Monday / photo — Comments Off on Mid-winter week
01
Feb 21

Mid-winter week

It is sloppy and slushy out there. And cold, bitter, bitter cold. I went in a half hour later than normal. Let someone else’s car warm up the roads a bit. We live in the county, but the city limit is literally just down our road. Our road is never plowed, despite the man who lives on the street who has two trucks with mounted plows. I assume it’s a contractual and liability issue, and maybe one day I’ll see him out and ask him about it. Maybe I can take up a gas money collection to get a path cleaned on our road.

After that first residential street, you find that the next one wasn’t snow and slush and a touch of ice. It was just wet slush. The road after that was just wet. The one after that was basically dry. So, waiting for others to get out and about was a good plan.

Tomorrow it will all be melting. Oh, sweet optimism!

It will be cold, but perhaps not bitterly so. And! It will be sunny, and some of the snow will melt. That picture is from Friday, before the weekend’s weather, which gave us a full blanket. Seeing that melt away will be a treat. But you can’t take too much of that. It’ll get worse before it gets better.

The cats are taking it all in stride, because they stay inside. They don’t want to, but that’s just because they don’t really understand snow. They, of course, understand cold. They’re always burrowing into something, as you learned last week.

Phoebe had a casual Saturday night:

Yesterday, she had a big day of yoga:

This is how she gets down after a cuddly nap. She wants her belly rubbed, and then she’ll stretch out like this for a while and then push off the chair and roll forward. It’s quite athletic.

Poseidon wants you to know he knows how handsome he is:

Sometimes his cuteness makes up for what we’ve termed his high-spiritedness. Sometimes.

He’s listening to The Yankee walking around upstairs. It’s a very intriguing part of the evening. She’s getting ready to call it a night and if the cats didn’t immediately follow her upstairs we have a few moments of this.

Then it is a big sprint! Something more fun than this is happening up there!

Isn’t that just the way of things?

Friday / Instagram / photo — Comments Off on Let’s weekend
29
Jan 21

Let’s weekend

It snowed and then it stayed and then it finally melted a bit, just in time for more snow this weekend. But, today, I got back to the house at the end of the work day and found snow melting off the roof. It was a sunny, but cold, afternoon. The water poured off the corner in a great stream, a little more than the gutters could handle. And below that corner is a little bush. It faces north and sits in an almost day-long shadow, so we had a nice little shrubcicle:

Here’s the sun going down on the woods in the back yard:

And while I was outside watching that, I heard the honking of the Canada geese. They were flying northwest, away from Old Man Thompson’s place.

I’m not sure where they were headed. There is one retaining body nearby on their line of travel, or they could be moving over to check out some of the creeks. Too bad they aren’t going home for the season, because that would mean the seasons were changing. But, as we said, more snow this weekend. And sometime after that the real cold stuff arrives.

Here’s today’s sunset, and that’s a perfectly fine, meditative way to get into the weekend:

Any big plans? I know some of you have big plans. I’ve seen your Instagram accounts.

See you Monday. Until then, check out my Instagram. And did you know that Phoebe and Poseidon have an Instagram account? Also, be sure to keep up with me on Twitter as well. And if you need some podcasts, On Topic with IU has plenty of helpful episodes for you, as well.

bespoke / cycling / Thursday — Comments Off on Two high-water marks
28
Jan 21

Two high-water marks

I got in a 26-mile bike ride on Zwift this evening. The first little bit of it was a VO2 max workout. That’s about your oxygen consumption in an exercise of incrementally intensity. As it turns out, the last vestige of any athletic ability I ever possessed can be found in my fairly decent VO2, and so this exercise was more fun than hard. Five four minute intervals at 225 watts. Look at those pretty, even, graphics.

But that was just an hour, and so I decided to ride some more. I did two laps of this course:

And that’s how I spent about 90 minutes, looking out at the melting snow in the diminishing light. We had 11 hours and two minutes of daylight today, Nautical twilight was at 7:04 p.m. and tomorrow will be almost two minutes longer. One of the real treats here, the increasing length of days.

This summer I’ll be able to stand in the yard and see a still-light blue sky at 9:30 at night. And summer can never get here fast enough or stay long enough, in part, because of that.

I finished up my DIY pocket squares. This is the final batch of seven. I probably won’t use all of these, those floral prints are a bit much, but they came in the mini-batch with the purples, which seemed like a color to have on hand. The days are getting longer. Spring pastels will be out soon, after all. (So that’s how the stay-at-home has been treating me. Why do you ask?)

So I counted and now I have … a lot of these things. But my jackets will look sharp, so I’ll have that going for me.

video / Wednesday — Comments Off on Just snow
27
Jan 21

Just snow

It started at about 2 p.m. and it flurried until late into the night.

We got about three inches.

IU / podcast / site / Tuesday — Comments Off on Light day around here
26
Jan 21

Light day around here

Web work today, and if only I meant Spider-Man work. But I updated a lot of pages I update around the web for work things, leaving only many of these pages un-updated. There are two glaring areas on this site to deal with, and I’m going to get into one of those this evening.

I did add one thing to this site, on the front page. Careful observers will note one of the old photos has been replaced by a new photo. Check it out. Maybe you’ll see it. You’ll definitely see it. There are only so many photographs to look at in that display. Maybe you’ll notice it.

So there’s a new student loan grace period in place thanks to an executive order President Biden signed last week. So I talked with Phil Schuman, who is the executive director of Financial Wellness and Education at Indiana University, to see what this means for alumni, students and potential borrowers.

Dozens of people will listen to this, and you should, too.

Nationally, student loan debt reached $1.6 trillion dollars last year. Average monthly payments are between $200 and $300 and the U.S. Department of Education says about 20 percent of borrowers are in default. Tough economic times, to be sure.

And I spent part of the afternoon looking for the next podcast idea. And that’s the day. Some days are more fruitful than others, what can you say?

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