On Saturday, I rode the Albuquerque Century. I did far better on this course than I ever have before. Not only was my time smashing, but I felt really great afterwords.
( I witnessed the worst bike crash I've ever seen )
I rode 100.56 miles in 5:25:12 on bike, with 5:59:33 wall time, giving me an average speed of 18.55mph. I've never finished Albuquerque in less that six hours, and given that this time counts picking up my rider packet as well as stopping to talk to 911, I'm fantastically happy to have had such a great ride. Of course, I didn't stay on the official course, and these numbers do reflect riding on a course I enjoy more. 100 miles is a 100 miles, however.
I'll probably do this same "personal course" next year, as it removes a lot of stress over finding a vehicle, is more fun, and won't leave me having to recover from a 130 mile day.
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In September of last year, I wrote an entry on solo adventure games. Since that time, I've been playing several solo-adventure games, largely in three categories: single-page pick-up games, gamebooks, and a game I'm playing using the Mythic Game Master Emulator.
( Wow, how this hobby has really gotten its act together )
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On May 17th I rode the Santa Fe Century. This was the first century ride I've done where I experienced any sort of mechanical failure, and that failure threatened to SAG me out of the ride.
( Bicycle Repair Man appears at the Santa Fe Century )
I finished the 103.75 mile course in 5:48:55 on bike, 17.84mph. My wall time was 6:45:56, accounting for the 1 hour stopped for repair at mile 40. This may well have been a personal best on-bike time for this course, though if it was it was within minutes of my time last year.
Two Wheel Drive pretty much made my day, what with their gift of 60 miles I wouldn't have otherwise had. I've never needed the services of an on-course mechanic, and I'm really glad they were there.
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This would totally make my day, though I much prefer the DIY version.
The Santa Fe Century is this Sunday.
I have a fever right now, which sucks. I'm otherwise in great shape to do this ride. Hopefully it will pass by Sunday. If not, I'll still ride anyway. My goal is to finish in under 6 hours.
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For those of you who don't read ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) yarrowkat, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) sunflowerriver, or didn't get an e-mail from me: we've recently had Joy Slagowski, a reporter for a Phoenix area paper called the Daily News-Sun, write an article about Sunflower River for Earth Day:
Foursome enjoys connection with Mother Earth
In that article, I credit Dave Pollard's blog, How to Save the World, with being a turning point in my ecological awakening:Post said his path began as a personal transformation a few years ago, after reading the "How to Save the World" blog of David Pollard, a writer and environmentalist.
"He was doing a lot of writing on intentional communities, social justice, and ecological issues," Post said. "And it struck a chord with me and I decided to manifest the kinds of changes he was advocating in my own life." I wrote Dave Pollard telling him about the article when it was published:Hello Dave,
I've written you once before, a year or two ago. It was from a different e-mail address than this message.
Roughly three years ago, I started reading your blog and as a result have radically changed my life: changed jobs (out of the financial industry), changed partners (my ex-wife and I were part of consumer culture, and I've distanced myself from it.), and changed the way I look at and relate the world to incoporate a far greater understanding of how my actions impact the environment.
As part of that, I purchased land with 3 other people, formed an intentional community, and began raising livestock and practicing organic gardening.
In that time, I have repeatedly mentioned your blog as my turning point, as the thing that woke me up and set me on the course my life is now on.
Today an article was published about my farm, and in it I credit you with inspiring me to the life changes that caused me to start it. I thought you might be interested to read it:
http://www.yourwestvalley.com/news/food_5888___article.html/water_day.html
Even though you and I have come to different conclusions about what one can or should do about the state of the world, You continue to inspire me with your writing, years past the day I read "The Truth About Nature and How to Save the World" and realized that everything about my life needed to change.
-Alan Today he wrote me back: Wow! Thank you Alan. I'll mention this in my next 'links of the week' article. Hope we'll meet some day! Cheers from Australia.
/-/ Dave I'm excited to get a mention in his Links of the Week article, which I always look forward to reading. It is a look at what is going on around the world, and is often extremely inspiring.
I'll post a link to it after he publishes it, but I'll be out of town this weekend, so it will be a bit late.
Color me excited.Current Mood:  content |
The physical machine hosting my virtual server has crashed in a more or less permanent way.
I haven't been able to receive e-mail the last 5 days or so as a result of this. If you sent me something important, you probably already saw the bounce, but if you didn't, sending it to me again wouldn't suck.
I've just put a temporary solution in place to handle e-mail, and DNS is probably still updating across the internet. But I'll be getting delivery again soon.
My VM is being migrated to greener pasture, but that process is hung currently and will take a day or two (*hopes*) to resolve. That doesn't affect anyone else nearly so much as it affects me.
Oh boy, the stress that has been going 'round this fair shire. |
The field of ecopsychology concerns healing one's sense of disconnectedness and curing mental illness by exposure to the natural world. There is a related meme that I have encountered, which is that our destruction of the natural world reflects a mental illness of self-destruction in ourselves. That our attitude and treatment of other people mirrors and parallels our treatment of the natural world.
Did this idea come from ecopsychology, or is there a separate body of work exploring the parallels between the way we treat each other and the way we treat the natural world?
I'm doing some research on this topic, and I'm looking for pointers from people that have already covered this ground. Thank you! |
I occasionally run across two independently published articles that I draw an unintended connection between. Recently, on Overcoming Bias, the article The cost of talking values discussed how an organization can become paralyzed by arguing over their basic values. That effective organizations execute on a presumed shared value, and focus the discussion on execution instead of the worth of the value in question.
Jeff Vail recently wrote Towards a Scale-Free Energy Policy. I focused my energy in this article on organization style, given that Jeff writes about Rhizomes as a metaphor for non-hierarchical organization. I've talked about this concept briefly in talking about wirearchy, which covers a lot of similar ground.
The connection I found interesting is that scale-free energy policy is a lot more prescriptive of action than "rhizome network" or "wirearchy," both of which are much more suggestive of ways of being. It presumes a shared goal, but doesn't make that goal the focus of the effort--it is more a non-ideological way to frame the discussion, and means that you might personally work on your share of the problem using consensus process, while your broader community integrates that solution as part of the overall community's goal using representative democracy.
Thoughts? |
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