Training Log Archive: bl

Ride around to Ordway Lane from Beth, walk/jog back with dogs. Fingers got cold in spite of gloves, left thumb too cold. Didn't need the compass anyway tho' could have made for more orienteering with. Logging at start was most disconcerting! Bad! Don't ever want to see again.

Route


Early on


Bog Meadow in blue

Past noon Luti, shunpike mentality put aside. Drying after last night's rain, a few bright holes, patches of blue and right amount of bracing air. Still a SloGo - w/o Diane, even. Do get bored from repetition: made a few changes...grassy hypotenuse for two hardtop legs & later cut thru CHS athletic fields, rewarded with several hundred meters of very wet grass/running shoes & socks, the latter for the rest of the rather short pm. On SPS campus, saw all of three people, 2 were kids playing hockey in the drive. Strong is the 'go home for Christmas' impetus at such a private place tho' many families live on campus.

Another Friday: Friday has come fast the past three Fridays - it's Monday, then with breathtaking rapidity, it's Friday. It's Friday, then with even more breathtaking rapidity, it's Monday. Time's shifting perceptions, dysthymic cycling afoot? - who knows. One knows time is getting short! unless we are blithering about Geologic Time...now that's something worthy of caps.

Life can't be all bad. There's a box of Barnum's animal crackers on my desk. Beth buys these periodically for me when she's feeling positive about me. So this Friday, things are good, I guess. Animal crackers and Captain Crunch...indications of never having grown up. PB created a ruckus last winter with mention of the latter...a ruckus that went on nonstop for some 100 days - and only recently subsiding. That Bricker, at least this time it's ping pong...bong!...table tennis.

Any manner, shape or form: "TGIF" (and the eve of Christmas Eve points out Beth). With retirement, every day will be "ANOTHER". Been there before, still raced around like a headless chicken.

Mocha: "Are you nuts?"

Winant Hill, parked at Auburn entrance. To top, around some & back. Could
see Monadnock. Certainly oversigned/blazed. 50F, almost eerie.

Solstice pondering
Summer sun lowering over the lake, Mohed, Sweden, site of last summer's
O-Ringen.


What more poignant of summer's evocative memory (in depths of winter) than
young people swimming in a far-away lake in a far-away land in a far
off-season?

C • Far out! 7

PM DP, just at nightfall on a grimy, gray, rainy day in the hole of the year. Dressed up fine so as not feel whimpy when meeting the wet branches. No dog transport car - out the back which is thick in places. Maybe a year since passing thru the old Times Square...once a nice meeting of paths in a fairly mature pine forest. Aug 31, '01 produced a micro-burst that flattened the Square. Now it's full of white pines fighting 'a thick' for ascendency. Got to the PL where I could see well enough. Had considered the road for return but no leash/rope for dogs. So, started back into woods but didn't find the path I was looking for right off. So, hell, make the road after dark work...done it before. Stopped in the open (3 walls & roof) town storage bldg, one last search for a pc of rope. Think the supply dried up more than a yr ago but one can hope. No rope but in the head lamp beam, voila!: the missing mouse have-a-hart on a shelf on a wall. Had left it there some wks ago with a hesitant mouse - forgot to pick up. When Beth went to look, was gone. Interesting to find de novo in dark in the beam of a headlamp. Funny though, that I bought a replacement just today at Blue Seal. Was in search of an outdoor thermometer to replace one that had been visible outside on a tree for 10 yrs. Found a replacement & then saw the H&H section and the needed new one. Beth had said she wanted a second as the mouse-out-of-house business has been good. Bought it and then the eve's good fortune.... 2 Christmas gifts, humor & pragmatism-driven, of course. No more jewelry from the League shop. And, clothes, much too much of those. Only a trip to the Caribbean or Paris would be in the far-out league.... Solstice tomorrow, slowly leave the dark hole in the year behind.

C • Solstice 2

SPS wander, parked near top of Dunbarton Ext., down to the boathouse...the Light Calvary was coming the other way...possibly 12 vehicles, painfully spaced, in a veil of dust. Something going on at the boathouse - another 12ish still there. Not in 10 years have I seen more than 2 on that 0.4ish mi stretch. Took the 'rooty', rutted path along Turkey Pond - one to take maybe q 6 mos. When it freezes, running parallel to shore or most anywhere on the pond is more fun or interesting or both.

Faraway series, phtos from elsewhere, #87

"Exuberant festivity", Denver Civic Center, December, 1967
(in visiting: my mother lived in Denver at the time)

C • Season's greetings! 3

Fisk-Little Pond, CCW. Mostly calm, sunny, overdressed. Was 15F this am -
maybe hi 20s at 12:45., tad hot. 'Just do it' was the goal.

DP with Beth. Cold in shade. OCAD for refreshing, dusted off file etc.



Pause to ponder