We woke up early enough this morning to take a little bike room. So there we were in the bike room, pedaling away, thinking about what was upstairs, not getting packed. But I got in 25 miles — which was great!
This was my first ride in a week, and my last ride for a week. Meanwhile, the calendar keeps churning and my yearly mileage record is still out there, waiting to be met.
I should make it, but probably not by much.
Couldn’t do more than 25 miles today, and let me just say, he wrote, that based on how the rest of the morning and early afternoon developed, I did not have time to do 30, or even 27 miles. The day was perfectly, accidentally, plotted out.
We got cleaned up and finished packing. I loaded the car and drove us to the airport. We made it through security and down to our gate with no incident, having left the house six minutes later than we wanted, but with no stress on time.
(Let’s see if we can do that the next two or four times in a row before it’s worth really remarking on, though.)
Anyway, to Delta, and a plane that winged us away to LaGuardia Airport. Here we are flying into Queens now.
They’ve been working on LaGuardia, an $8 billion renovation, since 2016. The terminal we flew into today opened last June. And they’re now nearing the completion of this whole project. Joe Biden, then the vice president, famously said the old airport belonged to a “third-world country” and the mid-project experience was none better. But now, here we are, the airport the New York media is calling the first new major airport built in the United States in the last 25 years.
What is not be available: mass transit.
Can you believe that?
Getting to the rental car companies is no easier. Landing at Terminal C there is sometimes a shuttle to Terminal A. From Terminal A you’d have to take a second bus to the car rental people, who are off the premises. Or you could walk. It is not, repeat, not, conducive to walking. This whole design is as naively 20th century New World as can be.
We took an Uber, instead. Two, actually, because we got in the wrong car the first time.
There’s egg on my face but, hey, it’s in your car, lady, and not mine.
So we got the car and then drove toward our next stop: Pennsylvania.
At a key moment on the two-hour plus drive (about the same amount of time as the flight, I think) The Yankee noted that we have been in seven states in 36 hours. It was then that I decided to tally up our travel mileage this holiday season.
We had dinner with her god-sister’s family. We spent the evening playing card games with their daughters. It’s fun watching them grow up, and it’s a special treat to be able to spend this time with them.
This is their oldest, when she was about a year old, in 2009.
Tonight we were talking about colleges. She’s brilliant, I’m surprised we weren’t talking about graduate programs.
Both of those kids beat me up playing cards, so if that’s any indication …
I visited another dollar store today, found nothing but cheap plastic and small containers of food stuffs. This search for silly Christmas presents is going to require an upgrade tomorrow.
Tonight I started doing the laundry. Thrilling stuff, I know. We also enjoyed a nice, mild tilapia for dinner, and figured out the final details of the rest of our holiday travels. These things did not all happen in that order.
No one in their right minds does the planning before the fish.
Earlier in the day I did the recycling. Anyone need 400 words on that? Loading the car is the trick, you see. I have to break down a bunch of cardboard boxes, because we aren’t always in the best habit of doing that as we go. The boxes fit into the truck. There are four large bins that take the trip, one each for plastics, aluminum, steel and glass. Over time I have developed a stacking system that allows me to get all of this in the car. There’s also the other stuff to work around in the car: my bag for work, my lunch, an umbrella, some sneakers I’m driving around for no discernible reason. I made it all fit because it wasn’t raining in my driveway. But by the time I had it loaded, and covered the short 2.1 mile distance to the recycling center I was in a drizzle. This was what I’d hoped to avoid: recycling in the rain.
If you’re going to save the earth, the least the earth could do is generate some ideal weather patterns. Be appreciative, Mother Nature.
We’re actually in a moderate drought just now, so the rain, such as it was, was welcome.
It didn’t rain much, but the day looks like this. Every day looks like this. These are the colors we will absorb between now and late March.
I stood on the loading dock, for no good reason as it turns out, for quite a long time. Might as well get a photo out of the deal.
Next time, I’ll do one so that we can’t tell where the limestone ends and the sky begins.
I went on a short bike ride last night. I’ve been trying late night bike rides, but this hasn’t been working well.
Sunday night my legs were sluggish and there was some sort of setting problem with the trainer. I did about a half hour and, discouraged, I called it quits. Last night I was trying to correct the trainer problems, and even made some progress with it. But, nevertheless, it wasn’t right, so, discouraged, I called it quits once again after 30 more minutes.
Last night I figured it out. Really got the trainer and the bike dialed in. Half an hour in, I got into a fast group and I was able to hang on. It was the fastest half hour I’ve ever ridden. And then, at 59 minutes, I got a flat tire.
An actual flat tire on my virtual, video game ride.
My tube burst because my wheel wore out on the trainer drum and, you don’t care about this.
Tomorrow, new tires arrive, and I’ll get back to it. This is the final push toward breaking my personal milage record. (I suspect I’ll meet this underwhelming achievement on December 30th.)
Today in the Re-Listening Project we’re going to learn some things. And, the most important thing you’re going to learn about is Vic Chesnutt. He was from Athens, Georgia. He released 17 records, but his moment was around that fifth or sixth record. See, Chesnutt was in a wheelchair and was partially paralyzed from a car accident he had when he was a young man. He played guitar, but had limited use of his hands. The medical bills piled up, but so did the accolades among his peers. In 1996, a cover album, “Sweet Relief II: Gravity of the Situation” was released.
Chesnutt’s perspective of Americana, which was funny and pointed and gothic and lovely and frightful and pretty much every other emotion, was finally in front of broad audience. R.E.M., Nanci Griffith and Hootie and the Blowfish, Indigo Girls, Joe Henry and Madonna and more showed him off to the world. Here are a few from the and more column.
I’m not saying it’s not the best Garbage song. What I’m saying is it’s the best Garbage song.
And here’s a Soul Asylum performance worth actually listening to.
The undisputed best thing Cracker ever recorded.
And, finally, Vic Chesnutt appears on the last track, alongside the great Victoria Williams.
He died in 2009. He was described by one critic as “a neo-hippie, an ex-drunk, an ex–garage rocker turned earthy Southern songcrafter.” Don’t let the grime get in the way of the myth, though, especially when the myth grew better. The myth also obscures the complicated, and that seems as reasonable an approach as any when considering a songwriter that copped to the conceit of, ya know, writing songs. There’s equal parts misery and faith in most of his work, and whatever precipitate the two yield should be in there in abundance, too. It’s overdone, to be sure, but the writing is something to admire.
Today there’s a songwriting seminar in his name, and a songwriter of the year award is given out in his honor. I suspect he might have differing opinions of the virtue of those two things.
Next we have Primitive Radio Gods, which I picked up as a radio station freebie, and only because of that one song. And, until this very moment, had always thought this was a one-person band. (Sorry, fellas.) This is actually a three-piece. Guess I never read the liner notes. Anyway, they got to the very top of the Billboard Alternative Songs chart with the unthreatening, catchy “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand.” You remember it, easy hip hop beats and a lot of samples, including B.B. King and gonging of distant church bells.
The whole of the album is like that. Modern alt rock, one important chord and a lot, a lot of samples used as fills. At the time this was impressive. Not avant garde, but mildly thoughtful. Looking back, it was technically impressive. Without thinking about it, I can reel off three different ways, we could pull down any sound, archived or contemporary that we wanted if we were to make a song like these today. But, mid-1990s? It was on a format you had on the shelf or you made it yourself, and the options of just searching through a database to find something that fit your meter were limited, to say the least.
These guys got caught up in a few years of record label difficulties. Drops, mergers, re-acquisitions, and so on. I haven’t picked up any of their later stuff, but they’ve released seven studio albums, or 11, depending on how you count. The latest was in 2020.
But on this, the debut, the one with the big and only hit there are 10 tracks. The one you might recall if you had a radio in 1996, this one, which has the distinction of sounding distinctly different from most of the record …
The title track, “Rocket,” is the best song on the thing.
For reasons I don’t remember, and mysterious knowing the timeline doesn’t easily and obviously overlap, I dubbed a friend Rocket. Maybe she was over at my apartment when this was on one day. Anyway, she knows that single and then she knew this song because I assigned it to her, for some reason. She’s married to one of my best friends and though I don’t talk with her directly on a highly regular basis, that nickname has basically replaced her given name in my brain for a few decades now. Weird how you tie one thing to another, for no reason at all. No telling why that happens.
If this feels brief or rushed today, I’d agree! And there’s not a good ending, either. I’ve almost finished the next album for the Re-Listening Project. I’m sure that’ll wind up here tomorrow.
I have re-started a bad habit, at least for a short while. I’m now reading multiple books at the same time once again.
Oh, I used to do this a lot more. There was the book-in-the-car book, the regular-read book, the books I might have been studying at the time. In the Before Times, when I went out to eat, just about the most fun thing to do was to eat and read.
But these days, not so much. There’s a lot to read online, though I’ve determined I should cut back on that. I have a three-shelf bookcase full of things to read. The top is stacked with books. There’s another pile almost as tall as the bookcase. There’s dozens of books waiting patiently on my Kindle, too. You can’t work through that stack, I’ve learned, without a certain determination, without fewer distractions.
None of that includes whatever else may come my way.
And what’s come my way today is a library book. Craig Johnson is just about the only non-fiction author I read, and that’s only because of the Longmire TV show. The book series spawned the show. The show — featuring 33 episodes across three seasons on A&E and and an additional 30 episodes in three more, grittier, Netflix seasons — was far superior. But the books are close enough.
Johnson writes one of these every year now. I check them out from the local library around Thanksgiving. This is this year’s installment. I’m not sure how much more he can get out of the character, who was aging when it started. But these years later, the long-in-the-tooth part is stretching the realism.
Just as well, then, that this book is all in the spirit world, or the afterlife, or a drug-induced condition, or a coma. This is kind of annoying, because physics in an already physical world don’t always apply.
But, when our protagonist sheriff is a ghost, in the past, there’s this line …
It’s a good line.
I’ll wrap this book up in a night or two.
But I’m also happily sawing my way through Rick Atkinson. It’s late in 1776. Washington is on the run, from out of New York and into New Jersey, from the British. The situation is dire.
I like that Washington had time to order wine and water. And, in a book, these things get compressed, so we don’t know exactly when Nathanael Greene wrote this letter to his wife, maybe it was after the fact. But it’s nice to think he dashed it off just before hoping on his horse. Apparently, there was a window of about 10 minutes between the general receiving bad news and moving out. So probably that encouraging note came later, but …
Atkinson’s attention to detail is so great I’m surprised he didn’t draw the comparison to Joshua 1:9.
I’m in the last 20 percent, or so, of that book, which means I now have to agonize over it ending, wondering when the second installment of the trilogy is going to come out and, most importantly, decide what book, or how many, to read next.
“In the mail” is a bit redundant, don’t you think?
Not at all, dear interlocutor. You can receive envelopes in many ways. Someone can hand you an envelope. You could fashion one out of your own paper, or even purchase some. I have a small box in my desk at the office.
OK, fine. You received a curious envelope in the mail.
Yes I did. It had a certain texture.
Texture?
Not like a golf ball, which has that dimpled surface for aerodynamic properties, but the opposite of that.
Surely it has some purpose, this round skid plate design. Surely I am meant to stand on it, securely, squarely, confidently, while I’m opening the rest of my correspondence.
Sure, plus, it makes it stand out.
You’re right! I felt it right away.
And we’re talking about it.
Yes, we are.
So job done.
I didn’t tell you who it was from though, did I?
And that’s just how exciting today was. Emails, a few conversations about future to do lists, watching people watch the World Cup. Laughing at people. I also wrote a letter and sent that off. No fancy envelope, though.
I got in a little bike ride this evening, if nothing else to see how my knee would feel doing its part after I aggravated it in last night’s run. Stairs felt the same. Walking didn’t hurt. Getting up and down to clean a few things around the house felt as it always does. But maybe, I figured, the repetition of riding 25 miles would tell me something different. So I tapped out 25 easy miles. No pain. Lots of gain.
By my count, I’ll have the opportunity to ride nine or 10 more times before the end of the year.
If that holds up, and I hold up, I just might set a new personal best for milage in a year.
It’s time to check in on Rick Atkinson’s The British Are Coming. This is an incredible descriptive bit about General Charles Lee. You could look at this in a few ways. How many different ways to you need to describe a person? You could note how this is about personality, and not about his physical description. You’re right about that, the physical part shows up elsewhere. Begging the further question, how tightly can you pack in facts about a man? (And, not pictured, this goes on for a bit, as it is our introduction to his trotting into Charleston in 1776.) But I have a different question.
How much time did Atkinson put in the simple, thorough, act of pulling together this description.
It’s always thick. It’s never burdensome. I love how the man writes.
I am 340 pages into this 564-page first installment of his American Revolution trilogy. (No word on when the second book is due out.) There’s something new to learn everywhere, here. And, even then, you know you’re not getting everything. Something to think about over the next two hundred pages.
Waiting in the wings, the latest installment of just about the only fiction I read.
As promised, here’s a bit more from yesterday’s adventures. These are the first 90 seconds of the Monet at The LUME exhibit. You cover a fair amount of ground with the impressionists in the next hour or so. It’s a fine presentation. Go see this when it gets near you.
The giant image of an aging Claude Monet near the end of the exhibit, and before the gift shop.
Try as we might, and we tried mightily, we could not talk the folks into buying a beret.
We went back to Newfields after dinner to see the Winterlights demo. Much better weather this year. A lot of smiles, a lot of happy children. A lot of adults looking with the eyes of a child. (Just imagine if they’d seen someone wandering around in a beret.)
Had a nice bike ride today, I put 40 more miles in the books. That’s almost four loops on this specific Zwift course.
Someone decided two circuits, 21.50 miles, should be a Strava segment. Strava tells me I’ve done that segment seven times. And, today, I shaved two minutes off my best time.
