There’s a reason I’m not posting much :-)

Somehow the dark of winter is making posting hard.  I don’t get out as much.  And stuff inside doesn’t seem as fun to photograph.  On the other hand, I contributed $6.50 toward the US trade deficit with China and bought an ‘intervalometer’ for my camera.  This device lets you 1) decide how many pictures you want to take, 2) how long between pictures, and 3) how long to leave the shutter open!  Awesome!

So I promptly took time-lapse photos of grading.  Exciting.  Then of working out upstairs.  Also exciting.  Then bicycling the next morning in the basement.  This is my life.  Exciting.  The collage below has a sample of these as evidence of why, exactly, I haven’t been posting much.  :-) Grade papers.  Lift weights.  Ride trainer.  Repeat.

Grade papers. Lift weights. Ride trainer. Repeat.

Back at it.

Bam! Pow! Shazaam!  Finally, a powerful week!  I biked.  I worked out.  Played racquetball.  Chopped wood!  It was awesome.  If you’ve ever had a couple of weeks in a row where everything seemed too much, you can appreciate how wonderful this week has been.  I tried to capture what it was like to struggle through the day in the picture below.  The colors of fall bleed through the image and the textures and overlays let the weight of the world lead in to my eyes.  Delicious.  Of course, I made it during the awesome week — when I had the energy and will to experiment!  There’s a certain irony there we should enjoy.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Photo by Myriam.

Fall is upon us

this is my ride

I love the colors of Fall.  I love the cycling among the light scattering off the yellow and red leaves.  I had a certain image in mind when I went to the trail today — a high contrast grainy black and white wash of glistening roots.  I wanted to capture the trail I rode a few weeks ago.  Instead, I wasn’t the rider I was then — too little sleep and too much stuff made my moves twitchy and robbed me of stamina.  Neither was the light the same; instead I rode through the lush golden light of the late afternoon sun.  It’s funny:  I’ve ridden these trails for twenty years; I know where the path bends and dips. Riding them clumsy makes them seem new again; taking a photo of the trail — like the one at right — shows how little the path stands out against the trees and rocks and leaves and wet.  You can just see the shimmer of a path from the rock on the left, snaking through the trees and down.

Not even the slow shutter speed makes me look fast and thin!

I call these the ‘old man rides.’  I go alone; no trying to push my buddies into riding too fast, no pushing myself to look good to strangers.  I tell myself ahead of time that I don’t have time to crash and I often walk here or there where I might fall down the mountain sideways if my attention drifts.  Instead, I surfed the rocks, forward and back, as time drifted by.  I found some of my balance but I also found a few spots to sit and listen to the birds.

This last picture is perfect.  I kept trying to ride along the spine of the rock and then up the next.  There strength and balance weren’t there today, but loved seeing the sun in one direction and the long shadows back in the other.  A few minutes later I remembered to check the time and quickly raced back out of the park to shower and take my sweetie to dinner.