Those two things are completely unrelated. Tonight, after spending the last two days digging out of the fourth snowiest February in Minnesota history (the snow banks at the end of the driveway are as tall as I am, even with two toppings by Eryn), we went to a Alita: Battle Angel premier. The Rosemount theater had a good deal for advance screening tickets and, combined with my gift card and rewards card, there weren't even any additional fees. Bargain. The movie itself was perfectly serviceable, but that speaks for itself. The focus was on the spectacle and it felt like the character interactions were a bit lacking because of it. I enjoyed it; very reminiscent of Ready Player One in design, but not nearly as good as that movie.
Last Saturday Eryn and I went to see Trevor Noah at the Xcel Center for his Loud and Clear Tour. I won tickets and parking from work. We tried to go to the Red Cow before hand, but it was too crowded, so we ended up at the Bohemian sausage place, which makes Eryn a bit nostalgic for the one in Eagan that quit paying their bills and skipped town.
Ming and his family were at the show on the other side of the Xcel from us. We could barely see them when we squinted. Eryn loved the show and laughed a lot. She was somewhat annoyed with the first comedian whose bit was about things millennials didn't know about (but do), but she liked the second guy and his bit about his uncle and micro-airlines, and she loved Trevor Noah. He did some politics, but focused more on differences in men and women, branding (although that was political, and had a pretty varied set. Eryn was amused when he was talking about branding and asked all the men to put their hands up then said "put your hand down if you've stopped masturbating", and followed it up with the guys not wanting their wives/spouses to think they were quitters. We couldn't tell if Ming put his hand down.
I was supposed to go for a bike ride with Ming today, but he messed up and had me take today off when he meant Friday. So I tried to make the best of a messed up situation and headed down to St. Peter to play board games with Klund as he he some time free. I went early and ate at the local breakfast joint, the Nicollet Cafe. Good basic breakfast (2 pancakes, 2 sausages, 2 strips of bacon, 2 eggs), but a bit 2 much food. I had some time left, so I went over to the River Rock for coffee, forgetting how I don't particularly like their Americano. Klund does a better job.
Before I point out the games, I thought this picture was particularly strange, because it seems to imply Ming has his own fallout shelter in St. Peter. Maybe he has them all over the country and I just haven't been paying enough attention.
We played a slew of games. Several rounds of Klund's new game, Onitama. I saw it reviewed on one of the games for couples series on Actualol. It was as fun as it looks. Guyblin on Medium claims it's replaced chess for them. I think it would be a great work game and a great game as a gift for nieces and nephews. Fast, very fast. Here's the Actualol video it was in.
Then we tried Kane Klenko's Covert. I've owned it for a while, but hadn't gotten around to playing it (there's a lot of those at the house). So we sussed it out. It's a bit like Pandemic. A bit like Ticket to Ride. And a bit of Klenko's dice placement. It took a little bit of time to get in the right frame of mind, but then it made sense. There are some interesting mechanics, like the code bar where you try to make the codes match the codes on cards you have in order to claim spy resources that are worth victory points or usable as means toward completing missions.
Very Pandemic feel to the board. Missions to the right, "resource" type cards which double as special bonuses and flight cards to the left, and suitcase/codes at the top.
Here's the view from behind my screen. It's the winner's view, I finished 7 missions (you need six to win, but there's a last chance to finish a mission). A lot of my success had to do with finishing a mission that gave me an extra set of lockpicks in all situations and capitalizing on grabbing a bunch of lockpick-based missions.
It would have been more difficult with more people. Playing your dice to get cards and movement requires that you have a die that's sequential (up or down) with a previous die. That wasn't too hard with two of us. With a few more people it might get crowded and tricky.
We followed Covert up with two rounds of Dead of Winter. Klund hadn't played it before and I think it's better with more than two people, but we played straight coop and used a hard mission on our second try. We won both times, partially because we got a lot of firepower without exposure in the right places. During our second game (collect medicine from remote locations) we actually managed to pull a card that removed all food in the school pile, meaning every single card drawn after that was a useful card. I almost wish we had done worse just to get a better feel for the game and what makes it fun (when things get stressful). We could see it looming with food shortages and waste accumulating, but just never got there.
And we finished off the day with Seasons. A game I've had forever, courtesy of my sister reviewing my Amazon wish list, but haven't played because there are a number of things that predate me almost dying that suddenly became something I wouldn't do because they predate almost dying. Weird. Psychological. But true. The rules were hard to figure out using the printed rules and we had to resort to a mix of printed and online rules. But once we got going, it was straight forward. Roll dice, collect resources, the ability to play cards, and points, and use the cards to make points, sell resources for points, and get better cards, to score. In some ways, a bit like Magic the Gathering meets Dominion with a dice component. Klund thumped me. Absolutely crushed me. I'm not sure it's a game I'd play regularly, but I'd like to see it played with three or more to see how it changes, and it might be a good game to play with nieces and nephews.
And, I should add, an absolutely beautiful day for a convertible ride to and from St. Peter, MN.
We saw Ghost Busters in Shenandoah. Ming was pretty sure we could skip it because he had promised to go with his family, but it was the only thing starting. His family went without him during the ride. It all worked out.
I was on the shuttle bus with a drive who told a few of us his life story about being born in the town 63 years earlier. He left for a woman. Those women can make you do whatever they want. You can't do a thing about it.
We were told to meet the shuttle at the tennis courts. The shuttle didn't stop at the tennis courts, so we sprinted to a nearby stop with a man and his wife - the guy was very cranky about the directions. We met him a few other times during the ride. He was just sort of cranky. At one point on a tractor ride later during RAGBRAI someone was surprised at the turn radius of the tractor shuttle. He noted, "That's what tractors do."
The spaghetti dinner below as at the Knights of Columbus. The highlight...the ice cold iced tea - all you could drink. Later in RAGBRAI Ming would come to judge other dinners by their lack of all you could drink beverages.
I got lost. I got up in the middle of the night and wandered the quarter mile or more to the bathroom down by the stadium. When I came back, I couldn't find our tents. I wandered from tree to tree looking for one with a lot of dead branches with no luck. Then I wandered from (same) tree to (same) tree looking for my bike. After a few rotations, I finally found it. I was probably walking around the same tents multiple times at 2:00 a.m. for almost 20 minutes.
Day 1 - the heat isn't exactly gone, but it's not as bad as 3:00 a.m. on Day 0.
Still..everyone is very careful to ensure they have enough water.
It was HOT in Tabor. But we were functional. So I took this sweet, sweet photo of me on a stand in front of a cutout of Iowa. This is the very first spot Adam accused Ming of eating watermelon just so he could get a boner. That lasted the whole week.
Bikes. There were a lot of bikes.
Breakfast in Malvern. I didn't eat pancakes all week as I have in the past. We mixed it up a bit. Although I had more pancakes than Ming or Adam. I tend to meet nice people sitting down for some flapjacks.
All this tech and I can still get my finger in the picture. Adam's in this photo.
Cyclists! In motion!
We were generally up by 4:40 and on the road by 5:15 a.m. EARLY AS FUCK. I didn't even have lights because I'm used to getting up early, but leaving with first light. So wherever we were, it was relatively sparse. I think Ming may have missed out on a bit of RAGBRAI by not rolling along with a group of 1000.
In Shenandoah, it sprinkled on and off. But never enough to have to find shelter.
Here's the other half of that rainbow. But wait for it...it gets better.........
IT'S A MOTHERFUCKIGN DOUBLE RAINBOW! AND MING HAS ONLY ONE ARM AND YET HE FINISHED RAGBRAI! Amazing. You can barely see him, but Tun is in this picture. Ming met him in the bleachers and we saw him every day for the rest of the ride. Nice guy although fuck all faster than we are on his loaner $8500 carbon fiber bike (he's only faster because of that expensive bike - I'm sure on my bike, or Ming's bike, he's actually slower than we are).
At one point a bunch of guys hauled this tent to the middle of the field as a joke. The volunteer in the stands told us the groundskeeper would NOT be amused.
TENTS! This is a tents-centric post. There were a lot of tents. Look for the one with broken poles. That's Ming's tent. Adam could have helped him at any time with his pole repair kit. He wisely chose to refrain until the end of RAGBRAI.
We had a spaghetti dinner in Shenandoah. Delicious. The "pick 2" homemade dessert bar was excellent.
This is it, including a jukebox they probably didn't have.
I said this was a tents-centric post. Ming's tent serving as a dryer. My tent is in the foreground.
Adam looks like he's going to puke. He got a new tent for this ride. No pole issues like last time.
TENTS!
MORE TENTS!
SO MANY MOTHER-F-ING TENTS!
It was one of the few days it rained. But we were already in the end town, so we were caught under the Casey's canopy for a while, but not much more. There are people smoking next to the gas dispensers in this photo. Seriously.
The live version...
We spent quite a bit of time in the Shenandoah museum which had a bit of A/C and lots of displays. Adam thought this lady was creepy.
They had a sense of humor. This mastodon skull is ready to ride. I had some ice cream across the street before taking my second tour of the museum.
Ming, what are Ming events? Why do they cast a shadow? It sounds sort of scary. Like something out of Flash Gordon. You should use this as a profile picture - at least a cropped version of the left image part.
The other day, I received a piece of mail with the following bit of Chinese associated with the tagline: 杜凯希. I had no idea what it meant, so I asked Ming. Which in retrospect was sort of silly, because I could have wandered over to Soon to ask the same question and he offers up a lot more backstory usually. Ming said it was a cool name and I figured that meant something, but he said no, it was just some Caucasian Googling his own name and using the appropriate Chinese sounds. In my case, this would be 斯科特, Si Ke Da. Which sounds very much like Cicada. Which has a pictograph of its own: 蟬, or chán. There's a pretty video here: http://characters.cultural-china.com/173.html. Which implies that if I adopt the character, I'm adopting the idea of being full of understanding and nobility. Or full of something else.
蟬
It doesn't seem to be taken as a superhero name, so it looks like I can begin work on a costume. Maybe I'd only come out to fight once every 17 years? Like a poor man's King Arthur. And there's already a maneuver I can claim as part of my superhero motiff, the Cicada block! But I wont' be doing this...this is just gross... (very pretty site over there at Pink Tentacle, despite worries that I was on a tentacle porn site, check out the catfish/earthquake art and music - also, the slightly darkened Tokyo video).
In the oracle bone inscriptions, “chan” (“蝉”) is a pictographic character, with a cicada’s head on top, its abdomen at the bottom, and wings on both sides, displaying a vivid picture of a cicada on a tree in summer. In the small seal script, the shape is simplified, with a “dan” (“单”) radical added to the right, indicating its pronunciation. The character thus becomes a pictophonetic character and basically remains in the shape till now.
In China, the cicada is also known as “zhiliao” (literally “know, understand”), because the songs of the insect sound like the phrase “zhiliao” in Chinese. In ancient China, there was a fabric named “cicada wing silk”, because it was as thin as cicada wings. And fans made of this fabric were called “cicada wing fans”. Ancient Chinese people regarded the cicada as a symbol for noble and unsullied qualities due to its exposure to the nature world. That's why an ancient scholar would express his noblility by comparing himself to a cicada.
I received some very peculiar pictures in my email. They came from mingslittlekat@google.com. Wasn't sure what that was all about, but the content was certainly amusing.
It must be nice to get a Valentine's Day card from your cat saying how much you're missed.
Is that sacrilegious? Probably. I don't think Jesus would mind. The M stands for Ming. Because he drew this stick figure Jesus. I was disappointed by the lack of a thorny crown and the spear piercing his side and by the lack of the other two on the mount. But brevity worked in this case. Still, it's not as good as his Milkman.
...and because it's for Ming, it's also for Kyle. Courtesy of the trip Eryn and I took to Groth Music today. I think this was title of a piece of fan fiction Ming was writing.
Unlike last week's Ironman, which was the first one I'd missed since 1998 because this year I was a single dad and I didn't want to make Eryn wear snow pants to bike, I made it to the MS60 yesterday and it was beautiful. I told Ming I'm pretty sure I could have done two 60s.
I don't think Ming was quite as up to the distance. But the general rule is, this year I'm on, this year you're off. And then next year, you just reverse it. He asked if losing 40# was having any sort of affect on me. I'm pretty sure by the end of the ride he noticed it was. But it was a huge difference this year not having a 4 mph rider with us, and that it wasn't 33 degrees and exceptionally windy.
Ming pumps.
Ming tires to get Logan to take a pre-ride picture.
Logan! What the heck is going on here?!!! Someone left a message for you on the rider board. 3rd place!? Ouch...I hope you take your dad back there and erase it. It's probably still out there at the 3rd rest stop. How embarrassing!
(While we were there, the guy on the bus said, "Hey, hey...what are you writing sir?" To which I had to reply, "I'm writing a message to a kid who's not on the ride. It's funny, not profane. And I'm going to erase it as soon as I take a picture." He warned me to be careful of standing where the SAG wagon would drive, just so he could chastise me for something.)
I did the MS60 last Saturday. It was damn cold. We started out the day at about 36 degrees, and it warmed up, but not by much. Throughout the day it was cold enough to see your breath, and when I got home I sat in a hot bathtub because I couldn't warm up. Top it off with a strong headwind, 60 miles of riding, and a pile of hills, and I was worried I'd bonk the last 5 miles. One of the toughest rides I've done in quite a while.
Practice ride the Wednesday before the MS60 with Mike. Truly a practice ride as it was cold and miserable, just like the MS60. We made it as far as Richfield before hoofing it back to Eagan. This is Mike, pedaling.
Moh at the halfway point on the MS60. He didn't quite make it to the end. About mile 45 he was down to 6 or 7 mph going downhill. Not a big deal on the MS60 as there are SAG vehicles, so I chased one down for him. Definitely the right decision.
Me at the halfway mark. I didn't take the SAG. It just made for a fun picture.
Ali blew a tire not too far after the Gateway trail. It took three people to pump it up, including a discussion about whether to pump it up to 200 PSI.
Pumping up the flat tire, the view from the other side. I hope it's mesmerizing.
My road bike! Not the bike I took on the MS60, but it was waiting at Erik's when I got home. I had new, wider rims put on it so that I can ride it more often (I'd put a few thousand miles on it many years ago, and the rims got soft and required spoke adjustment after every ride). I took it out for a short ride with Eryn on Sunday. I'm not used to the shoes and clipless pedals after all this time, but it's a much smoother ride, and I'm down below some of the wind. I'm looking forward to getting out on it this week after the rain and the cold weather are finally over.
I know...I took seven days off the blog. And then I posted five posts. And then I still didn't post this post and waited even longer. It's been nine days since Ironman, and I'm in danger of running into my next big ride in the form of the MS60 this weekend. Why didn't I just spread them out over five of those days? Because I needed a rest. Or because I had 12-16 hour work days. Take your pick. If you can't catch up, you belong on facebook ;)
But I have a good bicycling story unrelated to Ironman. On Sunday I was supposed to go bicycling with Ali from work (pictured at the bottom of this post). We were going to start at the park on Highway 13, just north of 494, and bike into Minneapolis and around the lakes and along the greenway. I got there before Ali and unloaded my bike and set it to the side against a trash can while I busied myself with my bag and pump. As a plane flew overhead, I looked up to see why it sounded so strange. And then it was gone, and I still heard the noise. It was my tube. The act of just sitting there had popped it. Fortunately, I was there early, so I popped it off, replaced it with the spare and started pumping. At about 20 psi, the new tube popped. I didn't even know that was possible. So when Ali pulled up I was contemplating whether to attempt a 20 minute patch job, or to just call it a day. I chose the second option, stating that something bad always seemed inevitable when I had multiple flats, despite not being a very superstitious person in general. Ali was worried because he hadn't been into Minneapolis from that direction before, so I told him to head down the trail to St. Paul along the river past the confluence, which was a straight shot.
The next day he caught up with me at work and told me that further down the hill he'd come to a do not enter sign and that another cyclist had told him not to worry about it and push on. He did, only to find that cyclist getting a ticket for a violation. He pleaded with the cop, telling him it was his first time on the trail and that his friend had sent him on alone, and that the other cyclist had told him it was ok. The cop let him go without a ticket, but when Ali turned around to head up the hill the cop told him no way and pointed at the huge, steep hill that circumnavigated the restricted area (there was a fear of falling debris during bridge construction). So Ali had to get directions from the cop and make a long, circuitous route back to the car.
I know if I had been along, I would have been the cyclist saying, "eh...that's probably nothing" and scored my first bicycling ticket. Fate was kind in the form of two flat tubes.
When I got home, I renewed my commitment not to have a non-functional bike again, and took my road bike into the shop for new, heavier rims (yes, a rim job), purchased two tubes for every bike, cleaned both bikes, and purchased a new spoke for the mountain bike I rode during Ironman. I hadn't even noticed it had popped one. Hopefully I'll be riding a road bike soon and enjoying some easier riding.
So the Sunday before last, Ming, Kyle and I went on Ironman in Lakeville. Ali went as well. But we didn't bike with him. We just saw him after the ride. It was very similar to last year, except it was just a bit warmer, so we weren't in danger of hypothermia. And it rained the first 10 miles, not the last 20. I still had water in my shoes, but I was much more cheerful, and fully willing to sit around Wu's for some Chinese food afterwards without worrying about changing my clothes.
Saddles covered with the latest in protective rain gear.
Ming. Doing his blow job exercises.
Kyle, running away from Ming.
Click on this one for the big panorama of Ming at the first rest stop.
Bikes at the first rest stop. My shoes hadn't soaked through by this point.
I've got layers upon layers. I was suprisingly dry, except for my feet, at the end of the ride.
Ali and Ming celebrating the end of the ride. Ali's quite the biker. He went from no mileage to over 100 a week. That's some serious pedaling. I'm a bit jealous, even though I get to hit the trails tomorrow.
End of the road at Lakeville High School. Only thirty miles, but the chill gets to your legs, so it's some work. Again, click for a bigger version of the panorama.
