cycling

adventures / cycling / Monday — Comments Off on One out of three isn’t bad for a Monday
5
Aug 19

One out of three isn’t bad for a Monday

This is just a little update today. I’m starting a new theme today, because it wouldn’t be a Monday without a theme with no real purpose or obvious end date.

The idea: celebrate Small Victories. The everyday ones. We’re not talking about Inbox Zero, here, no. (Though I am presently at Inbox Zero in one account and have four in the other.) Nothing quite so amazing here. We’re talking the very small indeed. This is not the sort of thing you’d make mental note of to share with friends or family the next time you gather. No, somewhere between that and the slightly less impressive and semi-irregular achievement of deleting three apps you don’t use anymore.

I had this idea with three such items in mind. I’d already planned a long bike ride and aspired to build a small thing this evening. Thinking of those plans earlier in the day, I was working my way up a stairwell at the office, thought up a good joke and had the opportunity to use it almost immediately when someone coming down the stairs perfectly set up the punchline. That’s a small victory.

There was a bike ride, this evening but it was not a long one. I didn’t feel so hot, so I turned for home at the 12 mile mark, much earlier than I should, and licked the proverbial wounds, realizing I should have gone for a morning ride instead. But there’s always tomorrow’s ride. We had a fine pork chop dinner, I washed dishes and then went to the hardware store to pick up a few pieces of lumber. I have an idea for a quick test project, a quick and dirty proof of concept, if you will.

Only, by the time we left the hardware store it was dark. It was about 9:30, after all, and the days are sadly getting shorter again. I decided, wisely, that I was too tired to play with power tools. So that small victory will wait until tomorrow as well.

So one-out-of-three. Doing that every day would get you a contract extension in the majors. Of course, my baseball equivalent of small victories would probably be going to the plate with my bat and not someone else’s. A bad simile, indeed. I’ll work on that for tomorrow.

Also on tomorrow’s small victory agenda: cleaning up some bookmarks and deleting a few things from the Netflix queue. It’s best to start these things out … small.

cycling / photo / site / Thursday — Comments Off on There’s math below; assume I got the (n) and (r) correct
1
Aug 19

There’s math below; assume I got the (n) and (r) correct

Another evening ride with my bride was the highlight of my day. We were out just long enough to get the heart rate up and the perspiration perspiring. No motorists were foolish, the sun was out, my legs were sluggish, some of the other cyclists actually waved back for a change. It was easily the highlight of the day.

On the way back to the house, two neighborhoods before ours, I tried an attack off the left side of the road. You can see just before it started here:

Farther away, maybe she won’t hear me or see me until it is too late. I think she heard my derailleur click, took two hard downstrokes on her right pedal and that was the end of my attack.

The other highlight of my day was giving a tour for someone. So, yes, let us talk more about the bike ride, shall we!?

Living near a creek bed, as we do, you’re always starting your ride going uphill. You must pedal up and out of the intersection. And then, depending where you are going, some actual hills may come into play. These aren’t mountains, by any means, but they may as well be to me. The one “big” hill we climbed today I had to spin up through my small crank today. Some days I go up that same hill in my smallest gear and continue accelerating over the top. Not today. But still, an average ride is better than no ride at all. And a poor ride, well, that might be the best of all, because maybe you stunk it up and really suffered out there, but you still got it in.

Do you know how many times I’ve told myself that, huffing and puffing over the headset of my bicycle. I’ve gotten that whole speech down to one sentence this year.

But, still, a nice ride.

Elsewhere, today, let’s see. I did some behind-the-scenes organizing of things on the website. You won’t care about any of those, but there were some pages section needed cleaning up. It was a today and tomorrow project.

Also today, I added seven new banners to the top and bottom of the blog. You see different ones each time you visit, or every time you refresh, of course. But I keep adding to them. Today there are 100 banners for the top of the page and 101 for the bottom. So with two randomized images per page and 201 possible choices, you have something like 20,301 different combinations of the different photographs you can see surrounding all of this brilliant text. I probably did that wrong. Later tonight someone will come along and point out the error which left an order of magnitude off base.

Anyway, to keep it neat, while adding seven new ones today I also removed seven other banners which were less relevant or otherwise irksome. That simple right-click-delete-I’m-sure-yes-I’m-sure-no-really-quite-postive-indeed-I-promise-is-me-not-you-just-delete-them-already action reduced the combinations by about 1,400 choices or so. You’re welcome, Citizen of the ‘Net.

There are a lot of things to clean up on the site, but they won’t all be done today. There are at least always about a half dozen things to do around here. And they’ll all keep so long as the weather does. I wouldn’t ordinarily bore you with the details – most of them for archival purposes anyway – but it just didn’t feel right having a stat like 20,301 and not sharing it.

Anyway, here’s one of the new header banners you will occasionally run across:

Even upon reflection that remains one of my favorite photos of our summer vacation.

Tomorrow, another bike ride! And the Adventure of the Five Shirts! (If, in fact, that is an adventure. It is tomorrow and hasn’t happened yet, so it is difficult to say.)

adventures / cycling / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off on Vintage chocolate
30
Jul 19

Vintage chocolate

Here’s another one of those troubled members of the floral community, the ne’er do well that never does … well. The layabout. The deadbeat. The do-nothing. The idler, loafer, lounger. The hibiscus aridus:

Bees, butterflies and hummingbirds like ’em. And you can find them as far away as South Africa. Again, I found this one in the back parking lot of a little building almost half a world away from there. Needless to say, it has a wide range, which is impressive for such a malingerer, the shirker, slacker and slouch.

Or perhaps I’m being too harsh. Maybe that plant is doing what it is supposed to, being colorful and charming and contributing to the local ecology and all, but suppose it’s just hiding a bit of curbside garbage can holder?

Don’t you think it could be doing more than that?

I was given a candy bar today. It was pretty good:

The big celebration starts in a few more weeks. I’ve been wondering for almost three years how you celebrate something that’s 200 years old. What’s the appropriate sequence of events to mark such a big birthday of an important, and yet inanimate, institution? And all this time, the answer should have been obvious: milk chocolate.

You’d think a 200-year-old candy bar wouldn’t taste so fresh. Or maybe you’d be surprised that a 19th century chocolatier would be so prescient as to make such a treat. You wonder how far into the future his vision might have gone, and exactly where he warehoused those delicious things.

We enjoyed a little bike ride this evening:

We tried a new road, a partially tree-covered, split lane number. Nice houses, no traffic, a place to take a deep breath, or a hard pull. It was a good ride, not fast, but it felt strong, in my legs I mean. Didn’t even bother my foot, which has been a mild bother to me since April. But progress! Which makes sense, you know, at the end of July.

The solution, as ever, is to ride more.

cycling / Instagram / Monday / photo — Comments Off on What a different a thunderstorm makes
22
Jul 19

What a different a thunderstorm makes

Here, like many places around the country in this totally unexpected, unpredicted and entirely without historical precedent of a month called … let me make sure I have this right … Ju-ly … have been enjoying some warm temperatures. On Saturday evening I went for a bike ride early in the morning and it was already 100 degrees.

Sunday evening I took another short spin. There was a new road I wanted to try, and when you get those in your head they are difficult to shake. There are generally two approaches. You could cheat and look at a map, or you just ride the thing. Well, I just road the thing. Again, it was meant to be a quick ride, and while I looked at the temperature, again offering a heat index of an even 100 degrees, I neglected to look at the radar. So I got rained on a bit:

And while that only increased the humidity, it cooled things off considerably. It was 78 degrees when I got back home, and that drop happened in about 30 minutes. And just like that, this most recent heatwave was broken.

By the time I got back to the house and cleaned up, it was time to run a few errands. I mis-timed one store’s closing hours, which is fine because that probably saved me $20. But, still, there’s always another store to go to.

Turns out there were two more stores to hit, because the first didn’t have what I was after. That only happens every other week.

On the way back in, I looked in my mirror and realized that I haven’t tried a sunset-in-the-mirror photo in some time. It’s probably been three-plus years. How often are you driving west at just the right time of day with a clear view behind you? If you live west of where you’ve been, don’t answer that. It’s unusual for me now, as a pure happenstance, which is fine. One really only needs this shot every so often, anyway.

I bet the ever-changing symbolism is still changing.

collarbone / cycling / Friday / memories / photo — Comments Off on And sure, I’m now all caught up on everything
19
Jul 19

And sure, I’m now all caught up on everything

Still filling time in this space for the week by catching up on things I haven’t already put here. Meanwhile, I’m updating the vacation pictures. Next week I may have to build out a section of the site just for that trip. And some of it will definitely go on the front page. I’ll let you know.

Anyway, here’s something completely unrelated that I’ve re-learned. If you wait, usually for just a few seconds, that flower photograph …

… will offer you something a little bit better:

I think I may re-learn that every year. Is that possible? Could it be that sometimes you and your brain disagree on the importance of things when you file them away? I’m not speaking of distraction, or short-term memory or forgotten things, but the simple stuff.

No, in fact, Noggin, this is useful information and I’d like it ready for immediate recollection, please and thank you.

Or it could be that information like this, knowledge which slowed The Yankee and I down from Wednesday’s lunch by a good 15 seconds, is something she’s de-programming. She could be spending the night whispering “That bumble bee thing isn’t important at alllllll.”

(Because it was on a television show somewhere once, so we now think this is how we are programmed, by whispered things said over and over while we sleep.)

I’m not saying she’s doing that. It’s probably just something my brain doesn’t prioritize in lieu of, I dunno, which lightswitch does what on the kitchen wall or where I left my phone charger. Nevertheless. Sometime in May next year, when I’ve forgotten how they sound, I’ll be startled by the sudden presence of bees. Then, two or three weeks, later I’ll have this realization: If you don’t rush right off after taking your petals picture a little winged creature will come by and make your composition that much better.

That just doesn’t seem like a thing you’d need to re-learn, is all. And yet I think I might be doing that almost annually.

In these last few days we’ve had something of an anniversary around the house. Seven years ago, last week, I had a big bike crash. I hit something I didn’t see and went straight onto my shoulder and head at a respectable speed. Seven years and two days ago I had a surgery that put some of the finest medical-grade titanium that Germany has to offer into my shoulder. I was off my bike until the next January, the plate and six screws were just part of it. I don’t remember as much as I should about those next six months or so, owing to the crash and surgery and medicine, I guess. But I remember being amazed at what happened to that helmet. It kind of exploded on impact.

That helmet took a huge blow my skull didn’t have to. It did its job. Maybe it saved my way of life. Maybe it saved more. Of course, after you destroy a helmet you have to replace your helmet. It turns out you should also do this on a regular basis as well. It’s a shelf life thing, basically. The good people at Giro Cycling, who make my favorite helmets, recommend doing so every three-to-five years even if your previous headgear hasn’t been damaged. So keep your purchase dates in mind.

Anyway, it was time for me to update, and so I got an upgrade. My new helmet, a Giro (with MIPS!) took our first spin together Wednesday evening.

Looks sharp, right?

If you ride a bike and don’t wear a helmet, it’s worth considering. I get it; I’ve heard the arguments against helmets. They all sound thin to me. You’ve heard the arguments for helmets, and maybe you disagree. I simply suggest that it’s worth considering how they can be helpful in some circumstances. Or, as I tell my students I see riding around town, “You’re spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on your brain; protect your investment.”

If you do wear a helmet, make sure yours is still roadworthy, undamaged and up-to-date.

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