It was the year of the jabs. And not a whole lot else. Our trip to Peru was put off until 2022 (at the earliest). My fall bike tour to New Orleans would have been the Tour de Covid, as the entire route went through the gut of anti-vax America. I stayed home and got a booster shot instead. Still, some good stuff happened and here’s a go at the ten best. (Assuming, of course, that nothing bodacious happens in the next few days.)

1. One L

My daughter, scholarships in hand, enrolled in law school in Connecticut. After a recon trip in May, we rented a U-Haul and moved her 350 miles in August. It being the case that I have spinal issues and my wife and I are both north of 60 years old, the wise move would have been to hire some help. Yeah, well. We managed to pull off the move and live to laugh about it. My back held up amazingly well, too. And the apartment that my daughter rented sight unseen turned out to be much better than her apartment in Rosslyn or any apartment I ever had in college or grad school

2. Going Yard

One downside to doing a series of long bike tours is that my yard became neglected. The backyard mysteriously started flooding. The lovely perimeter garden was a bed of weeds. The landscaped steps next to the house were a mess, The metal stoop at the side of the house had more rust than paint. And there were big muddy patches in various parts of our lawn from the removal of trees and some Russian olive bushes. In between bike rides, I attacked these tasks with mostly good results. Each task took two to three times longer than expected, mostly owing to my decrepit back. The yard is still a bit squishy after heavy rains, and one of the muddy patches didn’t quite take to seeding, but the rest came out as good or better than I had anticipated. I never got around to re-painting the shed, but there’s always next year.

3. Wait Till Next Year

The baseball season started with a surprise. I got in the paper! A special Opening Day section of the Washington Post included quotes by and pictures of Nationals fans. And one of them was meee, wearing a Montreal Expos (the former city and name of our Washington Nationals) cap and a 50 States Ride t-shirt.

Once it warmed up, I rode to some baseball games. Alas, it was a lackluster year until the Nationals gave up entirely and traded away many of their star players to replenish their farm system, depleted by years of trades that led to their 2019 World Series victory. The last two months of the season the team was pretty dreadful, but tickets were easy to get and inexpensive. At one game I sat a few rows behind the Nationals dugout and felt like a kid in a candy store.

During the spring law school recon trip to Hartford, we attended a AA minor league game. The home team is the Hartford Yard Goats. They play in Dunkin Donuts Park.

4. Baker’s Dozen and Other Events

I completed my 13th 50 States Ride this year with the help of a posse of charming gents. Michael, Kevin, Peter, and Chris made the journey a pleasure. Historically, the hardest part of the ride had been the climb through the Palisades up to Cathedral Heights only a few miles from the finish. This year the start and finish were moved to the low lying area of DC known as Near Southeast. Those killer hills now came 45 miles into the ride instead of 58 miles in. No problem! The after-party even included some surprise guests one of whom just moved back from Brazil (hello, Kitty).

I did three other event rides in 2021. The Sweet Ride is relatively new spring ride which, like the 50 States, is a production of the Washington Area Bicyclists Association (WABA). The very hilly course goes places in the near suburbs that I had never ridden. I’m not a big fan of climbing so it’s one and done for this one.

The Great Pumpkin Ride is one of my favorites. It’s held in autumn in the Virginia Piedmont when the air is crisp and the foliage is starting to turn. This year I rode it alone and passed on the beer at the final pit stop. I did the long 60+ mile route and I was finished at the finish.

The WABA Cider Ride in early November featured a slightly altered course. I started with Kevin and we added Michael at the first rest stop. The three of us had a great time together and I am grateful that my amigos waited for me several times when I couldn’t maintain their pace. I may be old, but I’m slow.

5. Riding East and West

The Eastern Shore of Maryland is a pretty cool place to ride a bike. It’s flat-ish. Traffic is relatively light. And I was sick of riding around home. So I drove over and did rides in Dorchester, Kent, and Cecil Counties. On one ride I kept seeing signs saying “Road Closed” and “Bridge Closed Ahead”. I ignored them, of course. Then I came to a bridge that had been damaged in a flood. I managed to walk across the bridge thanks to some strategically placed guard rails and traffic barriers.

On three other occasions my wife drove me to Purcellville, Virginia where the Washington and Old Dominion Trail has its western terminus. Each ride from there to home was about 57 miles long. One way. Gradually downhill, for the most part.

6. Big Nellie Reborn

I was riding Big Nellie, my Tour Easy recumbent, on the Mount Vernon Trail one day in June when my front wheel hit a root heave and my fork snapped off. I was fortunate that I was not on a road in traffic when this happened. (Of course, if I had been on a road, there wouldn’t have been a root heave to begin with.) A passerby saw my crash and portaged the bike to a nearby parking lot where I was rescued by Mrs. Rootchopper. Easy Racers, the company that made my bike, is no longer in business. The fork was made specifically for this bike so my fear was that Big Nellie was a complete loss. I emailed the owner of Easy Racers and didn’t receive a reply. Then I sent hopeful emails to bike shops across the country and Peter, owner of The Bicycle Man in Alfred New York, replied that he had what I needed. I put Peter in touch with Tim at Bikes at Vienna, my local recumbent shop. They figured out a repair plan. With the able help of Daniel and Beth, mechanics at B@V, Big Nellie was made good as new.

7. 10,000 Miles to Nowhere

At the start of the year, I told myself that I would not get caught up in another year of mega mileage bike riding. A few months later I found myself well off the pace for a 10,000-mile year. Then the weather took a turn for the better. Fast forward to the end of summer and I found myself chasing down that 10,000 mile bogeyman for the sixth year in a row. (I failed in 2017 because I became gravely ill with fewer than 200 miles to go.) By year’s end, I had ridden over 3,000 miles on three different bikes and bagged my 10,000-mile prize.

8. Jab Me

As someone who is over 65 and has a recent history of ideopathic (fancy medical speak for “dunno”) cardio-pulmonary disease, my anxiety over the Covid pandemic was at Def Con One in January. In February, after many fruitless internet searches, I signed up for my first shot of the Pfizer vaccine at my local Safeway. A month later I had my second. Five months later I went in for a flu shot. After another month I was Covid-jabbed for the third time. Boosted! In total I had the following side effects: a sore arm for one day after all four shots. From my second Covid shot, I had mild fatigue which I cured with an afternoon nap. I know others who had some more significant side effects, but none that came within a fraction of the impact of acquiring Covid.

In 2019 and 2020 I finally resolved chronic pain issues by getting cortisone shots in my hip and knee. Next I turned my attention to a growing concern, spinal stenosis. A narrowing of the pathway through which my spinal cord runs had been causing me increasing amounts of pain. At one point I had trouble walking a hundred feet. Finally, I received cortisone shots directly in my spine. The shots sent momentary electric shocks down my legs. It was extremely painful but it did ameliorate my pain. The pandemic kept me from returning to my pain doctor so I started a course of physical therapy that I found in various YouTube videos. It seems to be working. Somewhat. I had all but given up on hiking, however, but a short two-and-a-half mile hike the day after Thanksgiving was pain-free. I am now experimenting with, how should we say, plant-based analgesics.

9. Nature Is Weird

We were treated to another nearly snowless winter. We now seem to have only light, pretty snow falls, called “conversational snow”. It’s as if the entire area has been moved south 200 miles. Not that I am complaining. After all, I moved here to get away from winter. Little did I know that, unlike the northeast, this area is invaded by creepy flying bugs every 17 years. And 2021 was the year of the 17-year Brood X cicada bloom. For about three weeks in June we were treated to life in the Twilight Zone. It’s hard to describe the eerie sound of billions of flying insects mating like there is no tomorrow, because, for them, tomorrow is in 17 years. Some neighborhoods had massive infestations with piles of cicada shells lying under old trees. Others had next to nothing. Our yard had conversational cicadas. The fall brought one of the best foliage shows in many years. The colors just kept on coming.

10. Lost and Found

I found over 125 golf balls on my rides around DC this year. I have no idea what I am going to do with them. Nobody I know golfs much these days. I looked around at local public golf courses hoping to find a kids’ clinic or something that I could donate them to.

I also found a $100 bill on the road. I was stunned. A few years ago I found $140 on the street in front of my house and thought I’d never see anything like that again. Well, I did…and I didn’t. This year’s c-note was fake, movie money. How it ended up on the side of a busy suburban road is anybody’s guess.

But the big find was my wedding ring. I took my ring off when I was doing all that yard work in the Spring. One day after working in the yard and going for a bike ride, my ring vanished. After months of searching and even renting a metal detector, I gave up hope. Then, seven months later, it appeared in the dirt near my shed.

And we have one more thanks to Nigel Tufnel:

11. Hold My Guinness

In mid December after a long wait because of Brexit and Covid, my application for Irish citizenship was accepted. My name is now included on the Registry of Foreign Births of the Republic of Ireland. The entire process took over three years. Once the papers arrive from Dublin, I’ll be able to get my Irish EU passport.

Athbhliain faoi mhaise duit!

There’s a snarky old saying that you always seem to find a lost item in the last place you look. Unless you’re me.

Last spring I was doing work in my yard. Whenever I am using yard tools with long wooden handles, I inevitably get blisters. The worst ones are on either side on my wedding ring where it contacts the handle.

I routinely take my ring off and set it aside in a place that I am sure to see it. This spring I was in the habit of putting the ring on the padded seat of my recumbent bike.

After finishing my yard tasks on May 13, I took my recumbent for a relaxing 30-mile bike ride to DC. Back home, I was hanging out before my shower when I realized that my wedding ring was not on my finger. Hmmm.

Uh oh. It was on the seat of the recumbent. I went out and looked everywhere. On the seat. In the space between the seat pad and the seat back. All over the floor of the shed. In the lawn across which I rode the bike to get to the street. No ring.

For the next six months, every single time I walked into my back yard I looked down on the ground, thinking that maybe the ring fell off the seat when I left the house that day. No ring.

I overturned landscaping bricks. I emptied the shed. I raked the lawn using a metal rake. No ring.

My finger felt strange. When I went to turn the ring around my finger as I had the habit of doing, the ring wasn’t there.

My sister and brother-in-law came to visit in early July. My brother-in-law told me how he lost his wedding ring while raking leaves in his yard. He rented a metal detector and actually found his ring in a humongous pile of leaves.

I kept looking then decided after a few more weeks I rented a metal detector. I detected this way and that way. I found screws and nails and odd metal siding hardware. I found metallic rocks. No ring.

At that point I figured it had fallen off the seat of my bike during that bike ride to DC. I gave up looking.

A couple of days ago, I was walking away from the backyard shed when I happened to look down and… damn. There, embedded in top of the soil in a bare spot in the grass, was my ring. I had walked over it at least 300 times. It had been rained on, raked, mowed, and ridden over repeatedly in the past seven months yet there it was. I guess it had fallen off the seat after all.

Now it’s back where it belongs.

Yesterday was the big day. I woke up with only 29 1/2 miles to go to reach 10,000 miles of bicycling for 2021. As it turns out, the distance from my home near Washington, DC to County Mayo, Ireland, the place of my paternal grandmother’s birth, is about 3,333 miles. So if there were a bridge between here and there and you rode a bike across it you could do one round trip and then ride back to Ireland and hit 10,000 miles.

One of my little projects when I retired was to apply for Irish citizenship, which you can do if you can prove that one of your grandparents was born in Ireland. And so I set about tracking down official documents (with embossed seals and such) to prove my lineage.

I needed official copies of her birth certificate, marriage license, my father’s birth certificate, his and my mother’s marriage license, my grandparents’ death certificates, my parents’ death certificates, my birth certificate and my marriage certificate. My siblings had a few of the documents, some official, others photocopies. Thankfully, one of my brothers had the hardest one to get: my grandmother’s birth certificate from rural Mayo in the 1880s. Most of the rest I had to find on my own. It took over a year but I was finally ready to send my package off to Dublin.

As I was about to send in my application I found that I had misplaced my grandparents’ death certificates. I turned the house upside down to no avail.

I went to the website of the Vital Records Office of New York State where my grandparents died. It said I needed to appear at a hearing with legal representation to get the documents. I was ready to give up.

Mary Mother of Gawd.

To obtain my parents’ marriage license, I called the town office of Freehold, New Jersey where they were married. Talking to a human greatly simplified things so I decided as a last resort to call the New York Vital Records Office and beg for mercy. When they learned what I was doing and the fact that my grandparents had been dead for decades, they told me to send copies of the documents demonstrating my relationship with my grandmother and they would gladly send me the missing papers.

After a mess up on my part (and a 3,000-mile bike tour), I finally received the documents I needed. I sent everything off to Dublin with my application to be added to the Registry of Foreign Births, a process that normally takes three to six months.

After a few weeks, in August 2019, Dublin sent me an email saying they had all my documents. Alas, Brexit happened. Dublin was inundated with applications. This would lengthen processing time considerably.

Then the pandemic hit and the office closed.

Last month, I received an email saying that Dublin was once again processing applications. Yay. They would be processed in the order they were received. Applicants could expect to wait up to two years to hear about their status. Boo.

Yesterday morning, I opened my email and was stunned to learn that my application had been processed. Accordingly, my name had been added to the Registry of Foreign Births. I was now officially an Irish citizen.

I celebrated by going for a 30-mile bike ride. My body rode to DC and back. My mind rode across a bridge to a far away land.

We had a mighty nice November here in the mid-Atlantic. The foliage seemed to last for weeks. There were no big, blustery storms to blow all the leaves off the trees. The red maples and a few yellow ones, and some stubborn ginko trees were hanging in there to the end. Well played, mother nature.

Riding

As usual, cooler temperatures led to a switch to long pants on bottom and layers on top. I added a key piece of clothing to my bicycling wardrobe and I am really happy I did. Junction Hybrid Cycling pants from REI are a cross between long pants and tights. They fit perfectly. And they seem to be good for a wide temperature range. So far I’ve ridden in wind chills down to 35 degrees F as well as temps in the mid to high 50s F and felt very comfy. The only shortcoming to these gems is a lack of pockets. I would have bought another pair or two but I had to give my daughter something to get me for Christmas. I hope she comes through.

The month began with the last cycling event on my calendar, the Washington Area Bicycling Association’s annual Cider Ride. I began the ride with Barney (real name Kevin). At the first rest stop, Gomer (a. k. a. Michael) caught up to us. (This must make me Floyd the Barber, I suppose.) The weather was mighty fine and so were the warm cider, donuts, and apple pie at the pit stops.

In mid-month I did a one-way, 57-mile ride on the Washington and Old Dominion and connecting trails. The rest of the month included all too many loopy rides on area streets. I did get to check out the extensions to the 15th Street cycletrack in DC however. Earlier in the year it was extended from Pennsylvania Avenue to Constitution Avenue. In November, in a matter of days, a further extension was added across the Mall from Constitution to the Tidal Basin at Maine Avenue. No more dodging tour buses and taxi cabs near the Museum of the African American, the Washington Monument, and the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. Sweet.

For the month I rode 846 miles, mostly on Old Nellie and the Cross Check. For the year, I have ridden 9,564 miles, nearly evenly split among those two bikes and The Mule. The odometer on Old Nellie hit 47,000 miles along the way. If I can manage to average a little over 14 miles per day during December, I’ll hit 10,000 miles. Pedal, pedal.

Off the bike I raked a helluva lot of leaves. This left my body achy. After Thanksgiving dinner in North Arlington, I joined the other feasters on a hilly, half-mile waddle around the neighborhood. My back and legs were screaming at me the entire time. The next day a few friends reconvened for a short hike in the woods at Scotts Run Recreation Area in Mclean, Virginia. I used trekking poles and had absolutely no pain issues. My body is a mystery to me.

Watching

When pondering my medical woes, I watched a few movies on the tube. Worth was pretty interesting. It’s about how 911 victims’ families were compensated after the attacks. As someone who did wrongful death economic analyses as a side gig in graduate school, I brought an unusual personal perspective to the movie. Michael Keaton, Stanley Tucci (who’s in more movies: Tucci or Samuel L. Jackson?) and the rest of the cast was terrific.

Next up was Greta Gerwig’s Little Women. I am not big on period chick flicks so it’s no surprise that this one wasn’t really my cup of tea but the acting, set design, and direction were top notch. It has an all-star team of young actors (including Saoirse Ronan, Timothee Chalamet, and Florence Pugh) and July Johnson, er, Chris Cooper that is (who I’ll watch in anything). So don’t let my meh reaction put you off.

A few weeks ago I read The Vanishing Half, a best seller about two black sisters whose lives diverge when one decides to pass as white. The movie Passing explores similar themes and received decent reviews. I found it to be a disappointment. For the movie to work, you have to be willing to accept that one character passes as white. I never bought this for a second. It seemed cheaply made too. Thud.

Get Back, the Peter Jackson documentary about the Beatles is a technical tour de force. The man can do miracles. His World War I documentary They Shall Not Grow Old is amazing. He restored 90-year old documentary film. colorized it, added sound including voices (in various appropriate British dialects) synced to the images, and other magic tricks. Being a big time Beatle fan, I couldn’t wait to see what he could do with their film and audio archive from the 1969 Let It Be project. Get Back is every bit as technically amazing as Jackson’s other work. His team “de-mixed” monaural audio to extract conversations and re-produce musical rehearsals with impressive aural clarity. The film is visually crystal clear too. I wish Jackson had done brief film about how he pulled all this off as he did with his WWI film. The tone of Get Back is nowhere near as dark in tone as the old Let It Be film. The Beatles decided to write and record an album live, with no overdubs, on a three-week, self-imposed deadline. What could go wrong? Ultimately, they bring in Billy Preston on keyboards to get around their ban against overdubbing and his joy infects the band. As a five-piece, the band gels instantly. All the while, it’s obvious that this is the end of the line for the group. At about eight hours Get Back is quite an endurance contest for the viewer. If you watch it, break it down into 60- or 90-minute viewings.

Reading

I only managed to read two books. Release by Patrick Ness is a young adult novel about a sexually active, gay teenage boy, the son of Evangelical parents, going through various traumas over the course of a single day. There’s a side story about the spirit of a recently murdered girl. Neither story line worked for me.

A much better book is Amor Towles’ The Lincoln Highway, a novel about the misadventures of teenagers on a road trip to better lives in the mid-1950s. With so many plot twists and calamities, I was impressed that Towles held it all together. Loved it from beginning to end.

Family

My daughter came down from Connecticut for Thanksgiving. She was happy to get away from the grind of her first semester in law school. We visited with my son in Thailand via Facetime. I vaguely remember when my brother Joe called us from Paris in the early 1970s. That was exciting. Facetiming from Thailand seems oddly so routine.

On to December. I have a 46-mile ride on tap for tomorrow.

One of the nice things about living in the DC area is that the weather during the first half of autumn is pretty darn good for bicycling. I took advantage by riding 29 out of 31 days for 970 miles. My longest day was the Great Pumpkin Ride, which worked out to 68 miles on my bike computer. It was harder than I recall and it took me a couple of days to recover.

I reached 63,000 miles on the refurbished Mule. It now has a new bike computer and a front brake that doesn’t habitually stick to the rim. Thanks Daniel and Beth at Bikes at Vienna for the wrenchpertise. The Mule will get some much needed rest for the next few weeks as I switch over to my Cross Check which has been in dry dock since it hit 21,000 miles a couple of months ago.

I rode Big Nellie, my long wheel base recumbent. over 400 miles this month. That’s pretty unusual. I doubt it’ll see much more outdoors activity because it’s rearward weight distribution makes it rather crash prone on wet leaves. Then again, at some point in December Big Nellie will take up residence in the basement where it will become my reading platform.

My goal for 2021 is one last 10,000 mile year. I’m on track. I finished October at 8,718 miles. I think I can do 1,282 in 61 days.

In non-biking activities I watched three movies: Black Widow, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and No Time to Die. After reading several positive reviews about Black Widow, I was disappointed. It just didn’t float my boat. Shang-Chi was much better, particularly before the obligatory CGI pornfest in the last 45 minutes. I was unfamiliar with Awkwafina but I liked her performance in the first half of the movie when the characters are developed. No Time to Die was a pretty classic Bond film, better than most Bond movies. The references to the much derided On Her Majesty’s Secret Service were welcome. (I am one of the few people who think IHMSS is one of the best bond films.) I expected Daniel Craig and the actors in recurring roles to be good (and they were) but I was pleasantly surprised by Rami Malek and Ana de Armas who both owned their scenes with Craig. And while I’m at it, Geoffrey Wright is my favorite Felix Leiter.

My other passive entertainment was watching the baseball playoffs. All the displaced Nationals (other than Dusty Baker) were vanquished in the first two rounds which left me with no strong interest in the World Series. Still, the thought of no baseball for five months means I’ll watch the Braves vs the Astros anyway.

I managed to squeeze in two books this month. The first was The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman. This a fun read, a bit of Nick Hornby meets Agatha Christie. The second book was Beautiful World Where Are You, the third novel by Irish author Sally Rooney. I found it disappointing, lurching between the main plot and emails between the two main characters. The emails struck me as a lazy writing trick through which Rooney could make personal remarks about the writing life and the crummy state of the world. Her first two books were much better. She also seems obsessed with writing sex scenes. She’s a talented writer but by the fourth sex scene I wanted to have a cig and go to bed.