Today being Michaelmas, is the day we would pay our quarterly rent with a goose.

This is one of those marking points, coming on the heels of the equinox - fall harvest, perhaps, in a time when we were more directly attached to the seasons and their implications for our food supply.

We have no goose, alas, but Nora suggested we could throttle one over at the university Duck Pond and bring it home for dinner. The Michaelmas goose is said to be good luck, so this might be worth trying, though I am rather urban and apart from the goose-killing and -gutting skills of my genetic ancestors. Perhaps I'll just have a turkey sandwich for lunch and call it good.

I wonder if the mortgage company would accept a dead goose in lieu of our monthly check?

What is it about underdogs in sport?

Two great sporting underdog stories playing out this weekend.

In American League baseball, the Detroit Tigers play two games this weekend against the Minnesota Twins. They're one shy of what they call, on their own web site (actually the official MLB Tigers web site) dubious history - the record for most losses in a season in modern major league history. Despite my natural affection for odd and superlative statistics, I'm rooting for 'em to win both and stay out of that particular section of the record book. They are my underdogs.

Meanwhile in the Vuelta a Espana, the quintessential underdog Isidro Nozal is on the brink of stealing away the great Spanish bike race from its rightful owner, Roberto Heras. I've been a Heras fan for years. He's the little climber, and we love to love the little climbers, somehow underdogs as they cower in the pack among the big sprint boys on the flats, only to slip to the front and fly up the mountains when the pitch gets steep. Nozal is a boy, really, one of the youngsters of the peleton, a domestique who somehow found the jersey on his shoulders and rode like it belonged there, gritting up the mountains behind Heras' dancing asssaults ever time things got steep and somehow holding on.

Mom's rooting for Nozal, totally. I'm still hoping Heras can pull out magic today on the last steep climb they face, but a little part of me is cheering Nozal too. He's our underdog.

Time to go ride the bike.

I pulled out my Detroit Tigers cap for the dramatic close of the 2003 season.

They won again last night, a two game winning streak! They only have to win two of their last four to avoid breaking the all time record for most losses in a single season in modern baseball.

Go Tigers!

I'm such a weather geek.

I've been playing for the last few days with a Davis Vantage Pro weather station. The company sent me a loaner so I could write a piece about home weather station's, and it's a hoot. You can check out the readings here, though don't expect them to be up to date, as I'm not going to leave the computer on all the time just to post the weather numbers. I'd love to. It'd be cool to be able to log in from work during a rain storm and see how much it's raining at home. Am I a weather geek or what?

It's got a battery operated LCD control panel so I can check the weather at any time, along with a serial port connector to download much more detailed data to the computer. All Windows stuff, though I found a guy who's written a Linux package for it that downloads data into a MySQL database, which looks much more flexible than the Windows stuff. I'll have to try it.

With the graphed data on the computer I can see precisely when Lissa turned on the air conditioner the last couple of hot afternoons, and I could see the barometric pressure drop about an hour before the winds picked up this evening as a cold front started its move through town. (Very impressive - my National Weather Service forecaster friends nailed that one exactly.)

Sadly, I just get to use it for a month, then I have to send it back.

I sent a note to the GNOME docs mailing list this evening stepping down as GDP coordinator. I need more time to write, and being a manager - especially as technically inept as I am - was just leaving me too little time for it.

I suggested Shaun McCance as successor. He's been a great contributor, and I think will be able to take things up the hill ahead quite nicely.

ARTHUR:

The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water signifying by Divine Providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. That is why I am your king!

DENNIS:

Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.

Picked up the new bike Friday afternoon.

That sort of sly smile on my face in the picture below is genuine:

I've been riding for years on my old green Columbus and I love that bike. It was the first quick and responsive bike I ever owned, it got me up Sandia Crest and through my first time trials. I could add the numbers up from my logs, but my best guess is that I've put 12,000 miles on it in the last four years. But it's a heavy old bike, and I increasingly crave speed.

The new bike has it. I could tell today when I was ripping up one of my usual routes into the foothills. It climbs light and quick. The frame is stiff aluminum, and when I push the pedals the bike jumps - no much, no hesitation. I didn't really understand that hesitation I was getting on the steel frame, that flex, until I tried something stiffer.

But the real feel was coming back down Tijeras Canyon late this morning. I was near the end of a three-hour ride, and I'd told LIssa I'd be home by noon. Hate to be late. The canyon is generally downhill, but with a lot of rollers, and I was bucking a headwind. But the new wheels, they felt like they were slicing through the wind, like it wasn't there, and I was flying, faster than I've ever done that ride. At one point, on a downhill section, I was coming up on a guy who was pedaling to fight the wind. I just tucked and coasted and passed him.

Jaime seems almost as excited as I am about the new bike - he helped me shop smart for it, helped me think through the decisions. He's been named the bicycle's godfather. So it was fitting that we ended up, completely by accident, riding together Saturday morning on its maiden voyage. I was humping it down the bike trail along the river when I heard a voice behind me say, "Hey, nice bike." Up beside me rode Jaime, in the midst of a long ride, so he tooled along with me as we made the climb through downtown and up to my house.

For the gear heads:

Airborne Thunderbolt frame
Shimano Ultegra gear, with a double chain ring in the front and a 12-27 in the back for going up the mountains
Speedplay X-3 pedals that my knees might live long and happy lives
Mavic Ksyrium Elite wheels, because you shouldn't skimp on wheels

L's ankle is now safely immobilized in a big clunky removable brace as she clomps around the house. Its purpose is to allow the body to do its modest yet amazing self-healing job on the spot where a bit of tendon in her ankle apparently pulled away a bit of bone where it normally attaches. What happens, according to The Doc, is that new bone grows out and around the dangling tendone/bone end, enveloping it and pulling it back into place where it's supposed to be. This is remarkable, and will take five weeks, during which family logistics will be a loving nightmare, as L can't drive.

So the doc took a second, closer look at Lissa's x-ray and didn't like what he saw, so it's back in to an orthopedic type tomorrow to figure exactly what's going on.

Hustled home after work last night and stuffed down dinner (Nora made cheesy garlic breads) so I could make it to school in time for Open House, to meet Nora's teachers. I was running late, so I had planned to skip the principal's opening schtick, so I made a beeline past the cop on duty at the school door and straight to where I thought Nora's first classroom was.

The school was strangely empty, but I figured everyone was still in the auditorium listening to the principal. Then I looked down at the Open House flyer clutched in my hand. The school was strangely empty, I realized, because I was there on the wrong night. Open House is not 'til Thursday.

I am so lame.

Lissa's x-rays showed no bones broken, just soft tissue damage to her torqued ankle, but she'll be laid up for days. The doctor gave her an ankle brace and a prescription for pain meds and she's all curled up in bed in pain-induced second-day shock.

Nora and I are taking care of her.

Lissa blew out her ankle yesterday. Ouch.

I came home to find her sitting in her favorite chair with her leg up on an ottoman and ice on the ankle. She was hobbling. Today she can't even put weight on it at all. We fear a trip to the emergency room is in order. Ouch.

Lissa and I went to the New Mexico State Fair Saturday night, which got me thinking about art and creative constraints.

In addition to cows and clydesdales and midway carnival attractions, the fair is a sort of egalitarian melting pot of our best and sometimes worst creative output as a community. My favorite spot is always the Building of Goofy Hobbies, in which coin collectors and wood carvers and kids building with Lego put their best work on display. This year there was a crossstitch of a Frank Lloyd Wright stained glass window and a bobbinlace image of a '70s-era Corvette sitting beneath a tree. It was magnificent.

We also arrived on the right night to see the local N-scale model railroad club's display. They do fabulous work. There was Hoover Dam, and an amusement park, a lumber mill, an oil refinery, all to scale, all in modules that plug in one to the next so the trains can circle the room through an endless succession of imagined worlds. The N scale people are wildly creative, but in a perfectly constrained way. It has to be to scale, and match some real-world environment, real or imagined. And each module has to have the same three sets of rails spaced exactly right to match the modules to the left and right.

This is part of why I cannot write fiction. I am terrified by the completely blank slate. Your character can say and do anything. It's frightening. Ah, but journalism - the real world provides constraints, and there I can flourish. The potentially story space for me to traverse is immense, with many dimensions, but it is usefully constrained. That's what frames are for in painting, and the strictures of the French Academy of the 19th century.

I've been listening to Dave Brubeck of late. Music is helpfully constrained, especially by the standard strictures of the 3 or 4 beat measure. Brubeck poked his way out of that just a bit, with pleasant result, but never strayed far from the constraint. Ditto the Allman Brothers with that riveting 3/3/3/2 introduction to Whipping Post. But again, they couldn't keep it up for long. It's scary out beyond the constraints.

Thanks to Lou Metzger, who was out at Moriarity two weeks ago with a camera, I've got a snap of me time trialing:

And this, of Jaime, Gianna and I (Gianna's the cute one, Jaime's the handsome one, that leaves you to figure out which one's me....)

From the CIA:

We regret we are unable to process and provide certificates of congratulations to the fine young Americans who have become Eagle Scouts. We have curtailed some activities in order for us to concentrate on the War on Terrorism.

From the user's manual to the Shimano Flight Deck cyclocomputer (a sort of handlebar speedometer gizmo):

WARNING: Be careful not to pay excessive attention to the computer data while riding, otherwise you might have an accident.

Lissa's back garden has really come into its own this summer.

The panorama above (click for a bigger image) is five shots electronically stitched together so you can get a feel for the joy of it all.

The sunflowers have been a show, and the raised bed we built several years ago has an abundance of zinnias that just keep on blooming. Over on the mound on the right, a California poppy is finally taking hold, and L's been persistent in raising some tomatoes for my breakfasts. Yumm.

The shiny thing on the left with the cattails growing out of it is our pond. Birds love it, as do we.

In which Jeff visits the fish market, reminding me that there is far more to good journalism these days than the paid tripe myself and my colleagues often dish out:

The Fish Markets are a short walk from our place, which is very handy for Sunday lunches. Everyone else seems to feel the same way, because it's always busy. There are the rough old fishermen in beanies and flannies, snarling at the New Money fishermen, who look remarkably similar to the land-lubber Country Road set finishing off their lobster-champagne brunches; there are the European tourists valiantly trying to enjoy their meals, tortured by a fear that they could be eating their death, with their tour guide saving his commission by reassuring them that Australian seafood doesn't kill; there are the American tourists frowning at the messy floors and lack of have-a-nice-day service; there are the Japanese university students serving sashimi, lending an authenticity to the process marred only by the speed of their knife-clumsy typing hands and shy apologies; there are the punters carrying armfuls of fresh seafood, chasing their children over the slippery carpark; the families out on the dock sitting around bright plastic tables overflowing with mussels, calamari, chips and Coke; and the forlorn B-list TV personalities watching as their crowds shift to welcome a local movie star. There's also fish.

This is a piece I've wanted to do for a long time:

John Geissman bounded up the steep side of the volcanic knoll, leaving a trail of geologists panting behind him.

A tough half-mile climb above the valley floor, in a clump of oak, Geissman found what he was looking for— a piece of scientific history.

On this 1,000-foot high mound of volcanic rock in the summer of 1964, geologists found the final piece of a puzzle that changed the way we view our planet.

Geissman dropped his pack and circled a small outcrop of the rock that nearly four decades ago proved the theory of plate tectonics— that the continents move beneath our feet.

Mark your calendars. Dave Barry notes that Sept. 19 is Talk Like a Pirate Day. Avast!

I am some distance into Einstein in Berlin, an entwined parallel history of Einstein's scientifically formative years and the city in which he spent a good portion of them. The book in concept is intriguing - tell the story of Germany's revolution between the world wars through the lens of Einstein's science. And tell the story of Einstein's science through the lens of Germany's revolution between the world wars.

It's ambitious and intriguing conceptually and a little uneven in execution thus far, but as I don't know enough about either subject, and because I am intrigued by the author's attempt at a rather difficult bookish entwining, I'm sticking with it.

"There comes a time when there is just too much choice."
- Telsa Gwynne

Thanks to the beauties of Garnome and a free Labor Day morning, I've finally got myself switched over to GNOME 2.4 as my regular day-to-day desktop rather than just a sand box to play in. (Well, technically it's still sandboxed so I can switch back to regular Ximian, but it looks like the last annoyances are worked out so I won't need to.)

Watching the build, as make traffic flew by on the terminal screen all morning, I was struck by the absolutely remarkable volume of human effort involved in this project. All for free, shared with whoever wants it. Humbling.

Pretty cool that Evolution (the software) comes in second on a Google search for evolution.