Since this was my view all day, you can stare at it for 61 seconds.
The cracked windshield is a camera trick, for effect. The bugs are real.
Click. Watch. Enjoy.
More tomorrow.
photo
22
Aug 11
“We’ve done this before”
I did not go for a ride this morning. I could not wake up fast enough. So I took a ride in the evening. In between I read some things. I also wrote some things, sent out Emails that will help orchestrate the giant journalism workshop of the fall and made a list for all of the rest of the things I need to do this week. They include … there’s a lot of stuff on that list.
Wiped out one of my browsers. Browsers, like my inboxes, have become my online To Do list. If the tabs are still open — and I love the tabs — then attention is still required. Presently I have three browsers open, the one in which I surf, which is at present also being overrun by dissertation things, and two for paper ideas. As much as I love tabs, I wish I could close them faster because I love to close tabs.
It isn’t putting the check in the box, a level of psychic joy I’ve never been able to appreciate, but the disappearance of the thing. You, sir, have been closed. Vanquished is that search on political action committees. I banish the to the under realms, the places the Tron characters wouldn’t even go.
It’d be nice if a little poof of smoke popped up when I clicked the X.
We received a delivery this evening, a new mattress and box spring had arrived for the guest room. We have a queen frame and it has been holding a regular size for some time. Now, we figured, was the time. The Yankee found a deal, but I suggested checking another place. Her first deal stood. She found a coupon. I suggested driving around and doing a bit of window shopping.
The first place we visited stuffed their mattresses with the tender locks of unicorn hair, and that is the only way the prices can be explained. This was the place, I recalled, where I bought a mattress when I moved in my freshman year. We’d unloaded the U-Haul and set out to shop. Being exhausted, the first one I fell upon was declared the winner. And it worked for a good long while. I’ve either donated it or it is elsewhere in the family, I don’t recall, but the point was that it was cheap. And that same place had no such option now.
Just down the street, a par five away, we found the place with our coupon. We found the expansive clearance section. We tried every flat surface. We discovered one in the proper size, which became $100 cheaper if we turned down the frame, sheets and pillows. Done and done. We pronounced we had a coupon. They offered to deliver it for a song. We sang.
We realized we did not have the coupon with us at the time. “No big deal,” the guy said. “When would you like it delivered?”
We got it for about 38 percent less than the original find. I fully expect for it to dissolve over night.
Checking. Nope. Still there.
Anyway, the guys show up, two young men they pulled off fraternity row, and they were stunned to find the old mattresses carefully stacked next to the door. They big up the old mattress and carry it out. They grabbed the old box spring and toted it away. They bring in the replacements.
So you guys have it under control?
“We’ve done this before.”
“A few times.”
And then they were gone, off to do whatever mattress delivery guys do when they aren’t tearing plastic off your new purchase.
I spread out the blankets and tried the new setup. Our guests will no doubt be appreciative. If the thing doesn’t dissolve over night.
Set out for a ride just after quitting time. The road I choose was necessarily busy. So I called an audible, pedaled my way to the first stop sign, took a right and dashed off into the countryside. Well, dashed is a kind word. There are two little hills in that direction, both of which wore me down. But I got over the top of each, collected my breath and, as I often do, questioned my sanity. Down the hills in a proper tuck position, just hoping that the momentum will get me part of the way up the next one. And so on it goes.
I stopped at one point for a drink and a photograph.
And here a woman stopped and asked me for directions. I knew the place, but not it’s location relative to where I was standing. I told her to keep going and look on her right, thinking that if she hadn’t passed it from whence she came, it has to be just down there in the direction she’s heading.
She continued on straight, I went the opposite direction. Down a hill, back into the sun, rounded a curve, and there’s the soccer complex she’s looking for. Terrific. Just as I make it there, she actually passed me again. If I’d only been a bit faster she would have never had the occasion to see me on the road again. Brushing me with the mirror must have been tempting.
So, if you run across this, ma’am, I’m sorry. I’m not sure how long one is supposed to feel bad about giving the wrong directions, but be assured I’ll regret it for at least twice that length of time.
Made it home just as it got dark, marking a 26 mile ride, and just in time for dinner. Food, talk, scanner problems, a little television, some more reading and now this.
… Still there.
21
Aug 11
Catching up
I don’t know what you are, but you scare me. And even considering that you’re an ambidextrous frog that can juggle apples with their own fusion reactor inside, even as they phase into another dimension, just scares me more. I’ll stick with Apple Jacks. Their font is more inspired, after all.
Perfect! Just what I’ve always needed. Now if I can only find my motorized package opener with the cardboard removal accessory …
Now that is a lot of utility work. There are four trucks in one spot. You never see that outside of a natural disaster.
From my Saturday evening ride. There’s a stretch out beyond nowhere that, when you hit it at the right time of day, feels like a portal to another place. If nine dead guys came out of those trees and asked if this was heaven or Iowa I would have had to tell them no, and also, there’s no baseball field for miles.
Here are a few clips of video from the Storybook Farm visit yesterday. One of them was just too fun to have simply disappear. This will take precisely 31 seconds:
19
Aug 11
Grrrr
You’d think having three flat tires would be the most frustrating part of your day.
You’d be wrong.
17
Aug 11
Put the lime in the coconut
If you ever want to get an education, post something just slightly wrong on the Internet. I noticed these Persian limes at the grocery store this evening and put the picture on Facebook, writing something silly like “Persian limes, from Mexico.”
My dear friend Kelly, who is not a horticulturist, but did stay at a Holiday Inn Express near some lime trees once, wrote “Persian limes are just a kind of lime. You know what makes them Persian limes? They aren’t Key Limes.”
One thing led to another and now I have to know all about this particular citrus. Wikipedia tells me they are also called Tahiti limes. Great, another geography-challenged fruit.
They were developed in California. I feel duped.
Kelly, as always, was right though: they aren’t key limes. Wikipedia, and I’ll take their word, says Persian limes are less acidic than key limes and don’t have the bitterness central to key lime’s unique flavor.
We bought the store’s entire inventory of groceries. It was us and the poor gentleman behind us at the checkout line who had to make do with the crumbs we left in the back corner near the dairy section. You’ll be happy to know that we remembered to save the earth this trip and took our canvas bags. (We sometimes forget. Once they made it into the car but not into the store.) The kindly man who bagged our purchase up managed to completely load them up. If we’d chosen plastic there’d be 14,000 bags floating around on the kitchen floor just now.
Those bags, too, have a purpose. We keep a small supply on a hook in the mud room, but eventually it swells out to something you have to bob and weave around, less you take a glancing blow from the big tumor of plastic. You only need so many of the things for storage and secondary disposal.
Really I want to take a competitor’s save the earth bags into our grocery store and see what they do. Would they sack the groceries up without complaint? Would they glare? Would there be a conference? Their big on conferences there. Would they signal in the manager, they are ever-present like you see in the movies set in casinos when the hero makes too much money and the suits get involved. They are much, much, nicer than all of that, but it is remarkable how quickly a manager will swoop in.
Alabama Adventure may be for sale again. This is an amusement park and water park combo near where I grew up. I remember, just after my senior year of high school Larry Langford, who was mayor of Fairfield, a suburb of Birmingham, pitched his plan for VisionLand to a room full of high school kids. It was his dry run. He announced the project publicly a few days later. All the nearby towns, he said, would chip in land and money for land and they were going to build this incredible park. It would start a bit small and grow every year. Langford got the land, got the money, got a lot more money from the state legislature and built his park. He even had a statue inside.
He’d go on to being on the county commission and then the mayor of Birmingham, despite still living in Fairfield. And now he’s in jail.
But the park has struggled since not long after it was created. The current owner is the third owner. It was the second owner, after the park went bankrupt (the $65 million project went for just $6 million), that changed the name from VisionLand to Visionland, and finally to Alabama Adventure.
The entire Wikipedia entry is a sad collection of grand ideas that never came to fruition for one reason or another. The place has earned a bad reputation in some respects, but there’s a lot of that going around that area, too. The best part of the place, to me, was that you could spend a day at a real theme park and not have to drive all the way back home from Atlanta smelling like stale water. Home was minutes away!
I had a few dates at the park, and one company picnic. On a separate occasion I took some nice pictures there. Some of those photographs went into my portfolio which helped me get other freelance work. Here’s one of them that just happened to be floating around in some dusty corner of the site. It isn’t the best one, but I loved the water bucket obstacle course part of the water park:
I scanned that eight years or more ago, which is why it is so small. I’ll dig up the original at some point and do it a bit more justice. (Don’t bet on it.)
I enjoyed the lazy river, and never caught any problem worse than standing in the place where the fireworks debris falls. You never think about that, when you’re watching fireworks, but the cardboard and the embers have to land somewhere. Don’t let it land on you.
In my freshman year literature class I wrote a comparative essay on Machiavelli’s Prince and Larry Langford. I’m sure the paper was dreadful, though I somehow recall getting an A on it. Don’t ask me why I kept that memory. Thinking back on it, though, I’m intrigued by how different parts now apply to Langford’s tale. Some of it was all wrong in the beginning, but he grew into the treatise’s notion of idealism (he was vainly spurring on a campaign to bid for the 2020 Olympics in Birmingham when his political realm fell down around him) and then it all turned into a sad, sad parody, as some considered The Prince.
Sometime after the second owner of the theme park came along they removed Langford’s statue. It was the preface to Langford’s version of Machiavelli’s Mandrake*.
Who comes here for obvious references to 16th century Italian comedies? You can raise your hand. It is OK. You’re among friends.
I trimmed the bushes today. Well, one bush. It was so hot that I’d broken into a sweat by the time I’d gotten the extension cord untangled.
So, one prickly shrub, scoop up the trimmings and remember that old saw about discretion being the better part of pruning.
When The Yankee came home she didn’t even notice the trimming. Subtlety is an art form, friends.
We rode our bikes this evening. Or I did. She tried, but had a flat close to home. We are out of tubes, so we’ll have a stock-up trip to the bike shop tomorrow. I got in 19 miles and was not pleased with any of it, really. Seems 10 days off is too many. Now I must recover my legs again.
But I cruised down a road I’ve never been on before, so that was a nice treat. Well, I’ve gone the other way, the uphill side, of that road before. Today I got to see how the road should be attacked: from its highest point.
