Category: #bikedc

The Great Connecticut Road Trip

My daughter is enrolled in the law school at the University of Connecticut for the fall semester. The school in located in Hartford which is allegedly a six hour drive from our house. Last Thursday we drove there to scope out the school and the nearby rental properties.

The easiest way to get there is to get on I-95 for 300 or so miles to New Haven then drive 50 miles to Hartford on I-91. I hate I-95 in Maryland so we used US 50 and US 301 through the Eastern Shore of Maryland and Delaware. This alternative route is much prettier, has less traffic, and avoids two tolls. Or so we thought. As we crossed into Delaware we encountered a brand new Hwy 301. Unlike the old highway it was limited access, had a 65-mile-per-hour speed limit, and had very little traffic. It also had a brand new $4 toll. Oh well.

We rejoined 95 past the Delaware toll plaza and crawled through concrete spaghetti to the Delaware Memorial Bridge and into New Jersey. We then took the Turnpike toward New York City. Just outside of Woodbridge NJ we took a break at a rest stop. Wanting to avoid 95 through much of New York and lower Connecticut, I turned on the Google and submitted to its routing wisdom. Strangely the Google routed us off the Turnpike, over the Gowanus Bridge, then up US 1 and 9. Not really knowing why we were routed in such an odd direction we slavishly followed the instructions.

After an hour of stressful Jersey urban traffic the Google put us back on 95 and we crossed the George Washington Bridge. After a half hour of crawling the Google sent us up through Westchester County and eventually across Connecticut on I 84. All the while we were stuck in traffic jams. After nine stressful and perplexing hours we made it to Hartford.

I later discovered that my Google Maps app was set to “No Tolls”. This explains the bizarre routing.

After checking in to our hotel we needed some thing relaxing to do. As luck would have it, our hotel was a short walk from Dunkin Donuts Stadium, home of the Hartford Yard Goats AA minor league baseball team. It was a beautiful park and the seats were cheap. We sat behind home plate for $17 per person. The game was a blowout, 11-1 in favor of the visiting Somerset Patriots. The beer selection was decent and the junk food hit the spot.

Our appreciation for major league baseball players was greatly increased by our AA outing. Players in the big leagues make difficult plays look routine. We did see one fielding play, the final out, that was exceptional though. The Patriots second baseman caught a line drive to his left side with a deft sideways leap.

The next day we drove to the UConn Law campus in Hartford’s West End neighborhood. The five buildings all were done in collegiate gothic style. They, and the absolutely perfect grounds, made for a gorgeous campus. Easily in the top ten percent of campuses I have seen (and I’ve seen over 50).

After walking around a bit (all the buildings were closed), we started driving around looking at neighborhoods and rental buildings. There are some mighty nice homes nearby. Curiously, the nice places gave way to once-nice homes that had been neglected seemingly at random from one block to the next. The main commercial road nearest campus seemed to cater to the poor and inebriated. After driving around aimlessly, we took a tour of one apartment building. It was priced right but the neighborhood was sketchy.

We drove around some more and checked out West Hartford, the adjacent suburb to the west. This was much less gritty and reminded me of Bethesda, Maryland.

After a dinner at a downtown Italian restaurant, we crashed at the hotel.

Saturday we toured two more apartments. One was in a cluster of old buildings near campus. The other was a brand new place in West Hartford. For about $400 per month you get seriously nicer housing with a five to ten minute car commute.

It was too early to sign a lease but we at least accomplished getting the lay of the land and the housing market. Afterwards we headed to Guilford Connecticut near Long Island Sound. We had lunch in a deli on the town green. Ah New England! After lunch we drove to Jacobs Beach a few miles away. The beach is relatively small but uncrowded. A nice place to chill after so much driving.

We headed back to Hartford on back roads. It was an hour of immersion in postcard New England. I had forgotten how beautiful this part of the country is. It must be amazing in the fall.

Back in Hartford we ate dinner al fresco at a downtown Mexican restaurant. The food was quite good. The margaritas were too.

The next morning we headed back to DC. This time we re-set the Google to “Tolls” and had a much shorter trip. I-91 to a cars only highway that became the Merritt Parkway. Just before New York we stopped to partake in New England communion at the Dunks at a rest stop.

The Google routed us to the GW Bridge where we encountered the usual traffic snarl. After a 20 minute delay we were back on 95 speed southward. Occasional delays notwithstanding we made good time to Delaware. The temperature was in the 90s so we decided to avoid the beach traffic on 301 and took I 95 instead. One massive back up and 100 mind numbing mile later we arrived at home.

In case you are wondering, a yard goat is the slang term for the engine used to push rail cars around in a rail yard. Even though my grandfather was an engineer and my father and uncles worked a bit in the yards, I had to look it up.

The Mulch Gymnasium

My yard looked like hell. Not surprising considering I have spent the last four years riding a bike 40,000 miles. So with cool weather and, until recently, uncertainty about doing anything involving humans, I decided to spruce things up a bit.

My first project involved repainting a metal stoop. Next up was reworking some landscaping timbers that had been undermined by a massive tree root. After much deliberation, I raised the timbers to avoid cutting the root. The tree owes me one.

A tree company came and took down some trees and ground the stumps. Stump grinding results in a big pile of useless mulch mixed with dirt. I did my best to separate the shredded wood from the dirt and redistributed the shredded wood as mulch in the perimeter garden in the back yard. This project also involved digging up and chopping (of course) some roots from previous tree work. If you take roots out of the soil there is nothing to hold the dirt in place and it becomes a quagmire.

The timbers that I worked on were part of series of six steps that cascade through a garden on the side of the house. The steps are filled with pine nugget mulch. The mulch hadn’t been changed in a few years so I dug it out and replaced it with fresh mulch. As with the stump mulch, I distributed the old mulch in the perimeter garden.

The perimeter garden had once been separated from the lawn by brick pavers. These had been absorbed by the lawn years ago allowing the garden to be overrun with grass and weeds. I dug up about four dozen pavers and manually edged the garden. This created some left over dirt which I put in the stump holes and the tree root quagmire. I later augmented this fill dirt with several 40-pound bags of topsoil.

The final step was to spread dozens of bags of mini pine nuggets on the perimeter garden. On part of the garden I simply buried the invasive turf grass and weeds. On the rest I scraped all the undesired vegetation out of the garden. Ill be interesting to see if the extra work was worthwhile. Finally, I spread the mulch.

All this work took me about a month. At the start of the project I learned that my local hardware store stopped delivering mulch so I had to make multiple runs to the big box hardware store. Seeing as how my car’s trunk holds about eight bags of mulch, this process added several hours. I also have back issues so I made sure not to work more than 2 1/2 hours per day. Finally, rain caused me to skip entire days. I can’t complain because the weather was cool.

The end result looks pretty decent.

Who needs a gym, anyway?

It would suck to be a cow in Cuba

Today’s Washington Post had a story about a large Chinese rocket booster that is expected to fall to earth in the coming days. The story, written by Christian Davenport and Matthew Cappucci, explains that the odds of space debris hitting people are very low. The earth is 70 percent water. And most of the land is sparsely occupied. There has never been a reported incident of a person being hit by falling space debris.

The story does point out that “a cow in Cuba did lose its life in 1961.”

Dang.

Scrape, Ride, Paint, Ride, Level, Ride, Dig, Ride, Watch, Read, Ride, Rest

April was a mixed bag of work around the house and riding. Most days I spent a couple of hours on a project in the morning followed by an afternoon jaunt on my bike.

Projects

I finished two projects. One involved re-painting a steel stoop. It was in rough shape seeing as how the last time I painted it W was president. (Or was it Clinton?) Most of the work was prep. Scraping and grinding and sanding for hours on end. I thought it would go on forever. The actual priming and painting took only an hour or so each. The second project involved fixing some landscape timbers that had been undercut by a giant surface root from a volunteer silver maple. The timbers see saw if you stepped on them. I had the option of cutting the root or working around it. I ended up leaving the root alone and raising the timbers using some bricks I had lying around. It looks okay but will probably only last a year. This took only a few hours. mostly excavating and cogitating.

While this was going on, we had a tree company come and take down two trees, a diseased white pine and another silver maple. The tree crew also removed a couple of Russian olive bushes that were distressed. (They were growing sideways.) The tree folks ground the stumps leaving me the task of cleaning up the aftermath. This involves a great deal of digging and raking and even some root chopping. The soil is mostly clay so this turns out (I am still working on it) to be exhausting work, especially in the recent 80+ degree heat.

I began the month riding The Mule then switched to the Cross Check. After a week on that bike, I’ve moved back to Big Nellie, freed from her basement dungeon. It took a few rides to get my bent legs back but now I’m having a good time banging out one 30-mile day after another.

Miles

I managed to ride 862 miles, or just a tad under 29 miles per day. Last year I only did 772 miles in April so I feel like I’m improving a bit. Year to date I’ve ridden 2,891 miles compared to last year’s 2,906 (which included a leap day). Even though I am 397 miles off the pace for 10,000 miles I am well within reach of another 10,000 mile year, because the big mileage months lie ahead.

The Mule hit 61,000 miles during the month. That’s pretty good for a bike I was going to get rid of 21 years ago. Glad I kept it.

Watching

We watched The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. I thought it was kinda meh. I did like Erin Kellyman as the chief baddie. We also watched Concrete Cowboy, a strange movie about horse riding in a poor black neighborhood in Philadelphia. Basically, we’ll watch anything with Idris Elba in it. This one literally put me to sleep though.

My Octopus Teacher won the Academy Award for documentary feature. Entertaining. Octopuses are pretty strange critters.

I also watched nearly all of the Washington Nationals games. I am still not comfortable with going to a game in person. The mostly cool weather only reinforces my reluctance. Klarence, who had yet to be vaccinated, went to one game and said it felt creepy being there with a socially distanced crowd. (She had her first shot a few days after.)

Speaking of shots, I received both my Pfizer shots in March and became fully immune on April 1. I am old enough to have had vaccines for smallpox, polio (one shot and one sugar cube, if I am not mistaken), measles, mumps, shingles, pneumonia, tetanus, and influenza. If vaccines were dangerous, I’d have exploded years ago. Go for the jab, dear readers!

Reading

I only read two books this month. One was a 730-page biography of Sam Phillips by Peter Guralnick. It was overlong and repetitive, not nearly as good as the author’s Elvis and Sam Cooke bios. Still Phillips was quite a force in modern music as he was the first person to record Sly Stone, Elvis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Charlie Rich. He also recorded Bill Justis playing the song Raunchy which is a guitar instrumental. John Lennon was so impressed with 14-year-old George Harrison’s version of Raunchy (played on the upper deck of a bus in Liverpool) that he brought him into the Quarrymen. Phillips’s recording techniques were crude but innovative. The rest of his life involved radio stations and such and wasn’t very interesting.

The other book was The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks. It’s a series of case studies of neurological patients with truly strange behaviors. I read this when it came out 35 ears ago and loved it. This time around it didn’t hold my attention.

Stenosis Update

One would think that with all the digging and raking I’ve been doing that my back would be deteriorating by the day. Not so. My stenosis pain has been mostly in check. I do have to take stretching breaks during my digging/raking work but I have to say that I am rather shocked that I’ve made it this far without screaming pain in my back and legs. (The stretching I do is a simple runners stretch involving leaning against a wall and stretching my calves, hamstrings, and glutes. I think it also decompresses my discs.) I took the last day of the month off and went for a two-mile walk. After a quarter mile, my lower back started to ache a bit but the pain didn’t build and I managed to complete the walk without much difficulty.

Looking Ahead

May holds more of the same. Summer bike touring is on hold until I see how the pandemic plays out. Also, my daughter is moving to law school in early August so I need to be home to help with that. After that, maybe a week-long tour of sorts in August followed by a month-long tour this fall. (New Orleans seems like an interesting destination.)

A Lot Can Happen in 61 Miles

Today was my first ride over 60 miles since the last week of September. It was also my 19th day in a row of riding and 11 days in a row with over 30 miles. My weapon of choice was Big Nellie, my long wheelbase recumbent.

My travels took me about 30 miles northwest to Potomac Village, Maryland. Along the way I passed Old Town Alexandria, a decommissioned power plant, National Airport, the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials, the Kennedy Center, the Georgetown waterfront, historic Glen Echo Park, and a series of neighborhoods that grew posher by the mile. So many gorgeous houses. So much stellar landscaping. A suburban aspirant’s wet dream.

Along the way on the Capital Crescent Trail I spotted a sure sign of spring in DC. A dozen or more cormorants were perched in leafless trees overhanging the Potomac River. They wait there to pick off bass that are swimming upstream to spawn.

For a couple of miles I rode the rolling hills past the famous golf course of Congressional Country Club. This course has hosted four grand slam events since 1964. I haven’t played golf since the Nixon administration but I know an elite course when I see one. Dang.

At Potomac Village I turned back toward the river on Falls Road. After a ten minute break to devour a peanut buttered bagel, I rode the winding, wooded downhill on MacArthur Boulevard, north out of Great Falls Park. On a recumbent this is pure street luge.

Lunch stop

I re-traced my route back to Georgetown. Along the Capital Crescent Trail I was startled by a beefy looking hawk that swooped down in front of me and cruised about 15 feet above the path until it flapped its wings and climbed up through the trees and back toward the river.

All day I was seeing vultures surfing the winds, turning long graceful arcs as they searched for carrion to feed on. Vultures are so beautiful in flight and so ugly up close. At one point I spotted an enormous vulture doing its acrobatics along the river bank near the power plant. It was being shadowed by a much smaller vulture, a young one learning the tricks of the trade.

One advantage of riding a recumbent is the heads up riding position. You see so much more than when riding a conventional bike. Near Dyke Marsh I searched the trees for the bald eagle nest near Belle View Boulevard. Before I saw the nest, I saw a huge bald eagle perched high in a tree. It was standing guard over the massive nest immediately below it in a crotch in the tree. Pity the squirrel that gets too close to that nest.

My legs were pretty well spent when I arrived at home. 61 miles in the books.

When I went in the house and walked downstairs my left knee gave me a stabbing pain and buckled. Oops.

Maybe I should take a day off.

Nah.

Spring Cleaning

Colors

It’s been an odd couple of days around here. Every day a new plant seems to burst into color. Crocuses, forsythia, daffodils. Cherry trees. Redbud trees. These have mostly come and gone but now we are in tulipalooza. I grew up in Ak=lbany NY, a former Dutch settlement. Every year there was a tulip festival. It was a big deal. Or so I am told. I never once attended. Around DC you can’t help but attend. Tulips are everywhere. The Pentagon Reservation (they actually call it that) and the Arlington Memorial Bridge are two places with tulips on display. The front of our house, and countless other houses in suburbia, are another.

In time the tulips will shrivel and die back of course. Don’t despair; azaleas are about to go nuts! We have three azalea bushes that are ready to burst into color any day. Two other azalea bushes planted last year did not survive the winter. My theory of the case is that they were planted too far under the eave of the house and didn’t get enough moisture. If you want to get your azaleas on, there are two pretty cool places in the DC area. One is Bluemont Park in Arlington. It’s right off the W&OD and Custis Trails. The other place is the National Arboretum in Northeast DC. It’s a bit tricky to get to by bike but once inside the biking is grand.

My ungodly looking lilac bushes (they are more like skeletons) are starting to leaf out. Soon their aromatic blue blossoms will emerge, as long as my attempts to cut the bushes back last fall didn’t do them in. I love the smell of lilacs. They remind me of my grade school. I remember going out the door and getting hit with a wave of that glorious scent. Alas, the DC are a is too far south for serious lilac bloomage.

Taxes

Somehow, someway I did several things today that worked out right. The other day I e-paid my estimated taxes. I screwed up the Virginia filing and called the tax office in Richmond this morning to clear things up. After waiting less than five minutes, I talked to an honest-to-god human who told me that I would be fined $500 for my error.

Just kidding.

She was very helpful. She told me my error didn’t stop affect the payment and everything should be okay.

Changing

The other day I brought Big Nellie out of the basement – as sure a sign of spring as you’ll ever see. What you can’t see from this photo is the bald rear tire. It turns out that riding hundreds of miles with the rear tire contacting a resistance unit is not the best thing in the world for tread life.

I found an old Schwable Marathon Plus tire and decided to use it as a replacement. This tire probably has over 5,000 miles on it but you’d never know it. Marathon Plus tires are practically indestructible. And, better yet, they rarely get flats. This is especially good news because installing a Marathon Plus tire is a total pain. I have lost quite a lot of skin on my fingers getting one of these beasts mounted. To make matters worse changing the rear tire on a long wheel base recumbent is like wrestling a dolphin. The bike has a very unbalanced weight distribution. Trying to keep it in one place while working on it can be next to impossible.

So I decided to use my repair stand.

It took me three attempts to get the bike on the stand. The first try worked but I placed it on the stand with the chain facing the lever that clamps the bike to the stand. Not gonna work. So, I took the bike off the stand and turned it around. Picking the bike up was significantly harder because I am right handed. With the bike oriented in this direction my weaker left hand had to pick up the heavier rear end of the bike. I managed to get it into the stand but somehow in the process of applying the clamp the dolphin came loose. Eek. I fed the bike a fish (just kidding again) and tried again. This time the bike stayed on the stand and I closed the clamp. Now I could tilt the bike so the front tire was on the ground and the rear tire up in the air right at the ideal height for swapping out the tire.

The old tire came off with only minor assistance of a set of tire irons. Now came the hard part. I started working the Marathon Plus onto the wheel. I worked my way around the wheel, pushing the tire bead over the rim wall. After only one attempt, the bead popped over the top of the rim. Then I turned the tire around to work on the other side. Somehow, some way I had managed to install that side too. Do you believe in miracles? I flipped the tire around to make sure I wasn’t imagining things. In another few minutes the wheel was back on the bike and I was good to go.

Practice

I have participated in the Chasing Mailboxes Errandonnee every year except last year when it was cancelled because of the pandemic. (I suppose it could have been held but it would have had to be renamed the Infectionnee, or something like that.) The Errandonnee is a friendly challenge to do errands on your bike (or by foot or scooter or some means other than an gasmobile). Errandonneuring is not for the faint of heart. It takes determination and focus.

This year’s Errandonnee starts April 15. I suppose you could just jump right in to the event. With all the good weather we’ve been having, well intentioned errandonneurs often end up with errands undone. You just ride right past the store and end up doing a tour of tulips. There is only one way to avoid a failed Errandonnee.

Practice.

Yes, I know Paul Hornung and Allen Iverson made fun of practice. Let the record be clear: neither Horning nor Iverson ever completed an Errandonnee.

Little Nellie and I would not make the same mistake. Today, I rode my trusty Bike Friday to Walmart to pick up my glasses at the Vision Center. We made use of the fabulous bike parking at the shopping cart return. Walmart ain’t exactly woke when it comes to Errandonneuring. We were not to be deterred and finished the errand in fine fashion.

Then I went for a ride to look at the tulips.

The Errandonnee is open to the public. That means you. You can achieve errandonneuring greatness.

The Mule Turns 30 and 61

It was 30 years ago that I gave up trying to commute on my Trek 1200 and bought a commuter bike. The Specialized Sequoia that I bought came with a generator lighting system that was wired through the metal fenders. The lights were lame (3 watts as I recall) and the generator contacted the tread of the tire and wore tires out.

Over time I replaced everything but the frame, fork, seat post, and rack. The bike was priced to move, at $300 off list because, back in those days, people shied away from heavy bikes. What I didn’t know was that this bike was the best selling touring bike in Europe.

It is an awesome touring bike. Stable. Comfortable. Dependable.

For a while I stopped riding it when I switched to Big Nellie, my recumbent bike. Nerve problems in my legs eventually drove me back to the bike I have come to call The Mule.

Today The Mule turned 61 as in 61,000 miles. Still going strong.

Getting Stooped

Anytime you ride 40,000 miles in four years, something has to go by the wayside. I have neglected my house and yard now for a long time and it shows. I have so many projects to do in the months ahead there is no point in making a list.

The first job on my backlog is to re-paint the metal stoop outside our kitchen. I last did this a couple of decades ago> I did a poor job and the paint never looked good. It’s been a rusty mess with lots of chipped paint for years.

Last week I spent three two-hour sessions washing and scraping and sanding and grinding away at the mess. I also fixed some rusty holes using some epoxy. I did the best I could before saying “no mas”.

Kitchen stoop paint project

Next up was priming. The weather here was absolutely perfect for bike riding but alas I was back at the stoop. It is a cruel coincidence that perfect riding weather is also perfect painting weather.

First, I taped off the area. Next I rode Little Nellie to the hardware store for primer, a mini-roller and a brush. The last time I painted the stoop I used a brush. It was a frustrating mess. This time I started to prime with a small roller and was shocked at how much better the roller worked than that old brush. The horizontal surfaces all have a texture to them supposedly to impeded slipping. Getting paint on all sides of the textured surface was impossible with a brush but it was super easy with the roller.

As I primed I could see cracks in the paint that I had missed during prep. I did what I could to fix these. No doubt I’ll be re-doing some of this later in the year.

Unfortunately, I ran out of primer so I jumped back on Little Nellie and returned to the hardware store. The upside to this misadventure was that I now knew how much paint to buy for the top coat. So I bought that too.

The rest of the priming took about 20 minutes.

Kitchen stoop paint project

Priming and painting are infinitely more rewarding than prep. I had spent about six or seven hours doing prep and felt like I had accomplished nothing. After an hour or so of priming I felt like I was cooking with gas.

Today was the last step, the top coat. Last time I used black gloss paint. It was slippery and didn’t adhere well at all. The hardware store paint guy said that black satin would be a better choice and would not be as slippery, so that’s what I used. It took no time at all to paint the stoop. The only problem was the fact that the daylight was such that I had trouble seeing where I had failed to completely cover the primer. So once I had painted the entire thing, I walked around and looked for spots where I could see primer peeking through the top coat. After 15 minutes of this I declared victory.

Done, but for the tape removal

All that’s left is to take off the painter’s tape.

In celebration The Mule and I went for a ride among the blossoms in Alexandria and Arlington. Cherry trees are fading. Red Buds are taking over. After that come lilacs and azaleas. Also, the deciduous trees are leafing. Soon the Mount Vernon Trail will be a tunnel of green again. This will obscure the three bald eagle nests between my house and Old Town Alexandria. Two of these nests are quite active. The third seems in need of a tenant.

My next project involved a big tree root. No chopping though. Stay tuned for all the excitement.

Well, I’m Glad That’s Over

March is done. Kaput. Over and done with. Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

Biking: I was a sloth this month. I attribute this to being sick and tired of cold weather. This meant that for seven days I rode Big Nellie in the basement for a total of 122 “miles”. (I assume 11.5 miles per hour and translate time into distance.) Another 19 days were spent riding 631 miles on The Mule, mostly going around in circles. I did manage to ride the Indian Head Rail Trail. The 27-mile round trip featured more bull frog croaks than spring blossoms. The Mule did my longest ride of 50 miles early in the month. I also used Little Nellie to run a short errand. Yesterday, I cracked 2.000 miles for the year while on my second cherry blossom fly by in DC. Total mileage for the month was a paltry 755. For the year I am at 2,028 miles, about 100 miles fewer than 2020.

May be an image of bicycle

Health: I think I ate well over 2,028 Doritos which explains why I ballooned to 223 pounds. I seriously need to do some long slow distance. A couple of 60-70 mile rides should get my metabolism back on track. On the up side, I received two Pfizer Covid-19 shots this month with minimal side effects. I attain full immunity tomorrow. Yeah, science. On the down side, three days after my second shot, one of my pre-molars died. I had a root canal last week. I go back to the endodontist to finish the repair. After that I’ll be visiting my regular dentist to fully seal off my tooth (probably with a crown).

Reading: I didn’t set the world on fire in the reading department either. I read The Searcher by Tana French, State of the Union: A Marriage in Ten Parts by Nick Hornby, and In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson. They were all entertaining but not likely to be re-read soon. The Hornby book is actually the script of a rather unusual 10-part TV series. Each chapter is a conversation between a husband and wife who meet in a pub across the street from the marriage counsellor. Chris O’Dowd and Rosamund Pike play the couple to perfection. The book is witty and ironic and clever. The actors take it to another level entirely. It can be streamed on Sundance in 10-minute episodes.

Viewing: We finished watching Wandavision and still have no idea what the hell that was all about. We also took in four other films via streaming services of course. Britt Marie Was Here is the film version of a novel of the same name by Fredrik Bachman. It’s faithful to the book which I liked a lot. After that we started prepping for the Oscars. We all liked Nomadland but it gave me flashbacks to the long, brutal days riding my bike tour across the barren landscapes of Utah and Nevada in 2019. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom didn’t float my boat. Mank was okay, but Gary Oldman who plays the lead is way too old for the part. We finished our Oscar prep (at least until next weekend) with Pieces of a Woman. Depressing and a bit predictable. My wife and I stumbled in Casablanca on TV and watched it again. They don’t make ’em like they used to.

Chores: It was my intention to do one adult thing every day during the pandemic. Suffice it to say this didn’t pan out. If you want something done, give it to a busy person, as the saying goes. Last week I began the first of many small jobs around the house. (There are an infinite number; you just have to decide when to stop. They’ll be plenty left over for your ancestors.) We have a metal stoop on the side of the house that I painted about 20 years ago. The paint failed a long time ago and the stoop is now rusted and ugly. So I am re-painting it. So far, I have spent about 4 or 5 hours scraping the old paint and rust off. The platform and steps of the stoop have a textured surface which means I can only scrape about one square inch at a time. It’s tedious. In another two or three hours I should move on to sanding, plugging holes, and washing. Then I get to paint. The best time to do this work is when the weather is perfect for riding. I should be done with the project by October.

I also helped my daughter move back home from her apartment. My wife and I managed to move a 30-year-old sofa out of her place to the trash room in her building. It weighed a ton and had to be twisted and turned to get it out of the apartment and into and out of the elevator. My 80-year-old back was not amused. It took me three days to get fully upright again.

Today we cut down two trees and a couple of large, overgrown Russian olive bush. Ok, we paid someone. The pine tree was diseased. I was a white pine, one of a stand of six or seven evergreen trees that are now all gone. The other tree was a silver maple. Like the pine it was over 30-years old. It was unattractive and messing up an oak tree next to it. When we moved in 30 odd years ago, we had four silver maples. Only one of the original cohort remains. My wife planted two volunteers, seedlings that sprouted in the yard. They are thriving. Live goes on.

May be an image of sky and tree

Baseball: I watched the only two spring training Washington Nationals games broadcast this year, last weekend. Yesterday the Washington Post had a special section on the upcoming baseball season. My picture was in this section. It’s been a while since I was in the Post. The previous time was an article about bike commuting. I’ve also been interviewed by local radio (my part was cut for time, on air, but I made the station’s online story) about long distance bike commuting. For work I’ve did a telephone interview that was broadcast live on local radio. It was a bit nerve wracking. I put a picture of the interviewer up on my monitor during the chat. It helped me stay focused. I also did an interview for AP radio and another on local TV in southwestern Missouri. My big shot at media stardom came when I was interviewed on tape for a segment on NPR’s Marketplace, They used about 10 seconds of the 20-minute interview and broadcast the story on the day after Christmas. Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close up.

Tomorrow is opening day. Dang.

Spring Sprung Yesterday

Today’s post is dedicated to all my friends who moved away from DC.

Yesterday marked the first day of spring in DC. Not the meteorological spring. Not the vernal equinox. The cherry blossom bloom.

The last couple of days, the National Park Service has banned cars from the Tidal Basin area. For those of you unfamiliar with DC, this is the odd man-made lake of sorts which is lined by cherry trees and three memorials (Jefferson. FDR, MLK). If you go at sunrise, this is the place to check out the blossoms on foot. If you go any other time, you’ll encounter crowds, although judging by today, much smaller crowds that usual.

Of course, the best way by far to see the cherry blossoms is by bike. I rode to DC and took the 14th Street Bridge which ends right at the Jefferson Memorial. Then I rode east on Ohio Drive along the Potomac River. At the intersection of Buckeye Drive there is a stand of early bloomers that are amazing. Buckeye Drive took me across East Potomac Park which is a short man-made peninsula in the Potomac. Buckeye dead ends into Ohio. I took a left and rode 3 miles down to Hains Point and back. The entire way was lined with trees nearly all of which were in full bloom. I was in a tunnel of cherry blossoms.

(L-R) Heading toward Hains Point. Heading back from the point. Just past the MLK Memorial.

After the 3-mile ride I was back at Buckeye Drive. I re-traced my route but instead of going to the Jefferson I continued upstream along the river to the turn off for the FDR and MLK memorials. The path along the edge of the basin was nearly full of people but the road that I was on 50 yards or so away was empty.

At Independence Avenue I took a right and rode with the big metal boxes. They were going about 10 miles per hour so I was very safe but on guard against drivers distracted by the blossoms. I followed Maine Avenue and rode clockwise around the basin past the Jefferson then back over the bridge.

Five miles. Five bazillion blossoms. Perfect.

Tomorrow I’m going back. If I feel spunky I may ride up to the Kenmore neighborhood in Bethesda. It is packed with cherry trees. And, unfortunately, cars.