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adventures / memories / Monday / photo — Comments Off
14
Dec 20

They were hungry, I’m sure

Another week has begun, and so we are here, to charm you with your regular update about the cats. Over the weekend I had to open their most recent food delivery. Being cats, they were very interested.

Poseidon saw the box coming out of the storage closet and was intent right away.

I thought if I put it up on the counter I could do the things I needed to do — open the box, pull out the bag, and transfer the important information, like the proportions and the calendar progress, the date I opened it and all the nerdy things you would write on a bag of cat food. I don’t know why I thought I could do it on the counter unimpeded, since the cats spent most of their time on it despite by wishes.

I put the box, including the food and Poseidon, on the floor and pulled the bag out from under him. He was fine with it. Back on the counter went the bag. And up to the counter came Phoebe.

Who could write on a bag in permanent marker around a face like that?

Chewy, which has been dependable throughout, has text printed on the box encouraging you to keep the cardboard, because cats like boxes. We’ve got plenty of boxes around the house, thank you very much, Chewy. We will recycle it, though.

Today is the anniversary of the beginning of our engagement. It was twelve years ago today that we were under Our Tree in Savannah, the same place we spent a day on our first trip and the place we return on every visit. (We were supposed to visit again this spring, alas.) The next year we got married just across the street. I asked her if she would like to have more adventures with me.

And we’ve had great adventures, every day! And still plenty more to come. There’s tomorrow, and Wednesday and Thursday and that’s just the normal, daily stuff. Most times, those are the best adventures of all.

cycling / Friday / photo — Comments Off
11
Dec 20

The last decent weather day, I fear

In April or so, when everyone was shut down, we went out to one of the local flat courses to do a few time trials. It’s essentially a loop and it runs 6.5 miles, with a long headwind at the end. On our first visit we did four loops, and marveled at how quiet the roads were.

We went this evening, with just enough light for three loops, and marveled at how noisy the roads are. What health crisis?

The first lap felt fine, until that headwind, and I got well and truly dropped.

Later I caught back up and tried to give her something to attack, and she caught me on the second trip through the headwind. And on our third trip we soft-pedaled in for pictures. Soft pedaling, at 21 miles per hour, into the wind. It’s a weird year on bikes all the way around.

And now, as I shut things down for the evening, I was struck by the play of a solar light I have in the kitchen window. It’s a cheap yard light, and I thought having a few of them around would be a good idea if the power went out, which thankfully, is a rarity in our neighborhood. The light shining through the plastic globe and playing on the ceiling looks like a static kaleidoscope, or a fancy, giant jellyfish.

Have a great weekend! Catch you on Monday! And, until then, more on Twitter, check me out on Instagram and did you know that Phoebe and Poseidon have an Instagram account? Phoebe and Poe have an Instagram account.

cycling / photo / site / Thursday / video — Comments Off
10
Dec 20

I got in a ride today

It was a spectacularly beautiful day today. The rarity, the miracle, which that can be here this time of year. It was sunny and clear and almost warm. I’m not used to the cold being the norm, but it is the norm for here. I’m used to this being the norm here. It was in the 50s. You could see the sun, and the blue. That’s the way it should be. It’s an unexpected gift here. That’s just sad.

But you take advantage of it. And I did with a late afternoon bike ride.

I rode in shorts! With no gloves! Sigh.

Here’s a clip from a neighborhood part of my route, and the trail I added on at the end just to tick up the odometer a bit.

Kmart closed their two stores here in 2016 and 2017. I don’t know where motorists have been getting their licenses updated since then, but they’re all due a new road test. They were brutal today, so, in that way, it was usual.

This is from a different ride. It took place two or three years ago, and also it was during a different season. Everything was so green! And warm!

Anyway, we’re now essentially caught up with the county’s historic marker series. I ride around and take pictures of the signs and what they’re commemorating. One new marker has been installed recently, and another has been re-installed since I went by it last. So I have two more weeks of this we can still look forward to in this county. And then, perhaps next year, I’ll start riding to the markers in the neighboring counties.

Anyway, click this image to see this post.

Two things: I hate taggers. There’s not enough community service in the world to deliver on taggers. Second, have you ever noticed how every bridge is always the biggest or longest or highest or heaviest? Why must every bridge be superlative? Can’t we just acknowledge the brilliance of the engineering and what they mean, rather than an assessment of their constituent materials?

Anyway, to see all of the markers, just click here.

links / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
8
Dec 20

Things you should and shouldn’t do

Woke up tired. I’ve been waking up tired. And by tired I mean, tired. Anyone else doing that lately?

Anyone else grimly making jokes about why that may be happening? It’s not like I’m not getting six or seven or even eight hours of sleep — you should do that. There must be something else to it, right?

So I googled it — you should never do this — and it apparently has a technical term. It’s called “fa-teag-way.” It must be Italian.

Turns out, if you read the web — you should skeptically do this — that there are so many possibilities for it as to make you think that it’s probably none of them, or beyond your ability to successfully isolated and test the variables. Changing your “sleep environment” is no easy thing, after all.

“Chances are,” Healthline says, “your morning grogginess is just sleep inertia, which is a normal part of the waking process. Your brain typically doesn’t instantly wake up after sleeping. It transitions gradually to a wakeful state.”

So I search for some scientific documentation — you should always do this — on “sleep inertia.” Take it away, Dr. Lynn Marie Trotti in the National Institutes of Health journal Sleep Medicine Reviews:

The transition from sleep to wake is marked by sleep inertia, a distinct state that is measurably different from wakefulness and manifests as performance impairments and sleepiness. Although the precise substrate of sleep inertia is unknown, electroencephalographic, evoked potential, and neuroimaging studies suggest the persistence of some features of sleep beyond the point of awakening. Forced desynchrony studies have demonstrated that sleep inertia impacts cognition differently than do homeostatic and circadian drives and that sleep inertia is most intense during awakenings from the biological night. Recovery sleep after sleep deprivation also amplifies sleep inertia, although the effects of deep sleep vary based on task and timing.

It’s an interesting paper. Probably I’m just groggy.

Completely neglected the cats yesterday. Not in real life, mind you, but in this mediated space. The cats are great. Happy and snoozing and bathing and eating and annoying us at all the wrong times, knowing they can solve that problem by being cute and cuddly for 90 seconds.

Here’s Poseidon catching a nap on the stovetop cover.

He loves the radiant heat from the stove eyes. The other night he jumped up too soon and got a little warm. He jumped up and stepped a little too close and hoped off quickly, all before I could cover the distance. His cat-like reflexes served him well, and he was fine. And it hasn’t dissuaded him from one of his favorite napping places. But maybe he’ll learn to wait for the cover to get put back into plact.

And this is Phoebe, who was caught playing on the computer again.

She was googling cats. You should never do that.

adventures / cycling / Monday / photo — Comments Off
7
Dec 20

If you could be here you could have some

This is not a food blog. This is not a food blog because I am not a good food photographer. I am not a good food photographer because, sometimes, the things you see aren’t even food, but other times food photography requires extra lights and settings that I don’t want to employ and, ultimately, food photographers are some of your more talented photographers. I suppose I could improve my rather poor food photography abilities, but, ultimately, I’d rather eat the food.

Nevertheless, occasionally we try something new and tasty, and I want to brag on the delicious meal my lovely bride made. Recently I happened on a new recipe for red beans and rice and she decided to make it and we enjoyed that this weekend and it was quite tasty.

And I’m going to get a couple of lunches out of the leftovers, too!

The other thing about food photography is that sometimes what looks great on a plate might not always look great in a picture. But sometimes the shapes and textures work out. Because, also, she made sizzling cornbread and it’s pretty great.

If you get a Pac-Man shape in your day, you should document it.

If you’d been here for it we would have shared, but these are the times we live in, where we enjoyed that delicious meal just off camera of a video chat. But we could at least tell people about how good it tasted, and how she did a great job with the preparation and I did a pretty decent job clicking that link and exploring the recipe anyway.

All of it was delicious.

We also had a nice chilly bike ride this weekend.

That’s toward the end, where I notice from some great distance behind that she’s reaching for her phone and I have to try really hard to catch up. It’s a big ask, most rides. She’s very fast, even when’s soft-pedaling for a photo, as she was there.