Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

A most unremarkable day

More editing today. And then we went to a little birthday gathering. The owner of the local bike shop, a friend of ours, had the store open and his family were there with friends and neighbors. It was his birthday. His 60th, I think. We talked to them and a guy we run with and a graphic designer we know and a fellow who chatted us up about mountain bike riding.

And then we came home and I edited more stuff for my lovely bride. This one was a seven-page document. That puts the score for the week at 9 pages I’ve asked her to read for me, and 19 she’s asked me to read for her.

Hey, she made dinner. It evens out.

We learned some great news today. Something we worked on last year has led to something … impactful. I’m not sure if it’s something that’s public or not, yet, but it’s exciting.

Otherwise, worked through the day’s email, did a lot of reading, and spent a scant 38 minutes on the bike.

And that, somehow, has been the thrust of a low key day.

At Christmas a few years ago, my wife and I told our parents that we didn’t want presents, but to spend more time with them. And then the pandemic hit. So finally, a year ago, the stars lined up and we were able to take my mother on a trip. It was a lovely little week in Cozumel. We did some diving, we took it easy, ate some great food, did some more diving. It was a great trip. And a year ago, today, that trip was winding up. This was our last lunch there, before we set off for the airport. This was the view we enjoyed at lunch every day.

It was 84 degrees down there when we left that day. It was 32 degrees here today.

You shouldn’t judge one day over another, but, weather-wise, one was better than the other.

Monday / photo / Rowan — No comments
13
Jan 25

Syllabus complete

I spent a full day happily typing away at the keyboard today. A full day at the home office. A full day and then some. It was productive. My new class is now prepared!

Except!

I still have to make the Canvas version of the class. But that’s just a lot of copy-paste, date setting, triple-checking the details, typing some fine print and so on. That’ll be all day Wednesday, I’m sure. The readings and videos are set. The grading schema is established. The first five or so classes are essentially prepared. I’m feeling pretty good about it.

Best of all, I got the thumbs up from my lovely bride, who said it looked like a class plan.

So, good. I turned to the other class. I’m teaching what I taught in the fall, and only one thing has changed in that class, so it’s a straightforward prep.

And I also copy edited two things for her. Funny. I asked her to look at a syllabus, which was about nine pages, without all of the boilerplate. She wrote a few notes on it. She sent me two documents, 12 pages, and I sent back a lot of track notes. I’m note sure that was an equal exchange on her part.

It got up to 44 whole degrees today, the warmest it’s been in a month or so. The long range forecasts suggest we might get a few more days like that this month. But before that, a bunch of more days at or below freezing.

So I went outside to bust up some ice from a great big puddle. It bested me yesterday, but not today! Showed that ice who’s boss, is what I did. Then I looked up to this beautiful view.

That’s a random moment in the middle of January, and it still looks like that. We’ve got it pretty good, I must say.

It’s time for the site’s most popular weekly feature, it’s time to check in with the kiddies! They’re happy to be back in their regular Monday spot, let me tell you.

I caught Phoebe getting ready to be wacky. The crouch-down pose is a big favorite in our house.

And Poseidon, we ran into him on one of his regular inspections of the guest bathroom.

You never know what’s going on with shower curtains. You’ve got to jump on cabinets and sniff them and look over them some times. You never know what’s going on with shower curtains.

Nothing was found.

But the kitties, as you can see, are doing well. Hope you are, too!

Friday / photo / Rowan / site — No comments
10
Jan 25

Getting things done

I think I spent all day in either a productive and good committee meeting, or working on a syllabus and an outline for my new class. The latter is a bit of a slog. The good news is that, after however long I’ve been working on it, and for the last four months or so that I’ve been thinking about it, I finally got it into a shape I like, this new class.

There’s still work to do. a lot of it, but six weeks of layout are now in the can. I can do the next two with my eyes closed, if I have to. There will be some great guests after that, and then a series of group presentations after that. And, by then, we’ll be in the home stretch for the term.

Tonight I even figured out the midterm paper and two options for the final.

It was a productive day, then. It should all be mapped out on paper this weekend. Hopefully the rest of the details will click into place in a satisfying way.

Then I have to build the Canvas site for it.

And then I have to prepare lectures and presentations and deliver them, of course. But, here, in January, I found the path to May.

If I can sell the students on following along this could be an interesting journey.

That’s pretty exciting for me, even if a day spent pecking away at keyboards and looking for good resources to use in the class isn’t the most exciting thing to talk about.

Perhaps, then, the most exciting thing today was this. I set my cup on the countertop in the kitchen and went into another room to do … whatever it was, I forget now … and I heard the sound of something falling. Because we have two cats, you have to put things in just the right spot, or chaos gets created, and almost right away. You come, too, to know all the sounds. So I knew what it was, from two rooms away.

One of the cats was playing flip cup.

And someone won.

I wonder who it was.

There’s new art on the front page of the site. It’s a nice eight-image presentation, this is the general premise.

So go to the front page and check it out. I’ll wait for you.

It’ll probably stay up until the end of February, unless something really blows me away between now and then. By then we’ll be past due for something that makes us feel warm.

Also, I started making new buttons for the front page. There are plenty of updates coming. But I’m just doing a bit here and there, because there’s a lot of regular work to be done. And, as ever, the Want To Do list, is crammed full of items. Maybe I’ll have some of those done by May, too!

cycling / family / Rowan / Thursday — No comments
09
Jan 25

Progress is being made

Terrible night of sleep. But the morning’s sleep was better. Usually, I go to bed when I’m dead tired, but I went earlier and just … laid there for about six hours. Also, both cats decided it was my turn to be their personal space heaters. One cat is fine. Both cats are a furnace.

I looked at the weather, and then I looked at the forecasts for family. So, today, after doing a bunch of work, I called my grandfather to see if he was prepared for snow and ice. It seems he’ll have a harder winter weekend than we will. He assured me he is prepared to stay indoors. The porch has already been treated. He has the traditional French toast provisions. He gets the joke, but not being adventurous with cuisine, I doubt he’s ever eaten French toast. Nevertheless, he’s ready to watch the weather come and go. I asked him when it was supposed to warm up for him.

“Springtime!”

Nowhere near soon enough.

Though we’re now forecast to hit 41 degrees this weekend. I might set up a sprinkler and go run around in it.

I spent today working on class stuff for the spring semester. It’s just that for the next 12 days until class begins. Honestly, 12 days probably isn’t enough time. But I have the outlines for the first three weeks of class prepared. Another two or three hours will make me properly prepared to navigate through them. And tomorrow, and part of the weekend, I’ll continue building outlines.

It’s terribly exciting stuff, I know. It is, if you like the subject matter. Lucky for me, I do. We’re going to talk about globalization and media and culture in the first three weeks and, looking through what is in store, I want to talk about them right now, but all those days will be here soon enough, leaving me plenty of time to prepare.

Except there’s never enough time to prepare. The class I’m working on right now meets twice a week, for 75 minutes. I haven’t taught a class of that length in several years. Three, maybe four key points per day. It is a mental shift, and a lot to prepare for.

Tomorrow, I’ll figure out how to boil down the entire history of recorded communication into a class session or two. And then figure out what I can omit for a unit on global cinema, and then another for an entire planet’s worth of television. These are challenging choices.

So, I’m left with the idea that it’s a good thing that I don’t have months and months to prepare; I’d agonize over it. I know that, for certain, because that’s what I’ve done every time I’ve sat down with it over the past several months.

I’ve been working my way through a sprint series of Zwift this week. I’ll do a workout, and then round out the day with some free riding to get about 30 miles in. Yesterday, I did a workout inspired by the outrageous style of Mathieu van der Poel. He’s a six-time world champion in cyclocross, and a world champion in gravel bike. Two titles he currently holds, in fact. He’s been the European champion in mountain bike. He also wins stages in grand tours and in the European monuments and classics. Also, he’s been world champion on the road, too. The exercise was meant to name drop him and try, with a straight face, to convince you that you’re emulating the attacking style of one of the best riders of his or any generation. (There are maybe three generational talents on the road right now, including perhaps the best ever; it is absurd.) Surge and recover and surge and recover. Then go over your threshold some more.

Do that eight times, and you’re just like Mathieu!

The training session has little messages on it, and I was having a good ride, and I was sure it was going to say something laughable like that. “You’re ready to race MvdP!” I was ready to mock it endlessly. But they held off.

From his Tour of Flanders win in 2023 …

In great news for wattage fans globally, MVDP has even uploaded his power data. You might want to take a seat before reading this next section. Van der Poel averaged a stunning 285 watts for the 6.5 hours with a peak power of 1,406 W. That’s 1,406 watts in the final seconds of a six-hour-and-thirty-four-minute-long race. Most of us could barely say “1,406 watts” at the end of a 280 km ride, let alone hit such a figure. MVDP’s heart rate monitor also had a tough day at the office. With an average heart rate of 141 bpm and a max of 189 bpm, the Dutch superstar’s heart rate was the only thing faster than his speedo(meter).

If you don’t know what that means, it means a lot. It means something nearly incomprehensible to mortal human beings.

I don’t care about watts — I have a shirt that says “More Pulse Less Watts” — but that’s the central metric of the workout. I was doing but a fraction of that yesterday. And I did it for about 90 minutes, rather than all day.

But I set five new Strava PRs yesterday. Four of them on climbs. (Take that, Mathieu!)

Today’s workout was a long segment with eight sprints in it. I hated most every second of it. But I kept getting these great canned messages from the app. Usually they are of the “You’re getting stronger,” standard rah-rah. But in today’s workout …

Read the room, Zwift.

After 24 miles going from sprint to sprint to sprint — some of them a bit uphill, mind you — and a few more miles just passing the time, I found I’d set Strava PRs on five of those eight sprint segments.

When they don’t feel especially fast it just means you are especially slow!

photo / Wednesday — No comments
08
Jan 25

Just stalling

Still unnecessarily cold here, but sunny. But cold. So nothing is melting. A bit later in the week we are forecast to get just a bit above freezing, and so maybe the yards and roofs will finally have a chance to be free of this thin blanket of snow we’ve enjoyed since Saturday.

I forgot to share it, but when I went out to check the mail on Monday night, this was our road.

The township doesn’t clean the roads. I don’t mean to say they’re bad at it. They don’t do it. But one of our neighbors has a tractor and a plow and he lives for this. So after the weather system passed through on Saturday, he was out patrolling the roads. He does our neighborhood, and two others, on either side of us. He refuses gas money. He loves it.

It snowed again after he cleaned the road, but just enough to leave an impression. It was perfectly safe to drive. It just wouldn’t melt, until Tuesday afternoon. Today, the roads are perfectly dry.

I loaded up the car with several weeks of recycling and took them to the inconvenience center. Cardboard boxes, collapsed, go in this giant bin. Aluminum, glass and plastic all go in this large, unsorted bin. It was cold enough to wear gloves. Depending on the time of day you were outside, the wind chill was somewhere between 14 and 5 below. I chose the former.

It’s not the best story, it’s not even a story, really, but it was a cold story.

To make up for it, here’s the site’s most popular weekly feature, our check-in with the kitties.

Phoebe loves to nap on the cozy blankets.

Some days, all of ’em right now, you want to get cozy under the blankets.

Poseidon has figured out another technique, here he is, sitting loyally ~~next to my feet~~ by the space heater.

It’s funny how the usual can look unusual.

I don’t often see him from a low angle, I guess.

OK, enough waiting around. I’ll go do something productive. First, I’ll ride my bike.