Tools, fire, phone

The blizzard of gadgets I’ve had to shovel off my mental sidewalk this December also includes a new cell phone, motivated by the eminent death of my two year old one which has more miles logged with me on a bike than some Cat B racers rack up in a season, because my girlfriend uses it to text me so I tend to find myself phone-less, and also I will blame an email I got from AT&T telling me I could get it for free.  Free being a word without which nothing can be sold, and which has thus been just a little degraded in meaning.  Free used to mean you didn’t have to spend anything.  In this case, I spent $150, because the new free phone requires a blue tooth headset and a different car charger.  I remember when $150 was almost real money, but now I realize it is a small enough amount to be considered free.

My candy bar Nokia is what I would call a basic phone, and my brother calls “Rick you have a real job.  Why don’t you get a decent phone… an iPhone or something”.  Bare bones for Christmas 2009 means a phone which works in over 300 countries in the world, thanks to GSM (4 years ago just being digital was amazing) and 4 bands of radios built in, text messaging, a 1.4 MPixel camera with 3:1 zoom and a night vision mode sufficient for pretty good imaging of the moon, movie record and playback with sound, an earphone jack and USB port for uploading and playing MP3 music and books, an address book that holds something over 1000 entries, calendar, alarm clock, internet access on 3G for email, banking, googling things, instant messaging (in case plain old texting, the internet at 7Mbits/s and emailing aren’t enough connectivity) games (Tetris among them), 17 ring tones and 22 other alert tones.  And who could live without at least the ability to download (a euphemism for purchase) more games, music, applications software and tones.  With this barebones phone, you don’t have to take that risk.

It also can dial by voice, handheld or via its built in Bluetooth supporting both phone headsets and listening to music in stereo.  Simultaneously.  If you hold it up to the radio and hit a key, it tells you what song you are listening to (but don’t try that on a Chopin Nocturne) and of course with one more button you can purchase, oops I mean download, the song or just a ringtone version of the song, which for some reason costs more than the song.  Did I mention it also comes with a half dozen different wallpapers for your customizable display, or you can change the display to a picture from its camera or any other graphic you download via Bluetooth or the USB port?

So like I said, a phone suitable for at least cave dwelling and other pre-agrarian societies.  It makes me happy in other ways than just its ability to ring polyphonically imitating a phone my grandparents had sitting on a wooden table in a room people used to call the foyer.  I figure my students all have phones 10 times this complex, so while they aren’t doing much in my classes, they are learning something somehow.  The world is more complicated – our brains are thriving, even if our bodies aren’t.   Thumbs excluded.

And since I was sort of a failure at Econ, it pleases me that economists actually think they can track prices from one year to another.  10 years ago having a cordless phone was for the majority of people, pretty connected.  A cordless phone costed $100. or maybe $49 or maybe $19 on sale at radio shack when you bought two, the other one of which had an answering machine in it (let’s not get into what those were) (i.e. the $19 phone cost $100 – this was the beginning of the devaluation of “free”).   Now I have this netbook disguised as a phone, ostensibly free with a 2 year extension of a contract I wanted to extend anyway.  It costs me $69 per month, vs. $24.95 for my old landline, but that one had $16.50 in taxes added it to it for line fees and other things I never understood – just wrote checks for.  But this one has free national long distance – and that 3G internet.  Worth more than its predecessor Edge?  How much more?  And voicemail and texting.

None of which do I write checks for – it shows up on a credit card which I pay over the internet (I could do over the phone but haven’t figured out yet, plus the idea of using my phone to pay for my phone worries me for 2nd Law of Thermodynamics reasons).   So excluding the labor involved in figuring out how to turn the thing on, the price of telephoning has gone… up…?

We used to worry that we would yield the ability to remember stuff, lazily storing it all, to our phones and Palm Pilots (remember those?).  It turns out remembering how to find all that stuff you stored is enough of a challenge, let alone the stuff.  But there remains a darker element stored inside the persona of my brushed aluminum and sleek black slab – lurking about in a file folder called Saved Items (don’t we all hope to end up there?).  When I first turned my new phone on, I found it came with 11 of them, which are called Templates, by me… pre-fab texts.  And what were these 11 messages, so common that every phone owner would find and supposedly use them, so vital that they are not deletable, ever, from your phone?  The list starts with the just mildly depressing:  “I can’t talk now, I’m in a meeting.  Will call you back at   “.  There is the more general “I will call you back at    “.  Then there is the “I will arrive at    “  and the always useful “meeting is cancelled   “.  Most of mine seem to be.  I had hoped to find my favorite, adopted from a New Yorker cartoon “I’m dead, would you like my voice mail? “

Lurking at the bottom of the list was the one I did not want to find, and hope never, ever to receive.  Still just the thought it is in that Top Eleven, that millions of Nokia phones, some owned by people I might today, or one day, care about…  Beware if you ever receive it – never to know if it’s real or Memorex.  It is those four little words,  “I love you too”.

from jujubakillerdeviantart.com

the life cycle of butterflies

a selection from our new book

March 30, 2008

My first and last biology class was in junior high school exactly 40 years ago.  Other than it confirming my distaste for animals and lack of interest in plants, I also remember something about the life cycle of butterflies and moths.  They evolve through four diverse stages with the same individual taking on completely different appearance and behavior with each passage.  Finally, they graduate to the most beautiful, the adult stage, when they show off their wings, flying precariously in summer sunshine over meadows and through deep green forests.  I wished, as an overweight and socially clumsy 13 year old, that I could hope for such a makeover sometime in my future, emerging into a life of physical beauty and freedom (from 8th grade biology among other oppressions).  I suppose that desire, the aesthetic appeal of these animals, and their freedom to fly aimlessly outdoors with no apparent destination or motivation other than to play, imprinted them, just a little, on my psyche.

But there is another reason my 13 year old self was impressed by their story.  It was not so much their designs, colors and flight, as the dissonant tragedy that can go hand-in-hand with their hard-earned maturation, and with it, the freedom to fly.  Some of the species, upon achieving their adult phase, can no longer eat.  Each individual lives for only a few weeks or at most months, burning up fuel stored during earlier lives.

Apparently the inevitability of their end doesn’t inhibit them.  Maybe it even motivates them to fascinate us, to brighten our world, and for the time that they have, to make more of living than without them we would ever know.

As you know, Nancy has not eaten in about 6 days – excepting Diet Coke, a little cran-grape juice and grape flavored shaved ice.  Last night, she and Karen watched some DVDs together.  Nancy and I spend our time, the time when she has the energy and focus, talking, watching clips on her Mac, even laughing.  It is, it has been these last few days, weeks, months, in many ways the life we probably always wanted,  one we didn’t have.  A life being together, without focus on work, a construction of a future, the mortgage and the money we should be saving for the time we might no longer be able to work.  A life orbiting just around ourselves.

Sept. 17: Life V2.0 begins

My neighborhood, working morning, light rain, cobblestones (photo Brian Pankhurst)

Yesterday I walked into my apartment here in Rome and found everything as it was when I left at 7:45 AM on Sunday, June 7, thinking I would be back in three hours to run over to the grocery store to pick up my vegetables for lunch.  It was spooky.  it reminded me that we do not know what life has in store for us – an accident, a phone call from a physician or a family member – what we take as routine can end in literally the blink of an eye.  Forever.   I have had a crash course in reality.  Hyperreality.  Haven’t we all taken that course by this time in life.

This morning waking up as I always have in the dark to work by the light of my lava lamp, it was surreal.  I did go through that blink of the eye life changing event, and yet 102 days later, here I am, a little beat up, scarred slightly, sore a lot, but doing it again.  I was saved, I have no idea why or how, and reinserted in a life I loved and lost and now can love again.  Not in the same way – it is the same in the settings, in the homework and obligations, in the bus and metro and pool and Elite grocery store (one of those ok but not great urban chains of small overpriced grocery stores New Yorkers know well) – it can not be the same, and I don’t want it to be the same because I don’t want to be that naïve.

OK, back to work and then the pool, then italian class and the university and Mario’s.  I will spend a fortune on cabs today – I am too sore from the trip to deal with any walking other than into the metro station or whatever.  But sore is not a bad thing – I am like in training for an ironman and yesterday was a hard day.  I will take a few easy ones.

fuso orario

Here’s your italian lesson for today, fuso orario.

Fuso orario – literally, the fusing together of clocks and calendars.  Which is what time zones are – a way of linking disparate time systems around the world.  It reflects an old world view when everybody ran their own clocks and there was no particular system of conversion.  The fuso orario refers to what at the time was a radical idea – a system accepted worldwide whereby everyone agrees to live in and respect the same time keeping, of a particular zone, enabling us to easily calculate times anyplace -. like we do linking dollars to pounds to euros.  There is a fusion, a linking, of time all over the world.

When I first had to memorize fuso orario, my brain resented it.  Why not just say Zona Tempo or Zona Orario like the rest of the world?  But Fuso Orario has something time zone doesn’t – it has history.  It reminds us that it wasn’t always so, that indianapolis and chicago and columbus and cleveland had at one time clocks separated by 10 minues, by 17 minutes, by an hour and 20 minutes, whatever.  Every little town had its independent time keeping system, and somehow, it is sort of a miracle to see all humanity agree to anything, the whole world of millions of independent clocks, got fused down to 24 zones, and really one universal system – the fusion of timekeeping – the fuso orario.

When I first started our project in Kuala Lumpur, I guess in the mid ’90s, they had their own ancient time zone.  it was 30 minutes different from what should have been their time zone according to the Fuso Orario Mondiale.  At the space agency they have an enormous sun dial.  Since the sun shines almost always there (except at night and the occasional afternoon thunderstorm) a sun dial is pretty useful.  It was huge and built of rock, solid and impressive.  Unfortunately, in that time they finally accepted the Fuso Orario – they became fused to the world system, and shifted their clocks for the country by 30 minutes to be in synch.  Now that sundial is the only clock in Malaysia that keeps the old time, and while at first a lot of talk was about somehow moving it to synch, now it is a little bit of history, an anachronism from when the world was not linked and every independent group of people could have whatever time they liked and without instant communications, it didn’t matter.

Life is the constant work of expanding the past

Olympus waterproof camera ride report

Brain the size of a planet. It, not me.

What I noticed is that despite my Olympus 550 WP costing just $120, it was not lost on their engineers that hey, they have a computer, power, a display and tons of memory available. Not to mention a vast reservoir of software already written for other cameras. Thus for instance, on the screen at default there are 20 variables displayed around the edges . Usual stuff like f-stop and shutter speed, plus the mélange of modes, flash status, level of zoom (electronic and optical), battery charge level, various warnings if the subject is too dark, or shaded or not able to be focused upon, and more. And you can add more by customizing the frame.

There are at least 15 shooting modes, each of which you can customize by selecting around 15 variables buried inside each one. There are 3 automatic modes (it seems less than automatic if you have to pick which automatic mode – like an automatic transmission with three speeds) but there are, it turns out, two super automatic modes which choose among the 3 automatic modes best suited, which in turn picks among the 15 options inside it, each of which has its own 15 variables, any and all of which you can change… One of those superautomatic modes senses the type of scene you are shooting – profile, night etc. Sensible. But I am drawn to the other one. It is so automatic they don’t tell you how it chooses. I like that – the Wizard of Oz Mode.

As if that isn’t enough, you have the option to record sound, to pick the frame rate, to decide among 3 types of florescent lighting and a couple types of tungsten lighting and two types of sunlight (for planets orbiting double stars, I guess). Of course you can take movies, but that’s another 20 pages of the manual I skipped over. I did note that the optical zoom doesn’t work for movies – but the electrical one does. And the audio defaults on, but you can turn it off, or toggle it on and off, or add sound later, or subtract.

In both movie and still mode you can pick your resolution among about 10 options, and within each of the ten, the type of compression you do or don’t want. A total of about 50 resolution settings. Then of course you can’t live without the power saving modes. Another few pages of the catalog tell you how to display your pictures on the camera’s screen, on various types of TV Screens (HD, widescreen, PAL etc.) and then on various Mac and PC compatible computer screens. Manually or in slide show mode – skipping some or showing all of them, with your recorded voice over, or the audio you recorded with each scene.

Oops, almost forgot to mention the self timer. 12 seconds. Fixed. What the hey?

If you are smart enough to wade through all that you must own a computer. But in case you left it at home, or on shore, you can image process all your stuff, including image improvements like contrast and gamma, and cropping, and adding audio later, or deleting audio you don’t like, or editing the audio. And you can print without a computer by “simply” (they use that word a lot) enabling PicBridge software. Which opens up a menu of menus so you can manage your printing in a million ways.

Did I mention it has an MP3 music player? Not an add on, they figure you might want to narrate your shots with music. not a problem.

It would be easier to say what it doesn’t have – a phone, a GPS, and a V-8 for driving to where you are taking the photos, with submenus to choose the comfort vs. handling of the suspension, performance vs economy shifting schedules, and presets for the temperature the seat heaters come on (separately for the driver and front seat passenger, but everyone in the back has to live with the same setting until the software update comes out – which you can download from OlympusUSA.com. Don’t forget to register online!!!).

It was little comfort to note that the 80 page manual, including 3 pages of safety warnings (for a camera that weighs 4 ounces? – I suppose they have to remind you it can be a choking hazard) is only the start and “lots more” (not just a little more) information is available on-line. Lucky – I was worried what I was going to do for reading in 2011. Plus there are user groups you can join for discussions on special topics. Lucky thing. If you don’t like the plug in the wall charger, a cord option is available (in some countries). Handy if you want to operate while plugged in – on the tripod (mount included, tripod optional). It takes several memory card formats, but don’t lose the little plastic adapters. Or swallow them.

There are a few pages not so much on using it underwater, but cleaning it afterwards. Don’t forget to dry it in “warm shade”, but in any case, below 105˚F. Thermometer NOT INCLUDED. I can’t believe they left out the weather station option. But it does have an underwater photos set of settings, all user adjustable (who else would?), but they advise doing that before going into the water. Wimps.

Back on land getting bumped is always a danger – especially when dialing in the long zooms. Naturally there is optional anti shake, which can be automatic, or manual. And you can tell it to anti shake faces. I like that – blurry bodies, sharp faces. I wonder if there’s a Magnum Mode to get the opposite? It does speak italian – and 9 other languages including two Chinese dialects, Arabic, Japanese and Hebrew.

Luckily for those of us not planning to enroll in Olympus University majoring in Stylus Underwater (and compared with their other cameras, this one probably only offers the Associates Degree), you can be a typical American Guy and just turn it on and snap pictures. Maybe zoom it in and out. In which case you only need to know to push the button part way down to let it think about what it thinks you are wanting to do for a few milliseconds, and then push down to take a picture. I got that far. But you will have to live knowing your camera will think, no, it will know, it is smarter than you are.

bike meets car v4.0

If you noticed my disappearance from most of the known world, it is because a few minutes after leaving my apartment in Rome to meet some other cyclists for the usual Sunday AM giro on June 7, I was hit from behind by a Fiat.  As happened in 2002, when I was similarly hit by a car while riding a very similar Carbon Colnago bike on a similar Sunday morning, the bike was destroyed and I did my best to share the pain. This time I ended up with long fractures of both the left and right femur, and the head of the right femur was completely separated from the rest of the bone.   I was spatula-ed from the pavement by an ambulance, and to make a long story short, ended up 18 hours later in my 3rd hospital, a beautiful place called The European Hospital.  Thanks to Tom and several friends here with medical contacts, a team of three surgeons reconstructed me on Monday night, and I woke up Tuesday morning with many segments of tubing leading from various regions of my body, and oxygen trickling into my nose, flat on my back staring at the ceiling.  I have a philosophy that any day I wake up with no tubes connecting me or other hardware attached to my body, is a good day.  Tuesday gave the affirmation of the converse of that principle.

 

The result of 7 hours of surgery, 4 units of blood and 35 mg of morphine, besides a truly miserable experience first recovering from anesthetic, was some hardware in both legs, plates and screws, titanium left, steel right presumably so one day I can do a true side by side comparison, and lots of staples to hold the insides in and outsides out.  Leave us not forget long stretches of dressing covered in longer stretches of surgical tape, the removal of which every other AM for cleaning is definitely a sufficient substitute for any espresso I’ve had here.  

 

The people who took care of me there were just outstanding, without exception, working my diet and fluids and moving and cleaning me, it’s quite an experience being totally dependent on medical people to do any more than lift a glass from table to lips.  I don’t recommend, but I do appreciate the dedication of these people.  My surgeons were in to check on me daily, or more.  Amazingly, post surgery I have had zero pain medication – zero – just loads of nutrients to rebuild blood, fluids, antibiotics etc.   My only pain is trying to get back moving – otherwise I’m what you would call resting comfortably.  Though resting is not my favorite activity, it beats resting uncomfortably. 

 

My energy level is well approximated by the number zero, and I was reluctant to even log on.  i hope you’ll understand that if you send me an email, I will definitely read and appreciate it, but unlikely I will reply to it.  My focus is on doing what they want me to do, and being stationary with the computer on my lap is not going to be possible – or desirable anyway.  When not trying to move, or eat, I’m mostly asleep.  But I did want to at least get the news out and assure everyone that my passport to remain on planet earth has yet to be revoked, though the authorities are wondering how many ways I’m going to test their patience.  

 

Gradually during the 9 days all my lines came out, and  I was ambulanced to The American Hospital in Rome (you really have not fully experienced driving here without that ride), which has a specialty in rehab, where I will be for a few weeks until I can fly back to RI.  Like the European Hospital, and my health club here ‘all around sport’, the English ends at the stationary… it has caché.

 

Today is about my 12th post crash and I feel pretty much myself as one can given I spend all day on my back, excepting two hours practising sitting in a chair, which at the moment is a big deal to do, but also progress.  Monday I’ll be in the therapy pool, starting to walk without weight on the legs, and they also take me to the gym in the hospital to enjoy more creative torture than available in bed.  American Hospital is bigger and more bureaucratic, but has all the cool rehab facilities, and also an excellent place to be if you have to be somewhere like this.  

 

Looking forward, I am told I’ll be at home with live-in 24/7 help in July, and walking by end of August, maybe sooner.  Given my quick recover to date, I am planning on the optimistic side, but a few days or weeks one way or the other is what it is.  The body will be ready for the next thing when it’s ready.   

 

On a philosophical note, It’s a big shift in a few hours to go from looking forward to some free time after tough teaching stints at Brown and La Sapienza, plus my teaching and consulting at ASI, to hoping to be recovered enough to resume it all end of September.  But overall I am grateful for many things – foremost that I am alive and will recover 100%.  I have rolled these dice maybe too many times and nobody has to tell me what can happen to a cyclist hit by a car – an experience I have now had 4 times in the past 20 years.  The fact that I have ‘only’ orthopaedic injuries I consider amazing.   If you don’t think you need to wear a helmet, I have some remaining pieces of mine you might wish to take a look at.  Having had 4 serious bone breaks on the bike in the past 7 years, having spent almost 50% of that time in some form of recovery, I look at this outcome as a chance to make some necessary changes in my lifestyle and I’m committed to doing that.   I was only 5 weeks off crutches from my Feb. 1 bike crash when this happened, and that was my first thought lying on the pavement Sunday AM – how can I muster the attitude for another long campaign to recover.   Somehow I did / am, but I see my next challenge as making sure not to again face this kind of challenge.  Life is full of risks, one can’t exist in a bubble, but this is ridiculous.

 

Thanks for reading.  I hope I haven’t worried anyone – worked on this all day hoping to be clear that I’m comfortable, in good hands, and recovering, but without putting any makeup on the reportage.  

Cancer Contest

From my mother I inherited a light skin prone to keratosis – pre cancerous cells that if not treated can become more serious.  I have it, or someimtes it’s more advanced stages, treated wherever it turns up at least once a year.

 When I would come home with a small part of me dug out somewhere, or a red face from a shower of liquid nitrogen, I would say to Nancy “You know, you’re not the only one around here who can have cancer”.  She’d say “pffft – your cancer is wimpy – it’s nothing.  It’s not even really cancer”  I’d rebuff “You’re just a cancer snob.  Nobody’s cancer measures up to your cancer.  Lance Armstrong – what does he know about cancer, out there riding his damned bicycle”.  And she’d say “Now you’re getting it”.  
I am going through a month or so of topical chemotherapy with a common treatment called Carac, which, whatever the pages of medical jargon that comes with it says in that 4-point type, kills a lot of the skin on your face to wipe out Keratoses.  There’s a lot of blog chatter about the suffering associated with it – mainly that your face hurts, your body is in general not itself and not in a good way, and you look pretty ugly when the stuff is really working.  

The Buddhist “become the fire” viewpoint is helpful to me.  There are many things worse than a cancer treatment that works.  Specifically, ones that don’t work.  My advice is to enjoy the fact that it’s working, and that you’ve got what it takes to go through the month or so of symptoms with some aplomb.  And a few tips:

 - limit looking in the mirror to a maximum of 2x per day.  Less is better.  Your face is not your problem – you don’t have to look at it all day.  So don’t.

- Enjoy your free education in being an “other”.  Watch how people look at you and treat you differently just because a few square inches of skin is different.  Imagine being in a wheelchair, black in white America, a recovered burn victim, or just very short or very tall, or very heavy or very thin.   

-  Greet people as follows:
 • them:  Hi, how are you doing
 • you:  OK.  It’s not contagious. 

- You can’t make a 500 mile bike ride wishing the whole time you were home watching the game on TV or sitting with friends and the  Sunday times at Peet’s Coffee.  Picture yourself as a domestique on a leading team in the Giro d’Italia.  Ace cyclist out there doing what you do best – covering those miles.  Yes, it hurts sometimes, and it rains some times, and hydration and food don’t always happen when you want.  But overall, you trained all year for this week, unlike all others on your calendar.  This is the week you’ll remember all year round.  And too soon it will not be real, it will just be a story you tell about your past.  Don’t waste it moving your brain to some virtual reality.  Live it in its transient coolness.

You only have one month to be Mr. or Ms. Carac.  Don’t cover with makeup and creams.  Your MD won’t approve, and it’s not going to work anyway.  Be the fire.  This is your month to feel weird, look weird, and do something good for yourself.  You emerge from 500 miles on the bike in great shape – you are what you were meant to be physically, before your brain and civilization took over your primordial physicality.  You’ll emerge from your Carac month (and a couple weeks to get over it) with the best skin you’ve ever had – and the most appreciation for healthy skin you’ve ever had.  Meanwhile, go with it, tell your Carac to go for it With Gusto!  After all, it works for you, not the other way around.  You’re paying for the ride – enjoy it.

Space Debris Editorial

 

I’ve gotten a lot of email asking me about this latest fender bender in Low  Earth Orbit.  For what it’s worth, a few personal thoughts for you to agree or disagree with…

 

The crash is nobody’s fault – it’s a result of a totally uncontrolled approach to orbits, appropriate to the early days when hardly anything was up there, never updated as reality morphed, and shared by virtually all space fairing countries.  And the law of probabilities.

 

  Some of the press blamed Russia – which is absurd.  Their satellite was dead, but so are most of the satellites up there, including many that I have built with US Government funding and compliant with our best practises.   I can think offhand of 5 of mine that are just aluminum in space for now and will be there for maybe another 20 years.  Eventually they come down and evaporate in the atmosphere, but for 5, 10, 20 years, they are like bullets shot into the air, which usually come down harmlessly (or in this case reach the upper edge of the atmosphere harmlessly where aerothermal effects reduce them to molecules). 

 

This is a scenario Arthur Clarke predicted almost 40 years ago.  One hits another, creates 10,000 chunks which then have a high likelihood of hitting another couple, creating maybe 50,000 chunks and pretty soon, everybody is in trouble.  I worry just because I’m closer to them, about Italy’s brand new radar satellites (COSMO SkyMed) which are maybe 100 km lower and in a similar orbit.  In the next few years that debris will start to reenter, and its orbit will become more elliptical, crossing their orbit.  This was $billions of Italian investment over the past 15 years and it’s working wonderfully – has propelled them to prominence in space world-wide.  Many countries are in a similar situation with significant national investments at risk.  Speaking as a probabilities guy, they were always at risk, but the risk is now more tangible and immediate, which is generally what it takes to move any one threat above so many others on a list of national priorities.

 

  I’m sure engineers at space agencies and companies around the world are burning the midnight oil (or LEDs) figuring out how to defend, but it’s a little like protecting your car from being hit by bugs driving to Saratoga Springs in August.  As is typical of the US, we have spent a lot of time in the Quixotic search for a perfect, universal solution.  Likely a smaller country will take a more practical appraoch and solve 80 % of the problem in the next 5 years.  

 

But it’s hard to predict.  Sometimes we greatly over perform compared with expectations, and other times humans fail to act at all.  It is too early to tell how this latest news flash will evolve as the great space bureaucracies digest it.  But my general sense is that people need challenges and threats and that space suffers from a lack of urgency.  So this may well be a good thing for the industry, in a way analogous to how hurricanes are good for construction companies.  A little counter-intuitive, but not without precedent.

 

 - Rick

Ride Report: Matera to Rome

 

Arrived Rome a little after 5 pm last night having departed hotel in Pietravairano (mapquest that one) pre-dawn that AM – 6:45.  Man, was it cold, still in mountains, in twilight conditions first 15 minutes.  Takes a long time (9 AM) for sun to reach the road in the valley.  Another 41°F start – autumn comes early to the hill country of Italy – I should have remembered that when I picked my ride clothes.  I did make a vest out of a plastic pillow holder after freezing the first day to Potenza.  I hate that thing – stiff, makes noise in wind, but it blocks cold air.  On the last day, when things warmed up, I shredded it with gusto.  People make fun of us riders in Lycra, but consider the alternatives…

 

This was among the most difficult (not longest, but per mile) rides I’ve ever done.  2.5 days of steep climbs and descents – often times an hour or even two would go by with no opportunity to take even one hand off handlebars – up 10 degree and down 10 degree grades, narrow often bumpy roads.  I quite often wondered what I was doing out there (don’t we all ponder the easily answered questions and skip over the hard ones).  

Few street signs – every time I spotted a live human being (most live items being animals from snakes to sheep) – I checked directions.  Most people at least know where they are, and a few know where the next town on the map is.   There are no good routes through this part of the South other than one freeway, and so very few people attempt this route.  I only did it because the conference I attended was in Matera, and my next assignment in Rome.  Connecting dots I can handle.  But for a vacation I’d probably pick a route with better infrastructure.  I took enough food for the whole day, and supplemented only with water, mostly from bars -  the only commercial entity in the small villages I went through – otherwise begged from inhabitants.  If anyone is wondering about drinking tap water in rural southern Italy, I seem to have survived plenty of it.  Don’t know if I’d try that in some other countries, but the reason to drink bottled water in Europe has more to do with style than substance.  Not a route for an inexperienced cyclist.  The only food in these bars is potato chips and mints – not exactly good ride fuel!  But if necessary I suppose one could get by on chips…it didn’t come to that, thankfully.

 

Most of yesterday was on the straight rolling hills road back to Rome on the old main route – Casilina.  It is lined with war memorials.   And populated by plenty of traffic, including ridiculously huge trucks on a small road often with no shoulder.  I would call it unsafe, the only modifier being that Italian drivers are well adapted to cyclists, and there are many others commuting along the road.  Neither would I call riding within the city limits of Rome safe, but at least there are lots of bikes and scooters and drivers do not hate us as some do in US.  A long day with cars and trucks buzzing by riding the bumpy edge of the road.  The other three days were physically hard but peaceful and beautiful.  The last day was 120 miles grinding away – very Iron Man.  Even though I don’t look for that sort of thing, sometimes you have to do it temporarily.  ”My mother told me there would be days like this” comes to mind.  But the bike was fine, I was fine, weather was nice, so no big deal.  The last 10 miles through Rome were an exciting compensation for the first 110.

 

Lots of work this week.  Cycling long distances is a hobby that can make you really appreciate a few days of presentations and meetings wearing wool or cotton that doesn’t squeeze your skin and wick anything.   Maybe by the weekend I might be in the mood for a few miles on the bike.  As Michael Phelps said after Beijing – I’m glad to not move for a day!  It’s hard to describe – it was a fantastic experience, but an exhausting one.  And when it’s over you’re both sad it’s over, and grateful you survived it – less in a danger sense, more that I wouldn’t have thought I’d have the physical ability to do what I did.  I look back and think – how did I do that (and why!).   I think I climbed in 3.5 days something like 30,000 feet.  Plus 375 miles riding.  And the first day I didn’t arrive until 8:30 pm – the last two hours on unlit, narrow, winding mountain roads, in the dark, to Potenza (the only town with an Albergo after departure from Matera).

 

Second day the choices for stopping points were again limited, and I ended up in Caposele, which is famous to us students of the history of salt as a place the Florentine salt cartel sourced the white gold.  Though in those days it was more often grey or black than white, containing plenty of other minerals which technology didn’t exist to separate except at great expense.  White salt was reserved the the priveleged few.  Crank that into your cost of living calculations – we’re all rich in salt.  Or maybe not – all those other minerals might be good for us…  700 feet up a 13% grade from Caposele is the shrine of Santo Girardo, with numerous hotels for pilgrims.  I joined those seeking cures, getting married, and shopping the street stalls for local chestnuts, Jesus figurines made of straw and other local curiosities including nougat, which is so sweet it’s hard to believe anyone over 6 years old actually consumes – but they do, of course.  There are several weddings per day up there, including 2 at my hotel during my 12 hours there.

 

Which brings me to my latest thermodynamic invention…  Which saved me from hypothermia over that cold night above 3500 feet in an unheated hotel room.

 

Many tourists come to Italy in hot summer, and learn about the Italian air conditioning – lobbies are frigid, rooms are tepid, and at night (coincidentally after everyone is checked in and no new prospects will enter the lobby), they save energy by shutting the A/C off completely.  

 

What tourists don’t experience so often is the other extreme – it’s 40 degrees outside, and the room is not much warmer.   The heat is on, explains the front desk.  But the radiatore is freddo – freddisimo – as only a hunk of unheated iron can be.  

 

Enter my thermodynamic invention.  The rubber band.  While void of heat or A/C, even the 1 star hotel bathroom (assuming you have a bathroom in your room) has a wall-mounted hair dryer.  No Italian will stay at a hotel without a hair dryer, apparently.  Armed with your stout rubber band ( I recommend carrying a few spares – they weigh just a gram or so each), you wrap it tightly around the spring loaded trigger grip on the hair dryer, and just leave the thing on.  Heats up the room, dries the cycling clothes you washed in the sink, and simultaneously masks the band and singing from the wedding going on at 2 AM down in the restaurant.  

 

The rubber band.  Don’t leave home without it.

 

Did I mention that for extra hero / idiot points, I made this ride with an apparent stress fracture of a bone in my right foot?  I think that’s why cycling shoes use Velcro – so you can widen them to accommodate swollen feet.   I expected it to be much worse after the abuse of the last 4 days.  But in fact it’s better – maybe only by contrast… 

 

With this ride I’ve managed to stitch together about 1200 miles of long distance cycling this “summer” – in quotes since I don’t consider riding in 40°F weather summer – wimp that I am.  I admit returning to a winter season of day rides and commuting, where you actually know where you’ll be at sunset (home) and don’t have to lug a day’s supply of hazlenuts and stop every 10 km to ask directions, scrutinize a map, your eyes tear blurred, or seek water refill sounds pretty good right now.  

It bothers me that I don’t read enough.  Nancy would consume a huge tome or two per week – real intellectual stuff – while I read mostly aerospace trade, ham radio and cycling magazines.  But my excuse is she read very few maps, if any.  Reading maps is like talking with nature – you have to bring a lot to it – isn’t that intellect at work – or at least fantasy.   By February I’ll be ordering my  ration of maps from Barnes & Noble and plotting next summer’s rides.  I had thought about a mid-winter ride this year, maybe RI to Florida or NYC, but this one might almost count.  I plan to rethink that from my heated – without use of any rubber bands – house in RI when I’m back next month.