collarbone / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off on My back. My shoulder. My shoulder and my back.
22
Dec 20

My back. My shoulder. My shoulder and my back.

Pretty low key day around here today. And a pretty day, too. I sat and enjoyed the sunshine streaming through the windows at midday. And we had a nice three-mile walk in the late afternoon, getting back to the house just before the sun went to hide and the real cool temperatures moved back in. It was, during the day, about 45 degrees. It was nice in the sun while you were moving around.

I’m trying to move around a little right now, you see, but only a little. I’ve been nursing some back and shoulder thing, brought on by an awkward sleep on Saturday night. It’s a frustrating and sometimes recurring issue. Also, it hurts a fair amount. But today it has started to improve somewhat! Maybe tomorrow, maybe Thursday, I’ll feel more like myself again.

Fortunately, I am not missing much right now by sitting still — it’s one of those, “it doesn’t bother you if you sit perfectly still, until it does,” sorts of musculature issues.

The cats are great, and seldom sitting in one place for long. This is our weekly check-in with the two Felis catus that run the joint.

Phoebe is really into wrapping paper this year.

She’s a seasonal kitty. Or maybe she’s just into being covered up and hidden. Difficult to tell.

Poseidon has been spending a lot of time climbing on me. Here he is, just this evening, standing on my (good) shoulder and contemplating the ceiling.

And looking down upon us, as a cat is sometimes wont to do.

Everything here is grand. Quiet. Slow. Reading a lot. Resting a fair amount. Accomplishing little else and sometimes pleased by that. Happy to be safe and healthy, and fortunate that so many people we know and care about are healthy, as well.

adventures / books / cycling / history / Instagram / Monday / photo — Comments Off on Look! Up in the air!
21
Dec 20

Look! Up in the air!

I got setup on Zwift and a new indoor trainer this weekend, a gift from my lovely bride. Let’s see how bad this can hurt me.

Quite a bit, it turns out. That was a Saturday afternoon introduction ride, and for the next several rides, I’m sure, I’ll try to formulate the way that this style of riding is similar, and completely different, to being on the road. And I can’t wait to try to get better next week!

We had a nice walk on Sunday. The park nearest us was closed for surfacing repairs, said the sign. But the swings were open. And she is excellent at flying through the air.

She got that high because I helped push a little. We agreed that the days of high-altitude ejections was behind us. Knees and age and all that. But you’re always a kid again on a proper swing set.

Speaking of flying through the air, I finished up the David McCullough book, The Wright Brothers, last night. This was certainly one way to end a chapter on a down note.

I enjoy McCullough’s work, and have read about half of his immensely well-regarded catalog. This book seemed a bit rushed in the back-half, however. Having worked through the significant achievement of flight, the book glosses over training of Walter Brookins in Montgomery, Alabama and others elsewhere, the barnstorming and so on. It’s not the authoritative text, and is hardly extant, but it’s a good opening read on the Wright family.

Speaking of up in the sky, saw this cloud on this evening’s walk. I guess I was thinking about antique flight because, in the few moments before I could to a clear view of it, the shape reminded me of a dirigible.

Clouds being some of the most ephemeral and over-observed items available to us, it probably looked like a dozen things to a dozen different sets of eyes while it was lazing about today’s calm sky. What was your bunny was someone else’s turtle and my steampunk airship.

Planetary movement being predictable in ways that clouds are not, we all knew to go outside and look this evening. And, here, we had a good glimpse of the mislabeled Christmas Star.

I was sure, when I first read of the Great Conjuction a month or so ago, that we wouldn’t be able to see it because of the season’s regular dose of cloud cover — almost as predictable as the planets! — but we had a brilliantly clear and cool night.

And if you, like me, wondered if this or a similar planetary conjunction might have been central to the Christmas story, some astronomers who know how to calculate those things did the math and said, maybe, possibly, but also perhaps not.

cycling / Friday / IU / video — Comments Off on Progressive video and circumstance
18
Dec 20

Progressive video and circumstance

We had a graduation today. This is what that looked like.

It was a live production and went off without a hitch, owing to the good work of some talented people, and also me. It’s probably a dry run for the spring commencement. While some 100 people became graduates today, we’ll have 600 students moving the virtual tassel from one side of the mortar board to the other.

If anything, I said, we should do all the future commencement ceremonies like this. It went faster. After, you could just come in for the cookies and punch and socializing, which is where the real fun is, anyway.

Came home to spend about 75 minutes with this view.

And a few more miles were ticked off on the trainer, glancing through the blinds, listening to old music and feeling the burn. It’s an interesting series of experiences. You go in there in a light jacket, get ready to ride, climb on the bike and take the jacket off. Once your heart rate gets up a bit you are, of course, comfortable. It doesn’t take long at all, because the chill is only just barely a chill. It’s the buffer between the inside world and the outside world, the temperature re-configuration chamber. What, you’re not thinking of your house in these terms this year?

When you really get your trainer-mounted bike going you get the flush cheeks and the other familiar precursors to sweating. And suddenly there’s a drip, and you begin reminding yourself this doesn’t happen on the road because of the evaporative qualities of nature and the wind wicking away your perspiration. Which it is most decidedly not doing here.

Before long, you’re no longer just sweating, you are now actively hot and that first chill is a far-off memory. There’s a ceiling fan, and turning that on makes some magical atmospherics happen. Your heart rate is up, you are wondering whether you should question these decisions, and the fan is circulating just enough cold air to null this whole thing out. So long as you keep going.

As soon as you stop, being soaked through and under a fan in a chilled room, you have to leave, leave now or never get control of your core temperature again.

This is that time of year where I’m always concerned about the temperature getting into my bones. There are no amount of blankets or hot beverages, no appropriate number of layers of socks, to get warm again. There are some particular experiences, like time itself, which you can never escape. Especially when the bike isn’t going anywhere.

We can outrun this semester, though. Another one, thankfully, in the books.

bespoke / photo / Thursday — Comments Off on My left breast pockets are natty
17
Dec 20

My left breast pockets are natty

This evening I spent a bit of time making new pocket squares. Making is the wrong word. It’s not as if I acquired the cotton seeds and cultivated the crop, spun out the fabric, dyed it and so on.

I found some DIY instructions online, is all. It was on a manly site. A how to site, without the patriarchal and chauvinistic overtones. The point, essentially, was a jacket without a pocket square is naked, indeed. And a splash of color is, in fact, the accent you’re looking for.

And now I make my own pocket squares. Here’s today’s batch:

It’s quite simple and straightforward, really. Really straightforward. It’s “Why did I have to look that up? A few seconds of reasoning would have demonstrated that, ‘Hey, these are squares.'”

Really, you just have to clean up the edges. The rest is in how you decide to fold the squares.

So that adds 12 to the collection. I have 17 more to make, pastels mostly — hooray spring! — and about seven more own the way. If you had those to the other six or seven I have, that’s a lot.

The problem becomes which one to wear. Tomorrow, I think, a dark blue will work. Simple, understated, matches the cufflinks.

cycling / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off on A most heated debate
16
Dec 20

A most heated debate

We’ve come to the end of the unseasonably nice weather. Now we are down to the seasonably, inexorably normal weather. It isn’t all bad, you get about 15 minutes of sunlight a day, most days. And the tree nearest the back door is still holding on to some of it’s leaves, for some reason. They’re still green, even. The tree doesn’t know what to make of all of this, either.

Anyway, the outdoor riding is probably done until March or April, cruel a notion as that is. Forty degrees seems to be my threshold, and we won’t see a lot of that for a while. So, it’s inside we go, to the bike room!

It is the room with my bike in it. I will pedal furious circles and go nowhere, slowly.

But the windows will get a nice foggy appearance over the course of an hour or so.

There has erupted a minor controversy around here — meaning in the house, meaning only myself — about whether miles on the trainer count as miles. And, finally, after protests and demonstrations and heated debate — meaning I talked about it out loud and my lovely wife had to hear me utter three sentences on the subject — it was agreed that those miles do count.

So 20 miles today, and the annual tally can continue. We’re just setting all sorts of records this year. (Why, yes, there’s a spreadsheet charting these things.)

And these are the sort of updates you can expect for the next few weeks, I hope.

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