Tuesday « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Tuesday

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8
Apr 25

Spring showed up

Over the last week or so spring has sprung here, where the heavy land and the green sands meet. It takes too long to arrive, spring, but it does linger a nice long while. And it positively shows off when it wants to.

It’s an interesting idea, seasons having moods. Nature has her charms and her fury, why couldn’t there also be moods? And why can’t they all be as harmonious as this?

Of course, there is one category of drawbacks involved with spring and summer.

In an attempt to keep my knees liking me, and my enthusiasm for pulling these weeds higher than the weeds themselves, this year I am purchasing a rolling stool. Sit and scoot and don’t bend over. We’ll give that a try. Even if it only works on the driveway and not the stones out back, it’ll be worth it, because I’m sure I’ll find other uses for it.

You can have too many weeds, but you can never have too many flowers, or too many seats that roll.

Anyway, it might be light around here for the next few days or more. Playing catch-up and get-ahead simultaneously is time consuming.

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1
Apr 25

It’s me, I’m the fool

On Sunday, I took my lovely bride across the river, to charming Wilmington.

It was a Christmas present delivered in March. I got tickets to see Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood doing their improve show. We sat right up front. Right up front. At one point I thought Colin was going to step off the stage, and I had a plan to try to break his fall.

The two of them have been doing this traveling improv show for more than a decade now. Every show different, some of the games familiar, if you know the Whose Line Is It Anyway? format. They did the game where people in the audience had to move them around, and another where people had to make the sound effects. A mother and her young teen daughter made the sound effects, and in that we learned that not every teen knows The Beatles. They played another game where a man and a woman had to play Siri and Alexa.

Finally, they closed a show with their own improvised Broadway tune. The setup was there was a musical titled “Wilmington!” and this was going to be the go home number in the show. So they sought out, from the crowd, the iconic things about the city. It was a short list, and it devolved quickly to “bodies in the river” and “condos with a view.”

We saw another improv show in 2019, with Greg Proops, Jeff Davis, Joel Murray and Dave Foley. I was able to get a line into that show, “She’s from Canada. You don’t know her.” No such luck this time, but it was a good show, if a little overly reliant on audience participation. That’s the high wire part of the show, though, and those guys are great at it. Catch them if you can.

I could tell you about my bike ride … let me tell you about my bike ride. This was the third ride with my new helmet, and the first of those three where I remembered my sunglasses, so the look was complete. But the ride was delayed, because I had a flat on my rear wheel.

It was further delayed when I ruined a second tube trying to fix the problem. But when you don’t rush, and do a thing a second time, you get it ride, and so off I went, content to pedal myself into the evening.

And 4.5 miles later that tube was flat, too. Joke’s on me!

So I gave up. Three in one day is plenty. And I’m buying new tires. It was about time, anyway.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must get ready for a weekend trip.

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25
Mar 25

Reading about literacy

Catching up on grading today … seemingly an evergreen phrase … and I ran across a paper where a student wrote “We live through a crisis of critical thinking.”

I may wrap the class on that note — now, not at the end of the term — and spend all of my free time trying to remember the most direct route to get future classes to that same point. Some weeks ago I was trying to summarize our class conversation in the last few moments when I found, around the corner and down the hall, an opportunity to make just this point, and so I steered my riff that way. It was a great go home message, and it must have stuck with that student.

For this paper, I’d asked the class to look a few years into the future and try to project the problems of misinformation and disinformation that we’ll be dealing with, and how we might best cope with, and try to overcome it. Another student wrote, “Media literacy will also be an essential tool … As consumers, we can play a part by using critical thinking skills … Schools and universiti3es should also teach media literacy and teach students how to discern fake news from real news.”

It’s fun to read papers when the authors are trying to make these sorts of connections.

I went for a little bike ride this afternoon. I quickly realized that I need to rest up a little more. Sinuses, or whatever I get, don’t always make for a good experience when you get your heart rate up and start breathing hard. So it was a brief ride. I got in my 16 miles, just to spin the legs and see the sites. Like the irrigation system to infinity.

And the excavator at rest. I wonder what it gets used on around there. There’s not an obvious worksite, no scar in the earth. Just fields waiting to turn green.

If it’s active this year, I imagine it’ll be a sod crop. We’ll see.

Elsewhere, it’s just lovely pastureland, and these two paints enjoying a late lunch.

Now, I’m going to go back to reading the last of those papers.

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18
Mar 25

Signs of spring

This is not the first thing budding, but it is the first photographic evidence I’ve produced of the budding of spring.

Charlotte Brontë wrote of spring, “a greenness grew over those brown beds, which, freshening daily, suggested the thought that Hope traversed them at night, and left each morning brighter traces of her steps.”

She wrote that at a higher latitude where I’m writing this, so she must have been thinking of a bit later in the season than this. It’s not even true here yet, the part about the greenness. It could be the want, or the heart, but the freshening daily part has come to pass. Maybe it’s the Hope.

It was 60 and cloudy most of yesterday. It was sunny and made it to 66 degrees today. Tomorrow the forecast calls for the mid 60s and 70 degrees on Thursday.

Hope traverses us all at night.

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11
Mar 25

First outdoor ride of the year

Yesterday, at the end of class, I gave my students my other bully pulpit lecture. I tell them at the beginning of the term that being at the front of the room allows me to give one or two brief speeches that have little or nothing to do with the class. And yesterday was the day, because today was the day.

That speech is the one about how to pass other road users safely when you’re driving. There are relatively new state laws. People don’t know them very well. I am updating people one room at a time. I have a whole patter about this, because I’ve been doing it for years. I used to do it much more intently.

The whole thing was about being careful to allow cyclists room to safely operate when you pass them. And I won’t tell you what I wear or what color my helmet or my bike is because I want you to be safe and attentive and considerate when you pass all of them them. Because one of them might be me. “And remember,” I used to say in the driest tone of humor I can muster, which is pretty considerable, “I have your grade, right here, in my hand.”

That’s what I used to do, and one semester a student said to me at the end of the term that I’d psyched her out and tensed her up whenever she saw a cyclist. That’s not the point. Nor is it the point to threatened anyone’s grade, of course. It’s a laugh line. After that, it seemed important to point out, “This is a laugh line. But, also, be careful.”

All of this was made much more relevant after my lovely bride’s pickup truck-caused accident in 2022. And it’s relevant since we’ve been doing research in this area the last few months. And it’s relevant because, today, the weather was beautiful and I took my bike off the trainer and put it on the road. (Twenty-two days earlier than last year!) Oh, happy day.

Also it was a momentous day, of sorts. I’ve been sneaking up on this little achievement for a while, and I certainly didn’t want to capture it indoors. So I have slacked off on the trainer, with that in mind. I didn’t really want to do it on a road I know very well, but that’s the risk you run when you are on your normal training roads. Not that it matters, nothing about this matters, but, somewhere, right in here, I reached a mileage equivalent to the earth’s equatorial circumference.

That’s 24,901 miles to you and me. I celebrated by dropping a gel, turning around, and picking it up.

The bullfrogs were cheering me, and summer, on.

In addition to being the first outdoor ride of the year, and the equatorial ride, it was also new bike computer day. New is a relative term. I bought this, used, at the end of last September and mounted it in the cockpit today. The computer I just retired, a Garmin 705 Edge, I bought used in 2020. It was a 2008 release. My new computer is the Garmin 520, which made its way into the wild in 2013, so I’m happily still behind the curve, but it is a half-decade leap forward for me.

And that’s an important five years because the new computer communications with this new light, the Garmin Varia. I got one for The Yankee for her birthday last year, she loves it, and so she got one for me for Christmas. This is no mere light. There’s a radar system here, and it detects approaching vehicles, and then signals the computer, which beeps, turns red on the edges, and displays dots meant to represent the traffic behind you.

It’s a cool little feature. Sometimes, in the right circumstances, you don’t always hear the oncoming vehicles, so it is a nice help. Though you mustn’t think of it as 100 percent accurate. It’s not too bad on false positives, but there seems to be one time of day, if you’re riding in front of a low-in-the-sun sky, that it isn’t perfect. It didn’t pick up the first two cars that passed me on this initial ride today, but I think it caught the rest of them. One extra layer of safety.

What’s nice is that sometimes the headset will beep, because the Varia picks up a vehicle before I hear it. I have developed a three-look technique that seems to help. I glance over my shoulder when the oncoming motorist is well back, when they’ve closed about half the distance and then just before they get to me. And this seems to help them realize that I’ve seen them too. Since I’ve started doing this late last summer, most of my passes have been much better.

But perhaps the best part of the Varia is this. It has different light settings, and I’ve watched this with great amusement while riding behind The Yankee. She leaves her light on a solid setting, but when a car or truck gets to a certain distance away from them, the light starts blinking. Every time, every time, you see the car decelerate and move over.

So if you wandered to this page thinking about bike radar, we’re still in the early days, but big fans of them so far.

Also, because why not, it was new jersey day.

I got a good sale at NeoPro. Full zip, three pockets, they do the job you ask a bike jersey to do, except make me faster and skinnier. They’re bike jerseys.

Now I need to find good sales on bib shorts.

And to go pack. So, if you’ll excuse me.