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Friday / ICR / Instagram / photo / site / Twitter — Comments Off on Highlighting Friday things
11
Jun 21

Highlighting Friday things

There is a new look to the front of this website. The photo below will give you a clue. And if you click that image, you can go the front page and see the new art for yourself.

Speaking of the site, I tallied the stats earlier this week and noted that kennysmith dot org recently surpassed four million views. I’d like to thank you for your continued support. And the bots for continually crawling the site. They count, too.

It’s Friday, let’s show off some other people. This is some of the work stuff that I did this week. Enjoy.

And since we’re promoting things around here …

So go visit them. And be sure to come back on Monday. We’ll have updates on the weekend, and the cats!

cycling / photo / Twitter / Wednesday — Comments Off on So much is unknown from any given point of view
9
Jun 21

So much is unknown from any given point of view

The perspective of walking and distance is an interesting thing. I park in a parking deck when I am at work. The deck is one block from my building. As I crossed onto the middle block today I noticed a fire truck down near where I was walking. And as I got closer I was having this on-again/off-again conversation about how the fire truck was positioned.

It was parked. The lights were on.

It is blocking the entrance and exit to the parking deck.

No it isn’t.

Yes it is. No it isn’t. Yes it is. And so on until, finally, I was there and could tell that the truck was blocking the entrance and exit.

There’s only one. It’s a small parking deck. There are three lanes, two are now devoted to entering and one to leaving. And the truck was blocking the one exit and middle entrance, like so.

I was parked on the second level. Near my car was a campus police cruiser. Unoccupied, but running. Not in a spot, but at one of those hasty angles police sometimes use. It was near another car and one of the corner stairwells. Downstairs were two fire fighters walking out. And another guy, who looked young, had a backpack and a low key fire department shirt on, just loitering at the entrance. You can see him silhouetted above.

And we’ll never know what took place in the parking deck today. It’s a mild curiosity, but, on the other hand, this experience could have been a really lousy day for someone. So that walking perspective is important here, too.

Someone could collect a list of stories like this, little tales with no known outcome, and write an anthology series. I wish I’d started this years ago.

But I suppose I was always too preoccupied with my other You’ll Never Know mind game: What’s the closest I’ve ever come to unwittingly walking over buried treasure?

Boats would count, too. When was I closest to accidentally discovering a lost Spanish galleon?

It’ll make you wonder, that game. But a short-story anthology might actually be more rewarding.

We went for a bike ride this evening. The Yankee has all but gotten her TT bike dialed in, as I feared. And, as I have prophesied, I can’t keep up with her in such a highly refined aero position. She’s too powerful. Also, let’s also blame the gearing. But not my lack of fitness. This too, requires perspective.

That, I also noted on Twitter, is an old gif, and a different bike There was no way in the world I could get my phone out today. I was working too hard to make new art.

So this is how it works now. I have to wait for hills, or rollers, where I know I am sometimes just the tiniest bit better, and really work hard there and close down her advantage incrementally. (It takes many hills.) The rest is guile. Descend those little hills, corner aggressively, win a sprint when she’s just out for her ride and doesn’t know I’m trying to race back ahead of her. Which is how I found myself attacking in a left-hand turn three-miles from the house at 30+ miles per hour.

In her Strava notes, she wrote that it was categorized as an easy ride. It was not easy for me. This is what it takes just to keep up. Perspective.

bespoke / photo / running / swimming / Tuesday — Comments Off on Oh so colorful
8
Jun 21

Oh so colorful

As of today I can be out of the heady cufflink manufacturing game. I’ve been making my own, you see. And I had some great fabric and the bits to put all the cufflinks together. But, now, the task is complete. Just when I got into a good rhythm of producing the things I’ve run out of supplies. And happily so. Once you’ve created an efficient technique and found the material you want to highlight and cut and trimmed all the fabric and assembled the things … then you count them. And you find … a lot of cufflinks.

At least I’ll have colorful wrists. And I can go a long, long time before repeating any.

Here’s the last batch, then.

I counted them all, so I could note it here. But now maybe it’s enough to say it’s a lot. Making things — most any kind of widgets, really — on your own is inexpensive and brings about a certain satisfaction. And those widgets pile up in a hurry.

Which brings us to the next project, pocket squares. I have so many, of them already, but I’m going to make more.

It’s something to do.

This evening we went for a run. Also something to do. It was in the upper 70s and 90 percent humidity and I just jogged out two easy miles, but that was enough to make it look like I’d been playing in a sprinkler in the back yard.

I use two recording apps for this. I don’t know why. One says I gained 70 feet of total elevation on my two-lap neighborhood route. It always overestimates, if you ask me. (And you just did, in your head, ask me. I know.)

And the other app says I gained 21 feet of elevation. So a disparity between the two, and a not small one, within the context of a short run. This is the fun part. That second app breaks it down by miles. It says I gained zero feet on the second mile. But it recorded an elevation loss of three feet on the first mile. So where did I gain the 21 feet? Or the 24 feet, as the case may be?

We’re worried about our phones tracking us. We should be wondering about what’s tracking us correctly. (And also why we have willingly allowed such things into our lives, sure.)

The Olympic trials are underway, which means the Olympics aren’t far away — should things continue as planned at Tokyo, at any rate. All of this means we are watching people do things near and at their peak human physical capability. And some of the names we know. There was a swimmer in the pool tonight who was my lovely bride’s student last semester. Pretty neat stuff.

He finished seventh in his heat tonight. I don’t know if he’ll ultimately make the team, but he is, as you might expect, very fast.

One thing about the Olympics is that the proper speed of the racing events doesn’t really translate in the camera shots. You really have to be at the venues, and the closer the better, to really appreciate how these gifted athletes go.

Years ago I was in a pool with an Olympic swimmer. This guy was in the lane next to mine during an open lap swim and without writing sonnets about it it gets difficult to express the power and grace they have. It was a pleasure to watch from up close. He did it with the ease and the certainty in which you might open a kitchen drawer. And that was the moment I realized we overuse the phrase “swim like a fish.” That guy did, most of us don’t.

It called to mind a conversation I had with 12-time national champion swimming and diving coach David Marsh. He said “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.” And he was right, go figure. (Marsh has also coached 49 Olympians. The man knows stuff.) I think about that comment a lot. You’re gifted, and you work at it. That’s what it is. That’s the historical formula.

And it makes me want to go for another run now …

bespoke / Monday / photo — Comments Off on Monday cats and things
7
Jun 21

Monday cats and things

I put on all my cycling stuff and then looked outside and saw it had just started raining. Well then. Instead of having four things I wanted to accomplish, I suddenly had three. I don’t mind riding in the rain, if I’m already out and it starts to rain. That’s fun, and funny.

But it takes some doing, getting everything clean and dry at the end of that ride. Price of admittance, though. And you’re honoring Rule #9. Somewhat, that is. If I’d gone out, willfully turning the pedals just as the rain began, it would be a perfect expression of the rules.

But if you can stay dry, stay dry. That’s not a rule anyway, as far as I know, but maybe it oughta be.

So I stayed in and worked on one of the other three things. And, hey, one-third of one of those three things was accomplished. And here’s the proof.

So a few more sets of cufflinks, ready to adorn sleeves. Don’t they look nice? I especially like the pair on the bottom. This photo doesn’t really do them justice. And now I need more french cuff shirts. And then more cufflinks. And so you see how it spins out of control pretty quickly. When I get through with all of these I’ll have … way too many of these things.

Which is fine, because a project a bit further down the list of things to do is build something with which to hold all of my cufflinks.

So many projects, so little time.

The cats are no help with the many projects. But otherwise, they are fine. And to begin our weekly check with a cozy shot of Phoebe sleeping in her hammock seat.

Put something fuzzy in front of a window and she’s set.

Here she was, one recent evening, cuddling and … volunteering … for … something. Most assuredly she was not offering to help with any running project.

This is the way they’ve been lately. When one gets up the other immediately takes over. Like Poseidon, here, who has spent a lot of time curled up next to me the last few days.

He’s keen on taking naps on kneecaps.

Making this another week in which we won’t solve the mysteries of kitties.

Tomorrow, more progress! I’m trying a new thing: I’m talking my many projects into fruition! Let’s see how that goes for a while.

cycling / Friday / photo / video — Comments Off on Bzzzzzzz
4
Jun 21

Bzzzzzzz

Just in case you’ve managed to not hear the cicadas yet … we are, perhaps, nearing a peak of Brood X here. Today was very noisy, indeed. If you weren’t deep inside a well-insulated building they could become part of the general soundtrack of any given moment.

You’d need to break out some proper field recording equipment to do it justice, I assure you. And in that area, which is on a section of campus that was developed 100-plus years ago, it sounds like you can hear different dialects of cicadas in the trees.

So far in the last few weeks I’ve only had two or three land on me. Each has been far less traumatic than when it happened to me as a child. I don’t remember my young age or the year, but one just flew in and settled on me, in that most cicada way. It was upsetting, that’s what I remember.

It’s been interesting, riding my bike around, how some places seem to have great concentrations of cicadas and others seem to have none. I’m sure there’s some good entomological answer.

Let’s ask the shadow of someone who took an entomology class 25 years ago:

Experts think it has something to do with urban developments since the brood went into hibernation. Maybe older neighborhoods had less soil disturbance in the intervening years. Tree reduction, cement and asphalt addition, are very impactful on the local population’s health. Maybe, also, it has to do with chemicals we put into the earth. Maybe it’s a combination of things, or other natural features, but it’s still something of a mystery. Where you see them is close to where the best part of them went into the soil in 2004, they don’t seem to go far.

And it was a different time back then, no one thought to ask them back then.

That’s what my shadow said on my bike ride today. I heard a lot of them. Saw a few. But none of them landed on me in two hours in the saddle. For which I am grateful.

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