I mean the sap is running! I tapped the maple tree a month earlier this year than last year. The sap began running from the hole before I could tap the spile into place.
I recently ran out of syrup and bought some at the store, thinking it would be a while before I’d have sap to make another batch.
Here it is, barely mid-February, and I’m cooking the first syrup of 2023. Three liters of today’s sap should make about 75 ml of syrup. If I get that much more tomorrow, it will be the sweetening for this week’s bread. (The forecast is warm and rainy for the next two days, then cold and snowy, so today’s haul might be it for the week. I’d then supplement it with some other sweetener.)
Orchids
The local botanical garden is holding its orchid show in the conservatory; an excuse to get hot and steamy in the winter. While it is a summery 40º (4.5º C), that’s no match for the 80 or so (27 C) in the conservatory.
Too warm to stay inside!
The ride to the library and conservatory convinced me that enough snow had melted to get another bike out. The Bruce Gordon got the call, since it has fenders. This may be the earliest in the year it has seen pavement since it moved here from San Francisco 29 years ago. The bike turns 35 this year but, according to its serial number, it is a December baby so it’s only 34 now.
This time next week I will be riding across Washington. We will ride 7 days before our first rest, then 6 days/week thereafter. We will ride in any weather.
We will ride in any weather (though I hope not like yesterday, with 70 mph winds). We lost power briefly a few times during the afternoon. The neighbor’s cottonwood dropped a few branches, including one that is hanging from a power line as we await a crew to remove it. We got lucky. An apartment building a few miles away lost its roof and a lot of trees are down. A cottonwood crushed the roof of one house I rode past and an oak took out a car and the canoe on top.
Another oak tree casualtyWith a 20 mph wind, I was hoping for a windchill. Instead I get a heat index due to the high dewpoint. After 48 hours of rigorous dog-sitting, it was time to get back on the bike.
Some storms clear the air and it cools down with the dewpoint dropping in the aftermath. This one was the opposite, ushering in heat and humidity. I know in the southwest this is no great shakes but, as you can see from my thermometer, it’s kinda hot. (For those of the Celsius persuasion, those numbers are ~34 and 43.) I figured I should get used to it, so headed out for a ride with the sun high in the sky. As the day goes on, the temperature is rising but the dewpoint is dropping, so the heat index is staying relatively constant.
I rode past a trailered boat belonging to the Mad City Ski Team. It sported three 300 horsepower outboard motors. In my skiing days, it was a big deal when we upgraded from 60 to 75 hp. The fast guys had 100 hp engines. Now, one 300 hp motor could pull me out of the water faster than you can say Jack Robinson. Three of ’em could dislocate my shoulders faster than you can say, OW! That hurts!
Land of breakfast?
Before I leave the Land of Milk and Honey, as well as maple syrup and sorghum, I rode through the land of breakfast this morning. Corn on one side and wheat on the other. Tortillas? Toast? Corn flakes? Wheaties?
Wheat – closer to harvest than the corn across the road.
Training
Back in my youth, the standard for early season training was LSD (long, slow distance). The idea was to get in some miles before any high intensity work. Lately, the fad has been HIIT (high-intensity interval training). While riding today, I wondered why training regimes sounded like thinly-veiled drug references.
Have another hiit
I decided to make up a couple of initialisms my own. I do not endorse any particular training method other than riding your bike. STP (Speed-Time-Power) is also the psychedelic drug 2,5-Dimethoxy-4-methylamphetamine. Amphetamine (AKA speed) has led to the death of cyclists including British cyclist Tom Simpson during the Tour de France (accompanied by excessive heat and dehydration). Time (as STP the drug is known for having a duration of effect up to 24 hours). Power, because serious cyclists nowadays ride with power meters and measure their output in watts. I prefer to hook up a couple of high-wattage incandescent lightbulbs and see how long I can keep them burning. Plus the heat output of an incandescent bulb helps mimic the tough conditions of a day like today. So STP involves riding hard for long periods of time.
DMT (N, N-dimethyltryptamine) was known as the “businessman’s high” as it is a psychedelic drug with a short duration of effects. The claim was you could get high over your lunch hour and go back to work without lingering effects. As a training regime, it stands for Distance/Minimal Time. It is a sprint training. You could do it over your lunch hour and them go back to work, where your co-workers would quickly invite you to go home early, since you’d be sweating like a pig and stinking up the workplace.
Lest you think I am endorsing these training methods, I will remind you that I am not a professional cyclist or trainer. I am a half-fast cyclist attempting humor after riding in extreme heat. Lest you think these references are the result of a misspent youth, I will inform you that I was once a drug crisis intervention counselor so I encountered these substances professionally. We took drugs very seriously.
I used to tell people my specialty was English-to-English translation. We have so much trouble understanding each other even when two native speakers of the same language talk. Expectations and what we want to hear often get in the way. Wanting to be heard (instead of wanting to hear) and planning your response before the other person speaks get in the way. I would hear two people talking past each other and quickly rephrase for each of them and they would come to an understanding.
This is not to say that I don’t have the same problem with some people. It is though we speak two different languages which contain the same words.
In my work I spend a lot of time translating medical into English. Doctors tend to forget that normal people have no clue what most medical terms mean. People don’t want to seem dumb so they smile and nod. When the doctor leaves, I’ll ask what they understood of that. Frequently the answer is “nothing”, so I translate.
This was prompted by someone else’s post about actual language and cultural differences, which prompted this memory [cue harp music for a flashback].
I was in Nicaragua and our regular interpreter was unavailable. One of our group leaders offered to translate. Someone asked a local farmer how life had changed since the revolution. She said it was harder to get food now. The interpreter said something completely different, vaguely and rhetorically in support of the revolution. Two of us called her on it. She tried to say that the woman didn’t really understand the question. We argued that she clearly did understand the question but the answer was not the one you wanted to hear. After a bit more discussion, with the interpreter and the farmer (who made it clear she understood the question) in Spanish, then the group in English, we agreed to continue, with the translator knowing that she couldn’t get away with that degree of “interpreting” another’s thoughts and statements.
This also led to thoughts about language, fluency, and on-line translators. On-line translators are handy if you know both languages and are uncertain of the nuances of a particular word choice. They do not work if you think you can get the gist of a large work from an algorithm. If in doubt, listen to this:
“Let it Go” run through Google Translate through multiple languages and back to English. If you want the original English lyrics, they’re here.
I used to get asked if I were fluent in Spanish. Usually I just said no. Sometimes I answered that I wasn’t sure I was fluent in English. Other times I thought about what fluency meant.
After five weeks of language school I took a week off to travel and try to incorporate what I’d learned. Standing on a train, I started chatting with a local school teacher. After we’d talked for a while, he went to get a bottle of pop and asked if I wanted one. While he was gone I checked my watch and realized we’d been talking for two hours; a wide-ranging discussion that made me realize that: 1) I was thinking in Spanish and conversing naturally; 2) I had just fulfilled the goal I’d set five years earlier in Ecuador when the owner of the hotel where I was staying tried to initiate a similar conversation and I was unable to carry out my half.
I thought I had told this story before but, searching through the archives, I can’t find it. It was about January 1977. I was going through a home and roommate-related crisis. I called a friend in Berkeley, who knew the issues and people involved. He suggested the best solution was to join him and a friend (who had just arrived from Australia) on a trip to Colombia and Ecuador. On that trip, I could sort things out, and things here could sort themselves out.The idea had merit. A week later, I met them in Miami and we flew to Barranquilla, Colombia. We stepped off the plane and into customs. Since S & C had met while traveling extensively in Guatemala, I presumed they spoke Spanish pretty well. The customs agent asked C how long she would be in the country. She smiled. He repeated the question. She smiled more sweetly. He turned to S with the same question. He smiled, more broadly and sweetly than C. I realized: 1) they had gotten through Guatemala on friendliness and smiles; 2) they knew not a lick of Spanish; 3) I was now responsible to communicate for three. I told the customs agent that we all wanted 90 day visas, he stamped our passports, and we were on our way.
My Spanish got us through shopping, getting meals, finding our way, renting hotel rooms- all the basics of being a traveler. One rainy day (in Baños, Ecuador), while S & C were in another town, I was sitting in bed reading. The hotel owner stuck his head in the door, said hello, came in, sat down, and struck up a conversation. Within minutes (seconds?) I had my English-Spanish dictionary out. [It was years later that I bought a Spanish dictionary, recognizing that knowing a language meant learning to define words, not translate them.] Within a few more minutes I realized I was over my head. I did not know how to talk to anyone. I could conduct business, but I couldn’t talk. I apologized, he left, I cried. I felt shallow. I vowed that I would learn to speak Spanish and have that conversation some day.
After a week of vacation I went back to school for three more weeks. Was I fluent at that point? How about five years later when I went back for a refresher course and, as my final exam after three weeks, I gave a 45 minute slide presentation (on my work in Nicaragua) to the school in Spanish? Or when I returned to the school for a visit after 3 months working in Nicaragua and someone told me that the secretary said I was back in town and now spoke with a Nicaraguan accent? (I’ll admit I was flattered. For a Mexican to say I sounded Nicaraguan and not North American was one of the best compliments I had ever received.)
I realized that we have word-finding difficulties in any language. If the language is familiar enough, we find a way to talk around the missing word if it doesn’t come to us. There are words that we may not know, but we can discuss the concept in a way that gets the meaning across without the missing word. Ultimately, I discovered that fluency is a continuum, not a point. I’m pretty fluent in English after speaking it for more than 65 years. I’m less fluent in Spanish and considerably less fluent than I was when I was cutting down trees in the forest and miscommunication could mean death from falling tree.
Half-fast Cycling Club 