Badlands :: A Prairie Dog Town

Wednesday, August 24th - - After the bison had moved along, so too did I. Traveling a short distance on the gravel road, I stopped at the Prairie Dog Town and watched the little critters for a while. Some were rather close to the road but as soon as I opened the door and stood up they all scurried off to their burrows. So I got back inside Van Dora and waited a few minutes until they decided to come back out. All of these photos are cropped, some more so than others.





Youngsters. Not sure they should go down into the safety of their burrow or stay outside. A second later and they had disappeared.





Oftentimes you see more with the camera (thank you, whomever invented the zoom lens!) than you do with the naked eye. This little fellow, and the ones below, were quite a distance from a burrow and fairly close to the road, sampling the morsels provided by Mother Nature.











It was so much fun watching these little guys. They were quick to scurry off in every direction at the lightest noise – a cough, a clearing of the throat, even sometimes the sounds of the camera.

Cycling Up an Appetite: Women and Food

When I was in graduate school, a friend was conducting a research study that involved interviewing female students with and without eating disorders. This proved to be more difficult than she anticipated. Of the young women she'd recruited though a randomised process, all but one showed signs of disordered eating: She did not have a sufficient control group. So she dismissed her initial participant pool and tried again, only to get a similar result. Eventually this caused her to change the direction of the investigation: Her inability to recruit a group of university women with no history of eating disorders in itself became the theme of her research.



Looking back at this 10 years later, I don't think that she or I would have qualified for the control group of that study either. While neither anorexic nor bulimic, our eating was not what I would now consider normal. We were hyper-aware of our calorie intake.We knew our precise weights.We paid attention to the times of day we ate. After a meal, we would keep a mental note of the amount of exercise we'd have to do to compensate for it. The truth is, eating at that age for many of us was an inherently conflicted experience, the effect of food on our bodies ever-present in the backs of our minds. We were not fashion models and we were not athletes; we were university students. For most of us, it was not about our looks but about maintaining control in a competitive and stressful environment.



It was also a matter of having lostour natural appetite regulation mechanisms. We counted calories because we genuinely had no idea when we were truly hungry and when we were not. Our hunger and satiation signals were so out of whack with reality that we no longer trusted them.At age 12, feeling hungry simply meant I needed to eat something. But by age 22, this connection had become severed. There was nervous hunger, cravings for comfort food during all the endless studying, emotional eating. Lack of appropriate satiation signals could lead to overeating unless we were vigilant. And so we were, and it made us miserable.



How did this become the norm for so many women? Most likely it began with dieting during our teenage years and spiraled from there. We did not see it as abnormal, because we were neither puking up food nor outright starving ourselves. We were simply "eating healthy," watching our weight, making sure we maintained whatever clothing size we saw as being appropriate for our body types. But in truth we were suffering, and did not know how to put an end to it. In retrospect, I cannot believe how normalised this was in my generation of university women. Most of my female friends, acquaintances and colleagues had these issues and hid them with various degrees of success. Countless male friends have told me that they've never had a girlfriend who was not "weird" about food.



I cannot pinpoint exactly when things began to turn around for me. Possibly it was moving to a large city in my late 20s where I was suddenly doing lots of walking - not for exercise, but as a natural part of living and getting around. But riding a bike was what really accelerated the process of getting my appetite instincts back on track, so the connection is a strong one for me. Experiencing my body as a useful machine and not just as a bothersome appendage to my brain was what really did it. Through cycling I began to think of food as fuel. If I wanted to ride, I had to eat. And at age 30, for the first time in what must have been 15 years, I was once again able to eat when hungry and stop when full, just like I did when I was a child.



Since I began writing this blog, I have spoken with many, many women cyclists who describe similar experiences. Regaining trust in their hunger and satiation instincts for the first time since their pre-teens has been a gift more dear than they can express. And while cycling is not the only way to achieve this, it is certainly a great way, both fun and practical. Here's to all the women out there, cycling up an appetite.

Embracing the Local Scene

My manager told a fellow manager last week that she and I were "embracing the local culture". She's right. We are both definitely working hard at embracing it vs rejecting it. I had just purchased a pair of cowboy boots within hours of her sharing that. And if that is not embracing the local scene, I don't know what is.



She is doing her own thing to find a way to do that and I'm doing my own thing to do the same. There are times when it can seem a bit slow to me, and I find myself literally amusing myself by doing things like tracking the progress of how quickly an animal decays in the hot summer heat. Then I take pictures of that progress to share with Nathan who does not get to outside and play during the day like I do. Warning: Gross picture below.




Pretty cool, huh? For the record, that was taken on Day Nine. Tropical storm Debby dumped all kinds of water in the area making a mess of things for many people and animals.


The river flooded due to Debby's gift and so we dealt with more flooding in the park. So much so, we "moved" from one site to another site to avoid being in the flood water.



Let's see, beyond all that fun I have had tree frogs jump on the top of my head twice in the past month. Once it took a lot of arm flailing and a funny dance to get it to leave the top of my head. That was pretty fun. It has been so boring for the most part here though that it has allowed me to be ridiculously lazy. I've enjoyed it. We are leaving to go on a cruise tomorrow and while I'm excited, I fear that after my recent daily pace, I will be exhausted two days in. I will have much more to share here when I get back though. Something more blog worthy than tree frogs that is.



Living the life in lazy Florida.

Glen Avon Falls, Beaver River

Taken last Wednesday on our way home from Duluth. We took a short detour off Highway 61 and headed up to Glen Avon Falls on the Beaver River. This was only my second time visiting this location, and I can't wait to go back and see it when the water is higher. It is a spectacular section of the river with lots of photographic possibilities.





































I had a lot of fun with my 100-400mm lens taking shot after shot of this particular spot in the river. It was at the bottom of one of the many cascades that make up Glen Avon Falls. Each shot was so different from the one before, amazing how infinite the patterns of water can be when you freeze the action like this!

Lewis & Clark Bridge

Going south from Washington state to Oregon state.

Embracing Wrinkles

One question I am often asked about cycling to work, is how to avoid wrinkles on business and formal attire. I don't have many pictures of myself dressed up, but I do cycle in suits and dresses that fall into the business/ formal category. And rather than avoid wrinkles, I tend to choose clothing that either doesn't wrinkle easily, or that is meant to look wrinkled. This habit is a hold-over from a life of constant travel combined with a hatred of dry-cleaning and ironing boards, and it lends itself well to cycling. Here are some suggestions I can make from personal experience.

My go-to fabric for looking presentable in the warmer months is linen (shown above). I own several linen skirt and pant suits, and I mix and match them to create a variety of outfits. People tend to think of linen as a limited, "afternoon tea at a resort" sort of fabric, but in fact it comes in many weights and textures. A dark, crisply tailored linen suit can look formal, while a pastelgauzy linen dress can look whimsical. But what all linens have in common is that they actually look good wrinkled; wrinkles are part of their "personality." That's what makes them great for tossing into a suitcase, and it's also what allows me to get on and off the bike as many times as I want without worrying whether my skirt needs to be frantically smoothed out before a meeting.

I am also a fan of "twist-dried" designs. There may be a formal name for this process that escapes me, so someone please help me out. But what I mean is that there is a style of shirts, skirts, even evening dresses where the wrinkles are part of the garment's very design. This is achieved by drying the article of clothing in a wrung-out, or twisted manner. The resulting wrinkles are clearly intentional. They add a sense of structure and the illusion of subtle colour variation to the fabric once it is dry. Typically, the twist-dried effect is produced by the manufacturer, but you can create it on your own by simply drying any shirt, skirt, or dress (crisp cottons and silks with no pockets work best) in this fashion. Having wrinkles as an inherent design element of your outfit eliminates the need to worry about them.



To some extent, the same idea can be generalised to textured fabrics. Tweed, seersucker, lace, embroidery - the texture both disguises wrinkles and somewhat prevents them from forming.



If your dress code limits you to more conventional suiting, I have found that wool skirts and trousers tend to be more forgiving as far as wrinkling goes than other fabrics. They still wrinkle, just less so. Not getting on and off the bicycle saddle every time I stop (but leaning the bike and putting a toe down instead) has been helpful in preventing wrinkles from forming as well.

Of course for dresses there is wool jersey, though it has become increasingly more difficult to find ready-made. I've been working with a designer to help create a cycling-specific dress with a couple of interesting features, and one reason we chose jersey is for its non-wrinkling properties. While I prefer wool or bamboo jersey, cotton jersey and various artificial blends work well in this respect also and are easier to find in stores.IbexandIcebreakerhave begun to make wool jersey dresses, and while theirs tend to lean toward the more casual, it's a promising sign. The nice thing about jersey fabrics, is that they not only resist wrinkling, but also have some give to them, allowing you to move easier on the bike.



One last suggestion I can make for those whose clothing is wrinkle-prone, is to try throwing a coat on over the outfit. Granted, this works best in cooler weather, with stiff wool coats. But in warmer weather even a thin trenchcoat can be helpful.

While cycling to work is easy if your typical wardrobe already lends itself to it, I think it's important to address the concerns of those who would like to ride in their regular clothing but, for whatever reason, find it impractical. Sometimes it is a matter of having the right bike or accessories, other times it's a matter of making minor alterations to your wardrobe without inherently changing the way you dress. What are yours strategies for dealing with wrinkles and other forms of dishevelment that cycling may impose on your clothing? If it were crucial in your line of work to always look crisp and impeccably groomed, would you still ride to work?

In the Woods

We took our first trip to the Jemez Mountains last Thursday to start woodcutting for the winter. When we got there we had to sit in the truck and wait for a rain shower to pass before we could start cutting. After the rain I noticed this nice pine tree with lots of green moss on the left side and the log and rock at it's base to make a nice photo.

Balloons

Morning Glories

My morning glory flowers are finally blooming and most of them seem to be playing a game of peek-a-boo in and around the leaves.

On The Road Again, Again!

Monday, May 2nd - - After 12 days back home in Indiana, I'm on the move, heading west. I traveled 350 miles today, through Indiana and most of Illinois, and not even one of those miles was on the Interstates!



I think we only had two days of sunshine the entire time I was home, and today was more of the same cloudy, overcast skies. It was raining when I left Columbia City but it quit shortly thereafter. My stopping place for the night was Argyle Lake State Park, about 15 miles southwest of Macomb off of US Route 136 in western Illinois. It was late afternoon, and as so often happens at that time of day, the clouds began to move off and the sun finally made a most-welcome appearance.



After a quick bite to eat, I went for a short walk – on the paved, level road through the campground then down to the lake. Just taking it easy but getting a little exercise to get the old legs moving again. And trying not to do whatever it was that I did before to cause the pain!





Lots of these pretty blue wild-flowers were near the edge of the woods alongside the campground. Each flower in the cluster was about an inch in diameter.







I opted to not attempt these stairs leading down to the lake – they didn't look very sturdy and they were much steeper than they appear.





There was no clear view of the setting sun, which was blocked by the forest on the other side of the meadow.





As the sun set further, the sky filled with color.



A very nice ending, to my first day on the road again, again!

Fall Photo Adventure

This past weekend was a "Fall Photo Adventure" with 3 very good photographer friends that came to visit Grand Portage for a couple of days. My good friend Roger was accompanied by his brother Ralph from California, and Jake (Gary Jacobson) joined us from the Twin Cities. We had loads of fun, not nearly enough sleep and came away with more great shots than we can count! The fall colors this year have been incredible and their visit on this weekend couldn't have been timed more perfectly for the peak color. If you'd like to check out some of their photographs, here are their websites:
Roger Nordstrom: http://www.rogernordstromphoto.com/
Ralph Nordstrom: http://ralphnordstromphotography.com/
Gary "Jake" Jacobson: http://www.frozenshutter.com/



Above: Jake: "Some people hunt with a rifle, I hunt with a Canon."



Above: Roger capturing the view of the Pigeon River valley



Above: Ralph and Jake enjoying a roadside lunch



Above: The whole crew on one of the local fire towers. From left to right: Me (Travis Novitsky!), Gary "Jake" Jacobson, Ralph Nordstrom, Roger Nordstrom.



Above: Jake shooting the waterfall



Above: Jake and Ralph figuring out their next shots



Above: On Friday night we were doing some star shooting and were treated to a nice surprise showing of the Northern Lights!



Above: Roger is always looking for unique angles



Above: Photographers all in a row!



Above: The guys posing with their cameras



Above: Ralph photographing fall color reflections



Above: Jake takes in the view at Esther Lake



Above: Jake and Ralph shooting along the shoreline of a beautiful Northwoods lake!

Wondering Horse

The other night about 8pm I heard the neighbors dogs barking and my mare, Star, whinnying so I went out to see what was going on. At first I didn't see anything then something nudged me in the back. I knew instantly it was a horse, I've been nudged like that so many times, but what was one doing in front of the garage? It was my Quarter Horse mare, Nita. Apparently hubby or I didn't get her gate shut good when we gave them their afternoon snack and filled water buckets. I'm not sure how long she was out but by the time I got to her she was ready to go back to her pen for the night feeding we do at about 9pm.
Since we still have mud from all the rain we have been having it was easy to follow her tracks the next day and see where she had been. First she went to the cottonwood tree right outside her pen that has a nice bunch of grass growing at the base of the truck and ate the grass. Next she sampled some of my roses near the tree and tip-toed through a pile of used lumber and sheets of tin that we had pulled of the hayshed roof last year to replace with better material so the roof didn't leak. We have slowly been using the lumber and tin for some other minor projects but it was a messy pile of junk that no horse should have been in. Next she visited the two ponies in their pen and went on by the kitchen window and into the back yard. To get there she had to go under the brase that helps hold up the gate that is usually left open. The brase is just over 6 feet tall, enough for hubby to walk under. Nita is 15 and a half hands tall so if she had her head up she would have smacked into the brase. (you can see it in the photo taken last week when it snowed) She made a trip around the back yard and walked right by the hole that the dogs had dug that morning (I think they were after one of the rats that tunnel under the garden). She then when back out the same gate and by the kitchen again to where she was by the garage when she and I found each other.
I couldn't find even a tiny scratch on her. I think she might be the kind of horse the cowboys called a 'night horse' because they can get around in the dark so well. I was just glad she didn't get hurt.

Measure!

I spend a lot of time measuring things. I measure my work in steel to .0001" or better. I get a consistent body weight every morning at a certain time to .1 of a pound. I want to know how hard I can climb on rock to the letter grade or how fast I run a 5 K to the second.



I want to know if I am in the black on a target. Is it in the X ring or just a 10. I want to know how many pull ups and sit ups I can do and my blood pressure and resting HR every morning. My Max HR on the bike and on a run. And I want to know what my dbl boots and my bikes weigh to the gram.



I measure because I want to do better. If you aren't measuring how do you know if you are doing better? The fact is you don't. The flip side of that is if you aren't getting better you are getting worse. If you don't measure you don't know what is better or what is worse. There is nothing that takes any kind of physical skill that stays the same for long. Use it or loose it. Measuring it will help you keep it or better yet get better at it.

Sunflowers

Champ de Tournesols, originally uploaded by ParsecTraveller.

It's definitely not sunflower season yet, but I finally managed to access the broken hard drive where some of my pictures were imprisoned. These sunflowers were near the small village of St. Savin, in the Dauphiné region of France.