Monday

cycling / Monday / photo — Comments Off on Welcome to the last week of July
26
Jul 21

Welcome to the last week of July

Let’s jump right into the big Monday feature. Mondays are better with pets, after all. So here’s a nice series of Phoebe doing her modeling thing on the stairs.

She looks up, giving you coy.

She looks down, giving you introspection.

And that’s all you get, she says.

Poseidon sometimes jumps on the TV stand. He’ll look at the TV for a moment. He’ll walk around it. Once in a while he stands on his back legs and tries to poke his head over the top. He’s long and tall, but you can only just see part of his face. He’s big and strong enough that it makes you nervous.

But then he uses feline grace and does this.

For whatever reason, he likes bike races. (Yes, this little series is a few weeks old now. I’ve been saving it.) This isn’t the first time that he’s been interested in road racing.

He sits with me to watch them too.

Yes, he’s sitting in my lap and watching the Tour there.

Speaking of bikes …

My front derailleur froze. This is only a problem if you want to swap from the big ring to the little ring. It happened over the winter, probably because I get sweaty during indoor riding and it fused.

I had a springtime tuneup, an annual rite of passage for most road bikes. That required new cables and the purchase and installation of a Fisher-Price replacement derailleur. (It looks like the real thing; it does nothing.) Still didn’t work. Soon after, there was another trip to the shop, where the mechanic tinkered, but ultimately did not fix the problem.

So a third trip to the bike shop, where the mechanic, one of the few who doesn’t actually want to work on things, I’ve decided, fixed it again. After he destroyed the new cable he put on a few weeks ago.

I learned on Saturday’s 30-miler that, after all of this, the front derailleur works precisely a third of the time.

That’s a great way to keep the spirits up on a bike ride.

I need a new bike shop.

The rest of the weekend was normal. There was the routine Chick-fil-A lunch, an evening chat with friends and, of course, the Olympics. My lovely bride is a world-renowned Olympic scholar. We watch a lot of sports. Over the next two weeks here you can pretty much assume that almost every moment not specifically accounted for is sleep, or Olympics.

cycling / Monday / photo / video — Comments Off on I made a Latin joke
19
Jul 21

I made a Latin joke

I had a 27-mile ride on Saturday. It was not my best bike ride, he said for about 60th time this year, but it was a fine ride otherwise. This one, meanwhile, is cruising along in fine form. I think she’s lapping me here.

We celebrated with the traditional Saturday Chick-fil-A takeout and then had a chat with friends. We also watched the final two stages of the Tour de France, completing the race as we do every year, singing Joe Dassin’s Les Champs-Elysees.

I also went for a run. Nice and slow. Any slower and I’d be walking. Somehow, I’m told, being slow makes me faster. Which might be the case if you were running slowly deliberately. At the moment I’m running slowly as a matter of function. It’s the status slow, you might say.

It’s Monday, and that means it is time to check on the cats! It’s the week’s most anticipated and widely viewed feature, and don’t think I haven’t noticed.

Phoebe would like you to know she was framed.

Framed!

No one has ever caught her doing anything she isn’t supposed to do, because Phoebe is a good girl. No one has ever caught her out on the ledge where she doesn’t belong …

It does look cozy out there. I always wonder why it was carpeted. Every day I wonder.

Poseidon is hanging out in his tunnel and is playing up his big ham tendencies.

It takes a lot out of him, being a ham. Here he is asleep. Under a blanket. On a pillow.

That cat. Et quod ad somnum.

Monday / photo / running / video — Comments Off on Happy usual Monday stuff
12
Jul 21

Happy usual Monday stuff

I went out for an easy 5K run on Saturday morning. It was pleasant, temperature-wise, if a bit muggy. The sidewalks were empty, the roads were generally quiet and I shuffled along at my own slow pace. Just the way it should be done!

I did see one friend.

If that’s not close enough for you, here’s a better version. Same deer. Same spot. Only got antsy if you made direct eye contact. I was probably about six feet away and it was just my eyes that were bothersome.

My eyes are a pair of my better attributes, too. What does that deer know, anyway?

Soon after, I ran into my lovely bride, who had been off on an early morning bike ride. We did not plan this.

Sometimes we plan things like this, but not in this instance.

Time to check in with the kitties! I know, I know, it’s perhaps your favorite weekly feature.

Here’s Poseidon, who one recent evening took a passing interest to the television. Usually they don’t acknowledge it at all. Poseidon, if anything, is more interested when it is off because he can better catch his reflection on the screen, which is always a dangerous concern, since he must go fight the reflection. But every now and again he jumps up on the little table and marches around the screen, or notices some movement that intrigues him.

This time, he was a space cat.

And he’s got some concerns about how this mission is going.

This crew has a problem.

Phoebe is ready to change the channel.

And here she is, later, up on a little ledge where she does not belong. She seems to be saying, “Can you blame me, really?”

“Really?”

She does not belong on the ledge, and she doesn’t care. There, at least, she is removed from Poseidon’s dramatic cinema recreations. (There’s lots of cat emoting involved, usually.)

cycling / memories / Monday / Twitter / video — Comments Off on Happy Fifth
5
Jul 21

Happy Fifth

I once had two tires go flat on my bike in a place where there was no shade for a mile in any direction, so I had to walk a good ways before I could figure out how to address the problem of having two flats and one spare tube. I once rode in a race so hard that I couldn’t walk for an almost disconcerting length of time after it, because, that time, my feet had gone flat in aging shoes. Once, of course, I crashed my bike and had surgery collarbone surgery, several months of hazy memories, two additional surgical consults, a neck exam (to make sure, months later, I hadn’t broken* it) and multiple rounds of physical therapy before I managed to get the pain of it all under control. Another time I got caught out in a sudden thunderstorm that produced hail, which fell hard enough to break my skin. Oh! And there was the time when my ride went too long and after an agonizing 45 minutes of realizing this wasn’t going to work out it got so dark I couldn’t see anything and I found myself pointing the front wheel in a general area where I expected the road to be and, you know, hoped**.

Saturday’s ride, a 47-mile effort where nothing went right, wasn’t as bad as any of those. But it’d go on a longer version of such a list.

At least I saw this cool barn!

And the old grain bin next to it was pretty nice, too.

The city canceled their fireworks this year. But the neighborhood provided quality entertainment once more. As an added bonus, we didn’t even have to leave the yard.

I decided to experiment with a Twitter live stream.

And I learned that for some dark and mystical reason of video compression, the audio doesn’t sound quite right, which is amusing.

The fireworks show they put on last year was incredibly impressive, but they scaled it back this year. Even still …

And if you didn’t get enough colorful things in the sky around you last night, here are some videos I shot of the neighbors last year. They really did go all out. This one is deliberately blurry, evocative of how fireworks hang in our memories.

No kidding, they had four false finales last year. Here’s the third one.

This was, I believe, the big finish.

*This was about why things were still hurting well, well beyond when I should have been healed up. That second specialist, saw me because my mother-in-law worked with him. He saw me over the holidays, listened to all my complaints and said, “Six months? Yeah, that’s not right” and “Let’s look at your neck.” So they went off to fetch the right technicians to do scans to rule out neck trauma and I remember sitting alone in his examination room, incomprehensibly mad, muttering to myself I do NOT have a broken neck. (And I was right! I did not have a broken neck.) What I did have — according to the third surgeon I consulted later the next year — was a good procedure from the first surgeon, who gave me inscrutably bad recovery advice and a lousy therapeutic regimen. So that’s how that particular bike ride went.

**I have a good light for just such an occasion now. And I don’t typically ride that late in a day anymore, anyway.

adventures / memories / Monday / photo / Washington — Comments Off on More of the Bell Trail
28
Jun 21

More of the Bell Trail

Can I milk blog content from a casual, long getaway weekend for longer than the weekend lasted? We’ve met, right?

We skipped town on June 18th for the Pacific Northwest. We were experiencing painful heat indices when we left. And we returned on the 23rd, to much more pleasant temperatures. And we left Washington just before their brutal heat wave arrived, as it turned out. The moral to the story, as ever, if you hear we’re traveling somewhere and you are similarly interested in the place, go early or reschedule. Something always pops up in those places while we are there or just after.

The government fell in Italy while we were there once. Sure, you say, that’s because it was Thursday. And you’re right! And, what’s more, no one even noticed. But there were also austerity protests and riots in the streets of Greece while we were there in that same trip. The Yankee was in Thailand during the 2010 uprising — 70 or so killed and hundreds wounded. She also went to South Korea during the last round of saber rattling. We routinely beat big storms out of somewhere we’re visiting. I’m not saying we caused Brexit or wild fires in Alaska, but they are at least coincidences.

These stories, and there are a lot of stories like this, have all been derived by tourist-type trips. I stopped following chaos in-person years ago after I left the news. (I deleted five sentences with one ancient anecdote here that can best be summed up as: I miss it, conditionality.)

So here we are. Taking careful mini-vacations like people do — or used to do, or like vaccinated people do, or whatever. And wherever we go, something like this follows soon after. The Smith effect and recency bias are very real. Witness these oppressive heatwaves in a part of the country that’s probably just not prepared for them.

But when we were there during the first part of last week, it was lovely. The area was uncrowded, the scenery inspiring, the forecast each day was derived straight from the Chamber of Commerce.

And if you just walk that direction, you’ll be on the beach.

The paths and sidewalks and parking lots were all clean. You don’t notice it until you do, and then you can’t not notice it. You might not want to live there, but they make a great effort to make you want to come back and visit. (They are successful at this. Were it not for the layover and a long flight I’d say we should go again tomorrow.) This is the path that we ran on by the Pacific Coast. I ran about eight miles on this thing.

We touched on the Bell Overlook last week. There’s a brief beginner’s trail to it. You’re not there for the trail. You’re there for the interpretation.

Gymnasts. They just can’t help themselves from interpreting things. She’s even got her toes pointed there. I checked.

The trail is paved and short, but it’s always a wonder to walk through the woods in the Pacific Northwest.

The view is what you’re there for, and it does not disappoint. And if you didn’t see this last week on the site what have you been doing with your time on the Internet? You need to catch up on the catching up because it is really important that you are caught up.

There are a few small battery positions on the trail. They command great views of the Pacific.

But the view inside was even better.

Is it still a photobomb if it is deliberate, rehearsed and several versions are taken?

We’ll have to find that out another day, but not tomorrow. Tomorrow, we’re going to check out the lighthouses. (I’ve charted this out, I’m getting at least two more days of blog posts out of this trip. Go to that part of the world if you can get a chance, is what I’m saying. It’s a pleasant experience. But wait for this heat wave to pass.)

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