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adventures / cycling / Friday / photo / video — Comments Off
24
Apr 20

Riding into the weekend, and then walking into it

For reasons I’m beginning to understand only a bit, and am not quite yet equipped (or perhaps inspired, or both) to remedy, the videos I shoot on my phone look like compressed garbage when I upload them. What is this, 2012?

Anyway, here’s a little bit of today’s cross-county-line ride. Before the turnaround, and well before today’s flat. So sick of flats.

This, too, was before the flat. Good thing, as this was well away from the house. But you aren’t thinking about any of that when you see turkeys:

Anyway, just before getting back to the house I had another flat. It was on the last big downhill which, in my experience, is the wrong place to have your rear wheel to go down. At the bottom of the hill is a hard turn that leads up into our neighborhood. But I stopped short and figured, ehhh, I’m walking this in.

Because I could try to re-inflate the tube, or swap out to an extra one, right there on the side of the road — like I did just four rides ago! — or I could just walk the last mile in and do all of that in the comfort of my bike room or home-library.

So I walked it in. Problem: bike shoes. So you take those off and walk it in feeling a little ridiculous: spandex, helmet, walking a bike and barefoot. At some point you have to figure the people in your neighborhood, to the extent that they notice you, are just used to it.

Bobet, I hope so.

Anyway, you could be mad at flats, or pleased with the opportunity. If my tire hadn’t gone down I would have whizzed right through here at 20-some miles per hour and not even noticed this redbud tree (Cercis canadensis) demonstrating its cauliflory.

It’s a trait some species exhibit, where blooms can grow directly out of the trunk. Cauliflory, by the way, is ‘stem flower’ in Latin.

And, yes, I looked up the scientific name. There’s only so much stuff I can keep in my head, after all.

Also on the walk back … and this is just after The Yankee got to the house, put her things away and walked back out toward me with my sneakers. Which was great, because half-a-mile barefoot is quite enough, thanks. Anyway, we walked it in together, which was also nice, and we saw this:

And that’s how the weekend begins. I hope yours begins with pretty things and nice gestures, and fewer mechanical issues.

adventures / cycling / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
31
Mar 20

Still a few leftover pictures

We’re going back to our roots!

When I took that photo I thought, Wow, that’s a lot of roots. But, somehow, it seems like less now. Maybe that’s a compression of the whole scene into a computer monitor rather than the several square feet of ground the tree’s lateral branches. Maybe I was just impressed by being outside.

This was a sad sight.

In the background you can see a field where, in happier times, soccer and football and whatever else is played by the little kids. It’s a nice park floating just above the nearby middle school, surrounded by a quiet walking path. But there can be no swinging, and no monkeying around on the monkey bars. The climbing parts have been fenced in. There were still a few kids playing in that field, however.

This was from our bike ride yesterday, which was a nice and easy ride.

I don’t know why some days are nice and easy, and others feel like the most inept demonstration of human ability possible. But in that little ride, I established four new PRs on various segments and felt about as strong as seems likely, so it was the former.

You would think the sport, at the professional levels at least, would have caught up to science on this, but no. We are left to acknowledge that, sometimes, we have good legs. And then, other times, we resign ourselves to realizing we don’t have good legs, we merely have meatsicles that just hang there and feet that pedal squares. Sometimes it is a demonstration of physical grace and power and ease. Other times that fish that doesn’t need a bicycle could do it better than you. And that’s always the day when you see people you know out on a ride of their own.

adventures / Monday / photo — Comments Off
30
Mar 20

No really, it is spring now, apparently

First things first, this is a panorama, or almost a panorama, I took on a weekend walk. Click to embiggen.

Let us do our regular Monday with the cats. We have a strict Not On The Counter rule that the cats ignore. Lately, they’ve found a loophole. The Yankee received this package in the mail some time back and it’s just been sitting on this out-of-the-way corner. And so the cats jump up on the counter and sit on the box where, as Phoebe demonstrates here, she is not on the corner:

They are also chewing on the box, both of them. They don’t eat it, they’re just destroying it bite by bite. I pick up the bits on the floor every day, and I am pretty sure they haven’t really thought this through. When they eat the box, they’ll be back on the counter, and we will set them in on the floor again.

I’ve been asked why we always see pretty pictures of Phoebe, and pictures of Poseidon in his hijinks. Mostly it is because Phoebe is a good girl. And Poseidon does things like this:

Note the feet. Note the balance.

Now, note the cuteness:

Now, note this wackadoo:

Computer? Enhance:

Found on a run this weekend, art which transports you from where you are, to, well, wherever this is going:

It isn’t awkward at all when the homeowners notice you taking a picture of this. Or when you realize the artist was an adult.

Just down from where I took that panorama picture at the top of the post, after you’ve walked down the hill and over the footbridge, there are two tennis courts and a small playground and a nice long walking path. It’s just down a second hill from an elementary school, and, as you might expect, there are a lot of kids in a nice spot like that. The teachers know that, too. And so up and down the path, they’d come out and left notes for their kids:

It’s the cutest, saddest thing. Imagine the progress a teacher has made with those kids all year long, and it’s over in March. They haven’t canceled school for the year yet, but it’s coming. And from the point-of-view of the teachers, the big and little worries they must have. For that teacher it came down to the one message. Keep reading.

I think I got in trouble for reading too much. If class bored me, and many classes did, there was a book in my lap. How do you scold a kid like that? Meanwhile, you’re worried about that child on the other side of the room that is in a real struggle? And now you, a compassionate teacher type, know they won’t be there in your class, to benefit from your training and experience in a formalized setting for a good long while.

Spring is showing up. In the backyard:

These are all from one tree. And the blooms won’t stick around long enough, but what they portend is welcome:

I think of that Moritsugu Katsumoto line a lot: “The perfect blossom is a rare thing. You could spend your entire life looking for one, and it would not be a wasted life.”

Who knows if they’re all perfect, or if the poetry there is really about the aspiration, or even the pursuit. It’s a nice thing to think about while you’re staring at the edges of fragile, fleeting things.

Here we are down by the creek:

It was a nice weekend to see the beginning of things to come.

adventures / photo / running / Tuesday — Comments Off
24
Mar 20

Spri — nope, not yet

We’re just a week or so away from the visual clues being unavoidable. And then it’ll quickly turn to all-green, all-the-time, which takes a few days to get used to. And then, when you think back on it, you can spend a few days marveling at how you get used to it so quickly.

But first, this little budding stage of things:

These photos were all taken on our Monday evening walk, which was beautiful and delightful in most every way. Today was not picturesque. It was cold and gray and damp and that’s not frustrating at all. The clouds move so slowly. I looked at them during this evening’s slogging run of just under four miles with no inspiration, no legs or anything resembling pace, and I was again mystified how there were no clouds, but but the always terribly exciting white gray. You can’t see any of the defining characteristics that allow you to distinguish one large collection of very tiny droplets of water or ice crystals from the next. It all just … is.

I’m ready for spring.

It’s been a very mild winter.

This tree is ready, too. And that bloom isn’t the only thing around here excited for something to happen, and waiting for it to do so:

I got photobombed.

It was pretty much the highlight of the walk, which was already a fine part of a nice day.

I’m just showing off the non-macro lens on my phone, now.

On these nice walks, I should take my real camera. As I was taking that photograph, on my phone, this skein of Canada geese flew over.

They’re heading west, in the direction of several nameless ponds. They should go back north. But I guess they know something I do not.

adventures / Monday / photo — Comments Off
30
Dec 19

What does Google Earth know, when did they know it?

After 3,052 miles (a legitimate rough estimate), a half-dozen or so car rides and two plane trip … the Christmas travels are complete. It’s great fun. It’s a great blessing to do, to see so many people and have the time to do it, and to just want to be seen. And it is an endurance run.

But now we’re back. After days in Alabama — which was in the midst of that sort of weather that could give you a little chill in the shade and warm comfort in the sun — and sunny beach runs in a Connecticut December, we’ve come back to … this:

At least there’s pizza. And simply the best pizza. We stopped at the Mellow Mushroom in Carmel while we were returning from the airport in Indianapolis. So we have leftovers, because if you can’t get good pizza in a college town you make excuses to go to visit one when you’re in a larger city. And then you order extra, for more meals.

When we got back on Sunday evening we also visited IKEA, the Scandinavian store that shouts at you. IKEA!

We had a mission, and that mission was to discover all of the shortcuts among the byzantine aisles and sections of the store and avoid the meatballs. Because the cafeteria always seems out of place. Actually the mission was to check out some chairs. We have two backless barstools sitting at our breakfast bar, but have lately begun exploring upgrades. You know, chairs with backs? So we went to IKEA. Where no one has ever shouted at me, but where the thought to shout at someone does, from time to time, cross your mind.

I saw this on one wall there:

I thought, Good for you, IKEA, as one does. And especially since this was on an out-of-the-way wall. You weren’t confronted by this language at the front door or the exit, or even by the meatballs. Why, most people would never see this. And then I thought, Most people will never see the roof. And then I thought, Most people will never see the roof. This could be a great ruse.

Siri, show me the Google Maps view of the roof of IKEA!

Ah-ha! I have it on good authority this store has been in place for almost four years. (Because, needing the excitement in my life, I went on the day it opened.) And I have been in the building at least twice. And you’re telling me it isn’t even on the map? As if the building, or its solar panels, don’t even exist?

Siri, show me the Google Earth version …

Oh, well, there you go though, then. Google Earth knows the truth.

And the truth is that IKEA was telling us the truth about the solar panels. (Unless the IKEA people got to the Google Earth people somehow. But, no, that sounds like crazy talk.) Which just leaves us to wonder about the difference between the two divisions of map recorders at Google. A mental problem for a different day, perhaps.