Ploafmaster General

Finally made it to Fort Worth this afternoon, but not without incident. Somewhere east of Paris I unavoidably struck a truck tire belt either coming off of a truck in front of me or passing right underneath it. Either way, I couldn’t swerve in either direction and couldn’t break quickly enough to dodge so it slammed into the front of my car at highway speeds, effectively tearing off my front license plate and part of the plastic covering on the underside of my car. I’m grateful my family is safe, and it’s a minor miracle that none of my tires lost air. We made it to our hotel without any further drama and I’ll defer that costly repair until my return to Richmond.

Thankfully we arrived early enough to start taking in the touristy wonder of the Stockyards. I can’t help feeling like it’s cowboy cosplay, but it’s charming and the kids love it. We had a helluva steak dinner, some terrific ice cream, and finally some pleasant time to unwind here in our room. We have all day tomorrow to explore the rest of the Stockyards before we cap it off with a rodeo in the evening.

Meanwhile, the forecast for Monday’s eclipse is still kinda terrible. At the very least it seems like it’ll be mostly cloudy. We’re still making our way to Clarksville (more on the way home than the original plan of Ennis) the morning of to take our chances, but we’re prepared to make an earlier departure if it looks bad so we have time for a more relaxed dinner in Memphis on the way back.

Fingers crossed!

My family hit the road this morning at 6:30, Eastern Daylight Time. We’re on our way to Texas in order to, ultimately, watch the total solar eclipse on April 8th, weather permitting. It has been a loooooooooong day, and we made it to my stretch goal of Memphis, Tennessee, after about 13.25 hours of travel time, door-to-door. I’m pretty exhausted, and not exactly behaving like my best self when the kids (bored and full of pent-up energy) snark at me right now.

I need a back rub. I need sleep. I need to watch the latest episode of Shōgun on the laptop before I turn in, and maybe I’ll finally start reading Dune before my eyes give up.

Tomorrow we’ll leave early again and I’ll drive across the Mississippi River for the first time as we enter Arkansas. As long as nothing goes wrong, we’ll reach Fort Worth late in the afternoon. I’m pretty good at long drives, but I’m also ready to be finished with this one.

Uh…so as of today I have ridden over 2000 miles in the first quarter of 2024. Pretty dang pleased with that!

Sweet fancy Moses! LEGO now has a tool on their website which lets you customize your own minifig!

Sometimes you get to share some of your favorite stuff with one of your kids, and everybody wins.

Last night, while my younger child was at school for some fun activity, I suggested to my wife that we take our older one out to dinner at her choice of restaurant. She wanted to go to Slurp! Ramen in Church Hill having never been, so off we went. A little time for her to get her parents to herself, to visit a fun restaurant and have delicious food. We all loved dinner, but since the night was young after we finished, I suggested we head next door to The Emerald Lounge - one of Richmond’s finest cocktail bars. This isn’t typically a place to take a kid, but it was reasonably early in the evening and they have several excellent non-alcoholic options available.

Our daughter is ten years old and seems to be just old enough to appreciate what it means to have a night out at one of the local “cool” spots. So my wife and I were able to enjoy some magnificent cocktails at one of our favorite places, but the kid got to feel extra special with her fancy mocktails, too. “It feels like my birthday!” she said several times.

What a great night!

Never would have guessed that, in the year of our Grob Gob Glob Grod 2024, my 10 year old would be teaching The Macarena to my 7 year old.

Really amused by what appears to be a minor backlash against all the stupid poured-epoxy slab tables on YouTube.

Lemme tell you, I will take persistent, strong headwinds outside over riding the trainer in my dining room any day of the week.

Don’t worry, I won’t make you tap the sign.

There’s already so much sign-tapping around here that it’s beginning to sound like hail on a tin roof.

I’m unreasonably excited for the arrival of my best friend, Robert, this evening. He’s driving down from PA for some family stuff but staying with us through the weekend. There will be long walks, adult beverages, hanging out with my family, and a boat load of laughter and shenanigans.

Should be here some time late this evening…

Finally caved in and snagged this trick narrow-wide chainring from what seems to be the Polish Garbaruk (who, themselves, appear to be operating in Poland for likely obvious reasons). It’s technically an “aero” chainring, which, who cares? But it’s silver, 42T, fits my crank arm, and works well in a 1x setup. I had to remove my gigantic pedal for my gigantic foot in order to swap rings, but I’m happy with the result and can’t wait to give it a whirl tomorrow!

I’m coming up on 16 years since my dad passed away and I still find great difficulty escaping some of his worst qualities in my own parenting.

Okay, so…my website hasn’t had a lot of attention for many years. I post occasionally. It’s nothing special. But it’s time to move it off Wordpress. I don’t care if it looks ugly for a while, I just wanted something where I could pay a modest amount to good people to keep my website somewhere that I didn’t have to manage it all that much.

And here we are, on micro.blog. We’ll see how it goes!

Yeah, importing my old Wordpress site…things might be messy and old for a little bit.

AND, hopefully I can catch any of my regrettable, regressive old posts before they’re public for too long (the ones I haven’t already scrubbed in the past).

Stuck with an overnight trip from Richmond, VA to Wilmington, NC for the weekend so my wife can continue parenting her mom. The kids didn't get to see their grandma over Christmas for *reasons*, so at least they get a little bit of that today and tomorrow. But a 5 hour drive each way (with the minimum stops) in such a short time really takes a dump on the weekend.

I took my bike down with me and got in close to 27 miles around the supremely boring exurban sprawl that continues in Brunswick County, but at least the weather was mild and I had the time at all. I recognize how whiney this all sounds while my wife has it much worse, but all suffering is relative, and I just want some normal weekends in the near future. Weekends without worrying about work on Monday. Weekends without 80% of daylight hours already accounted for in the calendar by a variety of Girl Scouts or swimming or errands or...

Anyway, here's some old-web-style postscript: it’s 8:16 on a Saturday night. I'm wearing a comfy flannel. I'm listening to "Fantasies" by Rogue Wave on my headphones. Goodnight.

Earlier this week, in the final days of our winter break, I took my family on a hiking trip around parts of the James River Park trail system (primarily the North Bank and Buttermilk trails). It was chilly but sunny, only lightly windy, and fairly dry. My kids were really into it for the first few miles, and in my head we really only had about 4 miles tops ahead of us on our loop. But then it turned out that my lack of planning meant that we were really staring down about 6 miles of hiking from start to finish. Not only was this a bit more than the kids (and Valerie) had bargained for, but it also backed us up against a time constraint. We needed to be back at the house in time for my oldest kid to get picked up by a friend for a trip to the movie theater.

Somewhere between 3.5 and 4 miles, my wife and I agreed that I would leave the backpack with her and the kids and I would travel much faster by myself ahead to the car so I could drive back and pick them up before the end of the loop. We all made it back in time with about 25 minutes to spare, but now I'm sworn to plan out our route ahead of time before dragging everybody on an extended hike again!

I never seem to get a chance at photographing foggy scenes. Usually the timing is wrong for me when we get the right weather conditions, but this morning I woke up early already planning for my Saturday ride when I saw a dense fog advisory in my weather app. I loaded the camera and my travel tripod onto the bike and headed out...only to have the freehub fail on my rear wheel (this means I could spin the pedals freely without actually making the bike move 🤦‍♂️).

Thankfully I was only about a mile from my house so I didn't have to walk far with my bike. My ride for the day is kinda ruined since we have stuff going on mid-day and more rain should arrive this evening (I generally try to plan my longer weekend rides around early morning and/or after bed time for the kids so I'm not sticking my wife with all the child care). But I wasn't abandoning the glorious fog, so I took my gear in the car and drive down by the river.

This year has been incredibly validating with respect to personal goal setting. I'm not a particularly goal-oriented person, but I have set and achieved a number of goals related to cycling in 2023. I rode 1-way on the Virginia Capital Trail back in May. I hit a metric century (100 kilometers) back in September. And this past Friday, less than 6 months after riding 1-way on the Capital Trail, I made it there and back. But that wasn't my goal! I wanted to ride 200 kilometers, about 124.27 miles, which is a significant distance in endurance cycling.

On this ride:

• I beat my previous longest ride (the 100k)
• I beat my previous total miles in a day (70.5 miles)
• I hit my first imperial century (100 miles)
• I crossed that 200km line with a final distance of 127.42 miles
• As this weekend draws to a close I find that I'm 500 miles away from hitting 6000 total for the year, having initially set a goal of 4800 miles.

I don't really like to brag and, for most of my life (including the present), I haven't had much to brag about anyway. Considering I was essentially sedentary 18 months ago, I'm pretty damned proud of how far I’ve come! I don't know when I'll have the time (or the luck of such good weather) to ride like this again, but I'm super grateful it worked out this weekend.

It’s a Monday, and that’s a pretty busy day in my household this school year. Everybody shuffles off the weekend, Valerie and I each had early meetings, and the kids will have swimming this evening. That means I'll be off in the Southside with them for a few hours while Valerie changes out their warm weather/cool weather clothing at home.

Oh yeah, and it’s our 19th wedding anniversary.

We had our anniversary dinner this past Saturday, so we got a date night, sure. But it’s still a slight bummer to me that we can't make more of our actual anniversary. So it goes at this stage of life with two kids in elementary school. We talked, in fact, during our date, about what we might do for 20 years in 2024. And you know what? We may not get to do much. Westerners love our significant round numbers, but we don't have easy access to reliable family babysitting for multiple nights. That means we’ll be lucky if we even get away for a short jaunt within a few hours of Wilmington, where my mother-in-law lives.

I sure am happy to continue my marriage with Valerie and I love my kids, but I sure do look forward to when they're old enough that my wife and I can go have some more husband and wife fun on our own from time to time.

You know what, though? That’s one of the fascinating things about my extended partnership with Valerie: it’s not that the importance of the anniversary date has diminished. It is, rather, that we get to keep sharing these regular days together, year after year. With the kids, without the kids, but always with each other.

Most of the time these posts are about ideas or words spontaneously floating through my head. This time, however, my wife was talking to me right before bed last night about how our son seems to have lots of random thoughts floating through his head, similar to me. That seems to have been enough to jar loose a word that kept my awake after getting up to use the bathroom at 5:17 this morning.

"Stultifying" is impairing or dulling, or making one seem kind of stupid. Sort of how I feel whenever a random word floats through my head and keeps me awake, costing me sleep, and I can't quite remember what it means.

Found a hidden boat ramp on Town Creek in Brunswick County on my ride this morning.

I mean, dang.

Ten years ago this kid was born. The day before, my wife mixed castor oil with peanut butter, spread it on toast and ate it, in order to induce her own labor. We settled down to watch Shaun of the Dead, and contractions started within a few hours. We headed to the hospital near midnight, and after a couple hours more, Maddie was born around quarter-to-three in the morning on September 3rd.

She’s entering her Very Tween phase where Valerie and I are constantly wondering how much more surly she'll be as a teen. But she’s also seriously creative, loves to draw, and continues to amaze me with her ability to pick up nearly any new physical activity. She’s developing her own taste in music, groans at a few more of my dumb jokes, and is navigating the challenges of social complexity with her friendships at school. I love this kid, and I'm so lucky to be her dad.

Happy birthday, Maddie!

(photos used with Maddie's permission)

For the past year I’d been wearing a silicone wedding band because I’d lost enough weight that my actual ring was starting to fall off my finger. Before that time, I pretty much never took it off, but after the third random slide-off, I was afraid of losing it. But I procrastinate with so many things and my gold ring sat inert in a filing cabinet drawer for many months.

I finally took it to a local jeweler to be resized (from a 13 down to 11.5), and yesterday I got it back! I was kind of unexpectedly emotional when I put it back on since I don't even take it off to do the dishes, shower, or work on stuff with tools. It’s a small thing, but I'm happily married, and happy to have that symbol back on my hand.

7:00 AM: woke up to my alarm and rain. Had I known it would rain, I’d have delayed my alarm and grabbed another hour of sleep.

8:00 AM: finally got ready for my morning ride and headed out into the humidity of a late August morning in Richmond. Saw a family of deer near Maymont. Stopped for espresso.

10:30 AM: returned home, took a break and let some of the sweat dry.

11:00 AM: Took my daughter out to the sidewalk with a new-to-her bike so she could practice shifting gears for the first time.

11:15 AM: Headed out on a lovely ride with my daughter with a stop for treats at Up All Night baker in Bellevue.

NOON: Brief lunch interlude.

12:45 PM: foolishly drove to Carytown at a super busy time with my daughter to buy a water bottle cage and bottle for her bike. Traffic was terrible (as I should have expected), eventually parked, found out there were no more of the cute PDW animal bottle cages left. Grabbed a demi-baguette from Can Can for my son before heading home.

[ Brief loafing interlude ]

3:10 PM: Headed to Movieland with the kids to take advantage of $4 movie ticket day and saw the EXCELLENT new Ninja Turtles movie. We all loved it.

5:30 PM: Headed back to the house to pick up Valerie and go to The Cask for dinner with the family. Had two of my very favorite German beers.

7:00 PM: Home just in time to catch the US Gymnastics national championships and sneak in completion of my timesheet from the past week.

9:00 PM: Published this blog post, tucked in my daughter, and gave in to the reality that I need to take care of the dishes in the kitchen before *my* bedtime.

This is the first week of school for my kids and, for my nearly 10-year-old daughter, the start of her final year of elementary school. This is only really starting to sink in for me; next August she'll get on a different bus from her brother at a later time. She'll get off the bus by herself. We’ll start letting her stay home on her own as she feels ready for it. She'll be in *middle school* for crying out loud.

Okay, maybe not actually crying out loud. Yet.