new low

party hats

i have written about my little round hats before.

these are not them.

they are little, and they are round, but not the same.

virus

yesterday i got a shady phone call from some boilermaker call room and a guy telling me that my windows machine is sending error messages that indicate i am infected with a very, very bad virus.

am i online now? he wants to know.

now, i know that reputable companies do. not. ever. ask for information over the phone.

wow, i say. that's awesome. please tell me what company you work for and give me your contact information so i can verify you and get back to you on that.

it is a very urgent matter, he tells me. my computer could crash any second.

oh, well, then. that's another matter! i should go right away and take it to the IT department at the university.

it's very sophisticated, he tells me. undetectable. my computer guys will not be able to help me.

oh, that might be true if i were just taking it to a computer store, i agree cheerfully, but i'm pretty sure our IT guys in the computer science department at the university can put things to right.

the reason i am still on the phone with this dipstick is because the longer he is on the phone with me, the harder he is working and the less time he is spending scamming someone else.

i kept him on the phone maybe fifteen minutes before he slammed his phone down.

i already know that if my machine is sending error messages, the recipient already KNOWS the information this guy is trying to ask.

and anyway, even though i have a windows machine for use in the car, i run a mac.

which is what made today's news so unsettling.

so of course after i painted a party hat and made cracker dough and a batch of soup i ran right upstairs to find out if my machine is clean.

it is.

yay.

pennies

people born in 1956 are 56 this year.

i have a friend having a birthday soon and  i thought it would be nice to give her one penny for each of her years.

at the time of this writing i am still missing pennies for 1956, 1958, 1959, 1963, and 2012.

56 is also divisible by 14, which is my friend's favorite number, so i'm playing with that a little.

later on i will show you my hats.

eggs

a while ago i quit buying grocery store eggs because even when you pay extra to get cage-free eggs, you still aren't getting the product of humanely treated animals. all cage-free means is that the hens are warehoused on a floor and it can be a crowded, unpleasant floor.

i'm by no means an extremist; i happily eat red meat, although i very much prefer locally raised grass-fed beef. not grass-fed corn-finished, as is on so many labels these days, since the general population seems to think grass-fed is good, but haven't taken the trouble to learn anything about it.

it is getting harder and harder to learn anything about it, too, because a number of states are passing laws making it illegal to take pictures of farming operations because farmers (read: big business) are afraid that if people saw where their food comes from, they might start buying food from local farms (read: farmers).

anyway, they pasture beef on my road and every time i drive by those boys i sing out : have a good day, boys! be delicious!

so it made me happy when i found a friend with chickens and a surplus of eggs. i could eat eggs and be happy about it again! so it was a sad thing when my chicken guy told me he was sending the herd out to his sons.

but then yesterday afternoon i found a family who lives ON THE WAY TO THE GROCERY STORE who has a handsome flock of chickens wandering around the yard.

i went to buy eggs and she showed me the chickens and talked about their habits and the problem they've had lately with hawks coming down and eating them. turns out hawks like free range chickens, too.

but when you get a dozen eggs from a small flock of birds, you're getting nonstandard eggs. because the birds are diverse, their eggs are, too. and because nobody sizes and grades them, they come in many more shapes and sizes than from the grocery store.

here's the dozen i bought yesterday. one is so big the box won't close.

beer

once a year or so i buy beer.

it's not a secret here that i went to ithaca college, and when i go back to ithaca i sometimes pick up some beer for crashco, because he likes small breweries.

and the ithaca beer company makes some fine beers, and they have a nice variety twelve pack.

so i'm in the checkout lane with my groceries and the cashier asks me for my driver's license. at first i'm really confused, because i have never been asked for my driver's license when i get groceries before.

and then it dawns on me.

oh. you're carding me? really?

so i show her my driver's license and i giggle the whole time, because i'm a lot closer to 50 than i am to 21 and really if we're going to be up front about it, i'm a lot closer to 50 than i am to 40.

made my day.

whatever happened to red?

do you remember when duct tape was just duct tape? and people didn't make wallets and bracelets and from gowns from it? when duct tape came in ubiquitous silver, like ductwork? it was the dominant decorative motif in my grandfather's house.

and if you wanted other colors, you got elecrtical tape (black) or florist's tape (green) or gaffer's tape (still the most awesome), which came in fancy colors. and then there were other, utilitarian colors for duct tape.

and then it became a crafting thing.

fine.

granted, i was looking for it for a craft project, but i just wanted red. red and green.

simple.

except the packages say "cha cha cherry", "clover", and "merlot".

merlot?!?

apparently it also comes in jayhawk.

they do!

a few weeks ago i read on a kitchen blog (i forget which) that instead of buying scallions, you should cut them off and put the bottoms in water and they will just regrow.

they do!

i owe it a push

last friday at five in the afternoon just outside utica, NY, my car turned 100,000 miles.

i should probably push it a mile, just out of respect.

too busy to work out, eh?

i have a wii fit. it's actually a good fitness tool, if not terribly advanced. it won't take the place of running every other day or riding or putting on the real miles, but it's good for some things.

but you get the part where i run every other day, right? outside? and sometimes ride my bike or something else?

so when you get on a wii fit every other day, the little wii avatar thingie asks you "too busy to work out yesterday, eh?"

maybe i'm just testy, but today i shouted  "no, i'm not too busy to work out, you self-righteous little prick!"

somebody missed the boat when they designed this thing.  software that tracks every fluctuation of weight over three years and keeps track of when you use the blasted thing might -just might- have included a feature that notices a stable pattern and just shuts up about it.

speed

today i went for my run and i was not expecting much out of it since the last three times i ran that distance my times were nearly identical at over 27 minutes.

and i was away all weekend and eating away food, so i wasn't really surprised not to have lost any weight last week. not an ounce did i gain or lose, despite all the running and stuff.

but today i came in under 25 minutes, which is an astounding 14.7 minute mile.

you know.

 astounding for me.

because when i was in good shape i didn't run faster than a fifteen minute mile, not ever.

sweet. maybe next week i will add to my distance or something.

and from my desk, here's a little project.

to break up the trip a little, while i was on the road i took a picture every fifteen minutes and made a cute little video montage.

down on the inlet

it was not all that early in the morning, but i heard all this noise and shouting and thought one thing: maybe i should set my camera to video.

i get to say it every year.

sadly, each year it is only a matter of when and not if i will post this poem.

Elegy

Syracuse lost
the ball game last night.
It made me think
of the last time i was in Syracuse
and found myself
pushing a car
on a street
where someone i once loved lives.
Everything was cold and grey,
encased in ice
as we tried so hard
to keep the car from slipping
out of control,
down the hill, because
Everything
slides, too easily,
down. 

i'm going to go watch the jayhawks game now.

blast from the past

i don't have anything to tell you. not yet, not today.

except that being in the town where i went to college in the springtime feels very much like being 20 years old again, when everything was fresh and urgent and the whole world was laid out in possibility and only the vaguest hint that the future contained not triumph, but illness and sorrow.

but i am here, on the ground in the one town i could be homesick for that is not my home.

oddly, my first blog post ever was about being here.

go ahead, read it.

mailman's mad mod

my mailman drvies a right hand drive subaru.

this is pretty common for rural carriers, and subaru makes a model especially for this purpose.

my mailman, however, does his own modding so that when he wears out one car he can just take out the unit and put it in the new car, which saves him a lot of money.

i asked if it made any difference in how the car gets inspected, and he said it doesn't.

first day of spring

the speed limit on my road is 35, which these days only amounts to madcap optimism. mud season is often a lot worse than this, and i can't say as other than the road there's much mud season at all. come to think of it, winter never really got here. usually on the first day of spring the skiing is still fine and there are still feet of snow outside my door. this time last year i was still sledding down into snohaus.

yesterday i peed outside, standing up, and although it wasn't as neat an affair as i'd hoped, it was a lot tidier than i'd feared and i managed not to get any on my shoes or clothing, which i count as pretty much a sucessful first run.

i had been noticing a degree of saddle soreness yesterday while at my desk. i always forget that those first few days of riding mean getting into condition where butt meets saddle and even though i ride what are known as "relief saddles",  it takes a little getting used to every season.

if i thought i noticed some saddle soreness at my desk yesterday, it was a whole other kettle of trees when i got on my bike today for a short climb up notch road until you can't go up any farther and a little bit past that and for sure i was NOTICING those contact points.

road condition was kind of a drag, too. mud suck away your energy and even on a flat or a slight downhill you still feel like you're climbing.

and then on the way back down (first day on the blue rocky) i thought i had some brake failure in my front brake, and downhill on a dirt road approaching a T going a little over 30 MPH is kind of a bad time to discover that.

tuns out it just needs a little adjusting and it's fine, but when you're going that fast downhill on dirt coming to the stop sign you need to be thinking about evasive moves and scrubbing that speed and getting your weight back in case there's a sudden need and you're thinking about what you're going to do if you have to go barrelling through the stop sign at the top of the half-blind curve.

in short, you don't have a lot of time to think: "is there really a problem with my front brake, or is it just pulling unusually high?"

by the time you realize there's no actual problem it's kind of anticlimactic.

here's a picture of a crocus i took today.

some discomfort

speaking of discomfort, did you see the kansas/purdue game last night?

i did.

a lot of the time when i am watching sporting events i am doing crafts or making soup or something. not this game. i was rooting for the jayhawks (q.v. cr, below) and things didn't look good. not good at all.

jayhawks didn't manage to tie up the game or even take the lead, not ONCE until they had about three minutes left in the game and squeaked out a one point lead which they lost immediately on the next turnover and things were looking very grim indeed until they managed to get that slim one point lead with nineteen seconds left on the clock.

nineteen seconds is a LONG time to defend a one point lead with purdue hitting long threes all night.

but they managed to do it, and sink one more basket besides. the purdue team and fans looked something just past disgusted and i'm sure there's a lot of moaning about "should'a'" and "deserving", but the ball falls where it does and there's a REASON kansas was seeded higher than them, anyway.

it was pretty exciting. i stood up most of the time, right in front of my tv.

today i went to the house i'm modeling to take measurements and pictures. while the homeowner is very happy to see the model and will love having it done, i do not think she gives much thought to the idea that i am necessarily in her house poking into corners and taking pictures of things like baseboards (what rooms are they in? along what walls?) and plumbing fixtures and closets. i think she would be appalled to know that i have seven hundred pictures of her house, and very few of them are pretty arty shots. they are mostly of things like the underside of the stairs.

and i went to a friend's house and did some light yard work and house chores. never mind why. and if anyone asks, i wasn't there. i only bring it up because when i got home after having done a good piece of work already and already "enjoying" some discomfort, i went for my run at the new distance.

it did not suck as bad as i thought it would. i started out in moderate pain, but it was localized pain, so not so bad. and i didn't reach the level of "hurts pretty much bad" (which is not as good as "significant pain" but not as bad as "extreme pain") until i had only about  two tenths of a mile left, so it almost doesn't count.

i timed it, just so you could have an idea of exactly how slow a runner i am. even when i am in peak form (and by peak form i mean a year in which i might win some cycling trophies) i am a very poor runner. in my present condition i ran the whole 1.66 miles in just twenty-seven minutes.

that is very nearly a sixteen minute mile, my friends.

i have never run better than a fifteen minute mile. not even in a year when i considered and sixty-mile bike ride to be no big thing and did it a couple of times a week and got trophies and stuff.

so.

there's hope.

running right along

i'm still working on that model, and some things i am not telling you about.

like the penny hunt. you have to sort of know me in person to have current news on a thing like that, although i am finding it interesting.

the model is coming along well, but it is right now such a huge file that i can't get nice video of it because of all the nice photorealistic textures and stuff.

yesterday when i went for my run i graduated up to 1.6 miles, which is about half the distance i need, but it's early yet. i'm getting faster to to the point that other people might actually recognize what i'm doing as running, as opposed to my trademark slow lope.

and today i went for my first bike ride of the season.

here's my handy dandy profile of yesterday's run.

i made it at geocontext.org but it is not dynamic or live linked because while i'm pretty free about telling you about where i live, i am not comfortable posting a map that goes directly to my front door. i'm just not.

notice that it has a bigger elevation gain, though. and the pain never started. oh, sure, it hurt. but by "pain" i've come to mean "subsuming pain" because anything less is hardly worth noticing these days.

my bad

syracuse is playing kansas STATE.

it comes from not caring very much, i guess.

meanitime, i'm working on my model and making duct tape roses.

later i will sort pennies.

never mind why.

outcomes

today syracuse (goooOOOOOO orange) is playing KU (rock chalk jayhawk KU) since i like both teams, there's not really a bad outcome for me. i would be happy to see either team advance. i'd be happier if they BOTH advanced, but that's not how tourneys work.

the last time a thing like this happened to me it was syracuse getting beat by UVM and i got teased about it by someone who ought to have known better.

it was sad, though, because that year syracuse was hosting a bracket, and i was in syracuse the morning after the game and (as often happens in syracuse) is was grey and cold and raining. it was like the whoel town had dolled up for a party they were having but then at the last minute all the guests arrived and the host was suddenly, inexplicably uninvited but the guests stayed on anyway even though the house was covered in mourning crepe.

but what i'm REALLY (and predictably) excited about is and awesome interactive chart that you can find here.

go on, go. don't waste your time here.