Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

adventures / Covid-19 / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off
20
Jul 22

The show doesn’t always go on

We were going out for a frivolous experience. An adventure! Adventures are very necessary. They vary in scope and scale and, as such, grand gestures or big activities do not an adventure make. The best adventures are the smallest ones, generally speaking. And most anything is an adventure in the right company. But today’s was to be a frivolous experience. This would, by my count, be the sixth since the pandemic began. We’re on two hands now!

This is a cornfield we passed today.

Our frivolous experience was canceled. Covid.

Fortunately not us, but someone in the show. We went to Cincinnati to see Barenaked Ladies again. You’ll recall we saw them a few weeks ago in Indianapolis, it was a fine show, had a great time. (I sprinkled video here over the next week, if you’d like to scroll back in time.) Soon after that, The Yankee found some re-sell tickets for cheap. We drove over to Ohio. Guy working in the parking booth at the venue told us the news.

And sure enough, there it was. The word had come down, it just had not caught up to us.

pic.twitter.com/YHsNPG7KQH

— Barenaked Ladies (@barenakedladies) July 20, 2022

So we spent the evening down by the river, near the baseball stadium, enjoying the warm weather and the park. Got a bite to eat and headed back to Bloomington around 9 p.m. Some of the clouds we saw on the drive back.

It was not the adventure we planned, but it was a great adventure nevertheless.

Saw this at the rest stop. Anyone have any idea what this is meant to do?

Also at the rest stop … Do you ever read rules, or signs, and think, This is about a specific incident? This is about a specific incident. Surely.

We didn’t get the concert, but there’ll be another, at another time. The one we just saw was a 2020 date, twice-rescheduled. This one, I guess, is a 2020 date that will eventually be thrice-rescheduled.

They named this, in at least 2019, the Last Summer on Earth Tour. I wonder if they’ve rethought that at any point.

Since we didn’t see it tonight, here’s the encore from July 1st. Barenaked Ladies closing the show with Toad the Wet Sprocket and Gin Blossoms.

We’ll see them again. Soon, hopefully. Because the 90s will never end, I guess.

adventures / Cozumel / memories / photo / SCUBA / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
19
Jul 22

The turf and surf menagerie

Last evening, during a walk, we saw a deer.

We saw two deer, in fact. Who knows how many more were just out of sight, watching us.

We also spotted three rabbits and two squirrels.

The highlight was surely the stray cat that came into our back yard. Poseidon noticed it, and was most emphatic that the interloper be removed. After a time The Yankee went out to check on the cat, and decided it looked like one posted on the local Next Door community. She called the number. We kept the kitty — spooked but healthy and hungry — in our yard until they arrived.

They were nice people. The woman is desperate to find their pet. Last weekend they drove 80 miles one-way to see if a cat was theirs. It was not their cat, but they adopted it anyway. So they are nice and passionate people, and perhaps cat thieves. Who can tell with these things?

And then they … wouldn’t leave. So they were nice, passionate, perhaps cat thieves who did not pick up on the social cues. Who can tell with these things? But they’d come over from a few miles away and it was a break from yard work or research or whatever they were doing. They also offered to take this other cat.

So definitely cat thieves, then.

Somewhere during all of this our neighbors came out to visit and we found ourselves having a party in the side yard.

None of this sounds like much, but they stayed on the porch for a good long while, and it was otherwise a evening, so take this elderberry and be happy with it.

If that’s not enough, congratulate me on completing the Cozumel diving social media project. Since March, I have been uploading daily clips of our diving to Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Tens of people, perhaps, have seen them. But if you missed all of that somehow, just click the Twitter link and you can see them all threaded together.

Or revisit with me those videos in the longer form on YouTube, where dozens of people have watched. I edited them each day of the dives.

I am very popular on the world wide web.

adventures / cycling / Monday / photo / video — Comments Off
18
Jul 22

Catching up from the weekend

We enjoyed a little bike ride on Saturday morning, trying to beat the heat before the heat beat us. We stopped about 10 miles in to stretch the legs and let the sweat drip, drip, drip onto the cement under a church awning. A man walked by with his dog on a leash. He told the dog, “Do not bark. Do not bark.” And the dog did as he was instructed. He did as he was instructed for as long as he could, and finally he let loose with a deep woof-woof-woof that intimidated me into action. I told the dog I had learned my lesson, and would be on my way. He had saved the day, protected his neighborhood from the outsiders in funny clothes.

The Yankee had already set out to continue her ride, but somehow the dog positioned himself in my route of travel. So I had to wait until the nice gentleman was able to reel him in. He was a very good boy, that dog, and made me leave as soon as possible. I am sure he told everyone about it the rest of the day, for treats and pets and to reassure his people that he was on the job. The sweaty guy dressed funny won’t be back anytime soon. Woof.

Anyway, since she got off ahead of me I had to catch up, which changed the video I was going to make for that ride. But this one is still fun.

I hit 43.7 miles per hour somewhere in here. That’s 70 kilometers, which sounds more impressive — and we’re presently watching the Tour, where everything is in kilometers anyway. So it was a 56 kilometer ride, and I topped out at 70 km. Not bad for a Saturday morning.

Time for the weekly kitty check in. The cats are, happily, doing just fine. And they are, of course, pleased to provide the site’s most popular feature.

Here’s Phoebe hanging out on top of the cat tree.

And here she is, yesterday, sitting in the duffel where we store the massage boots. A little compression therapy for me, a little bag time for her.

Such a character.

And here’s the occasional proof that they do, sometimes get along.

Poseidon is sometimes pretty aggressive and she doesn’t tolerate it very well and it carries over into many of their interactions. This morning she walked up to him and hissed at him for just sitting there. Usually it is the other way around. But sibling rivalries

Poseidon, meantime, works extra hard to be cute and charming, when he’s not being a pill.

He’s just an adventurer at heart. Here he is in the laundry room.

I measured all of this, after I climbed up there and dragged him out. That’s a four-and-a-half foot jump from the top of the washing machine to the top of the cabinet. And the space between that molding and the ceiling is about four inches.

I thought that was pretty agile, even for a cat. Showed that picture to The Yankee and she was not surprised. I complained about having to pull him down from there.

Oh, she said, I just leave him.

So it isn’t the first time he’s made that leap.

cycling / Friday / memories / photo — Comments Off
15
Jul 22

Down the painful memory lane

Oh, why not? TL;DR: Wear your helmet, kids.

Ten years ago, tomorrow.

Because, 10 years ago, earlier this week.

That’s my left collarbone, in several pieces. Bike crash. Hit something I didn’t see and went over at about 18 miles per hour, landing directly on the point of my shoulder and head.

I’m told this could come out at any time, but I still wear this.

I stayed off the bike, except for the trainer, until January of 2013. Everything hurt too bad and I was foggy, besides. Almost a year later, to the day, I noticed, for the first time, that my shoulder and collarbone weren’t hurting. It was fleeting, but wonderful. I was snorkeling in Bermuda. Guess who was the last person back on the boat that day? As soon as I pulled myself out of the water, though …

I saw a second set of specialists six months after I crashed, because everyone agreed I shouldn’t still be complaining about these things. That doctor was concerned about my neck. He ruled out any damage with an X-ray, but I could have told him that in his exam room. I willed my neck to be fine because, and I was quite adamant about this, there was no way I’d walked around with a broken neck for six months.

A third surgical consult the next year, in August 2013, helped get me sorted out. Things I wrote down about that initial visit:

“Tell me everything. Start at the beginning.”

So we talked about the last year. He tested for nerve damage and said there was none. He tested for rotator cuff problems and said there were none. He touched my hardware and I decided I’m going to pinch, hard, the next person that does that.

He looked at my X-ray and said things look good there.

[…]

Also, this doctor, who is apparently nationally renowned for shoulder surgeries, says I should have been in a sling for six to eight weeks. Had him repeat that.

My surgeon had me out of my immobilizer in a week. (I had to ask. I couldn’t remember. I don’t remember a lot.)

I told the third ortho that if he had a magic wand, but it could only fix one of my problems, I’d ask him to address my shoulder. So after he verified the problems weren’t skeletal he sent me for another long round of specific physical therapy, at a different facility from the first place, and that magic wand worked pretty well.

All told, it took about 18 months, I think.

Ultimately the conclusion was that the surgery was good, but the initial recovery was poorly managed. Now my shoulder rarely bothers me, but my collarbone usually offers me a dull reminder.

This is the helmet I was wearing the day I crashed.

This is the back of the helmet, as seen from above. You’d be wearing this and facing the top of the frame. Note the chunk that the road sheared off, part of that is resting beside the helmet.

I wonder why I picked up that little piece from the road after I crashed.

Again the back, from straight on. See how the upper left and center of the back was ground away? Note the small cracking at the base of the helmet’s back and that crack on the left side.

Here’s that left-side damage. Hardly a hairline crack.

This is a little farther up the side, but still on the left. As you’re wearing the helmet this crack would be directly over the left ear. The fracturing only stops at the air vent. From these pictures we surmise that, without the helmet, the crown of my head over to my ear would have been heavily damaged.

Finally, looking up into the helmet. That’s one-piece, molded crash foam. Look how much it separated.

This is probably why there are patches of 2012 that I don’t recall all that well.

Update: Went on a long ride on Saturday. Didn’t think about any of this.

cycling / memories / photo / Thursday / video — Comments Off
14
Jul 22

Tour update: Hors catégorie means beyond cat-egorization

Poseidon is now very interested in this year’s Tour de France.

It seems Poseidon needs Tadej Pogačar, seen here in the white jersey, to be chasing the overall lead. Pogačar is the two-time defending champion, but yesterday he lost control of this year’s tour in some incredible bike racing. It’s difficult to encapsulate exactly what transpired across the French countryside in a four-minute clip, but here are a few highlights from the now legendary Col du Granon, a hors catégorie, seven-mile climb that goes up 3,474 feet, topping out at almost 8,000 feet above sea level.

The can-do-no-wrong wunderkind was finally hurt yesterday. All those attacks by the Jumbo-Visma super team paid off. It wasn’t quite tectonic, but close enough in road cycling. It took two-and-a-half years for the best riders in the world to exploit a weakness in Pogačar, meaning this was something really special.

That further means that, today, the final day in the Alps, the defending champion had to start chasing. In the photo above Pogačar was attacking his main foe, and current yellow-jersey wearer, Jonas Vingegaard, on Alpe d’Huez.

He could not pull any time back on the Danish Macaulay Culkin lookalike. It is a two-minute and 26-second race at the moment. This has our cat’s attention.

But this is not a new thing for Poseidon. Here he is last year, taking in the first stage of the 2021 Tour.

Maybe he hears the word peloton and thinks he’s going to get pets. Maybe the word bidon is too similar to Poseidon. Perhaps, because of his aggressive nature, he misunderstands the use of the word attack. Or it could be that the best joke is the one from the headline. Maybe he’s hors catégorie.