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adventures / Monday / photo — Comments Off
30
Mar 20

No really, it is spring now, apparently

First things first, this is a panorama, or almost a panorama, I took on a weekend walk. Click to embiggen.

Let us do our regular Monday with the cats. We have a strict Not On The Counter rule that the cats ignore. Lately, they’ve found a loophole. The Yankee received this package in the mail some time back and it’s just been sitting on this out-of-the-way corner. And so the cats jump up on the counter and sit on the box where, as Phoebe demonstrates here, she is not on the corner:

They are also chewing on the box, both of them. They don’t eat it, they’re just destroying it bite by bite. I pick up the bits on the floor every day, and I am pretty sure they haven’t really thought this through. When they eat the box, they’ll be back on the counter, and we will set them in on the floor again.

I’ve been asked why we always see pretty pictures of Phoebe, and pictures of Poseidon in his hijinks. Mostly it is because Phoebe is a good girl. And Poseidon does things like this:

Note the feet. Note the balance.

Now, note the cuteness:

Now, note this wackadoo:

Computer? Enhance:

Found on a run this weekend, art which transports you from where you are, to, well, wherever this is going:

It isn’t awkward at all when the homeowners notice you taking a picture of this. Or when you realize the artist was an adult.

Just down from where I took that panorama picture at the top of the post, after you’ve walked down the hill and over the footbridge, there are two tennis courts and a small playground and a nice long walking path. It’s just down a second hill from an elementary school, and, as you might expect, there are a lot of kids in a nice spot like that. The teachers know that, too. And so up and down the path, they’d come out and left notes for their kids:

It’s the cutest, saddest thing. Imagine the progress a teacher has made with those kids all year long, and it’s over in March. They haven’t canceled school for the year yet, but it’s coming. And from the point-of-view of the teachers, the big and little worries they must have. For that teacher it came down to the one message. Keep reading.

I think I got in trouble for reading too much. If class bored me, and many classes did, there was a book in my lap. How do you scold a kid like that? Meanwhile, you’re worried about that child on the other side of the room that is in a real struggle? And now you, a compassionate teacher type, know they won’t be there in your class, to benefit from your training and experience in a formalized setting for a good long while.

Spring is showing up. In the backyard:

These are all from one tree. And the blooms won’t stick around long enough, but what they portend is welcome:

I think of that Moritsugu Katsumoto line a lot: “The perfect blossom is a rare thing. You could spend your entire life looking for one, and it would not be a wasted life.”

Who knows if they’re all perfect, or if the poetry there is really about the aspiration, or even the pursuit. It’s a nice thing to think about while you’re staring at the edges of fragile, fleeting things.

Here we are down by the creek:

It was a nice weekend to see the beginning of things to come.

cycling / photo — Comments Off
27
Mar 20

It’s Friday, let’s go ride bikes

Left work about 15 minutes early to go on a bike ride. And by “left work early” I mean “announced in the four different platforms in which we are presently communicating (because the first three weren’t sufficient), that I was going for a bike ride.”

So we set out for a pleasant little 30-miler. Someone told me in the fourth communication platform, eschewing the other three mediated formats, to be careful. I take this advice to heart every time it is offered. Fortunately the traffic broke our way:

That’s the benefit of getting out just a few minutes early. You can beat the crowds that don’t exist. Down that road is the local lake and, even on a slightly chilly and predictably gray day you’d expect to see one or two boats being pulled down for the weekend float. But not today.

So we went through the three neighborhoods, long roads with houses and big yards really, that we normally cruise through on that route. We came back up the same direction, over the big hill which has the ice cream shop sitting tantalizingly at the bottom of the descent, the big hill which sometimes I can get over in one gear, and sometimes I need to the whole cassette, and on neither occasion have I ever wheeled my bike in there for a cone, but one day I will. There’s a big false flat sprint after that, a hard right hander into some rollers and then a left turn before two long stretches of road where you can really build your pace or completely lose your wits, and then we saw these guys:

And then on the last little bit we worked on the art of moving fast, but trying to look casual about it.

She’s doing somewhere between 22 and 25 miles per hour right there. That’s not a put your head down and grit your teeth pace, or anything, but it’s a fair clip, for me at least, with one hand and in a small gear ramping up to the last descent at the end of the ride.

photo / running / Thursday — Comments Off
26
Mar 20

Fowl in not fair air

After yesterday’s sunny and fair 26-mile bike ride — which was the sixth bike ride of the year, and, thus, we should stop counting as the novelty of newness has very much given way to the annual complaint of “Why does it take so long to be able to ride around here?” — today we returned to the grayness and general ‘bleh’ that typifies four or five months of the year.

Which, hey, at least I can look out of windows and see it now?

Also ran in it today. Charming mood-setter, really.

Oh, but to get outside, though. Yes. It was outside. And no, it was not something to be desirous of today. I want to take the positive approach: We are able to do this thing! But the legs and the mind were not onboard with the effort today. So it was slow and sluggish and just something to be endured. Sometimes that’s a positive approach, too: Enduring. But today it was a po-tah-toe, rather than a potato, sort of thing.

This is wholly about the weather, and the reality that the weather is like this in late March, when I am in no mood for such a thing. Give me warmth or give me sun. Ideally, give me both, because we’re into spring everywhere in my various social media streams except for right here. But since I can’t have what I want, give me at least one of them.

Even the geese don’t want anything to do with this stuff.

You might say I’m projecting. I thought you might. When they flew over I asked them. I said, “Hey geese, am I projecting my feelings, in the sense that Sigmund Freud, and later, Karl Abraham, defined the concept, about these lame atmospheric conditions onto you?” Do you know what they said?

Honk.

Covid-19 / cycling / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off
25
Mar 20

I am still able to keep count — for now

This is Day 14, I think. It all depends on how you choose to count and where you are, I suppose. Two weeks ago yesterday the university announced they were seriously curtailing campus activities, and that has continued to evolve the more they dive into it, and will likely continue to do so. Two weeks ago from today our dean told us to go home and work from there and not come onto campus unless it was vital that you be there. So I worked in the office that Wednesday and then went in that Thursday evening for television … and we were all so much younger back then.

So two weeks at home, and working from home. Lots of Zoom meetings and a lot of email. The latter is basically my natural condition anyway. What’s nice, I suppose, is that I get to sleep an extra 40 minutes. And I can have breakfast at home, instead of at my desk.

And today I’ve started moving around the house, so that I don’t sit in the same spot every day. Also, I’m working on straightening up my home-office, which was overdue to be reworked anyway.

Last week, our first full week from home was Spring Break, so The Yankee was able to scale back her workload. Mine was naturally reduced by timing and circumstance, so I got busy playing catch up on a few things and enterprising some other projects out of the very air. This week has been a second week of Spring Break, ostensibly to let the faculty readjust their curricula to an online setting, and probably just to let everyone catch up with the changing floor beneath us and other important things like, their breath. So next week is Back To It: No, Really, But From Home.

We’re still doing great. We had a nice day of mild weather for a change and went on a bike ride. Saw this guy on the private road that almost no one rides down. It features a nice up-and-down roller through the woods and a loop on the back and then the harder version of the down-and-up roller to leave the little pastoral neighborhood.

When I went down the road he was on the left hand side, sitting on his horse, and talking to another gentleman who was standing across the road. Maybe that’s just how they’d going when they ran into each other, but as I tried to carefully split the road perfectly between them I liked to imagine that they were the local vanguards of the social distancing movement. And what an awful name that is, no?

When I finally caught back up to The Yankee, who is faster than me at this stage of the year:

In the originally sized image you can see me pretty well in her sunglasses. So really this is a selfie.

adventures / photo / running / Tuesday — Comments Off
24
Mar 20

Spri — nope, not yet

We’re just a week or so away from the visual clues being unavoidable. And then it’ll quickly turn to all-green, all-the-time, which takes a few days to get used to. And then, when you think back on it, you can spend a few days marveling at how you get used to it so quickly.

But first, this little budding stage of things:

These photos were all taken on our Monday evening walk, which was beautiful and delightful in most every way. Today was not picturesque. It was cold and gray and damp and that’s not frustrating at all. The clouds move so slowly. I looked at them during this evening’s slogging run of just under four miles with no inspiration, no legs or anything resembling pace, and I was again mystified how there were no clouds, but but the always terribly exciting white gray. You can’t see any of the defining characteristics that allow you to distinguish one large collection of very tiny droplets of water or ice crystals from the next. It all just … is.

I’m ready for spring.

It’s been a very mild winter.

This tree is ready, too. And that bloom isn’t the only thing around here excited for something to happen, and waiting for it to do so:

I got photobombed.

It was pretty much the highlight of the walk, which was already a fine part of a nice day.

I’m just showing off the non-macro lens on my phone, now.

On these nice walks, I should take my real camera. As I was taking that photograph, on my phone, this skein of Canada geese flew over.

They’re heading west, in the direction of several nameless ponds. They should go back north. But I guess they know something I do not.