Monthly Archives: January 2009

Team Revolution

Posted on by
1

frost-bike

Anne picked up her bike yesterday from VeloCity Cyclery.  She had left it there after last Sunday’s Frost Bike ride, for a tune up.  Yesterday was a professional development day at school, so Anne had the day off.  Yesterday she walked the three miles from our house to VeloCity.  Walking past Fontbonne College, she called Andrew on her cell.  As she walked, they talked and then she continued walking and they continued talking, all the way from Big Bend to Skinker.  She picked up her bike and rode around the Park, nine miles.

I was home from work last night by the time Anne returned from her bike ride.  We had theatre tickets, so Anne showered and changed quickly.  We went out to dinner, to Big Sky Café, but it was crowded and we ended up having to sit at one of the tables in the bar.  It was rather noisy, but the food was good as always.  I had the BBQ salmon and Anne had the strip steak.

The play last night at the Repertory Theater was George Bernard Shaw’s, Saint Joan.  Saint Joan is based on the life and trial of Joan of Arc.  It was published not long after the canonization of Joan D’Arc to sainthood by the Catholic Church, in the 1920s.  It is said that Saint Joan was Shaw’s only tragedy. 

Shaw advances Joan as a precursor of movements that would soon transform Europe from its medieval slumber to our modern times.  One of her ecclesiastical prosecutors accuses her of fomenting heresy and here he searches for a word, “… a kind of protest-ism.  She bypasses the Church and claims to speak directly with God.”  Likewise the secular lord, the Earl of Winchester, and a member of the first estate, questions her devotion to king and country over her own feudal lord, “This love of France is also a heresy, a kind of nation-ism. 

Shaw is not without his quips, in the epilogue Joan returns as a ghost.  A clerk for the 1920s Church reads a proclamation admonishing people of France for having erected so many statues to her.  Joan asks if this means that there is a statue of her in front of Winchester Cathedral.  The clerk answers, “No, unfortunately Winchester is temporarily under the control of the Anglican heresy.”

I went into work this morning, trying to get a presentation ready for Monday.  Anne rode her fourth Frost Bike ride this morning, entitling her to the t-shirt, symbolizing success.  The picture for today’s post shows Anne and her fellow riders, at VeloCity café, after the ride.  Anne also bumped into Joanie there, small town?  Anne decided to join Team Revolution, a women’s bike club.  She got twenty miles today.  I worked until two and then came home for a bike ride.  Did I mention that the high for today was in the mid-fifties?  The snow melt was a bit messy, but overall it was nice to be out and about on such a gorgeous afternoon.  I got fifteen miles.

Today’s header shows a photographer, assistant and a very cold looking model.  They were working in the Park today.  I think I annoyed the photographer by taking this picture, but I figure it was a noteworthy sight and I was standing in the street, in a public park.

I leave you tonight with some humor, thanks to a website called Old Jews Telling Jokes.  I think that it has just started up, as there are only three jokes on the website so far.  All three are good, but I especially like the broccoli joke. 

OK, one for the road, a physics based joke, that I heard on NPR this morning, “A proton walks into a black hole.”   😉

Pooh’s Birds

Posted on by
Reply

Anne (aka Pooh) has been running a collection of bird feeders in the back yard for quite a few years.  She has two metal poles, with a feeder or two on each, and a chain in between, with a suet feeder on it, plus one more feeder hanging off the garage.  It makes for quite the avian smorgasbord.

Anne loves her bird guests.  She gets: juncoes, cardinals, sparrows, (Eurasian Tree, white throated and house) Carolina wrens, chickadees (rarely), flickers, woodpeckers, (downy and hairy), red and yellow bellied sapsuckers, mourning doves, goldfinches and house finches, and more other birds then I can keep track of.  Depending on the seed mix in use, she also gets house sparrows and starlings and grackles and red-winged blackbirds. But she doesn’t like them as much.  And then there are the furry squirrelly birds, the ones that don’t fly.  So far this year they haven’t been in much evidence.

The movie with this post is one that Anne shot on our back porch.  A Carolina Wren had gotten trapped in the porch.  Maybe the sleet had confused it?  Anne opened the screen door and stepped back out of the way and filmed the bird.  In order to see the bird very well, you need to go to high definition mode.

Today’s header shows signs of a Wednesday bird death in the snow.  The perpetrator of this death is not entirely clear.  Last Sunday we saw a Cooper’s hawk stalking the backyard bird feeders.  My prime suspect though is the Alpha Predator, the neighbor’s cat, from across the street.  But like the butler, I always suspect the cat.

A Marl Bog

Posted on by
Reply

marl-bog

Marl is common in post glacial lake bed sediments often found underlying peat bogs.  Marls are calcium carbonate or lime rich mud which contain variable amounts of clays and calcite or aragonite.  The term is most often used to describe lake sediments, but is also used for marine deposits.  The term marl is widely used in North American geology, while the term seekreide is used in European references.

This is a remembrance post from Anne’s and mine Great Adventure.  The day was July 15, 1982, a Thursday.   We are on just our second day from out from the Cabin.  We are headed down state to the planet, which was not called that then.  We had camped the night before at the Foley Creek National Forest Service campground, just north of St. Ignace.  Yesterday we had gotten 44 miles, are first serious ride in over two weeks.  Here is the story:

Today is a tourist day.  We take the ferry from St. Ignace to Mackinac Island and play on the island all day.  First we shop and Mark discovers why tourists are called “Fudgies”.  Then we ride over the island, by Skull Cave, the battlefield, etc.  We ride back around the east half of the island and then do the fort.  We ride to the Grand Hotel, but the admission fee deters us.  Pizza before the ferry ride to Mackinac City fills us.  This is a good thing since we end up having to backtrack five miles from our planed destination at the Wilderness State Park (home of the marl bogs) to a KOA campground.

Anne always hated KOA campgrounds, but I secretively like them.  I’ve always enjoyed that rustic experience of setting your tent up on freshly mowed grass.  The back story was that before we set out from the Cabin, Anne told me that she had always assumed that I would want to end the bike trip there.  Frankly, this surprised me.  I always intended to go on.  Maybe it was the Michener novels? 

I always set the pace.  Wait, I was the accelerator and Anne was the brake.  I always tried to wait for her at the top of the hill.  Sometimes I would launch down the hill just before she could catch her breath.  That trick worked maybe once.  Usually, I pulled out the current Michener novel and read as she approached and then rested.  I read more than a few of his books.  Most times when Anne was ready to go so was I, but sometimes James A. had me in a headlock and Anne would just set off ahead.  I liked having a lot of reading material in one volume. 

When we left the Cabin we had only ridden 60% of the mileage that we eventually obtain, some 5,000 miles in total.  We only got 24 miles that day.  In the week to come, as we eventually cranked up to speed, we obtained our adventures one and only century, a hundred miles in one day.  We did this on our arrival into Ann Arbor.  There we partied with the honeymooners, Anne and Bill and our friends Alice and Chris, bumming rides or just biking around town.

My spovely louse has just researched the Great Adventure, i.e. the diary she kept and determined that these photos are from a marl bog at Macgregor Point Provincial Park, in Ontario, on the Bruce Peninsula, taken on June 22, 1982 and not of the marl bogs at Wilderness State Park, Michigan.  I say a marl bog is a marl bog and a marred blog is a marred blog.

Snow Storm

Posted on by
Reply

oak-knoll-park

It had been snowing here since Monday evening.  Not steadily, just off and on.  It looks like we got about five or six inches.  This morning dawned white and bright.  Anne had snow days yesterday and today.  Yesterday morning, when I stopped at Starbucks on the way to work, I noticed that traffic seemed very light.  I called the company’s employee hotline just to be sure, because last year I drove to work only to find a company sponsored snow day, but no such luck yesterday or today. 

Today’s header and post picture were taken in Oak Knoll Park, where I stopped on the way to work this morning.  The morning light and new fallen snow were irresistible.  Most of the side streets were at best barely passable.  The arterials were a little better, but still snow covered.  I did see one guy biking to work on Clayton Road this morning.  Maybe he was crazy, but still rather awe inspiring.

The Tour of Missouri has announced that this summer’s Tour will go in reverse.  It will begin in Saint Louis instead of ending here as it has for its first two years.  This puts it in town on the same weekend as the Gateway Cup criterion bicycle races that are traditionally held that weekend.  This combination of races should make Saint Louis the capital of world cycling, at least for one weekend out of the year.  Also, Tyler Hamilton, the Olympic gold medalist, announced that he would be competing in this year’s Tour of Missouri.  Could Lance be next?

The Gateway MS society has announced that this year’s MS-150 ride will be returning to the Boone County fairgrounds, a venue that we enjoyed in 2003.  This is a much better site then the one at Midway.  This site and the new routes that go with it will feature the Amish country around Columbia.  It should be very enjoyable.

Last night Anne and I re-watched Dan in Real Life, probably for the third time.  This time, I checked it out from the library.  Starring Steve Carrel and Julette Binoche and an ensemble cast, this is a great romantic comedy.  It portrays a middle aged widower (Carrel) with three daughters over a family holiday weekend, where Dan again finds love.  Most of all, I love the title, Dan in Real Life, it has personal resonance.

Woot: One Day, One Deal; that is this website’s shtick.  Sean, one of the young guys at work clued me into this website.  Basically, the website sells just one item per day and it sells that one item for one day only, an interesting sales model.  Yesterday they were selling for $35 a pair, USB interfaced, computer controlled, Nerf missile launchers.  Now who do I know would have wanted those?  😉

In coffee news, Starbucks will stop serving decaf after noon.  It is billed as a cost cutting move, but I think they are just trying to jump start the afternoon economy, by only offering leaded coffee.  Also, I found a new Kaldi’s coffee shop behind the Wine Merchant on Hanley, just north of the parkway.  If they close my Starbucks I might have to go their for my morning go to work brew.

Abominable Snowman

Posted on by
Reply

abominable-snowman

The eye candy for today is actually from last Sunday, when Anne rode the third weekend of Frost Bike and I tagged along.  Today’s header was shot after the ride.  It shows my bike glasses, sitting on the dashboard of my car, checkout the full story here.  My bike glasses are sports glasses from bollé, they have an outer wraparound lens and a prescription insert.  As you can, some of the snow that fell got stuck in between the two lenses, filling the bottom third of the lens.  The droplets above the snow came from road salt spray.  I should have had the bike fenders on that day.  The picture with today’s post, I shot of myself.  I really did look and feel like the Abominable Snowman.  Believe me I was as cold as I look.  Soon after shooting this photo, I bagged it and headed back to the car.  Here is the official description of the ride.

We had Dan and Annie over for dinner last night.  Dan pointed out that the Gerhard Richter painting in yesterday’s post is just one example of what is the SLAMmer’s and the world’s largest collection of his work.  After dinner we talked for a long time.  I don’t remember how we got on the subject, but Dan recounted his canoeing trip to Bowron Lakes Provincial Park.  The trip took place about nine years ago.  Dan was a freshman in high school.  Robin, Aimeé and Betty had invited him to join them.

I remember his flight to Seattle was on a Saturday morning.  It was a foggy morning and when we arrived at the airport it was crowded, always a bad sign.  The fog had delayed Dan’s connection through Chicago.  Not to worry said the helpful and friendly ticket agent, “We’ve already booked him on a later flight.”  “Wait a minute,” said Anne, “that flight is too late!”  “This flight is just the first in a chain of events.  He has to get to Seattle in time to make the last ferry to Lopez Island tonight.  The following morning he has to drive 500 miles in time to make the start of a week long canoeing trip.”  Anne is a force to be reckoned with when properly riled, and this was still at a time when the airlines paid lip service to customer service.  As Dave unfortunately found out this last Thanksgiving, that time has passed.

Anyway, they switched him to another carrier and the only seat left on the flight from Saint Louis to Chicago was in first class, poor Dan.  Anne and I both worried about sending one of our babies through O’Hare.  Dan had flown alone once before.  That time it was a direct flight to Dallas and my Dad was there to receive “the package”.  Anne cautioned him to ask an attendant to help him find his connecting gate and then he was off.  When he arrived in Chicago he called to chide us that his connecting gate was only two gates away.  Returning home, I found a website that allowed us to “track” his flight.  I must confesses I spent way too much time watching that little airplane icon crawl across the West.

Aimeé called us after they had met up with him.  They made all of their connections and had a great time.  Dan recounted stories last night of “canoeing” with paddle hoisted sails, duct taped luggage thanks to aggravated guides, leeches, swimming and swamped canoes, but those are his stories.  And soon he will get an Internet connection, maybe he will tell them then.