Biding time

 It works.

To contribute to the Muscular Dystrophy Association, click here: Jon's MDA drive.

We've been at the Michigan homestead this week, working, mostly, all in the realm of Upkeep. Still it's a nice place to be, and we are fortunate. 

Waiting for my bike ride to commence, I feel a little lost, living ahead of myself, and, when I come back to where I actually am, and doing what I should be doing, I feel tired. So I'm up to about a nap a day. 

I leave June 15 or 16, thereabouts, and have tentatively recruited a compadre, the famous Bruce, who will join me a day or so in, and stay on the trail for, well, who knows how long. Where company is concerned, I'll take it. 

I did a dry run, in a car, of my first day's ride. It'll be about 55 miles through woods and past farms. As I have not ridden in almost two weeks, 55 sounds like a long way. But I'll leave early and I'll just keep cranking. And eating.  

Behold, above, my new tent. I put the fly on after the picture was taken -- inside out. It was a choice. No, really.  

Well well well

Oh boy.

Sorry I've been out of touch. Still a month till I go, but I've been packing assiduously for days. It's like doing a puzzle, and then doing it again, and again. My office is a mess, the bike's leaning on the dining table where we hope the dog won't knock it over, and we eat hunched over the TV trays holding conversations that are, well, merely polite. 

Sorry about the tired picture. It's from last fall's ride -- closest I could come to what I'll look like this year.  And here's my half-finished packing list: 

It's a fluid document. I don't want to carry things I won't use. On the other hand, I want to keep myself from turning savage, stealing food from picnic tables and snatching sleeping bags out of strangers' tents.  

So.

We've had a couple of outdoor dinners with friends at local restaurants, and it was like surfacing after a long period under water. We could actually talk in the old way, interpret a hesitant smile, gauge a shrug of doubt, listen to an anecdote uninterrupted by a spinning connection. We are, again, HUMAN!

June 15 is still my tentative departure date, give or take. We're going to Michigan for a few days at the end of the month, and while I'm there I will drive my first day's ride, just to see what it looks like. If it's nothing but hills and wind and cars, heavens, maybe I'll just cancel the whole thing. 

Such a good boy.

Summer ride

 Making plans

I said I would finish my crash-interrupted cross country ride of 2019, and I'm finally getting around to figuring it out.

Just to recap, I'd done about 2600 miles from Astoria, Oregon to southern Michigan when, in August, my riding buddy Mark and I were hit by a car. We were both hospitalized for many days; the driver, a young woman, was cited with two counts of causing bodily injury with a motor vehicle; and still, at this late date, my claim for medical costs is ongoing.

My old bike was destroyed, and I bought a new one, a Surly "Disc Trucker," in February and have been riding pretty regularly when this crappy Wisconsin weather allows. 

The red line on the map shows what I've done so far, the "x" the site of the crash, and the brown is my tentatively planned route. I hope to leave in mid-June. 

The route takes me from the ferry landing in Ludington, Michigan, around a crescent-shaped loop (an Adventure Cycling route) to Bay City and down to the Detroit area. I might get help from my intrepid wife in a car to get me through Detroit -- although there are trails -- and on down to Toledo, or maybe Huron, Ohio. 

The best way to go would be through Canada along the northern shore of Lake Erie, but Canada is closed to visitors, so I'll follow the southern shore of the lake on marked routes. This involves a few big cities, like Cleveland, so I'll just take my time. 

At Buffalo, I meet the Erie Canal trail. It's about 400 miles, flat, wide, pretty much straight and closed to motor vehicles. I think it might even be a little dull, but there are small towns and lock stations to explore, and it has an interesting history. 

When I reach Albany, I'll follow trails through the Hudson River valley to NYC, where I'm hoping my sisters will take me in, and Ms. V will pick me up. 

It's about 1200 miles, roughly a third of the total distance coast-to-coast. It should take 30-ish days, so let's say 40 at my lollygagging pace, which would bring us to, say, the end of July or beginning of August. 

Stay tuned!

  

On the downbeat

 

The Hoan Bridge drowning in fog.  

It would be disrespectful to say the weather is like the pandemic. But it's depressing in its way. I've been biking semi-regularly, but for two days now I haven't had the spunk, and, outside the window, it's a sunless 50 degrees and threatening to rain, so maybe I'll take another day off and just futz in the house.  

The dining room is littered with dog toys like car parts in a vacant lot. You have to walk very carefully just to cross the room, and we're looking forward to getting out of town in May when we'll be all vaxxed up. 

I can't wait.

The lakefront. Same day as above, no kidding!

I'll do my best.

Hostage to a 4-pound dog

Jamison with his keeper

It's been two and a half weeks and young Jamison is settling in well. He has us trained in his service and we are meeting his every need. We think he was in shock for the first couple of days -- he was wary and did a lot of staring, and of course who could blame him. It would be like me, for example, waking up one morning to find myself on the Serengeti tended to by kindly elephants. 

Ms. V has been a warrior on his behalf, enrolling him in a class, taking him to the vet, procuring special foods, and taking him out to do his business six or eight times a day, including at least twice in the middle of every night. She has slid into a kind of baby talk with him that is barely comprehensible, but he is, like, in love with her, and even tolerates me in short polite intervals, which is about what I deserve. He travels with V everywhere, including to see her mother -- two hours each way -- and is pretty content to ride it out in a little crate, where he also sleeps at night, propped on a couple of chairs so he can see his momma all night long. 

He understands the world mostly through his mouth -- that is, seeing something is not quite enough; he has to taste it, chew it, see what it's made of. He has accumulated quite a few toys and he likes nothing better than to have to retrieve a thrown squeaky toy or a plastic bone. He runs fast, paws flying, skitters to a stop, picks up the toy and races back to drop it on his red T-shirt or his pad, whichever he has designated as his nightly Base of Operations. In the hours before bed he gets so wound up, scrambling here and there, we call it the Nighttime Crazies, and it's better than TV. 

POSTSCRIPT: We have appointments for vaccines this week, and we are excited! We used this link: https://mke-vaccines.egov.com/  It may require you to be a City of Milwaukee resident. 

 

 

  

Dam-burst of dog dreams

Our long-running push-me pull-you dog discussion ended last week with Ms. V the winner, just as she wins most of our discussions. Hey, she's a lawyer. 

It's not that I don't like dogs. I just didn't want to have to care for a dog, what with my full schedule of eating, biking and fretting. Until recently, Ms.V was working full time, exercising or yoga-ing straight thereafter, and then rushing off to book club or investment club or theater club or church club or one of her various dining-out clubs -- much of which is not my cup of tea, and which would've left me the de facto dog-walker-in-chief.     

But along came the miracle of retirement. I had to relent. 

We took a little day trip to a pup breeder last week and spent about an hour with a variety of little dogs one or two at a time. We finally decided on a thoughtful, playful but scholarly little fellow, a 12-week-old "Poochon" (poodle/bichon). Julia was nearly giddy in the presence of pup after pup after pup, and has spent recent days buying toys and foods and reading up on her training manuals. We will actually bring the dog home Friday. 

 

We're calling him Jamison -- pronounced like "peanut butter and jam-ison." See Take a Letter for a good use of it. 

• 

Jamison on prom day

Jamison (right) valiantly battles a mighty foe. 

 

Leave me alone for a minute, lady!

Ahh.

Well, I didn't want to drop him.

Earlobe fatigue

 

It's not really the lobe, google says, but rather the pinna or auricle that all that crap is hanging on. The lobe is the drippy thing on the bottom, as if you didn't know.  (Bet you didn't think I actually did research, did you.) In any case, it's gotten to be kind of a lot, as the crimpled, folded state of the top of my ear shows. 

If I put it all on wrong and then, say, try to put a stocking cap on, it all comes tumbling down and I have to start over. If I try to take off my glasses, or, for example, pull my mask -- or both masks -- down, you can see the problem. And don't even ask about changing the volume on my sound system. None of this, of course, has yet risen to the attention of the Biden administration, but for those of us not skilled in health care, or not flying to Cancun, it is what we're left to. 

While we're on the subject of ears, let me take you back about 40 years to one of the best days my ears ever had :

Ah, shucks. That's Ms. V, in her best flannel pajamas, fingering my smooth elfin auricle. Such hair!