Scorched Earth Policy

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It was a blazing hot weekend and I am not the best gardener when it comes to keeping the crops watered. I really need to find a solution to my irrigation challenges. But that’s a topic for another post.

Despite the hot weather, some of the plants are surviving, and even thriving. For instance, several weeks ago I planted a honeysuckle and two kinds of clematis (rhymes with “feminist”, I’m lectured told) along a chain-link fence on the side of the back yard. The clematis hasn’t spread particularly fast, but it does seem to be thriving and has put out several gorgeous blooms.

As you might imagine, I wouldn’t be upset to have blooms like this take over the entire fence.

In other news, two years ago I planted a hybrid cherry tree sapling in the back yard. Each branch is a graft of a different variety of cherry. One of the branches died during the first winter, but the others have seemed robust and are nicely leafy. And, best of all, one of the branches has started producing fruit! Only three cherries, but still!

How long will I be able to resist before I pluck a cherry (ahem) and give it a taste?

Voyeurism

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I’ve been checking out the music on an iPod that was carelessly left in my presence. Which is not unlike checking out someone’s bookcase or medicine cabinet for revealing hints into their personality and secret life.

Which leads me to wonder – would I rather have someone judge me based on my music or my porn?

Late night ride

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Remember a couple of weeks ago, when I talked about roughly a dozen people showing up for the Portland Critical Mass, and compared that to the mob scene at CM in San Francisco?

Last night I was part of the Portland edition of the World Naked Bike Ride. I’m convinced there were well over a thousand people in the ride!

We started from a warehouse in the NW at midnight, pedaled down TrendyThird past the bars, through downtown, over the Hawthorne Bridge, down MLK for a bit, back across the Burnside Bridge, and back to the industrial NW. All told, around 8 miles.

The highlights included:

  • The sporadic cries from the riders of “nice ass!” Coulda been said by anyone, to just about anyone. It was that kinda crowd.
  • The one lone rider (clothed) who refused to stop at a red light where a fire engine was trying to get through… only to get pulled over by a cop almost immediately. Instant karma’s gonna get you.
  • Cheering and high fives from the crowds thronging the sidewalks outside the bars.
  • The driver who pulled up next to me and asked, “Why are you naked?” The best I could come back with was, “Why are you dressed?”

It was massive silly and hugely fun! I would do this ride monthly, weather permitting.
In hindsight, the obvious costume would have been a stylish pair of chaps. Maybe next year.
🙂

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Today’s ride was along the Springwater Corridor, on the far east end of the route. We started in Gresham and headed east until the trail turned to gravel, and then went a bit farther. Then we turned around and headed west until we reached the detour at SE Circle Ave, at the base of Powell Butte.

Overall, the ride was easy and fun. Flat and smooth (gravel notwithstanding) and fast, and lovely weather for it. The highlight was seeing two young deer along Johnson Creek!

Grand total, a little over 16 miles.

Hagg Lake ride

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Today I rode around Hagg Lake (in Scoggins Valley Park), west of Hillsboro. This was my first ride with any appreciable hills in a long time. My basic goal was to not stop on the side of the road and break down in tears. I succeeded in that much. But sheesh, I was sucking wind really hard on some of those hills. My tour guide and traveling companion was a real sport about accommodating my feeble pace, but she did pick a couple of moments to yank my chain in a sadistic fashion.

At one point I was climbing a hill, giving it my all, panting and grunting. I somehow managed to catch my partner by surprise and slip past her on the left. As I inched forward, she called out in a sing-song voice unencumbered by such trivial details as gasping for oxygen, “I’m still on my middle chain ring!” Eeeevil.

On another long slow climb, she confessed as how she had developed a pattern of waiting until I just caught up with her, then she’d change gears and pull away again. Over and over and over… Rhymes with “fig plucker”.

Still, I completed the loop and the idea of doing the ride again in a couple of weeks doesn’t make me tremble in fear. I can only get better. We were also riding on a really bright sunny day, in the very heat of the day. A milder day could only help. As it is, I’m waiting to see if I picked up a sunburn anywhere.

All told, 11.5 miles. Doesn’t sound that far, but c’mon, hills!

Transported

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Sitting in a car, lizard-basking in the hot sun, when the iPod starts playing Pat Metheny’s “Are You Going With Me?” from the album “Travels”. In a blink I’m transported back to college. Long, hot Knoxville summers, onthe balcony of the apartment in the student ghetto. Sitting in a canvas deck chair with my feet up on the railing, drinking a slushy margarita so fast I get brain freeze. Peecocrap speakers hanging by canvas straps from the deck roof, playing this album.

Feedback loops

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I’ve been doing some thinking lately about feedback loops.

If you are able to tap into a positive feedback loop in your thinking and behavior, it can be a wonderful thing. As an example, consider a novice guitarist. She’s more likely to practice if she feels like she’s making progress and getting better at her instrument. And the more she practices, the more progress she’ll make, the more at ease she feels. Which makes her want to practice more, which makes her better, which …

Sadly, the difference between a positive feedback loop and a negative one is often just a subtle difference in perspective. If feeling awkward playing the guitar makes you want to play and practice less, which means your skills atrophy, so you feel even more awkward, so you practice even less …

Which is just a long-winded way of saying feedback loops can be driven in either direction.

I’ve had experiences with those sorts of loops in relationships as well. I tend to warm up to a relationship fairly slowly. It takes a while for me to feel at ease and really comfortable with a person. But as I get more at ease and more relaxed with someone, the relationship starts going better, which makes me even more comfortable, which …

(Editorial aside: Apparently I don’t know how to talk about feedback loops without using a lot of ellipses.)

But I’ve also seen negative feedback loops in relationships. In my first serious relationship (hello there, you 🙂 there was a time where my girlfriend felt insecure and threatened. Which made her very clingy and possessive and needy. Which pushed my buttons and made me look for more space. Which left her feeling even more insecure, so she became even more clingy and …

I find those negative cycles to be enormously difficult to break. With that girlfriend, it took a concerted effort from both of us. She worked hard at trusting more in the relationship and accepting a certain amount of ebb and flow over time, and I made an effort to not pull away when she was feeling clingy. It was really hard work. Feedback loops are self-perpetuating and I found it very easy to slip back into the negative patterns that I was trying so hard to break.

I wish I knew a reliable (and easy) way to break those negative patterns, or even how to reverse direction and drive the loop in the positive direction instead. It’s deceptively easy to spot them and offer solutions when you see the patterns in someone else’s life, but I know from painful experience that it’s a very different challenge when you’re on the inside looking out.

Today’s Ride – Kelley Point

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Today we loaded up the bikes and headed to North Portland towards Kelley Point State Park. We actually stopped at Marine Drive and biked in from there, past I-5. We headed south on North Portland Rd so we could stay on bike paths, and ended up biking through the Smith-Bybee Lake wilderness area. A parking lot there had a bunch of public art pieces, including some carved boulders and tree stumps.

Kelley Point is part of the “40 Mile Loop” set of trails around Portland (the Springwater Corridor is another part of the loop). I was surprised to see a couple of signs that seemed to indicate the end of the loop. Umm, isn’t the whole point of a loop that it has no beginning or end?

The entire ride ended up being a little over 19 miles. Which still feels like a lot to my atrophied biking muscles. But it was a good day, and definitely a park I will want to visit again!

Saddle sore

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I woke up this morning in Beaverton needing to get home to Gresham. I had originally planned to get a lift to the MAX station and ride it home, but during the brief car ride, I somehow talked myself into biking home. Yeah, because my tailbone wasn’t sore enough from Sunday. 🙂

From downtown Portland, I crossed the river on the Hawthorne Bridge and then followed the waterfront south, past the Sellwood Bridge and caught the Springwater Corridor all the way east to Gresham.

Wow, was I really in Portland? Ample views of Johnson Creek, woods and marshland. Spotted a rabbit on the trail, sheep in someone’s field, horses in another field, roosters and a possum (or a former possum). I took a very brief breather on the way, but otherwise hammered through it. Just a bit over 17 miles.

Oh, so that’s where my quadriceps are!