cycling / Monday / photo — Comments Off on Now looking for a new challenge — and a Wikipedia page
31
Jan 22

Now looking for a new challenge — and a Wikipedia page

Lovely, cold and fast weekend. They just go too fast, but they’re otherwise lovely. Nothing of great import was accomplished, as if by design. It was a weekend to sit in a chair and enjoy a nice blanket. So I did some of that.

But the skies were clear the whole time. This was approaching sunset last night.

We had dinner with a friend on Saturday. Our friend is a professor, an incredibly well regarded political anthropologist. She writes about food and labor and refugees. She has a Wikipedia page. She must not run her own Wikipedia page because, having just checked it, I noticed her being a wonderful host to two brilliant neighbors has not been added to the entry.

We’re the brilliant neighbors. She lives nearby. We run and ride by her house a fair amount. She is also a triathlete. Perhaps soon she’ll come dine at our house. So you have a week or so to create quality and credible Wikipedia entries about us.

(If you need a credible Wikipedia entry, I’ll try to return the favor.)

I wonder how many people I know as more than acquaintances that are on Wikipedia. Someone should write a script that cross references your social media networks, contact lists and text message recipients

I think this makes the fifth non-family we’ve dined with in a home in the last two years. I’ve been to three restaurants in that same amount of time. One of those was under professional duress, and the other two were outdoors. It’s no more or less weird than it has been over the last 21 months, oh, and here comes another variant.

Two Zwift rides this weekend. I’ve spent all my time in the saddle, of late, on just one particular course of the game. I set an admittedly humble goal of averaging 20 mph over the Volcano course. It’s a comparatively easy route, it’s biggest feature is one of the milder climbs on Zwift. Gear and Grit says the volcano KOM climb is tied for seventh in classification, 10th in length, 13th in ascent, and 15th in average gradient. In other words, this climb suits my style.

I’ve been sneaking up on this silly goal the last few weeks, and made a few improvements on Saturday.

I cut six (or 16, depending on which app you like) improbable seconds off my PR on the volcano KOM segment. That’s the 2.3 mile climb itself, which I’ve been up a dozen or so times by now. (So you can say I know the road.) I did the math after the Saturday ride and calculated that I need to find 32 more seconds somewhere over the course of the whole route to get to that 20 mph goal.

Looking at all the data on all the different apps, knowing I’m working pretty hard and with the climb to contend with, I just couldn’t see many places I could find 32 more seconds.

I tried again Sunday afternoon, thinking I might be able to get a few more seconds out of a lull in my good Saturday ride. If I could push a bit harder in the two-to-four mile and four-to-six mile splits I could get some gains. Push there, recover somewhere, and then peel my legs off on the climb and the descent. This was my thinking as I got ready, putting on the workout kit and noticing my legs seemed a little heavy. “No way I do it today,” I said to my reflection.

Started the route in the rain, motivated by passing a big clutch of people early, I concientiously upped my tempo in those two early splits, while hoping I could keep a respectable rhythm on the climb and maybe strategize something out of the descent and then the last bit toward the end.

I somehow found four more seconds of improvement on the KOM, which I’d just re-set just yesterday. Even more surprising, I took 1:47 off my total best time for the route. I hit my humble 20 mph goal, and finished the course averaging 20.4. I also improved my equally humble 20-minute power average by three percent. Over the course of the month I’ve bettered that number by six percent.

So, in that sense, the 12 rides I had this month were productive. I should ride more.

A few years back the great Bill Strickland wrote a list of things he’s learned in a lifetime of riding bikes. I liked the list so much that I copied it into a Word file, deleted the ones I hadn’t discovered, reworked the rest into what seemed like my own chronological order of discovery and started filling in the spaces in between.

My list has just 20 items on it. Twenty items in 10 years feels fairly prolific for life lessons. One of them is “You can push harder than you think.”

I remembered that one again yesterday, after that ride.

It’s Monday, and time to check in on the kitties. Phoebe enjoyed part of her weekend and some afternoon sun on the landing.

I told you about the new mattress. Poseidon is still a big fan of the old one.

And here’s the rare shot of the two of them sitting nicely with one another.

Must have been cold that night.

Looks like it’ll be colder still this week.

Friday / iPhone / video — Comments Off on Everybody’s snowy for the weekend
28
Jan 22

Everybody’s snowy for the weekend

Snowed today. I managed to step outside and see this many seconds of it.

After which my phone returned to the repair shop. Because taking it in last weekend just wasn’t enough! I had the battery replaced, the most cost-effective upgrade you can perform on an iPhone. This is the third battery in this phone, which has served me well for five years or so.

Last weekend I asked the repair folks to clean the charging port because, in addition to the old battery not holding a charge, I could barely get the phone to receive a charge. No matter how patient you are, this eventually becomes frustrating. It has had almost-deletirious effects on a few work days. If the phone dies in the middle of the night because it won’t charge, you see, I have no alarm.

Which is a strategic problem, I know. I should use more than one alarm! But let me ask you, early risers, how many alarms should I use? I run three on my phone.

A further strategic problem, sure. Three alarms are great. Putting them all on one platform is a shortcoming.

After I struggled through how to do many of the various things required of the day that sometimes require a phone — messaging, dual authentication, taking photographs, whatever — my phone went back to the phonecanic. Clean the charing port, please. I’m sure they prefer the term “technician,” but you don’t get the honorific until you complete the job. My lovely bride dropped it off in the afternoon, while I was in the middle of a Zoom meeting. They said it’d be ready after 4 p.m., which seems to be the rote answer. She picked it up just after 5 p.m., and the phone was charged to 100 percent. And it’s holding a charge, so maybe the second time was the charm.

Which, again, if that’s as inconvenient as your day gets, it’s a pretty great day. And we insist on great days on Fridays.

I left the office at 5 p.m. for a change. The snow had stopped and the sun was almost threatening to break through the overcast sky. That it had stopped was great because there was no evidence of any winter weather road treatment taking place. And my car slipped and slid and arrived slowly and safely in my garage.

At the house I experienced the Friday burst of energy. I shoveled the driveway, the sidewalks and part of the walking trail. (People need to see the entrance, which runs right by our yard.) In doing all of that I learned that the hat I got this Christmas is indulgently effective. If it is cold where you are, and you have to be outside, get that hat.

(I’m leaving it in my car. It’s going everywhere with me.)

I emptied the dishwasher. I put together a new little ottoman that arrived today.

The ottoman will sit at the foot of the bed. It’ll hold sheets and blankets. Between that and the new mattress — after two nights of sleep I can report it feels like a cloud, mostly because you’re sleeping on the mattress, rather than in it — the bedroom feels almost entirely new.

It’s enough to make me want to go to bed at a reasonable hour tonight.

(Update: I did not.)

food / IU / photo / television / Thursday / video — Comments Off on How’d you sleep?
27
Jan 22

How’d you sleep?

We purchased a new mattress, and it arrived yesterday. My lovely bride got the thing upstairs without me. She took the old mattress off the box spring, put the new one on last night. A mattress, you would think, is one of those things you want to go down to the showroom. Kick the tires, lay on it for 36 seconds, and all of that. Well, where has that ever gotten you? A mattress that works for a few years before you buy a foam topper, which works for a few years. Eventually your sleep patterns leave impressions in all of that, so the foam topper comes off, and the now old mattress isn’t much better. And how many times have you done all of that?

So she found an online service. Good reviews. Excellent return policy, and time will tell about their guarantee language — and whether the company has any longevity under this business model. She did this unilaterally, because the old one has been bothering her the most, she’s a bit more particular, and that’s how it works. Whatever makes you, quite literally, more comfortable, dear.

The new mattress, I learned last night, is a little taller. You need a running start. And as we discussed this afternoon, the biggest and most immediately noticeable thing is that you can just, sorta, roll over. Not every muscle group needs to be activated to make a common turn from back to side.

If the new mattress does that alone it’d be a win for internet merchants everywhere.

As for the first night’s sleep part, it seemed unremarkable. Pretty much the ideal, right?

All that sunshine from the last few days has regressed to the mean. And that’s just … mean.

The day, being a Thursday, slowed down a bit compared to the earlier part of the week, and I managed to put in just eight hours, so it the net perception was: null. Many people worked from home because of close contacts to Covid-positive people, and I have to figure out how to do that, without invoking karmic problems.

I spent part of the morning working on a podcast. Today we enjoyed our usual once-a-week Chick-fil-A takeout lunch. The afternoon’s highlight was probably cleaning up some Google Docs and preparing for a Friday morning meeting.

After a few days of doing everything rapidly it is nice to luxuriate in spending too much time on one thing at a time, is the point.

The television folks have uploaded two of their most recent sports shows for you. Here are all the latest highlights on all the coolest sports around here.

And here’s another sports show, featuring different perspectives and probably more fun than you should have outdoors in Indiana in January.

There will be another studio talk show online tomorrow. And another simulcast TV-radio project after that. There are also all of the online chats they do. The sports media students simply don’t stop anymore. It’s impressive when you consider the rest of the demands on their time.

The daily duds: This feature is going away because I realized that the goal was pointless. I was trying to document looks so I wouldn’t reproduce them too quickly, but that’s impossible without a proper indexing system. So today I’m just showing off this lovely pocket square my in-laws got me for Christmas.

Also, that’s one of my favorite sports coats. It has character and comfort, which is to say that, once you get past the print, it’s super soft.

And tonight’s dinner, because it looks healthy enough to brag about.

That’s three nights in a row of healthy things. We’ll have to blow this up tomorrow.

IU / journalism / photo / site / television / Twitter / video / Wednesday — Comments Off on We return to television
26
Jan 22

We return to television

This was the view the first thing this morning, as I walked into the building thinking of the to do list of seven big items that needed attention today. These were the seven things that needed to be done, around all of the small things that sneak into your day and chip away at your time and attention. Somehow, those seven things became a list of 10 things.

I managed to get eight of those things done over the course of the day, and pronounced that a win as I headed into the studio this evening.

That’s a sports show, because it’s Wednesday. All of their shows will be uploaded later this week. I’ll be sure to share them here.

Meanwhile, here’s a show the news division shot last night. They got everything in they’d planned, and they ended on time. Now we’ll start adding extra things back in.

I’ve learned a few things working with student media over the last 14 years. One of them is this. Resets are fun — they haven’t been in the studio since December, and they’ve changed directors, too — but building on momentum is an encouraging sign of the program’s health. I’m proud of them for that.

Patron saint of IU journalism, Ernie Pyle, would be proud of them too. He told me tonight that I can’t complain about the long hours — a 10-hour day, today, after yesterday’s 11-hour day — because he’s on deadline and, as you can see, Ernie is still banging keys on his Corona.

He’ll be there when I go in gray and early tomorrow, too. Because he’s a statue.

The daily duds: Pictures of clothes I put here to, hopefully, help avoid embarrassing scheme repeats.

It is difficult to make this suit work.

But I occasionally do enjoy trying.

I’ve lately realized this is a silly feature, and it’s going away, but not today. I’m going to end on a strong one.

cycling / IU / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off on Full speed once again
25
Jan 22

Full speed once again

There’s a window near my office … not my office, mind you … that affords you this view.

That was this evening as I was on my way to the studio, which was after I’d recorded video for someone, which was surrounded by doing social media for others, and after I’d given a tour for someone, and that’s just how the week is going. Happy to do it; wondering when I can get my work in. Mostly worrying what important thing I’ve inadvertently neglected, or outright forgotten.

But, hey, when that’s your worry, life is pretty good, right? Give yourself some grace and all that.

He said, at the end of an 11-hour day.

Tomorrow will be 10-or-more hours long.

I decided it was time to start adding a bit of time back into the bike ride. The route I’ve been doing lately takes 45 minutes. If I could make it take 44 minutes I’d hit my goals there, which I’ve rambled on about here recently. Only I don’t know where to pull in those last few seconds. It’s a fun mental challenge: when to do what. I’m eyeballing it, shooting from the hip and playing it by ear. It sounds anatomical, but is in no way scientific.

So I found a flat route and added a 15 minute easy ride at the end of my bigger effort. Ahhh, London, where it feels like you’re going slow at 19.

On the end of that little course the Zwift designers added a little sprint segment. There’s a little green light on the ground telling you you’re entering a sprint, and there’s a banner in the distance. Just before that light a bunch of other rides sped right by me, and so I decided to chase them. And then I decided to catch them and pass them. My cool down ride ended with a 34 mph sprint.

Which wasn’t the point, but in the rare moments when you can feel like a sprinter, take the moment to feel like a sprinter.

(I am not a sprinter.)

On subsequent rides I’ll start putting a few extra minutes here and there. Very progressive, hardly scientific.

Phoebe is the appropriate amount of impressed.

And since we are a day late on the weekly check in with the kitties, we can show you our progress with Poseidon and brushes. It is a work in progress.

Note the blur. He, too, is moving fast.

He also likes my toothbrush. He jumps up on the vanity, stands on his back feet and tries to grab it away from me. I recently replaced one that had an all plastic handle with a toothbrush that has a rubberized grip. He is less impressed by that. It’s the plastic, of course. He can’t get enough of the stuff, and we’re constantly on heightened alert to keep it from him. I like to imagine, though, that he’s taking a keen interest in hygiene beyond his regular self-grooming.

The daily duds: I sometimes put this here in the hopes of somehow avoid embarrassing scheme repeats — so far so good. But, today … Auburn is the top-ranked basketball team in the country and they’re playing tonight, so we’re flying the orange and blue.

You can’t see it, but on the bottom of the tie there’s the ol’ interlocking AU.

Basketball school.

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