Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

cycling / Tuesday — No comments
13
Jan 26

Nine! And three-quarters

I had a meeting today. It involved four of six people and took a week to get to. It resolved that we are resolved. At the end, a full 50 minutes of background and resolution, I thanked everyone for the time and interest and their care.

I did not thank them for the impetus to move a piece of furniture in my home office, which I did before the meeting.

My home office has two windows. In between those windows, and against the wall, is where I have placed my desk. Out of one window I can see the driveway. Out of the other, another neighbor’s yard, or a sunset, if I have the blinds open on that side. To the immediate right of my desk sits an old newspaper honor box. On top of that is my podcasting and voiceover setup, which I really should use more. Inside the newspaper box is where all of my dozens of pocket squares live. That was not the intention, and I do need a better place for them. Maybe one day. But the newspaper box, itself, has for more than two years now just jutted out at an odd angle. from the desk. This morning, I pushed it back nine inches toward the corner. Nine and three-quarters, actually.

It changed the whole room.

Just wait until, later this week, I move my monitor more toward the center of my desk.

Sometime in early May, when I put all of these textbooks and notes and notebooks away.

Also, today, I purchased a new pair of shoes. I’ve been eyeing these since late last spring. These are my first new pair of shoes since November of 2022, which explains why I feel extravagant at ordering such a thing.

And now my back hurts. Early in the day, it was my lower back. This evening, the pain had moved around a bit. And now, at the end of the day, it is back to my lower back. It’ll be gone tomorrow. It’s probably from stress. Or that meeting. Or feeling guilty about shoes. Or pushing a lightweight metal box nine inches. Nine and three-quarters, actually.

I made a new banner for indoor rides, since we are now using Rouvy. After years and years of wintering in Watopia on the Zwift platform, we are making the jump, and I am starting the process of riding myself back into shape. It’s a slow and utterly futile process, at this point. But it’s fun to ride.

If you had asked me before this evening’s ride I would have said I was only passingly familiar with the idea of Zone 6. Even the Cleveland Clinic only writes about Z1 through Z5 here. And I’d say that it had never occurred to me to use Zone 6 as a recovery from Zone 7. But there I was, on this evening’s short workout, in Zone 7 24 percent of the time.

(All of that Z1 is coasting.)

Training Peaks, which is clearly better at medical stuff than The Cleveland Clinic, breaks it down thusly: Z1 is active recovery, Z2 is endurance, Z3 is tempo, Z4 is lactate Threshold, Z5 is VO2 Max, Z6 is anaerobic Capacity, and Z7 is neuromuscular Power. This has to do with the wattage output. Zone 6, says Training Peaks is when you are working at greater than 121 percent of your power output. There is no nuber by Zone 7. All of which is to say, Rouvy hasn’t figured out my output yet. Which is obvious. I’m brand new on the platform. And not in the best fitness.

But look at those views! This is a video in Bolivia’s Pampas. A featureless stretch of road, comparatively speaking, but better than the video game feel from Zwift. And while there’s the occasional vehicle, or animal or person on the side of the road, I can turn the other rider avatars off.

I also did a little lap around a neighborhood in Sri Lanka, just to feel a few extra minutes. I feel so worldly.

The best part of this platform, I think, is that you can upload your own routes. You don’t get the video experience, as above, until someone goes out with a GoPro or some such, but you can get the distance and the terrain. If, that is, you can get the import feature to work. I’m still struggling with that part. But the routes just fill the imagination. I mentioned, yesterday, that I’ve been daydreaming about a 50 mile route up toward Mount St Helens for 15 years. I want to layout routes in my childhood neighborhood, just to feel what the hills are like there. I want to go over big bridges, for the same reason. I want to put in the course for the Race Across America and do that, even if it is from my basement. There are so many possibilities. I hope to get to them all, one day.

But first I need to straighten up some of the paper in my office. And move my monitor. Maybe about seven inches to the left.

Tried a new app, ready to ditch an old one

On Saturday night we were invited to a hockey game. Some friends had extra tickets, and so sure we could go. If we could get there. Somehow, we missed an exit. The re-route was not drive-able, despite passing right in front of the venue, there were several cut-throughs that were blocked off. I am sure there are reasons, but they all hampered us. So we had to continue on, up and past the venue, now the venue is behind us. Now it is well behind us. Now, and only now, we can turn left, a leap of faith despite running two maps to plot our course.

Lewis and Clark would be so proud. The explorers, I mean, not the defensemen.

Let’s assume there are two players skating named Lewis and Clark. They’d be proud, too, but not as proud as the explorers. For with the bright glowing lights of two sports venues to guide us, traffic to follow, and who knows how many satellites connected to two separate maps, we managed to park across the street.

Not where we’d reserved parking, but where we could pay anew.

The walk was easy. We got in. Had to walk halfway around the joint to get to our seats to see friends. It was dollar pretzel night. I sprung for pretzels and mustard for everyone. Let’s do a little algebra.

On dollar pretzel night, I purchased four pretzels. I purchased two waters. The bill was $18 and change.

And so you see why the water wars to come will be brutal.

But not as bad as the hockey we saw tonight. The home team would, from time-to-time, put on an impressive display of holding the puck in front of their opponent’s net. The opposing team refused to do that, however. They just shot the thing at the home goalie.

And, friends and puck fans, he was not up to the task tonight. On our way out of the venue, when it was 6-1 and they were still skating, people in the concourse had some thoughts about the local netminder. They weren’t shy or polite about it, either. The final score was 7-2. (They played again this evening. It was not much better.)

But, hey, free hockey!

I enjoy all of the things they do in between periods. The light show is a lot of fun, though it might need to be refreshed. Also, if you mistime it, you can make the pyrotechnic show look like a calamity!

We were parked under this sign. On Sunday, that team did no better. Glad we weren’t there for that.

But I’ll probably never go to a game there. The prices are outrageous. I just couldn’t enjoy myself knowing what was spent on this ticket, especially when I every angle possible on the television, and climate controlled conditions, just a few miles away. It got into the 20s last night when they were suffering through that playoff game. I was sitting next to a blanket on my sofa.

The sky had a full day of it, yesterday, too. It was one of those indecisive days. I am a blue sky! Now I am moody! Now I am purple! But what if I embrace the gray and dark! Oh, I’m in my bright blue era again! And so on.

Worked on a class again today. Got in some of the email. I have made a list of notes for a meeting tomorrow. After tomorrow, I will have to do a lot more work. So, this evening, then, I am getting on the bike.

I haven’t ridden a lot in a long while. Just didn’t feel the need to. Or the motivation. One or the other. Maybe both. I could feel what little bit of fitness i had slipping away, though, so there’s that. That’ll happen when you ride for just a few minutes a week. It’s mental, as much as anything, but now I feel, mentally, that I want to ride some more.

Also, we are trying a new service. Our indoor riding has been on Zwift for years. In the winter time, that’s what you’ve seen here. It looks like a video game, and it is. It is useful for training, but it’s an intricate series of animations, basically. My lovely bride unilaterally decided she wanted to try Rouvy, which is funny, because I have been meaning to mention that same platform to her.

On Rouvy, you ride through real places. So, to the extent that the visuals matter, you’ve got that going for you. The first route I tried, just for the name, was Death Road, or Yungas in Bolivia. The road itself is 40-mile long highwire act. It has been replaced by a better route, and is now largely for tourists. And it kills an absurd number of people a year. No way in the world I’d get on this gravel in the real world, on any sort of vehicle. But I can’t fall off my smart trainer!

Yungas Road looks, in part, like this.

And then, just to round out a little time, I rode through Safari Park Dvur, a zoo in Czech Republic. I saw some deer, some varieties of other antlered wildlife, something perhaps related to an antelope. There was the flank of some huge animal that I could not identify, for it came and went quickly. I passed by a giraffe which was walking on the side of the road. For a few moment, two tiger cubs trotted alongside me.

This is done by cameras. Someone has strapped recording equipment to themselves, to their bikes or mopeds or cars and given me this predetermined route. The next time I visit that zoo, those tiger cubs should still be there. (Though it’ll blow my mind if they aren’t. Maybe I should ride it again tomorrow and see?)

There’s some other great data you get from the rides, and cyclists love their data. I was spending a lot of time in Zone 3 today, because see the self-criticism about my fitness. And since that’s lacking at the moment, the hills felt even more real. What’s a 7 percent gradient when you have no legs?

My lovely bride tried Rouvy for the first time yesterday. When she came back upstairs I asked her how it was. She liked it so much she canceled Zwift before she was finished riding. Today, I rode under and was slightly splashed by a small waterfall on Yungas Road. They say they have routes in 71 countries available to ride. They say I can import my own routes — there’s a road I’ve wanted to ride since 2011 or so. It was absolutely the first thing I checked when I downloaded the Rouvy app.

We drove that road, a 51 mile route from the highway to a mountain opposite Mount St Helens, ages ago. It’s just been sitting here, waiting for me to ride in some way or another. And now I have an app that will let me do it, if I can figure out some problem with the GPX import issue.

Of course this means I will need to make a Rouvy banner for the site. And ride a lot more. Tomorrow is going to be a great day to ride.

Friday / Rowan / television / video — No comments
09
Jan 26

The Coldplay song just gets in the way

This is the third time I’ve tried to write this. It goes like this. I’m trying a new pattern, where I catch up on some reading of a particular author I like, and think of that as a primer for what to put here, and what not to put here. I am well behind. Months behind. I am reading July of 2025. It is a five-day-a-week proposition over there, so you can see I’m well behind. The guy has just retired and we’re all wondering what comes next. Well, people that are behind are wondering. Many people know, because they aren’t behind. I am behind.

Anyway, read a week, and peck away. Only, as I read, one cat climbed up into my arms. Very well. I can enjoy a purr-filled cuddle and scroll to my heart’s content. That cat got down. But I was on, like, a Wednesday or something. So I must finish the week. This is when what we call call the shift change took place. Out of my office went one cat, and in came the second. This time it was a sit on the desktop and rest the head and neck across the forearm move. Well, let me just tell you, any domestic animal that uses me as a pillow has the right of way in every arrangement. As happens with cats, though, there was a sudden recollection of a meeting that must be attended to in another room, and down and off we go. Only I’m reading a Tuesday or what not. And wouldn’t you know it, before that week’s worth of catch up reading was done, the cat was back. When he finally got down, I was reading in August. Mid-August. The author has been retired for a month and is making lists to give structure to his day.

I am, sadly, a long way from retirement, but I find this interesting. Do I need structure in the event of my eventual retirement? Would that just be productivity for the sake of productivity? Will I read less? Putter about the house 15 percent less? I should go out more. I should go out more now. Maybe I’ll get to that this spring. Definitely by next fall. Who needs a productivity list when you’re already trying to envision the events of next fall in January?

I have completed the outline structure of my new class, Rituals and Traditions, or Rits and Trads as we’re calling it, to save 11 letters and to sound hip. Several of my friends are kind enough to think it sounds interesting. I have, this week, consulted with a few of them to see what I might be overlooking. I have talked with an architect professor friend to see what from his world would apply here. He sent along a reading. And I have consulted with my in-house colleague and on-campus office mate, who is really quite good at this professoring thing. She has helped me cinch up the last two or three days of ideas. So, if the syllabus is the brain, and the outline is the skeleton, we now have the outline and the skeleton in place. I’m guessing the classes and lectures are the hearts and blood and muscle in this metaphor some sort of way. The first, call it 10 classes are all in my head or notes, and ready to be put in slides. That gets us through the third week of February. I’d like to come up with one more working component for the students to do. And maybe that’ll come to mind soon. I’m sure they won’t mind if it doesn’t.

Today is the 15th anniversary of the day Representative Gabrielle Giffords was shot, in Arizona. It seemed a good day to watch this again, a sequence which, for my money, is just about the best seven minutes of television ever produced about television. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen this now, if I say half-a-dozen I’m low. I’m still finding little layers, both within this series of events, but also how it contributes to the show. This is four episodes in, and written with the privilege of hindsight, but still.

No matter how many times I’ve seen it, it still pulls at the emotions, every time. And this was no different.

So I had a little sob today. This, Minnesota, just a general lousy few days of other stuff besides.

For the best part of three seasons — I didn’t care for the way The Newsroom ended — they really brought something, but none of it, the fictional stuff, or the almost-this-reality stuff that Aaron Sorkin pulled from would bring it all together quite like that. And if I don’t watch it with the timer on the screen I — a person who, in his first career, made his living by the dispassionately cruel, unrelenting tick of a broadcast clock — am absolutely boggled that that is seven minutes.

Here was the former congresswoman today, talking of those she was with on that horrible day in the desert.

Today marks 15 years since a gunman tried to assassinate me. He shot 19 people and killed six.

I almost died, and think of those who did every day.

[image or embed]

— Gabby Giffords (@gabbygiffords.bsky.social) January 8, 2026 at 7:11 AM

Well, the cat has come back in. He’s looking for a little ziploc bag that he was chewing on. Inside of it was a small bottle of hand sanitizer. Both had been in my backpack. Since he is not allowed plastic, I hid the bag. He is looking for it. He’s getting quite close.

Let me go hide it again.

Have a great weekend. Until Monday!

errands / Thursday — No comments
08
Jan 26

It’s true, you really can — and also moats, and a hardware store

There were actually more interesting parts to yesterday. I just didn’t tell you about them because I had the parts that I wrote about on my mind. Also there were parts that weren’t worth telling, so I didn’t tell them. The opposite is also true.

But the other parts of the day were like this. I had to drive somewhere to return something. The recipient was not home, which was my fault. We’d vaguely said “afternoon” and that was it. So I left the thing on the guy’s front porch, just beneath his Ring camera, which I’m sure saw me walk up, press the ring button, ran a series of not-at-all-intrusive algorithmic searches and cross-database and multinational platform searches. Also, three satellites were contacted in informing the guy that a person was on the porch.

People, you can just get a dog.

It was not intrusive because I was, of course, in this person’s yard. On his porch, to be specific. I very carefully avoid the yard in case people are put off by that. If a man’s house is his castle, then his yard is his moat. His driveway and sidewalk, though, are asking for it.

So ring the Ring. Rang the Ring? Rang the Rang? I pressed the button and waited for an appropriate amount of time. Left what I came to leave, and then returned down the sidewalk and driveway to my car, and tried to exit the neighborhood in a different way, in case I just caught him off guard and he came out and we had to have an awkward yard exchange. “Good to see you, and, dude? You’re standing in a moat right now. I mean, it’s your own moat. This is embarrassing for both of us, I should think.”

I composed a quick text message apprising him of the situation his non-dog doorbell had already told him about. I complimented the holiday decorations. It’s a classic white house, black shudders style, and they have really tasteful wreaths on the windows. Nicely done. You deserve compliments even after Epiphany, I think.

Anyway, I could not exit the neighborhood the way I went. So I had to turn around and race up the street, just in case he was on the porch, or in the drive. Or in the moat. I ducked down low, holding my cell phone up, with the camera acting as a periscope as I drove by because, please no eye contact, not now. None of this will look suspicious. None of that happened.

Except the part about having to drive right back by. That part definitely happened.

An hour or two later he returned my text. He’d had to run an errand which took longer than normal and nice job staying on the sidewalk.

Part of that text didn’t happen, either.

I went to the hardware store. I had two things on my list. Two! And this is where the day gets interesting.

Oh, now, 493 words in, now it gets interesting?

Hush, you. Just read the thing. Comments go below.

I walked up the stairs of the porch to the hardware store, because it is designed in that style.

“Riveting.”

Seriously.

Walked in, and at first glance it looked like they’d taken away the checkout island. That threw me right off. Now there’s a guy there, leaned all casual on a stack of whatever and we’re doing the eye contact thing and he is not in a moat, and now we must speak.

Some warm kinda day out there, I said, because it was that precise level of mild that, standing under the sun made you feel like it was a perfect temperature.

“Wait until you see tomorrow,” he said, “and the next day. I was going to go skiing, but not now.”

Sure does look like great weather ahead, I said, or something like that. I don’t know. I wasn’t taking notes. I agreed that forecast was surprisingly wonderful for early January, and what am I even doing here anyway?

(Update: What I am doing here is shaking an ancestral fist at the forecast algorithms. Nothing of what we’d been promised for days came to pass on Thursday, Friday, or Saturday. First it was cold. Then it turned gray, and also damp.)

I was there for two things. I wanted to stock up, perverse as it sounded with weather like this, on snow blower oil.

They did not have snow blower oil.

I wondered if all oil is the same? Sure, there are different weights of oil, owing to viscosity and their purpose, this part I know. But is there snow blower oil? Is that different than car oil? Does that suggest there are snow blower oil tankers? And car oil tankers? Are there snow blower oil fields somewhere? How far away are they from the car oil derricks?

So I wandered over two aisles to look for brad nails. The hardware store had two options for brad nails on their shelf. Neither of those two sizes will suffice for the intended project. (I did the math.)

So I left the first hardware store empty-handed.

(Told you this was the interesting part!)

I did the math twice because this means I’ll now have to go to a big box store. I’d much rather just go to a hardware store. But everyone’s needs are different to the point of exotic, and every store’s inventory space is finite.

Well, there’s one other ma’ and pa’ hardware store I can visit first. Its name hearkens back to a time when you went into town to pick up your order of coal and/or ice. The marquee out front, the last few times I passed by, proudly boasted of having Ivermectin in stock. Surely, they have the longer brad nails.

And, then, back home to the emails I can’t do anything about, and also the ones asking ‘Should we meet?’ And also the class prep. Most of today has been in that same vein. These are lost days, then. I’ve hit a bit of a wall, this week. I’m predicting a breakthrough tomorrow.

It’s interesting, how you can see motivation coming.

photo / Wednesday — No comments
07
Jan 26

The more interesting parts of Wednesday were other days

I met a high school student the other day, not for work purposes, but this is the daughter of someone we know socially. She was telling us about her classes. This student is taking three AP courses in the 10th grade. I think my high school, a whole century ago, might have offered three total AP courses. Ultimately, if the student continues to take AP courses and passes the end-of-year exams, she basically graduates from high school and is prepared to almost be a college sophomore in terms of credit hours.

The classes are pretty remarkable, too. A high school sophomore is taking classes that will potentially substitute for a college psychology class and a geography course, but she said her favorite was AP World History. I leaned in and asked her what her favorite era was so far. She said she was presently interested in colonial slavery. She rattled over a couple of particular aspects that intrigued her.

I leaned in a little further. I have a read for you, I said. I used to teach a class that was about different media forms and how and when they emerged. And when we discussed books, you could talk about several books. There’s obviously the printing press, the Bible and protestant reformation … I ratted off a few others. And then told her how the capture and enslavement of Black Africans from the Senegambia by the Portuguese in the 15th century set in motion a series of supremacist attitudes we’re still dealing with today. Prince Henry was collecting slaves, and eventually, he was apparently making more money off people than the rest of his country. Henry had a man that worked for him named Gomes Zurara, who wrote and validated the enslavement. The way Zurara figured it, capturing Africans they were actually saving souls. Zurara put all of this in a book form. There’s this confluence of events, books become popular, the Portuguese start exploring, expanding their shipping lanes, and they’re making all of this money. And this book I told her about, Stamped uses that as a key premise. Because I am an excellent storyteller, she thought this was an incredible

I think she was just excited to talk to someone about books.

You know who else likes books? Poseidon likes books. If you’re reading, you’re sitting down somewhere, somewhere still and he can get his cuddle on.

Phoebe, meanwhile, will catch a nap just any ol’ place that’s comfortable.

She was sitting, one recent afternoon, on the end of the dining room table, enjoying the sunshine. I said to my lovely bride, I should put some seat cushions there for her.

My lovely bride laughed and said I shouldn’t do that.

I went by sometime later and she wasn’t on the table, so I put a seat cushion where she’d been sitting. Then I sat out looking for her. And there she was.

Just any ol’ place that’s comfortable.