We only had the one night of aurora. That was Thursday. Friday night, the sky looked like it always does.
Which isn’t a knock on the night sky, but everyone would have enjoyed another light show.
The rest of these are just photos, and a video, from weekend bike rides, but don’t think of this as yet another bike riding post … well, I suppose you have to for this video. It was a road worth riding down slowly.
Think of it, instead, as a beautiful Saturday afternoon I got to enjoy. Watching you watering your sod …
Or letting a field sit for the weekend …
Or cutting your hay for winter …
Or imagine you sitting inside, wondering if you’d brought all of your equipment in, or left something out somewhere …
I asked my lovely bride if she’d like to go for a ride, just something easy to get outside for a while to enjoy another beautiful autumn day. She considered it, and agreed to an easy ride. I knew I was in trouble when I saw the steely look in her pretty eyes when she settled onto her aerobars.
It took a Strava segment PR and a second-best time on another near the end of the ride to stay in front of her.
If you’re here for the day’s bike ride, and evidence of Halloween, that’s below. But, first, a first.
My first aurora borealis. Solar radiation and the magnetosphere in the night sky made for a lovely light show. Electrons collide with atoms and molecules of the upper atmosphere and isn’t this lovely? Ten photos below, poetry in essay form is not required.
I got in a late 15-mile ride today, a route I’ve come to think of as the neighborhood route. In truth, it includes at least three neighborhoods and several miles of farmland besides.
People around here love Halloween decorations. And, apparently, Halloween isn’t something you can do a little. To welcome the ghouls and goblins, one must go all out.
Believe me when I say, this is one of the more subdued displays.
I bet they give great candy though. How could they not?
On Saturday, a beautiful day for a bike ride, I crossed 17,000 miles with this machine. Raced and ridden in six or eight states, I’ve added new derailleurs because of rust, replaced a snapped saddle last fall and swapped out a handful of chains over the years.
It makes all of the right noises, this bike, especially the silent ones. It goes slow uphill, except for those times it’s gone fast. It will go fast downhill if I ask it to. It goes where I steer it, and has always brought me back again. And somewhere along the way it became a breathless place to catch my breath.
Like I said, it was a beautiful day for it. Jump cuts incoming!
Altogether, I got in an easy 82 miles this weekend, including another beautiful sunny afternoon ride with my lovely bride, where we passed the farmers in their late season work.
She was ahead of me much of the time, but then I caught her, and then I attacked on a road near the end, just because the timing was right and I wanted to try to set a new Strava segment PR (which I did). And when I got home, I looked at the times and realized one of our friends holds the record on that segment, one second faster than me. Back to the drawing board.
On the final stretch before we got there, though, she attacked me, and it was well timed.
It was a beautiful weekend of riding.
And, now, back to grading.
Until tomorrow, then, the latest installments of Catober? Poe had the prime spot today, Phoebe will be back to show off her cuteness tomorrow. See them all here.
Welcome to Catober, where we daily highlight the kitties, because once a week isn’t enough. They also get their own posts in October, because they slipped that into their contract when we weren’t looking. So, I’ll take turns highlighting each cat. Tomorrow we’ll have some amazing Phoebe cuteness. You can see the full collection of lovely cat poses right here.
I’m mid-thigh in grading things. Fortunately not hip deep, and only that deep because I stayed up far too late — even for me — grading stuff. And so today I graded stuff. Tonight, I will grade other things.
At this rate I’ll be grading things all day and night tomorrow. I believe I have it paced out so I can finish grading on Thursday. Just in time for this weekend’s stuff to start rolling in for grading next week …
Whoever set this schedule up deserves a talking to. Me, it was me. I deserve a talking to.
Here’s a video I shot on yesterday’s bike ride. There are a lot of fields turning a beautiful, bright yellow just now. I might have caught these just a few minutes too late in the evening for the color to really pop. Still lovely in their own way.
Since it is the beginning of the month, we should check in on the mileage. September was a good month, my best September ever, and it turned into the fourth most miles in any one month, be they ever so humble. And we can see the progression through the first nine months of the year on this neat little chart.
The blue line is this year, the red one is last year, and the steady green one is a simple what if projection of doing 10 miles per day. I’ve been trailing behind that, sadly, since mid July. Now I’m making progress and I’ll be back over the green line before you read this.
And there are some humble, yet cool-to-me milestones coming up on the bike. You’ll be underwhelmed.
I’ll be whelmed.
That’ll be the extent of it.
Let’s get back to the Re-Listening project for a brief update. This is the one where I’m listening to all of my old CDs in the car, in the order in which I acquired them. At some point, I figured I could write about it to pad out the site with a bit of content — share some videos and the like, but these aren’t reviews, because no one cares. So let’s get to it, so I can get caught up. (I’m only behind by three albums, I think.)
We’ll return to 2006 or so, when I picked up a copy of Live’s 1999 record, “The Distance to Here.” It was the band’s fifth studio album, it went platinum in a month, debuted at number four on the Billboard 200 chart, topped the charts in three other countries, and settled into the top 10 in a half dozen more. They promoted three singles from the record, all which became at least moderately successful on the Alternative Airplay chart. But it never really worked for me. This is the last Live album I bought, and by the time Ed Kowalczyk left the band a decade later, I had no idea.
But I have two things here. This works a whole lot better now, for me, than it did back then. It could be a small doses record at the very least. And one or two of these tunes could be sticky — which is sometimes good and sometimes “get out of my head.”
The other thought was centered around this show at a concert. I saw the band at a festival when they were touring on this record. They closed their set with this song, and they were working out the instrumentation so that, one-by-one, the band slipped away off the darkened stage. Then there was only Kowalczyk, and the whole sweaty crowd was singing along and he stopped strumming his guitar, they kept singing, and he waved and walked off. It was better than this version, which came about some years later, but similar.
Kowalczyk rejoined the band after a few years away. And then he fired the band. They were all, as I recall, southeastern Pennsylvania high school classmates who got their break soon after, and became a 10-years-later overnight success. And now, they’re taking turns suing each other or some such. Kowalczyk is touring with the name, but all new band mates. They just came off the road from a midwestern swing last week.
In the next installation of the Re-Listening project, we’ll try out a pretty decent tribute album I’d entirely forgotten about — which is entirely the point.
And now, back to grading. And next for you, more Catober!
As we wrap up September we’re always really gearing up for October. By the end of this month, the only thing there is to miss is summer, but you have to give that up eventually anyway, so you may as well look ahead. Indeed, this evening, I spun around the front porch sign. The “Hello Summer” side is hidden. The much more nuanced “Welcome” is now on display.
To see that sign you have to walk between two oversized shrub trees. And in that greenery there live some artists. I am hesitant to ask them to leave, because they do some beautiful work.
And they keep the bugs at a manageable level. Or at least they’re supposed to. Who knows. Right now it’s gnat season and the arachnid artists must surely be either full or overwhelmed.
I got in 85 miles on the bike this weekend, and I’ve also realized this weekend that I’m behind on sharing these incredibly high value videos I’ve shot recently. Here’s one that, I think, you haven’t seen yet. I was on a new-to=me road, open fields on either side, and these birds were relaxing on a power line. At least until I went by. The road ended in a T-intersection with a busier road, so I just doubled back. The birds had just enough time to re-settle, until …
The good news, I guess, is that I have several videos to use here in the next several days.
Here’s a road I rode down today.
When I got to the end of that road I turned to the right, and that new road sent me right across this picturesque view.
From there it was more woods, and then back into the farmland. The evidence of people wrapping up another season’s work. This farmer has five of these little trailers parked on the edge of this field, a little non-moving parade.
I had a quick meeting on campus this evening. I made it in time, but then couldn’t find a parking space — a problem on campuses everywhere since cars were allowed on campus. When that was over, and I headed home, I ran across this great big tractor.
It was of such a great size that I couldn’t even get what it was hauling. This, on a U.S. highway. Because there are fields down that road that need to be worked, too.
He must have driven down that road a good way. There’s nothing but the university, suburbs and a wildlife management area over the next several miles. I wonder if he’s got a good horn on board.
That’s how we’ll wrap up September. Sixty-five photos, five videos, four weeks of classes, nine swims and 19 bike rides and one day trip out of town. And probably some other stuff, because none of that seems like a lot. We’ll have to work on that for next month.
You know what next month brings, right? Right? If you don’t know, watch this space.
