Mr. Roethke’s Farm

I went to lunch on my own today so ended up writing a poem. For some reason last night I had this thought come into my head "Mr. Roethke's farm." It put an image in my head that was kind of sticky, so while I was waiting for my food I started jotting down some lines. This came pretty quickly and I kind of like it.

Theodore Roethke was a poet from Saginaw, Michigan, in case you don't know. Look him up—he was a wonderful poet. His father ran a greenhouse and there's a lot of natural imagery in his poetry as a result. He died the year I was born.

Mr. Roethke's Farm

The old greenhouse at the edge of the field
Stark and cold in the stillness of November.

Everything is flat, sharp.
Muted grays, browns, sterile
White and lifeless.
Blackbirds sit in trees but don't move,
Silent as dead leaves.

It's all a facade,
A brushed canvas.
Reach down in the cold earth.
Let the dirt sift through your fingers.

There beneath the surface
Of those lifeless winter beds
Bulbs sleep in their potential.
Waiting for spring--

To wake and set the world in motion.

JuJu: Good For A Hundred Miles!

Today I decided I had better get out there and see if I could ride a hundred miles these days. El Tour is coming up pretty quickly. To make the test as good a test as I could, I took my touring bike with a bunch of unnecessary stuff in the rear packs along with about an extra gallon of liquid. Yeah. It was heavy. I decided to follow a route that incorporated some big chunks of the El Tour route but that wouldn't take me too far east—just in case I keeled over and someone had to come out and scrape me off the road.

We live right off of the El Tour route so I started on that course. Twenty-two miles into the ride, wouldn't you know it, is Stephy's house! I just had to stop off to see Julian—what kind of grandfather would I be if I didn't? Plus, I knew if I got me some JuJu I'd be good to go. Of course, Stephanie had some delusion that I was sweaty and stinky and gross or some other such silliness. This wasn't the case, obviously, but she's hormonally challenged or something. Either way, she wouldn't let me hold my own grandson. It's almost grandparent abuse if you ask me. Still, I managed to sneak in a few touches and pats.

The good thing is it only takes a little JuJu to get you charged for the long haul. I'm pretty sure if it hadn't been for my Julian fix I'd have been D.O.A. mid-ride.

I decided to come up Swan so that I wasn't any further east than that. Holy crap was it windy! I don't know how windy it was but when I stopped off at Starbucks—there's a whole other rant coming on that one!—the tops of the palm trees were blowing sideways and the wind was coming directly south. I was heading north. Plus it was all uphill. Fortunately, I had my JuJu working for me!

Going up Swan wasn't nearly as bad as I expected it to be. I've never ridden up it before, only down. Coming down it certainly seems steep. However, it has a number of slight "flats" going up that break up the monotony of the climb. Plus, I was expecting a steep little climb right at the end, but that was actually a slight descent. Excellent! I was good and tired by now and the mostly downhill course of Sunrise was a welcome relief. Right up until Oracle that is. Oracle was tough. By this time the wind was steady and stiff. Almost the whole way north I was crawling somewhere between six and eight miles per hour. Sure there were a few short faster runs, but not many. The best of them is a descent I routinely hit about 35 mph on; today I topped out at 18!

Rancho Vistoso was my math stop. I knew I would have to keep going out Oracle in order to make my century, but I wasn't sure how far. Figuring the El Tour route from Rancho Vistoso to the turn off to my house to be just shy of eight miles, I still needed eighteen miles to make a hundred. That meant an extra nine miles out, which, luck would have it, was almost exactly the distance to Florence Junction. (It turned out to be a little beyond it, but not too much.) Well, wouldn't you know it. Just before I got to Saddlebrooke my bike felt a little bouncy. Weird. I looked down and, sure enough, I had a flat. I had been dreading flats on the touring bike, especially on the rear (and, of course, you know that's where the flat was). The rear end with packs, even lightly loaded packs, is a bear to lift up and maneuver. And, I soon found out that having a fender doesn't help much either! I pulled my frame pump off and attached it to the tire, hoping to pump it up on the off chance it would hold air long enough to get me home. Instead, the pump fell apart! There on the ground were two plastic pieces, a broken circular piece, and the spring. What was I supposed to do now? I chose to stand there and look stupid for a bit. Then I rummaged through all of my packed materials to see if I had placed my CO2 pump in there. I've never used it but know I just did something with it. Maybe it's on the other bike, but it is definitely not on the touring bike. My only two choices were to either figure out how to make the pump work or declare defeat and call for rescue. I fit the pieces of the pump together and managed to get enough air in the tire to be ridable. For a few hundred yards, that is. I ended up going onto the immaculately groomed (and wet to the touch) lawn of the Saddlebrooke entrance. I managed to pull the wheel off, change the tube, and replace the wheel. It wasn't easy. I'm actually surprised it went as quickly as it did, though. And I managed to get the pump to give me enough air to finish out my ride, too!

The ride back to Rancho Vistoso was great! The wind was at my back for most of the way and I was able to rest on the aerobar for a good distance. Unfortunately, the closer I got to Rancho Vistoso the more the wind began to shift. I started getting some crazy cross winds that made it too dangerous to use the aerobar.

Nothing says "Wake up!" like being buffeted sideways on a bicycle. With only one other stop to take off my sunglasses and turn on all of my blinking taillights and my headlight, the rest of the ride was uneventful (the way we like it). I ended up with 100.5 miles—pretty good figurin' there, huh? Here's the ride profile for those who are still with me:

Now, if I can figure out how to get a little bit more JuJu for the actual El Tour event, life should be pretty good. I was out on the road a long time today (ten hours!), though actual bike time was considerably less. I'll be riding my road bike with minimal gear for El Tour, so I should be hauling at least 15-20 pounds less for that trip. That will be nice. Unfortunately, aerobars are banned for El Tour so I can't use them. I can certainly see why they don't want people using them—they make your bike handling a little twitchy and the brakes aren't quickly accessible; however, they sure are good for easy the aches and pains and for cutting wind resistance.

Here I am getting a little JuJu the other night:

The American Dream, R.I.P.

The reason we won't stand up to big business, big oil, and the Republican party is because we still buy into the Horatio Alger myth: Work hard. Get rich. Except we all want to skip the hard work part. To quote our whining President, "It's hard!" The thing of it is if you get rich today it's either a fluke or you ought to be in jail. What we and most of the people coming across the border fail to realize is that we've killed the American Dream and we've shipped the body to China.

We've left responsibility and innovation behind. We've moved into legislating an "even playing field." The days when America saw another country kicking our butts in some area (e.g., the Russian space program) and said, Oh, hell no! We are not going to let this stand, are gone. We've stopped holding ourselves up to a higher standard in almost every area. There was a time when if the U.S. saw the Japanese making better cars at better prices (even after importing them!) we would have leapt to our feet in protest and insisted on making an even better product. But no. What we do nowadays is go crying to the Government asking them to raise tariffs and otherwise create roadblocks for foreign competition. We have the ability to produce vehicles getting a hundred miles to the gallon; we have the ability to make cars that run on fuels other than gasoline and in much smaller quantities. We have these abilities, but we don't exercise them because we believe it will affect short term profits. Because for some reason we feel we shouldn't have to.

There's a series of commercials out now for Ford Motor Company. They did a big "car switch" with people hoping to get them to like their cars. They probably picked people with old cars and swapped them with brand new ones. Of course it's going to be an improvement. But the key point of the ad is that they didn't tell anyone they were from Ford, they said it was market research. It's pretty sad when American car companies have to resort to deception to get folks to try their cars! And I'll tell you something else—they probably had to lie. I had a Ford Fusion as a rental not too long ago and it was a piece of crap. I will say that it got pretty good mileage—a little more than 30mpg. But that's not enough. It was clunky, uncomfortable, and simply not ergonomic. I hated it. If you told me you were going to swap my car for a Ford Fusion for a week, I'd run the other direction. I'd stick with my bicycle for the week, thank you very much.

If anyone or anything is unpatriotic or guilty of treason it is not the group questioning these things. If anything it is time to fire up the anti-American activities committee and set them loose on Detroit, the oil industry, and, frankly, our own Government. If there is one thing that can be pointed to as the biggest threat to American security, it's our own dependence on foreign oil (don't get me started on education!). By refusing to do anything but foster this dependence when the technology is there to eliminate this dependence right now, these groups are committing the highest form of treason. It's time to put a few heads on the block and change our direction.

The Eyes Have It

These things are cool. The Nike Maxsight by Baush & Lomb is a "sports" contact—tinted like a sunglass lens, filtering up to 95% of UVA/UVB rays, so on and so forth. The best thing is they work. They come in gray-green or amber. I picked amber because I like the visual acuity of the whole blue blocker aspect. I've had them out for a couple of rounds and am pleased by their performance. The only downside is that, unlike regular sunglasses, you can't just pop them off when you go indoors for a minute. They're on 100% of the time you're wearing them. Of course, the best thing about them, hands down, is the absolutely freakish look in your eyes—it really throws people who don't know you're wearing very unusual contacts.