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Monday

adventures / Italy / Monday / photo — Comments Off
30
Jun 25

Cheese!

Marco picked up the four of us from the beautiful Contrada Beltramelli, our lovely last stop before the long return trip home. Everyone at the B&B was lovely. The dinner last night was outrageous. The breakfast table was filled to overflowing. They allowed us sit in their courtyard to enjoy the beautiful atmosphere for a few more hours until it was time to make our way to the airport. Just a charming group of people. We would definitely visit the Contrada Beltramelli again.

The only problem was that our air conditioner made a rhythmic coughing noise throughout the night. I chose to interpret this as a blessed confirmation of the chilled air, a divine intervention when it was 93 degrees yesterday and 95 degrees today. They’ve had a heat wave for most of our time visiting, and this part of the world is not accustomed to, nor prepared for, this kind of weather this time of year. A coughing air conditioner might interfere with your sleep, but only if you let it.

Anyway, Marco picked us up. Him and the four of us and our luggage in his little car for a two-hour ride down to the airport in Milano. He said he’s been on this particular job for six weeks, and it has allowed him to improve his English, which was quite good. Every day, he said, he’s learning something new, and so I began to wonder what he would learn from us. But then he told the 25 minute story of how he came to learn the language to begin with, when he was a younger man.

There was a woman. I’ll just leave it at that.

OK, he met a woman at a club. They had a fine night of dancing. There were drinks. They decided to go somewhere more private. She asked, through their broken bits of language, if he had any protection. He did not, so that was the end of the night, but the beginning of his motivation to study English, somehow.

I was really hoping the story’s punchline would wind up with him one day learning that he did have a preservativo, only he didn’t know the word, but that was not the case.

It was quite the story, filled with many of the people that have dropped into and out of his life giving him a little English here and there. And, just yesterday, he said, he learned the word for when you’re startled. As if a car had suddenly pulled out in front of you.

CHEESE!

We returned to that line over and over, and either everyone else heard “Jeez” or no one had the heart to correct him from the dairy product.

But then I offered up that the word can mean many things, depending on how you said the word. So I gave him CHEEEEEEEEEEEESE.

He gave us “Che seccatura,” as in, “What a drag this trip is over.”

We had dinner in the lounge of the airport, which was better than terminal food, but not a real dinner. I did find the secret platinum door.

As I stood there taking that photo the door detected my presence and slid open, as doors sometimes do. The chairs looked comfortable. It was a bit more spacious looking than the regular old VIP lounge we were in. No one looked up, maybe I could have walked right in. But, then, best not to cause an international incident.

We flew to London this evening, arriving later than scheduled because we took off on Italian time. (Which is unfair, because the previous flight was late getting in … from London.) We caught an Uber to an airport hotel, which was a place designed to look and feel like a club and, man, we’re gonna be here like seven hours. Can we just not do all of that?

Anyway, from London to New York tomorrow. Movies on a long flight. And then the drive home. And then a few days of dealing with jetlag.

adventures / Monday / Switzerland / video — Comments Off
23
Jun 25

Beautiful views from the gondola down from Jungfraujoch

From the “Top of Europe” you take a brief train ride. And you are so high up — just over two miles above sea level — that the train station doesn’t bring you all the way down to the valley floor. You take a gondola, the Eiger Express, to get you down to Grindelwald, a village of about 3,000 people that sits at 3,392 feet above sea level. You are, after all, in the Alps.

And this is what it looks like, coming down on the cable car. Enjoy.

Tomorrow, it’s all about the Olympics.

adventures / Monday / photo / Switzerland / video — Comments Off
23
Jun 25

Views from Jungfraujoch — “the top of Europe”

Today we hopped a train and then a gondola and then another train to the top of Europe. Jungfraujoch is the highest train station in Europe and … well, just listen to the narration in these two captivating videos.

Whoever that guy is, he can lay down a VO.

Seriously, you just don’t get quality voiceovers like that everywhere. We’re pretty lucky to have stumbled upon something of that stature for the site.

Here’s another thing about Jungraujoch. Two-plus miles of elevation is a lot of elevation. A lot, a lot. The highest elevation I’ve ever lived at is about 804 feet. Depending on the source, we currently live at 43 feet or 48 feet. (And those five feet are important, right? That’s almost a 12 percent increase.)

But up there, on Jungfraujoch, anything more than walking around can make you feel a little lightheaded. Your lips will go purple. You will measure your steps. You’ll occasionally lean on a wall. But it’s all worth it for these views.

And I could write more about the views. I could write hundreds of words. I could torture us both with poetry about them. But, instead, here are 15 photos. Enjoy.

Those views are pretty great, no? The next post will show the scenery from our way down the mountain.

cycling / memories / Monday / photo — Comments Off
16
Jun 25

Gummosis is actually the term for it, yes

I set two alarms, 18 minutes apart. There’s no reason for this. At one point I made an alarm in my phone for the top of the hour and at another moment I had cause to make one for 18 minutes after the hour.

If you had to log an explicative for your alarms, they would be as banal as they are amusing. On this, we can all agree.

So I set an alarm in my phone, doing the math, figuring, “That’s a good solid 8 hours of sleep. That’ll help fix me right up.” And then I stayed awake for the next two-plus hours.

But when the alarm went off, I’d been woken twice. Once by the light, because I did not configure the doors for optimal photonic blockage, and once when my lovely bride began her industrious day. And so it was that I was surprised when the top-of-the-hour alarm finally went off. And doubly so when that next one sounded, 18 minutes later. That was a delightfully long 18 minutes.

And so the morning things. And then the afternoon things. We watched the FedEx man sprint across the yard to hurl a small box on the porch. It was our version of those insurance commercials, when homeowners become their parents. What if he slips and falls?

Simple, we bury the body. Of course you have to do something with the truck. That’s a bigger hole to dig. But, you’d of course pull other people’s deliveries out first. Maybe there’s a shovel — or an excavator, or a front-end loader — in there.

Happily, he did not slip. I fetched the box, one the cats will not enjoy, for it has their medicine in it. It is designed to reduce the thing that cats do that you have to clean up. (I don’t want to be too descriptive, because you are perhaps reading this over a snack.) We administer it twice a week, it’s a gel that is rubbed on the foreleg, which they lick off and, despite it’s pleasant-to-cats odor, it is the worst thing that has ever happened to them, ever. Just ask.

So I opened the small box and put away its contents when they weren’t around. The shipping box is now in the recycling stash, ready for tomorrow morning’s run.

I checked the mail. DirecTV wants me back. We haven’t had DirecTV in several years, never at this house and it wasn’t in my name. But they want me back. I do miss the DVR function and the UX they offered. Well, not the last one we had. They’d just rolled out a new guide system and we dropped them before I had time to adjust to it. Still, in these, our modern times of convenience, after navigating apps for six minutes before waiting to find out if the Internet connection is going to work (pretty solid here, actually) I do miss good old fashioned TV.

Several years ago we had a grad student stop by our house for something, this was a woman in her mid-20s, easily. She walked through the living room, did a double take at the TV and said, “Oh, you have one of those.”

Earlier this year I read a study that argued that people that watch streaming things still think of it as TV. And I was gratified by that, until I remembered I saw an interview with an NBC bigwig from last year who said the same thing, and there’s no way they were both correct, right?

Anyway, we’ve lately been streaming West Wing. Just sort of waiting out time until the next big bike race, which we will also stream on our own delayed schedule.

I can’t remember if that race is taking place on the app that showing you a preview as you scrub through the slower parts of the program, or not. The inconsistency of thoughtful little features like that is just one more argument against a la carte streaming.

Which is funny. People argued for a la carte cable. Cable wouldn’t or couldn’t comply, so there’s another industry taking a 3-iron in the teeth. We, meanwhile, have six dozen apps and, bizarrely, a Samsung TV package we don’t acknowledge.

When I was young, I knew two things about peaches. The first was about that sticky bit of gooey ooze that comes out of the fruit on the tree. Hands should not be sticky, and that impression influenced a lot of my young thoughts about peaches. The second thing I knew was that peaches and chocolate cake make for an excellent pairing. And if you didn’t know that, you’ll need to do a little research. Bake yourself a Betty Crocker cake and crack open a can of peaches and become the person you were meant to be. This will also influence your thoughts about peaches.

Now, we have a peach tree and I have learned several things. I know the three-pronged test for determining ripeness (color, squeeze, and smell). I know this tree will be all-encompassing come August. And I know to recruit peach recipients early, which we have been doing.

So I checked on the peaches. They’re coming along. Another banner crop, I’m sure.

They are a small fruit, but they are delicious. And they are plentiful. And that’s how I have learned so much about this particular stone fruit the last two seasons. We still have some from last year. We might still have some from last year. So long as you stay away from the gummosis.

I set out for a haircut today. I have tried this once before, last week, which isn’t unusual. It often takes several attempts. Mostly because everyone needs haircuts, everyone seems to go to the same cheap place I go to, and they all go at the same time I want to. And the only worse than sitting in the big chair is sitting in the waiting area.

The last time I went I just told the woman that cut my hair: I don’t like to be here. She was cool with it. Of course, she was deep into her shift and on her feet that whole time and probably felt the same way. She was very nice. Gave me a good cut. Did not, however, remove all of the silver hair.

It was a different person this time, of course, because more than 15 minutes have elapsed. And she picked up on my pleasant style of chatty silence quickly. She asked if they’d thinned this part the last time. I, a guy, said Maybe? It gets poofy and I probably complained about that, and it didn’t seem to get so poofy. So maybe. She said it felt like her colleague had thinned it.

I wanted to ask why it all grows at different speeds out of my head. Why are some parts of my scalp more exceptional than others? Just look at this discrepancy. I could not help but look as she held it up, appraising the problem, arriving at the solution and sharing my shame with all of the world, or at least the old man behind me and the fidgety little kid to my left.

Anyway, haircut done. The various layers are trimmed and shaped and “My! What thick hair you have!”

I don’t mind that part. I like that part. Everything else, not so much a fan.

Our neighbor invited us for a group ride this evening. The three of us went out with another who was, apparently, on her second road ride — today, she figured out her shifting. She’s training for her first triathlon, a sprint, in August, and tonight we took her on a 17-mile lollipop.

She’s a runner and a swimmer. Her parents did tris. Now our neighbor and the Yankee, both Ironmen, are giving her tips and advice. She’ll be just fine. Best of all, we found another person to ride nearby. This is going to turn into a full-on group ride before long.

Just when I got out of the echelon, they pulled me right back in. Only kidding, I haven’t done a proper group ride since 2019. I’m OK with that. You’re never last when you ride solo.

adventures / cycling / Monday / music / photo / video — Comments Off
9
Jun 25

An entrance to eternal summer slacking

I’d like to share with you this Hemerocallis daylily. Native to parts of Asia, beautiful anywhere in the world. This one is holding down the corner by our garage.

There are always wonders in the yard. I just have to go outside to find them.

Daylillies require almost no care. I wonder why the people that used to live here didn’t have them planted everywhere. But, I suppose, you could ask that of any beautiful thing. And we have quite a few lovely things in the yard — have I noticed this daylily before? — but most of them are quite singular. And most of it takes care of itself pretty well. The rest, well, they’re stuck with us.

There’s a grapevine, and we are trying to rework it over its trellis. Nearby, the honeysuckle seems to be rebounding well from the early springtime work we did on it. Other things are coming along nicely. We had to recently remove a few bushes that had died. I view this as a personal shortcoming, a promise I never made to the sellers of our home, not that I’ve done a lot to help those planted things that struggled and died, even while others have thrived. Everything grows here (weeds best of all!), but some things stopped last year. Maybe it was that drought. Maybe it was something else.

Anyway, the daylily is lovely.

We had a nice bike ride Saturday morning with our neighbor. It’s great. He rides around the loop and right up our driveway. Then he set us out on a course that included a few roads we know, and a few we haven’t been on before. It sprinkled a bit, and the conversation was nice, and the roads were quite empty at that time of the day.

This was soon after I’d done my big turn on a Strava segment, which I felt like I managed quite well if I must say, but did not set a new PR. Our neighbor just sat patiently behind me after the sprint, through the left turn and then the quick right that turned me back up hill. As soon as it pointed up, he went around me.

I was going to sit up, but I had to keep up. And so I tried, and did.

He’s a nice guy, our neighbor, and it’s nice that we have the chance to take the occasional ride with him. You need a few people like that from time-to-time.

When I went out today — a perfectly pleasant solo ride of some of the standard routes ridden backward — I rode alongside a little boy on his BMX bike for a moment. We met at the road that enters-exits the subdivision, but from opposite directions. And that guy was fast. So I had that to think about on my perfectly average pace 27-miler. If he suggests a ride in a few years, when he’s a bit older, I’m probably going to be busy that day.

We went to a concert last night, and I’ll share tiny little clips of that to help fill up our week. Here’s the opening act. You might remember Fastball from the 1990s. A bunch of guys from Texas who scored two Grammy nominations and two or three songs at or neat the top of the charts in 1998. They also went platinum on that record. Later they had trouble because what genre even is this? But musical genres in general, and their style of rock in particular, was struggling at that same time.

I never actually liked this band. They’ve been at it all these years, honing their touring craft, and it shows. I liked their performance. They had a tight 25 minute set and held a crowd like you don’t often see for a warm up. Also, they threw in a bit of Steve Miller, just for fun, as a medley.

Maurice, by the way, means “Gangster of Love.” That was mixed in with their minor 2013 hit, which is peppy.

These days, Fastball says they “combined a fondness for melodic, Beatles-inspired pop with the alternative aesthetic of late-’90s mainstream rock,” in which case everyone should love them, right? But I just never got into them. I did enjoy this mini-set, though.

And, tomorrow, we’ll see a clip for the feature act.

On the way to the show, we passed this U-Haul truck. We passed it, it passed us back, like this photograph was meant to be. Of all of those little bits of Americana that they could share …

I just saw a television reference to that fungi. And, as I look at it now, I find I can learn more about fungi on the website, but U-Haul is of … questionable credibility on this issue.

Probably no one who’s rented that truck has thought about it, or tried to look that up on the site. When you’re trying to move, you’re on a mission: minimize the effort and aggravation of the move.

And you hope there are daylilies where you are going.