It never did as well on the stairs, as it is doing in the basement. It might be getting a bit more water now, go figure.

Some of the other plants had the traditional outdoors-indoors struggle. I’ve got lighting for them, but the humidity and temperature transitions can cause some small problems. Most are now beginning to bounce back, though. Now I just have to remember to not forget the basement nursery.

Which reminds me.

We had a bike ride with a friend on Saturday morning. Did the usual route as a trio. Then, my lovely bride went off to do something else and our friend had to head elsewhere for her afternoon plans, so I road some more. I turned a 21-mile ride into a 42 mile ride. Part of that was discovering this new road. It was so quiet. So still. So … odd. The fog didn’t hurt that mood. (And, now, neither does this lossy format compression.)

When I got in I realized that our friend has one of the fastest times on that segment on Strava. It’s a road she took on three years ago, long before she knew we existed. A road she’s probably forgotten.

Today, I returned to that road and raced her. I patterned my tempo over the rest of the route to be ready for that 2.77 mile stretch. I timed it so I could hit the segment with good momentum. I did not waste time fiddling with my phone. I did not sit up for water. I did not take in the sights, creepy as they may be.

I beat her by time by 21 seconds.

I choose to see that as an omen for a good week of bike riding.

cycling / history / markers / photo / We Learn Wednesdays / Wednesday — Comments Off
29
Nov 23

The record setting ride

After some time working on them today, the fig tree is now covered in two parts. I used a lot of twine, a few utterances, and two buckets, just to add some personality.

After I stepped back to take that photo I added a bit more twine, created some tension tiedowns and pronounced, to the surrounding shrubs, that there was no way wind is getting under there now. Soon I’ll fill in the base with leaves to help keep the cold and frost away. After that, I’ll be satisfied that I’ve done everything I can do, and the tree will need to look after itself for a few months.

“Kudos to you, dude,” said the crossing guard as I went by.

Hey, you’re out here, too …, I replied.

“Yeah, but I have to be out here. You want to be.”

Why am I out here, anyway. It felt like 25 degrees. And, yes, that is ice in the field.

I have a page on my cycling spreadsheet, tracking my highest mileage, by month. Recently, I noticed that this month had the potential to make it onto that chart. On Nov. 20th, this month sat in 12th place overall on that list. Two good rides that week put it in the top 10 with a bullet. And so, these last few days, I’ve been riding with the goal of trying to make November 2023 my best month of all time.

It made since. The leader on the board was January 2023, but all of that was indoor riding. Wouldn’t you rather have your best number be on open roads?

The only problem is that these last few days it has been windy, or bitterly cold, or both. Tomorrow will be nicer, but I’ll be in class. And so today was my shot.

My shot. This is why I’m out here. First of all, it is, of course, a meaningless record or goal. No accolades or money. Nothing monumentous beyond the personal. So it’s just that, a personal best. It’s not a real accomplishment, not an achievement, not really. It’s an endurance effort. Put a few more miles in the legs, learn some cold lessons about layering in cold weather, trying to time it all out with limited daylight.

So there I was, measuring out rides these last few days, and it all came down to today. Should I ride enough? It wasn’t a question of could or would. I had the time and two jackets and long pants and gloves and so on. It’s not a race, and no one was trying to stop me, or slow me down, not that I can go much slower. So, did I want to try to find the time to ride tomorrow, in the morning, or tomorrow night after class. Or should I just do it today.

And by how much should I best the old mark?

This is what I did, I started out planning to ride a combination of our regular two routes, but started a bit later than I should have, meaning daylight was going to be a question. So I did one of those routes, added an extra road just to see where it went, and then modified the tail end of the course to add a few more miles. All told, that was 31 miles in the cold air, by little ice puddles and through a lot of open fields exposed to the wind. When I got closer to home I added all of the neighborhood roads to bolster the total. I figured all of this would give me about 30 miles for the day. I decided I’d let that be enough and there’s always tomorrow if I really, really need it.

I finished today’s ride at 31 miles. And that meant, when I got back to my spreadsheet, that I set a new best for miles in a month. By one mile.

Kudos to me, I guess.

My best December ever is in ninth place on the all-time list of months, by mileage. That was 2020. If I am to best that mark, I’ll be starting from behind: I’m taking tomorrow off. Maybe Friday, too.

We’ve been talking about going on a ride with a friend on Saturday. After that, we may be close to retreating to indoor rides, depending on what the prevailing weather patterns.

This is the 18th installment of We Learn Wednesdays, where I ride my bike across the county to find the local historical markers. Including today’s installment we’ll have seen, I believe, 36 of the 115 markers found in the Historical Marker Database. (This marker was not found on today’s ride, just so you know.)

Today’s marker is about a church.

Their website is … unfinished. The name of the congregation is altogether too common to stand out in web searches. The erstwhile local paper only has about 20 years of archives digitized and uploaded — the wrong 20 years to pick up a lot of history — to any database I have access to.

It hasn’t been digitized on the National Register or the National Archives Catalog. Do they expect me to talk to actual people?

I love that the old walls were made a part of the new building. Now, all of it is old, and they’re still making good use of it.

Mt. Hope UMC offers a traditional worship service every Sunday, supports youth and children’s ministries, the Neighborhood Center and Cornerstone Women’s Center. The children’s ministry supplies cold weather wear to the children and they also cook meals for the community and maintain a food pantry.

In next week’s installment of We Learn Wednesday, we’ll see another church. If you’ve missed any markers so far, you can find them all right here.

cycling / errands / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
28
Nov 23

Perhaps the most wind, non-storm related, I’ve experienced

We covered the fig tree in the backyard. This was a process. It took several days. First, you have to find out this is necessary. Then you have to make some attempts to find out how to cover it. Everyone has an opinion. None of them are authoritative. Some seem excessive — insulation! plastic! whale blubber! — and some some very casual. So who knows, really.

Anyway, get some burlap. Burlap does the trick. Burlap, you can’t find in stores. Oh you can find some useless burlap netting, which is meant to get in the way of your gardening, I guess, but it has no practical application. So finding burlap is the second step. We found some coverings. We put it on the fig tree. It was not big enough.

So we ordered a second burlap covering. That was step three. It arrived last Wednesday, and we put them on the fig tree on Thursday. One cover on the left half of the tree, the other cover on the right. It took the two of us and, there was a moment when a third set of hands might have been helpful. That was step four, I guess. One of the covers blew off last night, so today, step five.

And I got the fig tree, the part on the right, covered once again. All by my lonesome. And, oh, the details I could tell you about that. Only it was very windy today, so this was done in vain. The cover stayed on for … about two, three, hours. It was very windy.

This is how windy it was today. I went out for my bike ride and I went down this road. The map shows about six tenths of a mile, and if you go from right to left you’re on a slight, a very slight, downhill. You lose about 15 feet of elevation in that time. It’s nothing. But then there was the wind, blowing from the left to the right, gusting at 36 miles per hour.

I was in my hardest gear, pedaling as well as I could, and my Garmin said I was doing 8 mph. I was afraid I would just fall over from lack of progress. At the end of that image there’s a road that makes a big circle. Our neighbor, also a cyclist, says he’ll go ride that loop to hide from the wind. He says he’ll do 15 laps in there. It is almost 1.7 miles of a lovely wooded neighborhood, and it does keep a lot of the wind off of you. But that seems like a lot of repetition to me. Plus, three buses came in there during the short time I was there today, and I passed the same landscapers six times. They were beginning to get curious, and my feet were beginning to get cold.

The weather app said it felt like 25 degrees. And there were also flurries. Which is funny, because, before I consulted the app at the end of my ride, I thought I saw two or three suspicious things falling from the sky.

I’ve never ridden in flurries or snow before — because I used to have more sense, I guess, but we’ll get into that tomorrow — and I still haven’t, not really. I thought something was falling out of the trees. I thought I wanted to be inside, which is where I went, after I discovered that the second cover, on the right-hand-side of the fig tree, had blown off again.

Well tomorrow for that, then. This evening I had to make a run to the hardware store. I picked up some electrical tape for another project-in-vain, some more of that twine for same. And, also, a short length of garden hose. Like extension cords, you can never have enough garden hose. It’s been a while since I’ve purchased any hose. You have many options these days, and I have no idea which is the most appropriate for the particular planned drain duty. I chose the heavy duty version. It’ll probably last longer than any of the other ongoing outdoors projects.

And, now, to the grading! So much to grade! But a lot of it is fun stuff. So much fun stuff to grade!

adventures / Monday / photo — Comments Off
27
Nov 23

That was a lovely weekend

All of our company has gone home. My lovely bride’s uncle headed back on Friday. Her parents on Saturday. We had company over for dinner Saturday night. The house is quite again. The cats have noticed.

And so now we are into the holiday season and, with it, in the midst of all of the blah blah blah. The stuff that takes too long to arrive, moves too fast or too slow, or both. All of it in a dizzying blur. All of it in a hold on as you can mentality. All of it with the end of the semester on the front end, as well, which brings it’s own frenetic pace, three weeks worth, which starts now.

The kitties, as you can tell, are not impressed. There is the afternoon sun, and there is no need to rush through that.

Saw more geese moving around this weekend. Or the same geese, I dunno. I’m not tagging these things. In the afternoon these were going toward the southwest.

But, in the evening, they were going northeast. Or some other geese, I dunno. I’m not tagging these things.

This was the only football game I’ve watched this year. If you’re going to watch, this is how.

Wild game, ridiculous finish, a ridiculousness of the most resolute fashion. At least the ridiculousness was kept to a minimum. All of which was better than 60 minutes of it. The view was the best part of it.

We had a different sort of view last night. A cold and rainy night, a short parade. A few fire trucks, a few Corvettes, for some reason, and three loosely grouped people we might call bands. We also saw the big guy, the ho-ho-hoer in chief. Apparently his sled is going into the shop. Or maybe the reindeer take off November. Maybe it’s a union thing. Perhaps they’re just carbo-loading.

Come to think of it, those sleighs aren’t very aerodynamic, are they? There’s a lot to answer about all of this. Fortunately, you have several weeks to explain it all to me.

adventures / family / Friday / Philadelphia / photo / video — Comments Off
24
Nov 23

Punches on ice

So many leftovers. Somehow they all made it into the refrigerator, which is, right now, more full than it has been since we moved. It’ll be a week of turkey and sides for me, and no complaints.

Today we went across the river to catch a hockey game. It was the homestanding Flyers and the Rangers, which drew a large crowd all their own. There was almost as much red, white and blue as black and orange at the Wells Fargo Center.

And the Rangers fans went away happy. They’re team won 3-1.

I might be bad luck for the Flyers. They’re 1-2 when I am there for a game. The win was in … 2007.

We’re there for Gritty, basically.

After the game, I ducked back in from the concourse to see what was happening with everyone walked away from the rink. Those video ribbons, it turns out, go all the way down to the ice. I wonder why. Aside from maintenance, what would be the purpose? And why lower it after a game?

On the way back home, we enjoyed splendid views of the sunset.

After which we started on the leftovers — didn’t make a dent, really — and eased into the second half of this lovely long weekend.