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friends / Monday / photo — Comments Off
2
Sep 19

Three-day cheers

Company this weekend. Friends arrived late Friday night. We watched football on Saturday and we visited a local fruit operation. After we’d enjoyed the public-facing part of the facilities we enjoyed a two-room tour of some of their production operation. You see signs like this:

It is a grape growing concern, founded by a former professor who wanted to share his beverages with friends. And now, thanks to tanks and tubs like this, it is one of the largest such concerns in the country.

OK, top 50. Still, that’s impressive for the middle of somewhere. No one could tell me if that was in terms of acreage, volume, sales, widgets or what.

But who cares? There’s grapes! Also, it is peak summer in almost every way:

Long may she reign:

Company, sadly, left this morning. But it is day three of a weekend, happily. The second-best part of that is that you must only face a four-day work week. But it must still be faced.

Friday / photo — Comments Off
30
Aug 19

Phewwwww

During Ralph Parker’s cubist phase, he drew a lot of inspiration from his brother, Tommy Parker’s work in parking deck stairwells:

Ralph Parker is a misunderstood genius, sure, but everyone around the Parker family knew that Tommy was where it should have started. And probably it was Tommy where it should have stopped, as well. But only after he finished the job.

I understand paint swatches, but this is a public building, which means the personal investment of pretty much everyone is reduced. So this isn’t about determining the proper shade of gunmetal to use when considering the morning sun comes in from yonder window.

Sometimes just enough might not be enough, though. I bet they didn’t even take a carpenter’s square to the corners to make sure they hit this at 90 degrees.

The square in a rectangle is an evocative look, I must say.

Eventually some white hat vandal — Those are still a thing, right? They’re still around? — will figure out if they scrawl nonsense on the whole wall then, some 18 months later, everything will get painted.

And that’s really all I have to say about today, which is mercifully behind us. We have some company coming in later tonight to spend the weekend, which will be lovely. So bring on the three-day.

I hope yours is lovely.

adventures / photo / Thursday / video — Comments Off
29
Aug 19

Almost average, even.

I wondered yesterday about the prospects of maintaining color continuity over the course of the long term. There were blue and tan elements. And so there are today, as well.

I only took this picture to put on Instagram, because, at the end of the day, I wasn’t sure if it was a good look or not. The reviews have been good so far. One follower chimed in “You know I have opinions,” but left it at that. Owing to the flush of information through the Instahose I will now never know what those opinions are. I am sure, though, that this was a bad choice.

Really, it is just a good way to keep track of when I wore what.

We had a bike ride this evening, the last Thursday evening ride I’ll have for a good long while, since we’ll start back up with the television shoots next week. Best not to dwell on the absence of rides for now though. Look! The tar snakes are making a smiley face!

Was there video? You bet there was video, and the audio totally goes with that tie!

I PRed three segments on Strava on this ride. It was one of my better rides of the year to date. Which is something I should have progressively been saying since about June, but the feeling returns when the feeling returns. The title of that workout on Strava became the title of this post. No one considered that in post-post-neo-modernism-ish time we’d have to title our workouts, but that’s the world for you. Wherever you go, there better be a post for it. How else will Buckaroo Bonsai know where you are? Anyway, now, the trick is to get as much out of these more pleasant feeling rides as possible, dovetailing as they are with shorter days and milder temperatures.

And, naturally, I won’t be able to ride again for another four or five days.

More on Twitter and please check me out on Instagram, as well.

photo / Wednesday — Comments Off
28
Aug 19

This is about wheels, which I have, and color wheels, which I do not have

I got my bike out of the bike shop yesterday. They called Monday to tell me it was ready, I finally picked it up yesterday. It went in for a new spoke, after I snapped an old one last week. I also added on an overdue tune up and a badly needed new chain. To celebrate the work, and the happy reunion, I wore my bicycle cufflinks yesterday:

I also picked up a new stem. It seems my bike might be too small, and that’s causing some hand problems. Nothing lasting, just a nerve compression that makes riding less enjoyable than it should be. And my ongoing foot issue (which does largely feel fine and might actually be improving with time and stretching exercises, but we’ll see in the next month or two) might actually be exacerbating my problems issue. This is all very specific stuff in that odd way of things: technical if you don’t ride, basic if you are a cyclist.

Anyway, one solution is too change to an angled stem. My old one was a flat, 0-degree, number. It made for an aggressive posture. Now we go to the other extreme. This is a Salsa aftermarket stem, set on a full 25-degree angle:

The angle stem raises up the headset, giving the cockpit a different orientation and puts the handlebars in such a place that I am not falling over to grab hold. This might help with the hand discomfort I’ve been experiencing of late. It isn’t as aesthetically pleasing in any way, but cheaper than a new bicycle, and feels a lot different, even on the first ride:

I wonder what it will feel like on the eighth or ninth ride.

But, hey, it isn’t all bikes around here. Or even cufflinks about bikes. (Those were a gift from my mother, by the way.) Sometimes it is just about the tie. But, really, it is about the shirt. And this is a new one! I got it online and on sale. And what do you know, yesterday’s bike jersey matches today’s tie:

I can’t keep this color continuity up for forever, of course. Or can I? I wonder.

photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
27
Aug 19

Here’s a thing

You’ve got your mirrors. And you’ve got your planes. And, in retrospect, putting the two together was a big idea. Maybe no one figured on putting one on the side of the fuselage. I suppose it was an aero thing. And there’s not a rearview mirror because you can’t see out of the back of the plane.

Why, yes, we’re still nursing our way through pictures from last week. Why not? There’s good stuff here! How often do you get to see the lights on the landing gear of a 757?

I like the access panels. I don’t know why. They’re not really any different than an electrical outlet cover, or the gas door on my car. Maybe it is the writing:

How do they move the cargo off the planes? With the help of a lot of tiny, tiny wheels. Rust optional:

The next time I get a squished box, I’ll have to keep this in mind. They really do put a lot into these cargo containers:

They look like this, those containers. Their exterior shape is dependent upon where it is designed to go inside the plane. No space is wasted.

It’s interesting. You think your package is late or lost and wonder how that could be. How could they get this wrong? Why not do this one thing this other way, which corresponds with the idea I just came up with? And then you go to a distribution node, see a tiny slice of the operations working on one plane for a few minutes at one of the dozen or so hubs around the world and you realize: you really don’t know anything about this. It’s a modern miracle that it works so frequently. It’s amazing your things can cover such great distances in such a short time. We live in amazing, squished box times.