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cycling / Friday / photo — Comments Off
11
Dec 20

The last decent weather day, I fear

In April or so, when everyone was shut down, we went out to one of the local flat courses to do a few time trials. It’s essentially a loop and it runs 6.5 miles, with a long headwind at the end. On our first visit we did four loops, and marveled at how quiet the roads were.

We went this evening, with just enough light for three loops, and marveled at how noisy the roads are. What health crisis?

The first lap felt fine, until that headwind, and I got well and truly dropped.

Later I caught back up and tried to give her something to attack, and she caught me on the second trip through the headwind. And on our third trip we soft-pedaled in for pictures. Soft pedaling, at 21 miles per hour, into the wind. It’s a weird year on bikes all the way around.

And now, as I shut things down for the evening, I was struck by the play of a solar light I have in the kitchen window. It’s a cheap yard light, and I thought having a few of them around would be a good idea if the power went out, which thankfully, is a rarity in our neighborhood. The light shining through the plastic globe and playing on the ceiling looks like a static kaleidoscope, or a fancy, giant jellyfish.

Have a great weekend! Catch you on Monday! And, until then, more on Twitter, check me out on Instagram and did you know that Phoebe and Poseidon have an Instagram account? Phoebe and Poe have an Instagram account.

cycling / photo / site / Thursday / video — Comments Off
10
Dec 20

I got in a ride today

It was a spectacularly beautiful day today. The rarity, the miracle, which that can be here this time of year. It was sunny and clear and almost warm. I’m not used to the cold being the norm, but it is the norm for here. I’m used to this being the norm here. It was in the 50s. You could see the sun, and the blue. That’s the way it should be. It’s an unexpected gift here. That’s just sad.

But you take advantage of it. And I did with a late afternoon bike ride.

I rode in shorts! With no gloves! Sigh.

Here’s a clip from a neighborhood part of my route, and the trail I added on at the end just to tick up the odometer a bit.

Kmart closed their two stores here in 2016 and 2017. I don’t know where motorists have been getting their licenses updated since then, but they’re all due a new road test. They were brutal today, so, in that way, it was usual.

This is from a different ride. It took place two or three years ago, and also it was during a different season. Everything was so green! And warm!

Anyway, we’re now essentially caught up with the county’s historic marker series. I ride around and take pictures of the signs and what they’re commemorating. One new marker has been installed recently, and another has been re-installed since I went by it last. So I have two more weeks of this we can still look forward to in this county. And then, perhaps next year, I’ll start riding to the markers in the neighboring counties.

Anyway, click this image to see this post.

Two things: I hate taggers. There’s not enough community service in the world to deliver on taggers. Second, have you ever noticed how every bridge is always the biggest or longest or highest or heaviest? Why must every bridge be superlative? Can’t we just acknowledge the brilliance of the engineering and what they mean, rather than an assessment of their constituent materials?

Anyway, to see all of the markers, just click here.

links / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
8
Dec 20

Things you should and shouldn’t do

Woke up tired. I’ve been waking up tired. And by tired I mean, tired. Anyone else doing that lately?

Anyone else grimly making jokes about why that may be happening? It’s not like I’m not getting six or seven or even eight hours of sleep — you should do that. There must be something else to it, right?

So I googled it — you should never do this — and it apparently has a technical term. It’s called “fa-teag-way.” It must be Italian.

Turns out, if you read the web — you should skeptically do this — that there are so many possibilities for it as to make you think that it’s probably none of them, or beyond your ability to successfully isolated and test the variables. Changing your “sleep environment” is no easy thing, after all.

“Chances are,” Healthline says, “your morning grogginess is just sleep inertia, which is a normal part of the waking process. Your brain typically doesn’t instantly wake up after sleeping. It transitions gradually to a wakeful state.”

So I search for some scientific documentation — you should always do this — on “sleep inertia.” Take it away, Dr. Lynn Marie Trotti in the National Institutes of Health journal Sleep Medicine Reviews:

The transition from sleep to wake is marked by sleep inertia, a distinct state that is measurably different from wakefulness and manifests as performance impairments and sleepiness. Although the precise substrate of sleep inertia is unknown, electroencephalographic, evoked potential, and neuroimaging studies suggest the persistence of some features of sleep beyond the point of awakening. Forced desynchrony studies have demonstrated that sleep inertia impacts cognition differently than do homeostatic and circadian drives and that sleep inertia is most intense during awakenings from the biological night. Recovery sleep after sleep deprivation also amplifies sleep inertia, although the effects of deep sleep vary based on task and timing.

It’s an interesting paper. Probably I’m just groggy.

Completely neglected the cats yesterday. Not in real life, mind you, but in this mediated space. The cats are great. Happy and snoozing and bathing and eating and annoying us at all the wrong times, knowing they can solve that problem by being cute and cuddly for 90 seconds.

Here’s Poseidon catching a nap on the stovetop cover.

He loves the radiant heat from the stove eyes. The other night he jumped up too soon and got a little warm. He jumped up and stepped a little too close and hoped off quickly, all before I could cover the distance. His cat-like reflexes served him well, and he was fine. And it hasn’t dissuaded him from one of his favorite napping places. But maybe he’ll learn to wait for the cover to get put back into plact.

And this is Phoebe, who was caught playing on the computer again.

She was googling cats. You should never do that.

adventures / cycling / Monday / photo — Comments Off
7
Dec 20

If you could be here you could have some

This is not a food blog. This is not a food blog because I am not a good food photographer. I am not a good food photographer because, sometimes, the things you see aren’t even food, but other times food photography requires extra lights and settings that I don’t want to employ and, ultimately, food photographers are some of your more talented photographers. I suppose I could improve my rather poor food photography abilities, but, ultimately, I’d rather eat the food.

Nevertheless, occasionally we try something new and tasty, and I want to brag on the delicious meal my lovely bride made. Recently I happened on a new recipe for red beans and rice and she decided to make it and we enjoyed that this weekend and it was quite tasty.

And I’m going to get a couple of lunches out of the leftovers, too!

The other thing about food photography is that sometimes what looks great on a plate might not always look great in a picture. But sometimes the shapes and textures work out. Because, also, she made sizzling cornbread and it’s pretty great.

If you get a Pac-Man shape in your day, you should document it.

If you’d been here for it we would have shared, but these are the times we live in, where we enjoyed that delicious meal just off camera of a video chat. But we could at least tell people about how good it tasted, and how she did a great job with the preparation and I did a pretty decent job clicking that link and exploring the recipe anyway.

All of it was delicious.

We also had a nice chilly bike ride this weekend.

That’s toward the end, where I notice from some great distance behind that she’s reaching for her phone and I have to try really hard to catch up. It’s a big ask, most rides. She’s very fast, even when’s soft-pedaling for a photo, as she was there.

Friday / photo — Comments Off
4
Dec 20

The week with bad titles, part five

Today, a bit of wabi-sabi.

That’s a deck post. And wabi-sabi, Wikipedia tells you, is:

In traditional Japanese aesthetics, wabi-sabi is a world view centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of appreciating beauty that is “imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete” in nature.

Characteristics of wabi-sabi aesthetics and principles include asymmetry, roughness, simplicity, economy, austerity, modesty, intimacy, and the appreciation of both natural objects and the forces of nature.

I’ve written about this here before, about keeping some of the wear and tear in a house as artifacts of previous owners. Long ago we cleaned up the markings that noted all the kids that used to live in this house. We’ll get the rest of this place painted one day, when we feel we can safely get painters in. There are two or three bigger gouges that I’d like to correct, but there are nicks in some places which I want to keep. It’s part of the story of the place.

It’s all small and cosmetic, but keeping one or two things here or there might let you imagine the children playing here, the joy their family had, the lives they were living here. Oh, sure, those little corners of molding at the foot of a few doors, that’s from furniture moving in or out, or a zealous vacuuming session. The one place on the windowsill in one of the bedrooms, I have no idea what that was, but I want to hear the story, a story I’ll never know, and I hope it’s better than “We were moving out with our hops and dreams and clipped it with a dresser.” Some of these other marks might be from imaginary gun fights or adventurous car races or a time a grandmother — three generations lived here, together — just leaned a little too far to the right. Some of those should absolutely stay.

I bet those kids had a lot of fun on the deck out back. It’s held up by that post pictured above. And that post isn’t just a post. It could be a base for hide-and-seek or part of a doorway to the yard and the woods and the creek beyond. That big tall chunk of wood could have been anything.

And, to a kid, the imperfect and impermanent might be just the opposite.

Plus, you’ve got an entire national concept behind it. And, with wabi-sabi, you don’t have to replace things quite so often.