Archive for the 'life' Category

Michelin Man

Published
by
Phil
on /2008/December/15/
in life
. 4 Comments

Michelin Man, originally uploaded by me.

Recently, I had occasion to celebrate another year of birth on the planet. A very good friend presented me with a framed poster that I am really quite fond of. It is an early advertisement featuring the Michelin Man.

After receiving it, I did a little research on the subject. The sign on the Michelin man’s back, loosely translated, says “The best and the least expensive.” The cigar was actually part of the Michelin man’s trademark at the time. Evidently, the Michelin man’s “name” is Bibendum, and he was introduced in 1898. The same artist who created him did this poster, sometime around 1910. His name is Marius Rossillon, but he used the name “O’Galop.” The Michelin man is said to be the world’s oldest trademark, and is of course still being used today.

This is a truly fascinating piece of history to me…and quite a frightening and intriguing figure! It’s a wonderful present, which I absolutely love. I found a spot for it right above the mantel.

The Hawk Rescue

Published
by
Phil
on /2008/December/7/
in Bicycling, birds and life
. 2 Comments

Back on September 13 of this past year, my friends Linda and Dean were with me on a 40 mile bike ride around the Indiana countryside.  It was a great day to ride; sunny, crystalline blue skies with interspersed, puffy, cumulus clouds, the kind of late-summer day that I absolutely love to go riding in.  I am not much of a “group” rider, but I do enjoy having a few close friends around, people who know me, and will not necessarily take offense when I do not say a word for miles, or when I seem to be in a daze.  When I really get into a ride, I tend to get lost in my own thoughts and feelings, and the surroundings.  Sometimes riding to me is just a shade shy of mystical that way.
This particular ride was one of those rides.  I don’t remember much of it, other than the event I will be shortly describing.  I know that we rode out past Memphis IN, out almost to Henryville IN, then made our way back.  I wore my Garmin watch that day, and I have the route recorded, which you can see by clicking this link.
When I first saw the hawk, Linda and Dean were a short distance in front of me.  I was looking off to my left on a road called Bud Prather Road.  I am very much a lollygagging, take-in-the-scenery kind of rider.  One of my favorite things to do, on rural rides especially, is look off to the side of the road at the tall grass rushing by in a delicious golden blur.   Sometimes I enjoy looking at my shadow on the rolling grass, cast by the sun, if it’s low enough in the sky and I am in the right position.  At this particular time, there was no shadow, but I was still grooving on the colors, the smell of sweet farmland, and the sounds of the wind with the soft purring of my freewheel, gears and chain.
Suddenly up ahead, I noticed what I first thought was a brown dog standing by the side of the road.  I always have a sixth sense “radar” operating for dogs or any other creatures that may give chase or dart out in front of me, but as Linda and Dean had both ridden past it and it had not given chase, any such worry was practically non-existent.  I was more curious than anything else.
We were all going slightly fast, about 26 mph, on this one little stretch with a very slight decline in elevation.  As I sped past, I realized it wasn’t a dog at all, but a large bird.  Its eyes met mine as I rode by it.  I immediately got the feeling it was in some kind of danger or distress, and my heart just leapt inside my chest.  I hollered out “A bird, a bird!” and Linda and Dean slowed.   “Stopping, stopping,” I called out, and they both stopped with me.  I told them there was a bird back there, a big one, just standing by the side of the road.  I may have sounded like I just saw a UFO, but they know me I guess, and understand my idiosyncrasies.  At least I am sure Linda does, as she has known me longer.  She knows if I see a large bird just standing there, it’s something worth getting excited about.
We all rode back, slowly, and we all saw it.  At this point, I will call it “him,” because I believe it to be a juvenile male red-tailed hawk.  We did not ride up directly to him, but instead dismounted and walked very, very slowly, to not disturb him or appear as a threat.  He let us get really close, about eight to ten feet, before he flapped his wings and sort of fluttered back a bit towards a fence behind him.
We stood there and speculated.  What could we do?  What was wrong with the bird?  Was he injured?  Old?  Ill in some way?  On one side of the road, the one opposite the bird, is a large electrical substation.  It is the only really industrial looking site in an otherwise scenic and rural locale, and often when I ride by it I can “feel” the electricity in the air, as well as hear a noticeable hum and crackle.  I speculated that perhaps the big bird had received a shock of some sort, but how were we to know.  The main thing was, what could we do for him?
Continue reading ‘The Hawk Rescue’

Catching Up

Published
by
Phil
on /2008/November/2/
in life
. 0 Comments

Well, I really don’t know where to begin.  I doubt if I can really catch up just in one post, but I will try, for those two or three people who stop by now and then to see if I am still on the planet.   :)    My year started out good.  I had some goals.  I have achieved a few of them, and I have not achieved a few of them.  I was running races trying to prep for the Mini Marathon.  I think the last one I logged here was the Anthem 5K.  Then after that, I did the Rodes City Run 10K, the Clover Leaf 10K, and the Papa John’s 10 miler.   That was on March 29.  I kept training after that, but a week or two later, I sustained a fluke injury, a bruised rib.  At work.  Sitting in my chair, lol.

But it was a bitch.  Every step I took was like someone poking me really rather severely in my right rib area.  Actually, it was like that with every deep breath I took.  I couldn’t believe my dumb luck.   For a while, I thought I was not going to be able to run the Mini.  I didn’t really make my mind up until about two days before the race, which was April 26.   I managed somehow to complete the race, a whole lot slower than I had originally planned, but considering the circumstances, just finishing was an accomplishment for me.

During that entire time, and since then, I sort of withdrew into myself a bit.  It’s not like I have become anti-social, but I didn’t really feel like I had much to say in terms of keeping this journal up.  I still am not quite sure if I have enough going on that’s worthy enough to write down, but maybe there is.   We’ll see.

After the mini, I stopped training.   I have only run two races since then, both 5Ks, the Thru the Zoo race on May 10, and the Race for the Cure on October 12.  I am in piss poor running shape, but I am going to get back into the swing of it.   I felt like I could barely finish the Race for the Cure, but all I had to do was think about my friend Diann who is recovering from breast cancer, and whatever pain I was feeling during the run seemed trivial.

So, what I have been doing, a whole lot since about June, is riding bicycles.   I had not been doing much riding in the past few years, but back in June, I bought a Cannondale Synapse.  Since then I have been totally and completely hooked.   I have picked up a couple of old Schwinns, too, and restored them.  I made one into a singlespeed with a flip-flop hub for fixie riding, and the other is an aqua colored 1984 Schwinn Traveler 12-speed that is now in it’s original glory.

I have been putting miles in.  It’s sort of addicting, like running is, when you get into it.  Since June 13, I have ridden over 1500 miles, which of course is not a whole bunch but considering I am a working stiff and I don’t really commute because I can’t bring myself to fight the Second Street Bridge traffic on my bike all alone, twice a day, I think the miles I have accumulated so far are good miles.  By that I mean they are miles that for the most part have been exceedingly freeing and supremely satisfying.  I wish I could think up some more superlatives to use.  Bicycling is great.  It doesn’t help me lose weight like running does but that’s not why I do it so much.   It’s very hard to describe but it’s kind of spiritual for me.  :)

More to come…I shall attempt to document the rides I did this weekend, but in a different post.

Haven’t been posting, but I am alive

Published
by
Phil
on /2008/October/23/
in life
. 2 Comments

Yeah.  I haven’t been doing too much in front of the PC at home lately.   Not for a few months in fact.  To catch up, I ran the mini, started riding my bikes again, bought a new bike, started riding it, started fixing up some old bikes I got, started riding them.  And so on.  I will have to get my act together and start blogging again, it’s cathartic.  But so are a lot of other things.   More to come.

Groove Me

Published
by
Phil
on /2008/February/23/
in Running, life and music
. 0 Comments

Today I completed a 13 mile run, in keeping with my training plan for the 2008 Kentucky Derby Festival miniMarathon. It was the longest I have run since April 28, 2001 (last time I ran the mini). I am pleased that I made it through the run, but I now know that my goal of completing the mini in under 2 hours is probably not achievable. I thought I ran fairly strong, and I took a one minute walk break every 9 minutes, carried water with me and hydrated correctly, ate a bowl of Kashi hot cereal beforehand for energy, etc. But I must have bonked somewhere around mile 10. All I know is that by the time I had gone around 11.6 miles, it seemed like I was running in slow motion, maybe because I was! The last two miles seemed killer to me.

I kind of felt this coming, psychologically. I have not been losing weight like I was, in fact, I have even gained a couple of pounds in the past couple weeks [lousy diet lately], and I have been having the winter/gray skies/all work and no play blues. So building up to this day, I just felt a little anxiety. I woke up around 4 in the morning last night feeling like I needed to have some new music on my iPod to just get me through the run. I downloaded about 10 songs, most of them old funk/R&B classics. I have a huge weakness for early 70s stuff, especially soul funk. Then I created a playlist on my iPod called “Get me thru” and loaded the new songs into it, without listening to any of them because I wanted sort of a “surprise” factor, and mixed in some stuff I already had, enough to last 2.5 hours. All I can say is thank god I did. I really don’t think I could have done this run if it weren’t for the music. And I know for a fact I would have just walked the last uphill half-mile if not for King Floyd’s “Groove Me.” What an awesome, awesome song! From the moment it starts out with a grunt, all the way to the very end, just absolute beauty.

And so, I title this post in honor of that song. King Floyd died a couple years ago but I owe him big time. For those of you interested in the song or maybe want to listen to it, click on this link to a page on the NPR website about it, and about Mr. Floyd. You can then click on another link to listen to the full song, in all its funky splendor. Maybe you will see what I mean, how it carried me up the hill and through the last half mile, and why I love it so.

Obligatory numbers (Yeah, I know. Slow.):

Total Time (h:m:s) 2:21:45 10:45 pace
Distance (mi) 13.19  
Moving Speed (mph) 5.6 avg. 9.4 max.
Elevation Gain (ft) +967 / -964  
Temperature (F) 30.8 F avg. 32 F high
Wind Speed (mph) N 6.9 avg. N 8.1 max.

Deep Space Nine, Miles That Is

Published
by
Phil
on /2008/January/27/
in Running and life
. 0 Comments

Yesterday I completed a nine mile training run through Seneca and Cherokee parks in Louisville KY. What a great ending to a not-so-great week. I did the nine in accordance with my training plan for the 2008 Kentucky Derby Festival miniMarathon that I posted earlier. I had not been feeling good physically all week, fighting off a cold and flu-like symptoms that still have never seemed to fully hit me as of writing this post. I did not do a three mile outdoor run Thursday morning, but instead, opted for the misery of a treadmill at the YMCA on Wednesday evening. Oh, the horror. But it must have served it’s purpose, because yesterday I felt great.

It was one of those zen runs for me, where my mind seemed to wander in “deep space”while my body just stayed in a groove. I began the run wearing my recently purchased Mountain Hardwear Ascent mittens, even though the temperature was nowhere near as cold as the previous week. I just did not want to repeat the 20 minute painful hand thaw that I had endured last Saturday. (By the end of this run, my hands were drenched in sweat, but perfectly toasty, which was fine with me!)

As I ran along, I went into deep reflection mode. I began thanking people in my mind. I was thanking all the bosses who had ever hired me to do a job. There is nothing quite like looking for a job, applying for it, and then getting it. I continued on that vein, thanking all the people who had ever cut me any slack in my life. All the times I goofed up in something, and despite my error, the people who have stood by me stood out prominently in my mind at one point during the run. I thought about all the women who had ever kissed me. (Alas, so few!) I don’t have to say to anyone how wonderful a kiss feels. Anyway, off and on through the duration of the run, I would think of someone to thank. Even people I had never met. Thank you, Mr. Jeff Galloway. Because even though I did not come to that park to walk, the walk breaks you advocate allow the running portions of my training to be just that much sweeter. Thank you, nice woman running toward me in the opposite direction, for looking at my face and my eyes and smiling a knowing smile, for it’s good to see others sharing in the same experience.

When the run was over, there was the usual hip flexor pain I have been experiencing the past couple months, but it didn’t matter. For me, it’s part of the territory. I made my way back home, ate some real eggs and had a huge glass of orange juice, turned on the ridiculous commentary on the South Carolina election results and shortly after, turned them off again, and then soon crashed on my sofa with my cat, Starlight. A final thought of gratitude: Thanks, body, for giving me at least one more nice run.

Total Time (h:m:s) 1:28:28 9:45 pace
Distance (mi) 9.06  
Moving Speed (mph) 6.1 avg. 9.0 max.
Elevation Gain (ft) +598 / -595  
Temperature (F) 31.6 F avg. 32 F high
Wind Speed (mph) SW 8.3 avg. SW 10.4 max.

Remembering Nelson

Published
by
Phil
on /2008/January/12/
in life
. 0 Comments

Nelson passed away today, January 12, 2008. He was not mine, but a very much loved dog of two very good friends of mine. I had the pleasure of taking care of Nelson and his brothers when my friends would go out of town. He became a friend, and it was my privilege to see to him those few times.

A few years back, I painted this picture. But it doesn’t really do him justice. There are photos of him here, here, and here.

This is a poem that his “mom” Linda wrote today:

Nelson

You were the perfect dog
That no one wanted
How fortunate, for us
With stringy ears, spotted tongue
And a quirky grin, we called
You ‘thumper,’ for the sound of your tail
Beating on the floor for our attention.

With the gentlest soul
You never begged, jumped,
Destroyed anything, or barked without reason
In your timid way,
You quivered through thunderstorms
And skulked away from the camera
That you feared so much.
We joked that maybe you feared
Our photos would steal your soul.

But there were those other times
When you enjoyed life
With reckless abandon
Head out the car window, snorting,
Fur blowing in the breeze.
Drinking water enthusiastically,
Letting it pour out the sides
Of your mouth when you
Lifted your head.

How terrible to find that
Someone once hurt you,
Filled your body with buckshot
Before you became ours.
Hopefully, from the moment
We laid eyes on you,
You knew those days were over
You knew you’d be fed, held,
Touched, walked, and loved so fully
Until that last moment, that moment today
When your life slipped peacefully
Away from us, into sleep.

A different kind of race

Published
by
Phil
on /2008/January/9/
in Running and life
. 0 Comments

On October 13, 2007, I participated in a running event, the first race since I started running again, the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure in Louisville, KY. It was a 5K, and I ran pretty well for a guy who just three months before was huffing and puffing at 267 pounds. It was a beautiful day, and it felt great to not only be out there running, but running for such a wonderful cause. A few of my friends and I were on a team that participated in honor of a woman named Teresa, a friend of a friend, who is battling cancer. And we were also running for everyone who has ever faced and will ever have to contend with that same challenge. I did not know it then, but I was also running that day for a very dear, very wonderful friend of mine.

She and I worked together a long time ago, and we became close from that point on. She moved away to go to college, met a great guy, got married, had two wonderful children, and after that we sort of lost touch. Life takes us all our separate ways. But a couple of years ago, I was able to reconnect, and we have been touching base since then. Last night, I heard from her. Around the exact same time I was running the Komen, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She had a lumpectomy but they found more, and since then, she has undergone more surgery, and will be taking some chemotherapy treatments, to ensure a full recovery. The prognosis for her is good, but when I found out, it was a shock. She has good doctors, great family support, and a wonderful positive attitude. I know in my heart and soul she will be fine, and her life will continue to be blessed.

Today, in honor of her, I ordered some pink wrist bands from the Susan G. Komen site to wear. I had been wearing a yellow LIVESTRONG band, and now, I will wear pink.

D, if you are reading this, please know that I care, and like so many others you know and have touched, I will be sending you great vibes from miles away. And when I run the Komen later this year, and every year, from now until the time I can no longer take one more step on the planet, I will be running it for you.

Going for a goal

Published
by
Phil
on /2007/December/30/
in life
. 0 Comments

This is not my New Year’s Resolution post. That will come later. But I had a goal of slimming down to 200 pounds by February 6, 2008. Sometime last September I started tracking everything in a spreadsheet, and I figured from that point on that 2/6/08 was the day I should have reached 200 pounds at a loss of around two pounds a week.

As you can see by the table below, taken from my spreadsheet, I was going along pretty well but sort of plateaued about a month or so ago. I think I have had too many fluctuating weeks, and too many “in the red.” The hip flexor injury hasn’t helped, but I think a little more discipline might be needed in the diet.

At any rate, I am not discouraged. I don’t think I can hit the goal, but I am going to make a push at it. Starting New Year’s Day, I am going to go into a modification of the “detox phase” of the diet I started back in August. That first month, I lost 20 pounds. I don’t expect that same loss this time around, but I know I will achieve some benefits, regardless. With a little luck, I will at least get under 220 by then.

Date Weight Loss/Gain Total
8/4/2007 267 N/A N/A
9/12/2007 244.6 -2.9 -22.4
9/26/2007 237 -4.5 -30
10/10/2007 233.9 -2.2 -33.1
10/24/2007 228.7 -2.3 -38.3
11/7/2007 227.9 -2.1 -39.1
11/21/2007 229.7 +1.9 -37.3
12/5/2007 228.8 +2.9 -38.2
12/19/2007 223.8 -2.7 -43.2

Lunch with total strangers

Published
by
Phil
on /2007/December/8/
in life
. 0 Comments

One of the nice things about working in a busy, downtown metropolitan area is being able to go out and walk to a variety of decent restaurants. One of my favorites is a little deli called Safier. It was a cool, brisk afternoon, and evidently quite a few people had the same lunch idea as I did yesterday. The place was packed, with no open tables, but I ordered anyway, thinking that by the time my food was ready someone would get up and leave.

Well, my order was ready pretty fast, and there was no place open. The waiter there, a really cool guy, said for me to come with him, he would sit me down with a couple of people. I guess in larger cities that happens frequently, you share a table with a stranger, but frankly, here in the “River City,” I have not had that happen too often.

Anyway, I was seated with two very nice women, I think their names were Meredith and Nicole (bad on remembering names but I remember faces). It was like sitting down to eat with old friends. We talked freely about work (they work at Seven Counties Services), life, pets, travel, Christmas plans, etc. It was a wonderful, human experience. Great food, connecting with total strangers. Lunch should always be that good.