spokesNspin

The other day Andrew and I spent some time raking the leaves on the front lawn. 

 I told Andrew how much I enjoyed doing this type of work now and then.  I told him how much more I enjoyed watching him do it.  Andrew, like most teenagers, didn’t enjoy it.  He suggested we buy one of those leaf blowers.

I hate those leaf blowers!  They are just another one of those things we have added at ever diminishing margin of consumer utility.   With the creation of the leaf blower we have managed to add both air pollution and noise pollution into one small carry on your back package.

With a rake I can enjoy the fresh air. I got a little exercise.  And with a mindless job like raking, I could chat with Andrew.  Andrew being Andrew means that chatting took about 30 seconds of the total hour and a half we spent raking.

I enjoy feeling the sun on my back and just letting my mind wander.  It is a way to be productive and contemplate your life at the same time. 

I like watching the progress.  I like seeing windrows of leaves across the lawn.  It gives me a feeling of accomplishment.

I would get the same feeling when I was a teenager  doing some farm work.   Tillage work was like that.  I could drive the tractor up and down the field for a few hours and think about life and the world.  I had the pleasure of watching my progress as the soil was turned with each pass.  One side sort of a gray brown and the other dark and moist. 

Where I grew up we would never see a Seagull unless one started doing some field operation that turned the earth.  Then immediately the field would be covered with Seagulls gorging on the worms that were turned up.  I always wondered where they came from. 

They would come in flocks of hundreds or maybe a thousand.  They would land immediately behind the tractor and feast on the smorgasbord.  I would reach the top end of  the field and turn around and head back.   The birds would stay and eat with the tractor approaching.  At the last possible moment they would take off in huge cloud of birds.  They would fly just high enough to escape the tractor and then again light immediately behind to a freshly laid table.

Often when I am bicycling past the D.C. Marina I see these little dinghy type boats.

Being the landlubber than I am, I wouldn’t know a dinghy from a doo-hickey but these things look like fun. 

There is normally an instructor in a motorized boat with a whistle giving instructions.  The boats sail around in formation.   Every now and then a boat tips over the and the leader in the motorized boat comes to the rescue. Sometimes the boats have colorful sails. I haven’t been able to get a picture of those yet.

I don’t know what it is all about.  If anyone knows  they can clue me in.  I just might have to get my feet wet so to speak and try it some time. 

Enjoy the Friday Foto Fiesta.

Like many cyclists and other endurance athletes I like to track the numbers. I track the miles I ride my bike. I track the type of ride i.e. recovery, interval, hills, time trial etc. I track my food, the calories, fat, protein, carbs and sugars. I track my weight, body fat etc.

Do you think this sounds obsessive? I haven’t even started.

I keep track of my x-training. Each pilates class, each bodyflow class, each run and each weight lifting workout.

I recently started tracking my car mileage. My financial documents look like they came from a major accounting firm. I have cash flow charts, I show debt ratios, net worth, disposable income. And all of these are displayed over time with charts and graphs. I adjust them to be shown in current and constant dollars.  My check book is generally balanced to the penny.

If your checkbook is not balanced, let me at it.  I would love to take it on.

You might think that I am crazy but I like numbers.  It’s like a collection. Some people collect baseball cards. I collect data.

I even work as a statistician.

I like looking at numbers. I like looking at trends. I like to see relationships. I like searching the Internet for reliable numbers that either support or disprove common misconceptions. I even like completing my tax return.

A big tax refund is not that exciting for me. I like to see that I have estimated things close enough that I come out even at the end of the year. Not only do I look at the past numbers but I try to project the future numbers and I set goals.

So as they say on NPR….”Let’s do the numbers”

September 2008 Bike vs Car:

Bike: 528 miles 19 trips

Car: 976 miles, 11 trips

How is that for a turn around?  I had a major car trip this month and most of the car miles came from that.

Between the server crash and being away on vacation, I have not written much.  Let me try and bring things up to date.

I spent last week on vacation again.  This time it was like a real vacation.  At least in some ways.  Real in that I got away and did not have a real time table to do anything.  It was very nice.

I took my bicycle and car went to Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park.  Two years ago I rode my bicycle on a self contained tour along this route plus the Blue Ridge Parkway.  You can read about the adventure here.  It was a very difficult tour. 

This time I intended to relax and just do a few rides sans 50lbs of gear.  So I took my Specialized Roubaix bike.  It was nice to revisit some of the same sites and see it differently.  

It was interesting to see how much narrower the road seems when driving than when bicycling.  And as is normally the case when driving, you don’t notice how much elevation change there is. 

After driving for a day I got up one morning and took a bike ride.  It was really hard.  I thought to myself that I didn’t remember driving all these climbs just the day before.  I wondered how I did it two years ago fully loaded with 50lbs of gear.  As Ernest Hemingway once wrote:

It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.

I think it is true that even though it was hard work two years ago the scenery seemed more spectacular traveling by bicycle than by driving Skyline drive.

Two years ago I traveled during June.  I saw many Appalachian Trail through hikers.  When I stopped at Elk Mountain back then it was like some mountain man rendevous site.  There were hikers every where.

Now that it is September most of them have already passed through the area.  I saw  few through hikers last week.  At Elk Wallow there wasn’t a single hiker.

As you can see my site is back.  The most recent posts were not in a backup but can be restored and will be eventually. 

As you can see I lost my theme.  I will work on that also.  My plan was to be on vacation this week.  So I am not sure how much of my blog will be restored right away.   I was thinking it might be time for a new theme anyway.

So for now you get this plain Jane default.  No offense to anyone named Jane.