Shoes, Ships, and Sealing Wax

Be ready for the detours

A family friend died yesterday. We found out today. Not many details yet.

He was two years younger than my dad.

He was like another uncle to me. Definitely like a member of the family.

Close enough, in fact, that he was going to be joining us at the beach.

I guess it's not a matter of being ready for detours, is it? You can't be ready. You just gotta take them when they come.

What else can you do?

Is done

Ok, I crested the summit of my own hors categorie climb this afternoon...the most significant portion of my project is done and delivered.

I have a lot of loose ends, but they'll need to wait until I get back from vacation.

And if what I turned in doesn't work, well, that will also need to wait.

I'd feel a little better if I felt a little better...as usual, I think I worried myself physically sick. (I'm such a dumbass.)

Now, I'm going to go to the beach and take pictures of sunset or puddles that look like all my other pictures of sunsets and puddles.

You know what I like

Penalty kills.

Double plays.

Mountain stages.

I don't go in for flash. Sure, I'll appreciate the results of the breakaway goal and the out-of-the park home run, but it's not what I came to see.

So in cycling, I've had a sort of distrust of sprinters...hang in the pelaton all day, then elbow your way up for a 100-meter dash. Maybe it was just the dominance of Mario Cipollini when I started watching the Tour that gave me that attitude; I hated Cipollini's style of winning a bunch of sprint stages early, showing up in an ugly custom kit, then departing for the beach as soon as the race hit the Alps.

(Zabel, you ask? I like him now because he's old. And he stuck it out through the mountains.)

So, given this, why have I watched Mark Cavendish's fourth stage win twice already today, on my feet both times?

Man oh man.

(Now, there's a reasonably good chance that Cavendish is going to bail soon, as the race hits the Alps. He's still got the Olympics coming up. As long as he doesn't show up in an outlandish jersey tomorrow, I won't hold it against him this year.)

Say anything you want

...I've heard every reason in the world why I shouldn't care. But this was great to watch tonight (and I already knew who won).

To the Bastille!

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, and all that.

I took a European history class taught by a guy who was working on his Master's in the French Revolution, so he talked about it a lot. I still have trouble with it. (Maybe I need a French version of Schoolhouse Rock, because I can totally explain No More Kings! and The Shot Heard 'Round the World.)

When I was on the safety committee at work, I did try to rename it the Committee of Public Safety, but nobody understood why I thought that'd be funny. Chemists (as a general rule) have less of a grasp of French history than I do.

If it didn't happen in the middle of the Tour de France, I probably wouldn't even notice that it was Bastille Day...but since it does, I do. Happy Bastille Day, everyone!

I actually put this stress on myself

Project from Hell took an ugly turn the other day...like, a turn into a big tree, whereupon it burst into a ball of flames, plunged off a cliff, and sunk into shark-infested water.

I sent an e-mail update to my contact in the Legal department, for whom I do PfH.

She responded: "Wow."

Sometimes, I guess, all you can do is the best you can do, and hope that that best doesn't wake you up in a cold sweat at 3 a.m.

People's lives are not at stake here...not directly, anyway. My boss knows I'm working. The lawyers know I'm working. I oughta just calm the heck down, put in eight hours a day, go home and watch the Tour (and get up and do it again, amen.)

As I pushed open the front door this morning, Jackson Browne did pop into my head:

I'm going to pack my lunch in the morning
And go to work each day
And when the evening rolls around
I'll go on home and lay my body down
And when the morning light comes streaming in
I'll get up and do it again
Amen
Say it again
Amen

When I start singing The Pretender on my way to work, it is always a sign that I am not happy.

Tour de France trivia

Courtesy of Cycling Weekly.

I found it looking for this tidbit:

The oldest rider in the field is Stéphane Goubert of Ag2r-La Mondiale. He's 38 years and 3 months.

So it wasn't yesterday's birthday boy Erik Zabel after all. In any case, they're all just youngsters.

A day late

We didn't bother going out in the rain on the 4th of July to look for fireworks, since fireworks have become a staple of weekend baseball games. Last night, we went down to Woodbridge to see the P-Nats with Ted and Liz, and after the game we saw some nice pyrotechnics.

For Christmas last year I got a Gorillapod, and last night I remembered to stick it in my bag. So I wrapped it around a railing and played with the "fireworks" setting on my camera.

The framing wasn't perfect, but the shots were better than what I usually get.

Ever since I got my first camera, I've been fascinated by long exposures and light. With the fireworks fresh in my mind, I set the camera on the dashboard and played a bit more on the way home. (Victor was driving, obviously.)

Trippy, huh?

Here's the album if you'd like to see more.

The names on the jerseys/TdF

As I settle in to watch the Tour de France this morning, I've been pondering team loyalties.

I'm a home-team fan, across the board and with no apology. There have been players over the years that I have not embraced, there have been coaches who made me groan and owners who made me cringe, but it never really occurred to me to move my loyalties elsewhere.

But really...it's just geographical convenience. I don't try to claim there's a moral superiority of my team over another...not even Pittsburgh or Philadelphia. (That's of the team. Fans are another story.)

I have a friend who also grew up here, a sports fan, who is my opposite. He's indifferent to the local teams, and chooses to root for specific players he particularly admires. In a way, that's more pure than my brand of fandom, because he's looking for skill and heart, regardless of the jersey.

In cycling, I realized, that's the one sport where I pick my teams without a home-town loyalty. And I find I use my friend's method, by character. (I may not have always made the best choices in retrospect, but I wasn't the only one fooled.)

Regarding the Tour, I have no predictions. I'm giving that up. I just have my favorites: Garmin-Chipotle (nee Slipstream), because it's run by Jonathan Vaughters. And sentimentally, Team Columbia (who are the rebuilt T-Mobile, and were called High Road until a few days ago. Actually, it was a few weeks. I haven't been paying attention.) because of George Hincapie, about whom I have never heard a bad word. And then there is Erik Zabel (Milram), who would nearly qualify for my Grey Jersey team, if I hadn't had to abandon that because all these guys are too darn young.

But in the end, I enjoy the race for what it is overall, regardless of who wins. It is a bit liberating.

July 4 cookout

I suppose I could have gone traditional, but I've been eating too much meat lately. Instead, I decided to deconstruct rataouille:

After grilling:

Worked pretty well, actually, served with pasta and pesto...and sausage, since I did need to feed carnivores, too.

Blackberries haven't come in yet this year, so I had to settle for blueberries and red and black raspberries. I chopped the berries, mixed them with yogurt, and tried to use the ice cream freezer we've had sitting in the basement for 15 years. It would have worked better if the mixture hadn't frozen so quickly to the bowl that the dasher wouldn't turn...I ended up making it the old-fashioned wat, stirring it myself for twenty minutes. But it wasn't bad:

Lookin' out my back door

Remember the mystery rodent in the basement?

We never caught it, so we never figured out what it was. But I've been seeing dozens of chipmunks (or perhaps, the same two chipmunks, dozens of times) around the neighborhood, so I was feeling pretty justified that it was a chipmunk.

(The other reason I thought chipmunk instead of the second-choice rat is that nowhere in the ceiling did we find anything that had been chewed, and I'm intimately acquainted with how much rats love to gnaw holes in things.)

Then tonight, I was looking out the back door while the dog was outside, and I noticed something small, brown, and not a chipmunk move along the patio. I called Victor...not in the eeeek, a rat! way, more in the come see that you were right, dammit way.

The rat took shelter under a bush on the edge of the patio, which I thought was a little odd, given that the dog was out...but then, an old beagle who is unphased by rats is no threat, and maybe the rat knew it?

But right after Victor came to look, the rat fell over.

Now, I don't want a dead rat in the yard. My emphasis isn't on rat, it's on dead. I'm always afraid a dead rat is a poisoned rat, and the last thing I need is for the dog to end up poisoned by trying to eat a poisoned dead rat.

The rat wasn't quite dead, though. Victor tried to catch her (when she fell over, we could tell it was a female), but she had enough energy to scamper into the really overgrown hedge. She may have been injured rather than sick, or both, who knows.

Since we have a nice long weekend coming up, I think we'll be doing some gardening, and trimming the hell out of the overgrown vegetation. (Hopefully in the process, we won't be needing to hold an impromptu funeral for a rat known but to God.)

I have all the correct practical things in mind, but as I fed, medicated, and put the resident rats to bed tonight, I couldn't help but look out the window and feel bad. People may try to tell you that there's a difference between my fancy white rats with curly whiskers and the limping brown wild rat in the hedge, but genetically, there isn't...it's just the circumstances of birth.

I interupt the baseball season

...to consider that the Tampa Bay Lightning have added veteran goalie Olie Kolzig to the team that includes Jeff Halpern and, of course, Marty St. Louis (for whom I have publicly admitted a completely inappropriate love, given what he's done against the Caps over the years.)

Yeah, it's the name on the front of the jerseys, not the names on the back.

I have already told my mom and Victor that I'll get my own tickets to the Tampa games next season, though, so as not to embarrass them around our fellow season ticket holders.

(What kills me...what had me literally shouting obscenities last night...is that idea that, if only the Caps front office had played it right this spring, that Kolzig could still be finishing out his career here. I have nothing against Jose Theodore, but nothing particularly for him, either, and for bridging the next season or two until the propect goalies in the system are ready for the NHL, I'd give the edge to Kolzig as mentor.

A lot of people have said that the team owed Kolzig nothing, it was no big deal that McPhee never called him during those last few weeks of the season to say where the team wanted to go. I disagree; I think 18 years or whatever it was, plus Kolzig's desire to stick around through a horrid rebuild, earned him that right. I suspect McPhee may have been a little complacent, assuming that Kolzig was so loyally a Cap-for-life that he could totally ignore him but, if he ended up on July 2 without another goalie, Kolzig would happily resign instead of retire.

Well, whatever. It'll be interesting, first time the Caps play the Lightning...I'll know by what play brings me out of my seat where my real loyalty is.)

And sometimes, it rains