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cycling / Friday / photo — Comments Off
29
May 20

Brief notes about a now regular route

At the end of the workday, at the end of the workweek, it was time for a bike ride. And, on Fridays, we ride a bit longer. This involves leaving the usual route through the adjoining neighborhoods and then turning left, instead of going straight.

Going left meant different rollers, and two or three cycles through the same red light, cars parked in the bike lane and a small handful of other indignities to a good ride in the first four miles. After that, though, it moved along nicely.

The next 45 minutes were all on the same road, so you settle in and duck the wind and try your best. We’ve done this route the last three weeks in a row and if you do such a thing often enough you begin to have an understanding of what you can do over such roads. Sometimes you do your best, which is great! And sometimes your legs and your mind and your bicycle have formed an unconscious understanding of what your best can be and you do even better, which is great! And sometimes it just isn’t in you and you underperform. Which is, you know, just great.

Anyway, you do your best until you pass through two little communities and over the county line where you can enjoy a short and steep downhill. After that you turn left and run along a causeway over a lake for three miles or so. And it was somewhere in there that I set a New Personal Best Top Speed of 49.1 miles per hour.

And, boy, are my jokes tired.

Right after that, the road goes up and away from the lake and there’s one stiff hill you have to get over. Eventually, you take a few turns and you’re back on that first long road and headed back toward where you started. It let me breakaway from The Yankee for about 20 miles before she caught me in traffic.

And soon, at around mile 30, we caught up to these nice people:

I’ve read about people on bike tours using pool noodles. And now I have seen a family do it. That one guy is hauling two kids on a pull-along, and they all count as cyclists. After we did a big circle we saw them again from the other direction. They waved and said hello and we waved and said hello and I hope they were having a fine a time on their bikes as we were having.

Got to the house at precisely the right time:

And began to think I should start adding some serious miles back into my routine. Some how. Some when.

photo / running / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
27
May 20

I almost had to use the “overwriting” category here. Almost.

Here’s a little video clip I shot on a walk last weekend. Things just land in your phone and it’s easy to forget about them amid the rapidly accumulated photos and duplicates and, who are we kidding, we’re never trimming these things down to manageable numbers.

While you watched that I removed 15 photos from my camera roll.

There are now 3,958 photos on my camera roll. Even if I could, even if I wanted to delete 15 shots a day — and after a few days you start talking about some real choices, right? — I’d have an empty phone in just under 10 months.

Still, phones are better than wallet photos. And there’s just so many you can scroll through!

The next time you’re with some people, whenever that is, time how long it takes for someone to whip out a phone for kid or pet pics or to show you the meme they found on the way over. It’s startling. Phones come out much faster than wallets ever did. We are a visual society in almost every respect.

Pro tip: Words? Written words are visuals too.

See?

Now, you could say the word quickly loses all meaning, and you’d be right. I would say there was a severe oxygen deprivation going on yesterday’s run and that, furthermore, it is bad design to prove a point. There are 10 different fonts there, which is seven to 10 more than necessary, depending on who you ask. They are thrown together all slapdash just so I could flesh this out with another paragraph or two. I would also be correct.

We’re into the silly season now — a season we never seem to leave anymore — and so we’d do well to remind ourselves that two people can disagree with one another but still share common cause, find ourselves with different ranked priorities, but still behave with common accord and that there are often times degrees or even kinds of accuracy. It’s not a question of whether the sky is blue or the grass is mauve, but how many fonts you see there.

And if you see 10, you are also mistaken, because that doesn’t allow for the national triathlon championship fonts on the hat, which are blurry to the point of being obscure. Sometimes, when we are right, we are wrong, because we don’t know or see it all. It’s a difficult thing to acknowledge, one’s impenetrable personal surety. It’s a pride thing, a fear of weakness thing, an inability to show vulnerability thing, a tedious thing.

Sort of like this run was tedious!

(Phew! That was a close one, no?)

I didn’t even record the run in my app, because my app failed. We can both agree that the app was not right. We can also agree, because I will bear to you this testimony: it was not a good run on my part, but it did complete the standard issue neighborhood 5K and change.

Today I had a fast bike ride, so I’ve got that going for me.

memories / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
26
May 20

Well that settles it, I need a better light box

This weekend I was walking around and found a big mound of pea gravel at one of the near condominiums. I like that gravel. It always reminds me of home, traipsing around in creeks, playing in the woods, filling days with the wonder and curiosity of a child with far too much energy and enthusiasm.

I could stand beside a stream and peer through those rocks for ages, looking for interesting shapes and colors, hoping to find a cool arrowhead and never doing it. But always finding crinoids and being fascinated by them. (I found those last month, and now there’s something else to collect. I’ll try to do it without lamenting all of those that I put back over the years.)

Anyway, those rocks always make me think of summers and things I had and people I’ve lost and wishing for ways to get them back, if only in your mind and only for a moment.

And this weekend I found a few that had some nice sedimentary pieces. The color changes were interesting.

I saved the best ones for last, so keep scrolling.

And here’s the thing to notice here. Look how the photo quality changes.

These are all in a cardboard light box. You can see tons of DIY guides online, and I was just rushing through this today, but the point of a light box is quality and consistency.

This one isn’t getting it done anymore. And the rushing didn’t help. Plus, you’re always just working around an extra cardboard box.

Instead of all of that, I’m going to wind up making a more substantial, third version. Because the subjects in them should all look like this:

That rock is cool and that picture is great. The background blends right in to the page’s background, which is the point.

I know this is what you’re here for, random observations about half-baked projects, and pictures of even more random objects. I could have told you about today’s sweaty run or this morning’s Zoom meeting. Or the Zoom meeting that came after that. I wonder if I could run during a Zoom meeting. There’s always the emailing. I can get 300 words discussing email as easy as putting on a comfortable t-shirt. I could write another 450 or so words out of how many of them don’t get replies.

I started watching a documentary in Spanish! We could discuss that. And I’m looking forward to a bike ride tomorrow.

This evening was the highlight of the day. We had a two-hour Zoom chat with some of our students, just for fun. It’s so nice to hear from them and see them interact with one another and to watch them laugh.

The theme tonight was show and tell, and it was a big hit. One guy showed off a choice baseball jersey from his massive collection. Another showed a cool bat collection he has, including one he got at his bar mitzvah. Someone talked about a really cool plant, there was a camera and some celebrity photos. One guy showed us his grandfather’s sailing trophies, which was also really cool.

Show and tell, it turns out, is still pretty awesome. Give it a try. And if your crowd isn’t receptive to it, consider the crowd.

I didn’t show off these rocks. Maybe next time I’ll show off a new light box.

adventures / Monday / photo / swimming — Comments Off
25
May 20

Happy Memorial Day

A Memorial Day unlike any other. There was no pageantry observed, no war films watched. The Yankee did use the grill. The day sped by with little tangible achievement. Went for a bike ride, threw yet another flat and so, in disgust, I limped back home. The day went by quickly, somehow.

The cats are doing just fine. Phoebe is surveying her queendom.

And one recent evening we were doing some work on the bed frame, which found the mattress standing on it’s end. Poseidon climbed up the underside of it and walked along the top.

We had a great time with that. Enjoyed it so much, laughed so hard, did I, that I couldn’t even be frustrated with the cat. And I said so. I’m not even mad. This is good stuff!

It was when he prepared to walk on top of the door that I stopped laughing and taking pictures.

The biggest news of the day was that we went to the lake and The Yankee got in a quick swim. I stood by as lifeguard and chief photographer.

I said, your suit is buoyant, so if you cramp up, just sit there and float until I can get out to you.

With the pools being closed this was her first swim, since early March, and finally, I guess, the lakes are starting to warm up. She was very excited about all of this.

And so were the other people at the lake. Three other swimmer at our inlet. Several people were preparing to put in kayaks. It felt like a summer day. A mid-summer day, the sort you enjoy and file away and don’t really catalog, not a holiday, not a day that marks the informal beginning of a season, but just a regular, muted day. Maybe that’s what it was. The whole of it seemed muted. A fuzzy reflection of a copy of some far off summer that is well out of reach. The peonies are blooming, the grill is cooking and the sun is finally warming things up, but this summer already feels lesser in most every respect.

Maybe that’ll make it feel more like a summer, somehow.

cycling / Friday / photo — Comments Off
22
May 20

Got bread? I know how you can make others jealous

Well, we made it to the weekend. Treat yo’self for that.

It’s warm here now, and that’s nice. We’re in the 70s, and just 48 hours after jackets were required. So summertime acclimation has hardly begun. For now, it’s nice and it’s Friday and that’s more than enough.

We had a nice 32-mile ride around one of the lakes today. I only dropped my fuel and then my sunglasses. And then I got dropped on the back third of the route. The Yankee was cooking today.

You know who else was cooking was this guy, George Rabich, celebrated baker of Allentown, Pennsylvania.

We were doing a little casual genealogy research this evening and I ran across that New Year’s ad. It seems an odd bit of clip art, but, really, how many different pieces of New Years lead would a 1916 newspaper keep in their typesetting cabinets?

We followed along, and apparently 1916 was a good year for the baker. He’s in the local paper quite a bit. You could get some luxury bread in early May of that year. And needles! Needles were still like a currency in Allentown that spring, I guess.

Probably there’s a good reason. Hemming clothes or something, I’m sure.

Later in May, and it hasn’t yet occurred to anyone to specify that the needles were not in the bread.

The needles are not in the bread, people! You may eat and break and dip our bread without concern for your gums! The needles will be in a package on the side. We keep them entirely separate of the luxury bread here in the bakery.

Now, the blue collar bread? Needles for days.

By June, and no, I did not actually see this coming, they’ve realized the problem. Our bakery is one of the cleanest in town! Guaranteed! Healthful! Unless you’re the one guy in Allentown with a gluten problem, then you should probably stay away.

But everyone else! Clean! Healthful! Ask our customers! They’ll tell you Rabich bread is some of the cleanest bread in town. And they give you needles!

All of those were 1916, and before there were needles, there were prizes for kids!

Bring in your wrappers and get a bike, or a jump rope. Be the envy of all.

I bet all the neighborhood kids are sizing each other up over jump robes and strider bikes. He’s got that and bread? Maaaaa!