The Yankee’s parents are celebrating their 40th anniversary this weekend.
The Yankee and family friends conspired to throw them a little surprise party. Here they are walking in the door of a little Italian restaurant they frequent:
Did you hear her say “We say your car?” That was one of their local friends. We parked right next to them and they said “That looks like their car … ” We also parked right next to an out-of-state family member’s car. No one noticed it.
We crammed 28 people into Tutti’s, the delicious little Italian place. Everyone had a great time. My mother-in-law said “These are all of the people we’d want to have dinner with.”
The Yankee and all of the people involved in putting the party together did a great job. The guests of honor had no idea.
One of the brides’ maids produced the dress she wore 40 years ago. Some of their lifelong friends brought out the old photographs.
Here are two snapshots someone showed off, taken just after the young couple had returned from their honeymoon:
Here’s another picture from some time shortly after that:
And these next two pictures were taken on the night they met. This was at a one year reunion for her nursing program. I was sitting tonight next to the lady who set them up, she told me the whole, cute, story.
My mother-in-law is on the far right, decked out in crepe paper. It seemed to be the style of the time. The guy in the awesome jacket was a doctor in that nursing program. (Three of her nursing classmates were at the party tonight.)
Facing the camera in the photograph on the left is the groom-to-be. He’s a bit fuzzy in the original too, but there’s an entire series of pictures where he’s floating in the background, in that posture, in the same place.
She says he tried to pick her up by suggesting they go out to his car and listen to his stereo.
“No way,” she said. But he’d finally win her over. He’d soon tell his friends she was the one. They’d be married a year or so later.
And here they are today, surprised and surrounded by their friends.
I love this road. Good quality asphalt, a bike lane basically the entire way from beginning to end. It is quiet because the business of this road is down near the other end. Up here, for the time being at least, it is still undeveloped. It is the victory lap of some of my routes. A fair amount of it is downhill.
I did an easy 20-miler this evening. I’m looking forward to longer rides, which will start back next week.
And if you need a bit of inspiration for, well, just about anything, here’s a video destined to go big. Only 250,000 views so far, but that will change. Tune out the music, and wade through the first two-and-a-half minutes. The reward comes soon after that:
Things to read: Local boy is a good speller. Samford and UAB baseball both make the NCAA regionals. Auburn and Alabama did not.
New York City plans to enact a far-reaching ban on the sale of large sodas and other sugary drinks at restaurants, movie theaters and street carts, in the most ambitious effort yet by the Bloomberg administration to combat rising obesity.
The proposed ban would affect virtually the entire menu of popular sugary drinks found in delis, fast-food franchises and even sports arenas, from energy drinks to pre-sweetened iced teas. The sale of any cup or bottle of sweetened drink larger than 16 fluid ounces — about the size of a medium coffee, and smaller than a common soda bottle — would be prohibited under the first-in-the-nation plan, which could take effect as soon as next March.
That’s a sticky slope, friends.
Two years after the oil spill, the fishing is bad down on the Gulf:
The long-term prognosis for the Gulf’s health remains uncertain.
Recent studies have found higher numbers of sick fish close to where BP’s well blew out and genome studies of bait fish in Barataria have identified abnormalities. Meanwhile, vast areas of the cold and dark Gulf seafloor are oiled, scientists say.
And many fishermen are convinced something’s amiss.
[…]
“We was there to work, but couldn’t,” said Lawrence Salvato, 49, as he stopped for lunch on a dock where he moors a shrimp skiff he runs his wife, Lisa. “Usually people are excited and they can’t wait to get out there. This year, there’s no real incentive.”
He said he made about $10,000 in seafood sales last year compared to $75,000 in 2009. He said his family made do with a $40,000 interim payment they got from BP. Fishermen who haven’t settled legally yet with BP over damages continue to survive on periodic payments from a $20 billion trust fund set up by BP.
“We’re afraid,” Salvato said. “A lot of people are getting out of fishing. They’re afraid.”
“We are no longer a newspaper company,” Sun-Times Media Holdings LLC Editor-in-chief Jim Kirk said in a memo to staff. “We are a technology company that happens to publish a newspaper. We deliver content. And we will deliver content on many platforms and in ways that we haven’t yet fully considered.”
We rode around the city yesterday morning. The Yankee was doing another brick, a training exercise designed to simulate an upcoming duathlon. She swam and biked. I don’t swim in laps, so I waited until she was done and followed her around town.
It was warm, but still morning, so the air was filled with this crisp feeling of not-too-warm which, really, is just the way we internalize the I-hope-it-doesn’t-get-too-hot feeling.
We rode the city’s bypass and then cruised around the outside of the airport, by a new church that is going up and then that long, last, slow, supple hill before home. Just as we pulled into the neighborhood I reached this on my odometer:
That’s for the season. I’m a few hundred miles behind where I want to be. But I’ll catch up.
Sunday afternoon I got out for an afternoon, heat of the day ride.
“Couldn’t you have ridden later?” my lovely bride asked. I think she was concerned about my health and well being in the way that people that care about you have. It was sweet, but halting. Is this really sensible?
Well, yes. Because, you see, I was gassed the other day when I went out for a ride on the first real warm day of the season. And that shouldn’t be happening to me. There are plenty of times when I don’t have the legs or the form or the fitness. I’ll accept those shortcomings as physiology or just the bad day of a bad cyclist. But I live in heat and humidity. This stuff shouldn’t bother me like it did that day, and so, yes, I will ride in the heat, because that can be overcome.
Also I drink a lot of fluids.
So I rode in 96-degree temperatures on Sunday, and I was pleased with that. When the mercury really spikes, I’ll be riding then, too. But you have to survive the 90s first.
My gloves, as of today, now have 2,100 miles on them:
I wonder what the lifespan of gloves should be. These feel like they are getting up there in age.
Watched Austin City Limits tonight. Usually, when I catch it, I’ll have it on as background noise to feel good about my thin appreciation of the arts. “Musicians I’m not entirely familiar with!” Sometimes, though, you get good pop tunes. And sometimes there’s a bit of international flavor:
Flogging Molly played the second set. Their second or third song they started like this: “This next song celebrates the life of over 100,000 Irish people shipped to Barbados as slaves. Let’s dance in their honor.”
Well, yeah, naturally.
I trimmed the hedges today. Some of them. It was the high point of the day’s heat, and so naturally I was outside sculpting away and fussing with garbage bags full of leaf leavings. I trimmed and cleaned a dozen. That’s not half the property.
The back and the side will just have to wait. There’s only so much you can feel like doing in one day.
A few doors down someone had their lawn guys hard at work. They wrapped up whatever they were doing as I struggled along, thinking, I’d hire someone to do it, but there are no artisan hedge trimmers in town.
And you need an artist for this job. We’re not doing sculptures, mind you, but there’s a lot going on. On one side they have to stay below a retaining wall. In the flower bed they have to be kept just so, seeing that they don’t dominate the roses and hydrangeas. The flowering shrubs need to be worked in such a way as to leave the flowers still showing vibrantly.
The two bushes that frame the garage present special problems. One is over a perennial flower bed and trying to remove clipped leaves from the ground there would be madness. The other one needs an extra curve to accommodate the side mirror of the car as it enters and exits the garage. The two shrubs that stand sentry at the end of the drive need to be kept close, allowing for a good turning radius. One of those is swallowing up the mailbox. I’d let it grow over and frame the thing, but I doubt the nice lady who delivers our bills and junk mail would approve. There are another series of shrubs that conceal all the utility boxes, and that sits on the property line. I want to help my neighbor, but not cut back his shrubs so much that he dislikes my efforts.
And that doesn’t get us around the side where someone, at some point, thought “You know, shrubs of varying sizes. That’s what this long wall needs.”
I’d like to meet that person. I’d like to shake their hand and tell them how wrong they were about that.
Anyone watch Sherlock? I finished the second series last night and I’m trying to figure out the big season-ending cliffhanger. Want to help? Here’s the entire final segment, including the brilliant work of Andrew Scott who treats Moriarty like a manic personality with great results:
The Guardian is writing about it, quoting the writer that everyone is missing a big clue. They are writing quite a bit about it. There are hundreds of fan theories.
Someone taped a thoughtful six minute video detailing the Holmes conspiracy:
That’s not the only one of those such videos, by the way, but that one is particular well thought out. The truck with the garbage bags is key. I’ve watched this scene three or four times now — it is especially tense and moving — and the last of it in slow motion a bit too. That truck seems almost like a continuity error, though.
Time warp: Old Auburn football pictures from The Anniston Star can be found here. There are lots of great images form the 70s, 80s and early 90s in there.
In 2006 I had the privilege of celebrating Memorial Day at the place where it all started, Gettysburg, Pa.
I put together a flash video of that day — a slideshow with audio — and would like to share it with you now. It was a great day, and a touching ceremony with the opportunity to see some of the most important places in our nation’s history.
Since it autoplays I’ll just link to it here. Please turn on the speakers and share 2:20 of your time with me.
