Covid-19 / Twitter / Wednesday — Comments Off on Et tunc tardius primo cursim
03
Feb 21

Et tunc tardius primo cursim

The front page of my site is now working correctly and I am so tired. These two things aren’t related.

I’d been having some sort of small code issue or a security certificate issue and it occurred to me that I could get the host provider’s tech support people to look at it. And 11 minutes later they’d fixed the thing. Modern technology is amazing. That person is in California or Hong Kong or Texas or who knows where. They received a note from me, ascertained the problem, owing, no doubt, to my excellent description, and fixed everything for me. And I just waned them to point out the error. But now it is fixed. So that’s one less thing. Which is good. There are always more things.

I am tired because I spent too much time on yesterday’s car chase that stretched into today. I just don’t bounce back from three hours of sleep like I used to.

Even more importantly, it doesn’t seem like the badge of honor it once did.

So I’m tired, you see. Which is probably why this is bumming me out. I’ve had my Covid-19 vaccine — now what can I safely do? Your questions answered.

First of all, I have not had my vaccine. This state just made it into their 65+ range on Monday. Second, if you can’t click that link the best summary is: Once you’ve got your shots, continue to wear masks and continue to stay away from people and don’t take trips and don’t eat at restaurants and don’t hang out with friends, if you have them. So it’s kind of the same as it was yesterday. So it is exactly the same as yesterday. The idea here is you have to have some still amorphous percentage of the population vaccinated and those rates aren’t going to be reached anytime soon. At all.

I’m so happy for people who are getting their vaccines. (I know some of them now!) And I am quite frustrated for those people who have told me their parents or grandparents can’t get signed up. I guess I understand the hesitancy of others, to a point.

All these dominoes have to fall, nearly simultaneously, for us to contemplate getting back to “normal,” which will never be the same.

You noticed the group not included above are the willfully stubborn. Good luck to all of them, since they’re never getting on board.

Consider that video while reading this.

Meanwhile, I have lost count of people I know, or am related to, who have been ill, hospitalized, re-hospitalized and so on and/or have died from this. So, yeah, there’s never going to be a “normal,” just a new thing people pretend to accept while hundreds of thousands of people, or more, are hurting, healing and aching forevermore.

Not every day can be treated with equal parts good cheer and British Steel.

More on Twitter, check me out on Instagram and more On Topic with IU podcasts as well.

cycling / photo / site / Tuesday — Comments Off on This one confuses the dot org space-time continuum, sorry
02
Feb 21

This one confuses the dot org space-time continuum, sorry

There’s a new look to the front page. And now I know what that’s supposed to look like. Click on the image below to check it out.

I’m really looking forward to the next update of the front page — probably in the next week or so. It’ll really hit the theme’s design.

Last night I did an amazing thing. I was riding up a hill on the bike trainer, turning out more watts than the session demanded, because the session didn’t seem especially demanding, and I had a flat. I developed a little pinhole on an indoor ride. So I stopped my ride because you can’t ride on a flat. It was almost dinnertime, anyway. So I’ll just have to re-do that workout later this week.

I looked it up. You can get a flat on a trainer in the traditional ways. But there’s no debris in my tire or in the wheel rim. So this must have been a trainer flat, which means I was super-heating the thing.

Yeah, there probably was something in the wheel that put the little hole in the tube, but it’s more fun to imagine I friction-burned the thing into submission.

(I wrote this part Wednesday, but it pertains to Tuesday and Wednesday.) I almost fell asleep, three or four times, watching a car chase tonight. Because I was tired, and it was late, and the chase lasted all night, and four hours into the morning.

This is what happened. At 10:19 p.m. we got the notification that NBC LA was in the air following a car. The driver was wanted as a possible suspect in a shooting. The gang division had been following him and he wasn’t going to go easy into that good night. He raced across surface streets, living the charmed life of someone who is ignoring every light, a charmed life until, suddenly it isn’t.

But he managed to work his way through two parts of greater L.A. and onto the interstate system. He raced along the freeways. And then he started going slower. And then slower. And much, much slower. After a time, he would crawl to a stop, the police cars would line up in their traffic stop configuration and he would drive away again.

It was amusing at first, until it became boring. And he did it so much it became amusing again. And then just frustrating. But you’re invested in the thing by then. And that’s the problem, because you figure “I’m invested in this thing now. What’s a satisfactory outcome?” You don’t watch chases for bad things to happen. I don’t want to see any innocent people also on the road getting hurt. I don’t want to see this guy get shot. I also don’t want him to get away. So I, secretly, cheer for a foot chase and then a good solid linebacker-style tackle of the suspect who is, in this case, considered armed and dangerous.

At about 4 a.m., seriously, and after about two hours of slow crawling on three flats, he finally drove the rim off the driver front side of the car. This, as we know, brings the car portion of any chase to its conclusion. Police were content to let this play out on it’s own time because the driver had turned this into a slow-speed chase hours ago. They didn’t want to PIT him, because you don’t want to go nose-to-nose with a guy who is carrying a weapon.

Within five seconds of that rim falling off, and the car going down to its drive axle, the local NBC lost its feed. For about 60-75 seconds NBCLA was offering me one of those video autoplays that play every story other than the one you want.

When I got the feed back the driver was out of the car and standing on the closed highway. He’s got his hands up. He’s facing away from the officers while the cops are doing whatever cops do there. It takes forever. The dude puts his arms down. They command him to raise his arms again, he turns and yells to them back over his shoulder, and raises his arms. Until he lowers them again. More yelling. He raises them. He lowers them. On and on this goes.

Until the helicopter had to leave again for fuel consumption. (This was their third helo of the chase, mind you.) So after a six hour chase, about 5:40 of THAT being on camera, NBCLA couldn’t even get the apprehension.

Their story this morning notes he had two outstanding wants for felony burglary. No weapon was found.

Guess who’s dragging around tired eyes today?

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.

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