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Another poor month. Let’s blame the holidays and all that comes with that. And the weather.
Next month, I’ll do a lot more than this.
For the year, I rode 1,722 miles. The calendars say I ran about 100 miles, give or take. But I didn’t start put the spring running in there, so that’s incomplete.
Funny, it never seems enough.
This is Maria. We had dinner at her restaurant, Tutti’s, tonight. Her husband is a master chef. They have a professional soccer playing son and a daughter who is in investment management. Also, the food is delicious. Order anything there.
Got an email this morning from the site where I monitor my exercise. It said I’ve pedaled 1,722.9 miles this year. A very low number. But there’s always next year!
This morning it was cold. Very cold. It was 26 degrees at midday. Before that we went out for a run. So there is the last of the Christmas snow on the ground, ice puddles in small holes and frozen mud, the stuff that doesn’t accept your footprint.
I ran a little over four miles. After we got started it didn’t feel cold. I passed an old couple who were out with their little dog. The guy told me I was doing great and looking good. I also looked like a fool in a windbreaker and shorts. (At least my ears and hands were covered.) As I finished my last big circuit around this park and pronounced it the right time to quit. The chill was starting to get in at the very end. Why not? It was in the twenties.
I’m starting to like running, then. You’d have to, to do something as crazy as that.
So we spent most of the afternoon warming up. Dinner at Tutti’s. We made it back home for football. Johnny Manziel had a New Year’s Eve party on the field:
We’re watching the ball drop in Times Square, relatively warm and in no crowd. The phrase of the night seemed to be “a million people, a million people.” Who needs that?
Anyway, enjoy your arbitrary demarcation of a new solar circuit. As you put the old one behind you — should you find you were fond of it, or simply find that you are fond it is over — I wish you health and abundance and twice the happiness in the next trip around the sun.
I’ve been battling a head cold of sinuses and various other fun for several days now. I can point to when it began, precisely at the end of dinner on Christmas Eve. This being the holidays, and that meaning traveling and a dozen people’s varying schedules and being courteous to the dietary habits of others, that would have been at around 5 p.m.
We’d had dinner with a portion of the family that was just getting over some bug or another. And I thought, for a time, that I’d been given some fast acting strain of a thing that I did not want.
Instead, before I complain about being sick and never eating, let me tell you about the best Christmas present I received on Christmas Eve.
We show up late, because there is being courteous to the dietary habits of others and then there is being alternatively busy and passive aggressive against the idea of eating dinner at 3:30 in the afternoon. So we sit down, all of the family in one big giant circle. For some this is a nice time. For others, perhaps they’d rather be elsewhere. Presents are passed around because one of the kids has to go to his father’s for another meal — the typical modern American Christmas, of course.
So it turns out that all of the gifts are aimed at the children, as it should be. This set ranges from 10 to 17 or so. Being book lovers, and considering these particular kids, The Yankee and I decided we’d simply do gift cards for all of them to a local bookstore.
The 10-year-old, after the haze of Christmas presents presents burns down to a nice, soft, amber glow in his mind, becomes upset. He has gotten me nothing. He disappears. He scours his room. He sends word that I am to join him there. He presents a miniature American flag. And a child’s giving, loving heart.
For the next three hours he proceeded to try to cheat me out of every dollar possible at Monopoly, but, still, for a moment, that was perfect.
Anyway, that was Christmas Eve, where I started coming down with something in his house. When the plane landed the day before yesterday here I couldn’t hear anything because of whatever is going on in my head. I’ve been walking around sniffling and listening to everything as if I’m three feet under water.
So we went for a run this morning. So we walked up the hill to the park where my wife played as a child, the same park where we had our engagement photos taken a few years ago. It is one of those old, large homes turned into a city showcase arrangements. There are dog runs and empty fields and disc golf and a gravel path and plenty of woods.
It was about 39 degrees and I’m going to be that guy, here, but the run helped me feel better. Cleared my head a bit. Now I’m hearing things slightly more clearly, and so on. I got in just over four miles.
We got back to the in-laws just in time to see Uncle Scott, who was up from New Jersey for Connecticut Christmas. How nice of him to wait for us, huh?
Cleaned up, and then Christmas presents, where Santa did an amazing job of bringing wonderful things to everyone. I’m still very much under the spell of that thing parents tell kids just before Christmas, and I’m always sure that I’ve never been good enough to deserve the Christmas gifts I receive. This year, this fine year, was no exception.
We had Christmas dinner, at a reasonable hour. And I calculated this: I believe it has been eight days since I’ve had both lunch and dinner at or near their regular times.
Now let me tell you about the luck of Christmas dinner. My mother-in-law, she’s a fine chef. Christmas in their home is shrimp cocktails and prime rib. Prime rib isn’t the first cut of meat I’d choose for myself, but she makes it happen and it was delicious, as always.
So I helped her clean up afterward and then went to play with my Christmas presents, which are too many and too grand for a boy like me.
Also, at this Christmas dinner, we open crackers. It seems you have this tradition or you’ve never heard of it. There is a cardboard tube with a ribbon coming out of either side. You pull the ribbons and it pops, a mini-firework! The tube opens and you get a paper crown for dinner, a cracker jack-type toy and a joke. These are the jokes we received tonight:
And Christmas still isn’t finished! One more tomorrow …
I went for a run last night. It was cold and I was about two miles from home when it was dark enough, and simultaneously light enough, that I could see my breath. Then I car would come, and those headlights are far off in the distance in the night time when you’re on foot and only doing a tiny part of the job of closing the gap. Then suddenly there are all these headlights, and yet you’re in the dark. And by the time you figure that out, the curious behavior of directional photons and the physical features of the earth and what not, the headlights are now upon you, blindingly so.
You run a little farther off the road, farther away then you already were. Because it is dark in December and cold and no motorist has a reasonable expectation of finding you there. In my 5.32 miles I met four walkers, five cyclists, two joggers and a couple walking their dog. Hope we all got home safe.
This evening I took my bike for a quick 20-mile spin. I was pressed for space by three separate pickup trucks. One which lingered long enough to allow me to make jokes about his license plate. Another which clearly belonged to a man who’d just received word that his baby was about to be born and, with it, the luckiest lottery ticket of all time, but it could only be cashed if he showed up 15 minutes ago, having bent space and time to learn how to deliver the child himself and could do so with the ease of years of practice. And so he must pass every living thing like it were a dead thing and proceed with great haste to the special baby extraction unit. Or to his late appointment at the accountant’s office. Whatever was going on in the guy’s life.
How I didn’t roll up on the accident he must have surely caused later can only be explained by the idea that it happened on a different road than my route.
And so, I have a theory: pickup trucks are the most dangerous vehicles to cyclists, and perhaps everyone else.
Otherwise, grading and some grading. The grades are due this week, and so they will be done this week. I’ve made good headway and will, tomorrow or so, input the final numbers into the Excel formula. I will watch the averages move up and down and spot check a third of a class roster’s score with good old fashioned math to make sure I’ve built the spread sheet correctly. It is the least I can do. I usually build them correctly, but there’s always that concern, right?
Met Adam for dinner. We visited Cheeburger, where we had large cheeseburgers and I had a milkshake. All the while I complained about always being hungry. I was hungry when we left the place, in fact. Exercise will do that to you, it turns out.
Things to read … If you take away toy guns from toy monkeys then only toy monkey criminals will have guns. Our society is a little out of control just now, with the exertion of so much control, just now. Funny how that works. TSA Seizes Tiny Toy Gun From Stuffed Monkey, Threatens to Call Cops:
“She said ‘this is a gun,'” said May. “I said no, it’s not a gun it’s a prop for my monkey.”
“She said ‘If I held it up to your neck, you wouldn’t know if it was real or not,’ and I said ‘really?'” said May.
The TSA agent told May she would have to confiscate the tiny gun and was supposed to call the police.
The terrorist monkeys have won, basically.
But wait! It gets even more sublimely stupid! Snowball Fight at Univ. of Oregon Could Lead to Criminal Charges
Is there video? There is video:
So, yes, college students are doing silly college student things. And the retired professor decided to get out of his car, where he was safe behind his high-tech, ultra-dense, futuristic anti-snow polymer shielding. If it feels to you like there’s more to this story, it is probably because there is more to that story.
Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania, leave your quiver-filled imagination at home. Or get suspended. Truly these are dangerous times in education.
How about a few nicer stories. Building a library: Donation of books to low-income first-graders in Birmingham underscores importance of early reading:
Zion was among 80 first-graders at the school to receive a bag of five books to take home. Other books were “Charlotte’s Web,” “Amelia Bedelia,” “The Tale of Peter Rabbit,” and “Where the Wild Things Are.”
“These kids don’t have a lot so this is an opportunity for them to really build their own personal libraries,” said Theris Johnson, student achievement coach at Minor Elementary School. “They’re starting a lifelong interest in reading.”
There was nothing, and still is nothing, quite like a book that could take you away from the struggles of your day.
Though someone should tell educators there is an axe in Charlotte’s Web, Amelia uses scissors and Peter Rabbit is drugged by his mother. I’m sure there was something subversive and dangerous to school principals in Where the Wild Things Are, as well.
So the boss gave you a nearly unlimited budget to do a bit of viral marketing. Well done:
The selfie. Someone making contortions to explain it away: context matters.
So does decorum. When you land on a site called Selfies at Funerals, you have little of it.
Someone commented there, “One of the most important pictures of our time.” And that may be right. Another person, elsewhere, recalled Barbara Tuchman:
“So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration. In scarlet and blue and green and purple, three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates, with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes, and jeweled orders flashing in the sun. After them came five heirs apparent, forty more imperial or royal highnesses, seven queens – four dowager and three regnant – and a scattering of special ambassadors from uncrowned countries. Together they represented seventy nations in the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and, of its kind, the last. The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.”
Granted, The Guns of August may be a bit of an overreach for a vacuous photograph. At least we all hope so, at any rate.
Finally, this incredible video has been making the rounds. A design professor friend asked why I didn’t make an appearance. I assured him my only trick was balance, and even then only on occasion:
That is very much the kind of video you need to watch from the beginning to the end. It only gets more impressive as it goes. Amazing stuff. And, much like the rest of life, stick around to the end to see the (painful) bloopers.
This is what I did on the bike and on my feet. All units are miles. Sad little effort, It all picks up next week.
