I had to stop my ride to work on Friday when I met some immovable traffic on the trail.
Category: photos
Growing Up
Tuesday evening, the girls demonstrated in two clear-cut ways that they’re not so little anymore. First, within a few minutes of arriving home, both were engrossed in books – Julia a Junie B. Jones chapter book, Genevieve a stack of wordy picture books. Both read and read and read. I couldn’t get their attention at all. Even six months ago, neither of them was a good enough reader to sit silently with a book for long. Now? Fifteen minutes or even a half hour!
After a while, though, they turned to a second activity, one which Julia decided upon after reading about it in a Ramona Quimby book: making their own dinners. After a bit of squabbling and a lot of hard work, by god they did it, and did it well. Fruit salad, a turkey wrap, and cinnamon strawberries on bread for dessert.
I’m not sure why they’re both smiling like the Joker in this picture, but take it from me: they were proud of their work, and delighted with their meal. As they should have been!
New View
The lovely view out my office window of a tree and passersby on the sidewalk was been lost for the summer by this view, of the scaffolding necessary to do some loud and smelly repairs on our building. As one of my coworkers said when we were sharing mild complaints about the noise and stench, “I’m just glad the College has the money to fix the buildings!” Hear, hear – but I can’t wait till I don’t have hammer drills going outside my window again.
Summer Clothes
Compare and contrast, if you will, my daughters’ approaches to clothing themselves last Tuesday, June 22 – a day when the temperature was over ninety and the heat index was up near a hundred.
On the left, Genevieve: a nice pair of shorts, a light t-shirt, and – even though it was a sunny day – rain boots. On the right, Julia: a very heavy too-big-for-her “Snow Queen” gown from the dress-up bin (and, though you can’t see them, fancy dress-up shoes).
To each her own!
Bike for Sale
Since getting my Surly CrossCheck last fall, I have no need for my older mountain bike, a Kona Lava Dome.
The Lava Dome is a great bike that’s held up well since its 1995 purchase. I’ve used it in the last five years mostly for commuting, but it is an excellent bike for off-road trails or gravel roads, too. The frame is very light (especially for such an old bike), the 21 speeds can handle pretty much any terrain, and the Shimano components are decent and well-maintained. I equipped it with fenders for commuting, but they can be taken off at will. The bike was always a bit small for me (5’10”), but it’d be a perfect fit for someone about 5’8″ or so, male or female.
I’m asking $250 for it. Get in touch with me here if you’re interested.
I Heart Sufferfests
With the weather promising to be decent and my body hankering for a tough workout, I decided to do a long ride today, one based on this route. The weather actually varied from cool overcast to light rain to cloudless sunshine, but the ride would have taken a long time in any conditions, and it sure did. I have never felt more trashed after a workout or race. Over the last half hour the only distractions from my screaming back were the expectation of cold Coke at home and the cramps in my forearms.
But the ride was also felt really good: fun to do and satisfying to have done. Training is weird like that. I hope I can go at least this far again a couple more times this summer and fall. A few pictures to illustrate the ordeal fun.
This shot’s from late in the ride, but the view is perfectly typical. It’s wonderful, wonderful riding.
Fairly early on, I found this gorgeous ruin – probably of a mill – south of Cannon Falls.
I also saw a beautiful old headless brick silo. The farmstead was gone.
I loved this sign, versions of which I saw several times on the twisty, rolling country roads. It made me think, somehow, of zombies.
Riding through farm country, it was no surprise that I saw lots of livestock, like these very sleek cows:
About halfway through the ride, I hit this climb, which was the toughest “ascent” of the route – though not because it was either long or steep. I was just tired and needed some food and water. The fuzzy black zones in the corners were caused by my camera lens failing to open all the way, but the blurry half-view pretty much suggests how I felt.
I looked like this when I finally took that much-needed break:
My rig, which I realized needs a good name, also enjoyed the rest. I have to remember not to lay it down on the derailleur side. Something chainy/cranky rattled all the way home.
Not long after my break, just after I passed through the tiny town of Sogn, I found a stretch of road through these beautiful rock walls. After this picturesqueness, I pretty much stopped taking photos because I was back in the pain zone and because the remainder of the ride was in the wide-open country, where the sun was unrelenting and the wind was pretty tough, too.
I looked like this after all that cycling. Not pictured is the giant bowl of ice cream I’m going to eat now.
Cautionary Cycling
Thanks to the roofing project on my office building, my bike rack – and my bike – was cordoned off into a “caution” zone today. They can’t stop me: they can only hope to contain me! Tomorrow, though, just to be safe, I’ll use the other bike rack.
Father’s Day 2010
Almost at the end of a pretty good day.
You-Picked
Facing an early bumper crop of strawberries, our CSA farm put them on “u-pick,” meaning we could go and pick as many as we wanted. We duly spent an hour and a half there this morning, picking at least six quarts of strawberries. We would have had more, but some members of the harvesting party operated on a “two for me, one for us” basis:
At least she acted cute after getting caught!
Money-Making $cheme$
In an effort to “juice” the endowment with cash revenues, the College has converted the upper level of the Rec Center into a greenhouse for producing Minnesota folding chairs (Chaairus folderol prairie). Conditions are perfect for growing, as you can see from this shot of the bumper crop. College officials hope to get three or even four crops from the greenhouse before it’s converted back to its intended purpose, holding ultimate frisbee tournaments.
Riding Along on My Velocipede
I had a sweet gravel ride planned for this afternoon, a 34-mile affair that would’ve probably taken a couple hours in the cool humidity. Alas, eleven minutes into the ride, I suffered a pinch flat, which – since I’m not exactly a wizard with the bike repairs – took a good bit of time to fix.
Given that delay, I figured I had to cut the ride a bit short, which I accomplished far more effectively than intended by taking a wrong turn and cutting a few miles off the route. Whoops. Still, the ride ended up being a solid 80-some minutes and 25 miles in length, and crossing parts of Rice, Dakota, and Goodhue counties. Not epic, but better than good. I came home equally sweaty, tired, and gritty, having absorbed into my kit, skin, and hair about 10% of all the gravel I rode over (plus or minus): two days of rain increases the tackiness of the roads quite a bit.
In all that time, I didn’t meet a single other rider, and only a few cars (except for brief stretches when I had to zip down this or that highway). I did see some oddities, such as this overturned sofa bed in the ditch near the Goodhue County line.
This was a far more typical scene:
Aren’t they pretty? I honestly don’t know how cows, or the bovine gaze, became synonymous with stupidity or indolence. I think they look placidly curious. If I could muster that combination of interest and calm, I’d be a better person.
Summer, 1981
A while ago, I waxed nostalgic for the woods, and specifically, for the evergreen swamps of the Upper Michigan, forests that made my hometowns – Daggett, Ironwood, and Hancock – into tiny islands in a sea of taiga.
Right next to those forests, and no more than a few miles away from any of my hometowns, is a real sea: Lake Superior. And it’s Lake Superior that really says “summer” to me. As long as I can remember, my family (such as it was) went to the lake for picnics, cookouts, even, once in a while, camping in a tent or in our cousins’ tiny cottage. For me, the defining image of my childhood’s summers is hanging out with those beloved cousins, the Mattsons, who came up from Ohio a couple times a year to stay in that cottage, which was near Little Girl’s Point, outside Ironwood and just a few miles from the Wisconsin border.
In this photo from summer 1981 (or so), my sister (age four or five) and I (about age eight) are sitting on our cousin Andy’s lap on the shoreline below their cottage. That’s my grandpa right behind Andy, wearing the wool cap, flannel shirt, wool pants, and undoubtedly the longjohns that were the unofficial attire of “Finlanders” like him. It takes sisu to wear longjohns in August.
Some “beach,” huh? We called it that because we didn’t know any better: I’d only been to a sandy beach a few times, so this rocky shoreline was far more familiar. All those wave-scoured stones were brilliant for rockskipping, a skill which Andy and his brothers practiced frequently. Sitting here, we were almost literally below the cottage. You had to use steep, slippery wooden steps to go up or down the sheer cliff between the cottage and this “beach.”
Here I am again, sometime that same summer (I think), dressed for swimming in the lake. The shirtless guy behind me is my dad, then about the same age I am now. My grandpa, his dad, is the enflanneled man between us. While you totally dig my swimsuit, keep in mind that Lake Superior’s average August temperature is around 55°F – not exactly bathwater. Note also the swimming goggles. Even back then, I loved the gear.
So did we swim? We did swim. Though the cousins would go some distance from shore, to some rocky outcrops, I stuck closer in – and enjoyed it a lot, as this shot (again, from sometime in the 1981-82 period) shows. Yes, my pecs now look exactly like my pecs then.
When the sun started to set, the real beauty of the lake emerged. The sunsets were so gripping that even little kids like my sister and I would pause to admire them:
Those were good times.
First Grader!
Here’s the new first grader! I’m so proud of her!
The Pipe at the End of the Rainbow
More (unseasonal) silliness from Carleton students…
Zootastic
Though the rain made today’s field trip to the Como Zoo a total miss as far as photography, the kids enjoyed themselves, and the cadre of chaperones had a pretty easy time of it. I only had to monitor Julia and her friend A., both of whom were perfectly fine – except, predictably, for tiring out and getting hungry. We did get to see most of the coolest animals, and saw some funny stuff like a keeper feeding the penguins, tamarins chasing each other around, and a giraffe using its long purple tongue to eat crackers. A few pictures…
Julia, tiredly (and distractedly)s sitting for pictures toward the end of the tour:
I liked the surname-pun possibilities of this sign:
Kids loved the koi pond in the “Sunken Garden” flower area:
The garden itself was amazing:
