Clipper Ship - The Ballad of Captain Kyle

In 1988 I had a class in CAD/CAM at RPI.  It had a mouse that looked a lot like the compass I used for orienteering in Boy Scouts.  You could see through it so you could position the cross hairs on the appropriate parts of a picture or diagram beneath it.  If you review a history of the mouse, it was noted in 1984 that it would lead to the failure of the Mac.  So that gives you an idea of how early in computing history we were.  If that doesn't convince you, then you might consider that the machine I took to school was what was considered a top line 80286 Compaq portable and the computer before that had been a Vic 20 with a cassette drive.

I had a favorite picture of a clipper ship that died only recently.  It was that poster that I used for my CAD project. Beautiful, eh?  It's named after a girl I never managed to get a date with from high school.



But just a picture wasn't enough.  As a bit of foreshadowing to my days of leaving long-winded stories embedded within production VB code, I wrote a poem to go with it.  The Ballad of Captain Kyle.  Apparently I sent the picture and poem to my Grandpa Don, because a letter, the poem, and the ship were all in a folder of important documents my grandmother left behind when she passed on this year.  I'm not sure if she kept it because she enjoyed it so much, or because she was worried she might need it one day during arguments about whether I needed to be committed.  To be fully above board (ha!), when I submitted the ship for my class assignment, the poem was submitted with it.  I had a habit of submitting literature with my assignments.  I suspect I can find Physics Picnic in the trunk downstairs.  I hear it was on the overhead display for how to create a physics cheat sheet for years.

So without further ado, The Ballad of Captain Kyle, in picture and text form.  Enjoy.




The Ballad of Captain Kyle

There was a man whose name was Kyle
He sailed the ocean blue,
And the Lady Amy, bright and fair,
To her his heart was true.

He sailed and searched the seven seas
In quest of gems and gold,
But back to Amy his heart would wander
After adventures fierce and bold.

Yet upon the waters did also reside
A man of evil intent,
Weinerbeard, the African pirate,
Who did Captain Kyle resent.

A man so sick, so cruel and mean,
That to the gods he did taunt,
"Amy's not so special,
She's mine whenever I want!"

So he sailed stealthily into the port
Near her home under the dark of night,
And kidnapped her, bound, hand and foot,
Wrapped up sound and tight.

The news came to Captain Kyle
As he stood upon windswept bow,
And looking up to the heavens above
He made an angry vow.

"I'll have you Weinerbeard, I know I shall,
And you'll pay for what you've done,
Your ship will sink and your life be mine
Before the setting of another sun!"

So he sailed out, upon his ship,
The clipper, her lady Nicole,
And found Weinerbeard, ready and await,
Anchored in a nearby shoal.

Guns were fired and cannon roared,
Their noise a salvo of thunder,
Masts were felled, sails ripped,
And timber split asunder.

Smoke rolled heavily across the sea,
Obscuring all from sight,
Bodies and debris littered the water,
Bloody evidence of the fight.

The Nicole was boarded and Weinerbeard came
Challenging Kyle to a duel,
"I'll have your head," he bellowed aloud,
"You'll not stand before me fool!"

Their swords did clash, steel upon steel,
Sparks flying far and wide,
Until with a thrust, Kyle did run him through,
His sword in Weinerbeard's side.

Thus, Weinerbeard fell, his lifeblood spent,
On his burning ship sailors yelled alarms,
And Captain Kyle sailed away into the bright sunset
Fair Amy within his arms.

Savage Senior Citizen

A newspaper article from right before my grandmother passed.

The Savage Senior Citizen organization began the spring of 1973.  In the beginning the group met at various churches with 10 to 14 members.  In 1976, the new firehall was completed with room to accomodate the senior citizens.  In 1979, the organization purchased the Madsen Hardware building.  The purchase was realized by a grant, their savings and generous donations.  The center is still open at this location today.  The center serves congregate meals every Thursday at noon, with coffee and goodies which are ready by 9:30.  The Savage Senior Center is an active group, participating and supporting many Savage activities.  Presently, the center has 60 active members, including fifteen over 80 years of age and four over 90.  We are very proud of our center and thank the ten members who began it in 1973.  Back Row L to R: Edgar Fisher, Sandy Ler, Elmer Inhoff, Normal Etzel, Bob Koeppler, Jean Odenbach, Leonard Odenbach, Vivian Reed and Frank Reed.  Front Row L to R: Madeline McVay, Luella Hafeman, Gertrude Chance, Melda Asbeck, Violet Ronningen and Pat Suit (Submitted by Terri Miller)

Sunday Breakfast

Yesterday I biked into downtown St. Paul to have breakfast with Ming at the Four Inns.  I had to wait around in front of the federal building for a while because it only took an hour to get there, not the hour and a half I'd allotted myself, so I amused myself by taking photos and reading the news.  This one turned out really well.

When Ming got there he was on the other side of the building and, by the time I caught up with him, he was talking to the cops on the phone about the guy who'd been on the side of the trail with a machete.  Unfortunately, the cop couldn't investigate because he didn't know how to look up bicycling trails on Google.  So there's your piece of advice for the day.  If you're going to commit a crime, commit it on a bike trail and you'll buy yourself hours while the cops try to align it with geography they understand.



This was in the window across the street.  Vote Betty!  The nurses used to have lots of this exact sign when I worked for them back in the 80s and Betty was running for City Council.  I believe she actually came to the office once to talk to the nurses as the association (our district wasn't officially a union) did a lot of political action committee work representing registered nurses and health care in general.


The Four Inns had good food.  The pancakes were particularly tasty.  This guy loomed over us throughout breakfast.


And she stared at us from the corner.  She reminds me of art I'd see at work.


After breakfast, we noticed a bag under a bench right up against the building.  So we tried to find a security guard who could help us, but when we got on the elevator and pushed the button to the 10th floor, it just turned itself off again.  There was no one immediately available on a Sunday morning.  After taking a closer look I could just see inside to see it was empty, so I popped the top open so it was obvious nothing was inside for anyone else who might be worried about a bomb scare.  Given the current nonsense about physically implanting bombs in people, I wonder how they'd have reacted to me calling in the authorities to look at a lunch box with a big chunks of metal in my hip and a scar.  Guess it depends on whether they brought a metal sniffing dog as it doesn't show below the edge of my bike shorts.

Lilydale has had a lot of work done since I last pedaled into St. Paul.  They're routing the trail along the wetlands a little further south, and this is going up.  Very nice looking as long as you don't peek around the corner and see what seems to be a homeless tent city hidden in the woods.

I raced a couple of road bikers here just to make them work.  They never like getting passed by my hybrid/sport bike.  It's a good reason not to accept Ming's mirror - I'd only use it to mess with people.


The panoramic view.  You can see it better at the [Original].
 

Clouds that look like things

If I had been in the UK instead of Iowa, I'd have had the perfect forum to post my photos.  Flickr makes it easy to find many examples, including this very disturbing photograph.

Backwards Cuba!


A dog on back, either pushing a ball or getting ready to eat or drink out of his dish.


A turkey.  Not the live kind, the Thanksgiving kind, ready for the oven once you tie his legs back.  Or the kind with which Mr. Bean is most familiar.


Reindeer!  Could be a fat Rudolph.

I'm a little man lost in a parking lot!

If only I'd gotten a fortune cookie with my lunch, it would have been perfect.  This is from when I saw Scott (The Boss) and Ron walking around the back parking lot at work.  I almost never eat at the counter along the windows overlooking the lot.  So I know it was fate that led me there that day when everything else was full up.

From my window seat, I could watch as Scott and Ron wandered toward the far second lot, then doubled back, then walked in a wide circle around the (rather large) near lot, and then had to go almost car to car to find his car.  I think it took them a good 15-20 minutes of walking which is probably significantly more time than it took them to drive to lunch.

Night of the Living Dead

This afternoon we, as a family, went to a matinee of Night of the Living Dead, the play, at the Mounds Theatre in St. Paul.

Acting at the Mounds is never top shelf.  I think they pull a lot of actors from the local community, so it can be hit or miss.  But they definitely try hard and they put some amusing ideas on stage and their productions are always fun. We saw Mort there, based on the Terry Pratchett novel.  And they've done Guards, Guards! in the past as well.

Night of the Living Dead started out with a black and white remake of the car scene in the movie, which ended by Barbara fleeing to the Mounds Theatre where a number of other people were also holing up.  At that point it switched to the actors and never switched back to film again except to show an exploding pickup and some zombie cleanup at the end to the tune of Cash's The Man Comes Around, an homage to Dawn of the Dead.

During intermission, the zombies all come out to wander around and act like zombies, eating hands, pondering an electric saw, and attempting to use a shotgun.  One in a poncho sat down next to Eryn seriously freaking her out.  She wasn't having it.  And the idea of playing The Man Comes Around on her guitar while dressed as a zombie is apparently right out the door.

This picture turned out really well for accidentally leaving on the flash and getting it blurry.  She looks like a zombie.  We sat on the corner, so most of them walked past us at one point.  The little girl zombie came over to sniff Eryn's Milk Duds.

You can see a zombie lurking like a stage hand near the intermission sign.  As with many zombie-related shows, the humans are overrun in the end, both from the outside and from the inside, where a child bitten by a zombie turns into the undead and dispatches her parents and forces the main character into the conflict of shooting a child.  By the end, only the main character is left, holed up in an upstairs loft.  When the militia comes to eliminate the zombies, he throws open the doors blocking the loft, exultant because he's saved, and is promptly shot dead by the militia.  So the Asian guy lived the longest out of anyone, but still didn't make it through the show.

Product Launch

We  launched quite a while ago, but it took a while for our airplanes to fly across the Pacific from China.


Mine in particular, given the detached wing.  Fortunately, a bit of super glue took care of it.  I wish all software bugs were that easy to fix.  I like having a memento of a product I worked on getting out the door and into the hands of customers.  I have a memento of a software project that never made it out the door.  So this is much better than that.

RAGBRAI XLI 2013 - Fairfield to Fort Madison, 63 miles and 2,427 feet of climb

Last day, day 7!  Fairfield to Birmingham to Keosauqua to Bentonsport to Bonaparte to West Point to Fort Madison.

It was cold.  In the low 50s in the morning.  Cold enough that I wore my rain jacket for the first part of the ride and Adam shivered.  Twenty-one days of RAGBRAI in my life and I've never been cold before.  Crazy.  All sorts of riders had jackets and arm warmers on.

We saw two sets of these signs the last two days.  Adam and I both worked for Mycogen Seeds when we contracted for our old company, before they were bought out by Dow who closed down the Eagan, Minnesota, branch.  I didn't even realize they were still a name in the seed business.  When we worked for them, one of our applications was to track patents, which was precisely what Dow was after.  On one of my previous rides I saw a farmer with Mycogen swag on, which he presumably received as part of the seed incentive program we automated and layered applications on top of.


If you zoom in on the original of this photo you can see Adam in all his end of RAGBRAI-pedaling glory (not to be confused with his tire-dipping glory, which we'll see later).

This pie made me sad.  Partially because I went with a cream pie as my last slice of pie on RAGBRAI (fruit pies are my rule) and partially because it still tasted good with that fluffy top, but I dumped more than a third of it in my lap.  Last piece of pie on RAGBRAI = lap pie.  Damn it.  And I just wasn't in the mood, after daubing my crotch, to have a second piece.


The West Point Bike Mountain.  It's not turtles all the way down.  There's a structure the bicycles are glued to.  But pretty cool.


West Point panorama [original].  Only 10.9 miles from the end.

And the end.  Fort Madison and the tire dipping.  There was a fairly narrow space for getting down to the river.  A few people braved the rocks along the shore, but I'm a little skittish about things that affect my balance since the broken hip.  406 miles from the start, around 425 miles of total bicycling with overage and biking in towns, and 2486 miles since I started bicycling on the broken hip.  Not bad for 11 months.  There's a big wooden fort behind us.  Presumably a replica of Fort Madison.  I didn't realize the War of 1812 had involved Minnesota and Iowa, although the fact that it was fought with Native American allies makes that seem obvious with some consideration.


Adam and I officially dipping our tires.


My front tire getting a good wash.


Some live action tire dipping.


And 12 more seconds of dipping:


I had two other left over photos.  This is the charger I took along to recharge my iPhone.  It worked great because my phone was a bit of an energy hog.  This held six charges.  Usually I just added a half charge to the phone when it was closer to running out of power.  Much easier to handle than worrying about a solar-powered charger.  And when the ride was over, Eryn used it to power the iPhone and Android on the way home, and I powered up the iPad just to prove to myself it carried a significant charge.  Even without plugs, this would have probably gotten me through the week as long as I wasn't running RunKeeper the whole ride.


But I'd rather finish on a picture of the ride.  The sky merged with the tents a little in this picture, but it turned out very nice and sort of artsy looking [larger].  XLI was a great ride and Adam and I had a great time.  A fun 406 miles!

RAGBRAI XLI 2013 - Oskaloosa to Fairfield, 52 miles and 1,222 feet of climb

Day 6! Oskaloosa to Cedar to Fremont to Hedrick to Martinsburg to Packwood to Fairfield.

The last two days had small towns.  Even the meeting town was small.  No theater in the overnight town.  Instead we went to the local pizza place and had pizza, soft serve ice cream (at least I did - it came with the pizza, free access to the machine), and recharging.  We rounded it out with some shopping at the used book store and grabbing some air conditioning at the chocolate, cheesecake, and ice cream shop. Otherwise it was an early bedtime in one of the few shady sites we had during the ride, with a nice breeze, and the sound of the Spazmatics loudly playing until 10:30 p.m., even though they were 1.2 miles away.

It was a relaxing day, right down to a pretty pleasant shower with hot and cold water in the shower semi and a church that recharged our phones while providing free gatorade and popcorn.

I realized I missed two stories.  During the ride I was behind this guy who was listening to strange music I could only describe as elevator music.  Another rider passed me, pulled up next to him, and asked him about it.   The first rider explained it was a mixture of disco and synth.  So the second rider nodded his head in deep thought and offered that if he liked disco/synth, he'd probably like Flogging Molly. Flogging Molly is Celtic punk!  If you like the Dropkick Murphys, perhaps it's appropriate to say you'd like Flogging Molly.  But in no conceivable way are they related to disco/synth.  We listened to my Flogging Molly CD on the way down to the ride, so I know what I'm talking about.  The two sounded nothing alike.

Thursday there was a stop as we crossed a highway.  A couple of cops staffed the intersection and while Adam and I were there, they let some traffic through while accumulating a bundle of cyclists.  A peloton of cyclists?  A hub of cyclists?  Pick your own plural noun.  We waited, we waited, he slowly started to lift his hand, and one of the cyclists shot across the intersection all alone.  The cop shook his head, announced in his loudest, snarkiest, voice, "Sometimes I want to be first too," and waved the rest of us through.  There was a lot of chuckling.

Hedrick was the midway point and it was a little confusing as to whether you should go straight, or take the right.  We took the right, and it routed us past a community center that had a wonderful pie stop.  In my opinion, if it looks like there's a small loop at RAGBRAI that catches an odd part of the town, you should take it.  It's usually the difference between eating yet another smoothy and the traditional food stands, and a glorious piece of homemade pie.


This is one of the signs that you're going to get a very good piece of pie.


Lots of riders missed this stop so they didn't have to bike the extra five or six blocks.  Their loss.


Yum.  A more accurate picture would have showed the brat I ate sitting on top of my pie.  The other pieces of apple pie didn't look like this one.  They were definitely individually made and had different amounts of apple, sugar, and color to them.  One guy nearby asked for a particular kind of pie and a server disappeared for a few minutes and came back with a whole pie from the back room.


Fairfield.  They had a circus theme.  There were jugglers and gymnasts downtown culled from the local talent.


Some of the townsfolk built this amazing bicycle out of drainage pipe, pvc, and other items from the local hardware store.


I picked this up at the chocolate/ice cream shop.  I kept it so Erik H. can use it as inspiration for his next book.  I know he works hard on his blurbs.  To me this sounds sort of like a new age Doctor Who.  If you're 950 light years away, aren't you obviously in the future?  Why are they light years?  Because distance is involved as well as time?  Aren't they pretty much inter-related at that point?  Or is she 950 light years away AND in the future, just not necessarily 950 years in the future, given her mode of transportation and/or meditation techniques?


These two guys camped near us.  Adam's tent!  Pinky was right about the poles!  I noticed one of them hadn't set up earlier and, when I looked, it was obvious his poles were broken.  I offered them Adam's role of duct tape, but they had made due with other means, including stuffing a folding chair in the bottom of one tent to hold it up.  These pictures were from the next morning, so the guy with the folding chair had obviously kicked it over overnight.  I can't imagine that wasn't a bit wet with dew.


Overnight picture.  Six days of bicycling make Scooter go something something!

RAGBRAI XLI 2013 - Knoxville to Oskaloosa, 52 miles and 2,808 feet of climb

This is from later in the week.  I set my pack on a banana from the Iowa Conservation folks and, not wanting to eat a banana that had been mashed into my tent, decided to draw a face on it.  I surprised Adam in his tent with Banana Man and then mashed him over a sharp edge inside the trash can so that whomever opened the trash next would see him staring up, a look of surprise on his face at being trepanned by a trash can.  I have edited it down and added some music for Adam.


The windmill in Pella, Iowa.  The largest in-use windmill (of its sort) in the United States.  The thing is massive.  Shortly before the windmill we had pancakes at Central College.  At the other end of our table, and Adam missed this whole event, were two young guys and a woman having pancakes.  At one point one guy starts telling this story.  It seems he's sharing a tent with someone on RAGBRAI.  So he woke up touching his wiener (his word).  But it turns out it was the other guys wiener.  And that guy woke up, and he was touching his wiener. That was their homoerotic moment for RAGBRAI.  The woman starts laughing so hard I thought she was going to choke on her pancakes.  And the other guy, who's not wiener guy number two, looks absolutely shocked that anyone would admit to that story.  Laughs uncontrollably.  Is shocked again.  And then the three of them are laughing so hard for minutes they can't eat.  It was pretty funny.



The home of Banana Man, the Iowa Conservation free banana and postcard stand. It's somewhere along the route every day.  I sent Eryn a cow postcard and an owl postcard one stressing Whoo and one stressing Moooost proclaiming me to be the best dad.  She's still my little girl.

A very attractive picture of Adam with his camelpack on his front and applying sunblock.


Mr. Banana Man's family.  Bananas!  Bananas everywhere!


There were a couple signs like this on the ride, including one that warned that the road ahead was in no way built with bicycles in mind.

Oskaloosa's literature claimed they'd won a prize as one of the 15 most picturesque town squares in the Untied States.  Nothing adds to that beauty like dropping an orange safety fence and a giant, inflatable Budweiser bottle in the mix.


In Oskaloosa there was a cool book store called the Book Vault that used to be a bank and had a safe on each floor that was now a book closet.  Unfortunately, I needed a break from the book of plays I was reading, so I went searching for a horror or sci fi book.  There was a dubious looking book called Cryonic: A Zombie Novel on the shelf, but a search on the in-house computer told me it was about a 4.75/5 on Amazon.  These reviewers are friends of the author.  I can think of no other reason for a 4.75/5.  It is a bad book.  Sorry Travis Bradberry, but your book is one of the worst zombie books I've ever read.  Your main character is a Mary Sue of the most obvious sort and no one does anything particularly clever and your loose ends are blatantly tied up and the writing...well, at least it matches the plot.  I think I'm going to send it to Klund to read.

 

Next door to the Book Vault was an enormous coffee shop that looked like it had once been the movie theater.  For the first time since we had left Minnesota we managed to charge our phones to almost 100%.


For a while it looked like rain.  This was our tent neighbor's attempt to ensure his/her bike stayed as dry as possible.  I think it looks like a way to torture a bicycle.


The second picture of No Parking bicycle humor from the ride.


Mixed berry pie.  Excellent crust.  Delicious, even without the ala mode.


A pair of very wide photos of our Oskaloosa campsite.  The two of them together comprise about a 360 degree view.  There was a little girl near us who couldn't pronounce Oskaloosa.  I asked her if that was her name.  It was also near here that the Heather stretching discussion took place.

Through those tents lies a water hose that I used to fill my bottles.  The guy before me set it down and started walking away and when I picked it up I activated the hair trigger on the nozzle.  Shot him square in the back.  He took it with a good nature as I was obviously almost as startled as he was.

[Original]
 
[Original]
 

Team Fur Bandit.  They covered their bikes in fur and what seemed to be carpet.

Unfortunately, it was near here that we saw Grown Ups 2.  Our selection of movies was incredibly limited and, in order to take advantage of the air conditioning, we were willing to see whatever was playing at the time we were available.  That included Sandra Bullock's The Heat and Grown Ups 2.  Grown Ups 2 made The Heat seem like an absolute masterpiece.  Wow was it bad.  At first we couldn't find the theater, but a very friendly woman gave Adam a hug, copped a feel, and personally escorted us to the theater.  I thought she might come in to canoodle with Adam.

A number of Iowa towns didn't have a theater, or had a theater that was undergoing a major overhaul but had stalled for lack of money.  The new digital technologies seemed to be expensive enough that revamping to support what had become standard was incredibly prohibitive.  It was hard to believe downs of 6-8,000 people didn't have a single screen unless you drove 16 miles down the road.