Thursday « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Thursday

Klink, thunk, ping

I’ve learned a few things today. Valuable, important things.

None more important than this: riding your bike through a hail storm can be painful and hysterical. A big chunk of ice cut my right thumb, right in that crinkly part of the joint. I could hear the hail pinging off my top tube and grinding away under my tires.

This was on an abbreviated ride this afternoon. There were things to do and there were storms. Don’t judge. This was one of those days that featured a storm that defied conventional forecasting and radar. I headed north, saw the clouds gathering and heard the foreshadowing of far off thunder. So I turned south, calculating my time and distance and trying to figure out just how much I could get in for the day.

At just 16 miles it was time to go home, so I made the big turn and noticed the soaked clouds had followed me. Now I’m gliding under them despite all of my previous twists and turns. Big drops start to fall, but this is nice because it cools me down. For the first time ever, I’d managed to forget my phone, so I can enjoy the rain without worrying about ruining electronics.

Before long this turns into movie rain. There was sideways rain and stinging rain and even some that came up from the ground. I’m riding through puddles that reach my feet in the pedals. The temperature drops by what feels like 20 degrees. I’m counting lightning and thunder reports like lifeguards. I’m this close to finding someone’s porch to hide under.

That’s when the hail started. At first they were tiny little bits that were so unremarkable you wouldn’t notice. Is that … hail? Now I’m riding with wet socks and watching ice bounce off the asphalt. I hear it striking my bike, trying to notice the difference between an aluminum and a carbon fiber impact.

The hail is getting larger. Marble sized, in fact. I find myself in a weird position of needing to get home, but dreading going any harder because hail hurts. Now I can hear it thunking and plunking off the shell of my helmet. I’m in the neighborhood, but riding faster means more hail, somehow. I put my hands right over the stem and hope my back is up to the challenge. I’ve got a half mile to go.

A minivan pulls up and offers to give me a lift. “It is getting nasty out,” the stranger says.

Yes, it is. But I’m almost home. The nice thing about riding in the rain is that wet socks make my feet heavier, and that means the pedals turn faster. I don’t even remember the last hill onto our road. I think I top it better than ever before, but the hail still looks like it is growing when I make it to the porch. I’m drenched, laughing and cold. I open the door and ask my lovely bride to bring me a towel. But there is no towel to be had. She is not home.

She’s out looking for me because there’s a bad storm coming, apparently, and I didn’t have my phone for the first time ever. She tells me I’m in trouble. We laugh about this while I dry my bike. Riding in the rain is great. Riding in the hail might mean something entirely different.

Other things I learned on this ride:

Honey Stinger’s packaging keeps their product dry even in a blinding rainstorm. I had one in my pocket for the drenching and figured I should try and eat it as I got cleaned up. If I’m soggy, I figured, I wouldn’t feel too bad about eating something that was also full of rain water. But the waffle held up, and that’s comforting.

Putting balled up pieces of paper in your shoes dries them out.

Your standard cycling kit, which is designed to wick away moisture as you ride, can get so wet in the rain that it takes hours to dry. It takes only about 20 minutes when you pull it out of the washer, though. There was a lot of rain.

Turns out trees were downed. The high school nearby had a fence ripped up in the wind. In one of those weird dynamics of storms I didn’t get any of the wind.

We drove through another small storm cell this evening to have dinner in Prattville. Picked up Brian, who’s going on a beach trip with us this weekend. We had barbecue at Jim ‘N’ Nicks. Haven’t been to one in ages. Miss the place. We more than made up for it in peppermints, though.

And since we are traveling tomorrow, I must pack tonight. So here are some links to bide your time.

More than 1,000 shots recorded by Birmingham’s ShotSpotter during July 4th holiday. I find this difficult to believe, somehow. Bullets are expensive, after all.

Federal judge: Websites must comply with Americans With Disabilities Act. This will be huge.

Forget politics, here are 10 things that really divide Americans. Number one is “Dogs.” You can stop reading after that. And probably ignore everything else the site ever publishes on anything. They didn’t even include the Continental Divide.

5 things the public wouldn’t know without FOIA. FOIA is your friend.

Smartphones hardly used for calls. Great chart to ponder there. Jeff Jarvis writes:

Mobile = local = around me now. Mobile is my personal bubble. It is enhanced convenience, putting the device and the world in my hand. But next imagine no device: Cue the war between Siri and Google Glass to eliminate the last mediator, the thing.

I see companies assuming that mobile requires maps and geography or apps and closed worlds. But I think what we now mistakenly call mobile will instead be about getting each of us to what we want with fewer barriers and less effort because the service has gathered so many signals about us: who we are, where we are, what we like, whom we know, what we know, what we want to know, what we buy…. The power of what we now call mobile, I believe, is in signal generation and the extreme targeting and convenience that enables.

What we call “mobile” is disruptive in ways we can’t yet figure out. We call it “mobile” but we should call it “what’s next.”

Finally, News Cat gifs.

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28
Jun 12

A holy roller, and some words about words

Saw this on the road today:

The scripture there, a bit blurry in the picture, is Romans 10:9, “That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.”

Do you ever wonder why people share the scripture they share? There’s the precise message, of course, some are motivated by the very specific point. But others, you just think If you have the chance to share one, what would it be? There’s that entire book of them, after all.

Mine is Philippians 2: 1-4.

Therefore if there is any encouragement in Christ, if there is any consolation of love, if there is any fellowship of the Spirit, if any affection and compassion, make my joy complete by being of the same mind, maintaining the same love, united in spirit, intent on one purpose. Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves; do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others.

That’s a lot to live up to, but worthy of aspiration.

What’s yours?

Anyway, all down the side the truck had this great pastoral church setting. The truck was owned by a small company from Georgia. On the hood, where you’d normally find the truck’s ornament, was a giant rounded cross.

It is a two lane highway, so I didn’t get the chance to see what was on the other side of the trailer. We can only wonder.

Finished the biggest part of that paper I mentioned earlier this week. Tonight, as I was dabbling in the last section of it, my entire Macbook froze on the F3 exposé. Also Chrome shut down separately from all of that. Chrome — We were good, once, for about six weeks! — at least has the restore tabs function. Otherwise I’d have become convinced that the electromagnetic field around me had gotten off kilter today and that this paper was destined to never be finished.

Earlier in this project we encountered a few server query problems that kept locking up as we tried to gather data. Earlier this week I managed to spill a full glass of tea all over the notes about my data. Taken altogether this has been comical, though it didn’t feel like it at the time.

But I passed my section on late this evening to The Yankee, who’s coordinating this project into a an impressive bit of brilliance. I wedged 23 citations into 11 pages with 2,500 words, most of them I wrote three and four times. Some of them good, even. Some could stand for some extra polish.

Any takers?

Tomorrow: two percent more typos, 12 percent more photographs, three percent funnier! Just a prediction.

adventures / Auburn / cycling / friends / iPhone / journalism / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
21
Jun 12

It was a pretty full day

Had the big anniversary dinner last night, which also means the anniversary self-portrait, traditionally taken right about on this spot, the “Oh, yes, we should take a picture” spot.

We had reservations at the marvelous Warehouse Bistro — a local five-star restaurant that is hidden in the oldest industrial park in neighboring Opelika. All the big signatures are on the wall. You get the impression that a lot of powerful deals are made there.

We now have an “our usual table,” even though we go there once a year. It is a bit out of our normal price range. But the food is so good.

Here’s the New Zealand rack of lamb:

Try the … well, try everything. It is a five-star restaurant.

Rode a quick 19 miles today. Had dinner with our friend Jeremy. Did some research and planning — turns out the Harvey Updyke trial, which was set to get underway this week, was continued once again. That got scrapped this morning when the judge, concerned over this guy’s inability to stop telling members of the media he poisoned the fabled trees at Toomer’s Corner, media exposure and jury fairness, delayed the trial again.

The guy has talked to ESPN, Finebaum, Finebaum again and been featured in a thin television documentary that had a theatrical release. People have heard of him. This has all been an indecipherably, convoluted defense strategy, I’m almost convinced of it. (Finebaum, because he knows it is good for his business, has decided that Updyke has been punished enough. Last one out turn out the lights.)

(Incidentally, good on The Plainsman’s reporter for striking up the conversation that led to the story linked above. Word is that Updyke told the reporter he did it without being asked. The reporter was supposed to be working on something similar to a sympathy piece, but realized his story changed right in front of him. Of course he wrote it. The Plainsman called it a confession, and treated it like this was news. It was not. Updyke has been saying this since February of 2011. Also they missed on the age of the trees by 60 years. Facts are important, tricky things. But it was nice hustle nonetheless. Now the young student-journalist has been subpoenaed in this case. Nice start to a journalism career, that.)

The timing of this scheduled appearance had been fortuitous, though, because we’d fashioned a little project around it. But the decision today scrapped that plan. Worked out well, though. Our new plan fleshed out as a much better idea.

Incidentally, we’re 16 months out from his arrest, and still nothing more than an arraignment and depositions in bizarro-Updyke land.

Did a little packing tonight. Put the brand new bike rack on the car. Read every direction in the booklet. This is important. There are cars behind us that would like our bikes to stay on our new bike rack. And we’d really rather not trash our bike.

Tomorrow we’ll be on the road again.

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14
Jun 12

Wheels and bolts and things

My bike at rest. It deserves it.

Not because I’ve been riding a lot, but because yesterday was just hills.

Lots of hills. I rode this one over and over again, finally quitting when my times stopped improving.

So I did 15 miles of hills yesterday. That’s a lot of stomping on the bike for a guy with big feet like me. Thirty more miles today. Just as I got back home I glanced down at the odometer.

That’s for the year. So I’m only about 450 miles behind where I want to be on the year. I’ll catch up eventually.

The story about the faucet: This would be a great entry to the running page on fixing things in our house. I don’t have a category for it. It is too late to add one now and I’d probably just name it something hateful anyway. But we can now add to a list of repair jobs that include the air conditioner (twice), the shower, refrigerator, dish washer (twice), washing machine, the toilets (three times between them) and more.

We’ve lived here for less than two years.

So the kitchen faucet developed a drip. We found a certain way that you could turn the nozzle and the handle to minimize the problem. This worked for a while. And then it stopped working. And earlier this week the drip almost became a stream.

I’ve tried to take the faucet apart before so I could replace the washers, but the water is so hard here that all of the innards (plumbing term!) were fused together. I tried this for a few days. I tried this with WD-40 and various other things found in the cabinets and garage.

Having failed at this simple task I decided to just replace the entire faucet. So out from the cabinet came all of the cleaning supplies. Under the sink went my head. The supply lines, I discovered, were also fused on the faucet end. OK, then. I’ll just take it apart and pull the supply lines up from the top and buy new stinking supply lines with my brand new faucet that has to be installed because I can’t take the old one apart to install $.75 worth of rubber gaskets to it.

I’m thrilled.

The supply lines were disconnected from the bottom. I disconnected the sprayer nozzle. I freed one of the nuts that attaches the faucet to the sink from underneath.

The sink, you’ll notice if you spend enough time in the cabinets, is a great two tub cast iron deal. This is the most sturdy thing we own, I’m certain of it. That and the other nut that is attaching the faucet to the sink. That joker was fused with the bolt in the worst way. But underneath that nut was a concave washer type thing (more plumbing terminology!). It, too, was rusting.

And so it was that I found myself donning goggles, grabbing a screwdriver and just stabbing the crap out of that washer type thing. The plan was to punch out so much of that rust-crusted impediment and then just pull everything out from the top.

Which, eventually, I did.

So we went to Lowe’s and bought a new faucet. Nothing they had matched exactly, but that’s OK because we needed a working sink.

And we got in trouble at Lowe’s too! They have those rolling ladder step things and we moved one into the aisle to inspect the faucets above our line of sight. An old guy with a ponytail and a red vest took exception to this. I understood his point — safety is important — but he also understood mine. There is no one around in the store to give you any help. I know this because I’d done this exact same thing on this exact same aisle for more than 10 minutes last night. There were no red vests to be found. So I went to Home Depot, which is literally right across the street. And I stayed on their faucet aisle for even longer, and there were no orange aprons to be found.

Which brought up a great conversation about all of this online. In the middle of which came the Home Depot social media person with the “Oh no! Sorry to hear that! Which store were you in?” It might have been rude, but I said “Is it unfair to say “All of them”? Based on the responses I received from others the rep on floor help is staggeringly poor.”

The social media person did not write back to that.

The Lowe’s red vest with the ponytail came back later, as we were wrapping up our choices, and commiserated on the faucet problem. He knew they had a floor problem. I’m sure the Lowe’s managers do too; they just don’t care. Home Depot? Same thing.

But it gave me time to see things like this, the paper towel holder!

You’ve never seen such excitement for such a prosaic tool! It holds your paper towels! Above the countertop! It holds! Paper towels!

This, at a glance, is simply disturbing:

A jaundiced hand emerging from the wall, holding some sort of Matrix device. Or is it from Alien? Or is it Elvis’ alternative universe microphone. Don’t sing into this one though, you’ll just drown.

Or you could go into our backyard:

It rained a lot today.

Oh, and I installed the new faucet. Took eight minutes. It better work for years.

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7
Jun 12

The cat is mad at us, and I might not be pleased myself

We’re back home. I unpack the laundry — Not clothes. You do not take dirty clothes to someone else’s place to clean, of course. You leave with clothes; you return with laundry. Home, if you’ve ever wondered, is where you do your laundry. — and throw it in the basket or, sometimes, in the washing machine as soon as I arrive home.

The Yankee … she does something. I am usually too fixated to notice. Unload car. Unpack suitcase. Hide suitcase from myself so as to trick the eye that there are no more trips, no more windshields, insulting airport experiences or unusual pillows.

Typically this works. She’s petting the cat, I’m distributing the suitcases, the backpacks and whatever else we have going on. Eventually Allie comes to me, we’ve missed each other, but I want to have these things out of the way. And she’ll camp out in the suitcases if they’re left sitting around for too long.

We’ve been gone a while, but we have someone who is kind enough to spend some time with Allie every day. Check the food and the water and pet her. You’ve never seen a cat crave more from “hoomans” than this one. And so all night last night it was stamp, stomp, meow, head butt, yowl, stamp, stomp.

We don’t have the heart, yet, to tell her we’re leaving again tomorrow. The suitcases, it turns out, didn’t go very far.

At least all of our trips are really great trips!

This is the scene at the Crepe Myrtle Cafe, the local market where we get a lot of healthy food. This is some sort of onion flower:

We get this entire basket of fresh fruits and vegetables every Thursday. Most of them are grown very nearby. The girl that sold them to me today asked if I needed help carrying them to my car. Time to get that hair coloring product, apparently.

I mean, this basket is packed solid and gets hefty after a while, but really. I can handle it. And if I can’t, I’ll be in a commercial for one of those Rascal scooters. Delicious veggies, though:

Finally, got a chance to ride my bike again. Did 28 miles today, working on the backside of the big hill in town. There’s less traffic there, it has two great bends and is nicely shaded in the afternoon. I was timing my speed up it, going up and then down, up and then down. When the time started falling I moved on.

Elsewhere in my ride, I found a new personal best. I’ll have to double check, but I think I might have been speeding:

I believe I could get another mile or so out of that stretch, actually. Something else to shoot for.

FInally, my grandmother is feeling a bit under the weather. We went card shopping. This is the one I did not get:

The inside: