Walking the dog at sunrise this morning, I paused while walking down the high road through the prairie to capture this photo.
Another prairie sunrise
Category: Photography
Ashley unhappy with the rain
It rained yesterday, but not all the time. I was able to get Ashley out in the gaps pretty well. After raining all night, it seemed it was going to rain all morning as well.
I offered Ashley a chance to go out on the patio, and she declined. A bit later, after she indicated that she really wanted to go out. I put on my raincoat and put the leash on her and tried to take her out the front door, but she wasn’t having it. Just a few minutes later, she came and told me she needed to go out, so I tried again, and this time I actually dragged out out the door, into the rain. But No. She went about three feet out the door, then solid turned around and headed right back.
It was a classic case of Ashley wanting to go outside, but not to the outside that actually existed. She wanted me to take her to some other outside.
So I went back to my laptop and my third coffee (twice set aside, but still warm enough) and waited for the rain to let up a little. And it did let up a little, and I got Ashley out then.
We saw an opossum! He was a Very Handsome fellow, with a white face, a naked pink tail, and sleek counter-shading on his body, (I think the sleekness may have come from being very wet.)
Ashley, of course, wanted to play with the possum, and we chased it back and forth (the possum going through the shrubs next to the building, and us going around the shrubs). At some point the possum managed to get out of sight long enough for me to drag Ashley away.
By then the rain had gotten hard again, so Ashley let me take her home, where I did my best to dry her off. But as you can see, my efforts were only partially successful.
There is a flood warning. I’m always a little amused by flood warnings in Central Illinois, because it is so, so flat here. Yes, it is flooding. The little creek is over its banks, sorta. But as soon as it gets over the top of its banks, the water just spreads out. Before it could get high enough to threaten my house (a few feet above creek level), the water would have to flood literally thousands of acres all around us.
2026-08-09 10:17
That’s not what I learned in 4th grade.
An artist’s date for Jackie’s birthday
I’ve talked about artist’s dates many times, so I won’t go on about those, except to say that on Jackie’s birthday we went to the Krannert Art Museum.
Jackie particularly wanted to see the crocheted coral reef exhibit. I neglected to get a picture of the whole thing, but I did get a picture of this sea slug, which I thought was interesting because Jackie knitted a terrestrial slug for Steven for his birthday perhaps 15 years ago.
Here is Steven receiving his slug:
And after that enormous success, Jackie knitted several more slugs:
The left-most (greenish) slug is Sigurdsson T. Slug, my personal slug.
We saw lots of other cool stuff in the museum, but about the only other thing I got a picture of was this awesome snek jug:
Is it not glorious?
Wet things
Appreciate these day lily flowers with rain drops, and this wet dog (which smells like a wet dog, but that is not captured in the photo).
A painting that needs a monster
I was out walking Ashley this morning when I saw this painting on top of the recycling bins near my house in Winfield Village.
I immediately thought of a guy (probably this guy) who would buy thrift-store landscape paintings and then add a monster to them.
I shared the image above with Steven, who immediately thought of the same guy. (Steven was the one who found that link, before I was even home from walking the dog.)
Isn’t that little lake just begging for a sea monster of some sort standing in it? Or maybe some little cryptids lurking in the trees?
Ashley: Mighty vole hunter
Steven commented while he was visiting on how much fun vole-watching on my patio was.
Ashley thinks so too.
Ashley has caught three voles that I know of (because she was on-leash when she caught them). She may have caught some others on the patio when she was out there off-leash.
One thing that surprised me, because it is so different from our boxers when I was young, was how gentle her mouth is.
Our boxers would promptly dispatch whatever they caught—groundhogs, even raccoons. One shake of the boxer’s head and whatever it had captured in its powerful jaws was dead.
That is not Ashley’s modus operandi. Two of the voles that Ashley captured were released unharmed, after I told Ashley “drop it.” (The third got eaten before I got organized to tell Ashley not to.)
In addition to the three voles, Ashley has caught both one (rather stupid) squirrel, and one (rather immature) robin fledgling. Both of those were released unharmed as well.
I’m not quite sure why. I know some retrievers have very soft mouths, so they can bring back a dead fowl without ruining it. Maybe there’s a gene for that, and Ashley has it? Or maybe it’s just that she was rewarded repeatedly for being very gentle when she took treats from people’s hands?
Whatever it is, I like both aspects of my li’l pupper: truly a mighty hunter, but also a gentle one.
Crowne Plaza O’Hare Garden Patio
Have you ever seen a more pleasant garden spot than this sterile bit of lawn, concrete, and pavers at the Crowne Plaza O’Hare? There is no seating at all. There are some walls you can sit on, if you’re reasonably tall, but even the lowest bit of wall is too tall for me to balance a laptop on my knees.
I did find one cigarette butt, so I know the space does not go completely unused.
2026-04-30 13:27
Blue corn battered black cod with brown rice. Batter is half blue corn, half all-purpose flour, and has paprika, black pepper, thyme, and just a touch of cayenne pepper.
My recovery needs seem to be rising
I have been meaning for a while to write about how I seem to need more recovery from exercise now than I did five or six years ago. Back in 2020 I could do a hard workout one day, take one rest day, and then come back and do another hard workout. This year I seem to need more rest days to recover. A couple of times recently, I seemed to need six days to recover from a hard lifting session or a long run.
When I mentioned this to my family I got back a chorus of variations on “Getting old sucks.” And it is entirely possible that my recovery capability took a dramatic hit between age 60 and 66. But I didn’t want to just assume that it was aging. I wanted to see if I could figure out if that was actually true.
(I mean, I know that there are a bunch of other changes between than and now that might make a difference in how much recovery time I need. One is that I walk my dog a lot. Although I don’t count those walks as “workouts,” they are still physical activity that requires some amount of recovery. I didn’t have a dog in 2020. I walked plenty then too, but I didn’t go for a long walk every day. Probably only once a week did I walk as far as I do almost every day now. Another is that now I’m trying to train for sword fighting. Those training sessions aren’t usually extremely intense, but sometimes they are, and they’re also somewhat unpredictable, meaning I can’t always line those sessions up with days when I’m ready for a hard workout. Plus, they’re fun—which makes it much easier to end up overdoing it.)
Fortunately, I have my workout logs from 2020—starting right before the pandemic, when I rediscovered the fact that consistency beats intensity when it comes to exercise, and then from the couple of years after that, when the ongoing pandemic meant that I didn’t have to do anything else, and could just exercise as much as I wanted.
I have at least two ideas about things I might do to analyze this:
- Look at the logs. Is what I’m trying to do now (that seems to take so much recovery) more than what I was doing then?
- Replicate those workouts. An experiment I could do is just take a few weeks and do roughly the same workouts I did back in 2020. If that goes well, then maybe my recovery capabilities haven’t gotten worse. Maybe I’m just doing harder workouts. Or anyway, workouts that are harder to recover from
So, I did take a first look at those logs, looking to see how much exercise I was doing for the first 30 or so weeks starting right before the pandemic, and how much recovery I was getting. I remember thinking at the time that I should aim for a workout every other day, accepting the reality that I’d occasionally miss a day, and end up hitting about three times a week, which seemed like a good goal. It turns out that, during this period of initial consistency, I was getting in almost three workouts per week as intended: 2.89 ± 0.83 workouts. The numbers showed a slight upward trend, with a few weeks with 4 workouts and almost none with just 2 in the last few weeks.
So that’s a first thing to try: Exercising roughly every other day, rather than overdoing it for several days and then needing several days to recover.
Every-other-day isn’t the only good workout schedule. Since I like working out, I kind of like exercising almost every day. Separately from that test, maybe I can come up with a six-day-a-week schedule that doesn’t overdo it: Just one or two exercises per day, focusing on different muscles, different body parts, and different energy systems from one day to the next.
I have so many things to try! (Along with trying not to overdo it.)