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cycling / Monday / photo / video — Comments Off
2
Feb 26

When you rebrand the weather, I am over the weather

Monday. February. Groundhog’s Day and all of that. Still snow and ice on the ground. Hasn’t budged a micro, hasn’t melted a gram. In a group chat the other day I pointed out that none of my friends back home could say anything to me about their weather until we’d been above freezing for two days in a row. As it happens, tomorrow might be the second day. It did hit 32 today. We are promised 35 for tomorrow. And so, now, another post about how the weather has impacted everything. (This snow fell 10 days ago. I’ve not had too many snows in my life where the stuff just … stayed around. I can think of two. And, quite frankly, it has lost its appeal.

Saturday around midday I was out trying to widen the driveway a bit. We’d carved out a path last week just wide enough for a vehicle and, somehow, it was only just wide enough. Well, finally I got tired of that and so I gripped the shovel firmly and determinedly, and went to work. In that time I dug out the spot behind where my car is parked in the garage, and what I estimate the space necessary behind it to do the back and turn maneuver. I also tried to chip away at a few other places that were troubling. Working up a sweat in a long-sleeved t-shirt, I used our biggest shovel to bend the ice to my will for an hour. Until, that is, my back was bent against my will.

About that time my lovely bride returned home from her morning activities and midday grocery run. We did the grocery system. She carries in an arm full of groceries and I try to carry everything else in, so she can pretend to fuss at me. In the kitchen, with all of the bags on the island, I hand her things for the refrigerator. And then I hand her the things going into the freezer. And then I hand her the things going in the pantry. Finally, I stack up the bags and put them back out in the garage for her car. There’s nothing to it, but we do this every week and it’s also important.

Speaking of the kitchen island, I happened to be in just the right place to catch this bit of anarchistic artistry.

It was how Poseidon brought the spatula to the floor, looked around and walked off. Usually, when he does cat stuff like this, he owns it. He will sit by the thing he has knocked over or broken and wait until you see it, and him with it. It’s admirable, even as it is frustrating. But, here, he just walked off. Maybe it was because a rubber spatula can’t shatter, and there’s nothing to leak.

Somehow, we both managed to stifle our laughter until he’d left the scene of the his vandalism. We wouldn’t want him to feel he was being praised for all of this, after all.

To get away from the snow and the ice — snowcrete they are calling it — I went to Tokyo for an hour or so. Saturday night, I renamed the basement “Tokyo.”

The thing about Rouvy I haven’t figured out yet is everything. This was a flat route, according to the ride profile I saw before I started pedaling. There were was a tiny bit of climbing, but nothing to write home about. The profile I saw after the ride was … lumpy.

It was 26 miles through the various parts of Tokyo. Whoever recorded this most have done so in the very early morning. There was almost no one on the roads, as you can see from that image. Also, there were a lot of red lights, and the video seemed to catch them all. It is not at all demoralizing to be pedaling your little heart out, to see your avatar pedaling his little digital heart out, but you’re not going anywhere.

Anyway, it was a good sweat. I just have to do it more. Someone motivate me.

The weather is absolutely not motivating me. It is not motivating me precisely when it should be. One day this weather will not be our weather. One day we’ll emerge from the ice age. It will not be this day, for we are still solidly, firmly, in the Pleistocene Epoch.

Right in the middle, I would assume.

Here’s the view of yesterday’s sunset from my office window.

I think I spent all day at my desk. I’m not sure what I did with all of that time. Some work was done. But there was more work to be done today. We’ll get into that tomorrow, though.

adventures / basketball / Friday / Philadelphia / photo — Comments Off
30
Jan 26

Starts with birds, ends with birds, has other birds in between

We — the cats and I — were watching BirbTV this morning. I might have, for a time, been more interested than the kitties. It was when this beautiful cardinal showed up. She waited patiently, and then waited some more. She approached the bird feeder, then hopped away to a distant branch, and then came back again. You’ll have to forgive the quality of the photo, I was stretching my phone’s digital zoom and shooting through a double-pane window. It was, however, a beautiful bird.

That’s looking to the east. I also stood and looked to the west, taking three photographs before the chill chased me back indoors. The windchill was three degrees. I walked out there in jeans and a long sleeve shirt and house shoes.

Pretty soon we get to the Stockholm Syndrome portion of the winter which, in this case, is when I look up the weather in Stockholm and see that it is essentially the same.

Sigh.

I had only one meeting today, which allowed me the time to catch up on the week’s reading, grading, and make sure my prep for next week is at least underway. (Sunday I’ll start next week’s reading, and Monday I’ll prepare a lecture. And this is the course of most weeks for a while. Unless I get a bolt of energy and get ahead of lecture prep. But that’s never happened, so I am not counting on it.) The meeting today was a virtual meeting.

Have you ever been in a presentation where the presenter reads from their slides? The only thing better than being in a presentation where the presenter is reading from their slides is being in a virtual presentation where the presenter is reading from their slides.

The slides, to be fair, were helpful. I downloaded them for later, and mostly kept making sure I was on mute so the giggles and chuckles didn’t break through the reading. Of the slides. Which were on the screen.

We went over the river tonight and made a little history. Unrivaled, the 3-on-3 women’s basketball league. There was a doubleheader, and also history. The crowd set a new record for attendance of a regular season women’s basketball game. There were 21,490 people announced. They watched the Breeze and the Phantom, both teams filled with stars the crowd knew.

The Phantom won, 71-68. I like the timing rules. They play on a slightly smaller court — which changes the style of play — and then play three 7-minute quarters. In the fourth quarter it’s a race, first to plus-11. At the end of the 3rd, the score was 53-60, so the first team to 71 would be the winner. That format takes out a lot of the timeout and fouling gamesmanship that characterizes the traditional version of the sport. And it adds tension, too. I assume that at that stage of the game the fatigue is setting in for one team and desperation for the other, because that race to the final score was frantic, and fun.

It’s also meant to speed up the game, which it seemed to do. But there’s a flaw in the doubleheader setup. The time between the two games was interminable, even with the assistance of the hype squad, the mic woman (who had to be paid in Red Bull, for she was, herself very hype), and also a local rapper who has a big viral hit. The second game was set to begin at 9:30, and it started at about 9:40. It was between the Rose and the Lunar Owls, which is a great team name, obviously.

Maybe there’s a media component to this, there can’t be any other reason to drag out a 9:30 start. You are certainly not waiting for anyone to get into the venue at that point. But you are getting in the way of my dinner.

The Lunar Owls won 75-85, on the strength of Marina Mabrey’s 47 points, including the game winner. She had 27 of those in the first quarter, which is a league record, and the hoop must have looked 12-feet wide for her. She’s played all over the world, but grew up about an hour away. Must have been a nice homecoming.

Anyway, back to my dinner. We ordered Chick-fil-A from a nearby store. Went through the drive-thru. They’ve updated their app and now there’s no upsell point. This is why that’s a problem. You plug in your order, put in your car, and now, instead of seeing a person, you scan a QR code when you get there. Used to be, that person would confirm the order. They’d ask “Would you like to add anything?” But now there’s not an option for that. What if you’d changed your mind? What if you needed to add something? We got our sandwiches and then went through again, just to prove the point, and also to get a milkshake.

The new app and mobile ordering process violates Smith’s First Rule of Economics (1997): Don’t make it hard for me to spend my money with you.

It’s an ironclad rule.

cycling / maps / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off
28
Jan 26

I am so far ahead I can see tomorrow

Lovely day, if you like living at a pole, and the color white, and ice everywhere. I’ve been trying to count how many times I’ve experienced a snow that persisted — this snow came down Sunday and will be with us for at least another week. It is a small number of experiences. And now there’s talk of another snow system this weekend.

I’d like to just … not. I still have shovel shoulders from Sunday and Monday.

Productive day, today. Emails were fired off with abandon. I prepared two lectures. This was made all the trickier because we did not have classes on Tuesday, and because we are right at the beginning of the term, where I am trying to set up the definitions and paradigms we’ll be using throughout the semester.

For my Criticism class, where I told them I would lecture this week and they would see why the rest of the semester is conversation-based, I’ll have 75 minutes to try to make the points that should take up about two hours worth of material. Also, I am Frankensteining two lectures to do that. Duct tape and PowerPoint presentations will see me through. What could go wrong? In my Rituals and Traditions class I will combine a brief guest appearance with some further elaboration on the slides I sent them online on Tuesday. Again, two days in one, just to set the tone for the entire class. What could go wrong?

Students in my online class received the second of three notes they’ll get from me this week. This one was a 791-word, tightly written, well-edited walkthrough of a sequence of the course that amounts to 20 percent of their grade. I put a lot of time into that letter because I know how much students are inclined to read these days. And I’ve been working on it over the course of three semesters now. (Given my process for these messages, that means it’s gone through at least nine editing passes at this point.) It is a good letter. Helpful, expressive, detailed, precisely to the point at hand. I send it to their inbox and post it on our class CMS. Now I just have to hope they’ll give it a look.

Perhaps the most productive thing I did today, though, was lay out the rest of my week. The least productive thing I’ll do the rest of the week is ignore most of that plan.

The best thing I’ll do is highlight the kitties, because they’re famous and popular, just ask them. So let’s do that.

If you like belly rubs, raise your paw.

Phoebe really likes belly rubs. She held her paw up for a good long while … just so long as the belly rubs continued.

The birds are feasting at the feeder, because, I think, several of their food sources are under a lot of snow and ice.
And so BirbTV has been a big hit around here. So much so that Poseidon doesn’t even care what he’s standing on, so long as he gets a closer look.

The cats are doing just fine. Though they would also like it to be just a bit warmer.

I wonder how it registers when they look out of the windows and see how different things are with so much white stuff on the ground. Lately, though, I’ve noticed they’re not as keen on trying to get outside as normal. It feels like four below out as I write this.

This evening I got away from the cold and went to Torano, Italy, where it is somehow 30 degrees warmer than here. I’m not saying we’re packing up and moving, but this was a delightful little valley ride. You can see it here.

Rouvy puts you in a video that someone recorded, and layers your avatar over the footage. As you can see from this screengrab, I was riding in the Italian summer.

And look at that mountain up ahead, there’s still snow up there. Here’s a few of that same feature, a few miles farther along in my ride.

Those cyclists are not a part of my ride. They are real people that were captured on the video. If I rode this route again, I suspect I’d seem them at pretty much the same spot, no matter how slow or fast I’d gone. (I averaged about 24 miles per hour on this ride (it had some nice downhills), which is the best ride I’ve had in a while. I churned out almost 600 watts for a bit, and regretted it the rest of the way.) Same for the other two people I caught up to, who I caught at a left-hand turn. They put out their hands to signal the turn and it looked like they were waving at me as I went by. I’ll see them in that valley again, should I visit. Or so I suppose. And my avatar would catch the same red light in Grosotto, or Lovero, whichever little village I was breezing through. My avatar just disappeared for a moment, while the video (and the car or whatever was shooting the footage) worked through the stop. A blip that felt like a Twilight Zone moment, which would be fun, if everyday didn’t already have a hefty dose of them.

Tomorrow, we’ll go to campus. I wonder what the roads will be like.

adventures / family / memories / Monday / photo / video — Comments Off
26
Jan 26

Winter and weddings

Here’s the update from high noon. At least the sun was out, which was an improvement over yesterday. Also, there was no precipitation today, which was a glorious change of pace after yesterday.

We went back out in the late afternoon to chip away at more of the drive, thinking the sunlight might help, though it still felt like it was 10 degrees. Maybe it did. This is the system we adapted today. It is pretty good, if only because we had a lot of driveway in which to experiment.

I took the larger snow shovel and, standing in the middle of the drive, I would ram it underneath the frozen solid slab of ice that covered all of the earth. After two or four big pushes a few feet were carved out. My lovely bride, standing in front of me, and with a slightly smaller shovel, and one designed with a much better angle for, ya know, shoveling, would scoop those chunks into the yard. I worked around her, scooping up and chopping the left and right sides. This shovel is large enough that three rounds would just about clear the width of the drive. I figured that attacking the middle intimidated the flanks, because those were always a bit easier to bust up. In the places the ice got stubborn, I turned the shovel onto its corner and give a little axe-like tap. Working like this, we made our way down the drive, clearing off about 990 square feet in an hour.

Then we helped dig out the new neighbors. They have two little kids, and it was still ridiculously cold, never mind that I ditched my jacket. So mom and dad were taking turns with the kids inside, and the drive outside. Welcome to the neighborhood, nice to finally meet you.

Our other neighbor, Joe the Elder, was out on his tractor trying to plow the three neighborhoods for which he is responsible. No one gave him this job. He took it on himself. And it’s a good thing, despite the many taxes we pay, we are not the recipients of any road cleaning services. During last weekend’s snow was the first time in three winters I’ve seen a snowplow go down the road that wasn’t Joe the Elder. He must have been lost.

My lovely bride walked out of the neighborhood to see the big road, by which we mean a two-lane county highway. It is not in great shape. The local school districts have all canceled classes again tomorrow. I have just uploaded some reading materials for my students. There are a lot of country roads between our house and campus and I’d already heard from about 15 percent of my students that they weren’t going to risk it, anyway. I do not blame them. I commend the wisdom of the safe decision. We’ll catch up Thursday and next Tuesday, if necessary. (It’ll be necessary, but we’ll do it.)

As it says in the video, above, we dug out Sunday. You see why that’s necessary, but you also realize it is a Sisyphean task. I believe it snowed and sleeted and iced after that dig-out as it had before hand.

We got eight inches, easy. But even more on the leeward side of the house, where the sidewalk sits, blown off the roof no doubt.

That was Sunday. We were contemplating how to handle the drive today and I said, Are you expecting any deliveries this week? No? We’re not shoveling the sidewalk.

Saturday, before the storm blew in, we went out to celebrate my god-parents-in-law (just go with it) 50th anniversary. It was partially a surprise. It was supposed to be last weekend, on their actual anniversary, but that got snowed out. Their daughters hustled to get it in today, else we might have just celebrated in the summer.

It went like this. They’d rented a room at the happy couple’s favorite Italian restaurant. Much of their family came, some old work friends came, and so on. They just expected the immediate family for dinner, so the surprise was this full room. My godfather-in-law is a retired teacher, and I sat next to two of his former colleagues. The easiest way to say it is that the stories your teachers have about their lives away from school will really make you second-guess every opinion you had of these people. These two guys were no different.

Dinner was served. Vows were renewed, as officiated by one of their daughters. Photographs were taken. Cake was distributed. This was the cake topper.

Their actual wedding cake topper. (The groom was not wearing a black tux in 1976. It was a much better tuxedo.) One of their son-in-laws pulled it from safe storage when they weren’t looking so it could be used again Saturday. They’d asked all of the guests to prepare pages of a scrapbook, memories of family and friends for half a century. It was lovely.

My father-in-law, the best man at their wedding, gave a toast Saturday, much as he did so long ago. He did a great job. My mother-in-law gave a little speech. These two wouldn’t have been together if not for my in-laws. The two men were childhood best friends. They’ve known each other 70 years. The two women went to nursing school together, and were roommates there. They met at my in-laws’ wedding. My in-laws had the one daughter, and they are her godparents. They had two daughters, and my in-laws are their godparents.

Not the whole of the dinner party, but that immediate family — the happy couple, their daughters’ families, my in-laws, us — returned to their house for a few minutes after dinner. The still-blushing bride pulled out her wedding album. I saw photos of both of their parents — two of which I had the chance to meet a few times. She pulled out her wedding dress, which has been carefully sealed in a cardboard picture box all of these years.

Fifty years.

Fifty years, and one week. Count the weeks. That’s 2,601 weeks. Count the days. That’s 18,269 days, as of Saturday. Lovely people; they built a fine life and a wonderful family. They said it was about this cold that day, too.

photo / Rowan / Thursday — Comments Off
22
Jan 26

How you get there

So focused was I on the tasks of the day that I was about three-quarters of the way to campus before I realized that I’d gone the wrong way. There are several routes, of course. But you might want to wind up one one side of campus, and so you go this way. Or, if you want to arrive on the other side of the place, you’d take this turn, much earlier.

I wanted to do the latter, but we were almost there when I realized I’d done the former.

You’d like a story to start better than that. I mean that both the general and the specific sense. You’d like a story to start better than that. And you’d like a story to start better than that. But this is what else I’ve got. I woke up, did the morning reading, had a bite to eat. I sent a note to my online students. (I write them several times a week.) I finished getting ready — swapping out pocket squares several times — and then pulled my backpack together for the day.

The drive was far, far, more interesting, I know.

Two classes today. I walked right into the Rituals and Traditions class and we talked about sports for an hour, which was good fun. At the end, I summed it up, how all of these things allow us, encourages us, and gives us permission to feel passionately about something as silly as sports. Sure, I said, it’s important. And you can make that case in a number of ways. But, really, boil all of that away, and it is silly. And it is also important. That’s why we’re all here, in this class, in this program, after all.

After, I held office hours. No one stopped by. I did a bunch of work. I wrote a former student back. I received a lovely thank you note yesterday, and it deserved a careful reply. The rest of that time I spent making sure my Criticism class was ready. In that one, we also talked sports for a while, just trying to get everyone talking. And then I gave them two quick pages of notes, just the basics of criticism, what it might mean and how we’re going to apply it.

I started to learn a few names today. There are 46 or 47 people. I’m bad at that. It’s a shortcoming. I’m aware of it, and I dislike it. It takes me forever, but this term I have a head start. I know about 10 of these students already, and I look forward to getting to know the rest.

The days are getting a bit longer. Oh, such a happy sentence! We drove home and admired the sunset along the way.

There was an explosion in the sky. Unfortunately, the power lines were on the west side of the road for that portion of our commute. It took a while to get to an open space. By then, the colors had shifted, growing smaller but no less intense. In a way, it was better. Sunset photos are wonderful, but just watching the thing is better.

And, also, driving, of course.

Being in the moment was so much better than this, where I pulled off the side of the road, next to a field that is quietly waiting for spring. Me too, field.

But here was that view.

At least, I thought when I started this evening’s drive, I’m going the right direction.