I pulled out my Detroit Tigers cap for the dramatic close of the 2003 season.
They won again last night, a two game winning streak! They only have to win two of their last four to avoid breaking the all time record for most losses in a single season in modern baseball.
Go Tigers!
I’m such a weather geek.
I’ve been playing for the last few days with a Davis Vantage Pro weather station. The company sent me a loaner so I could write a piece about home weather station’s, and it’s a hoot. You can check out the readings here, though don’t expect them to be up to date, as I’m not going to leave the computer on all the time just to post the weather numbers. I’d love to. It’d be cool to be able to log in from work during a rain storm and see how much it’s raining at home. Am I a weather geek or what?
It’s got a battery operated LCD control panel so I can check the weather at any time, along with a serial port connector to download much more detailed data to the computer. All Windows stuff, though I found a guy who’s written a Linux package for it that downloads data into a MySQL database, which looks much more flexible than the Windows stuff. I’ll have to try it.
With the graphed data on the computer I can see precisely when Lissa turned on the air conditioner the last couple of hot afternoons, and I could see the barometric pressure drop about an hour before the winds picked up this evening as a cold front started its move through town. (Very impressive – my National Weather Service forecaster friends nailed that one exactly.)
Sadly, I just get to use it for a month, then I have to send it back.
I sent a note to the GNOME docs mailing list this evening stepping down as GDP coordinator. I need more time to write, and being a manager – especially as technically inept as I am – was just leaving me too little time for it.
I suggested Shaun McCance as successor. He’s been a great contributor, and I think will be able to take things up the hill ahead quite nicely.
ARTHUR:
The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water signifying by Divine Providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. That is why I am your king!
DENNIS:
Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Picked up the new bike Friday afternoon.
That sort of sly smile on my face in the picture below is genuine:
I’ve been riding for years on my old green Columbus and I love that bike. It was the first quick and responsive bike I ever owned, it got me up Sandia Crest and through my first time trials. I could add the numbers up from my logs, but my best guess is that I’ve put 12,000 miles on it in the last four years. But it’s a heavy old bike, and I increasingly crave speed.
The new bike has it. I could tell today when I was ripping up one of my usual routes into the foothills. It climbs light and quick. The frame is stiff aluminum, and when I push the pedals the bike jumps – no much, no hesitation. I didn’t really understand that hesitation I was getting on the steel frame, that flex, until I tried something stiffer.
But the real feel was coming back down Tijeras Canyon late this morning. I was near the end of a three-hour ride, and I’d told LIssa I’d be home by noon. Hate to be late. The canyon is generally downhill, but with a lot of rollers, and I was bucking a headwind. But the new wheels, they felt like they were slicing through the wind, like it wasn’t there, and I was flying, faster than I’ve ever done that ride. At one point, on a downhill section, I was coming up on a guy who was pedaling to fight the wind. I just tucked and coasted and passed him.
Jaime seems almost as excited as I am about the new bike – he helped me shop smart for it, helped me think through the decisions. He’s been named the bicycle’s godfather. So it was fitting that we ended up, completely by accident, riding together Saturday morning on its maiden voyage. I was humping it down the bike trail along the river when I heard a voice behind me say, “Hey, nice bike.” Up beside me rode Jaime, in the midst of a long ride, so he tooled along with me as we made the climb through downtown and up to my house.
For the gear heads:
Airborne Thunderbolt frame
Shimano Ultegra gear, with a double chain ring in the front and a 12-27 in the back for going up the mountains
Speedplay X-3 pedals that my knees might live long and happy lives
Mavic Ksyrium Elite wheels, because you shouldn’t skimp on wheels
L’s ankle is now safely immobilized in a big clunky removable brace as she clomps around the house. Its purpose is to allow the body to do its modest yet amazing self-healing job on the spot where a bit of tendon in her ankle apparently pulled away a bit of bone where it normally attaches. What happens, according to The Doc, is that new bone grows out and around the dangling tendone/bone end, enveloping it and pulling it back into place where it’s supposed to be. This is remarkable, and will take five weeks, during which family logistics will be a loving nightmare, as L can’t drive.
So the doc took a second, closer look at Lissa’s x-ray and didn’t like what he saw, so it’s back in to an orthopedic type tomorrow to figure exactly what’s going on.
Hustled home after work last night and stuffed down dinner (Nora made cheesy garlic breads) so I could make it to school in time for Open House, to meet Nora’s teachers. I was running late, so I had planned to skip the principal’s opening schtick, so I made a beeline past the cop on duty at the school door and straight to where I thought Nora’s first classroom was.
The school was strangely empty, but I figured everyone was still in the auditorium listening to the principal. Then I looked down at the Open House flyer clutched in my hand. The school was strangely empty, I realized, because I was there on the wrong night. Open House is not ’til Thursday.
I am so lame.
Lissa’s x-rays showed no bones broken, just soft tissue damage to her torqued ankle, but she’ll be laid up for days. The doctor gave her an ankle brace and a prescription for pain meds and she’s all curled up in bed in pain-induced second-day shock.
Nora and I are taking care of her.
Lissa blew out her ankle yesterday. Ouch.
I came home to find her sitting in her favorite chair with her leg up on an ottoman and ice on the ankle. She was hobbling. Today she can’t even put weight on it at all. We fear a trip to the emergency room is in order. Ouch.
Lissa and I went to the New Mexico State Fair Saturday night, which got me thinking about art and creative constraints.
In addition to cows and clydesdales and midway carnival attractions, the fair is a sort of egalitarian melting pot of our best and sometimes worst creative output as a community. My favorite spot is always the Building of Goofy Hobbies, in which coin collectors and wood carvers and kids building with Lego put their best work on display. This year there was a crossstitch of a Frank Lloyd Wright stained glass window and a bobbinlace image of a ’70s-era Corvette sitting beneath a tree. It was magnificent.
We also arrived on the right night to see the local N-scale model railroad club’s display. They do fabulous work. There was Hoover Dam, and an amusement park, a lumber mill, an oil refinery, all to scale, all in modules that plug in one to the next so the trains can circle the room through an endless succession of imagined worlds. The N scale people are wildly creative, but in a perfectly constrained way. It has to be to scale, and match some real-world environment, real or imagined. And each module has to have the same three sets of rails spaced exactly right to match the modules to the left and right.
This is part of why I cannot write fiction. I am terrified by the completely blank slate. Your character can say and do anything. It’s frightening. Ah, but journalism – the real world provides constraints, and there I can flourish. The potentially story space for me to traverse is immense, with many dimensions, but it is usefully constrained. That’s what frames are for in painting, and the strictures of the French Academy of the 19th century.
I’ve been listening to Dave Brubeck of late. Music is helpfully constrained, especially by the standard strictures of the 3 or 4 beat measure. Brubeck poked his way out of that just a bit, with pleasant result, but never strayed far from the constraint. Ditto the Allman Brothers with that riveting 3/3/3/2 introduction to Whipping Post. But again, they couldn’t keep it up for long. It’s scary out beyond the constraints.
