Found it!

I could swear there's a river around here somewhere.

#SilentSunday

At our old house, L would sit on the railing at the top of the stairs, looking down on the living room. This house has no stairs, so she parkours up to the top of the shower enclosure to watch the humans drench themselves. #caturday

I'll probably be going to a memorial service on the east coast in September. Spouse can't go, so I am tempted to ride the #motorcycle at least part of the way. Spouse said that sounds therapeutic, although five 600-mile days each direction is an awful lot of therapy, and would burn through all my PTO for the rest of the year. On the other hand, riding to someplace like Denver and then flying over the flat part of the country seems like a good compromise.

Yet another in a long series of indignities. #caturday #CatsOfMastodon #DogsOfMastodon

Spent the last 48 hours or so in central Oregon, doing a thing. The thing I was doing deserves some mention, for context, eventually, but never mind that, everyone. Last night, I was encircled by nighthawks! It was awe-inspiring, and it was all I could do to not forget where I was and what I was doing and really damage myself.

For context, I was doing my usual motorcycle thing of volunteering to patrol a lonely dark road in the middle of nowhere, overnight, to make sure the people participating in a long-distance athletic event are (and feel) safe. So, as part of this I found myself, just after sunset, on a dusty gravel road about five miles north of Fort Rock, piloting a slightly-too-big motorcycle at about fifteen mph, trying to kick up as little dust as possible. I was throwing a bright beam of light in front of me, which, of course, attracted bugs. The bugs, in turn, attracted this supersonic, darting, twisting shadow with gleaming white stripes on its wings, moving like the cheetah of barn swallows. "It's going to hit me!" I thought, seven times in two seconds, but no. It had a perfect idea of my size, shape, and momentum. I made no sudden movements, and it danced pirouettes around me, tracking a bug, grabbing it, veering off at the last moment, and then looping back for another bug. It was glorious.

#PNW #birds #motorcycles

There are bright points, however. The stomach muscles you develop from five days of dry-heaving will remain well-defined until you turn 40. There is some schadenfreude on the VHF radio: conversations between dismasted racers and a nonplussed Coast Guard flyer who had no idea there were going to be three hundred small sailboats out in the middle of the Gulf Stream this week ("You people do this for fun?"). There's also an eight-track tape player, for your listening enjoyment. I mentioned this was 1979, right? There is only one tape on the boat: "American Pie" (plus a few other great hits of the same time period) as interpreted by (I think) Henry Mancini and some pops orchestra, conducted very up-tempo, with the melody line covered by somebody whistling. Possibly it's Jiminy Cricket himself. As if it weren't bad enough to merely have this thing on the boat, some damn fool keeps playing it. Tweet tweet tweedledeedledy-deet. It's quite catchy, like the plague, and it doesn't kill you right away, either. The eight-track player is next to the chart table, on the other side of the cabin. Every time you try to crawl across the cabin to eject the infernal piece of plastic and toss it over the side, some helpful putz bundles you up and puts you back in your bunk with a couple of damp saltines.

2/3

Yesterday I made a remark, about the absurdity and senselessness of ocean racing, which—without context—may have seemed a little harsh. Here is some context (for context about the context, I wrote this about fifteen years ago on some other social media platform, if that matters).

___

It is 1979. Imagine you are ten. I don't think it's necessary to imagine you are male, because at no point do you get to pee standing up. If you think it helps explain the senselessness of it all, however, go right ahead. You are on a 36-foot sailboat that has just crossed the starting-line of a multi-day, open-ocean sailing race from Massachusetts to Bermuda. Within an hour of the race's start, you become seasick for the first time in your life. You descend into a seasickness which could possibly be described as Homeric, had Homer not had much better things to write about. Everything in your stomach goes over the side in 41°N latitude, not to be replaced until about 32°45'N. You are given a canvas bucket and relegated to a bunk in the main cabin. At one end is a leaky overhead vent. At the other end is a storage locker containing a leaky, stinking bottle of rum. Complaining that bottle stinks and is leaking will do no good, because you are apparently no longer speaking English.

1/3

Just gonna keep following this car until the license plate rolls over.

Domincatrix and subdog are at it again.

#CatsOfMastodon #DogsOfMastodon

I spent the last three days out in Bend doing a different flavor of my occasional volunteer #motorcycle work. The organization is called No Kid Hungry, and raises money for grants for school lunches (and presumably breakfasts). The event was called Chefs' Cycle, and it attracted lots of professional chefs, restauranteurs, and foodies who also like #bicycling . Each entrant had to bring in several thousand dollars in donations to participate, and apparently they raised over $1.2 million.

Never mind that, though; I'm here to talk about the motorcycle patrol. We had six riders—in addition to bike mechanics, SAG vehicles, and medical staff—patrolling a 100-mile and a 50-mile course for two days, keeping tabs on 130 bicyclists. For this event, I volunteered to be the coordinator for some reason. This meant I mostly* sat in a hotel room with the event manager, looking at dots on a laptop screen and radioing instructions to my six riders. I joked afterward that I'm ready to give up motorcycling and go into radio.

It was fun. As a fundamentally unorganized person, I was super stressed about being the coordinator (and I'm again stressed about the post-event admin stuff on my plate now), but it went off well, everyone worked well together, and everyone seemed to have a good time. We also got gourmet breakfast, dinner, and snacks each day.

___
* On day two, I had to rescue one of my riders who had killed his battery following my instructions, so I did get a little sun and fresh air.

Northern flicker! Taking a dirt bath! In the driveway!

#BirdCallout

The council has convened.

#CatsOfMastodon #caturday

South #Eugene: affluent enough that you've got a Porsche, but bougie enough that you pretend it's a Subaru.

We were talking about flickers drumming on noisy things yesterday, and I thought I'd unearth this twenty-two-year-old photo of my particular percussionist.

#birds #BirdPhotography

Cat: You're going to put this on Mastodon, aren't you?

Dog: You're going to put this on Mastodon, aren't you?

#Caturday #CatsOfMastodon #DogsOfMastodon

A cat and her dog.

#CatsOfMastodon #DogsOfMastodon

Unleash the #SuperbOwl! (Edited with alt text)

...and it's an indicator of how much coffee I haven't had yet that I wrote "shitpost about coprolite" with absolutely no self-awareness.

There was a shitpost yesterday about coprolite, I can't find it now, but when I saw it I wasn't wearing my glasses and jumbled the letters a little in my head and anyway now I have a new name for Microsoft Copilot.