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adventures / cycling / Monday / photo — Comments Off
12
Jan 26

Tried a new app, ready to ditch an old one

On Saturday night we were invited to a hockey game. Some friends had extra tickets, and so sure we could go. If we could get there. Somehow, we missed an exit. The re-route was not drive-able, despite passing right in front of the venue, there were several cut-throughs that were blocked off. I am sure there are reasons, but they all hampered us. So we had to continue on, up and past the venue, now the venue is behind us. Now it is well behind us. Now, and only now, we can turn left, a leap of faith despite running two maps to plot our course.

Lewis and Clark would be so proud. The explorers, I mean, not the defensemen.

Let’s assume there are two players skating named Lewis and Clark. They’d be proud, too, but not as proud as the explorers. For with the bright glowing lights of two sports venues to guide us, traffic to follow, and who knows how many satellites connected to two separate maps, we managed to park across the street.

Not where we’d reserved parking, but where we could pay anew.

The walk was easy. We got in. Had to walk halfway around the joint to get to our seats to see friends. It was dollar pretzel night. I sprung for pretzels and mustard for everyone. Let’s do a little algebra.

On dollar pretzel night, I purchased four pretzels. I purchased two waters. The bill was $18 and change.

And so you see why the water wars to come will be brutal.

But not as bad as the hockey we saw tonight. The home team would, from time-to-time, put on an impressive display of holding the puck in front of their opponent’s net. The opposing team refused to do that, however. They just shot the thing at the home goalie.

And, friends and puck fans, he was not up to the task tonight. On our way out of the venue, when it was 6-1 and they were still skating, people in the concourse had some thoughts about the local netminder. They weren’t shy or polite about it, either. The final score was 7-2. (They played again this evening. It was not much better.)

But, hey, free hockey!

I enjoy all of the things they do in between periods. The light show is a lot of fun, though it might need to be refreshed. Also, if you mistime it, you can make the pyrotechnic show look like a calamity!

We were parked under this sign. On Sunday, that team did no better. Glad we weren’t there for that.

But I’ll probably never go to a game there. The prices are outrageous. I just couldn’t enjoy myself knowing what was spent on this ticket, especially when I every angle possible on the television, and climate controlled conditions, just a few miles away. It got into the 20s last night when they were suffering through that playoff game. I was sitting next to a blanket on my sofa.

The sky had a full day of it, yesterday, too. It was one of those indecisive days. I am a blue sky! Now I am moody! Now I am purple! But what if I embrace the gray and dark! Oh, I’m in my bright blue era again! And so on.

Worked on a class again today. Got in some of the email. I have made a list of notes for a meeting tomorrow. After tomorrow, I will have to do a lot more work. So, this evening, then, I am getting on the bike.

I haven’t ridden a lot in a long while. Just didn’t feel the need to. Or the motivation. One or the other. Maybe both. I could feel what little bit of fitness i had slipping away, though, so there’s that. That’ll happen when you ride for just a few minutes a week. It’s mental, as much as anything, but now I feel, mentally, that I want to ride some more.

Also, we are trying a new service. Our indoor riding has been on Zwift for years. In the winter time, that’s what you’ve seen here. It looks like a video game, and it is. It is useful for training, but it’s an intricate series of animations, basically. My lovely bride unilaterally decided she wanted to try Rouvy, which is funny, because I have been meaning to mention that same platform to her.

On Rouvy, you ride through real places. So, to the extent that the visuals matter, you’ve got that going for you. The first route I tried, just for the name, was Death Road, or Yungas in Bolivia. The road itself is 40-mile long highwire act. It has been replaced by a better route, and is now largely for tourists. And it kills an absurd number of people a year. No way in the world I’d get on this gravel in the real world, on any sort of vehicle. But I can’t fall off my smart trainer!

Yungas Road looks, in part, like this.

And then, just to round out a little time, I rode through Safari Park Dvur, a zoo in Czech Republic. I saw some deer, some varieties of other antlered wildlife, something perhaps related to an antelope. There was the flank of some huge animal that I could not identify, for it came and went quickly. I passed by a giraffe which was walking on the side of the road. For a few moment, two tiger cubs trotted alongside me.

This is done by cameras. Someone has strapped recording equipment to themselves, to their bikes or mopeds or cars and given me this predetermined route. The next time I visit that zoo, those tiger cubs should still be there. (Though it’ll blow my mind if they aren’t. Maybe I should ride it again tomorrow and see?)

There’s some other great data you get from the rides, and cyclists love their data. I was spending a lot of time in Zone 3 today, because see the self-criticism about my fitness. And since that’s lacking at the moment, the hills felt even more real. What’s a 7 percent gradient when you have no legs?

My lovely bride tried Rouvy for the first time yesterday. When she came back upstairs I asked her how it was. She liked it so much she canceled Zwift before she was finished riding. Today, I rode under and was slightly splashed by a small waterfall on Yungas Road. They say they have routes in 71 countries available to ride. They say I can import my own routes — there’s a road I’ve wanted to ride since 2011 or so. It was absolutely the first thing I checked when I downloaded the Rouvy app.

We drove that road, a 51 mile route from the highway to a mountain opposite Mount St Helens, ages ago. It’s just been sitting here, waiting for me to ride in some way or another. And now I have an app that will let me do it, if I can figure out some problem with the GPX import issue.

Of course this means I will need to make a Rouvy banner for the site. And ride a lot more. Tomorrow is going to be a great day to ride.

photo / Wednesday — Comments Off
7
Jan 26

The more interesting parts of Wednesday were other days

I met a high school student the other day, not for work purposes, but this is the daughter of someone we know socially. She was telling us about her classes. This student is taking three AP courses in the 10th grade. I think my high school, a whole century ago, might have offered three total AP courses. Ultimately, if the student continues to take AP courses and passes the end-of-year exams, she basically graduates from high school and is prepared to almost be a college sophomore in terms of credit hours.

The classes are pretty remarkable, too. A high school sophomore is taking classes that will potentially substitute for a college psychology class and a geography course, but she said her favorite was AP World History. I leaned in and asked her what her favorite era was so far. She said she was presently interested in colonial slavery. She rattled over a couple of particular aspects that intrigued her.

I leaned in a little further. I have a read for you, I said. I used to teach a class that was about different media forms and how and when they emerged. And when we discussed books, you could talk about several books. There’s obviously the printing press, the Bible and protestant reformation … I ratted off a few others. And then told her how the capture and enslavement of Black Africans from the Senegambia by the Portuguese in the 15th century set in motion a series of supremacist attitudes we’re still dealing with today. Prince Henry was collecting slaves, and eventually, he was apparently making more money off people than the rest of his country. Henry had a man that worked for him named Gomes Zurara, who wrote and validated the enslavement. The way Zurara figured it, capturing Africans they were actually saving souls. Zurara put all of this in a book form. There’s this confluence of events, books become popular, the Portuguese start exploring, expanding their shipping lanes, and they’re making all of this money. And this book I told her about, Stamped uses that as a key premise. Because I am an excellent storyteller, she thought this was an incredible

I think she was just excited to talk to someone about books.

You know who else likes books? Poseidon likes books. If you’re reading, you’re sitting down somewhere, somewhere still and he can get his cuddle on.

Phoebe, meanwhile, will catch a nap just any ol’ place that’s comfortable.

She was sitting, one recent afternoon, on the end of the dining room table, enjoying the sunshine. I said to my lovely bride, I should put some seat cushions there for her.

My lovely bride laughed and said I shouldn’t do that.

I went by sometime later and she wasn’t on the table, so I put a seat cushion where she’d been sitting. Then I sat out looking for her. And there she was.

Just any ol’ place that’s comfortable.

memories / Monday / overwriting / photo — Comments Off
5
Jan 26

You’ve got two thumbs for a reason

I did what I always do after we invade the airspace of another country and perform some as-yet-ill-described snatch and grab of the sovereign power of state, I went shopping.

Why do you ask?

I recall, through the fog of now almost 25 years and the haze of long hours and weird schedules and watching, with empathy, the people that were in real fear post 9/11. I recall when President Bush said the necessary things, “our financial institutions remain strong” and the American economy was still “open for business.” I remember he told you to get on that plan. Go to Disney World. Help the airlines. Vice President Dick Cheney, long before he was shooting his friend in the face, said we should stick our thumb in the eye of the terrorists. That’s how we win, for it’s our freedoms they feared, and our BOGO sales they wanted. And it seemed silly, then, too, on a micro level. If the health of the nation depends on me showing my fierce Americaness at Best Buy, we’ve got a problem. It’d be months, after all, before Toby Keith delivered a soundtrack for the moment.

I think of that, from time to time. Not the song. It’s a level of saccharine that hasn’t aged all that well, even Keith had something to say about that later. I think about the urge to push people out. It was about confidence and normalcy and distraction in the face of fear and trauma. And, of course, keeping the gears of this machine churning.

Today, we’d be told to jump right back into Meta! Open that ChatGPT window and ask it some foolish question and earnestly accept its reply. We’d have to buy all of our American flags direct from Amazon. We’re all Prime members today. Your flags, made abroad, would arrive in 25 minutes or less, or the DoorDash guy picks up the bill himself.

It will, of course, be the gig guy that takes it in the teeth.

And if he’s not available, we’ve got these robots with 360-degree panoptic sight and sound monitors, to make sure you aren’t watching the Venezuela episode of Parks and Recreation in anything that’s not a suitably detached, ironic fashion.

Well, bub, I’m from Generation X. Watch me work.

Anyway, I went shopping. I needed to get out of the house. I’ve been a bit under the weather. That’s overstating it. The weather was above me. No, that’s not quite right, either. I have had the sinus whatever it is that I get. This version has had two defining characteristics. First, it has been the lightest version of this I can ever recall experiencing. Second, it is persistent. Will not go away.

So I figured, why not experience some of what life has to offer on a gray winter day? This was my Saturday thought. I had only work ambitions today. Saturday I visited an antique mall.

No place, I’m pretty sure, was built to be an antique mall. It is fun to figure out what this gussied up and semi-permanent flea market by another name might have housed in a previous life. The place I went to, I think, was a furniture store. It felt, in fact, like it was still a bit of both of those things. Also, it was clean. It was nice. Nothing terribly old. Nothing terribly interesting. Most distressingly, I did not feel as if I needed a shower when I left the building.

That’s the mark of a true antique market experience, the American experience, if you will.

So I went to another, in the opposite direction. This place is built into a big barn-looking building. And that was built into a hill. And that hill marks a secondary, but important intersection in its town. Across the street is the fire department. At the top of the fire department, inside, but visible from the street, they display the old fire house bell. This is an antique mall, then, that sits opposite people that respect what was.

Inside the red barn shaped building, sharing a wall with the antique mall is a restaurant. It may be the same people. The restaurant does three things. They make a lot of food. They hired the best food photographer in three counties to shoot it. (Food photographers get my ultimate respect. That’s not always the easiest subject matter to shoot.) And they try to tell me that a pulled pork sandwich should cost $20.99.

And, for me, it absolutely will not.

But the antique mall, now here’s a place you could prowl around. Here is a place where the floor creaks beneath you and you wonder if it was your holiday diet, or 100 years of termites. Here is a place where you wonder, How is< that shelf standing upright with a lean like that? Here is a place where you overlook the Star Wars plastic junk for maybe something interesting. Here is a place where you feel like you need to rinse off after your time inside is done.

I wasn’t looking for anything. I just enjoy the experience. Oh, if the right sort of thing jumped out at me, maybe I would be anxious about it for a moment before I moved on, but mostly I was proud to walk around somewhere and not think about work — or, ya know, the state of things — for a couple of hours.

I saw a bunch of hand planes and spokeshaves and other old hand tools I don’t have a need for or a place for. But I have watched people restore them on YouTube and it’s a satisfying transition. At least in a 12 minute video, maybe not the entire process.

Remember, if you don’t watch a good restoration video now and again, the terrorists win. Stick your thumb right in their eye, so they can’t see to click away at the good spots. Stick a thumb in your eye, so you can’t see to skip the pre-roll ads, because commerce!

I got buzzed on the way home.

I drove responsibly. And only had the chance to get a quick shot through the time of the windshield, which has that extra bit of tint, explaining the colors of the sky.

And that was Saturday afternoon.

photo / Thursday — Comments Off
1
Jan 26

Happy New Year

Poseidon, a cat of action, is ready for 2026. He’s been helping us put things away, like the Christmas dishes, which have been used since Thanksgiving, back in their place of honor in the heirloom china cabinet.

Phoebe, she’s more of a thinker, and she’s not at all sure about 2026.

We are now launching a campaign to try to convince them both that nothing of substance will change this year. They’ll get cuddles throughout the day. They’ll still be fed in the evenings. The squirrels and the birds and the rabbits will all be outside, just beyond their reach.

I wonder what their resolutions would be, if they made them.

Mine …

Patience | Thoughtfulness | Kindness | Productivity | Personal Peace | Happy Pursuits

Mine will be ridiculously challenging.

memories / photo / Rowan / Tuesday — Comments Off
30
Dec 25

Back to … wurk … Wurk? What is wurk? Why is wurk?

It was not my best idea, but it was a good idea. I spent most of the day in front of a computer, beginning the class prep for the spring term. (Just twenty-two days away, but let’s never bring that up again.)

Cleaned off the desktop of my work machine. Moved the subdirectories filled with material from last term’s classes into a larger Fall 2025 directory, which I will open less. I started working on some syllabi. Here’s how that is going.

Sometime in junior high I learned that the plural of “syllabus” is “syllabi” and that’s always just be a fun word to say. Thank you, Mrs. Newman, for that. Here she is, in a quick shot from my high school yearbook, which is full of soft focus shots like this.

(I did not shoot for my high school yearbook. But I worry that I might have inadvertently taken on its soft focus style.)

I had Mrs. Newman for English in the 7th grade, and she did not care for that. She taught high school, but she wanted to be at our school. That was her first year there, 7th grade English was her foot in the door, and she made sure we knew it. She didn’t like us much that first year, was our impression. But, by quirk of scheduling, and her progression to where she belonged, I had an English or literature class with Mrs. Newman in 7th, 9th, 11th, and 12th grades. By the time we made it into honors English as juniors and seniors, my cohort was much more her speed. We’d earned a bit of respect. And she’d shaped us into something.

She was a demanding teacher, and she was excellent at what she did. We had to write, daily, on a random topic of her choosing. I wish I still had those notebooks — I am glad I do not. On Fridays we had to write a précis (her class, in the 7th grade, was where I learned the word “précis”) on a magazine article of her choosing. There we all were, 7th graders subscribing to Newsweek. (It was still a terrific magazine back then.) We did this in every class, for four years across junior high and high school. For whatever reason, she graded these things on a scale of one to nine. I recall I once got a six or a seven on a paper and she wrote in the margin that she expected better out of me. In terms of writing, she made me expect better out of myself, too.

She bragged on her Lexus. Bragged on her son, the actor. Bragged about the writers she’d met. She told a story about randomly knocking on an aging William Faulkner’s door, and every time I think of it, now, I’d really like to know if that story was true.

I credit her often, mentally, but that amount could never be enough. Whatever writer I could become, she did the most formal shaping of it. Oh, I had wonderful training in college, and there’s nothing like reading and writing to up your game, but Mrs. Newman was the one that made me try. She smoothed the firmament and laid the foundation for me. She taught me how to be comfortable with volume, made me learn how to synthesize complex and nuanced works, made me write every day, opened the door that allowed me to expect more from what I’m reading, All of this has served me well. All of it was in her classroom in what was, then, called The New Building.

I talked to her once when I was in college. Called her out of the blue, made her tried to guess who I was. She figured it out. I had a question about a paper I was writing and knew she was the person to ask. That was the last time we spoke. She retired soon after that. Presumably she realized she couldn’t improve upon the good work she’d done on us. Her husband, a prominent attorney for decades, died a few years ago. She still lives in the area, I think.

I’m going to write her a letter later this week.

Anyway, I’m working toward three classes for the spring term. One is an online course, Digital Media Processes, I have taught twice before. This might be the first class in the history of me that I’ve taught three times. My hypothesis is that it takes three times to get a class right, but I’ve never been able to try it. If nothing else, I am excited to have a class that’s already prepared.

I’m also teaching my new Criticism in Sport Media again. This will be my second time with that class. The first experience, in the fall, was positive. I saw ways I could make it better. A few weeks ago I started sketching out how that will look. The student feedback was encouraging. They also professed enthusiasm for the point of the class. (High school teachers and librarians are seeing the same thing: kids know they need to be more literate in the world they are growing into.) Will I get to teach it a third time, applying polish from that second effort? No one knows.

But, for now, it’s another syllabus I don’t have to start from scratch. There are a few key changes to make, but it only took a few minutes on this first pass.

I’m also teaching another brand new class, Communicating Rituals and Tradition in Sports. So this syllabus, the lessons, the outline, everything is … well, not a blank slate … I have many scribbled notes and an outline on my phone and a dozen or so open tabs and things I’ve emailed to myself.

Whereas last semester I had three new preps — my 9th, 10th, and 11th since — fall off 2023 — I only have the one new prep this term. It won’t feel leisurely, but in comparison …

Today I started putting it all in the right order. I got about half of the semester situated in some kind of way. The idea here is that we’ll study individual rituals and team and organizational traditions and try to figure out why they are so important to us as fans. And we’ll also work with the athletic department at the university to try to help them come up with some new ideas for cultivating their campus fan base. This class could be really fun. I have it on the books for the spring and again next year. Whatever I learn this time out, then, I’ll be able to improve upon for fall 2026. Will I get to teach it a third time, applying polish from that second effort? No one knows.

Ah. Well. The same worries as every day are now the worries for a different day.

Now, it is back to finding interesting ways to talk about a variety of theories to make this class interesting and useful.