It is going to be sunny tomorrow, I know this because I looked ahead at the forecast. And also because I saw some color to the sunset.
After four days in a row, now, of rain and/or gray skies, I’ll be pleased to see some blue in the air and shadows on the ground.
This is just four days in a row, mind you. But it makes me wonder, how ever did we live entire winters like this?
I did go outside a few times today. I am conducting a towel experiment. The experiment is trying to get the smell of ethanol out of towels. I put the smell of ethanol in towels after Poseidon broke something with ethanol in it. (It was one of those cute little floating thermometer doodads. We got it for Christmas one year, one of those $10 and under parties, so the broken gauge is, itself, not a great loss. The almost two hours I spent cleaning up the mess is a different story. As is the three times I’ve washed these towels, and, perhaps, my sense of smell. That I continually have to hide more and more and more things from that cat is the biggest loss. We’ll be living in the basement, and he’ll still be finding ways to destroy things upstairs, I’m sure of it.)
I have five big bath towels blowing in the breeze, and also six kitchen towels. And my fear of having them around an open flame has diminished somewhat. But they still stink.
So, anyway, I was outside, and I noticed this. I believe it is a camellia.
I don’t think I even saw this last summer or fall, until we had cut away a few years of overgrowth. It sits along one of the back corners of the house and it’s a bit out of the way.
The blooms might have already had their show and come and gone by the time we arrived last summer, too. (I confess to not knowing the calendar of every plant under the sun under the dim gray clouds.) But! It’s going to be beautiful in just a few more weeks, you can tell already.
I wonder what color it will be. I wonder what else we’ll discover when the flowerbeds start their show.
This is what it looks like outside. Also, this bird was circling me, until I pointed at him. He moved down the street on the next gust of air. All casual like.
“What? Me? It’s just the thermals, baby …”
Anyway, grading stuff. I hope to wrap up this round of grading by tomorrow, after which we’ll be precisely halfway through the term.
[…]
I just tallied, and removed, the total number of things that leaves to assign and grade over the course of the semester, and then deleted those two sentences and the final number. It’s not a small number.
You know what is a small number? I’ve been challenging myself on Zwift to ride with a robo-pacer that’s faster than me. Previously I held on to the better bot for 17.3 miles. Today, when I joined his already-in-progress ride, he dropped me after just 2.3 miles.
Still set two Strava PRs, though. One on a slow and steady climb, and another on a sprint that Strava tells me I’ve done 123 times before.
Strava said I hit 30 miles per hour on that sprint. That’s not a small number. Even in the moment it didn’t feel hard. I think the fastest sprint I’ve ever produced was about 36 miles per hour on a false flat and probably a tailwind, so that’s why I kept waiting for the other people’s avatars to keep trying to come around me, but no one could, which is nice. I won a 500-meter sprint that means absolutely nothing!
Thursdays are all downhill after that.
