There were no stockings, but the jolly one was there!
This was not my first run-in with Santa. Here he was, preparing to make his grand entrance in 2018.
It’s a Christmas party my mother-in-law runs. It’s beautiful. They put out the nativity. Santa jingles his bells and the whole room lights up as he ambles in to hand out presents. There are cupcakes and music and a lot of fun and smiling faces. If you need the Christmas spirit, this is where you find it.
The Special Church Christmas party is always one of the best invites of the holiday season.
After a morning spent doing work stuff, I went downstairs to ride the bike. This would be ride three this week on Zwift. I did two short rides Monday, then last night’s projects got away from me. So I was going to ride long today. I am trying to ride all of the stages in the game, which is something I started last year. I’m almost there!
And so today I was riding Surrey Hills, in London, when I hit the wrong button. The game let’s you do a lot of things as you ride. You can send messages to other riders, you can change the “camera’s” perspective of your avatar. You can take screen grabs and more. The later is how I get the images I sometimes share here. (And I won’t do that as much this year, promise.)
Another thing you can do is hang a U-turn. When you do that you end the route. So there I was, halfway through it when I hit the wrong button. Human error. But there were too many other things I wanted to do today.
First, after a late light lunch, because I did get in 25 miles, I got cleaned up and set out to take on the world. Things to do! Items to scratch off the list!
I took out the garbage. Third time I’ve been to the inconvenience center in the last week, I think. Then, I visited one of the local hardware stores. This is a small place. A mom and pop place. An everyone talks to you place. A no-one-rushes-you-at-quitting-time place. In the back corner I found some cotton rope, which I need for an upcoming project. And then, just to mess with the guy, I asked about the zip ties.
He told me where they were. I looked them over and then said, Nah. You don’t seem to have the industrial strength version I’m looking for. Maybe, I said as I arched an eyebrow while staring at the rope next time.
And then I got my haircut. Clumsy woman, but at least I still have both of my ears. I thought she was going to take my eye, and it wasn’t even when she was attacking the waviest part of my hair. But she was nice. She’s over Christmas music. No need for the standards at Halloween in her book. She likes Prince. She told me about trying to understand “Raspberry Beret” as a kid. She started telling me the story about asking her mother about the lyrics. But I don’t know this woman, or her mother. Am I supposed to ask about this? Prince, I said, was a clever one, and I left it at that.She still goes to the mall for her Christmas shopping. (Is that a thing people do?) I was hoping for some last minute tips, but instead I heard about her brother who is an expert at guessing about what’s inside each present. It was all a blur. They don’t waste a lot of time on a guy’s haircut. No need, really.
Come to think of it, she didn’t even show me the back of my head via the customary handheld mirror.
Be right back.
OK, it is still there.
And almost every task of the day was achieved! Things put off until today were successfully addressed! If I could do that two more days in a row we’d have momentum.
Sounds stressful.
What else is still hanging around? This brief snippet of a video that I shot earlier this week, but haven’t shared yet.
This is the 20th installment of We Learn Wednesdays. I’ve been riding my bike across the county to find the local historical markers. Including today’s installment, we’ll have seen 39 of the markers in the Historical Marker Database. This one marks a 19th century building.
It is appropriate that there’s only wonderful, and generic, National Register plaque. I can find almost nothing about the house or its original owner, John G. Thackeay.
It was built as residence and store. It features three stories in a T-shape, and parapet chimneys. There are transom lights, broad pilasters and paneled shutters. The Greek revival style building went up in 1847.
It could be that this wasn’t John G. Thackeay’s place. There’s a John G. Thackray that lived in the area during that time. The dates, at least, make sense. But in the marker database, and some ancient county document that’s been uploaded to the web, they use the E spelling.
Thackray, though, was listed as a merchant in the 1860 census. His wife and four daughters were there. Two teachers, a hat maker and a servant were listed at his address. In the 1870 census, his last, Thackray is listed as a retired merchant. This house was a story, maybe that’s our guy.
He was laid to rest about a mile away, and almost all of his family is buried there as well. Today, his place is a store again. Hardwoods and carpeting.
In next week’s installment of We Learn Wednesday, we’ll go to school. If you’ve missed any markers so far, you can find them all right here.
Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow? It gives tomorrow meaning! And heft! And Wednesdays deserve a certain kinetic energy, a notion of real accomplishment, right there in the middle of the week.
These are the things you can say when you just don’t feel like getting to those things on a Tuesday. But you still must go to the grocery store. So I did that. Picked up ginger ale and some lunch stuff and headed back to the house. Back to the grading, which is now, mercifully, almost done.
I’m slow walking it, and I don’t really know why. I have the time; maybe that’s why. But I’m giving myself an arbitrary deadline, just to be done with it. Why do Friday what you can wrap up on Wednesday?
Actually, today was spent compiling grades. There are a great many good grades, for which I am thankful. Either they knew it or they got it. If they got it from the class they might have learned it from me. If they learned it from me, that means the semester was a success.
That, of course, is just the quantitative part of it all. The real success of a term is: look how much we’ve learned, and how much we’ve grown!
I spent a little time this afternoon with the fig tree in the backyard. I bet I’ll be writing that sentence once a week all winter. Also, I found a reason to have a post-holiday inspection of the greenhouse. It came with the new place, but by the time we got here this summer there wasn’t much need for it. The late growing season got away from us too quickly. But something about that little 8 x 6 space in the corner of the yard just intrigues me.
I also walked around for a few photos.
I found a bit of moss growing in the stonework of the fence.
You wonder what all of that blue and purple sediments are in there. I wonder how I hadn’t yet noticed them.
Almost everyday, I still learn something new about the place. I have just come to think of it as little surprises from the previous owners. Some of them are quite neat, and they make sense. Others, you wonder, What was the thought process here? Expediency explains some things. Maybe, for other things, I just can’t see the problem the same way, but I wonder how they saw the solution. Perhaps it is best to stick with expediency.
On top of that same stone pillar.
I have this probably false memory of an elementary school teacher trying to teach the class about evolution and moss and lichen became part of the explanation. The moss beneath your tree could be the beginning of some future society! Real or not, elementary or not, the idea is sitting there in the hippocampus. Every so often I see a batch of moss and that comes to the fore.
This is on the backside of a stone column that is itself not in the most highly trafficked area. The next time I look upon it, there could be more. But I’ll probably see it again before it sprouts a proper civilization.
This I’ll see more often. It’s on a table. I’ll leave it ’til the spring.
That stuff can’t be the genesis of the next apex society. We’ll be using the space for our own social purposes when the weather turns.
And while it isn’t terribly cold just now, it could turn warmer again right now and that’d be fine. It’s mid-December, which is the time to realize: you didn’t dine outside enough this year.
The lesson is simple. Don’t put that off until next year, again.
Back to the Re-Listening project. In my car, I’m listening to all of my old CDs in the order in which I acquired them. I’m writing about it here, to share music, pad the space and, occasionally, take a trip down memory lane. Today that trip takes us back to the second half of 2004.
I was in a record store — remember those? — and flipping through the T section, or the Rock section, or the Alt section or the Stuff You Don’T Know About But Are Gonna Love section and I saw this photo of three dudes walking away from the camera. They’re all holding guitars. The text on the image said The Thorns. And, somehow, I divined that this was Matthew Sweet, Pete Droge and Shawn Mullins. This was something of a supergroup.
Sweet had a huge hit, in 1991’s “Girlfriend” under his belt. That song went to number four. In 1993 he had another song make it all the way to the third slot on the Billboard Alternative Airplay chart and in 1995 he had a smash hit with “Sick of Myself,” which hit 58 on the Billboard Hot 100, 13 on the Mainstream Rock chart and number two on the Alternative Airplay chart. Droge, meanwhile, had become one of those musician’s musicians. He opened for the biggest names in the business, he toured relentlessly, his songs landed on major movie soundtracks, appeared in “Almost Famous” and has produced a lot of other great musicians studio projects as well. And in the oughts, everyone was familiar with Mullins, who was a 10-year-long overnight success by this point. He’d had four songs lodged firmly in the Alternative Airplay charts. “Lullaby,” of course, topped that chart in 1998. And then, here they were in 2003, all sat down together to put this little project together, The Thorns.
Brendan O’Brien produced the record, and played on it. By then, he’d produced huge albums for Stone Temple Pilots, Pearl Jam, Aerosmith, Paul Westerberg, Soundgarden, Neil Young, Dan Baird, Rage Against the Machine, Michael Penn, Korn, Train and Springsteen, to name quite a few.
This is what they came up with.
First track:
They released a music video for this song.
And what’s most interesting, but doesn’t seem to be online, is that I bought this as a two-disc set. The second disc is called The Sunset Session. They took a day off from touring in July of 2003 and recorded an acoustic version of the whole album. It might be even better than what I’m sharing with you here.
We don’t have a “Blue” policy on the site. Maybe we should. Let’s make a “Blue” policy. When you run across a Jayhawks cover, you have to share it. So here’s The Thorns’ cover of “Blue.”
Sweet has supported The Jayhawks, so I suppose that’s part of why that Americana classic is here.
The album is eponymously named, but there is a title track of sorts. It starts with these big drums, and it must have been a challenge during the production to settle on waiting until the fifth track to get this into your ears. And we’ll talk about that rhythm section right after this.
Jim Keltner, widely regarded as one of the best drummers in the business is playing on this record. He was about 62 here, but you wouldn’t know it from how he plays. And how he plays is magical. We could be here for a while working through a list of people he’s kept time for, but we’ll just say this, he’s played for three Beatles. Bob Dylan, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Bee Gees, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Brian Wilson, the Traveling Wilburys and a host of others were in his Rolodex.
(It seems a few songs from the Sunset Sessions that have been uploaded. Here’s one now.)
Perhaps you’ve heard him in here, but Roy Bittan, from the E Street Band, is on this record. “The Professor” is another one of those omnipresent musicians. He’s played for everyone from Bowie to Dylan, to Gabriel, and from Dion to Reed and Meat Loaf and Steinman.
Go ahead and play this one loud while we talk about all the many strings you’ll hear throughout the record.
In addition to the guitars, this album will give you a vihuela, a marxophone, a dulcimer, a ukelin, a hurdy gurdy and some symphonic strings. They might have been showing off a bit.
You might think we’re listening to the whole album here, and I was tempted, but no. We’re only playing 70 percent of it.
Take just a moment here and think about how many classic pop-rock could also give you this song. This could be the Eagles, or Crosby, Stills, and Nash or anyone that’s ever sang harmony in Laurel Canyon.
I like to think most every album has a song on it that requires an open road, open windows and an odometer that urges you to disregard the posted speed limit. This would be that song.
I did not see The Thorns in concert. (I’ve seen Mullins a few times and Sweet once. That has to count for something.) They toured North America and Europe on this project and then each went back to their regular projects. The closest I got was a date they had in Atlanta, but that was before I even knew they existed as a group. But I did find this high quality recording of a show in Germany.
And with that, I am finally all caught up on the Re-Listening project. Caught up on writing about it, that is. Somehow, for much of the next 20 years I didn’t buy an awful lot of music. There are only two giant books to listen through. At this rate the Re-Listening project should run through next year. But I’ve lately been getting new records … this may continue until 2026.
We attended a birthday party for a 3-year-old on Saturday. The theme was pink and purple. And also mermaids and unicorns. I don’t have any mermaids or unicorns, so I wore a pink shirt and a purple tie, and a purple pocket square. The 3-year-old was still better dressed.
The parents got some balloons with giant bits of confetti in them. Sadly I was in another part of the party when this happened, but it was decided to pop the balloons and record the pop in slow motion. Confetti was everywhere. They’ll be discovering it for weeks. The cake was a unicorn. Our present was a dress that was reminiscent of a mermaid, but also included about four layers of multicolored tulle.
The birthday girl is the cutest thing. Every present is just the greatest present that was ever presented. I could have gone outside and found her some pine cones and put those in a gift bag and she would be thrilled. But when she gets mermaid stuff, it’s a different level of joy, entirely. It was all very cute.
Elsewhere, just grading and emails and watching final exams come in. And, also, verifying that my spreadsheets and my formulas are all accurate. The sun, you could say, is setting on the term.
I have the last class meeting of my semester tonight: more video projects to screen. After that, there’s only a small handful of things to score. I’ll submit grades later this week and, finally, all of those long-suffering students will be done with me.
I hope they have all learned as much as I did. I always hope that.
It’s time for the site’s most popular weekly feature. Let’s check in with the kitties.
Phoebe has been enjoying this little box on one of the cat trees. The other archway gives her great views of the flowerbed. They like that for all of the birds, but there aren’t a lot of birds around right now. I’m not sure if she believed me when I told her they would be back.
What does a cat know of patience, anyway? Just put your head between your paws, the birds will reappear.
Poseidon likes boxes. This time of year, Poseidon loves the space heater. So I put a box near a space heater, thinking he would love this arrangement. Now he’s taking naps beside the box.
Last weekend I got a strangely shaped box. Poe likes that one, too.
Such a goof.
My closet has some wire rack thing and it was not conducive to my closet system. But I found a solution that did not involve redesigning the whole space. It just required a quick order from Amazon. I thought it would take the better part of a day to implement the new closet setup. It took about 20 minutes. And now we have to watch out for a cat in this long, slender, box.
I officially gave up on outdoor bike rides for the year. The remaining forecast does not look promising and more days in the 30s didn’t seem exciting and I rode outside until mid-December anyway. Time, then, to set up the smart trainer and update Zwift.
It’s flat here, so of course I chose a route that features 2,700 feet of climbing.
The first trainer ride of the year always feels like a first. It’s easier, but more demanding, than riding on the open road. Putting some simulated 10-14 percent gradients in your legs right away is the smart move. Right?
Let’s see if I can move around in a classroom after 90 minutes of that.
I took the garbage to the convenience center Tuesday because, of course, there is no waste removal service in our neighborhood despite the two companies that send trucks up and down the road to visit their customers, our neighbors, every week. And so I do it the old fashioned way, by carrying things seven miles across town in my leather-interior car.
This is at least only a once-a-week exercise. It could go longer, but I’m not trying to ruin my chariot, or funkify its old car smell. Only this week I neglected to clean out the refrigerator on Tuesday. It would have been the sensible time to do so, just before loading up the car. But I did not. Which means it still needed to be done. And since we’re talking about it today, that means I did it this morning.
Removing some old things was fast. Looking for expiration dates might have been the biggest part of it. But by then I was invested, and so I might as well clean the refrigerator. Also it needed it.
There are many sections to our fridge. The freezer is on the bottom, and that has taken some getting used to after most of a lifetime with the freezer on top. Though we recently had a seven-year experience with a side by side, and that seemed to work out OK, even as it did feel a bit small. The point, I suppose, is that I am mentally agile enough to accept a radical change in my frozen foodstuff paradigm.
Inside the refrigerator section, there are three drawers. One for fruit and one for vegetables. Each is about half the width of the fridge. Beneath them both is a third drawer. We keep all of our cold hard cash in there. Previously it was just hard cash, but now it is cold. And also the bacon. The bacon is in that drawer, almost as valuable as the currency and one is definitely hiding the other.
Above the three drawers is the main section. Big items, your milk carton sized stuff, fit there nicely. Above that, there are two more shelves. One is rather small, but seems a custom fit to hold all of the last in crypto technology. And another is a medium size. It is full of my lovely bride’s breakfast and snacks and also some various cheese varieties. These cheeses are outcast from the door cheeses, which will hobnob with condiments, but not all of their dairy brethren. And, of course, the butter has sequestered itself. Snobby, churned product that it is.
And so I cleaned some shelves. And then I took the one bag from the refrigerator chore to the inconvenience center.
Somehow all of this took two hours.
And I just wanted to ride my bike. Last nice day for a while, and all. Probably the last nice opportunity for the year. Because soon there are the many holiday events and here comes the wind and rain and precipitous dip in temperatures and already I’m riding in two or three layers and full fingered gloves. All of which makes it a little more difficult to reach my phone and get the camera app open when I see random images I’d like to capture for no reason whatsoever, which is definitely one of the points of my bike rides.
Not too much longer after that I had a flat. I was only seven miles in, but that meant the end of the ride. It meant the end of the ride because, for some reason, the universe will not allow me to fix a flat and keep on going. There is always, always, always some reason that it’s over. I’ve learned to not fight it.
So I sent a message to my lovely bride that I had a flat and I would be replacing that tube and then limping back home. This, of course, leads to the hilarious four-message sequence where I get to assure her that I’m fine and I can change a tire and it does not require two of us, or her coming to get me, but definitely we should book an Uber Ultra, just in case.
Removed the rear wheel from the bike frame. I pulled the leaky tube from the tire and wheel. I inspected the tire. A little sliver of metal had worked its way through my Gatorskin tire, a heavy duty tire designed to prevent flats. And probably they do! How can I prove a false positive?
So I pulled that little bit of metal out of the radial and reached into my pocket for a spare tube and mounted it on the tire. It only take a few moments to do all of this. Before you know it, you’re getting an extra arm workout from trying to inflate the tire with the portable hand pump. That takes just about the same amount of time. But, soon, I’m back on the road. I thought: I could just keep going. But, no, the universe. And, also, I am now only down to one spare. So I turned around to head for home.
Not two miles away there’s a four-way stop. And a guy there decided he would like to almost hit me as I took my turn through the intersection. A woman was walking by and saw it and she was aghast.
“That idiot almost hit you!”
Somehow, the only thing that came to mind was, It happens every day.
In the seven miles between replacing the tire and the house, I had to stop and reinflate that tube five times. It seems the Presta valve was failing. And so going back home was the right move.
And I only got two more ridiculous close passes along the way.
Happens every day.
Safely back home, I started some laundry. And then, I started a fire.
The only problem being that now all of my clothes are clean or are being cleaned, except for what I am wearing, which smells like smoke.
The fire pit was worth it, though. We had a nice time. And then we had an even better time with s’mores. Haven’t made those in years. Which is probably how long we’ve had those marshmallows. They were sticking together in the bag, and to the bag. But put them over an open flame and they behaved just as they should.
And, now. I am grading things. This will be the beginning of the last big push of the semester. A little more grading this weekend. The final grades to be delivered early next week and then final scores tabulated for the semester. This is momentum.
