November update, I went to New York

"Teach a man to fish and he eventually breaks his fishing pole."

- Winston Churchill

Okay you don't need to google that, I'm pretty sure Winston Churchill never said it. I did however, break both of my fly rods this year. One broke mid-cast and the other broke during a messy release. Fortuitously both were under warranty and were able to be replaced, though I missed a couple months of fishing at the end of the summer.

During late June I participated in an informal fishing contest sponsored by a local fly fishing shop. Given ten days, participants caught as many different species within the area as possible. I was pretty far out of the winnings, but had fun and got a lot of fishing in.

The relative importance of participating was maintaining my schedule and routine during the competition, as if every day is an opportunity to wake up at 4 AM, drive to Wisconsin, fly fish for 12 hours, drive home, ride my bicycle to the YMCA, swim a half mile, catch the paper, do the puzzles, make dinner, have a beer, wash the dishes, do the next day's New York Times Crossword puzzle, fall asleep, wake up and go to work the next day without pretense.

I'm not "saying" that's how it went, because it wasn't, it was only one of ten days.

The whole thing smacked of effort, as they say.

So around about mid-summer, I bought a round trip ticket to New York. I've been happily employed as a retail associate for almost a year now, and a vacation seemed warranted. Luckily I was able to get the time away from work and I started planning my visit for late October.

I flew to Newark airport on a Monday, and walked, and walked and walked. I walked across the Brooklyn bridge, I walked through Soho, Chelsea, Chinatown and the World Trade Center Memorial. I found the Fearless Girl statue, facing down the New York Stock Exchange; I walked past the Flatiron building, wrapped in scaffolding 22 stories high. I took some pictures, had a couple slices of pizza and got home in time to meet my hosts before they started their Tuesday morning.

Tuesday I went to New Haven, Connecticut and saw the Peabody Museum. On Wednesday I went to the Meat Packing District, visited the Whitney Museum, purchased a three day Citi Bike membership, found the 14th Street YMCA, swam and had more pizza. 

Thursday I started early, riding a Citi Bike past the UN Building, through Central Park and stopping at the Guggenheim museum. I've never seen anything like Central Park, or the constant throngs of people in and around the city. The Manhattan Riverfront Greenway was safer than riding in the street, and every view of the Hudson and East rivers was worth the effort.

With half the day remaining I made it to the American Museum of Natural History and The Metropolitan Museum of Art before they closed - eventually riding my way back to the Chelsea YMCA to swim again before having a late night Chinatown dinner and beer with my host.

These two museums, the Natural History Museum and The Met - are grandiose in scale. I only had enough time to see one specific room of The Met, and happily viewed paintings of the Abstract Expressionist style before going to the roof and watching the sun set over Central Park. 

Friday morning I saw the sunrise and got on the New Jersey transit to Newark before 8 AM.

While I was there my streak of New York Times crossword puzzles went past five hundred days. As I sat in the courtyard of the Natural History Museum and finished the Thursday puzzle without googling the answers or querying a blog for hints, I thanked whoever I could for the opportunity to be there, accomplishing something I had struggled with for so long.

So there it is, a couple of big events in the past four or five months. I think I skipped a few things, but most of it is in there somewhere.

Thanks for reading.

Manhattan, NY, 10-23-2019. Photo by Michael McKinney.

Manhattan, New York, 10-23-2019. Photo by Michael McKinney

Minneapolis, MN, 9-22-2019, photo by Michael McKinney

Peabody Museum, New Haven, CT, 10-22-2019. Photo by Michael McKinney.

Manhattan, New York, 10-25-2019. Photo by Michael McKinney.

Manhattan ,New York. 10-24-2019. Photo by Michael McKinney.

Saint Croix River, MN. 8-1-2019, photo by Michael McKinney.

Manhattan, NY, 10-23-2019. Photo by Michael McKinney.

Manhattan ,NY, 10-22-2019. Photo by Michael McKinney.

Manhattan, NY, 10-24-2019. Photo by Michael McKinney.

Minneapolis, MN, 8-23-2019, photo by Michael McKinney.

Manhattan, NY, 10-21-2019. Photo by Michael McKinney.

The inevitable mechanical issue

Awhile back I got into some trouble ... isn't that how all of these posts start?

"Awhile back I got into some trouble and yada yada yada, here is what I learned, I hope it is useful, take it or leave it, not to preach, etcetera etcetera, passive aggressive voice, should have learned my lesson but here I am" and so on and so forth.

So let's start with the Big Wheel. I didn't have a lot of toys as a kid. Star Wars figures in my neighborhood, and in my peer group, were the status symbol. I had a few, but also random oddities ... a Thundercats figure, a Tron figure, some Gobots; I was more Catholic in my tastes, you could say.

So the story goes I had a circuit I would ride on my Big Wheel, out my parents driveway, down the block, up a neighbors sloped driveway, skid turn, ramp down, back towards the parents driveway, over a grassy knoll, onto the concrete driveway of home, skid turn and start over. It was a dead end so how many times I could do it was more essential than watching out for passing cars.

Eventually, I got ambitious and tried a larger hill leading to my parents house. After a few tries I incorporated a skid turn, (remember the e-brake on the right hand side of the old all plastic Big Wheels?) and there begins a series of long and complicated crashes.

Skateboards, bikes, rollerblades, roller skis, skis, snowboards, cars ... just about anything that rolls down a hill I have crashed, with the exception of an oversized tractor tire. Don't ever try that. I strongly do not recommend that. Also wear a helmet.

Anyway, so what?, you crash and you get up and that's it. But not so with a decent working bicycle.

Sometimes the bicycle needs repair and then what? I have posted various DIY efforts on this blog before, and I am not sure anyone is really paying attention; sometimes I get it working sometimes not. I made a huge mistake in 2010, and therein lays the trouble I got into.

On a forty or fifty mile ride in Northern Washington County, past Big Marine Lake and William O'Brien State Park, I got a flat tire.

After breaking two tire levers, ripping two replacement tubes, cursing in frustration for forty-five minutes on the side of the road and eventually succumbing to a spiral of failure, I rode home on a flat tire. About nine miles on the aluminum rim of a new-ish wheel set.

Don't ever do that.

8 Years ... 8 very long years, with a lot of cycling miles later, I wore out a different wheelset. It took a little more than 10,000 miles over 5 years, but I needed to go back to that damaged pair of wheels, and I did. They were never right. The rear axle had been damaged and it occasionally oscillated so badly (usually going over 20 mph) that the rear hub would vibrate like a 1980s pager. So yeah, that was aggravating and embarrassing.

Couple that with trying to find out why it was not working without acknowledging I had ruined them made it worse, so here is an apology to those I harangued. The good news, and there has been a lot of it lately, is that life continues. Time passes. Sometimes the only person who rememberers how or why you came to be upset 9 years ago is you, and maybe explaining it isn't going to help anyone. What helped me a lot more was acquiescing and allowing someone to throw out that wheelset before I could try salvaging them one more time.

I enjoyed another 30 Days of Biking this spring, getting through another characteristically unpredictable Minnesota Spring with maybe a little less drama and fewer contradictions than how I came to be riding a bicycle year round to start with. The fishing has been a bit off due to high water (the Mississippi has set a record for being at flood stage for the longest period of time in recorded history, breaking the 1927 flood that shows up at the end of 'Oh Brother Where Art Thou?').

To be certain the potential for crashing is greater while cycling in the Twin Cities than on a dead end street in the suburbs; bike trails and multi-modal commuting are real world alternatives to making a poor decision or applying a little too much ego sauce on your plans and failing gloriously, "...in a cavalcade of anger and fear."

Did you know that while pitching the only perfect game in World Series history, Don Larsen threw a strike outside of the strike zone, and the umpire called it a strike?

I guess there is a lesson there about ethics and standards of operation, perhaps deviation from accepted norms and even the normalization of deviance, somehow, but I don't follow baseball.

March 7th, 2019. Photo by Michael McKinney.

April 5th, 2019. Photo by Michael McKinney.

April 9th, 2019. Minnehaha Falls, MPLS. Photo by Michael McKinney.

April 10th, 2019, Nicollet Mall, MPLS. Photo by Michael McKinney

May 4th, 2019 at the Fulton Fondo. 

March 2019

February was a long slog, snow kept falling and the temperature plummeted more than once. After moving to Minneapolis last year I didn't know what to expect in the winter. The streets in my neighborhood are closer, tighter, more lined with cars and alleys than bike paths along Summit Avenue, Saint Clair Avenue or the much hyped Cretin Avenue bike path.

The decreasing width of the one way streets due to heavy snowfall is not entirely new, last summer, within six weeks of moving, Hennepin Avenue was torn up for a construction project, and buses were running through Fremont and Girard Avenue one way streets ... that's a full size metro transit bus, between parking on both sides of the street, on a one way, every day, on schedule. Pretty much close to schedule, anyway. So I spent a little more time on NiceRide bicycles, and found their convenience reassuring, if the bus was not on time, there was usually a way to get to where I wanted to be.

I have been trying to swim more and more regularly, struggling to learn how to share a lane with another swimmer - I reflected to somebody once how playing basketball is the closest I can get to role playing as an adult, sometimes putting myself into the character of a player taking a free throw, or lining up a three point shot like Ray Allen, ice cold as the buzzer signals the end of the game. Unflappable.

Nothing makes me flap more than trying to swim in a lane with somebody, and it is not without precedent. I just don't want to be hit, or hit, or be disturbed for the twenty minutes it takes me to swim a half mile.

Sometimes, it is the only twenty minutes in a 24 hour period I can be in motion and not expect somebody to walk in front of me, to drive in front of me, to imperil or inconvenience me with side stepping, back stepping, waltzing to and fro, the tango, the sashay, the "whatever it takes to not get hurt or hurt", the "get out of my way" maneuvers that become a high school student's common practice as he or she makes their way from one class to another.

Who expects that from adulthood?

I aspired to loving, and being loved in return, and instead I have, "worry about being hit or hitting in return."

So anyway, that's what I like about swimming; even if I need to learn how to share a lane, I get those twenty minutes or so of just concentrating on my breathing, the floating and the kinetic drift of my body through the water. It is not a simple thing, despite Michael Phelp's large diet and carefree attitude, it is not at all like that.

Besides that, I got to reading "The Right Stuff" last year, and then watched the movie. I liked the book quite a bit, as it holds true to the essay form Tom Wolfe displayed in "The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test", sometimes interjecting personal opinions and embellishments that may or may not be true but really fill out the images and characters well. My daily efforts at crosswords and sudoku puzzles continue, sometimes to less than commendable results; not inconsequentially, gradually requiring less and less antagonism.

There has been some bike riding and baking so far this year, but more constant priorities have returned, as reliable as the Spring snowstorm that accompanies the Minnesota State Boys Hockey tournament; Will I be able to renew my lease? Will I have a place to live? Can I stay healthy? Is there a reasonable career I can establish for myself in middle age? When and where did all of the time go?

These studded tires are something else.

Photo by Jim McKinney