Bad Breaks

So yeah, Thing Two broke her ankle just about two weeks ago. I guess she missed the bottom step at her Mom's house, and at first it just looked like she'd rolled her ankle, but she wouldn't put any weight on it at all. Two broken bones in the ankle, surgery to fix it. There's two ways to reinforce the bones, internal screws & plates, or external rods. Given the risk of re-breaking it if (she has autism and seizures) she put weight on it too soon, well, the ortho surgeon recommended both.

After my finger surgery a few years back, I'm not disposed to go with the first recommendations of a surgeon. I wanted to get a second opinion, but after discussing the options with the first doc, and weighing the delay getting these opinions would translate to, well, the surgery.

So then it came to be my weekend to have Mo. Corinna wasn't home when we got here Friday so it was all on me to navigate the stairs into the house with my, like I say, autistic daughter with a broken ankle she must not put weight on for another month plus. She hops pretty good with the walker, and there's the wheelchair for when you just need to move her horizontally over a flat plane, but stairs. Stairs. Fuck.

And full disclosure, I have some PTSD type symptoms related to keeping my children safe. I'm their Dad, it's my job, and of course it's totally impossible, a fantasy to think I could keep them safe, but that doesn't lessen the emotional load. I worry about both, but Mo is the one with a significant disability making it all the harder to keep her safe. For instance, it's far from impossible that you'll be helping her hop up the stairs when a seizure will strike and getting in the house turns into a 911 call.

It didn't. And going back out when the artist formerly known as Frau Lobster came to fetch her, Corinna put her Judo expertise into wrangling the stairs. Which didn't help me emotionally even a little bit, it all looked like it was about to go bad in a very serious way, but she said she had it under control and I guess the kid got to the car in one piece so I have to take her at her word for that.

Besides by whim-whams, I'm totally heartbroken my daughter has to go through this. I had my finger almost five years ago, it's still a bit gimpy, but it doesn't hurt anymore. At the time, though, it hurt so bad I almost lost my job from losing my cool (chronic pain at a high level kinda malfunctions your perspective). I remember hoarding my pain pills because they barely touched the pain, but I could take a triple dose before PT and it'd let me push myself further. It was an Ordeal, and that was just a finger. I can't even fathom what an ankle is like, and experience tells me the worst is yet to come: while it's immobilized for the bones to heal is one thing, when you try to get shit to move like it used to, that's a whole other thing.

Bike MS Ozarks

I first did the Ozarks Bike MS ride last year after missing three years due, mainly, to a calendar shift on the KC ride.

Prior to 2009, I didn't even own a bike. I know this because I log my miles in an Excel spreadsheet and have since buying a $50 bike off a friend I was in a garage band with after another friend put me up to doing Bike MS. That first ride, 3.1 miles and I was whining about how my ass felt after it. Yeah, I was really in shape. Just checked, and the total miles on that spreadsheet now reads over 20,000 miles.

These days most of my cycling is transportational. Functional. I ride to and from work as much as possible, run errands by bike whenever I can, though I love riding enough that I don't always take the most direct route. I dabble in touring, and by touring I mean self-supported, carry your own campsite touring. But I know people who've gone coast to coast that way and my longest self-supported tour is three days and that was a few years ago.

But coming back to Bike MS, let alone that it's a great cause (I've had personal friends with this terrible disease), I love a good social ride and getting several hundred folks together for an epic ride is super awesome fun in my book. It's mostly roadies, the semi-derogatory term urban cyclists apply to people who never ride for transportation, who ride uncomfortable yet expensive bikes they refer to as 'road bikes.' A Trek Madone is a 'road bike' the way a Ferrari Testarosa is a 'street car.' But the man said, any bike you like to ride is awesome, no matter what bike it is, so bring me your carbon fiber, your drop bars, your huddled masses yearning to feel their fingers again.

The Ozarks ride is hilly, as you'd expect given the name 'Ozarks.' I think east of Springfield would be even more so, we go from Republic to Joplin and back, those Ozarks are hills, not mountains. But they have a way of going from a maybe 20% grade for a quarter to half a mile to all of a sudden, near the top, more like a 25% grade. I'm not a scientist with these figures, it's what it feels like from the saddle. When I saw people walking their bikes, I went ahead and downshifted to my small chainring, but I still felt the burn.

But on the return trip in particular, we went on some pretty rough roads. All were paved, at least technically. They were county roads, several of them one lane wide, often with multi-level pavement, potholes, accumulated gravel, etc. The roadies had given me plenty of grief about my heavy-ass bike but I wasn't fretting about pinch flats as we rode these roads. I was like, 'THIS is a road bike,' (my Long Haul Trucker), 'and it doesn't give two shits abut whether that road is paved, gravel, in bad repair, or whatever. If it's a road, we're on it.'

This cop car, I stopped to take a picture of it, and a woman was unloading feed from a pickup in the driveway by it. She told me the guy who lives there had been a rodeo clown. I said, those guys are almost as crazy as the bull riders. She said, he rode bulls before he clowned. What's he do now? He deals in Brahmas. They're what the feed was for.

There was also this oasis on the edge of what was once Route 66. We weren't on Old 66 for long, but it was an interesting stretch. You can't probably see from the picture, but the gazebo over the pond contains a hammock, and I honestly wanted to forsake the Joplin and just chill out in that hammock, it was obviously a place of peace. I'm guessing from the huge veterans memorial adjacent to the pond that it's a well earned peace. And no, I wouldn't normally think a place looked peaceful twenty feet from a bomb and a couple of artillery shells, but it did.

As it is, I slept in the gym at the East Middle School Joplin rebuilt after that devastating tornado. Which means I was able to plug in my CPAP as well as have a hot shower and take a dump on a proper toilet rather than in a kybo. I guess I also learned a lesson in just how old I've gotten to be.

I have a friend from Critical Mass in Kansas City, and by friend I mean someone I've met once, then 'friended' on a certain social media site you've probably heard of. Anyway, she's super cute and in the hour or two I spent with her in my whole life was really fun. She wanted to show me Joplin with her friend who'd also been a Critical Mass rider. And it was my birthday, so there'd probably be some bars that'd front me a shot just for showing up with a valid ID saying I was turning 46.

This is a very appealing combination for me. Beautiful women, free liquor, a night on the town, imagine my surprise when I begged off because I honestly just wanted to go to bed. On a gym floor in a sleeping bag.

When I woke up in the morning, I had a text message from my friend saying 'we just got to Turtle Heads.' I assume this is a fun bar in Joplin, but I got this message almost a half hour after I was asleep, and it came before ten o'clock. That's how old I am, given the chance to party with beautiful twenty-somethings who ride bikes, I'm in the sack with my CPAP humming before the nightly news comes on.

Oh, and the cute Chris Cakes girl (speaking of lovely twenty-somethings). She pranked me pretty good by saying she'd started Chris Cakes when she was in high school, which worked until I grokked that I'd first had Chris Cakes almost 20 years ago, flipped at me by a guy who probably wasn't Chris either..

Bike 4 the Brain

It was thundering out when I woke up, but I still figured I'd go ride Bike for the Brain. Got rained on pretty good getting there, then the organizer announced an hour's delay.

I wasn't having it, standing around in the rain is way dumber than riding around in it. So I went to go ride around to keep warm, when BAM! I had a blowout in my beleaguered rear tire. Threw the bead clean off the rim, sounded like a gunshot. I've had the worst luck lately on this front, despite buying the best anti-flat tires there are (Marathon Plus Tours). I've had to make warranty claims on two of the aforementioned tires, this is the third one.

The guys at Midwest Cyclery were out to service the ride, and two bike mechanics inspected everything the tire, the rim, the tube, couldn't find a thing that would account for it. A defective tube, perhaps?

Perhaps, but I've had a few lately if that's the case. I'd blame the wheel build, but it was fine for the first 1200 miles or so, the all of a sudden I started having these issues. Mystery flats, now a mystery blowout.

They got me fixed up in time for the ride to be officially cancelled due to lightning. Fair enough, I guess, though canceling an event because of lightning strikes is like worrying about being struck by lightning. I guess there are liability issues if it happened, and visibility was none to great when the rain came down hard which it did periodically.

My solution would have been to go around on the signs and cross out the capital B in 'Brain' and call it Bike For the Rain.

Museums: A Double Header

It'd been at least a year since I took Mo to a museum. We used to go all the time, before teenage naysaying entered the picture. But to my surprise, for once, when I offered she said yes.

It's hard to tell sometimes with her verbal communication. She'll say no to almost anything sometimes, including favorite treats like Sprite or Oreos. But when she says yes, you know you're on to something.

I realized something she's been communicating to me, probably, all along on these outings today. She'll go and pose in front of pictures or statues, but not all of them. I think what she's saying, she likes this one. She wants me to take her picture with it because she's giving it the thumbs up.

If I'm reading these tea leaves correctly, Mo prefers modern to classical. Or maybe that reflected the fact that we spent most of our time in the Bloch addition, which is mostly modern stuff, while we were at the Nelson and then we followed up the Nelson with a trip through the Kemper museum which is all new stuff. Vivid colors and dense color also seemed to attract her poses. Makes sense, I guess, when she paints it's with absolute obliteration of white space, her paintings aren't done until everything is color.

For my own part, I'm a sucker for modernity. The Dutch masters and whatnot, really not moving the needle for me. Actual antiquity, a 1700 year old Greek sculpture, yeah, that impresses me for its sheer age, but I'll take a de Koenig or a Pollack over a Rembrandt any day. Or pop art, I really enjoy Warhol. Or Richard Estes, I loves me some Central Savings type stuff.

I turned on Strava for this excursion. My health insurance rewards me for verified workouts, and I've been logging my bike commutes and whatnot to great effect. If my employer keeps this insurance and if the points roll over year to year (I don't know that yet), I think I can get a free bike out of the deal. Not a super awesome top drawer bike, but an entry level Trek mountain bike or cyclocross bike, a respectable backup to be sure. It took my wife seven months to harangue me into setting up the Strava thing but once I saw what was possible, I got really into it. They only credit one workout a day, but since I wasn't going to get to bike today, the walking thing. We walked 1-1/2 miles according to the app.

I think the idea that Mo is expressing approval of the art when she poses by it has an exception. She always, always poses in front of the wax guard, mocking him. If I dug around, I bet I have twenty shots like this covering her from about age 9 to age 18.

The puzzle chair really fascinated me. Then I read the placard on it and it totally fascinated me. I want one of these, you can get the files to 3D print your own for free, all I need is a friend with a 3D printer and whatever the plastic costs.

Trying to learn more about photography myself, I'm really in awe of the photography exhibits near the bottom of the Bloch addition. Shots from the 1860s, shot with the very earliest, crudest photographic technology. No looking at the preview to see if you got it, no tweaking the curves or exposure compensation, just really detailed photographs with challenging combinations of background and foreground. I don't know how many shitty shots it took to get there, but they just couldn't shoot as many shots as I sometimes do with my D7000 (and I often get mostly junk).

And of course we had to visit the Four Seasons by Haas while they're still there. Sadly they're going away in a little over a month, I like them enough I wish they were a permanent exhibit.

Judging from all the people trying for the same shots, I think the Haas installation has got to be a resounding success for the museum. I'm sure they bring in traveling exhibits at times they expect to really pull people in and then it's crickets, and then there's times where people just trip over each other getting in to see something. I bet it's semi-mysterious as far as what works and what doesn't, but the Four Seasons is a win

After we'd done the glass maze at the Nelson we headed over to the Kemper, which is a much more intimate affair. The glass maze was pretty claustrophobic for me, which is counterintuitive since it's clear. You can see a great distance in every direction, you just can't go there. The glass makes it hotter, and realizing you would have to walk those last 100 steps in reverse to get out if you had to, yeah.

The wall spider outside the Kemper was missing, and I inquired. First, I got a guard who thought they'd taken it down because the artist's work had gotten crazy expensive and they were afraid it'd be stolen. Or that one (the big lawn spider) by the same artist was enough to show. Then I talked to someone who seemed to really know, and she said it just needed a cleaning and some TLC, and it'd be back soon. I hope the latter was right, the only way I'd be okay with that spider leaving the wall of the Kemper is if I could have it put on the wall of my house.

Oh, and I totally need this coffee mug. Except I don't really drink coffee and it would be an insulting serving size for soda.