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hobby / Monday / photo — Comments Off on Photos to start the week
8
Feb 21

Photos to start the week

This weekend we received a red-bellied woodpecker as a backyard guest.

That’s just what they’re called. He didn’t explain the discrepancy. (The red crown distinguishes the gender, by the way.)

Look at this little guy:

One of his friends gave me my best photo yesterday, bird division:

Of course the cats like the birds. They have strategically placed spots with great sight lines of the menagerie taking place just beyond their reach and on the other side of the inexplicable transparent walls.

What must pets imagine of glass, and us?

Anyway, Phoebe is taking a break from the bird watching. She has the most intense relaxation face you can imagine:

Last month we noted that Poseidon likes to watch car chases with us. Apparently they make Phoebe a little more nervous. She couldn’t watch last week’s historic car chase.

Poseidon, meanwhile, has found himself a hammock bridge. Like he needed the help, or a new place to sleep:

Last night he decided to have a bit of water fresh from the mountain stream.

Better than the several bowls he has available to him.

More tomorrow. Check out the Instagram account that Phoebe and Poseidon run. Keep up with me on Instagram, too. And don’t forget my Twitter account.

See you there!

photo / Thursday / Twitter — Comments Off on Questions of a different kind of distance
4
Feb 21

Questions of a different kind of distance

I helped moved a few things from one room to another room today. And, when we were done with that we all sat down, carefully distanced — because we are conscientious about this sort of thing, except for the one guy, who, look, I happened to have a tape measure on me at the time and I ran out several feet of tape and pointed this out and I know you to be a smart individual, step back — and properly masked and all of the usual things, because we’re almost a year into the routine of it, now. Except the one guy, I guess.

Oh, if he were the only one, right? But there’s always the one person, in any walk of life, in any scenario you might think up. Parties, the game, the store, in a social distancing context, there’s always that one individual. And I chant “patience and grace” to myself, and, these days, I’m grateful the mask covers 64 percent of my facial expression.

Anyway, he left, and there’s no point to his presence in this story, or to the story, really. But he went about his day and we all sat down to chat and I sat on a chair that had this sticker on it.

Because, eventually, we all take turns being that guy.

I remember covering a hurricane once where the pre-landfall story of dubious origin was that the authorities were patrolling the areas under evacuation orders and handing out toe tags to anyone that had stuck around. The point being, that there’s a certain type of personality that doesn’t take a hurricane seriously. So, maybe this comparison won’t stand out the way the expert would have hoped. At some point, you get it or you won’t get it. Eleven months in, I’d argue, we’re well past that point. Nevertheless:

The first thing about this is, Well, that was obvious and apparent as a potential problem. The second part is, the sample size is, obviously, demographically skewed. So this is what you’ve have to work from as an observer.

Take this incredible woman’s story, for example.

The third, and equally important thing is, this won’t get better as we slide down the age scale.

What if we brought in the people from Chick-fil-A, Amazon, the IRS and each community’s most successful delivery start up and start a super group?

Don’t you just love when your brain seizes on a bit of history?

I spent some time looking through the online records. Mr. Hall was a man of some achievement and professional notoriety. As always, you’re getting the thinnest of outline notes in newspaper form. But what I’ve learned leaves a lot of interesting questions that you’d like to have answered these many decades hence.

So if anyone knows their grandchildren or great-grandchildren … send them my way for a quick conversation.

cycling / photo / site / Tuesday — Comments Off on This one confuses the dot org space-time continuum, sorry
2
Feb 21

This one confuses the dot org space-time continuum, sorry

There’s a new look to the front page. And now I know what that’s supposed to look like. Click on the image below to check it out.

I’m really looking forward to the next update of the front page — probably in the next week or so. It’ll really hit the theme’s design.

Last night I did an amazing thing. I was riding up a hill on the bike trainer, turning out more watts than the session demanded, because the session didn’t seem especially demanding, and I had a flat. I developed a little pinhole on an indoor ride. So I stopped my ride because you can’t ride on a flat. It was almost dinnertime, anyway. So I’ll just have to re-do that workout later this week.

I looked it up. You can get a flat on a trainer in the traditional ways. But there’s no debris in my tire or in the wheel rim. So this must have been a trainer flat, which means I was super-heating the thing.

Yeah, there probably was something in the wheel that put the little hole in the tube, but it’s more fun to imagine I friction-burned the thing into submission.

(I wrote this part Wednesday, but it pertains to Tuesday and Wednesday.) I almost fell asleep, three or four times, watching a car chase tonight. Because I was tired, and it was late, and the chase lasted all night, and four hours into the morning.

This is what happened. At 10:19 p.m. we got the notification that NBC LA was in the air following a car. The driver was wanted as a possible suspect in a shooting. The gang division had been following him and he wasn’t going to go easy into that good night. He raced across surface streets, living the charmed life of someone who is ignoring every light, a charmed life until, suddenly it isn’t.

But he managed to work his way through two parts of greater L.A. and onto the interstate system. He raced along the freeways. And then he started going slower. And then slower. And much, much slower. After a time, he would crawl to a stop, the police cars would line up in their traffic stop configuration and he would drive away again.

It was amusing at first, until it became boring. And he did it so much it became amusing again. And then just frustrating. But you’re invested in the thing by then. And that’s the problem, because you figure “I’m invested in this thing now. What’s a satisfactory outcome?” You don’t watch chases for bad things to happen. I don’t want to see any innocent people also on the road getting hurt. I don’t want to see this guy get shot. I also don’t want him to get away. So I, secretly, cheer for a foot chase and then a good solid linebacker-style tackle of the suspect who is, in this case, considered armed and dangerous.

At about 4 a.m., seriously, and after about two hours of slow crawling on three flats, he finally drove the rim off the driver front side of the car. This, as we know, brings the car portion of any chase to its conclusion. Police were content to let this play out on it’s own time because the driver had turned this into a slow-speed chase hours ago. They didn’t want to PIT him, because you don’t want to go nose-to-nose with a guy who is carrying a weapon.

Within five seconds of that rim falling off, and the car going down to its drive axle, the local NBC lost its feed. For about 60-75 seconds NBCLA was offering me one of those video autoplays that play every story other than the one you want.

When I got the feed back the driver was out of the car and standing on the closed highway. He’s got his hands up. He’s facing away from the officers while the cops are doing whatever cops do there. It takes forever. The dude puts his arms down. They command him to raise his arms again, he turns and yells to them back over his shoulder, and raises his arms. Until he lowers them again. More yelling. He raises them. He lowers them. On and on this goes.

Until the helicopter had to leave again for fuel consumption. (This was their third helo of the chase, mind you.) So after a six hour chase, about 5:40 of THAT being on camera, NBCLA couldn’t even get the apprehension.

Their story this morning notes he had two outstanding wants for felony burglary. No weapon was found.

Guess who’s dragging around tired eyes today?

Monday / photo — Comments Off on Mid-winter week
1
Feb 21

Mid-winter week

It is sloppy and slushy out there. And cold, bitter, bitter cold. I went in a half hour later than normal. Let someone else’s car warm up the roads a bit. We live in the county, but the city limit is literally just down our road. Our road is never plowed, despite the man who lives on the street who has two trucks with mounted plows. I assume it’s a contractual and liability issue, and maybe one day I’ll see him out and ask him about it. Maybe I can take up a gas money collection to get a path cleaned on our road.

After that first residential street, you find that the next one wasn’t snow and slush and a touch of ice. It was just wet slush. The road after that was just wet. The one after that was basically dry. So, waiting for others to get out and about was a good plan.

Tomorrow it will all be melting. Oh, sweet optimism!

It will be cold, but perhaps not bitterly so. And! It will be sunny, and some of the snow will melt. That picture is from Friday, before the weekend’s weather, which gave us a full blanket. Seeing that melt away will be a treat. But you can’t take too much of that. It’ll get worse before it gets better.

The cats are taking it all in stride, because they stay inside. They don’t want to, but that’s just because they don’t really understand snow. They, of course, understand cold. They’re always burrowing into something, as you learned last week.

Phoebe had a casual Saturday night:

Yesterday, she had a big day of yoga:

This is how she gets down after a cuddly nap. She wants her belly rubbed, and then she’ll stretch out like this for a while and then push off the chair and roll forward. It’s quite athletic.

Poseidon wants you to know he knows how handsome he is:

Sometimes his cuteness makes up for what we’ve termed his high-spiritedness. Sometimes.

He’s listening to The Yankee walking around upstairs. It’s a very intriguing part of the evening. She’s getting ready to call it a night and if the cats didn’t immediately follow her upstairs we have a few moments of this.

Then it is a big sprint! Something more fun than this is happening up there!

Isn’t that just the way of things?

Friday / Instagram / photo — Comments Off on Let’s weekend
29
Jan 21

Let’s weekend

It snowed and then it stayed and then it finally melted a bit, just in time for more snow this weekend. But, today, I got back to the house at the end of the work day and found snow melting off the roof. It was a sunny, but cold, afternoon. The water poured off the corner in a great stream, a little more than the gutters could handle. And below that corner is a little bush. It faces north and sits in an almost day-long shadow, so we had a nice little shrubcicle:

Here’s the sun going down on the woods in the back yard:

And while I was outside watching that, I heard the honking of the Canada geese. They were flying northwest, away from Old Man Thompson’s place.

I’m not sure where they were headed. There is one retaining body nearby on their line of travel, or they could be moving over to check out some of the creeks. Too bad they aren’t going home for the season, because that would mean the seasons were changing. But, as we said, more snow this weekend. And sometime after that the real cold stuff arrives.

Here’s today’s sunset, and that’s a perfectly fine, meditative way to get into the weekend:

Any big plans? I know some of you have big plans. I’ve seen your Instagram accounts.

See you Monday. Until then, check out my Instagram. And did you know that Phoebe and Poseidon have an Instagram account? Also, be sure to keep up with me on Twitter as well. And if you need some podcasts, On Topic with IU has plenty of helpful episodes for you, as well.

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