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.
A Few Spokes Shy of a Wheel 