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This was a beautiful weekend, and we had another glorious day, today. I spent too much time inside. But anytime you spent inside was too much, that’s how amazing it has been. There should be poems written about these days.
I’m no poet.
But I did take these photographs. Just scroll through them, enjoy, and make a promise to yourself to go out and enjoy the next picture-perfect day that comes to your neighborhood.
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.
To be fair, it was her THIRD workout of the day.
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.
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.
Twenty years ago today Hurricane Ivan came ashore, straight up Mobile Bay. It came ashore as a Category 3 hurricane.
I woke up at that morning to go to work. My power was still on. The drive got treacherous pretty quickly. Visibility dipped. A 20-minute trip turned into almost a 40 minute drive, but the worst was yet to come for our area, which was a good 250 miles inland. That far away from the coast, hundreds of trees were down and power poles snapped. Miles and miles of power lines were on the ground before the worst had even arrived. Early on, the state broke its power outage record, with Alabama Power saying three-quarters of their customers were in the dark. We couldn’t communicate with people down on the coast.
Whole forests down there were snapped, shredded and felled by 100 mph winds down there. The eastern part of Mobile Bay took a wallop. In Gulf Shores, they had eight feet of water on the main drag. Everything almost a mile from the beach was underwater. A handful of people waited out the storm on the battleship, the USS Alabama which is a museum in it’s day job. One wind gauge on the ship broke after registering a gust of 105 mph, another recorded a 112-mph gust. “You could feel the whole superstructure of the ship move when a big gust would hit,” one of the men that worked there said. The USS Alabama weighs 85 million pounds, and she was shuddering.
Up in Birmingham, we reported the hell out of that hurricane. I was still relatively new in that newsroom — my last newsroom — and this was just the second big national story we’d had in my first few months there. So I was showing off a little, maybe. But it was important. Before the next day was out, the estimates were already rolling in that there was more than $10 billion dollars in damages and some places would be in standing water and without power for weeks. I think I worked about 15 hours that first day and something just short of that the next day. I was calling everyone I knew and reporting their experience online. Back then, I knew a lot of people all over the region. I was calling the parents of ex-girlfriends: Do you have power? What happened where you are?
Only al.com eligible for a Pulitzer. This was 2004 and it was all so very new. But in 2005, Hurricane Katrina went to New Orleans. Our colleagues at our sister company, The Times Picayune and nola.com won two Prizes, and they deserved them both and more.
We were writing a lot more than a blog. We were putting together multimedia stuff as it came in. We were running a weather central microsite complimenting the wire copy and the NWS content. We were moving fast and doing creative things and telling a statewide, regional story. We didn’t win a Pulitzer, but we were paving the way, 20 years ago today.
I had a 35-mile ride on Friday. Almost thwarted just six or so miles in. I bunny hopped a railroad track and caught the rear wheel on the far track and popped the tube, right after this lovely little spot.
So I stood in someone’s yard, taking the wheel off the frame and the tube out of the wheel. I fiddled with a new tube and finally got everything ready to pump it up. I carry a pocket-sized hand pump. All hand pumps have a limitation. They just won’t push enough air pressure to let you do much more than get safely home. And that’s when it works well. But my pump is 11 years old, it was probably cheap when I bought it, and they don’t even sell the thing anymore.
It works … some of the time. Earlier this summer, for example, it really didn’t. In that yard today, it didn’t. After I limped a bit farther down the road and stopped in a field to try again, my pump decided to get its act together. I had a good stiff tire and did the whole ride I’d planned out. Just a bit later than I’d expected. But the views were wonderful nonetheless.
I did the last few miles in the extended neighborhood. Enjoying this view on a perfectly quiet road, soaking this in. This is why I enjoy riding in the evenings.
(If that’s not the nighttime video, just refresh the page and scroll back to it. There’s an autoplay function here I can’t turn off right now.)
I had a nice and easy 20-mile ride today. Easy, and somehow I found myself sprinting along a road at 36 mph, which is about where I max out these days. I’m not even sure why I did that, and I felt it for a good long while thereafter.
But before that, corn stalks!
It’s a nice time to be outside, so I’m spending a lot of time outside.
I also had a swim on Saturday. The pool was chilly, but that makes you go faster, they say. I think if there’s anything to that it’s just because you’re trying to get out of the water. But there was a comfortable 1,720 yard workout. That’s a mile, which sounds like a lot, but it isn’t, not really.
Today, I had another mile swim, and it was a bit faster, but still slow. But fast for me, because i was trying to get my laps in before the chill set in. The thermometer said it was 76 degrees.
And so I begin to wonder, what is my tolerance? And how many more outdoor swims can I have before we find out?
Quite a few, I’m hoping.
