Finale

It has been a very interesting November.  The first two and a half weeks were sunny most of the time and dry.  It started as the warmest November on record with an average high in the 60s, 20 degrees above the usual averages.  On the 18th a statewide blizzard struck with thunder, lightning and hail in the morning and for us here in the big cities some wet snow in the afternoon along with a howling wind.  Since then the month has been a little more typical with more cloudy days and then rain falling for six days.  Hail, thunder and lightning was repeated this Monday.  We will end with the second warmest November on record.

It was winter there for a while but today it is pretty clearly back to late fall.

Only one tiny bit of snow visible next to the mailbox post.

And the grass is still green.

And so today it ends, another NaBloPoMo, or as it came to be known among my blogging siblings and I, National Blog Every Day for a Month Month.

Who knows for sure when I will be back here.  Tomorrow if I can fit in a bicycle ride, probably later if not.  But return I shall.

My last act for November, here is another scan, this one of a photo I didn't have yesterday.  TOPWLH brought the photo home with her today after she and her siblings completed the apartment clean out.

Their wedding day picture.

Photos from my hard drive

Addendum

Hey @UMNChildrens - plenty of new teddy bears headed your way thanks to a sweet @KPan19 goal and @GopherWHockey fans today! #teddybeartoss pic.twitter.com/vfCaV4ofbh

— FOX 9 Sports (@Fox9Sports) November 28, 2016

Teddy bear toss

I went inside today on yet another November day which felt more like October.  A bicycle ride may have been possible.  The occasion moving me indoors was Gopher Women's Hockey annual teddy bear toss for charity.  Throw a teddy bear on the ice when the Gopher women score their first goal of the game.  All of the bears are donated to the UofM children's hospital for distribution to patients.

Yesterday's photos were a test run.  I came home, examined the results, spent some time with the manual, made a couple of settings changes, and today went better.

I got there early, as I usually do.  But today I was also confirming what my time with the manual and the changes would mean to the finished results.

Seven time national champions, all of the trophies are here.

The Gophers come out for warmups about 37 minutes before game time.  First on the list is some stretching.

This one is for TOPWLH who is the first person I ever heard say that Lee Stecklein's work is never done.  Lee Stecklein, Olympic and national team veteran, All-American defenseman, her work is never done.

Here's the opening face-off.

Kelly Pannek scored the teddy bear goal with 2:49 remaining in the first period.

That's the biggest bear.  It looks to me like the zebras are considering whether to impose a penalty on that big teddy for illegal largeness.

That light brown bear in the lower right is one of the two bears that we contributed today (actually one was a bear and one was a dog).

At this point the Gophers had just scored to take the lead 1-0.  Eventually it seemed like the players were interested in getting the game going again.  Players started to assist the crew removing the bears.

And they should have been interested in getting the game going again.  15 seconds after play was finally resumed Kelly Pannek scored again and it was 2-0 and off to the races.

Between periods our beloved rodent skates out and entertains.

Eventually Dani Cameranesi added two goals to the two Pannek goals and Minnesota won 4-1.

There are probably a couple more kinks to be worked out in hockey photography but I think it is now trial and error.  I probably will not have to consult the manual on this particular issue again.

Considering that it is very late in November I really don't mind missing the ride.  There just are never going to be many chances at this point anyway and I did have a good time at the Teddy bear toss.

Gophers 4, Beavers nil

Today was a totally rideable day and I regret missing it.

But we had tickets.

Here is a link to the box score.  Two goals for Cameranesi, one for Pannek and one for Schipper, a shutout in goal for Peters.  Shots on goal were 51-18 favoring the Gophers.

I took my new camera along and spent the pre-game experimenting with settings, shutter priority, automatic ISO, stuff like that.

This is the best one I got.

The problem is that it is pretty dark in there and the players are moving at a really high rate of speed.

Well, you have to try stuff.

Now I have some adjustments to make, I may take my camera again tomorrow.

Tomorrow looks totally rideable but we have tickets again.

Turkey shovel

Photo taken on Thanksgiving morning.

Well, not this year.  2010.

But it is good to keep in mind what is possible in dealing with what actually is.

This year?  Well, I am thinking that bicycling has a chance of breaking out tomorrow.  I was out of the house doing some grocery shopping and took the time to drive on most of the streets where the first 3 or 4 miles of a bicycle ride would occur and those streets were mostly pretty dry.

Possible high temperatures tomorrow in the mid-40s?  It is just barely possible that we have no yet reached the no bicycles beyond this point.

For those interested I also drove past the house with the blue tarp instead of a roof and they are still relying on the blue tarp.  Today the weight of the snow was causing the tarp to sag.  I am mystified.

It is also worth noting that it can get worse.  This one was taken two weeks after the above photo. 

I was out shoveling yesterday.  I still have that blue parka, I still have those Sorel boots, I was still wearing those choppers.

I have moved on from that shovel.  You just cannot scrape aluminum against concrete and expect it to last for six more years.

When I first published the top photo in 2010 I included in that post a link to a video of Judas Priest doing Diamonds and Rust.

Joanie recently had her 75th birthday and sang her song in concert with the assistance of Judy Collins.

Nice.

Thanksgiving

We celebrated Thanksgiving with Emily, Andy and Norah and Andy's family.

It was a slight mixture of traditions.  For example they didn't know about lefse.  But a traditional feast was provided, some football was watched and the day passed in a most congenial fashion.

Thank you to our hosts.

Here is the baby at play in yet another area where she had much to explore.

The toys are her own even if the room is not.  Lower torsos of Mom and Grandmom for scale.

Here she is in her Baby's First Thanksgiving bib just before the adults began to eat.

That's her Uncle Brad admiring baby's posture.

Unexplored territory

TOPWLH and TCWUTH are now in the midst of the annual baking ritual, really nutritious cranberry bread.  To facilitate this endeavor we picked up the baby at her day care and brought her here.

Well, there is just a lot of space here that she hasn't had a chance to check out.

After she came out from behind the speaker she posed for a more conventional photo.

She is really sweet until she realizes that she is hungry and then she wants to be fed RIGHT AWAY.

Grandma had started to feed her when Mommy arrived.

I say again, that baby likes us and gives us the most wonderful smiles that any one can imagine.  Until you see the one that comes onto her face when Mommy is here.

Sleeping right now, cranberry bread in process.

Football coach

Jim took these pictures too.

Before I was a softball coach and a basketball coach I coached football.

Before the undefeated Rangers there was the undefeated Augies.  We played our games at Saint Paul Academy.   Here we are in pre-game warmups before a mid-season game.

Well, mid to late.  I can identify the game number because we awarded stars for each victory.  That team of 4th and 5th graders played seven games to finish 7-0.

Five stars on the helmets, mid to late season.  That's I think 1973, and I absolutely know the names of both of the kids with me in the foreground and I am pretty sure about the kid in the helmet.  I would publish their names but I know that there is an internet search program which will report if your name is used anywhere on the internet and provide you with notice and a link to where it was published.

So those guys are in their 50s and may have privacy concerns.  I don't really have their permission to use their images so I won't use their names.  But I definitely can identify the two best players on my first undefeated team.

This is the next year.   We were good, really good again but not quite good enough to be undefeated.  Our two best players from the year before were 6th graders and the Catholic school that they attended sponsored a school team which 6th graders could play for.  So they didn't play for us.  We were still good, really good.

That's the Mayor in plaid, Yanker in the jacket that matches mine.

This team won some sort of trophy although I think it might have been third or something.  That's Coach Nagle with me behind the two rows of players.

I have a really, really good story about Coach Nagle and that team.  Try to get me to tell it sometime.  Note that we were still using the stars and that this team had won it looks like 6 by the time this picture was taken.  I can identify most of them too.

Coach Nagle, Coach Damjonovich (aka Yanker) and Coach Miller behind a team that pretty clearly thinks they are number 1.

Plenty of yellow stars, that team won a bunch of games too.

A highlight of that season was a father racing down the sideline paralleling the route of his son encouraging him with repeated "Go Son, go Son."  I remember it amused me at the time because pretty clearly everybody on the team was somebody's son.

So the point is, I guess, it wasn't a complete accident that when it came time for me to coach softball and basketball, I knew what to do.  I had worked out the kinks coaching other people's children and I was ready when it came time to coach my own.

Cold today, snow predicted for tomorrow

I thought I might take that front wheel with the new green tire out to the garage and mount it on the currently one wheeled orange tire bicycle out there and get a photo.  Instead I decided that old photos are good photos and decided to post a couple of them.  These are all photos taken by my brother and sent along to me over the years as scans.

The first one is in Jim's backyard, his information identifies the date as 1980.  Under the original maple tree as differentiated from the maple tree that is there now.

And three photos from 1982 at Deer Lake.  This one isn't that great of me but my bride is luminescently beautiful.

I think there was some badminton or something played the next day and this is a moment from that.

Later on that same day near the main lodge.

I don't think I have any of the baby girl's first trip to the State Fair but this is her first appearance at Tulip Time, I think 1985.  I do know that that stroller is the same stroller we used for her first trip to the State Fair so it is about the same time.

Old photos are fun.

Milking it

Bicycle content is hard to come by in, let's face it, what is rapidly becoming LATE November.  So if you have anything at all you have to milk it.  The sun didn't come out much today and when it did sun's extremely low position in the sky meant that whatever radiant heat we received wasn't going to be able to do much with an atmosphere that is still keeping the outdoor water in one or another of its solid states.  Ice.  Or snow.  That's a roundabout way of saying that it was cold out there today.

Not riding weather.

I repaired a flat tire.

This first one is early in today's activity.  The old tire is off, the new tire is half mounted.

Also visible are a couple of basic tools of the process, the tire levers, a specialized tire mounting tool, and one of my pumps.  Right.  I have two pumps.  I think just about everyone has at least two pumps.

Here is the nuts and bolts of tube repair.  I located two leaks.  It looked to me like I had a puncture which was in the process of going down and then with low tire pressure, I had a pinch which abruptly completely finished off my air pressure.

Find the leak, mark it, sandpaper to roughen the surface, rubber cement and patch.

It might seem tedious, but for me personally, I take a certain small amount of joy from extending the life of the tube.

Here is is all fixed up and ready to go.

The next time I ride on my front wheel I will be palping a tire in a green colorway.

So the story is about when the previous set of green tires ended its run.

I knew that the tire set had been on there for quite a while.  I knew that I had mounted those tires late in the year LAST year.  But I wasn't really keeping track.  So I had a flat on the front. The procedure is to locate the puncture in the tube and then use the tube to locate the sharp object which caused the flat.  This object is usually still lodged in the tire.  I found and repaired the puncture and then started feeling around the tire to find the sharp thing.  It immediately struck me that the tire felt inordinately insubstantial.  There didn't seem to be much rubber there.

So I keep track on my BikeLog of the mileage when I mount new tires.  I went to the log and was a tiny bit stunned to discover that I had 2,410 miles on that set of tires.  A couple of times in the past I have attempted to stretch a new set by trying to reach 2,000 miles and have even done it ONCE.  That time I tried and failed to reach 2,100.  So 2,410 is a record by quite a huge margin.

The replacement used tires lasted about 300 miles and I am now on the new rubber again.

It isn't much but it IS bicycle content.

Bicycle content

So sure enough, here is today's bicycle content.  That orange tire now definitely looks a little flat on the bottom.  Those green tires will be going on that wheel set, one now and one later.

That's NewLOOK in the background.  In fact, here's a look at that end of the basement, now the bicycle end.

I got started on the repair and have done the hard part of getting the tire off but temporarily lost interest.

There is snow on the ground, there is going to be a couple more days of opportunity to come back to this job.

Speaking of snow, I heard on cable TV this morning that the weather service keeps records of the first official snowfall of the year and this isn't it.  It looks like snow but officially there still has not been a snowfall here.

The weather service records as the first snowfall the first occurrence of one inch of snow.  The official observatory is at the airport and at that location we received 0.2 inches.

So despite appearances that is not snow.

Transition

Ours has begun.  The end of one, the beginning of another.

Forecast for the weekend is for cold, at or only slightly above freezing for high temperatures.  Then there is an 80 percent chance of more snow on Tuesday.

Has everyone seen this?

Just another illustration of why some of us think Bambi is vermin.

Felt like the last

The temperature was again 15 degrees above average, a bit higher, in fact, than Tuesday.  The sun was out when I started but it was windy, a north wind.  At this time of year a north wind is cold.  It was pretty hard work but I got out there and got the one last ride that I really wanted.  A couple more next week would be a nice bonus but . . . By the end of the ride today the sky had clouded up and it felt like a storm coming.  What happens tomorrow will determine if today was the last.

North wind meant a ride to the north.  Here is a definite sign of where we currently stand in the relative to the calendar.  I ride past a church on Lexington on the way out.  They have already received delivery of the stock for the Christmas tree lot that they will be opening the day after Thanksgiving.

I deviated a little from the standard route to try to get an end of season photo of Grass Lake.  The MUT ends right foreground.  Gramsie Road with a mini van or something right about at the spot where the tunnel goes under the road.

All this means that the water is at least 5 feet higher than most years.

I got out to Vadnais hoping to see some big white birds.  In the past I have seen herons, pelicans and swans.  Today I saw swans.

And geese.  And ducks.  The water is quite shallow up at that end and all of these birds are bottom feeding.

In all I saw 10 swans on the lake today including a couple that were less shy than most of them.

The storm is coming for sure and here is the tarpaulin roof house as photographed today.

It seems apparent that the reason for no repair is not related to occupancy.  The house looks decidedly lived in including today having a trash bin out for trash collection.

Does this thing look flat on the bottom?

I will have bicycle content tomorrow as I have to repair that.

Everyone knows that almost all flat tires are flats of the rear tire.  That's my front wheel and is the second in a row flat of the front.  This one happened just as I was about to cross Snelling on the way home.  I convinced myself by looking down that there was still a tiny bit of air in there so I went ahead and rode it home, a bit less than 2 miles.

Two things.  One, riding with a flat is a really slow ride.  And two, it is really, rally hard to steer with a front flat tire.

That tire was already a formerly used front tire.  The front gets much less wear than the load bearing rear and when I change tires I typically save the less wear front for later re-use.  But when an already used tire gets a flat it is time to chuck it into the trash.

That means if there are any rides next week I will be palping a tire in an orange colorway on the rear and a tire in a green colorway on the front.

As noted above, we'll see.

Curling

Today was yet another November day nice enough for bicycling.  Two things kept me from trying for one of the two rides that I still want.  First, late season bicycling condition isn't quite like middle of July bicycling condition.  I am finding riding two days in a row with this level of conditioning is a chore.

Second, I already had some fairly significant exercise planned for after the sun went down.

Substituting on the Flaherty rink for the 6pm draw.  We did OK for a while, 2-2 after four ends, but then we faded.  After a round of "good curling, thanks for the game" we left the sheets to the 7:30 draw.

A good time was had by all.  Which is sorta the point of curling.

Lanes

That whole no bicycles beyond this point seems poised to arrive on Friday with current predictions for 2 inches of snow.

I am not quite ready yet, I really, really want at least one more ride and would prefer two.

We shall see.

Today was my coldest ride yet this season, it was 49 when I started out.  I was as close as I have been for a couple of years to full winter costume.  I had double head coverage, including balaclava.  I wore that up over my nose and mouth at the start but the sun stayed out enough of the time to warm me and the air enough so that I had that item of gear in the preferred position of only covering my chin and neck by the time I finished.  I think it was 54 at the end.  I also went with the heavier jacket, a light weight vest and full double layer mittens.

I have the gear, I was comfortable.

Bike lanes are becoming more and more common around here.  I had seen this one before but I don't believe I have ever published it.

That lane comes out of the Horse Barn at the Fairgrounds (right across the street from the Cattle Barn) and leads over to the Coliseum.

A horse lane.

I try not to ride my bicycle in that lane, even when there are no horses present.

Professional courtesy or something.

I wanted to get out to Grass Lake but wind conditions led me south, over to the Falls.

I take lots of pictures of the Falls, it seems, but the Falls never disappoint me.

That is another illustration of the wet summer.  The amount of water going over the Falls at this point in the season when it should be relatively low water is equal to the high water level of many springs.  There promises to be a pretty spectacular ice formation over there this winter.

The street reconstruction on Raymond is now finished.  The street has not officially reopened but when not only is the pavement back in but the striping has been repainted the project is finished.  Expect reopening tomorrow would be my guess.

Note that as they did last year on the reconstruction of Raymond on the other side of Deadman's Curve that they have eliminated parking on one side of the street and formalized the bike path on each side.

Reconstruction is complete on both sides of the double underpass, I have a guess what comes next year.  And the patchwork mess underneath the underpasses does really call out for replacement.

Work on the infrastructure.

I got nearly home before stopping for this late afternoon shot of some pretty clouds.

The problem with November is that anything after about 1:30pm is starting to feel like late afternoon.

I believe those are cirrocumulus clouds.  Wikipedia reports that this is also called "mackerel sky" apparently because some of those among us with highly active imaginations have declared that the clouds look like the scales on a mackerel.