How cool is this:
Sinvula said hippopotami were not a threat to students as the mammals do not like the shallow, swampy waters across which the students have to paddle each day.
Just once I’d like to use the word “hippopotami” for real. I’d die a happy man.
That’s a blue bowling ball on the left, a thrift store finial for Lissa’s free stuff sign post.
She’s been on a garden thinning tear, and as she trims cactus or thins the iris bed, she puts out a sign that says “Free Cactus” or “Free Iris” beneath the bowling ball and sets the plants out on cardboard flats by the curb.
They go. They go fast.
She’s been doing this for years, and we now see our distinctive purple iris all over the neighborhood. This year she’s been seriously whacking back the cactus, and she’s become sort of a Lissa Cactusseed for the neighborhood. As I pulled in last night, a guy from up the street followed me up the driveway, his back of groceries in one hand and a flat of prickly pear paddles in the other. “So you just stick these in the ground?” he asked. “Yup,” I said. “Just stick that bottom end in and they’ll grow like crazy.”
I hadn’t met him, but Lissa recognized him. He lives a block up, the guy who last year had this perfectly charming fountain made of a euphonium (or was it a baritone?). Seems the perfect home for our cactus.
Today being Howlin’ Wolf’s birthday, I am led to remember the first album of my youth that doesn’t embarass me now. It was The London Howlin’ Wolf Sessions, which my friend Roger Innes had. We’d sit up in his living room and play it. I knew who Clapton was, but I remember Roger having to explain who this Wolf guy was. It was one of those albums where a bunch of the British blues rockers got together with their
genuine blues heroes and made respectful noise, and it was a revelation for this little white boy from the suburbs of L.A. It would be too rhetorically effusive to say it changed my life, so I won’t, but I still love that kind of noise today.
Packing this evening, going through my traditional list-making before a trip (toothbrush? deodorant?). We’re leaving Saturday morning for St. Louis, to visit Lissa’s uncle, Bill.
It’ll be the second time we’ve made the drive out there, and I’m really looking forward to the trip. Last time was 10 years ago, during the early stages of the great flood of ’93. It’ll be great to see Bill. He’s Lissa’s best connection to her family past. He reminds her so much of her mother.
It’ll also be good to have a week together with Nora and Lissa, without the usual distractions. No IM. No GNOME. No work. No blogs.
And now we have a digital camera. Travelogue on our return!
Blooming in the yard:
So in Emacs, the text editor I use for most of my routine writing at home, I have a menu item that gives me a random Zippy the Pinhead quote:
Dehydrated EGGS are STREWN across ROULETTE TABLES..
Microsoft Word can’t do that.
I did not know before today that New Mexico’s eastern plains are home to the Lesser Prairie-chicken (Tympanuchus pallidicinctus), a rare and troubled bird. Historically, it lived across a great swath of what is now Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado and Nebraska as well as my home state. No more. As you can see here, its range is now limited to a few much smaller patches.
I know all this because I received in the mail a survey from the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish regarding my views on the Lesser Prairie-chicken and the efforts underway to save its sorry ass. The survey assured me I was scientifically selected, and that my views were important. I take my survey-responding responsibilities seriously. I filled it out.
I spent a good number of hours this weekend in Windows upgrade hell.
Nora’s computer, running Windows 98, was having difficulties, and I figured a first reasonable step before spending money on it was a clean operating system install. I picked up a Windows XP upgrade disc at CompUSA and set to work Sunday afternoon.
I’m not geek enough to know whether the difficulty lay in the CD drive, or the hard disk, but when the install aborted partway through, I was screwed. I kept getting errors as the install routine copied files from the CD to the install directory. In other words, it had removed the old OS, but hadn’t yet installed the new OS. Luckily I was geek enough to have the BIOS boot off the CD, giving me something marginally more useful than a large beige paperweight. The errors were mystifying – it would, in seemingly random fashion, be unable to copy some small number of files from the install directory to the CD. But since the install was failing, there was no way I could figure out to manually get in, find the necessary files and put them in the right spot to fix it.
After hours of trying, I finally succeeded seemingly by chance – the only file it failed on was apparently unimportant enough that it was able to complete the install, and I was then able to track down a copy of the file, put it in the right place, and the thing seems to work now.
Windows XP, despite my GNU/GNOME/Linux preferences, is a very nice operating system. But I wonder how people without a geek in the house survive the ordeal I went through trying to get it installed.
I’ve had a longstanding goal – a 20 mph (32+ kph) time trial on the bike. To a serious racer, this would be laughably slow (breaking one hour for the 40 km time trial is a common dividing line between the weekender and the race boys), but for me, riding my own little time trials along the riverside trail, it’s been an elusive summit, ever just out of reach.
It’s a flat trail, with four little turns to break your rhythm and many pedestrians, kids on their bikes with Mom and Dad, but beyond that it allows as much flat-out riding as my legs, lungs and heart can bear. I can get over 18 reliably, and I’ve pushed up over 19 once, but the magic 20 always escaped me.
Lately, my approach to the challenge has been to ride gently out to the trail’s north end, a 45-50 minute warmup, then blast the down-and-back 20 miles, then ride home to warm down. It’s a great 40 mile workout, and I figured some day things would click. Saturday they did.
You can see my heart rate profile here. The key is the middle section. The graph pops up about minute 52, at the start of the blast, and I held my speed up, keeping my heart rate in the high 150s for the first half hour. That’s high aerobic – unpleasant but sustainable. Once I turned around at the south end of my little track (out-and-back is mandatory, to balance any wind advantage), I started kicking it up, until the last 15 minutes, which you can see is in the red zone – anaerobic.
A couple of factors at play here. I’d ridden three times during the previous week, so my legs weren’t flat, but none of the rides were particularly long or hard, so I was well rested. Also, I was experimenting with a carb drink, which seemed to keep my usual two-hour bog at bay. When I finished the time trial, I still felt like I had some spring left in the legs, like I could have continued. And mentally, I felt great, not a stress or worry in the world. My life’s good, and that makes everything easier.
Tom Mulhern: Maybe they mistook you for Duane Allman.
Frank Zappa: Oh sure they did. People do all the time.
Ferrying Nora to the record store this afternoon I scored myself. There were times when Frank Zappa had to just torch the place, to show that he could do the straight up guitar thing. One of my favorites is the Illinois Enema Bandit, another is Muffin Man (“Good night, Austin, Texas, wherever you are.”). Today, I picked up Them or Us for cheap, which includes what the Rykodisc catalog rightly characterizes as “a straight-faced cover of the Allman Brothers’ `Whippin’ Post.'” The story goes that Zappa was playing in Helsinki when some guy in the audience yelled out, in ragged English, “Whipping Post”. Frank was disappointed at the time that the bad couldn’t just rip it out, so they made a point of adding it to their repertoire. The later were, in fact, able to rip it out. Plenty of other great guitar playing on the album, and do-whop.
