one thousand umbrellas upturned

hey. been feeling pretty stressed these days, i suppose a combination of project pressures, upcoming family trip, and money. hard to keep all that stuff in perspective.

i should be excited about traveling to hanover this weekend for our youngest niece's bat mitzvah, the fourth and final in a series of opulent coming-of-age celebrations (well, fifth and penultimate when our sons' confirmations are taken into account, which they should be, albeit there is less opulence in our household). instead i am anxious about having all the right clothes for everyone, and getting through all the airports with this latest escalation of security.

i should be excited about finalizing the calibration of the st. louis water quality models, with all their intracacies and subtleties. instead i am anxious about getting a draft of the report out near the end of next week, given that the models are not really calibrated, to say nothing of the trial runs without combined sewer overflows.

i should be excited about traveling to west virginia for the CSO LTCP workshops we are doing for EPA. instead i am anxious about the worthiness of the LTCP-EZ form we developed, and the time away from working on the st. louis modeling report (not to mention the models), and then there is the whole flying thing.

i should be excited about revisiting the calibration of the ECOMSED model of the upper mississippi river. that is some meaty work there, lots of delving into the model code and doing brainy thinking about sediment transport formulations. but i pretty much have to turn the job over to somebody else.

so yeah, there is anxiety where there should be excitement, or at least eagerness to get on with the day. but at least i had one of those moments, when first jumping on the bike and pedalling silently down the street, threading between the dead and dying ash trees and glancing up at the patches of blue sky appearing for the first time in days, the patches that a few hours ago were peppered instead with stars, the stars random on their own but my brain having no trouble filling in the missing stars to make the constellation orion, my brain knowing that it's time to start seeing orion out the front door in the morning when i grab the paper, orion no longer visible in the scattered blue light by the time i jump on the bike and begin the silent pedalling between the ash trees, silent except for that whisper of tire noise and possibly the slap of a wet leaf grabbed by the tire and slapped against the fender as it comes around, and in those moments of silence and whispers and blue and green and brown, and the occasional, possible slap, i remember that there is a perfection unaffected by my anxiety, if i can just get past it for those moments.

so yeah i like to ride my bike.

the trip to midland was epic, maybe i'll write about it another time. it was all rain and sky and long-legged birds, concluding with a broken rear spoke about three miles from the end, after riding 115 miles i break a spoke, so somebody's god must have been looking after me, even while somebody else's god was preparing to smite me for my history of moral turpitude, or to turn me into a pillar of salt, or yellowcake, or whatever material might expediently serve the needs of this particular god's most blessed and beloved children, the other children be damned.

=<~°~>=o=<~°~>=o=<~°~>=o=<~°~>=o=<~°~>=o=<~°~>=

to be real orange

so tomorrow i ride my bicycle to midland, in a reprise of last summer's one-final-epic-ride. the justification, as before, is that the older son is up at interlochen for high school band camp, and there is this concert sunday afternoon, and all the normal spirit-infused band-supporting parents come up and see their children, and bring something tasty or groovy up with them, and that's cool with us, except it's kind of a long way to drive up and back in one day. so the idea is to go as far as midland on saturday and stay with the mother-in-law, and then it's just a short trip sunday morning and it all balances out so much better. and the crazy thing is, it was ms. cicadashell who suggested that i ride my bike up there and meet them on saturday. and i'm like, okay.

last year it was sweet, although i got totally rained on for the first couple of hours. that all went away, though, and i rode the whole 117 miles before any ennui set in, and only moderate knee pain. this was last year, coming off that ms-150 double fixed gear century that crippled me for a week. i rode the green bike to midland, thinking that occasional coasting might be beneficial, and i think it helped. this year, regular readers will recall, i did those 200 miles on my track bike without any pain at all; the plan is still to ride the green bike, however, i suppose in part to keep its feelings from being hurt but also because it's a decent bike, all around, the slinky steel frame and the modest 12-speed configuration and the nuovo record gruppo pieced together patiently on ebay. i even got a replacement cyclo computer today at the bike shop, only ten bucks because it had been returned after a ham-fisted attempt to install it, with a mounting o-ring missing that i was able to replace at stadium hardware, a mere 800 feet or so down the road from the bike shop. so that was a good deal, and in keeping with the style of the green bike, which has no new parts except for the chain and the tires, which wear out.

so yeah, 7:00 a.m. tomorrow i'm outa here.

the weather has turned humid again (dew point around 64 °F as i write this) after a week plus of brilliant sunshine and general dryness. i had a slightly melancholy sunday, having to stay mostly at home and work on projects instead of taking some glorious bike ride, and spent some of the time contemplating the past and the future in that heavy way that comes over me at times. it was mostly brought on by playing the first couple of saxophone gigs i had played since, well, since i don't remember. they were both ii-v-i orchestra gigs, one afternoon at dexter days (i was playing a borrowed alto which the bandleader brought, so yes sir i got to ride my bike there, showing up on the sleek white bike like someone who is cool), and the other an evening private party in saline, which was ostensibly a "pig roast" although for all i could tell the pulled pork could have been brought in from zingerman's roadhouse, so few pigs on spits did i see.

anywa there was the usual attendant strangeness to these gigs, always a good feeling to get the horn out and read some charts and peel off a couple of improvisations here and there, but at the same time an almost stultifying blandness from the bandleader's current taste in charts, that tend to extreme corn by way of billy may and others who, i suppose,could be called "the real deal" but only in the same sense that lawrence welk was "the real deal" if you follow my meaning. the bandleader is someone i've known for a very long time, and have played with in different bands through all kinds of ups and downs and situations that could fill another weblog from morning until night, weeks and months of typing and never the same story twice (won't go there, however). and i'm tempted to give him some slack, to say that after all these years he's just going somewhere else now, having been there and done that, so this is what he's into now. and there is a guy singer who can belt out a rhythm and blues song convincingly, and carry a jazz standard across the street at least, but doesn't generate a whole lot of excitement. and of course good vocal arrangements are no easier to find now than they've ever been, and not all that easy to write either. so there is some tedium to it all.

and the lingering feeling is one of failed potential, not so much because of a couple of other, younger saxophonists who have so much going on, because they hear me and understand what i'm up to, but just the whole passage of time, and the realization that i really haven't gotten any better at this in these recent years where i haven't been playing much at all, and the thought that time is actually running out for me to get it together and start playing more often and put together a group that plays the songs i write, and that takes them beyond the framework i imagine for them when writing at the piano and actually makes some music, some music beyond what i can fully imagine on my own. that would be really incredible. i tell myself that i have traded that, at least temporarily, for the better health and physical liberation of bicycling, and of course i really cannot give that up, not the health or the freedom of riding or the satisfaction (grimy though it may be) of tinkering and repairing and restoring and building the machines. but i may have to strike a new balance, settle instead for flying 200 times above 14 seconds and only a few century rides a year, and instead get more time with a saxophone in my mouth, and/or more time at a piano, or even a guitar. just something.

so anyway i was contemplating all that on sunday while the sun shone brilliantly and my younger son sat outside playing the kalamazoo flattop, and what i decided to accomplish that day, at least, was to get up and ride the new tallbike. and that i did, and i felt like a kid again. it was sweet beyond description. so i won't attempt it...

she likes her hairdo

so yesterday, while it was still quite sunny, this hawk landed on the lawn north of the office, and just kind of hung out there for a while. we were looking at it, through the windows, and it seemed to be looking back at us, at least part of the time. then it flew away, and i envied it.
























for a canon powershot a540, with breathtaking 4x optical zoom, through a plateglass window, the picture turned out pretty well. it makes me want to get a real camera, even more.

holy track bike fever frenzy,

batman!

where's the rest of me? asks my bike, in a fever dream about its former self. while i am typing this, a chap is ready to pay $433.80 (plus shipping) for this frame. maybe not actually that bad of a deal, all things considered. one of these days i will admit to the world what i actually paid for that bike at that garage sale six years ago, but until then, bid early and often!

the auction bike:














my bike a few years ago:















my bike today: