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Monday

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14
Feb 22

Happy Valentine’s Day

I finally got to try my new bike shoes this weekend. To recap, I bought these on Monday …

And I decided on Monday evening, to my great frustration, that I needed to get new cleats. The gray ones you see here are the old ones. The new ones are black and yellow. They arrived on Thursday, I think, and I installed them and, most importantly, they clipped in properly to my pedals. I do not understand the old problem. The problem has been corrected, I have moved on.

So, yesterday, I got to do this.

And I went faster than I’ve ever gone on that particular course. Two loops, felt easy. It must be the shoes. (Probably it was a lot of rest in my legs.)

These are the earlier model and, thus, less expensive version of the Torch line. The 2.0 cost about $50 more and boast a stiffer carbon sole — meaning a more efficient power transfer. Surely that doesn’t apply to a duffer like me.

But it felt yesterday like it might apply. I’ll try to keep that in mind in 10,000 miles or so.

Anyway, the fictional place I rode was not over the ocean. The islet Zwift uses is in the Solomons. There is one village there, the internet tells me, but no roads.

I wonder if I can talk my lovely bride into a Valentine’s Day ride.

Let’s go back 50 years and down to Selma. It’s the Times Journal, which traces its origins back to 1827. Started life as the Courier, had its press burned during the Civil War, later through a series of mergers it became the Times Messenger, then the Times-Argus, the Selma Times and the Morning Times. Then, in 1920, the paper merged with the Selma Journal to become the Selma Times-Journal, a historically great local paper. Let’s see what was happening in 1972.

Coal strike in Britain was shutting down about eight million jobs. Bombings in Belfast, Nixon prepping for his historic trip to China, and a few bussing stories make the front page next to that rather anonymous standalone Valentine.

Oh, isn’t this a sweet photo on page three.

They did not last. John died in Illinois, in 2008, and was survived by another wife, who he’d only recently married. Carolyn died in south Alabama in 2006 and was also survived by another husband. That man, who doesn’t figure into this newspaper at all, helped design the plaque placed on the moon in 1969. (Her widower died just last year.) But the two above did, perhaps, get married. The names of surviving children in their obituaries match.

The first woman to graduate from AU in building construction.

She passed away last month. In her working life she contributed to projects at Florida Southern College; the University of Florida; the Cathedral of St. Luke in Orlando and Disney World. It’s no small thing to have your work create something people will value long after you’re gone.

An inside editorial.

Good. I’m glad we fixed that.

Oh, this is just lovely. Mom had never been able to cheer him on in a college game, and she surprised him here. He posted 22 points and 15 boards that night.

Nate earned two masters degrees, was a chaplain in the Air Force, worked his way up to becoming Col. Nate Crawford, retiring to Florida in 2006. He’s still down there, as far as I can tell. One of his sons went to the same military academy a generation later.

A half-page double truck ad that starts on page six.

This is 1972, but forced air wasn’t a mystery. How should you use your heater? Turn the heat up until you’re comfortable. Note the temperature on the thermostat. Repeat as needed.

Oh, on the next page:

I grew up with Louie the Lightning Bug (he was developed in 1983, and I had a sweeeeeet glow-in-the-dark Louie shirt.) And though I know of Reddy Kilowatt historically, I was a bit startled to see him here, in 1972. Turns out he declined in usage in the 70s and after. Fuel shortages hurt the mascots first, it seems.

Finally, on the back page.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

adventures / cycling / Monday / photo — Comments Off
7
Feb 22

To a slightly less snowy week ahead

The roads improved over the weekend, but the snow will hang around for days, which is fine. Pleasant reminders and all of that. We’ll be lulled, this week, into a false sense of “warmth.” Tomorrow the mercury will flirt with 40 and the sun will be out. We will call it nice and believe ourselves lucky. And this is as close as I ever come to understanding Stockholm syndrome on a personal basis.

We took a nice little walk yesterday, and The Yankee traipsed through the woods. I’d chosen the wrong shoes for a side expedition, so I stayed on the path. Sometimes moving around does it, but sometimes staying where you ought to gives you an iconic photo.

Iconic photo.

After which I shoveled four inches of snow and ice off the megadeck. It seemed like a good thing to finally do. Why let all of that sit there and wait to melt and damage the wood?

Plus the experience let me see this. Somehow the snow and ice was sliding off one of the tables, but hit a chair and got stuck there.

And when I was shoveling over by the fire element (the grill – ed.) I scooped off a layer of snow and found this.

The camera phone doesn’t do it justice. I assure you, there’s a bit of definition to the nose area. Just to be on the safe side, I left that example of pareidolia alone, What if the deck is haunted by a woodland sprite or something?

Elsewhere, around the front of the house, I am imagining all of this snowmelt will mean good things for the soil’s moisture content come spring.

Time to check in on the kitties. Poseidon has a lot of fun watching the birds, who are eating us out of house and home at a bird feeder in that direction.

And Phoebe spent her Friday lazing in the afternoon sun.

It was nice to be at the house to see the kitties; that won’t happen much at all this week.

I rode through Paris this weekend. You can tell because there’s the Luxor Obelisk, 3,000 years old, direct from Egypt, and a fixture at the Place de la Concorde in Paris, since the 1830s.

Zwift says they changed out the statuary in their game as cutesy little Easter Eggs for riders. So you don’t see Frémiet’s gilded bronze equestrian sculpture of Joan of Arc in the Place des Pyramides in Paris. There’s a likeness of a a cyclist, instead.

That probably aggravates the French, but it’s tucked in a little turn and you barely see it as you’re tapping out of a little seven degree hill coming out of the Avenue du General-Lemonnier tunnel. But on the other end of the fabled Champs-Elysees there is the Arc de Triomphe. It makes sense that the detailed friezess are left open and blank. We shall not speak of replacing the four sculptures at the base of the arc: The Entry of Napoleon, The Departure of the Volunteers, The Conquest of Alexandria and The Battle of Austerlitz. Their digital replacement seems like an art crime to me.

We had the opportunity to visit it in 2015. The Arc is a beautiful thing to appreciate in person, if you can.

And here’s the Champs-Elysees route.

Seven quick loop gives you about 25 miles. Now it’s time to add miles.

cycling / Monday / photo — Comments Off
31
Jan 22

Now looking for a new challenge — and a Wikipedia page

Lovely, cold and fast weekend. They just go too fast, but they’re otherwise lovely. Nothing of great import was accomplished, as if by design. It was a weekend to sit in a chair and enjoy a nice blanket. So I did some of that.

But the skies were clear the whole time. This was approaching sunset last night.

We had dinner with a friend on Saturday. Our friend is a professor, an incredibly well regarded political anthropologist. She writes about food and labor and refugees. She has a Wikipedia page. She must not run her own Wikipedia page because, having just checked it, I noticed her being a wonderful host to two brilliant neighbors has not been added to the entry.

We’re the brilliant neighbors. She lives nearby. We run and ride by her house a fair amount. She is also a triathlete. Perhaps soon she’ll come dine at our house. So you have a week or so to create quality and credible Wikipedia entries about us.

(If you need a credible Wikipedia entry, I’ll try to return the favor.)

I wonder how many people I know as more than acquaintances that are on Wikipedia. Someone should write a script that cross references your social media networks, contact lists and text message recipients

I think this makes the fifth non-family we’ve dined with in a home in the last two years. I’ve been to three restaurants in that same amount of time. One of those was under professional duress, and the other two were outdoors. It’s no more or less weird than it has been over the last 21 months, oh, and here comes another variant.

Two Zwift rides this weekend. I’ve spent all my time in the saddle, of late, on just one particular course of the game. I set an admittedly humble goal of averaging 20 mph over the Volcano course. It’s a comparatively easy route, it’s biggest feature is one of the milder climbs on Zwift. Gear and Grit says the volcano KOM climb is tied for seventh in classification, 10th in length, 13th in ascent, and 15th in average gradient. In other words, this climb suits my style.

I’ve been sneaking up on this silly goal the last few weeks, and made a few improvements on Saturday.

I cut six (or 16, depending on which app you like) improbable seconds off my PR on the volcano KOM segment. That’s the 2.3 mile climb itself, which I’ve been up a dozen or so times by now. (So you can say I know the road.) I did the math after the Saturday ride and calculated that I need to find 32 more seconds somewhere over the course of the whole route to get to that 20 mph goal.

Looking at all the data on all the different apps, knowing I’m working pretty hard and with the climb to contend with, I just couldn’t see many places I could find 32 more seconds.

I tried again Sunday afternoon, thinking I might be able to get a few more seconds out of a lull in my good Saturday ride. If I could push a bit harder in the two-to-four mile and four-to-six mile splits I could get some gains. Push there, recover somewhere, and then peel my legs off on the climb and the descent. This was my thinking as I got ready, putting on the workout kit and noticing my legs seemed a little heavy. “No way I do it today,” I said to my reflection.

Started the route in the rain, motivated by passing a big clutch of people early, I concientiously upped my tempo in those two early splits, while hoping I could keep a respectable rhythm on the climb and maybe strategize something out of the descent and then the last bit toward the end.

I somehow found four more seconds of improvement on the KOM, which I’d just re-set just yesterday. Even more surprising, I took 1:47 off my total best time for the route. I hit my humble 20 mph goal, and finished the course averaging 20.4. I also improved my equally humble 20-minute power average by three percent. Over the course of the month I’ve bettered that number by six percent.

So, in that sense, the 12 rides I had this month were productive. I should ride more.

A few years back the great Bill Strickland wrote a list of things he’s learned in a lifetime of riding bikes. I liked the list so much that I copied it into a Word file, deleted the ones I hadn’t discovered, reworked the rest into what seemed like my own chronological order of discovery and started filling in the spaces in between.

My list has just 20 items on it. Twenty items in 10 years feels fairly prolific for life lessons. One of them is “You can push harder than you think.”

I remembered that one again yesterday, after that ride.

It’s Monday, and time to check in on the kitties. Phoebe enjoyed part of her weekend and some afternoon sun on the landing.

I told you about the new mattress. Poseidon is still a big fan of the old one.

And here’s the rare shot of the two of them sitting nicely with one another.

Must have been cold that night.

Looks like it’ll be colder still this week.

bespoke / Indiana / Monday / photo — Comments Off
24
Jan 22

A day with everything in it

It was a do-most-everything day. A bit of writing here, a bit of editing there. Consulted on a Snapchat campaign. Some social media, some file uploading. Casted a student for a recruitment campaign. Discussed a physical mailer. Hired some students. Shot some photographs. Recorded some video. The only thing I didn’t do was any audio, but I’ll have a podcast Thursday, if I make it that far.

I also had two meetings this morning, and I got pulled out of both of them for nonsensical reasons. Maybe it made me look important to the people I had to leave. It felt rude, but when you’re called, you go, right?

Was I needed when I got there? Wherever that was? I was not. The first time it was because someone else couldn’t be found, and I was to be the stand-in. (When I got there, the other person had turned up.) The second time there was a question about microphone audio. (It was fine.)
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So I got to go back to my meetings. Probably didn’t look all that important after that.

This was Saturday, a rare clear winter’s day. Cold, and worth it.

But that’s the miracle of it, really. Not every day is like that. Most aren’t. In fact, this was Sunday morning, after it snowed.

And this was this morning.

What’s the point of this? We’re nearing the end of January, and I don’t know. It’s been a mild winter so far, thankfully. Had a bit of real cold, but that’s to be expected. No real snow. I told a former student who is working in North Carolina that she got more snow this weekend than we’ve had all winter so far, and I was glad for it. (She’s a meteorologist, so all sorts of weather makes her happy.) We’ve just had the gray. And we’ll get a lot more of that. Maybe that’s the part that will be cruel this year. If it’s just comparatively mild, it’s easy to fool yourself into thinking it is almost spring. But it’ll be almost three more months before views like this are the norm.

It was stunning to see that this evening. It was stunning that I got out of the office and back to the house in time to see it. And this is the second real sign of the progression of the seasons: though you’ve known it, intellectually, for a month now, this is when you can now notice the days are getting a bit longer without carefully noting the clocks. The longer days, of course, being the best part about the place.

The first real sign of the coming change of seasons, of course, is seeing commercials for the Masters on TV. I don’t watch the tournament, but hearing Ray Charles, seeing those beautiful views, you know: Augusta is getting ready for their spotlight, and it’s OK to pine for the pines, and springtime.

In two more months. Until the end of March it is perpetual gray punctuated by false hopes — and I’ll only talk about this two dozen more times. At least Saturday looked nice!

The daily duds: Pictures of clothes I put here to, hopefully, help avoid embarrassing scheme repeats.

Love this shirt, until it comes time to pair it with something.

Got a nice compliment on that pocket square, though. It’s one I made, which made it all that much better. And prompted me to show off the day’s cufflinks. No one was counting on that.

I made those, too.

I am a man of fashion intrigue.

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10
Jan 22

‘They’re coming! They’re coming!’

Two years ago, plague.

Last year, plague. And locusts.

This year, plague. And also …

The birds, the noisy noisy birds. The messy, messy birds.

You should see the sidewalks. But it’s better if you don’t have to. And if it rained. Or someone rolled a high pressure washer outside.

Anyway, pretty day out there. But quite cold. This is a tradeoff I’m willing to accept.

Oh, and hey look! My new desk chair showed up Saturday. I put it together Saturday. The cats helped. And, right now, they’re taking turns checking out my stuff.

I’m assuming that it will prove comfortable, once the animals let me sit in the chair that I … just bought … for myself.

Which must mean it is time for cat pictures. Here’s Phoebe at rest.

And here she is, taking a nap. Yesterday, you see, was a serious sleep day.

And here’s Poseidon, wondering what I’ve done with his new chair.

He sat in it right there most of the day. After, that is, I assembled the chair, let him sit in it downstairs, spun him around a bunch, then carried the chair, and cat, upstairs. As soon as he got down, hours later, I put it in the office, and shut the door. He is very confused.

This weekend he has also discovered the joys of the space heater.

This is going to become a thing. We’re creating monsters.

As I typed this, Phoebe returned to the same position for another nap. Clearly I should be doing this at my desk and not in a recliner.

Monsters are what we are creating.

I had a nice punchy little ride yesterday, this is a part of Watopia, Zwift’s fictionalized world.

Which explains how I’m underwater there. Some of their environments are simulacrums of the real world. You can ride in a few villages of France. There’s a former world championship site in Virginia. You can ride in Central Park. You can also ride through the futuristic sky bridges of New York.

Or you ride around and up, and through, a volcano. Here’s my avatar coming down from the top of the volcano.

Of course there’d be a full moon and lava spewing. I often wonder, when I’m on this course, what it would be like if you had a different lunar phase as part of the reward. And how difficult to ride through the overwhelming presence of sulfur.

Your avatar rides, literally, on a road that goes through a volcano.

Which is a good metaphor for some people’s Mondays. Not mine. But Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Friday mornings? More meetings then you’d normally find on a volcano, though. Sometimes there is a sulfur smell, though, but, thankfully, minimal ash.

At least the birds stay in the trees.