We went for a bike ride, because that’s what we do, and because it was an abnormally beautiful weekend day. Just the sort that is intent to try to trick you into thinking this is what the whole fall and most of the winter will be like. It won’t be, and that’s a shame. And I can’t get that out of my head, and that’s an equally big shame.
Did I mention it was a great day? Ridiculous. It was 80 degrees, far beyond what anyone here would expect, which is also a shame.
Anyway, we were going out to the lake, but changed our mind to take a slightly different route. Different roads, different traffic — only yelled at twice, by a dude that, feeling he didn’t get it right the first time, decided to let us get by so he could pass us and yell again — and different views.
It was described to me as a nice, easy ride.
I looked down at one point because my legs notified my brain that I was turning over ridiculous RPMs. We’re talking maximum watts, and I’m torquing the handlebars for all they were worth. And that’s how I found myself in a sprint, at 26 miles per hour, just to stay on the Yankee’s wheel.
We were also climbing a hill when that happened.
Down on the causeway:
And a bit of video somewhere between here and there …
Anyway, yesterday was a lovely day for a ride, and we enjoyed it. And we look forward to the next one. (And it better be 80 degrees again!)
I also got to play around with part of this wood carving project I started on Friday:
This is just a test piece. I’ll use a longer piece to create the scoop-bowl volume I want here, and I need to figure out some way to handle the bottom of the bowl. It’s quite rough in there, as you can see, and I’d like to clean that up without having to buy even more stuff. I think this is becoming a scoop for dry cat food, which was the suspicion I had from the beginning. And that needs to be 3/4s of a cup. But if I can get the volume right, smooth out the insides of the real piece and thin the sides and shape the bottom, I’ll have a nice piece.
Or just something else that never works quite the way I intended.
Saturday was probably the last fine day for the foreseeable future. Certainly it’s the last time the weather service has had cause to use their sun graphics in the longterm forecasts. So we are settling in for the long grim winter. I guess we’ll be happier about it in mid-April.
I mean, we’ll be pleased with the change to better weather in mid-April, but you, of course, know I’ll look for new and inventive ways to say the same tired things about this gray place, and why it takes that long to burn off the winter here.
Anyway, we enjoyed the sunshine, and the chilly temperatures, that Saturday offered with a nice little bike ride. Here’s some video from the later parts of it:
The sun was nice, and will be missed.
Today we stood under the gray sky and performed our patriotic duty to vote, or as the kids these days are saying, “We did a democracy.” I’ll be working next Tuesday, and we are afforded some time off for the process, but if you can avoid the lines in a fashion that is presumptively more convenient, you avoid the lines in a fashion that is presumptively more convenient.
It started out under a very attractive maple tree:
A guy comes out of one of those old-homes-converted-to-office space that we're all standing in front of. Says this is the right time to be here. Says it's usually way around there.
The line is already a block long and around the corner. #Democracy! But moving. Also, #democracy!
There's a nice new SUV parked by the line and it's covered in signage for a judicial position on the ballot. (It's within state laws regarding electioneering and distance from the polling place.)
The candidate lists his quals. The last bullet is "Covid-19 survivor."
In all of my voting since the year blah blah blah, in many districts in several states, you never see a more pleasant bunch of people than the ones working at a polling place.
They meant more than the guy who would randomly go “Whoooo! WHO IS READY TO VOTE?!” It’s not a pep rally, friend. But thanks, I guess. Anyway, it took just about an hour. It was easy and inside the office space was a bit perfunctory, practiced, like the last night of a haunted house’s performance, but without the scary part. Aside from a few Boomers, who need to up their mask games, it was well ordered and stress-free.
Early voting in Indiana runs through Nov. 2nd. You can find out the rules for where you are at this link. Then, go educate yourself on the issues — up and down the ballot! — that matter to you, put on a mask and go pull the lever, punch the chad, fill in the bubble or whatever system your local government uses. You, too, can do a democracy!
This was the sky on Saturday. We were at the post office and I shot this through the sunroof.
Some days you feel like you can reach the clouds, and some days you feel like you need a great big ladder.
Some days you feel like you can reach the clouds, and some days you feel like you need a great big ladder. After lunch we went for a bike ride. I include this picture because I love this face. It’s her mean face, and it’s so stinking cute. Also, it means she’s going to ride fast; that’s a very aero mean face.
It was hard and windy and would have been fast, except it was hard, and windy. I was grateful for the turnaround spot, because we stopped to take a picture, and I could briefly catch my breath.
On the back half of the ride the air started to feel a bit cooler. No weather monitoring station reported it. All the numbers I could consult stayed at a steady 62 degrees, but I was out in it; I could tell the change. I got to the house and was happy to get inside, which was instantly when the bronchoconstriction began.
It was painful to breathe for a few minutes. The worst of it was “Would getting on the ground be better for this?” and “How can I tell if this is getting worse?” But it did not get worse. It hurt to breathe fully in, but I could get air. My heart rate was fine, considering the bike ride. I did not have any muscular or cognitive problems. I had a shock to the system, which began improving by the time I made it to the shower.
By last night it just hurt a bit to breathe all the way in, your classic this-was-irritated-yesterday feeling.
Watched this, with some interest, today. It’s New York, 1896. And not all of this is gone.
The upload and upscale is using a software treatment called neural networking. Mathematical functions, artificial neurons, are transforming the lower sourced input values into a higher quality output. The parameters can be altered because the networks are trained with high-res images that are down-sampled. Eventually, photo pairs, thousands of them, get analyzed and the process helps restore lost details. The information is filled in from what the network has learned. The network sees a face because it has been taught “that’s a face!” and it can flesh it out. A low-res building can show off individual bricks. Definition and depth comes with experience and exposure, just like the rest of us.
Then you speed it up, add some sound for ambiance and give it a little post-concussion color and you’re suddenly back in time. Sorta. Almost. It’s tantalizingly close to close.
Here’s a digitized version of “the original footage.” That’s Trinity Church in the background. By 1896 it was the second tallest building in New York City. It was built in 1846 and held the top spot for the best part of five decades. It gave up tallest building honors just before this footage was made to the New York World Building. (The World Building would come down in the 1950s for better car access to the Brooklyn Bridge.)
You can’t even see Trinity Church from that location today.
If you back up, down Broadway, you can guesstimate where, apparently, Alexandre Promio himself was standing when he filmed that.
Now, this footage was shot in New York City just five years later, in 1901. I think all of this is gone. But as interesting as the buildings and the signs and the carriages can be, the people — the guy that walks into, and then out of, the shot, the kid who isn’t yet sure if you’re supposed to mug for the camera, and then the couple at the end — they are what you’re here for.
… Someone will dig up some social media company’s servers in 2140 or so and figure out how to hook up real technology with this stuff we’re working with and then pioneer a way to extrapolate holograms from 1080 and 4K phone video. Won’t that be revealing …
Probably we’ll never know for sure, but I’m going to assume this camera was set up just to the left, on the sidewalk here. There’s a subway stop at this intersection, but just to the left are a series of those air grates there.
If the date on YouTube is correct, New Yorkers are between the first and second American car show right about there. The New York baseball Giants were bad. That September, William McKinley was shot in Buffalo, New York, and Theodore Roosevelt would become president. The subways were coming along nicely. Everything was beginning to really surge. This is what Manhattan looked like from out in the Hudson about that time. A few blocks back downtown you’d find the city’s tallest building in 1901, the Park Row Building, a proud 391-feet tall, is still with us.
Today, 391-feet puts you … nowhere near New York’s top 100 buildings, of course. Some days you feel like you can reach up and touch 391-feet, and some days you realize you’d need that ladder. Harry Gardiner, the human fly, needed no such help to climb the Park Row Building in 1918. He did it in a suit, too.
I am filling the internet with colorful leaves. Flooding your bandwidth with reds and yellows and greens, before they all turn to burlywood, burnt umber and other shades of … brown. And if you don’t like that, just scroll down, and you’ll find another short story about a bicycle ride.
This is a panorama. If you click the image you can see the full size. It’s part of our view in our backyard.
It’s a nice enough view for most of the year:
And look at this maple, blowing it’s last trumpet of the year:
We went for a walk this weekend and I saw this hole in the woods. I’m sure I’ve been through there, but it looks like a tunnel to Narnia or some such just now:
We had a nice time on our little path:
It eventually leads out to this maple, which is having a moment of its own:
And at the end of the path, where it returns to the road, and an empty field opposite:
And we saw this comparatively modest little thing on a sidewalk in one of the neighborhoods we walked by on our way back:
As I wrote here last week I had the 4,032nd flat of the year on Wednesday. I didn’t get a chance to ride again until Saturday. This is how that process worked itself out.
I decided to blame the tire, so I blamed the tire, and threw it out. Gave it a speech and everything. It was … perfunctory.
So I had to put a new tire on the back wheel of my bike. This is why you keep spares in your bike room. Did you know that bike tires come in different sizes? I did. Did you know that I managed to purchase the wrong size tires the last time I bought them? I did not. You can’t put a 650c tire on a 700c wheel, and I knew better than to try.
But! I found an old 700c tire I could use. So I started the process. Tire on wheel, tube in tire, start working it all togeth — oh, that’s why this is an old and used tire. This giant blistered bruised area. Now the mystery is: why did I keep this one?
So I threw out that tire, without a perfunctory speech. I figure it understand the sentiment.
I have still more tires. And they are all my wife’s, and they are racing tires. I considered putting one of those on. They are lighter and aren’t designed for the durability that I so clearly and obviously need.
So I thought about that, because anything worth doing is worth agonizing over for a few minutes. And then I remembered: I have an entire wheelset on my old bike I can cannibalize. So, off came a 700c Gatorskin, which has sat still enough to show off a little indentation. I put it on the good bike, put the new tube in, said a little prayer to the gods of vulcanized rubber, which is probably Vulcan, the god of forge and fire, and pumped it all up.
Well, I have an in with Vulcan. The new tube inflated, and that took care of the shape of the tire. And it all went back on the bike and out we went for a bike road of undetermined duration, because, hey, who knows at this point?
So we rode around our most usual route because, hey, who knows at this point? And we spent our prescribed amount of time pedaling away and I got in 25 miles with no problem.
And I’m climbing up the ranks! This weekend ride put 2020 third in my list of compiled mileage.
Now I’ll just have to see about setting a new high mark. We should be there in just a few more weeks.
Enjoyed a little bike ride in the warmth of Saturday afternoon. We are in that season where it is too chilly to want to ride in the morning. And the evening cools off just in time to go back inside. But, in between, it can be perfect.
So we had the usual bike ride weaving through the nearby neighborhoods and around the eastern side of town. No legs, but plenty of heart, some good smiles and a fine amount of fun.
Not too much fun, just the proper, moderate, amount. Not so much that you overdo it, but enough to make you want to go try to have a similar amount of fun. So, sometime in the next week, I’ll go have another ride with the appropriate amount of enjoyment. Nothing gluttonous, mind you, something perfectly unassuming.
But if I pile on the miles I can collect a personal best for the year.
What to do, what to do.
In addition to this being Catober, it’s also leaf season. It’s a bit dry just now, but maybe that won’t keep us from a nice, long leaf turn. If it hasn’t rained in a while maybe it’ll hold off for another month or so. It’s dry, but rain is nature’s big achoo around here. One shower and the leaves are everywhere. And trees don’t wear masks.
So, as long as it lasts, be warned: the photos around here will be soothing and/or reflective for a while:
The and/or construction is seldom used with great effect, but, I have found, it works when discussing the transitory nature of trees.
There’s also that sky rolling in, the one I dread for most of the next six months or so. The first real indication of that rolled in yesterday.
Autumn isn’t worth it, but I have no say in these things. It happens whether I want it to, or not. I am in the middle of it whether I want to be, or not. So, cheerily, one must find ways to rationalize it and take whatever advantage you can.
The maple in the backyard gives a nice going away present, at least.
It’s weird. You spend the summer dreading the autumn. I don’t mind autumn itself, but it’s signal. When the skies get gray and the tempers swing wildly and the leaves go, I know I’ll spend the autumn dreading the winter and “spring.” There should be a better way to look at that. Yet to find it.
