Tag: jigsaw puzzle

Leaping into a New Year – January 2024

Riding

The month started out a bit slow and stayed that way. I think I ate more cookies than miles. By the end of the month, I found hills to be a bit more challenging. Ugh.

I rode 634.5 miles for the month. This was my lowest mileage month in two years. I did 90 miles on Little Nellie, 307.5 miles on The Tank (my CrossCheck), and 237 miles indoors on Big Nellie. (I convert time to miles based on 10.5 miles per hour.) The Mule took the month off.

My long ride of the month was only 35.5 miles and this was split up into three rides. I rode 30-miles round trip to Friday Coffee Club with a detour to a hardware store on the way home. I followed that up with 5.5 miles on two short rides running errands to the office supply store and a different hardware store.

I ran a ton of errands by bike this month. The errands help me get motivated to ride outdoors on cold days. I have noticed that the daylight is lasting much longer now. I did lose about a week of outdoor riding because of two light, but messy snow events.

My indoor riding has helped me get some reading done (see below). I am currently halfway through David Copperfield which is turning out to be not quite the slog I had anticipated.

Watching

The Big Dig – I began listening to this nine-hour podcast from WGBH News last month. It tells the story of the biggest urban highway project in the country in which Boston’s infamous elevated Central Artery was buried and a new tunnel to Logan Airport was built. I learned only after listening to seven episodes that a video version is available on WGBH’s YouTube page. If you are into transportation, construction, infrastructure, urban planning, and such, you really should listen to this. The entire ordeal reminded me of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge and Panama Canal as described in books by David McCullough.

Loki Season 2 – Oddly well acted mess of CGI and multidimensional nonsense. There’s this sacred timeline and it’s spawning branches but the time loom can’t control them so the time lines will break and everyone who lives on them will die. Or something like that. YMMV.

Echo – Another mediocre Marvel miniseries centered on Maya, a Choctaw, deaf, amputee, who is a badass fighter, of course. Promos make it look as though Daredevil has a big role in this but he’s in it for all of a minute. Hawkeye, played by Jeremy Renner, is in it for a few seconds.

Armaggedon – A Netflix Ricky Gervais stand up movie. Crude. Funny in parts.

The Enemy Below – Robert Mitchum, U. S. warship captain, faces off with Curt Jurgens, U-boat captain, in WWII. I saw it as a kid and loved it. Star Trek ripped it off. Das Boot did it 1,000 times better. Still entertaining though.

Barbie – An absolutely fantastic opening sequence but otherwise meh. I am a big Greta Gerwig fan but let’s just say I wasn’t the target audience for this one.

Two NFL “Championship” games – I watched the Super Bowl semifinals so that I may look somewhat knowledgeable at our friends’ annual Super Bowl get together on the 12th. I need to bone up on my Taylor Swift songs though.

Reading

Why We Love Baseball by Joe Posnanski. What better way to spend the time before spring training than reading 350 pages of stories about baseball. IYKYK. There all all kinds of oddball anecdotes in this book but sadly it leaves out my two favorites from the Washington Nationals. Juan Soto hit his first home run five days before he was called up officially to the majors. Weirder still was how Michael Morse hit a grand slam without a bat in his hands. As Joe Garagiola said, “Baseball is a funny game.”

Prequel by Rachel Maddow. Americans, acting as agents of Hitler’s regime, carried out a long campaign to keep the US out of WWII and, even, to try to violently overthrow the US government. Sound familiar? If you listened to Maddow’s podcast Ultra you pretty much know this story. This book fleshes out many of the details that could not fit into Ultra. Among other things, the plotters used the free mailing privileges of a number of sitting Congress people to distribute Nazi propaganda. Suffice it to say, the connections to recent events is obvious.

Blood Memory by David Duncan and Ken Burns. The companion book to Burns’s American Buffalo documentary on PBS. Both the book and the film are excellent. The book and film describe the slaughter of tens of millions of buffaloes and the efforts to bring the buffalo back from the edge of extinction. Just seeing one of these creatures up close is an intense experience. I can barely imagine seeing them as far as the eye can see.

Eat, Poop, Die – How Animals Make Our World by Joe Roman. Birds do it. Bees do it. Whales do it. It turns out poop (and pee) is a wonderful thing.

Medical

Lumbar Spinal Stenosis – My lower back woes continue. They are getting worse incrementally in spite of me doing a physical therapy session nearly every day. I decided to take up walking for a couple of weeks. It’s uncomfortable and slow. Using a cane is a must. I managed to top out at 3 1/2 miles one day last week. I read today that Merrick Garland, the U. S. Attorney General, is having spinal decompression surgery to address his similar problem. It will be interesting to see which doctor he uses and how he makes out. Personally, I don’t know how much longer and I put up with this.

Neck woes – Somewhere back in December or November I screwed up my neck. It feels like I have whiplash. I think I brought this on with a combination of fiddling with the handlebar height on The Tank and doing side planks as part of my stenosis routine.

I get sharp pains that shoot up into my head when I turn my head. I can feel the tightness in my lateral neck muscles with my fingers. It even affects my bite. I was seriously considering going to my doctor for some advice or maybe an x-ray (to ROC – rule out cancer) just to be safe. On a whim I pulled Yoga for Cyclists off the shelf and looked up neck stretches.

Basically the stretches involve moving your head to the each side as well as the 45-degree forward position. My neck is so screwed up that I actually had to gently guide my head back into a neutral position between stretches. I am happy to report that after just one session of stretches my neck felt much better.

I learned a couple of things. Neck stretching should only be done to the sides and front. (This is contrary to the stretches in Richard Hittleman’s classic yoga book.) Rotating your head back makes things worse. I augmented the book’s stretches with corresponding head twists (assisted by a gentle guiding hand). I can now comfortably turn my head while riding which is kind of important when you’re trying to avoid big metal things.

And Finally…

Done

Re-setting

Cognitive Re-setting

Some people recently gave us jigsaw puzzles. Jigsaw puzzles are a torment. They lie there on a table, unfinished mocking our puny little brains. Yesterday I put the finishing touches to a 1000-piece puzzle that my wife, daughter, and I started over the weekend. Something happened, more than once, during the solving that is intriguing to me.

Late one Saturday evening when I was in college, I was grinding away at some calculus homework. I liked math in school because I regarded it as solving puzzles. This particular day I was making good progress when I hit a wall. I looked at a problem had simply could not figure out how to solve it. After a half hour of frustration I quit. That night I went out and partied. The next day I woke up with a hangover, rolled out of bed, and looked at the calculus problem laid out on my desk. The solution came to me instantly. I sat down and knocked off the rest of the problem set without the slightest difficulty. Somehow, over the course of the previous 15 or 16 hours my brain had re-set.

Over the years I have become a daily crossword puzzle solver. The same re-setting process happens all the time. I’ll get to a point in the solving when noting seems to come to mind, or worse, I know the answer but can’t retrieve it from my brain. (I think this is called presque vu.) If I put the puzzle down, and come back to it an hour later, the answer, more often than not, pops into my head.

The same thing happened when solving the jigsaw puzzle. On Sunday night I hit a wall. I couldn’t fit one more piece. On Monday, the pieces started falling onto place. Then I got stuck again with 75 pieces to go. Off to bed. The next day, all the pieces seemed to fall into place, literally and figuratively. (Oddly, since I was making a picture, literally and figuratively mean pretty much the same thing.)

Cinque Terre jigsaw puzzle complete. (One piece is missing but I found it on the floor after taking this picture.)

Is there some neurological explanation for this sort of re-setting?

Infrastructure Re-setting

Whenever I see pictures of bicycling infrastructure in The Netherlands I get envious. They build beautiful bridges and inter-city highways for bikes there. We have some decent trails in the DC area. In fact, I can pick up a trail near my home and ride with only minor on-road interruption to the eastern front of the Blue Ridge Mountains all on paved trails. Most of the route is along the Washington and Old Dominion Regional Trail, a very popular resource in these parts. The trail is along an old railroad right of way that has frequent, at-grade street crossings. One of the more dangerous at-grade crossings is at U.S. 29 near the Arlington/Falls Church border. This also happens to be one of the busier crossings on the trail. A few days ago, a new bridge was built over the crossing. They did this one right. Instead of doing things on the cheap, the designers built us one splendid looking bridge. In addition to looking fab, it has a concrete surface, attractive side barriers, and lighting. And its WIDE.

The Mule approves of the new W&OD Trail bridge.

Re-setting Winter

Winter in the northern hemisphere runs from December 21 to March 21. Meteorological winter in DC runs from December 1 to the end of February. As far as weather people are concerned, we’re in spring now. Last week we had a string of days with temperatures in the 70s F bookended by a couple of 60-degree days. Freed of my cumbersome winter riding gear, I gleefully rode 228 miles. Then reality hit and temperatures dropped back into the 40s and 50s. A month ago these temperatures wouldn’t have bothered me at all; I’d just put on layers and go for a ride. Now, having had a taste of the good life, I have retreated to the basement.

Even the neighborhood Bernie is having a hard time re-setting to winter. Her put one some earmuffs.

Bernie making the best of a false start at Spring. Pink is his favorite color.

Twice to the end

A Ride with Heather and Daniel

My friend Heather sent me an email the other day asking if I’d like to do a ride on the Mount Vernon Trail to take advantage of the nice weather and her furlough. And so I found myself riding my Surly Cross Check up to DC to meet her at the Capital Crescent Trail beneath Key Bridge in Georgetown.

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Heather brought her friend Daniel, an ultramarathoner and rider of a 29er (a mountain bike with big wheels and front suspension). Heather rode her aluminium Specialized Sequoia which bears absolutely no resemblance to the Mule, my 1991 steel Specialized Sequoia. (Specialized recycles it’s bike names, apparently.)

We began by walking up stairs to get from the underside of Key Bridge to the roadway atop it. Across the Potomac we rode. I stopped before turning onto the Mount Vernon Trail to point out the Intersection of Doom, the bicycle counter, and the glass and steel ick that is today’s Rosslyn.

Down we rode to the trail and across Trollheim, the sketchy boardwalk under the TR Bridge. We came to the staging area of the Memorial Bridge reconstruction project and were delayed by a tractor trailer backing its load onto a barge in the river.

Down by the airport we stopped to admire the planes landing at National Airport. I broke the news to a dismounting cyclist that the porta potties were padlocked shut thanks to the government shutdown. I explained that in order to keep rapists and drug dealers out of the country park users must pee our pants. The cyclist who was by now doing the pee pee dance hit me with a right cross.

On we rode to Old Town were we stopped to admire the hulk of the decommissioned coal fired power plant.

Further south I explained how the fake arches of the Woodrow Wilson bridge were put together. Then it was down the trail past Porto Vechio were an SUV driver failed to stop at the red light and nearly hit me as she turned right  onto the Parkway. Having been hit here once before under nearly identical circumstances at this intersection, I hit my brakes and STOP!! I do wish Alexandria would change this to a no right on red intersection.

As we rode south I pointed out a bald eagle perched in a tree across the road. We made our way through Belle Haven Park then along the edge of Dyke Marsh where I pointed out the nests on the Haul Road and along the trail just south of Tulane Drive.

The gradual climb up to the stone bridge took us by another nest, this one near Morningside Drive.

We continued on the trail with Daniel taking the lead. Despite having sore feet and knobby tires he set a healthy pace. We came to the nasty switchback hill south of Waynewood Boulevard and everyone slowed to wobble a bit.

The ride to Mount Vernon was pretty and uneventful. We are all pretty tired once we reached the top of the hill at the end of the trail. Heather’s husband Rulon appeared as we were about to lock up our bikes. Heather treated us to lunch at the food court.

After lunch I led the descent back toward DC. As we passed Fort Hunt Park I pointed out the big eagle nest across the Parkway. When we got to the stone bridge, I bid Heather and Daniel good bye and headed for home. I finished with 41 1/2 miles on my odometer, my longest ride since Veterans Day.

The Puzzle from Hell

This year we decided to go low key for Christmas. No tree. No presents (we all cheated a bit). Just a few decorations, a shitload of junk food, some board games, and, a 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle. The puzzle has been on our dining room table for over a week. I swear it was taunting us in our sleep. Looking at it day after day made me see jigsaw pieces as I rode my bike around.

Jigsaw puzzles make you appreciate how painters take what we see and how our brains translate that vision and distill it into bits of paint. That white dot in the puzzle piece is a headlight. The splash of white on the leaf is the reflection of a street light. The black line is the shadow beneath a piece of trim on a building.

Today I finished the painting. The push to the finish involved re-placing a couple of dozen pieces that had been improperly positioned. I laid 999 pieces together and realized the last piece, on the upper left side of the puzzle, didn’t fit! After 10 minutes of puzzle inspection I found a piece of the right side that was misplaced, switched them, and voila! Done.

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I am doing the puzzle in the middle of the day because I woke up with a head cold. Reason enough to lay about in sweatshirt and sweatpants and eat some chicken soup.

Now to bed….