Bachelor Weekend was a term I coined for weekends when I didn't have my kids after the divorce. I angled for as much parenting time as I could get at the time of my divorce, so that meant there were only twelve such weekends a year, and of those, really only six counted since I generally have my big freelance gig on the other six, a project I've done since the mid-1990s.
I generally pack as much me-time activity as possible into those six. I'm likely to do things like brew a batch of beer, go bike touring, plant 30 tomato plants, that sort of thing. I had the Bier Meisters competition the first half of this one, and kegging up cider and trippel for the other part. In addition to going to church this morning, probably by bike. Oh, and blogging a bit, and so on.
And it was even more bachelor-ish because the Poet Laureate of Lobster Land, my wife, is travelling.
Then, Sunday morning, Jello came into my bed and pinned me. I don't think you can appreciate the awesome power of a ten pound cat to subdue a grown man. It was nearly noon before I managed to wrestle my way out from under him. A few hours later, when I was finally ready to get down to business, I felt how warm it was outside and all bets were off, I had to go for a bike ride.
There was a tag, Hoer!, on a hopper car in the West Bottoms I'd been seeing from afar for a few weeks. No telling when the railroad will hook up and drag it away, but the only way I knew to get close enough for a good photograph was to ride my bike to it. I might have been able to get there by car, but the railroads guard their turf pretty jealously and experience has taught me a car on railroad property gets a railroad bull's attention a lot faster than a bike.
Even on a bike, you have to be mindful of your Get-the-Fuck-Out-of-Here meter. Not just for railroad bulls, it's an important piece of equipment to have any time you stop to take pictures in the city. If you are getting the creeps, even if you don't know exactly why, it's time to get moving. You can figure out what was bothering you later rather than getting hit on the head by it right now.
I guess there is another way, maybe an 800mm lens, but being such glass would probably cost more than I paid for my car...
I'm not a fan of riding on gravel or in mud, but when properly motivated I can do it. I'm actually getting less phobic about it, the whole fear being that I hate falling.
I didn't realize how many of the other cars on the train had pretty cool tags as well until I was down there. There were some half-baked tags I didn't bother shooting, either the product of substandard taggers or a tag interrupted by one of those aforementioned bulls.
I got almost trapped trying to get out actually. There were trains parked across the tracks on both sides of 12th Street, and I ended up finding a route around the end of one through more sloppy roads.
From there I looped around to the Woodsweather bridge to pick up a couple other tags I'd noticed when I didn't have time to shoot them.
And stumbled on one under the Woodsweather bridge running down from Broadway that you can't see unless you get down in Eagle Packaging's lot. I'm not sure Eagle is still in business, it appears to be mainly a camp site for the area's rent-liberated citizens.
Not a long ride, only about twelve miles, and slow because of all the stopping and the slogging across gravel and mud, but fun. 57ºF slipping down to maybe 50ºF by the time I got home with my trophies.
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