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Indiana

Bloomington / cycling / Indiana / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
28
Jun 16

My app says I rode my bike 90 mph today (I didn’t)

We found a spooky barn on our bike ride today. How often do you see a barn like this?

That’s probably a little over halfway along in today’s 30-mile route. It was at the top of a long slow climb. You get up there and before you can catch your breath you are wondering about the people that lived there. House on one side of the road, two little barns on this side, all right at the top of a round hill.

Which is better than being at the bottom of the hill, but you go through there thinking, Man, mechanized automobiles are great. Isn’t it great we didn’t have to haul these materials up here by hand?

Or that’s what I’d think, anyway.

Coneflowers we found somewhere else along the way:

We stopped four times on our ride today. And that’s OK. Great day for it. Everything is growing and in the full splendor of summer. It is a sight. You want to see it all, and hold it, and then find a way to keep it for forever, because you know the season and the beauty won’t last forever. But it should. Even when it shouldn’t, it should, even when you know why it can’t.

It’s not yet July, you shouldn’t be thinking about the winter.

I thought I would take a picture of my bicycle tire:

Seemed like a good idea at the time. I’d just mounted the thing, after all. Now I need to swap the other one, so the wheel doesn’t feel bad.

adventures / Alabama / family / Indiana / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
21
Jun 16

At the summer solstice

The sun is big and warm and that’s just about right. Daylight comes a bit later here, since we moved, but it is still bright over dinner, and we eat late. If only it stayed like this all year around.

It seems I can’t even mow the wildflowers in the side yard, reaching up and out as they are. I am presently cutting around them.

But it is nice and warm, but not overly so. The trees are nice and green and the grass is bright. You can hear the stream babbling nearby, if there’s no noise and you get close enough you can sometimes hear it before you see it. And, for the first time in as long as I can remember, you can’t really hear any road traffic.

There are roads, of course, and there are hills. We are going up and down them. Slowly, really. We’ve been out to discover a few new restaurants, mostly when we didn’t want to cook, and met a few nice people, most of them from our new bike group.

They meet twice a week in the evenings in a church parking lot near us. And we’ve been following them around, sometimes wishing they’d go faster and sometimes wishing they’d go slower. This is the first time I’ve ever ridden in a group and it is an adjustment. But we’re learning some roads.

Otherwise, we’ve just been unpacking and resting up from the move and learning the new house and recovering from the old house. There was much to paint and move and then the professional movers, five guys out of central casting, came and packed the rest and loaded it and hauled it all away. A few days later the physical evidence of our lives caught up to us. Even the parts we thought we were staying on top of caught up with us eventually. And I’m not talking about the painting, which we’d also hired out to the professionals.

Eventually, I’m sure, everything will start to feel normal again, whatever that is. Probably after all of the boxes and wrapping paper are gone and I can find things in the kitchen again and know what light switch controls what in the new place. Everything will be normal again after that. I wonder when it started being unusual before all of that. Longer than I’d imagine, I bet.

So this is an usual quarterly report, but a proper one. We wrapped up one life and are getting ready to start a new one. So the solstice is a good time for this. Do you know where the word comes from? It’s Latin. Sol (sun) and sistere (to stand still). Nothing stands still. It is just a question of which direction you want to go.

Bloomington / cycling / Indiana / Monday / photo — Comments Off
6
Jun 16

Photos from the weekend

We went to the Surplus Store. This is a facility IU runs where all of their extra equipment and furniture and what not from the many different campuses comes to be picked over by the general public. Plus, they were having a sale. I mean look at the deal they’re offering on these:

Cheaper than Wheel of Fortune. And authentic in ways that the Wheel letters haven’t been for quite some time. Vanna just touches the rectangle now, she doesn’t even spin them around any more.

The surplus store is interesting, but mostly office stuff. And the stuff that isn’t office stuff seems to be either almost-worn out or the sort of things you might not buy secondhand. I did get some pool paddles, though. And I would have stayed longer, there was that sale, if only to avoid this:

We are overrun with packing paper. Someone came in and poured water on it or fed it after midnight or whatever makes paper multiple. It is overwhelming. There’s at least two full car loads of paper due to a trip to a recycling center. It has to be more than one car load.

And then there’s the tape. And the boxes. We are making good progress, though:

I’m starting to hear the sounds that packing tape makes in my sleep, though, so I’m ready for that to be finished.

We went on a bike ride this weekend. I saw a bridge and took a poorly composed, off the hip while pedaling-beneath-it photo for no reason:

We made our way to one of the lakes, this one is named Lemon:

This ride took us through four towns, I believe. (I’m not sure if we should distinguish Unionville from New Unionville.) And we enjoyed the rural scenery:

And there was so much climbing! At least we didn’t have to go up that hill in the distance. (We’d already gone up that hill in the distance.)

I was vacuuming and wanted to make a joke about this Dyson. (I am not its biggest fan.)

Best I can tell, this Dyson was designed to stop working when it encounters more than four strands of hair or anything with the tensile strength of nine covalently bonded dust motes. Its seven-foot power cord was also an attractive selling point.
But it has this giant orange ball!

The Yankee points out I’m the only one that has trouble with it. Probably because I use it.

Bloomington / cycling / Friday / Indiana / photo / video — Comments Off
3
Jun 16

Someone help that man!

I haven’t seen one of these in a long time:

In fact, out of the corner of my eye, while we were riding our bikes through some of the local lowlands, I saw that today and thought it was real. This guy needs help!

That guy is actually a cool decoration.

And I would have stayed around there all day, it was nice and cool in the shade, but there are boxes to unpack. And soup to eat. Here’s the ceiling fan in my spoon in my soup:

Ceiling fan in spoon. #boomerangapp

A video posted by Kenny Smith (@kennydsmith) on Jun 3, 2016 at 11:57am PDT

Bloomington / cycling / Indiana / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
2
Jun 16

First ride in town

We found, online, the local bike group. One of their rides starts from just up the road from our house. So we joined them today. Also, just before this I broke 7,000 miles on the bike.

Also passed this barn, just before which I realized I was going to have to learn how to actually climb uphill now. It might be too late in the game for that, for me. But I have to try. Anyway, the pastoral beauty:

So that was a quick 22-mile ride that won’t ever turn anyone’s head. And, also, my first ever group ride. That will take some time to get used to. But they are nice folks and they know the roads.

So we’ve been here for about 40 hours and are already riding. That’s a good sign.

Also, it doesn’t get dark here until after 9 p.m. That’s nice.