Today I helped chaperone Genevieve’s first field trip, a rainy but fun outing to River Bend Nature Center in Faribault, Minnesota. We luckily avoided the day’s real downpours, and honestly the steady drizzle added something to the spring-ness of the place. The greens were GREEN, the mud was MUD, and the kids were HAPPY. Vivi even took a big digger, but popped right up again to show me her muddy hands (see the slideshow). A great, great time.
The storm clouds, rolling in from the south…
Turning lemons into lemonade, the girls rushed inside when it started to rain this evening, swapped their sandals for rain boots, grabbed their umbrellas, and headed out to wander and splash for half an hour.
The cottonwood fluff was thick on the ground outside our townhouse yesterday, but alas: not thick enough that it could be skied.
I’d planned to do hill repeats this morning, but various changes to the household plans forced me to shift to a shorter, less intense ride this evening, through the hazy light. In the course of the ride, I watched a kewl d00d take a laughably bad swing at his golf ball, smelled fields that had been tilled literally ten seconds before I rode past, giggled at a car that had a “Kennedy|Johnson” bumper sticker, managed to ride without braking through a particularly tough S-turn, and heard a pheasant squawk at me. The scenery was damn good, too:
8:00 a.m.
Goodbye Blue Monday
Perfect for coffee, bagels,
A scone, and homework
11:00 a.m.
Talking with a friend
While our three girls play outside
Unprecedented
3:00 p.m.
Vivi steams along
Julia rides by herself
For a long minute!
6:00 p.m.
A ride of my own
Cool, but ideally lit
Quads staged a revolt
7:30 p.m.
The girls are wound up
Richard Scarry can save us
Stories wind things down
Little-known facts about me:
I’ve been eating 2500 calories per day since I was an infant.
I now weigh only 11 pounds more than I did when I was a year old.
Pictures don’t lie.
Every day I can, I bike to and from work on a route that takes me through the Arb. I’ve said this before, probably more times than anyone has cared to read, because, honestly, the ride is one of those little dollops of quality of life that help make the rest of the day go that much better. Some of my pleasure in the ride derives from being momentarily in the woods, some from the decent speed I can make on the empty trails, some from weirdness like this bright blue fire hydrant, sitting about six feet off the path amidst the trees and brush. I love to imagine why this hydrant is where it is, and why it’s this very un-hydranty color, and who decided to put a blue hydrant in the woods. (Or, really, not quite in the woods: it’s actually right behind one of the bigger dorms on campus. Still, though.)
My bike’s nameplate was clean before I started my ride home. It also summarizes my mood after riding home in sloppy, cold, wet weather. Give me snowy, 20° conditions any day.
Today was my first real bike ride of the year. After driving and taking the bus during most of the brutally icy winter, I’ve been bike commuting for a while again now, but two miles each way (even if they’re through the reawakening Arb) just doesn’t compare to a real ride.
Today, I had only thirty minutes to ride, so I headed out from our place, up and down a sizable hill that’s literally 90 seconds away, and then back over the hill and up a nice easy road to the edge of campus, where I took a few laps of the fun, technical trails in the Upper Arb. I cleaned the junk out of my legs from my last workout, and built up some new junk for tomorrow.
Besides the pure pleasure of riding – which is second only to skiing as a wellspring of joy – today’s ride was notable for the incredible skies. Northfield is frequently blessed by some spectacular skies, but today’s were especially amazing. While I rode, Northfield was under blue sky that was bounded on all sides by the ragged-veil clouds of distant rain. It was stunning to see: literally a ring of rain all around us, but not on us. The late-afternoon sun was doing some wonderful things to the rain, too: making it a deep purple off to the west, a paler indigo to the north and south, and a light blue to the east. For a few minutes of the ride, I was tracked by four circling turkey buzzards, as black as the jets heading in to MSP were silver.
After dinner, I suggested to the girls that we go outside to enjoy a bike ride in the nice weather. As I knew she would, Julia balked at this idea. As I knew she would, Genevieve like this idea. I asked Julia if she’d like to walk with me while Vivi rode her bike. She said, “No, but I think I’d like to read magazines.” I asked if she’d like to sit outside and read magazines while I accompanied Vivi on a bike ride up and down the block, never getting out of sight of the house. Julia thought this sounded good, “but first I need to change into my jammies.”
Of course.
So ten minutes later, I was outside with Genevieve, who was wearing an appropriately safe helmet and an inappropriately thick jacket and sitting on her bike, rarin’ to go, while Julia, in her pinkest jammies (and sandals), got situated in her Disney Princess “camping chair” with roughly two years’ worth of Ranger Rick and other such magazines.
Internet, there has never been a more vivid display of similarities and differences between my daughters.
While Julia silently read, Vivi zoomed up and down the block for a while. She was just getting bored when Shannon came home, letting us head off to the hallowed bike path while Julia read through vol. 6, issues 9-12 of High Five or whatever. After a good half-hour ride, Vivi and I were back home, tired out, to collect Julia and her library and go inside for baths and bed.
For whatever reason, today’s run generated more random thoughts than usual. A sampling, in no particular order:
* Google tells me that there are 1,609 meters in a mile, which I should have remembered from running the 1,600 meter “metric mile” in high school track.
This morning on my ride to work, I finally stopped to take some pictures of one of the maple trees that’s been tapped in the Arb. The white bucket was kinda pretty in the early-morning light:
The bucket was maybe an eighth full, not including the big moth that had drowned in the sap:
I love this sign put up by the tree-trimming crew working around campus during spring break. It seems like a three-word poem.
A truly bizarre situation – the girls going to a tea party with Shannon, leaving me unscheduled for two hours – let me to do a nice long run through the Arb on Sunday afternoon. The weather was perfect, and though early spring is not the most beautiful time to be in the Arb, it was nice to establish a “before” against which to compare the verdant lushness of late spring and summer. To that end, a few photos…
