Thursday


15
Feb 24

It’s Spanish for “shark” (there’s a shark in the photos below)

Site news! I just sold this place! Some joker is buying it for $1.3 million and I’m cashing out! See ya, suckers!

That would be about what I’d say if that were true. And if Kenny “The Jet” Smith’s people want to call me — as we have a longstanding social relationship — which earned me a piece in a textbook a few years back …

Worth a shot.

No, here is the actual site news. The front page photos have been updated. It is now diving-themed once again. For example, a larger version of this photo is there.

There are 10 images in the current rotation. I’ll three rotations of 10 each for a while. That should keep us until the front page needs re-freshening with some other amazing photographs, or when The Jet buys me out, whichever comes first.

That was one of the things on the day’s list. Updating the front of the site, not selling out.

(Seriously, Jet, my number is 555 …)

There were eight things on that list when I closed my computer last night. And I managed to do six of those things today, and did some other work prep besides, so I am satisfied with the effort.

One thing I did, of course, was take a little bike ride down in the Smith Indoor Training Center. I did 66 minutes, which is about where my enthusiasm has dwindled the past few rides, come to think of it.

I did an actual training ride, today, an anaerobic capacity into VO2 exercise. I did this because I read a site recently which said that, without a training plan, I was just doing junk miles. Miles for miles’ sake. I was fine with that, of course, until someone put that particular name to it. My base miles are not junk. And they’ve come with some real exertion. But today I did this interval workout with five sets above my wattage threshold and set some new Strava PRs in the process. Behold! My phone!

I took Tuesday off from riding, opting for quality time, instead. It must have been the right choice because I didn’t feel bad about it, or second guess myself in the moment. Even still, today was my 20th ride in the last 21 days, which is a fair amount for a duffer like me.

On my cycling spreadsheet — everyone has one — I have a page that shows the best of each month. So I know what my most prolific July is, which year had the most miles in August, which September saw the most pedal strokes, and so on. (2011, 2023, 2014, respectively.) I have a separate column for February, because it’s February. And February of 2023 is my most successful year, for now. But that mark is going to get crushed, probably before the end of this week.

We’ll look back on this month and see the asterisk, but the asterisk will be about the leap day, definitely not about junk miles.

Meanwhile, back under water, since I told you about the front page updates and we’re still working our way through the photos from our last dive trip. I found one where my lovely dive buddy is actually demonstrating evidence of breathing.

The first rule of diving is just keep breathing. That’s actually a rule. I got quizzed on one of the dive boats because, someone has to be the fall guy and the divemaster asked me about the first rule. I said, “To make sure my partner comes back up. And also to keep breathing.”

I started diving at the beginning of the George H.W. Bush administration. That guy was just going to have to overlook my flip little joke.

Tortuga!

That’s Jennifer, one of the famous turtles of Palancar Reef. I believe she was trying to introduce us to her friend. Do you see that little overhang she seems to be working her way to there? Can you see what is underneath it?

Now you can.

Tiburón!

If you’ve been enjoying views from under the sea just off the coast of Cozumel, not to worry. I have a few dozen more photographs, and a lot of videos to work through.


8
Feb 24

A former student, the yard and dive photos

I had a lovely chat with a former student today. I had her in a class when she was a freshman and knew her all four years of her time in college and, today, I have the great good fortune to call her a friend. She is, and was, a talented human being. She sat in the back of the classroom, quiet as could be, but she took in everything. Everything.

One of her classmates and friends was loud and over the top and could command and intimidate anyone in a room. She was funny, but Sydney just sat in the back and soaked in everything.

Outside of the classroom she became a staff writer and then a section editor for the campus paper I advised. Her senior year, she was the editor-in-chief of her campus paper. She was also the section editor of two local community papers her senior year. She also carried a 4.0 GPA. She also was honored as one of the top journalists in the south that year. I’m telling you, this woman is talented.

Two years ago now she was on a New York Times team that won a Pulitzer Prize, and if you think I don’t find ways to insert that into conversation you haven’t been paying attention. She’s a book editor and still writes for The Times. Even better than all of that, she does all of these other things. In the last few years she’s taught herself to sew and knit and cross stitch. She has taken up, as an adult and just to try it, aerial gymnastics, and she’s getting quite good at it. She has discovered a green thumb. Late last year she and her husband moved to New England. They are way up there, and enjoying their first real winter.

I was telling her how much I admire all of the things she does. As is typical, I laid it on pretty thick. As is typical, she downplayed everything. She said, “My life is full of more things that bring me satisfaction and make me look forward to the future than I’ve ever had before, and that’s not nothing.”

Something about this young woman, her freshmen year in the back of my class, I knew she’d figure it all out. And now here we are.

There isn’t a term for it, short of the greeting card cliche, but it is so heartening to watch people you like thrive. And to watch them discover the things that make them thrive. Oh! It comes from years of mentally cheering for people daily, and then getting semi-regular dispatches. To see people, who I knew best as students, continue to find ways to learn and challenge themselves well into adulthood, it’s really something.

In my teaching philosophy, I’ve always written that I hope to help teach the value of a true education: the joy of learning.

Best part is, Sydney isn’t the only person I know who has embodied that. Maybe that means I’m on to something. I hope so.

A quick spin through the side yard, just to share some different photos. I got lucky with the light on this shrub, which enjoys a nice golden tint in the late afternoon sun.

This stone path doesn’t go anywhere magical, but it seems like it should, doesn’t it?

We have two-and-a-half stone paths, and one of them does seem like it should go to Narnia. Not this one, though, it just takes you to the utilities. But look! There between the stones!

Is that a periwinkle? An euonymus? Whatever it is, the ground cover is emerging in early February! I am heartened once again!

Maybe I’ll get to the backyard tomorrow.

But, today, we must return to our underwater lair. And if we can’t actually do it, we’ll do it with some photographs from last month. To the deep! And before you do it, I’ve already done. I was humming the opening bars to “Baracuda” at about 65 feet here.

This was our dive master on one of our boats. He was serious until he realized he didn’t have to be. And then he was hysterical. Big laugh. I think his laugh amuses him, too. He reminded me of Carlos Mencia, a little bit. Apparently, in his day job, he’s some sort of underwater welder. So he takes strangers diving as a side hustle.

Imagine that. You get on a boat and that’s where you meet people and, to some degree, you’re kind of responsible for them. Now do that and make great jokes that grizzled vacation veterans haven’t heard before. This is the life of a dive master.

Also, he took this photograph for us.

He was very gracious with his time to do that. We wound up getting quite a few photographs. One day I’ll put that on social media and see if the university will share it. And if they do, this will be a new thing, taking that flag to interesting places and so on.

Also, he wanted to take a photo with the flag, too.

But he never asked what a Rowan was, or what that owl was about. He just wanted a photo, which was cool.

I think I can get about two more weeks of photos out of that trip. And, of course, there are quite a few more videos to upload, too. I may be able to pad this out to spring yet!


1
Feb 24

There are only 29 days, so let’s get through February quickly

Here’s that three berry granola — “sweet strawberries” and “bold blueberries” and plain ol’ no modifier needed “cranberries” — that I tried yesterday. It was maybe almost too sweet. So, today, I added raisins. The raisins helped.

So now I’m wondering if raisins should be added to the list of highly versatile foods that make most anything better. Should they?

Right now the list is bacon, honey and … maybe raisins? Their universality is probably ranked in that order, too.

Anyway, tomorrow’s new granola is the fourth in the series, the final new variety in this first round of the experiment. The key ingredient is the humble, yet exotic, blueberry.

Today, I did the first-of-the-month computer chores. The Desktop needs to be cleaned. And so does the Download folder. I updated the website’s spreadsheet, which I only get around to doing every four or five months or so. It’s more satisfying that way, watching the hits climb more quickly.

The original version of this spreadsheet was just one column of monthly data points, but this is a column recording almost 20 years of numbers, and has become unwieldy. So I broke this up into years. It’s easier to do pointless comparisons that way.

For instance, now I can easily see that 689,000+ visits rolled into the site last year. (For reasons that will always escape me.) Last year was my best year yet! And my third consecutive years of a half-million plus. I can quickly see that 2021 was better than 2022. I guess everyone got busy again when they stopped pretending Covid was behind them. I can also see that I’ve been over a quarter-million every year of the last decade. And my three best months all took place last year, October, July and November, respectively.

Would you like to know which January was the best January of all time around here? Last January, of course. January 2024 was the third best January. And now I can determine all of that at a glance because I spent a few moments formatting the cells of the spreadsheet to include commas.

All of those things I learned in a class somewhere along the way in high school or college are coming right back to me.

Speaking of statistics, spreadsheets and numbers that don’t matter to anyone but me — and to me, only barely — it’s time to tabulate what I did on the bike for January. This chart represents simple mileage accumulation.

That red line shows what I did in January of last year. Last year was my most prolific year in terms of miles. And January 2023, the output ever so humble, was my second most prolific month ever. (Bested only by November, of last year …) The green line represents a simple projection: the mileage I’d accrue if I rode 10 miles a day.

The blue line is reality. As you can tell, I’m well above the 10 miles per day average, and charging toward the 2023 trend line.

I wonder what this ridiculous little chart will look like at the end of the year.

I don’t have 11 more months of photos from our recent trip to Cozumel. But I still have quite a few that we’ll see together. And, then, I suppose we’ll just have to go diving again. Maybe she’ll breathe on the next dive.

But, before that, another filefish on the Palancar Reef.

Here’s some coral that is, sadly, dying.

Staghorn coral is some of the fastest growing coral in the western Atlantic, up to eight inches a year, and there have been some encouraging restoration projects underway. While we’ve lost a great deal of their population in the last 40 years, there is some encouragement that they can repopulate, with careful attention.

Here’s another great stoplight parrotfish, or, as I like to think of them, the inspiration for 1990s sneakers.

If I knew anything, anything at all, about that industry, I would absolutely start a line of shoes that were reproductions of reef fish color schemes.

I call this one “Sand.”

I’m not sure why I took that, but it’s near the end of a shallow dive, and there was nothing there. So, you see, it was a profound statement on a day without diving.

Is it time to go diving yet?


25
Jan 24

Everything you want: food, meditative video, fish, music

I made a culinary innovation this morning, the likes of which will surely land me my own cooking show.

This would be my second cooking show pitch. The first one was, in my estimation, even better. The host is a character who plays an earnest, straight up sort, but he can’t cook. He’s also a bachelor. So the entire show is a dry humor examination of what that guy does to subsist, nutritionally. It’d be a short show, because he’s a bachelor who can’t cook, see. But there’s a lot of comedy in cold cuts and Hamburger Helper, I’m certain of it.

Today’s move — and if you happened to be in your kitchen at the same I was in mine and making this happen, you might have felt it too — isn’t earth shattering, but it is destined to change breakfast paradigms everywhere.

In an attempt to cut the taste of the maple syrup in the new granola, I did this.

Grapes! Dried raisins! The store-brand even!

It worked perfectly, HGTV. Now where do I sign?

If you’re wondering, this is the granola brand, which kicked off this new breakfast experiment yesterday. The serving sizes on the back of the bag aren’t for normal human beings, but there’s at least another day in here.

What I’m thinking of doing, because I bought four different varieties from three brands, is mixing the last ones together. That day, in a few weeks, some random Wednesday when I don’t see it coming, is when I’ll stumble on the perfect mixture. The flavor profile will send me to the studio to right songs about the experience, and I’ll spend the rest of my days chasing that mixture, the mad breakfast alchemist who can’t ever quite get it right again.

I forgot to include this here, but one of the big sheets of snow that slid off the roof was hanging at almost eye level over the back door. It was the perfect height to admire and fear. And so I give you 58 seconds of zen.

  

Even though it has warmed up and the snow is now all gone, it’ll be days before I can go out that door without thinking about an avalanche of mushy, days old snow landing on head, getting down my shirt, into my shoes.

Much better than that, picturing myself being underwater. When we were in Cozumel recently it was the low 80s every day. Just perfect.

Here’s my favorite fish.

It just occurred to me that these are the photos I like best, and I don’t take many of them. So I have to diving again. Drat!

You can’t see this ray, because this ray is hiding from you. Keep moving, stranger.

Here’s another shot of our old friend the black triggerfish. This fish is the pinstripe, skinny tie wearing fish of the sea, and you know it.

He might know it, too.

I don’t think we’ve seen the spotted trunkfish (Lactophrys bicaudalis), or boxfish, on this trip yet. If the triggerfish wears the fashionable suits, the trunkfish is the guy who really thinks he’s a hipster, but he’s trying too hard.

The trunkfish is a slow mover, owing to its size. It eats shrimp and mollusc and sea urchins and sea cucumbers. It has a toxin that is dangerous to ingest. The spots are actually a “stay away” warning for predators. Wikipedia tells me that predators as large as nurse sharks can die from eating a trunkfish.

Oh, look. A lobster. “Keep it moving,” he says with his antennae. Peering in at lobsters always feels intrusive, somehow, even moreso than just floating over his home, as we do.

No wonder they are always pointing the way toward the best currents. He does not want you to see what he’s warming up the butter for back there.

We haven’t visited the Re-Listening project in a while. This is where I’m playing all of my old CDs in the car, in the order of acquisition. These aren’t reviews, but ways to pad out the site with videos, and, occasionally, a trip down memory lane. The prevailing memory here is from the summer of 2004.

This song came on MTV or VH1 or whatever was on and within 60 seconds I realized I needed to buy the record.

And so I did. This is the only Keane CD I have, which is a shame. In terms of British fame it’s the Beatles, Oasis, Radiohead and Keane. This debut album was the eighth most sold of the oughts in the UK, where it lodged at number two on the year-ending charts. On the weekly charts here in the U.S., “Hopes and Fears” peaked at 45. The debut single didn’t chart here, apparently, but hit the top 10 in a half dozen other countries, and was certified double platinum in the U.K.

None of this seems to fit my memory, but the web isn’t wrong about things like this.

The second single’s video went minimalist. I’m sure this is the Beatles and Apple influence.

Anyway, it was good for car singing, and I don’t seem to have a lot of specific memories attached to it, otherwise. Other, that is, than the observation that pop music had (with the exception of Ben Folds) all but turned the piano into an exotic instrument by then. This is the alternate video for the fourth single, because labels were still doing that back then, and it is a study on the limitations of media technologies.

The last single on the record enjoyed a bit of success in the United States. “Bend and Break” landed at 20 on the alternative charts. And the video is enough to make me regret having never seen them live. It looks like it could be a good show.

Keane have released four more records over the years, three of which hit the top 20 in the US, and two in the top 10. The oversight of my not having them in the personal collection are mine alone.

And Keane are still going. This year they’re celebrating 20 years of this record, which is a thing bands must do now. They’re touring extensively across Europe for the first part of the year, but they’ll be visiting North America late in the summer. I could see them in September.

How many shows are too many shows in September, anyway?


18
Jan 24

A happy cat reunion

Three weeks or so ago we took the cats with us to The Yankee’s parents. They celebrated the holidays with us there, and stayed on as we continued our many travels. Today, though, was the day that we set out to go pick them up.

We went over the river.

We went through the woods.

And so on.

This visit also allowed us to attend Special Church services, which is a program my lovely mother-in-law runs. We saw friends, we made crafts, we sang songs. I found myself in a thoughtful conversation about the meanings of the word shalom. I’ve always heard that it means peace. But, it turns out, it also means wholeness. So there was this conversation that led me to ponder the idea that maybe they’re not separate meanings, but perhaps they could be, should be, interrelated. Maybe you can’t be whole until you have peace. So I learned something, and sang Beatles songs. It’s a great hour.

And, of course, we got our happy reunion with the kitties. I was sure they would shun us for a while, but they both came around before the night was over. I don’t know why. I kept telling them, they never had it so good as they do in Connecticut. There are people who play with them and pet them and basically let them rule the place. Plus, there are cozy spots and fuzzy blankets everywhere.

They made it clear, pretty quickly, that they hadn’t forgotten us. We got good pets and good purrs.

And then we left them again. Because they never had it so good.

We had dinner with The Yankee’s college diving coach. When she retired as a gymnast she decided to do the springboard for fun. And they’ve kept a lasting friendship with her coach for all the years hence. We had burgers at a little dive where she waited tables in college. You can drive there, or sail your boat up to the back door. A few years ago they worried the place would fall into the river. It’s a place where the floor slants, even after they reinforced everything.

A local band was playing Stevie Wonder and Earth, Wind & Fire tunes. A woman was dancing, by herself, for most of the night. Her gentleman friend danced one song, and we saw why she was dancing alone. (He could not dance.) She wasn’t dancing as well as she thought, but the libations were telling her otherwise. She was just far enough away that the three of us couldn’t decide how old she was. Turns out I was wrong, she was a bit older. And it’s funny how that works. I figured she was a certain age, which just made the whole thing a bit sad. But, as we left, I could finally see she was much older than I thought, which allowed me to think Good for you, lady. Now be sure to call an Uber.

Today’s SCUBA contribution is a couple of quick fish clips from somewhere along the Palancar reef off the coast of Cozumel, Mexico. Beautiful fish here, and all you have to do is hold your breath for 41 seconds.

More photos from under the sea tomorrow. And we’ll enjoy some legendary Connecticut pizza. It’ll be a great Friday.