Aly & Bryan are always up to something…
Hi! Aly and I put a lot of work into our family website/blog over the holiday season, and we made a big push to not only finish a ton of old blog posts but to jump ship from Blogger too! We made this new website from scratch to contain our blog and our photo gallery. Now that it’s all in one place, and mostly running on WordPress, it should be easier to maintain and update in a timely manner.
“If the pure and elevated pleasure to be derived from the possession and use of a good telescope were generally known, I am certain that no instrument of science would be more commonly found in the homes of intelligent people.” —Garrett Serviss (1901) Pleasures of the Telescope
The forecast for tonight and the following four nights calls for rain and clouds. After a dry summer and a drier autumn, what caused the sudden switch to wet weather? Why did we go straight from drought to downpour? Continue reading “Time Machine”
Our young friend Monkey has been nosing around the edges of our kayaking hobby for a few months. She and her family went with us one warm day last summer on a Remmel-to-Rockport trip. I think they all enjoyed it, but I think Monkey enjoyed it a little extra. Since then she and Mandy have talked about boats several times. She spent a few days with us over the holiday break, and it worked out that I could take her on a group trip to Bayou Deview on the Saturday before school started again. Continue reading “Monkey In a Boat”
Mandy’s out of town, leaving Bryan and I with quiet days home together on holiday break. On Christmas afternoon, it began to rain, and slowly the rain started freezing on the roof and on the bushes and on the trees. And on the street. And then it was ice. And little pine-tree branches fell on our house. And then it was snow. It snowed for hours, and when we woke up the next morning, we had more snow than I can remember seeing since I moved to central Arkansas.
Like a little child, I put on my boots and my rain pants and I went outside. But like the grownup my father taught me to be, I shoveled our sidewalk and then our driveway, throwing the white stuff off into the yard, making strips of piles of snow alongside the pavement. I love snow. I love looking at snow, and playing in snow. I even love shoveling snow. I love every single thing there is to love about snow. Continue reading “Snow Days”
A couple of weeks ago, my coworker Kristin noticed a stray dog outside her office window. I went out to say hello, and found that the dog was so afraid that he’d freeze anytime he saw a person, even far away. I stood still for five minutes or so, and he stood still too, just terrified of me. I felt awful for him but went back inside, hoping he’d go away and we wouldn’t see him again. I didn’t think there was anything I could do.
He was back again the next day, and was just as scared. I called the animal control place in Little Rock but they didn’t have anyone they could send to catch him. And then it was the weekend. Continue reading “Foster Dog”
We’d settled into the afternoon when Monkey sent me a text. ‘Can we come over and meet Foster Dog?’ Of course. Come on down.
And, since it was Festivus, it seemed appropriate to just go ahead and get the Festivus Pole down from the attic and pose for photographs with it. Bryan made chai again – it’s been his holiday-break project to perfect an easy and yummy recipe – and had a nice visit and a sort of aborted version of the Airing of Grievances. And Monkey and I tried to be appropriately serious and grumpy looking for our Festivus Portraits, but somehow that just didn’t work out very well.
First there was Christmas (observed) at our house. Since Mandy’s always in Tulsa for the first half of her holiday break, we always open presents either before or after that trip. This year, Saturday the 22nd was the day chosen to observe the gift-giving part of our holiday. We kept things pretty simple this year, and most of our gifts to each other involved needed outdoor gear. A stack of books grew as we opened our presents, too, as it always does.
We’ve tried to move away from using lots of wrapping paper and toward reusing gift bags and lidded boxes. But I think some of our presents may have gone a little too far away from ‘festive’ toward ‘cheerlessly utilitarian.’ Continue reading “Merry Christmas (Observed)!”
Our friend Diane was hit by a car in November, while riding her bike. She spent over a month in the hospital, in a coma, before her death last week. I think it was hard for everyone who’d known her to wrap our heads around the loss of such a beautiful person, in such a difficult way.
I feel a little self-conscious for taking it so badly, since I hadn’t known her as well as many of our other friends had. Is it because I feel sort of responsible for bad things that happen to cyclists in LR because I was involved with trying to make things better? Is it harder for me because my granny died in such a similar way? I don’t know. When it comes right down to it, loving people means knowing we’ll hurt when we lose them. Continue reading “Goodbye, Diane”
Bryan was determined to see some good meteors this year. DETERMINED. Our Orionids had been rained out, and our Leonids had been somewhat spoiled by the experience of driving around for an hour looking for a nonexistent viewing spot and then lying on the concrete in front of a dark fire station hoping not to get run over. The Geminids, though – they looked promising. A new moon and clear skies were going to line up perfectly. Some astronomers even predicted the co-occurrence of another, more minor meteor shower!
Bryan planned carefully. He invited our friends Cliff and Mitch and their kids, and he packed a stove and hot chocolate mix and air mattresses and lots of blankets. We had our good binoculars, and Mitch brought his telescope. We met at Williams Junction, where highways 9 and 10 meet west of Little Rock, and drove a caravan to Flatside Pinnacle. The parking area there is nice and flat, the glow of Little Rock is blocked by the mountain, and the skies to the west are dark over the wilderness area.
This time, we weren’t disappointed. We snuggled into our blankets and watched dozens of meteors streak across the sky. Most radiated from Gemini as it rose, of course. But there were a good handful angled perpendicular to those, was that the second shower or just random other bits of space dust? Some streaks were faint but many were big and slow and really impressively bright. Some even trailed glowing stuff behind them. The rest of us took turns dozing, but Bryan stayed up all night and watched. Just before we packed up our things to head home, about two-thirty in the morning, we saw a meteor so bright it lit our upturned faces and cast shadows behind us.
Here we are, friends, on a big rock we call home. Sometimes we need reminding that ours is not the only rock out there.
What, we’ve found yet another ridiculous bike-related thing to do? Ummm. Yep.
Avoiding ‘foot down’ is a highly valued skill in bike polo; if you can’t balance on your two wheels and your mallet, and your foot touches the pavement, you’re penalized. I suppose it’s also good to be able to balance without touching down in things like cyclocross and mountain biking, too, since putting a foot on the ground would mean a loss of forward speed and rhythm. Even road bike people like to be able to ride very slowly so that they don’t have to unclip from their pedals. And it goes without saying that people who ride tall bikes and unicycles should avoid the need to put their feet on the pavement. Learning to improve balance, in all kinds of cycling, is important. Continue reading “Arkansas Footdown Championships”