Wednesday, May 16, 2018

Summer comes to Durham

Although it seems like only a few weeks ago it was 40F and we were feeling chilly, we've had high temperatures above 90F for the past few days and it doesn't exactly feel like spring. Instead, it feels like we've been catapulted into full-on summer. I know that some of you will say that I'm weak after living in San Francisco for four years, and while that is in general a fair criticism, it has already been  up to 97F this week, and that is hot by pretty much any standard. To make the most of this new warmth (or, to survive in this burning hellscape, as Lynn has been calling it), I've been doing a few things.

Bicycling: Riding in Durham is the full experience of road biking. There are busy urban streets with lots of people and cars, protected multi-use paths for pedestrians and cyclists, and long stretches of rural roads with varying degrees of shoulder for safety. I've enjoyed exploring since we moved, although definitely overestimated my capacity to bike in the heat...

Essentials any bike ride... I highly recommend the goddess garden which has a lovely lavender sent and is extremely gentle. The others are great for the body, but leave my face feeling chemically burned...

I'm too far out from my kindergarten days of encylopedic dinosaur knowledge to determine whether this is a brontosaurus, diplodocus, or apatosaurus. Apparently we've all agreed that all three of these actually exist now, in case you missed the dust-up over whether being a brontosaurus was really a thing...

I've biked portions of the American Tobacco Trail, a rails-to-trails conversion that boasts many miles of beautiful (and relatively flat) cycling, the South Ellerbe Creek Trail, which is most notable for having a large dinosaur statue nestled into the trees next to the trail, and the Stadium Drive Trail, which is actually a glorified sidewalk that is great for safe walking and cycling away from cars for beginning cyclists or children, but is not really ideal for a road bike over about 8 mph.

Enjoying our backyard: "Yard" should really be in quotation marks there, as we don't have much grass at all. That said, "enjoying our backyard morass of sand and gravel" doesn't have the same ring to it. Since getting our fence installed, we've loved letting Cyril run around unencumbered by the stresses of other animals, cars, and similar distractions that are profoundly distressing to our tiny, sweet dog. The things we have taken out of the backyard in order to improve it's function and appearance include:
  • One third of a phone pole
  • An old fence post which was sunk into concrete but not attached to anything else
  • Several dump-runs worth of cement chunks, broken bricks, and large rocks
  • Five garbage bags filled with poison ivy
That's right, the ground cover that was flourishing that I may have mentioned to some of you was actually just poison ivy. We suspected that there was some after Lynn got a rash, and it was confirmed when our amazing neighbor who installed the fence informed us that our entire yard consisted of poison plants and that he would recommend treating the entire area with herbicide. We may yet use chemicals to kill the remaining plants, but opted for mechanical removal of most of them. 

The before... You can see the green patch in the back near the fence, and you'll have to trust me that it's ALL poison ivy...

 The offending plant itself. You can appreciate how lush and three-leaved it is. 

Rainboots - check, Tyvek suit - check, garden gloves - check, innate immunity to poison ivy - check. That's right, despite walking around in it unawares in my sandals, I have remained unaffected. I also accidentally brushed some of it onto my face during removal, and emerged unscathed.

Cy enjoying the one small patch of non-poison ivy (notably, it's clover, not grass) in the yard. 

Tuesday, May 08, 2018

The evolution of the blog

May is the month when "Blogiversary" pops up on my calendar alerts and this year brings us to lucky thirteen. I'm a few days late, but I like to pause for at least one post in May in which I reflect on what brings me back to the blog, and maybe what draws you all. I wish I had access to some of the content trackers and analytic software that the media researchers use to follow trends, because I would love to use data to watch the evolution of the blog, but I don't. Back in 2011, I used a web applet called Wordle to make some cool word clouds from my blog feed. Unfortunately, that website no longer accepts RSS feeds, but I've found a less sophisticated one, TagCrowd, that I think will nonetheless give some interesting insights into the focus of the blog over the years (2005-2018).

Some things to remember as you scroll through:

  1. The words are alphabetical, which is not as aesthetic as the Wordle clouds. 
  2. The app doesn't recognize words like "San Francisco" or "shave ice" as one word, so you'll see those words pop up separately, which seems out of place. 
  3. There isn't one for 2014. There were no posts that years as it was the second half of my intern year and the first half of my second year of residency. This was a low time.
  4. Some of the words that show up in the formatting of the posts, like "pm" for the time of day, are among the most common. I tried to exclude some of the most obvious (like "comments"), but got a little lazy as I went on with this. I've selected a threshold of seven appearances, and included a maximum of 100 words in for each year, so take them with a grain of salt. 
  5. The filter on this applet for "regularly used words" is not as good. For example, it highlights "really" in many of these clouds. I suppose I should broaden the range of adjectives I use, but it should also use a better filter, really. 
  6. Some years there just aren't a lot of posts. The first year (2005) is one of these, which is why it looks like buying eggs was in fact the most significant thing that happened all year. 
Here they are, from stratus, to cumulus, to cirrus, the word clouds of Someday I'll be Dr. Dre...