One episode I didn't get around to reporting from our adventure that included Saddleback and Bicknell's thrushes was our visit to Smalls Falls. We happened to be passing and thought we might as well see what it had to offer. At first impressions, it was a parking lot with a bridge and a view of a medium-sized waterfall.
We followed the trail which hugged the side of the falls and discovered that there are several cascades.
The noise from the tumbling water was quite overwhelming after our peaceful walk on the mountain. There were probably birds in the woods, but we didn't detect them.
I’m in a neighborhood book club, and we recently read Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear. I had decidedly mixed feelings about it, though truth be told I’m not sure whether it’s because, as a nerd who mostly reads sci-fi, I was disappointed to discover that it doesn’t actually involve time travel.
I guess that’s a spoiler of sorts, but I was a little annoyed that it was being marketed that way, and it’s clear soon after the main character wakes up in (what she thinks is) the past that that’s not actually the case. What’s actually going on is in some ways more interesting, though I kept feeling the book would resonate with me more if I had more exposure to both influencers and certain brands of Christianity than I want to.
The book did engender a lot of discussion, so, there’s that.
Back in 2022 Seattle Met magazine ran an article on the Ramtha School of Enlightenment, which I just read this week. The Ramtha compound is located about 60 miles south of Seattle in Yelm, WA. I’d heard about it back in the 1980s because Gary Trudeau used to make fun of it in Doonesbury, but I didn’t know it was based in Yelm until I went to the town for the first time in 2009 for a friend’s wedding. Since then I’ve been spending a lot of time in the area and will eventually be living there. The article’s discussion of Ramtha’s effect on the town tracks with what I’ve seen and heard from people I’ve met there, though it doesn’t mention some of the other reasons the town’s population is growing, including people moving north and south from increasingly expensive Portland and Seattle.
Sarah Lyons, whose writing I’ve been very much enjoying lately, had a recent piece titled “On Unholy Anorexia” that I at first read out of idle interest and then found myself really getting into.
Recently I’d decided to intentionally lose some weight, for health-related reasons. This isn’t an invitation to a referendum on that decision, but rather because the decision is recent, I found myself comparing it to the extremities Lyons describes in her piece. As a former Catholic I’m familiar with the forms that turn up in the lives of the saints, but it wouldn’t have occurred to me to compare them to the mortifications of the flesh showing up on Tiktok. I don’t think I’ll be looking there for inspiration.
Neurologist A.B. Acharya writes about his mother’s dementia, and I find some of the beats familiar though not all. My own mother’s aphasia is now so severe that our conversations, when we have them, consist largely of yes or no questions. She is always trying to get up and walk around, which I suspect to be an expression of frustration with her circumstances that she can’t get across in any other way. We were far down this road before I properly recognized we were even on it, and one of the many terrible things about the journey is that it continues whether you want it to or not, whether you’re prepared for it or not, whether you’re doing anything about it or not. Dementia sucks, and there’s no sure way to avoid it.
One thing I enjoy about getting into new-to-me music as an Old is there’s no pressure to know the latest of anything (though I get the impression that that’s less of a thing than it used to be anyway). So, though she’s been around for awhile, I just recently discovered Czarina:
Clips of this performance were floating around social media this week, especially noting that Robert Glasper has tears running down under his sunglasses while he plays a cover of Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right Place,” and it is incredibly powerful. But I poked around a bit and he’s been covering this song for at least 20 years, so I wonder why this performance affected him so much? (video)
This New York Times article about Sylvester Stallone’s Cliffhanger being a “good-bad movie” is fun and interesting, and it also made me think that if they really want to milk this “good-bad” thing, they could probably just write about every 80s and 90s action movie that I loved/love (aside from Die Hard, which is just a good-good movie). [GIFT LINK] (thanks, Syd)
I don’t know why I am interested in the $1.50 Costco hot dog (I’ve been vegetarian for 20+ years now, so I’ve never actually eaten one). But I am interested in the $1.50 Costco hot dog, mostly because people love it, its $1.50 price seems to be part of the Costco mythology, and people like Alan Seigel see fit to write about said mythology and what it means today.
There’s a section of this piece that captures something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: The idea that we all feel like we should try to make more money in order to afford nicer things and experiences, but that at a certain amount of wealth, you often (maybe unintentionally) buy yourself out of having an authentic human experience—or at least, an experience that’s authentic to most humans. Anyway, Garrett Bucks wrote it way better in his essay, “Do you believe that everybody should have fun or that only a few people should have fun?”: “I resent the corporations that commodify our joy. I hate this broader system of haves and have nots. And I’ve got plenty of not-too-tender feelings about the wealth hoarders themselves, occupying their luxury boxes and driving up prices for the rest of us. But I also feel sorry for them, because the more they buy into the idea of exclusivity and isolation, the more that they’ll never actually experience the best parts of being alive.”(via Kottke)
My friend Nick Triolo’s fantastic (and award-winning!) book The Way Around just celebrated its first birthday this week, and he found a really unique way to write about the experienceof creating the book, and doing his best to push it out into the world for the past year, including his therapist’s line that “by publishing a book you’re voluntarily expanding the surface area of the self that makes contact with the world, and that’ll bring with it all sorts of interesting and challenging encounters.”
I believe our things have a part in shaping us. I also believe that we shape those things in ways that might well be called their spirits. Our use of things makes them individual exemplars of those things, especially if we have them for a long time.
I said goodbye to my Toyota Prius this week, and I’m feeling pretty sad about it.
When I bought the car in 2006, it was mostly because I needed a vehicle for a long commute. At the time I was working in the south end of Tacoma and living adjacent to White Center, a daily round trip of about 70 miles. The second-gen Priuses were just coming out and were so hard to get that the only reason I didn’t have to wait six weeks for mine was that someone in Portland had decided they didn’t want it, and I didn’t care so much about the color that I minded getting a black one instead of dark gray.
That car made a five days a week trip with me for almost 16 years, COVID notwithstanding. I took it into situations that exceeded its design parameters, including forest service roads and snow and ice conditions that it was never meant to face. (It was great on slick roadways, though, thanks to the engine braking feature.) I loved taking it downtown, where I could squeeze it into parking spaces that my previous vehicle, a Chevy S-10, never would have managed.
I had it for 20 years, and over 300,000 miles.
It was still on its first hybrid battery, though I could tell that the battery was losing its juice. When it died, I thought, it would be time to replace the car, as a new battery would certainly cost more than the car was worth. I’d already had several expensive repairs as various parts of the car inevitably wore out. It wasn’t quite the Ship of Theseus, but it might well have gotten there.
I know that this isn’t always the logic people have about cars; in fact, there’s a good chance that my next car will be a used EV as people who bought the first two generations of them start trading up. I’ve never cared about having the latest and greatest of anything, although the Prius was brand new when I bought it, mostly because you couldn’t get used ones, yet. But whenever I decided to fix my car rather than put that money into a new one, it was due to a mix of sentimental attachment, and a belief I have about reducing externalities in general. We make a lot of trash on this planet, and trash is what all cars eventually become.
All that adds up to 20 years, and over 300,000 miles.
At the beginning of June, someone hit the passenger side rear quarter panel while I was stopped at a stoplight. They were trying, it turned out, to avoid another vehicle that had started merging into where they were driving. Not a lot of damage, but body work is never cheap these days, and the body shop quote added up to over $3000 when all was said and done.
The liability claim offered a payout of over $5000. In the end, it all came down to math.
I could’ve taken a lower payout, and gotten it fixed. I could’ve kept driving it, even without repairing the body damage, until the hybrid battery died, or something else expensive to replace, or it was in a worse crash (it had already been rear-ended once), or the engine finally at long last gave out. Occasionally I think maybe I should’ve, but I have a long history of second-guessing my own decisions.
20 years. That’s longer than I’ve been married, though only just.
It feels a bit silly to be sad about it. This isn’t even the worst thing I’ve gone through this week, to say nothing of my wider circle of acquaintance, not to mention the rest of the world. But in the small, personal, immediate circle of my life, something that took care of me and helped me move through the world in ways that I wanted or needed to is gone, something that was part of that life for 20 years and over 300,000 miles.
We watched some young barn swallows waiting to be fed but the actual visits from the parent(s) were so short that it was hard to catch on camera. Eventually I succeeded after a fashion.
This week was 33 miles of running and a lot of travel.
This entire week was spent in Olomouc, Czech Republic at the Olomouc Women's Grand Prix, where I a) got my International Para-Athlete classification, and b) raced the 800, 5000, and 1500. With some other adventures along the way. All of which will be described in the race report that I'm working on right now.
Dailies:
Monday: 6 miles very easy (10;00) with four strides in the morning; 2 miles warm-up and then a hard 400m in spikes for my International Para-Athlete Classification in the evening.
Tuesday: 5.5 miles mostly very easy (10:25) but with 2x100 in 26 and 25 at the end.
Wednesday: 6 miles, including 2x200, 2x100, 2x200 in spikes in 51, 51, 24, 24, 51, and 48.
Thursday: 4 mile warm-up, and then an 800m race in 3:22
Friday: 3 mile warm-up, and then a 5K race/solo time trial in 23:03. Later, another 2 mile warm-up and then a 1500 race in 6:59.
Saturday: Off. Just a lot of walking and cheering at the track meet.
Sometime between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. last Wednesday night, I got kicked in the head. I jolted awake, not sure what was happening for a few seconds, then realized it was my 3-foot 6-inch tall preschooler’s feet in my face.
I was trying to sleep against the wall of the biggest tent I’ve ever owned, and finding it a little cramped because my child, who was sleeping between myself and my wife, had worked himself into a position exactly perpendicular to us:
I gently turned him to lie parallel to his parents, the orientation I believe the tentmakers intended when they designed the tent. He remained asleep the entire time, the kind of sleep quality you can only obtain when you have complete trust in the world and your parents, no concept of time, and no responsibilities whatsoever.
This tent, the MSR Habiscape 4, is a tad under eight feet wide by eight feet long, weighs 12 pounds, and is six feet one inches tall in the middle. It is the first tent I have ever owned (I guess technically it’s Hilary’s since she got it for free from a previous job) that I can stand up inside.
Hilary and I met 14 years ago at about this time of year, and we moved in together about 13 and a half years ago—into a 2005 Chevy Astrovan, which had less square footage than the MSR Habiscape 4, and which you definitely could not stand up inside (or actually sit up, except in the front seats). We slept on a small mattress in the back of that van for a year and a half before we moved into an apartment together, and for the first half of our relationship we adventured often, sleeping in sub-five-pound two-person backpacking tents, tarps slung over trekking poles, bivy sacks, and sometimes just sleeping bags under the stars.
Then we got a dog, which usually necessitated a 3-person backpacking tent (except the time/times we mistakenly packed the 2-person tent), and then we had a baby. A baby we could fit in a 2-person backpacking tent, but with all the baby stuff we had to take with us, we figured maybe we just do the big car camping tent—which fortuitously appeared in our lives about three months before Jay was born.
Jay’s first-ever camping trip wasn’t until he was almost two years old, and when I mentioned to an acquaintance that we took a Pack ’N Play with us for his first camping trip, she seemed appalled, saying “You don’t have to take a Pack ’N Play” in an almost scolding tone, as if I didn’t know the first thing about camping. She was right, but look, I’ve slept outside on a portaledge hundreds of feet up a cliff, and on top of a coiled-up climbing rope on the rocky top of a peak, but that was a younger version of me. Older me had been getting his ass kicked by newborn/infant/toddler-related sleep interruptions for almost two years, so fuck yes we were taking that Pack ’N Play, a sleep sack, and whatever other interventions we might need to eek out a few hours of quality sleep. Also, this tent is 64 square feet! It’s not like we don’t have room.
Sometimes I joke that growing up is just building your own prison out of things you love, but that’s of course exaggeration—it’s more like sacrificing your own freedom in exchange for things you think will be worth it: pets, kids, a consistent roof over your head, maybe some plants to nurture.
Are there days when I somewhat wistfully stare out the window and reminisce about the days when I could just pack up a few things, strap them to my back or my bike, and head off into the mountains for a few nights out? Sure. But I’ve also been quite pleasantly surprised by how comfortably I have slid into the Big Tent life stage. We just got home from spending five nights in the Big Tent near Fernie, B.C., and yeah, we didn’t get very far into the backcountry, and getting Jay to go to sleep when it was light out until after 10 p.m. was a struggle, and I didn’t really get to do anything I might have done I been visiting on my own (look at all those peaks!), but I also didn’t have a single moment of wondering if I should be doing anything else.
If we’re doing things right at all, our 3 1/2 -foot-tall Amateur Human Being should be acquiring more skills and resilience as time goes on, and it won’t be too long before more of our trips utilize the lightweight but cramped quarters of some of our backpacking tents, and we leave the Big Tent at home because we’re farther into the backcountry. Which I guess will be a new stage in life—at least for one of us.
Here are some more birds from last Wednesday's nature group visit at the edge of The Pool in Biddeford Pool. Progressively more and more of a test for the low-light performance of my new lens arrangement.
We woke up abruptly a little before 6:30 am to the sound of an electrical fault that caused a power outage for an hour or so - once again a squirrel shorted out a distribution transformer in our neighborhood.
Fortunately, this didn’t interfere with the plans to celebrate Exile #2’s birthday which included watching the football followed by delivered pizza and a birthday cake along with some gifts of course. Happy Birthday Exile #2!
This week was 32 miles of running, 3 "miles" of pool-running, and 500 yards of swimming.
I'm catching up on the blog after being out for the past week plus. This week was a bridge week between the BAA 10K and the Olomouc Women's Grand Prive. So the first few days were focused on recovery from the 10K, followed by a quick tune up workout on Friday. And then I got on a plane to Europe.
Dailies:
Monday: 3 "miles" of pool-running in the morning; upperbody weights/core in afternoon, foam rolling in evening.
Tuesday: 4 miles very easy (9:42) with 4x100m in 25, 25, 24, 24, followed with PT exercises. Foam rolling at night.
Wednesday: 7.5 miles very easy (9:42) and 500 yards of swimming. Foam rolling at night.
Thursday: 4.5 miles very easy on trails (10:31) followed by PT exercises. Streaming Pilates and foam rolling at night.
Friday: 8 miles, including a 3200 at tempo effort (15:03 - 7:40/7:23), followed by 4 minutes of jogging and then an 800 hard in 3:27. Followed this with a 2:40 jog and then a 400 hard in 1:40. Then swapped to spikes for 2x200, 2x400 in 26, 25, 50, and 49. Foam rolling at night.
Saturday: 8 miles easy (9:37) and upperbody weights/core. Flight to Europe in the afternoon.
I had Thursday and Friday of last week off for the Fourth of July holiday. I ended up taking Wednesday afternoon off so that my four-and-a-half day weekend started and ended with England World Cup matches (Wednesday afternoon and Sunday night).
Our nature group also met on Wednesday in Biddeford Pool for a mid-week evening outing that felt like the start of the weekend for me.
I've recently added a 1.4x teleconverter to my camera setup and was pleased with how it held up in the fading evening light (it trades light for magnification). Here are some photos of a bald eagle we first saw perched on a chimney, then harassed by a gull before giving us a nice fly-by.
Do you use an activity tracker? I have an Oura ring, a Google Pixel watch, and a phone which runs Google Fit. All of those count my steps, and each one does some additional activity or sleep tracking. I find them all fun and interesting, so I’m always amused when yet another article comes out warning of the dangers of activity tracking.
I mean, sure. If you’re really foolish, you can be seriously led astray by one of these. But you’d have to be really foolish. It’s like the early days of GPS map software, where they’d be giving you directions and say, “Turn left!” but if you turned left you’d end up in a creek. Sure, you could do that, but all you had to do was look where you were going, and you could avoid it pretty easily.
Although the article has five items, there are, I think, two fundamental issues that Bakr is warning about. The larger one is outsourcing our good sense to some external device. The smaller is an excessive focus on step-count as the measure of fitness activity.
Letting a device tell you to push hard when you’re feeling crappy is just stupid. (It is perhaps somewhat less stupid to let a device tell you to take it easy when you feel great. I have several times decided to push hard because I felt great, even though one of my devices was warning me that I wasn’t fully recovered. More than once when I did that, I ended up having a crappy workout, because the device was right and I was wrong.)
With their fixation on steps (because that’s easy for a device to measure), devices have a pretty limited insight into the full scope of your movement practice. This means that they’re never going to know if your strength training is covering all the major muscle groups, or if your volume and intensity are on point. But that’s not really different from training without a device. Really, it only makes things worse if you’re so foolish as to imagine that it’s got some insight into stuff other than your steps and heart rate (or whatever else its measuring). Just like it doesn’t know enough about your strength training to provide useful advice there, it also doesn’t know much about your skills training or your flexibility training.
A lot of my training is focused on specifically increasing the sort of fitness I need for my HEMA practice. None of my devices even tries to guide me as to whether I should do less lunging practice in favor of overhead pressing practice or vice versa. (And if they did, I wouldn’t pay much attention, unless they’d started getting me to upload my sparring footage. And maybe not then.)
Getting back to the fixation on steps, the device makers want to pretend that step counts gives them some sort of deep insight into a human’s movement practice, with a one-size-fits-all target of 10,000 steps.
Weirdly, I don’t think that’s crazy. I mean, steps are by no means the only aspect of a human’s movement practice that’s important, but it’s actually not a bad proxy.
Over an evolutionarily long period, walking and running have been critical to human success. Running and walking were key to our successes in both hunting and gathering, and probably led directly to our big brains.
All three of my devices count steps. All three track walking and running. (They all try to track other activity—cycling, swimming, gardening, housework—but do so pretty poorly. Walking and running, though, they pretty much have nailed.)
In my mid-20s I was working in an office, but getting out to hike at every opportunity, which didn’t come frequently enough. I remember thinking, “If only I could get out and hike a few miles every day! I’d be in great shape!” That turns out not to be true, but it’s not completely false either.
My point here is simply that step counts are by no means a terrible proxy for one’s overall activity level, and 10,000 steps is by no means a stupid target—it’s mildly ambitious, without being out of reach for anyone with a reasonable level of fitness and some spare time. (I admit that I might well think this because I’m a weird outlier. I’m a walker from way back. I’m retired, so I have all the time in the day to walk if I want to. And I have a dog who likes to walk a lot. The upshot is, my daily steps hit 15,000 nearly every day.)
All of which is to say that I find these devices useful. In particular, they’re good at observing that I’m not fully recovered, meaning I should take it easy, even if I’m feeling okay. I find them (mildly) motivating, in that I pretty much never fail to hit 10,000 steps (unless I’m sick, the dog is sick, or the weather is terrible). I find them somewhat entertaining, especially when their praise is so for stuff I consider pretty minimal. (“You’ve met your activity goal for the day!” My Oura ring will say at 10:00 AM.)
In any case, I find them quite harmless. They don’t make me feel anxious or shamed. I’ve seen no sign that they are prompting disordered eating. I’m amused by their fixation on step counts, but not troubled by it. (I occasionally miss my 10,000 steps, usually when I’ve spent the day sitting in a plane, train, or car. I am not bothered when my devices observe that this is the case.) I care deeply about getting in my mobility work and my strength work, even if the devices don’t track it adequately. I take great joy in my movement—click any of the tags over there with “movement” in the name and find yourself taken to dozens of places where I’ve celebrated my movement practice, starting from before I had any devices, and continuing to this day. Finally, I am merely amused if my device dings me for not doing enough, as my Oura ring does if I sit for more than 50 minutes. (In fact though, these past few years, I can only barely sit still that long anyway.)
The key paragraph from the article:
For users, the first shift is to treat tracking as information rather than instruction. A watch can tell you what it has measured. It cannot tell you what your body needs today.
I mean, I know I’m a movement weirdo, but really? Who would do anything else?
It has been absolutely sweltering this week and although today has taken a turn for the better, we mostly stayed inside and kept cool. It didn’t hurt that there was World Cup footie to watch, although I couldn’t help wondering how the Norwegians were coping with running around on a summer afternoon in New Jersey.
I read a little bit about how England had been preparing, doing fitness drills in a tent heated to 90°F/32°C. It seems some of the coaches may have been doing the same, as a few have persisted in wearing suit jackets - either that or they have ice packs sewn into their linings. We’ve just learned, however, that the England game is delayed by an hour due to storms, so we’ll have to wait just a while longer to learn their fate (not so much of hardship for us as it is for those in the UK!).
If your website has a “See more” link, I assume that indicates that the rest of the article or site is unimportant or uninteresting, so I basically never click on it. Why would I?
Now, if you share 20 or more full posts and then have an “Older posts” link at the bottom, that’s different. (And much better than having a script to make the page endlessly scroll.)
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