It was a strange weekend for me.
I awoke with a hangover on Saturday morning, and didn’t get off the couch until 10am. If you’ve followed this space for any time, you will know that this is extremely late by my standards.
On Saturday night I forgot about the “old timer” hasher party. I intended to attend knowing that “reasons” is not an “old timer” hasher and that it was highly likely that “reasons” would be at the “Bring Your Own Boat” Hash campout. BTW- I don’t need to know whether or not that was the case. It wasn’t until Barb sent me a text asking me why I wasn’t at the party that I remembered it, and by then it was too late for me to go out.
The Blackstone has been seasoned! Yesterday morning I spent the hour or so heating up and wiping down the Blackstone griddle with oil. Had I not sweat up a storm by 11am I may have also made myself lunch on the griddle. Someday soon… In the process of seasoning the grill surface I burned through the remainders of a couple of one-pound propane tanks. I’m now trying to figure out how to responsibly recycle/dispose of these canisters. I’m also trying to determine my next solution for camping gas that doesn’t involve these one-pound canisters. I’d like to look into getting a refillable canister in the 5-11 pound range.
I was fortunate to get my grill seasoned and back inside the house prior to rain arriving around 1pm. Had I known rain was in the forecast I would not have watered WLF yesterday morning whilst grill seasoning.
While looking out the window last night around 6pm I saw one of the neighborhood hawks swoop through WLF. I hope that it found a nice dinner. 😉
Still contemplating my boondoggle this week. I will explain tomorrow when I make my decision on whether or not I will go.
I solved today’s Wordle in four attempts; my starter today was RESIN. This week all of my starter words will begin with the letter R.
Unproductive week-end as far as any home projects go. Ran on Saturday at Red Top State Park and then paddled around the lake. Located the BYOB hash campout area but no one was there when I pulled up so I raided one of the coolers and drank a couple of beers. Apparently they were Stan’s…so all good. Sunday I ended up hanging out at Mike and JoAnna’s pool with Barb and Allan. Finished a 2000 piece puzzle which I will be handing down to Paulie. I have my Women of the Woods hike this morning, then work, and then probably hashing tonight since it’s so close. Forgot to list my 7 days of purging last week. 2 pairs of running tights, 1 pair of flip-flops, 1 pair of shoes, 1 t-shirt, electric fryer pan, piggy bank, 2 soft computer bags, 1 backpack and 2 tchotchkes. Wordle in 4 starting with QUEST. Happy Monday!!
too funny about raiding Stan’s cooler – good timing!!!!
Agreed, perfect timing.
I’m still fighting my way through a 1000 piece puzzle that will become yours when I have completed it.
Wordle in 5 and could have been 4. My starter was no help, so I shant give it.
The good- I’m breathing, med free most of the weekend. I got out and cleared a huge fallen limb Saturday, around 2 hours of cleanup (I said it was big). Felt good.
The bad- I attempted a bike ride yesterday noon (not bright). In the 11 miles, I stopped 3 times. Got home and sat under the shower (actually the horses shower) for 15 minutes and even then could barely stay upright. Maybe I did too much?
Power went off about 4 and didn’t return until 8:30. I noticed when I got home from dinner it was actually cooler outside than inside so opened some windows.
And today started with a jolt when Debbie brought me my bank phone for a problem call at 0600. Lovely, but now resolved.
-FP
glad you are feeling better – did you ever get a covid test to see if it was that, or just something else?
No, and I guess I’m too late for it to show if it really was covid.
WLF caught about 2” of rain yesterday. All out there seems fine, though the top-heavy plants — peppers, tomatillos — toppled, mostly due to the shitty tomato cages I have used for them.
After a quick Kroger run I am working on a jigsaw puzzle, will shower, and the sink myself into some coding work, all in an effort to distract myself today.
Weekend was fairly slow for us –
Friday night – just stayed home & watched Amazon Prime high school-ish drama – The Summer I Turned Pretty (dumb title BTW). Sometimes I just need to watch a stupid series & zone out.
Saturday we didn’t do much, then off to a party at PMS’s. Breaststroke brought a bunch of old photo albums, and hash trashes – someone found the trash that had Andrea being named 12/7 1996. It was many pages long with a bunch of pictures. Those old hash trashes are fun to read. I have a big file here – I’ll need to dig it out. plenty of people I hadn’t seen in quite a while, and of course “reasons” (that’s an interesting nickname) wasn’t there.
Sunday we did a mornng walk, then over to JoAnna’s to hear Mike’s RAGBRAI stories. Going on the BRAG bus, the other BRAG folks, and the stories of what went on all week. He had fun, but wouldn’t necessarily go with the BRAG group again.
Not much going on this week – I think that’s a good thing.
I can imagine the BRAG crew was significantly older than Mike? Or was it that he was a solo participant? When I went in 2016 I was in the proper age group, but because I wasn’t paired up or previous friends with anyone it was tough for me to integrate.
Andrea’s party sounded like fun, wish I had remembered it.
and – the other big news of the night- Enema got a road bike!!! Allan & I were dumbfounded – as he has never wanted to ride. But Katherine talked him into an Italian biking trip, so he has to get comfortable on a bike.
Oh yeah, he mentioned that trip to Italy during his TdF gathering.
Let’s start out with a word problem (as opposed to a Wordle problem): Mike and Lucas are in Rockmart. David is at the Rambo trailhead. Assuming Mike and Lucas are on bikes headed toward David, how fast does David have to pedal his bike to intercept Mike and Lucas at Coots Beach on the Silver Comet Trail?
If you’re thinking, what the hell, that’s kind of what I was thinking on Saturday when I logged 70 miles on the Silver Comet. I’ll explain way in a moment.
Friday night Jamie and my brother Mike and I went to Chamblee to see Drivin’ n’ Cryin’. Mike and I walked to the MLK MARTA station. If you ever wonder why no one rides MARTA, it starts with MARTA having broken goddamn ticketing/Breeze card machines. After trying two machines and failing, I managed to coax their janky Breeze app into letting me through the turnstile. We met Jamie at Yuzu and had sushi. I can’t remember the last time I was in a sushi restaurant. Maybe never? I have had sushi I don’t seek it out. After much contemplation I opted for a California roll, which I enjoyed. Drivin’ n’ Cryin’ was tight, and put on a “really big shew”. We managed to work our way down to the equivalent of fourth row standing. Jamie drove us back, and put on a Velvet Underground album. Our route back included the Krog Tunnel, and driving past a rap video shoot in Cabbagetown. Let’s just say West Lafayette, Indiana doesn’t have any semblance of either thing.
Saturday midday we headed toward the Silver Comet Trail, in hopes of Mike getting his first half-century in. His previous longest ride was 20 miles, and he’d never been on a road bike before. He borrowed my road bike, while I rode my “fancy racing bike”, as Paulie calls it. 🙂 As the day unfolded, I was extremely glad for said bike. Other than Mike crashing immediately on the Silver Comet Trail (on grass, no harm done) as he got used to the brakes, we had a lovely and uneventful ride into Rockmart. We made it to the Knucklehead Cafe when Mike realized his phone had fallen off of his bike somewhere, and then we were literally off to the races. Mike has an Apple watch, and I asked him if he could use Find My Phone to track his phone. Initially FMP said the phone was in Rockmart, but after a bit it got it’s bearings and said the phone was at Coots Beach, which made sense because we took a cooling break there. Mike later remembered stumbling as we got going and apparently knocked his phone into the grass. I blasted off to Coots Beach and told Mike to stay in Rockmart with Lucas.
I was almost to Coots Beach when Mike said a guy had found his phone and was heading on down the trail, with his next stop being Rambo. FUCK! I was cussing and wished the guy had left the phone where it was, but he did have good intentions. I tried calling him on Mike’s phone and he wouldn’t pick up. Fortunately Mike changed his lock screen and put my number on it, and the guy called me from Rambo. Mike had said “My brother is on the way to get my phone” but the rider thought I was in a car. Once he realized I was on a bike he felt bad and said he would have met me at the tunnel. I figured correctly that the rider was one of those elbow-handlebar dudes. I hauled ass to Rambo, hoping to get there before his patience ran out, and I made it.
Once there, I called Mike and said “I’ve got your phone, eat lunch and meet me at Rambo.” Another best laid plan. He didn’t have his wallet on him, and Knucklehead didn’t accept ApplePay, but the Rails restaurant does. So they ate lunch and when it was time to pay, the waitress delayed just long enough for Mike’s watch to die. And so he had to call me from the restaurant phone to get me to give them my credit card number to pay for lunch. It was then that I realized I had the aforementioned word problem on my hand. The original plan was to stop at the convenience store by Coots Beach to get fluids/snacks for the ride back. My son didn’t have his phone on him, and Mike had no method of payment, so the stretch from Rambo to Coot’s Beach was so nice I did it twice. There’s no way they could have made it back without replenishment. I did intercept them about a 1/2 mile from Coot’s Beach, and then we made our way back. It became apparent that my son wasn’t going to make it back to Florence Road, so I told him and Mike to stop at Rambo, and Lucas could wait for me in the car there, and Mike could ride on to Florence Road if he wanted to get 50 miles in. That’s how it played out, I rode ahead, got the car, fetched Lucas, got Mike, and then got home at 9:20 PM, in time to meet our cousin at my house who was in town for the day.
Yesterday I took Mike to his first qi gong and medidation class. After the class he noticed his shoulders were appreciably less tighter than usual. Hmmm, there could be a connection. 😉 After that I roused my teenagers and picked up an extra one so that we could head to Lake Lanier to visit the last full-time boss I had 25 years ago. Mike hadn’t been on a boat since he was a kid, and had an equally deep-seated water phobia to mine that he made some progress knocking down yesterday by: riding on a boat, driving on a boat, riding on a tube float behind a boat, floating in the water and realizing that nope, you can’t sink with a life jacket on (that was a big ephiphany for me a few years ago when I first expereinced it), to laying on a giant floating mat that is maybe 8 feet by 15 or 20 feet that easily held three grown men laying flat with plenty of room for more. The mat stays tethered to the dock, it’s not a tow toy, but it’s a cool platform. Mike got back into the lake a couple of times on his own. So, needless to say, he’s had a pretty monumental trip to Atlanta so far.
Back to the Wordle problem, I had a frustrating as hell experience today. One correct letter with CRIER. 4 correct letters with my second guess. Took me four tries to close it out. I had two Wordles in 6 over the weekend, but my current streak of 36 lived on to fight another day.
holy shite David – what an adventure on the SCT!!!
How do you change the lock screen message? (I know, I can just google it)
And – “elbow handlebar guys” – that made me laugh.
Family water phobia – I guess someday I’ll have to hear how that all came about. But – great news that you guys can enjoy a day at the lake now.
Miles (the husband of PMS, the Saturday night party) went to Drivin & Cryin too. He said it was an excellent show. AND -not overly crowded. I’ll have to check out that venue someday.
I don’t know how to change the lock screen message, Mike was able to figure that out on his Apple watch. Of course he didn’t know his iCloud password and had to figure out how to reset it first. Everything that could have gone wrong did, and yet we preavailed.
My parents have never given me a satisfactory answer as to why I had a subdural hematoma (bruising inside my skull) when I was 10 months old. The family lore that I was “born with too much fluid in my skull”, which I believed for decades. However, that is encephalitis and I have two pages of a medical record that clearly state I was treated for a subdural hematoma. A couple of years ago in a failed gambit to get back into my good graces my father spun a tale about a handicapped babysitter dropping me. Supposedly she was in a wheelchair and I lurched backwards. Yeah, let’s say I did. Babies fall off of things. A LOT. It doesn’t put them in the hospital for brain surgery. Unless the babysitter was riding in the back of a pickup truck at the time that she was holding me I refuse to believe that I could have been injured so badly. So, I believe my mother shook me, because why else would one’s parents straight up lie about something like that? So then when I was six my father tried to give me a swimming lesson that went horribly awry. That experience gives me creedence for the shaking, because in this case my kid mind thought my caregiver was trying to drown me.
My brother had a different experience. My father forced him to jump off of a diving board into the deep end of the pool. Mike had no swimming expereience and balked. My father pushed him or did something that caused Mike to get scraped by by the diving board on the way into the water, and so that’s why he’s been like “oh hell no” about water until now. He has had a massive paradigm shift.
This is just a taste of what our childhood was like, and just a glimpse at why we’re both no contact with our parents who are 78 and 82. You have to overcome biology to go no contact with one’s parents, and so just know there has to be a hell of a lot of shit that went sideways they they refused to ever own. I will say it’s pretty damn amazing to help my brother find his way and break free after all of these decades. As he said, it took some MAJOR trust yesterday for him to do some of the things that he did.
I had no idea you could remotely change the lock screen (FFS Apple, quit capitalizing everything I type!), never mind from an Apple Watch.
Yes, which reminds me I should put my daughter’s phone number on my lock screen in case I do something similar. I’ve only lost my cell phone once, it fell out of my pocket in San Franscisco. I was riding an e-bike and feeling no pain after being at a couple of bars that were recommended to me by my friend Craig. I knew the risks and was being OCD about checking for my phone, but suddenly it wasn’t there. I turned around and found it a couple blocks back, in the bus lane, no one had run over it or picked it up yet. It was a close call because I was on my way back to my hotel to fetch my bag to head to the airport for the red eye, and my phone is also my wallet.
Quite. The. Experience!
Did everyone get POLYP yesterday? It’s not the most common of words…
I almost didn’t pull it off (pun very much intended), but got there in 6.
Wow. Well intentioned people, but damn, what a hassle. And 70 miles, even on the Comet is still 70 miles! Well done.
Yes, quite the hassle. 50 miles on the Comet is no big deal for me, even when I haven’t ridden for a while, 25 miles from Florence Road to Rockmart, nice lunch, 25 miles back. Throwing in 20 miles of sprint riding in the middle of that is a hell of a pop quiz. I had an anti-cramp shooter with me that I used on the sprint back to Coots Beach. It worked, but my god, I don’t know if the cramp or the cure was worse. It did clear up the cramp, but they returned the last 15 miles and I was nursing myself along.
70 miles is no joke. It’s one thing to work up to it, but I’ve only done one 50 mile ride this year, and my last longer ride was in October 2022, which was 67 miles. Thankfully I packed a variety of Honey Stinger energy snacks, I very much needed those. Oh, and my cell phone battery died about the time Mike’s Apple watch died. Fortunately Mr. Elbow Handlebars called me back on Mike’s phone that had tons of juice.
A ride to remember for sure!
Correction, Mr. Elbow Handlebars called me on *my* phone before it died. It was the restaurant that called me just in time before my battery died. What a damn day.
Wow, what an adventure! At least it all turned out okay, but damn!
Indeed! 🙂
Oh, and just to layer in a bit of Twilight Zone here, my brother’s Panda Express fortune cookie on Thursday night (the day before he flew in) read: “An adventure filled with good food and friends awaits.” Mike had no idea! 😉 He’s been getting a massive social immersion on this trip as well, as back home he doesn’t have any friends, but is finally getting to a place where he can work on that. At this point that fortune cookie is reminding me of that Stephen King short story where the gypsy touches a heavy set guy on the nose and intones “Thinner”.
We had a senior staff retreat last Thursday and Friday at the Carter Center, which was brutal. We ended around 2:00 on Friday and then I had to go back to the office to get the annual salary letters out. That was no small feat, either, and I was EXHAUSTED after that. But we had dinner plans with some friends whom we hadn’t seen in years so I couldn’t cancel. We went to A Mano and it was delightful. Saturday we did a bunch of chores, including taking glass to the Emory recycling and buying new living room lamps and nightstand lamps at Lowe’s. We had brunch at the General Muir, also delightful.
Sunday evening we had to go to a 60th birthday party for one of Kevin’s partners that was held at New Realm. Believe it or not, I’d never been to New Realm before. I stayed away at first because it was SO CROWDED all the time, then by the time it calmed down I was never on the Beltline anymore. Anyway, who has a birthday party at 6 fucking 30 on a Sunday night? His firm are all hard drinkers so they all took a vacation day today. I do not have that luxury so I had two beers and went home. Then I had my own adventure. We had Lyfted to the party and Kevin had the house key. I left and forgot to get it from him. No big deal, I’ll just use the hidden key. Well, the hidden key was not there (and let’s not get into the fact that the hidden key is on the back porch which means I had to walk down around to the back yard and then up the stairs to even get to the back porch). AND it was pouring rain to boot. So I had to get another Lyft to go back to New Realm and get the key from Kevin. Fortunately the Lyft driver was all, “just give me $20 and I’ll take you back to your house.” I was soaked and tired, but grateful that it wasn’t worse. At least the venue was only 1.5 miles away.
VERY busy week for me. We roll out a big announcement early this week and then Thursday and Friday we have another retreat. I already need a nap!
Dang, Jenka, that was an adventure! I’ve only been to New Realm once. They follow that shitty model of overcharging on beer and underdelivering on service, so no thank you. I can guarantee that my 60th birthday party the year after next will NOT be at New Realm. I’m glad the Lyft driver eased things along.
As a northeasterner it doesn’t bother me, because that’s how all bars are up there. If it’s a bar, meaning mostly a drinking establishment, there’s no such thing as table service. Feels normal to me.
That said, it is unlikely that I’ll go back there voluntarily, but that has more to do with age and not frequenting bars anymore.
I’m happy to pay for service, but if I have to fetch the beer on my own, then I want my labor factored into the equation. 😉
we have a hidden key somewhere (I can’t remember where, I need to ask Allan)
We have a key pad for the garage door, so I rarely use a key.
We have a key pad for the cabin, and it has erased so much anxiety. I’d love to install a key pad lock for our home, too.
Y’all city folks… our house is never locked. I think I have a key to the house on my ring, but I wouldn’t guarantee it.
And the keys stay in the cars here, too.
I know there is a high criminal element that reads the blog, but I ain’t skeerd.
David, I love Honey Stinger products!! A little hard to find sometimes…
Wow. I grew up in the middle of nowhere in the mountains, and we at least locked the door at night!
REI carries them. I’m making a pilgrimage tonight to stock up for the 33+ miles I’ll be riding in Cades Cove on Wednesday. Amazon has them too.
My 70 miles on Saturday was a hell of a tune-up ride!
Yowza, another amazing adventure.
Oh yeah, the weather and apathy kept me from going to an early show (6pm) at Eddie’s Attic yesterday. Chatham County Line was performing, a band I may have seen ten times already. However since they became a trio a few years ago something is missing for me. Oh well.
Dang! I go away for a second and find novels have been written! Sounds like fun week-ends for all!
Lunch, Impossible cheeseburger with some leftover roasted squash, eaten. Will embark on some coding tutorial work at 12:30pm.
Trying hard to limit grocery store runs to essentials and eat food that I have grown or already purchased and have in storage.
It’s getting hot out there. I broke a sweat moving buckets of water from Point A to Point B in WLF. My second rain barrel is nearly at capacity, I’d gather that it’s about 80% full at this time. The first rain barrel is about 95% full, and I have water in basins I can pour into it. If it rains heavily again anytime soon I will be completely filled up. I need to start using this stored water, at least the tanks not containing tadpoles, for watering instead of running the sprinkler.
I had lunch with Davey- got the scoop on the GLITTER hash weekend, and just caught up in general. Eurohash is coming up soon – I’ll be jealous while people are over there.
Dean was talking about Eurohash and I have to admit I had envy.
Oh boy, Apple stock is continuing a decline. Time to start coding practice…
We’re supposed to get heavy thunderstorms this evening around 5 or 6.
I saw that, which was one of the motivating factors for moving the water to the rain barrel.
The first of the thunderstorms has arrived.
Some water transferred from big bucket that catches water to one that doesn’t catch as much. I’ll start using this second bucket for water can filling soon.
Second wave bringing a ton of water and damage to WLF. Undoubtedly my rain barrels will be filled. More on this tomorrow.