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cycling / Monday / photo / podcast / video — Comments Off
27
Apr 20

There’s a podcast and a botched bike ride and some pics

And how was your weekend? Did you know you just had one of those? We’re all making that joke, now. It’s starting to work its way into television commercials, which is how you know the zeitgeist approves of the usage. But we should also remember that not everyone is in the same at-home condition. And there’s a lot of variance in the stay-at-home concept, of course. And some people don’t have a traditional weekend on Saturdays and Sundays. But you can’t address all of those in one joke, for punchline purposes. You really can’t do it in a small talk shorthand. And you definitely shouldn’t start a long post with it either.

That’s what I learned this weekend.

The cats had a fine time of it. Phoebe at dinner time:

And here’s Poseidon enjoying an afternoon lounging in the sunshine.

And speaking of Poseidon, here’s a cat video:

He never does catch the light. If you sit with that for a few minutes you can make a terrific story. And then you begin to wonder: do cats have revenge stories because of the things we write in our heads, or do we write those tales because cats just fundamentally have revenge on their minds?

Today the cat – light story is about a creature watching a flattened version of a Big Bang. It could be that he has no idea of understanding what he’s seeing. Or maybe he knows precisely what he’s seeing. Maybe that’s where the wonder is.

We could all use a little more wonder these days.

It was a chamber of commerce kind of yesterday, and so we went for a walk in the afternoon.

The flowers I fell for.

No, really, I fell. That was going to be how I started this post, but that sounds scary, and I’m fine. Jammed my shoulder up a little bit. It aches today and it’ll be sore for another day or two and it’ll be fine, I promise.

It was quick trip. The mud slipped out from underfoot and I stuck my arm out, thinking at the last moment I should tuck instead. So I did that, but not completely enough. Mostly it just hurt my pride and got my clothes dirty. So, yeah, I shot a video because if you suffer you should make some art out of it, or something.

That was all the weekend.

Today, I published this conversation with IU’s vice president for research, Fred Cate.

It was fascinating, I asked him to touch on all these different kinds of research, covering a big handful of disciplines from multiple schools on two or three campuses and he got them all. He’s really good at giving overviews. And there’s some great quotes in there. I like the one near the end, about how you’d be hard pressed to find some slice of life in the state (and beyond) not being touched by IU’s coronavirus research. It’s impactful.

I want to talk about all of them.

The view of the sky from just before our bike ride:

It was a weirdly frustrating ride all the way around. But the important thing is that today was hill repeats. Which means finding a hill and going up it over and over again. It makes you a stronger climber and, brother, I need that.

The really important thing is that today hill repeats meant going up the hill just four times before I had another flat. Allow me to visualize this for you:

That’s four flats in the last two weeks, and under Gatorskins, too. Gatorskins being an ultra tough tire meant to protect the fragile little inner tubes. So me and the Gators and the Mavic rims are going to have a long talk tomorrow, because this is getting expensive.

Have a great start to your week, which may or may not be well underway, or even great. But if it ain’t, do try to make it so.

adventures / cycling / Friday / photo / video — Comments Off
24
Apr 20

Riding into the weekend, and then walking into it

For reasons I’m beginning to understand only a bit, and am not quite yet equipped (or perhaps inspired, or both) to remedy, the videos I shoot on my phone look like compressed garbage when I upload them. What is this, 2012?

Anyway, here’s a little bit of today’s cross-county-line ride. Before the turnaround, and well before today’s flat. So sick of flats.

This, too, was before the flat. Good thing, as this was well away from the house. But you aren’t thinking about any of that when you see turkeys:

Anyway, just before getting back to the house I had another flat. It was on the last big downhill which, in my experience, is the wrong place to have your rear wheel to go down. At the bottom of the hill is a hard turn that leads up into our neighborhood. But I stopped short and figured, ehhh, I’m walking this in.

Because I could try to re-inflate the tube, or swap out to an extra one, right there on the side of the road — like I did just four rides ago! — or I could just walk the last mile in and do all of that in the comfort of my bike room or home-library.

So I walked it in. Problem: bike shoes. So you take those off and walk it in feeling a little ridiculous: spandex, helmet, walking a bike and barefoot. At some point you have to figure the people in your neighborhood, to the extent that they notice you, are just used to it.

Bobet, I hope so.

Anyway, you could be mad at flats, or pleased with the opportunity. If my tire hadn’t gone down I would have whizzed right through here at 20-some miles per hour and not even noticed this redbud tree (Cercis canadensis) demonstrating its cauliflory.

It’s a trait some species exhibit, where blooms can grow directly out of the trunk. Cauliflory, by the way, is ‘stem flower’ in Latin.

And, yes, I looked up the scientific name. There’s only so much stuff I can keep in my head, after all.

Also on the walk back … and this is just after The Yankee got to the house, put her things away and walked back out toward me with my sneakers. Which was great, because half-a-mile barefoot is quite enough, thanks. Anyway, we walked it in together, which was also nice, and we saw this:

And that’s how the weekend begins. I hope yours begins with pretty things and nice gestures, and fewer mechanical issues.

photo / Thursday — Comments Off
23
Apr 20

More blooming things

Out for a little walk this fine, gray, damp, chilly, late April, oh look, now it’s raining Thursday afternoon. I saw an older couple out for a shuffling jog and I saw them again later as they walked back to their home. It seemed as apt as anything else out there.

There are a lot of sidewalks and some nice paths in our immediate vicinity. One of those paths is succumbing to a nearby storm pond, and so work must be done. I wonder how many people have been up to this sign and turned around. Not many. Most of us are just walking around it.

But I do it thinking of an old joke. Enough is enough!

These won’t be around much longer, so let’s document them now. On a turn in between condos there’s a tree on the corner and whoever lives there probably thinks of it as their tree. And that’s just fine.

So long as they don’t mind if I stop by taking photos of the blooms every now and then. “Oh, Charles, someone is out there again, taking pictures of our tree.”

It’s important, I decided, to be very deliberate about which direction you face when you do that, lest someone think you’re trying to peer into and photograph their living room.

These are a bit safer. They’re in our yard.

And thus, they are ours.

Ours. All ours.

But, still, you want to mind your background.

Heaven forfend you get the exterior of a neighbor’s house in the shot.

photo / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
21
Apr 20

Nice day out; try it while you can

It was a lovely spring day. We’ll have more gross and cold weather soon, because these damp, gray, Canadian conditions can’t pick their spots. Hey, we’ll worry about that on another day. Like tomorrow! And portions of next week! And possibly a substantial portion of May!

Anyway, here are a few pictures of blooming trees from just down the street.

It was a walk, you see, taking in the lovely aspects of a fine Tuesday.

This was not the turnaround point, but it could have been.

And this is a dandelion in the front yard. It’s coming along rather nicely in the bed with three differing layers of anti-weed material placed with the intention of preventing such a thing:

The dandelion is growing in the shadow of these shrubs, which provide us with today’s Video That Has Nothing To Do With The Day:

Listening to birds singing is just lovely. And, for a moment, the wind was a nice addition and there were no kids or the far off beep beep beeping of trucks backing up or any of the other things that happen in a hopping neighborhood. It was a fine day to sit in the shade and listen.

cycling / journalism / Monday / photo / podcast — Comments Off
20
Apr 20

Some walks, a bike ride, a podcast, some cats

And your weekend? Was it functionally much different than your week? Unless, of course, you’re going into work still, in which case I apologize for the joke. But that’s all we can do with it, is joke and laugh, and then work from home or wish we could, or, in far too many sad cases, wish we could work from somewhere.

I get to work from home. I’m very fortunate indeed. And not a day goes by that I don’t spend a lot of time thinking of that. I do it a lot more than during the walk from bedroom to kitchen to home office, too.

One of the things I got to do today for work was this little program …

Elizabeth Malatestinic teaches human resource management in the Kelley School of Business at IUPUI. So she’s the one that onboards. I don’t know if she’s the person who came up with that term. It seems unlikely, but I didn’t think to ask. Anyway, she does HR, and we discussed what we should be able to expect from our bosses, what they can get out of us right now, managing the work-at-home dynamic and some other things. It actually is an interesting and useful conversation. But you’re only going to know that if you take my word for it and press the play button.

Press the play button.

On Topic with IU · On Topic with IU: Human Resource Management professor Elizabeth Malatestinic

Did you press the play button yet?

The cats are grand. Phoebe is studying yoga:

She has since decided to give it a try. She does it with a sense of panache that can inspire us all:

Poseidon has been studying yoga as well. Less interested, but nevertheless:

He’s a nice cat, when he’s being cuddly, and not a jerk to someone.

That cat is going through toddlerhood and adolescence simultaneously, and he’s going to be doing it for the rest of time, which is definitely something to look forward to.

On a walk yesterday we passed some carefully planted roadside trees and it reminded me of how I always make the same disappointed joke every year about maples being nature’s first quitters. It’s true. They are. It is disappointing, and then brilliant, and then just sad like all of the rest. But give the maples their due: They are some of the first ones back on the job, too.

Which is part of the twisted logic of acceptance: Oh, look at the beautiful early leaves! … As we approach the last week of April …

I am showing off the mask a friend made for me. She is crafty and has skills and a desire to help others and even me and I am very fortunate, plus it matches my eyes:

And a shadow selfie from today’s ride, which was notable only for the hill repeats.

You’re supposed to go up a hill for several minutes, descend and then start over again. Only I manage to do it based on the distance, because looking for that quirky tree or, like today, the discarded mattress on the side of the road is easier than staring at my bike computer. So looking at the data now, I went longer the first time, a bit shorter the second time, and then faster the next four times before slowing down for the next several climbs. Hey, it’s all slow and uphill to me. Also, I had negative splits on the back of the ride, which better be the case after 45 minutes or so of going uphill.

At one point this car was coming from the other direction right at the place where I was turning around. The hill continues on, so I have to keep riding, waiting for the car to pass so I can try to do a 180 at a suboptimal speed. Except this guy slows, rolls down his window and says “Steep ain’t it!?”

Hadn’t noticed, neighbor. Hadn’t noticed.