Do we have a lot for you in this post. Let’s jump right in! First, I just came in from watering the pothos plants, and I checked on the spider. She’s still out there doing her thing.
I’ve decided this is a she for reasons that don’t have any basis in anything, really. But he, or she, is one industrious spider. Every day that web disappears. Every night it returns. Almost in the same spot. The angle of it has shifted in the last few nights. Maybe this is better for catching things coming off the prize-winning plants back there.
Looked up how long spiders can live, and this is not a long-term location for my new friend. I’m going to wind up re-positioning this arachnid, if for no other reason than I’ll want this little section of sidewalk back. And also because this is too close to the house, and I don’t want it coming inside when the weather turns.
I bet she’ll have great success in the woods out back.
I got in a late evening bike ride. I started a little too late, which is funny because I’d just been mentally patting myself on the back for how well I time these rides. Usually, I’m back just as it gets dark.
It was still daylight when I started. Here’s the proof, this is about halfway through.
You know how those late summer evenings get, though. The sunset and the gloaming happen more quickly than you’ve lately been expecting. This photo was just four miles later.
And this was an accidental shot, but look at that blurry wrist!
The problem — if you want to think of it in those terms, and I don’t — is that soon after that last photo I made an impulsive decision to add on a few miles. Turned left to add a circuit, instead of heading straight in. That gave me almost six extra miles, which was nice. And about three miles into it, I had to pull the headlight out of my pocket and light the road in front of me.
I have a lot of light on the back of the bike for oncoming cars. But the other thing that’s nice is that I was on sleepy country roads. Over the course of the last six miles of today’s ride I was passed by five cars, and only two of them came by when it was truly dark.
Anyway, another delightful, slow, 22-mile ride is in the books.
You might recall we went to a rock ‘n’ roll show last Thursday. On Friday I wrote in this space about Melissa Etheridge. Today, and for the next few days, we’ll have a few short Indigo Girls clips.
This year they’re celebrating the 30th anniversary of Swamp Ophelia. And this is a deep cut, a tremendous song off a lush album. A song I don’t think I’ve heard live in decades, and apropos of the moment.
I’ve been in awe of that line about the summer since the 1990s. It’s not fair what Emily Saliers can do with a few lines of verse.
And here’s a 1997 classic to go alongside of that one.
That song — which went to number 15 on the US Adult chart, enjoyed a bit of air play on the radio and was in the last batch of videos I recall on MTV — was inspired by this documentary, which has become something of a classic on its own, while still remaining contemporary even as the sands shift around us.
That documentary itself is three decades old now. It’d be interesting to go back and see the modern version, just so we can marvel at what is and isn’t different.
I finished Walter Lord’s The Dawn’s Early Light. It is wonderful pop history, my first Lord book and I’m sure I’ll go find more of his writing later.
Militarily, his tactics are sparse, and written at a regimental level, but he’s not writing too much about the military action. It might be easy to get bogged down in that, or easy to get it wrong or be incomplete, all these years later, despite his excellent research. It’s a book about the time, rather than the conflict. He basically has it that the places the U.S. did poorly were down to bad organization and ineffective leadership. The places where we did better, Baltimore and New Orleans, were down to a key British army officer being killed and the Americans getting their act together.
And because it includes New Orleans, Andrew Jackson does become a minor character late in the book — a book which doesn’t sit on anyone for too long, come to think of it. Jackson has a few good lines in the text. This is, perhaps, the best one.
I’ve jumped ahead some 120 years in my next book. I’ve started reading about mid-20th century journalist and author, Richard Tregaskis. Updates on that text are something to which you can look forward. Also, more music tomorrow. And a swim! (Maybe … I’m trying to work up the nerve.)
