The article from NPR: 'Toxic Individualism': Pandemic Politics Driving Health Care Workers From Small Towns.
First, "toxic individualism" is the most American thing ever. That phrase is near perfect.
Second, I don't feel sorry for the small towns at all, for what is almost inevitably going to happen there.
When I get a picture like that, it leads. Thanks, Mike.
I work in healthcare, and even when we get holidays (and we don't get many), somebody's gotta cover, and their holiday gets moved. Today was New Year's Holiday for me, and yesterday, The Excellent Wife (TEW) and I both decided that it would be a good idea for me to ride with The Old Guys (which is what we call 'em), Team Social Security (which is what they call themselves), the folks that ride together three times per week on weekdays.
Mike, above, notwithstanding, there weren't a lot of the Old Guys on this ride; there were a number of the B and B+ riders from the club, looking for a ride on a day that several of us had off from work. Joe's ride was capped at 10, and all the spots were full. But skies were grey and temps were raw at the start, and there was a half a drip of rain. We decided to see if it passed.
Why can't I get a decent picture of Jen O?
The half-drip of rain seemed to pass, but the weather was still raw, if not actually freezing. We took off on Joe's route to the Jackson Wawa, and maintained a pace that was perhaps a smidge higher than the advertised. It didn't seem to matter, everybody kept up, and there was conversation much of the way.
We got to Jackson in good order.
...but it was remarked that the corner of the parking lot that always seems to be sunny was in shadow today.
(Hey, it's my blog. OF COURSE there are gonna be bike pics.)
O the way back, the sun came out... but one of our number had a flat, and rather than fix it on this cold day, he called his wife to pick him up. The remainder of us went back to the start at Etra Park.
We'd had a headwind coming out, so I counted on a tailwind on the way back, but Aeolus didn't cooperate when we were on Herbert Road. Laura pulled me much of the way. "Nice pull, Headwinds", I remember remarking at the intersection. It was, indeed, a nice pull.
We got back. Go look at the Ride Page.
If you're not a regular reader of Laura's blog, you might not know that she's blowing glass, of all things. She got a haul of colored rods for Christmas to play with at the glass works.
She doesn't think she's very good. I say that with messing around with rocks, fire, and wind (because what do you think blowing glass entails?), she's treading on the coattails of magic, and any time she actually gets the stuff to do anything close to what she wants, she's succeeded in taming the elemental forces. I'm right, of course. I'm eager to see what she does with that handful.
So, with that last ride, I've got 4200+ miles over 155 rides (some of which were only about three miles long), for 296 hours in the saddle for the year. Not bad, for a guy who works full time and doesn't commute on his bike. Good enough for me.
I was gonna say it started with this:
...and, while that's not UNtrue, it probably really started when I got this leader jersey:
I shoulda got a medium; I got a large, and it's baggy. (When I got the ne from the following year, I got a medium, and it's still baggy.)
Then I saw the video above. And then I found, in no particular order, the follow-up video:
And then this guy:
And then I ran into this series:
(She's got a bit of a 'tude, I think, but she's got great info...)
And then there was a number of other videos... and the next thing you know I'm shopping online, and looking at the Singer 4411 at Joann Shops. And then, I don't give a damn about umpteen extra stitches (you only use about five or six anyway, and that includes buttons and buttonholes), but I still want an automatic needle threader and one-step buttonhole, because neither my eyesight nor my tremor are getting any better, so I take a long look at the Brother ST371HD...
... and the day after Christmas, The Excellent Wife (TEW) and I are down at the Joann shop in Lawrenceville picking one up.
I'd seen this project:
... and I got a similar mask for Christmas from my sister, so I modified the pattern, and came up with these:
The tartan in the upper right is the one that was a gift. The blue was my first effort; it's full of mistakes, but it holds together enough that it will be my bike-ride mask for now. The other one is a bit better. I'm learning all the mistakes you can make on a sewing machine, so far without drawing any blood.
The next project will be to alter some t-shirts (and maybe turtlenecks) to fit; then to alter my jerseys. The long-term goal is to make jerseys for myself, and maybe others. I've found a pattern online, but cutting and sewing lycra is beyond my poor powers at this point.
But I plan to stick with it. And maybe someday I'll be sewing up team jerseys, or altering your off-the-internet jerseys so they custom fit (TEW complains regularly that the jerseys she sees are either ridiculously expensive [I'm lookin' at you, Terry Jerseys] or just too bleah). Good stretch lycra is about $8/yd plus delivery...
I know they're just a cover band.
I know they're not singing in their native language.
I know it's more about the visual performance than the music.
I know I wouldn't be anywhere near as interested if the singers were men.
I have been watching the hell out of Broken Peach.
I gotta stop going to Facebook. Get on, post the damn blog link, and get off. Do NOT dawdle. The monster WILL get me.
I just can't come up with a real blog post about this one, so I'm not going to force anything. I'll just post the best of the pics.
(Do readers know that these are links to the ride pages on RideWithGPS? I include 'em in almost every ride post...)
Above, Ralph's bike undergoes a non-emergency surgery to deal with a soft tube.
Today's ride was gonna be 35 miles with no real stop, if it was cold enough. So I went with extra bars in my pockets, in case I was going to need sustenance.
But when I got to the start, I found out that, because the weather was warmer than leader Dave H feared, now it was gonna be about 42 miles, with a choice of break at either 16 or 23 miles. I suggested the latter, and there was nobody who cared strongly enough to object.
Above, Jen O in shorts. In December. She was fine; I was the one who was cold.
As Dave's rides do, this ride broke into a faster and a slower group. I stayed behind with the slower group, partly out of loyalty to Dave (who makes noises like he values my sweep services), and partly because who am I trying to kid? Do you think I could keep up with the fast group?
I was glad to stay back, though, because one usually-strong rider was having a bad day. Dave and I kept that rider company, and Dave shortened the route to leave out the most demanding hills. We got to the break before the others, and I made a couple of quantum near-the-speed-of-light jokes at which some of the other riders smiled politely.
(One of the pics below might be the background for the Princeton FreeWheelers website soon.)
When the fast group went off, there were six of us left, and we headed back to Cranbury along some of the roads I actually recognized (people familiar with my navigational hopelessness may understand how noteworthy that is!). By the time we got back, we had about 35 miles... which is what this ride was originally gonna be!
I've got one of my somewhat slower rides for tomorrow... but some fast folks are signed up. I'm a little nervous about tomorrow's pace...
I've got a bike-y confession to make.
The shifters on both of my bikes are these simple and inexpensive Gevenalle shifters. They're available for single, double, and triple chainrings, and cassettes through eleven speeds, and for short-pull brakes (for the caliper brakes on most of our road bikes), long-pull brakes (for the caliper and vee-brakes on many mountain and cyclocross bikes), and hydraulic brakes.
The shifters are friction for the front derailleur, and index or friction selectable for the rear. My confession is that I've been using friction shifting, front and rear, on both bikes, and I don't think I'm going back to index. There's less fussiness necessary about the derailleur adjustment, and I have to pay just that little bit more attention to how the bike is behaving while I'm on it... which is not a bad thing.
Racers apparently need index shifting to ensure that the shift goes in exactly when planned, because fractions of a second count for them. But on the rides on which I go, fractions of an hour sometimes go by unremarked. We have stops for pictures, for wardrobe adjustments, for conversation, for food... there is no need for such precision. The shifters I have serve my purposes well, and I don't think any of the people with whom I ride complain that my bike or its appurtenances are hindering our progress. (I may bring other qualities to the ride that hinder progress, but the bike is not one of those factors.)
But a new bit of flashy metal has caught my eye.
That piece of hardware loveliness is the newly-available Dia-Compe ENE wing shifter. It mounts inboard of, and behind, your single-purpose brake lever. It will manage up to eleven speeds in the rear... and it's only available in friction shifting.
The set of shifters is about $200. A set of brake levers can be had for about $35, which makes the controls more expensive than the Gevenalle controls (at $200 for the combined brake-shifter unit), but less expensive than most other eleven-speed controls.
And it's a beautiful thing, that displays the workings of the mechanism, as most modern bike controls do not. One of the things I love about my bikes' cable workings is that the mechanicals are all visible; as I engage the brake, for example, the cable can be seen to move, and the brake housing changes position slightly in response to the increased tension. The friction shifter shows how the cable wraps around the barrel, tightening or loosening so that the derailleur can guide the chain onto the next gear. It's all visible, and beautiful. It's like watching a dancer's rippling muscles.
The ENE wing will do the same thing, with the added advantages of shiny silver metal, and rarity. I'm smitten. I don't have an excuse to put it on any of my bikes (and by the time I DO have an excuse, it may be out of production; such are the vagaries of the velo industry). But if I were building up a bike for pretty...
I wonder if I can talk The Excellent Wife (TEW) into relaxing the rule about the next bike*?
*The rule is, if I get another bike, I've gotta buy another house with a two-car garage (or three-car sometimes; the rule is not fixed) and a better kitchen... so my next bike costs me a mortgage.
