Most of February featured temperatures that were well below normal. It was not a lot of fun but I am grateful to no longer live in Providence which was pounded by a bomb cyclone and buried under nearly three feet of snow.

Watching

Frankenstein – The Netflix movie has great set design. They had the good sense not to use the words “It’s alive.” Entertaining, if overlong. Jacob Elordi was nominated for an Academy Award for playing the monster.

The Winter Olympics – mostly boring. Annoying commentary. I did enjoy the antics and skating of Alysa Liu and the Quad God. Lyndsey Vonn is a fool.

The Super Bowl – Mostly boring. Bad Bunny was far more interesting than the game. I drank two beers, my entire alcohol consumption for the month. I am a lush.

The Walk for Peace – A group of Thai monks walked 2,300 miles from Fort Worth to DC to promote peace and mindfulness and compassion. We stood in the freezing cold for over 90 minutes a half mile from home as the monks walked by. Just utterly inspiring.

On Becket by Bill Irwin. This was a lecture and performance at DC’s Shakespeare Theatre by Irwin, an actor who revitalized clowning in the 1980s with his performance of The Regard of Flight. At the advanced age of 75 or so, he still has an amazingly elastic body, and we were pleased to learn, voice. He has performed Waiting For Godot (emphasis on the first syllable) countless times. He spent about a third of this performance discussing and acting out various parts of Godot. We could have done with less lecturing and more clowning but I’m glad I finally got to see one of my favorite performers in the flesh.

Just Pedal: A Woman, a Bike, and the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route by Katrina Hase. The tale of a woman’s mostly solo trip from Jasper, Alberta to Antelope Wells, New Mexico. I am in awe of her ability to carry so much stuff on her bike! I also watched her video about biking in the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania, a ride that is on my to do list.

Man on the Run – A documentary by and about Paul McCartney covering the decade after the Beatles broke up. Really only for hard core fans but its honesty surprised me. A few things get short shrift, For example, neither “Another Day” nor his collaboration with George Martin on Live and Let Die are mentioned.

Reading

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman. The first person account of a woman who lives inexplicably imprisoned in a cage with 39 other, older women. In the beginning it reads like a Twilight Zone episode but it morphs into a story somewhat akin to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. It’s a short book that will resonate with the reader more than a multivolume saga. Definitely one for the re-read shelf.

Stoner by John Williams. A mid-60s novel that oddly appeared in a bunch of online lists of favorite books of 2025. It’s about the life and times of an English professor caught in a dysfunctional, loveless marriage and working in a toxic English department. It brought to mind the ruthless and childish behavior of some professors I knew in grad school. At 70 years of age, I found the long description of Stoner’s death unsettling. Very well written and engrossing none the less.

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. A re-read of a 2024 Christmas gift book, one of my favorite books of the past decade. This novella is set in the mid-1980s in small town Ireland at Christmas time. A father of five girls encounters the horrors of the town’s Catholic facility for wayward girls. A wonderfully written story that packs more into fewer words than books five times as long.

Foster by Claire Keegan. Another perfect novella by Keegan about a young Irish girl who is taken to stay for a while with her childless relatives during her mother’s pregnancy. What Keegan does with few words is amazing.

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore. A missing-persons mystery set in the Adirondacks in the 1960s and 1970s. A very entertaining, layered tale of two siblings gone missing, 14 years apart, from a summer camp and adjacent vacation home in the woods. I’ll be on the look out for more books by Moore.

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner. I am hesitant to buy best sellers by authors I don’t know but I took a lark on this one and was glad I did. It’s a memoir of a Korean American woman, who performs pop music as Japanese Breakfast. The memoir centers on her relationship with her domineering Korean mother. They become close when her mother contracts colon cancer. A surprisingly good read that I would have enjoyed even more if I was into Korean food, a key source of connection between the author and her Korean heritage. When I finished reading, I checked out her music videos on You Tube. I had the impression from her book that her music was mediocre but I found it to be very polished and catchy.

Riding

I didn’t ride outside for the first 13 days of the month because of cold and snowcrete, the lasagna of snow and ice that refused to melt.Eventually I rode 11 days outside. In all I tallied 690 miles, 306 outside and 38.

On the last day of the month I rode outside in shorts with temperatures in the mid 60s F. The Mule approves of this turn of events.

So far this year I have logged 1,412 miles, 48 percent of which has been indoors.

If you live in the mid-Atlantic you learn that weather forecasters are, how should we put this, challenged. Last week our fearless prognosticators were warning of a big snow storm today, just the news nobody around here wanted to hear. Having destroyed a couple of shovels during the previous storm, my wife made a trip to the local big boxes for a new shovel. Home Depot? Nope. Walmart? Nada. Lowes? Not gonna happen. She called the Ace Hardware in Old Town Alexandria. They had seven shovels left but “you’d better hurry.” She made it in time and now she has a nice red snow shovel. (As Bob Dylan once wrote: All I need is a red snow shovel, three inches, and the truth.) Just in time for the big event.

Last week I rode outside for the first time since the Snowcrete messed up the roads. My first ride was rather painful but just being back on The Mule and out of the basement was a treat. I managed five rides over seven days, 167 miles. And, except for some huffing and puffing on killer hills, it felt great.

Yesterday was snow-event eve. It rained all day. The red shovel stood boldly next to the front door. Avoiding the elements, I rode 20 miles in the basement on Big Nellie. Then I drove to the BloodMobile down the street. The donation went fine but I was light headed afterwards. Pro tip: don’t work out before donating blood. I managed to give a pint but I had a headache for the rest of the night.

Usually donors receive a bright t-shirt with unsubtle graphics indicating that the wearer donated. This time, as if they knew I was coming, the BloodMobile folks gave out a soft, blue blanket. When I returned home from the BloodMobile, I spent two hours after on the couch wrapped up in it.

Our snowstorm was a bust, one inch that melted by noon. The red shovel will have to wait.

I had planned to spend the day shoveling so I took a guilt-free day off of riding. Instead I wrassled with an IRS gift tax form. Income tax software does not include this form so I printed out the form, took pen in hand, and did my best reading the inscrutable IRS instructions. (Abandon hope all ye…) Luckily, I took Anal Accounting 101 in college.

It took over an hour before I realized that the most important calculation of the 10-page packet of forms was on Page 6. Not Page 1 or Page 2, or Pages 3, 4, and 5 which were utterly irrelevant to my situation, but Page 6. Also, the IRS requires a Notice, written and signed by your spouse that says that your spouse is splitting the gift with you. Of course, this is redundant with the info you’ve already provided on the form itself but rules are rules.

Conveniently, the IRS don’t provide a copy of the required Notice; filers are left to wing it. (I found an example on-line.) One advantage of filing on paper is that you can attach explanations and supporting math so that, if you screw up the form itself, some poor IRS accountant presumably can set things right. (You do not have to supply photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back explaining each one, as in Alice’s Restaurant.) And so that’s what I did. When I finished I had to repeat the process with my wife’s name on the top of a separate 10-page set of forms.

Of course, the entire exercise is just for show because under current law I won’t owe any gift tax unless I die with an estate of over $13 million. Somewhere in a cave in Kansas my gift tax form will be gathering dust just waiting for me to win the lottery and kick the bucket.

We are in the midst of a nasty winter storm. Just before midnight, snow began falling as a fine mist. By 10 am we had about four inches on the ground as the misty snow changed to misty sleet and freezing rain. I went out to shovel. For about an hour I used a conventional snow shovel to clear the walkway to the house. Thanks no doubt to my recent weight training, my body seemed to tolerate the workload.

Using the same shovel I cleared the snow off our two cars and then cleared the snow from around my wife’s car in the driveway.

It was time for the Wovel. The Wovel, also called a Snow Wolf, is an ingenious contraption. An oversized shovel pan is mounted on a shaft. The shaft passes through an axle. A large wheel is mounted on the axle. The wheel is a sandwich of two wheels bolted together.

To move snow, you push the shovel pan into the snow and then push down on the cross bar at the user’s end of the shaft. The real advantage of this design is that instead of lifting and throwing the snow, you push down on the crossbar while stepping forward, casting the snow away. In addition to being ergonomically clever, it clears snow much faster than a conventional snow shovel.

Another advantage of the Wovel is transporting the snow. Instead of carrying a heavy shovel-full, you let the wheel bear the weight.

I admit that the Wovel looks weird but you can’t deny the physics of the thing. It appeals to the recumbent rider in me.

I made short work of the rest of the driveway. I cleared a spot on the street for our garbage cans. (Pick up is scheduled for tomorrow but that ain’t gonna happen.) I then cleared the street out to the point where the snowplow had passed. As I worked the continuing precipitation made the snow heavier and heavier.

The Wovel started to wobble. As I finished the area in front of our driveway, the Wovel’s plastic wheel started to disintegrate. Two metal bolts that hold the hub of the wheel together had fallen off. Now each time I turned the Wovel the right half of the wheel started to slide away to the side. I kept putting it back together but each successive shovelful of snow put more stress on the plastic blades that act as spokes of the wheel. After another ten minutes one of the blades broke. My Wovel was kaput.

The Wovel was made by a small Connecticut company that is apparently no longer in business. My online searches have all come up with “No Longer Available”. Even on Amazon. Bummer.

I continued clearing snow for another hour the old fashioned way. I am sore in places that I didn’t know I had.

My wife took the second shift, mostly clearing sleet and ice.

Our fingers are crossed that the power doesn’t go out.