Birthday party

It was a little bit nicer day for a bicycle ride today than it was yesterday but no riding occurred.

One of these doesn't come around very often.

Most will know that Bud is actually as of today 95 years and 1 week old.

Here he is enjoying a piece of cake and the company of one of the many people who love him.

He also reports that having reached age 95 he now wouldn't mind terribly being 96.

Still counting

You can't count them until you ride them.  The truth is that I am hoping to have a final count of a somewhat higher number than I currently have.  Before I can count them I have to ride them.

So today I rode in what was very clearly November weather.

So grey, so dark.

It was 46 or so when I started at 1pm.  I assumed that as is the normal course of events that the temperatures would rise slightly during my outing.  I was a little concerned by this.  I think that probably my lower limit is 40 or so.  At 46 I figured no use holding back, I donned pretty much the full winter costume.  Including something called shoe covers.  I was worried that as the temperature went up I might find myself overdressed.

No worries.

The temperature DECLINED while I was out to what one place I saw was reporting as 41.

But the miles I rode today count.

The big news is that the road construction on Roselawn is entering the final stages.  Beginning shortly after the Fair that particular route has been peeled back to dirt, followed by a bunch of digging and only now the return of pavement.  The street is still officially closed but it is now bicycle passable.  This is a look back at the street from the Snelling end after I made just exactly that passage.

That's the corn field on frame left.  Corn was so long ago that fairly complete tilling has been completed.  Many years their is fairly significant stubble left in the field over the winter.  It is an agricultural experiment station, apparently the experiment for this winter involved back to the dirt tillage.

I wanted to ride out to Lake Vadnais at least one more time this year.  This time of year is when in the past I have seen swans.  That's an exotic enough sighting for a guy from this particular spot on the planet, I don't want to miss any opportunity to spot the big white birds.

Alas, not today.  It was extremely grey out there and starting to get colder.

There was, however, a considerable amount of wildlife out there, including a couple of large rafts of ducks.

Each group was pretty much like the others, an occasional mallard but mostly a profusion of what I believe I identified last year as lesser scaup.

I started to ride away and almost missed this.

So the vermin are being culled out there again.

I say good.  Others say how can you shoot Bambi?

And two photos from 2010

My brother's "bucket list" included trips to all four of the tennis grand slam tournaments.

In 2010 we went to the one in Paris.

While we were there we did a bunch of other stuff and here are two photos from May 21, 2010, both taken by me, one taken with his camera, one taken with mine.  As previously explained it was me who had a laptop along, all of the internet posting was done on my laptop, at the end of the trip I had all of the photos from his camera on my computer.

On the original post Jim says that I described this photo as being of the two oldest objects in Paris.  The oldest being that stump of what had to have been a remarkably ancient old tree and the second oldest being that not particularly old guy standing on top of the stump.  In 2010 he was 68, not very old at all.

 Later on that same day (you can tell it was later on because he had by this time of day been able to remove his rain coat/jacket) we were walking down the main street of town.

We had a good group that year, the four of us had lots and lots of fun.  Everyone who was there will recognize this photo.

One member of our party always took the stairs, the rest of us took the elevator.

One of the twelve Paris locations used for the film "Gigi".

At least that is what "Sim Carter" says in her comment about this photograph in this post from the trip by my brother and I to Paris in 2011.

Photo by Jim Miller.

2011?

So long ago.  So long ago that it was still a time when not every single person traveled with some sort of personal device. So long ago that only one of us had a notebook computer along on the trip.  So long ago that all of the posting to the internet that occurred on that trip had to be done on my laptop.  Which means that all of the photos he took on that trip are archived on MY laptop computer.  Probably his as well, after he got home, but I do have them.

According to Sim Carter:  "You've captured just the spot that Louis Jourdan stood in during his singing of the titular song."

So that's pretty cool.

Free space

If I recall Bingo correctly (and how would it be possible to not recall Bingo correctly, there is virtually nothing to recall) that center square on the card is the free space.

If you set aside each November as a blog every day for a month month, then it is a good thing to get a free space.  Particularly if you can get that free space early, like on the first Tuesday.

Someone check the archives, I think this post or at least something very much like this post has been done before.  Today is the free space.

Lens cap for scale.

I was out riding earlier in the day.  This is not actually where I vote but it is a place that I ride past almost certainly more frequently than I ride past the place where I actually do vote.  I was looking for a "vote here" place other than the one I usually post.

I made about 3 360s there in the street getting it lined up the way I wanted.  What I wanted was a view of the "vote here" complementing the "register for hockey".

As can readily be assumed based upon the size of the lettering of the two signs, here on the tundra we often take hockey registration much more seriously than voting.

When I voted today there was only a single school board election, four candidates, vote for up to three.

On a day like that maybe hockey registration IS more important.

Wardrobe malfunction

Yes, indeed.  Janet Jackson was in town last night but this isn't about that kind of wardrobe malfunction.  In fact, the local newspaper review labelled Janet as "newly demure".  No, our wardrobe malfunction involved the largest ever misjudgment of what was the appropriate costume for today's outdoor activities.

I rode yesterday and wasn't warm enough.  All reports early on indicated that we were somewhere around 10 degrees warmer today than when I headed out yesterday and I thought I probably had made appropriate adjustments for that amount of temperature change.

We got about two miles from home.  We stopped to remove our jackets and upon brief reflection not only removed our jackets, we reversed our course and headed for home.  A major reconfiguration was necessary.  The change was so extreme that we needed something more modest than a public street to remove what needed to be removed and get everything rearranged appropriately.

So on November 2, we rode in shorts.

A nearby insurance agency has recently installed a time and temperature sign board in front of its business on the Snelling Avenue frontage road.

It was a spectacular day to be out, OOTNDITHOD.

We rode past a lake.

I am able to report based on a class on DSLR photography that I recently attended that that particular photograph would probably be improved by the addition of a polarizing filter.

Such a tech update is NOT possible with my jersey pocket camera.

Lots of trees are bare but there were still spots where the foliage is still quite attractive.

That makes the most miles ridden in the month of November since 2012 and moves me past 3,000 miles for the season.

You can't count them until you ride them and at long last I have ridden them.

Dark season arrives early

The end of DST really reinforces the coming of the dark season and when the first Sunday in November is November 1 the season arrives as early as it is possible for it to arrive.

We have had cold and rainy for the past several days but today was only cold.  Well, cool, definitely on the cool side.  50 at the Cattle Barn.

But I got in a ride in November.  This is my first November ride since November 15, 2013, no rides at all in November last year.

That 2013 ride was the only ride in November that year and in fact was the only ride I took after October 27.  It was my worst year as I report also that I had only those two rides after October 10.

I had 392 miles in November of 2012.

Today's south wind enticed me over towards the big cities.  There is still construction going on at Deadman's Curve but they don't work on Sunday, so no men, and the first layer of asphalt has been put down.  The street is closed but there is a completely bikeable surface.  I rode on.

It was pleasant to be able to get through there as I got a pretty late in the season chance to visit the Falls.

On the way home I noticed this juxtaposition of three bicycling specific street signs.

The bike lane ends, good luck under that bridge (Deadman's Curve obviously).  Although the signs do state that everyone should share.  My experience is the same experience that all bicyclists have had, cars are not very good at sharing.  But don't even think about riding your bicycle on the sidewalk.  You MUST get off and walk your bicycle.

Actually most of the bicyclists I see on the sidewalk under that bridge are about as good at following that instruction as cars are at sharing the road.  In the interest of getting a photograph I once took my bicycle onto the sidewalk and I got off and walked it.  Only partly because of the sign, the sidewalk is narrow and goes around a couple of blind turns.  It just seemed a LOT safer to walk my bike.  And while walking my bike that day I did meet someone riding his.  But except for that one time when I did it, I cannot, in fact, recall EVER seeing anyone walking their bike.

Just for good measure, no parking, and there is someone willing to buy your ugly house.