Snippets

March 11, 2025 to March 17, 2025

Between the wintery weather and other commitments there’s little biking to report for our second week in Tucson, but we’ve been surprisingly busy anyway catching up with friends, driving up to Seattle to check in on dad, and running a variety of errands. We’re more or less on a blog break here, but I want to at least drop some photos in to remind us of where the time went.

Monday morning I had coffee with Elizabeth down at Caffe Umbria. She brought this photo to share, one that really surprised me. Elizabeth really avoids following politics, but her walking group pulled her into a demonstration.

Monday night: catching up on the blogs at a familiar post. Oh, and thanks ro Steve for sharing his outstanding photo of a hoopoe with us.

Tuesday: The lighthouse at Discovery Park, Seattle. We drove up Tuesday morning and stayed overnight before visiting dad the next day. We had a few hours to fill until having dinner at the Barking Dog with our new friends Mike and Tami, so I biked a loop around the park looking for birds.

The view toward the Olympics from Discovery Park.

Wednesday: the next morning we visit dad at his assisted living apartment, the first time we’ve seen him in a year, he’s definitely slowed down, but he picks up if you can get him reminiscing - easy enough to do when he looks around at his favorite books, photos, and models of the Boeing planes (the B-52, and all of the commercial jets from the 707 thru the 777) he was a flight test engineer for.

Dad was quite an accomplished musician, and as recently as a few years ago he led the ukulele group at the retirement center that he formed. He also sang and whistled (it’s striking how many of my stepfather’s characteristics I adopted), and still knows many songs. I reminded him of this, and he started singing some of them.

Elizabeth and I were both surprised by this photo, which we’ve never seen before. And dad seems pretty surprised by it too and doesn’t know how he came by it. It’s dad as an infant, being held by his mother standing next to his father, who died when dad was about three. No one knows who the girl was.

Here’s another photo that dad remembers well. Four of these five (including dad, second from the right) were sprinters on the Charleston High School mile relay team.

Thursday: On a day with several errands ahead, I get an early start on my way to coffee. I’ve just finished loading the Straggler into the car when I turn around and see the crows flying off east into an incandescent sunrise.

My first errand was to drive back to Bike Tires Direct to return Rachael’s new break levers because they’re incompatible with her brakes. They’re not labeled as such, but they’re only usable with hydraulic brakes. I’ve got some time to kill before the second one,so I stop in at The Great North for coffee and a pastry.

At 11 I head over to the Community Cycling Center to donate a bike. It’s finally time to let the Straggler go It’s a bike that never really worked for Rachael and she feels much more confident on the BF.

In a half hour of my life I’d like to have back, I tried every arrangement I could think of trying to reassemble the new combo lock that exploded when I tried to reset it.

Here’s the complete instruction manual. I also looked for it online to see if there was more information anywhere, without success. It’s sold by Yale Lock as product#1254D, but there are no markings on the device itself other than that it’s made in China. And yes’Steve, all pieces are present and accounted for, lthough many went missing from time to time and took a flashlight to find on the floor somewhere a number of times on the way. And I did figure out the general idea, though never managed to get it right. The green collars are the rings with letters and numbers to form the combination. They need to be strung along the beaded spindle, interspaced by a metal collar and washer, and then the assembled 16 pieces need to be jammed into the perforated tube and nestled against the end of the lock before closing it. With everything lined up and placed correctly, which leaves many more possibilities than you’d think. I think I finally had the formula and correct orientation of everything down and was getting some skill at holding it all together until I was ready to jam the thing together but after about the tenth failure I decided I’d invested enough in a $9 lock. Perhaps it would have been easier if I had both eyes working with me too and fumbled a bit less.

My Friday morning starts with me driving down to Sunnyside for my ophthalmology appointment. Afterwards I take a whack at thinning down the storage unit so we can fit the Rodriguez in and get rid of the bike locker we’ve been paying $15/month for for seven years. Part of it is donating all of the framed pictures that used to hang on the walls of our condo. This is a shot of Adélie penguins in Antarctica, a print by renowned nature photographer Art Wolfe that my parents gave to us as a Christmas present one year.

1997: Inside the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. At the time you could take an elevator up into one of the then incomplete spires and look out to the rest of the cathedral. It was striking to return almost 30 years later and find it nearly complete.

1997: on the middle corniche between Nice and Menton, ar rhe start of our ride from Nice to Lisbon.

I feel guilty about having sent this to Goodwill with the other framed photos. Mom painted this, and I should have kept it. I should go back to Goodwill to see if I can buy it back.

Saturday morning: looking out the window at the Lovejoy Cafe, a little known birding hotspot.

Sunday afternoon we went to Jake’s for lunch. Rachael is anxious to get in and claim our reservation, but there’s time for me to brag on my parallel parking skills one last time: I nailed it on the first shot, and on my blind side!

We both like Jake’s and have gone there many times over the last 20 years. Since we only go once or twice a year now though, we both always get our favorite dish: the salmon for her, the hazelnut-crusted steelhead for myself.

Leaving Jake’s, we stop to admire a new work of art that’s gone up since the last time we were here.

Monday we went to a matinee (Anora) at living Room Theater. It was sunny when we went in,and sunny when we came out two hours later was a new layer of hail on the melting off the sidewalk. I dropped Rachael off at the apartment and drove to Lucky Lab for dinner, and when I drove home a second intense storm broke out, coming down hard enough that I got soaked crossing the street from the car. Ten minutes later the sun came out again.

And five minutes later, there’s a rainbow framing the crows returning to roost for the night. Quite a wild day

Today's ride: 8 miles (13 km)
Total: 1,206 miles (1,941 km)

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Kelly IniguezThank you for the update. My mornings aren't the same without reading your journal.
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4 weeks ago

Karen PoretNor my evenings!
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4 weeks ago

Carolyn van HoeveNor my nights!
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4 weeks ago

Scott AndersonTo Carolyn van HoeveMy apologies, but this worked for a wet spell. Fortunately improvements are just around the corner.
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4 weeks ago

Scott AndersonTo Kelly IniguezLike I should feel sorry for you of all people, zipping around the Loop in the sun. Is the cactus in bloom yet?
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4 weeks ago

Scott AndersonTo Karen PoretOK. For you I feel a little guilty.
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4 weeks ago