Things you learn when you ride your bicycle 450 miles in five days:
1. Bringing an extra chain is a good idea.
2. The farther you go, the bigger the hills get.
3. There are more ways than you would expect to sit on a bike seat.
4. Number three really doesn’t matter, because by the middle of day two sitting on a bike seat hurts no matter how you do it.
The last time I wrote a column for this space I knew it might very well be the last time I ever wrote for the Independent. As that newspaper arrived in mailboxes around Farmington, I was on my way with my dad and my brother to Hayward, Wisc., to begin a bike trip that in less than a week would take us across northern Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to Mackinac Island, a city that exists solely to fill tourists with fudge and caramel corn. In five days of riding we covered distances of 95, 89, 93, 83 and 68 miles. This is what happens when my family plans vacations after a few drinks.
I didn’t know what to expect from the trip. I’m comfortable riding my bike long distances, but I didn’t know how I would feel riding so far so many days in a row. And there were some trying times. There was a while toward the end of a hilly, windy third day when I started mentally divvying up my earthly possessions (a disappointingly brief exercise, at least when we’re talking about things anyone would actually want) and wondering whether my riding companions would roll me into the ditch or just leave my body on the shoulder after I collapsed. Other than that, though I felt pretty good.
Even better, thanks to big breakfasts and bigger dinners I managed to burn all of those calories without actually losing any weight. That’s when you know you’re eating well.
We rode through a lot of remote forests, but we didn’t exactly get back to nature on this trip. With my step-mother and my brother’s girlfriend meeting us at our hotel at the end of each day, the closest we got to roughing it was staying in a bed and breakfast the fourth night and not being able to watch TV.
We all made it through the ride in pretty good shape. I broke my chain 93 miles into the first day’s ride, requiring me to walk the remaining two miles to the motel and forcing our support crew to spring into action a day earlier than they planned. They drove late into the night to meet us with a replacement. My brother broke his crank somewhere along the way, but that wasn’t as painful as it sounds and he was able to finish without any other major problems.
We were even lucky with the weather. While my co-workers back in Farmington dealt with a broken air conditioner in 90-plus degree weather, I was riding my bike in temperatures that never got much above 80. There were occasional threats of rain, but even the thunderstorm that greeted us on the morning of the fourth day cleared up early enough for us to ride and provided a nice tailwind for most of the day. Altogether we rode in the rain for about 15 seconds.
I don’t know that I’ll be in a hurry to try a bike marathon like this again anytime soon, but it’s at least nice to know I’m capable of doing it. Next time, though, I’m bringing a cushier seat.
Monday, June 12, 2006
A Rhose by any other name...
Until you’ve tried to identify kids for a picture that will run in a newspaper, it’s hard to understand just how many ways there are to spell what otherwise seems like a straightforward name. For every Erin, it seems, there’s an Aerin or an Aryn. For every Justin there’s a Juston or a Justyn.
Things seem to get more difficult the younger the children are. I can imagine a day in the near future when I will take a picture of a group of smiling fourth grade students and not know how to spell a single child’s name.
“What’s your name?” I will ask the first girl.
“Taylor,” she’ll say.
“OK. Taylor,” I’ll say, writing in my notebook.
“That’s T-A-E-Y-L-O-R-R.”
“Um, OK. And you?”
“I’m Zachary.”
“Zachary?”
“Z-A-K-K-E-R-Y.”
“Really? And you?”
“Matthew.”
“Well, that one’s easy.”
“M-A-T-T-H-U-E.”
“No.”
“Yep.”
“I’m Ashley.”
“And how do you …?”
“A-S-H-S-L-E-I-G-H.”
“Ash-slay?”
“The S is silent.”
“Of course it is.”
There is some fundamental aspect of baby naming I just don’t understand. I realize parents want their child to have unique names, but things seem to be getting out of control. We live in a world with Madelines, Madelyns, Madelinns and, for all I know, Maddelyinns.
The unique spelling trend seems to be most common among girls, but there is enough of it on both sides of the gender gap that that on the Social Security Administration’s recently released list of Minnesota’s most popular boys’ names for 2005 there were entries for both Aidan (No. 38) and Aiden (49), Caden (69) and Kaden (79).
Maybe it’s because I work with words, but I’m all for predictable spellings. Someone I know recently named his baby girl Maya. It’s a unique name. Before she was born the only other Maya I’d heard of was a character on the mediocre sitcom “Just Shoot Me,” although I’m not sure that’s a ringing endorsement. But the name was spelled exactly how I would expect it to be spelled — like the people who built all those pyramids in Mexico — not with vowels and consonants placed willy-nilly to serve as linguistic landmines to otherwise well-meaning journalists just trying to do a job.
I don’t understand how certain names become popular, either. Some parents name their children after relatives, but I can’t imagine there are enough young girls being named after Grandma Destiny to account for that name’s popularity (No. 90 on the list, apparently setting the stage for a large influx of exotic dancers in Minnesota sometime around 2023). There are hardly any baby Margarets these days, a fact I blame mostly on the negative portrayal of Margarets in the Dennis the Menace comic strip. The first Kayla I ever knew was a Farmington High School student who mentored with me a couple of years ago. Now every third elementary school girl in the United States is a Kayla. How does that happen?
According to a story in Tuesday’s St. Paul Pioneer Press, the hottest name for girls these days is Nevaeh, at No. 55 last year on Minnesota’s baby names list and apparently climbing like a monkey on amphetamines. The name is “Heaven” spelled backward and is pronounced nuh-VAY-uh, which mostly makes me think of lotion.
What might be most frightening, though, is the story gave at least part of the credit for the name’s popularity to the fact a member of the Christian rock band P.O.D. named his own daughter Nevaeh, a fact he apparently revealed on the MTV show “Cribs.” In other words, America is taking it’s baby-naming tips from a show where mid-level celebrities show off their cars and swimming pools. And, apparently, their newborns.
When I mentioned the growing popularity of Nevaeh to someone in my office he threatened to name his firstborn son Lleh. I would never go that far, although might name one of my children Yrotagrup, which I would of course pronounce “Frank.”
Things seem to get more difficult the younger the children are. I can imagine a day in the near future when I will take a picture of a group of smiling fourth grade students and not know how to spell a single child’s name.
“What’s your name?” I will ask the first girl.
“Taylor,” she’ll say.
“OK. Taylor,” I’ll say, writing in my notebook.
“That’s T-A-E-Y-L-O-R-R.”
“Um, OK. And you?”
“I’m Zachary.”
“Zachary?”
“Z-A-K-K-E-R-Y.”
“Really? And you?”
“Matthew.”
“Well, that one’s easy.”
“M-A-T-T-H-U-E.”
“No.”
“Yep.”
“I’m Ashley.”
“And how do you …?”
“A-S-H-S-L-E-I-G-H.”
“Ash-slay?”
“The S is silent.”
“Of course it is.”
There is some fundamental aspect of baby naming I just don’t understand. I realize parents want their child to have unique names, but things seem to be getting out of control. We live in a world with Madelines, Madelyns, Madelinns and, for all I know, Maddelyinns.
The unique spelling trend seems to be most common among girls, but there is enough of it on both sides of the gender gap that that on the Social Security Administration’s recently released list of Minnesota’s most popular boys’ names for 2005 there were entries for both Aidan (No. 38) and Aiden (49), Caden (69) and Kaden (79).
Maybe it’s because I work with words, but I’m all for predictable spellings. Someone I know recently named his baby girl Maya. It’s a unique name. Before she was born the only other Maya I’d heard of was a character on the mediocre sitcom “Just Shoot Me,” although I’m not sure that’s a ringing endorsement. But the name was spelled exactly how I would expect it to be spelled — like the people who built all those pyramids in Mexico — not with vowels and consonants placed willy-nilly to serve as linguistic landmines to otherwise well-meaning journalists just trying to do a job.
I don’t understand how certain names become popular, either. Some parents name their children after relatives, but I can’t imagine there are enough young girls being named after Grandma Destiny to account for that name’s popularity (No. 90 on the list, apparently setting the stage for a large influx of exotic dancers in Minnesota sometime around 2023). There are hardly any baby Margarets these days, a fact I blame mostly on the negative portrayal of Margarets in the Dennis the Menace comic strip. The first Kayla I ever knew was a Farmington High School student who mentored with me a couple of years ago. Now every third elementary school girl in the United States is a Kayla. How does that happen?
According to a story in Tuesday’s St. Paul Pioneer Press, the hottest name for girls these days is Nevaeh, at No. 55 last year on Minnesota’s baby names list and apparently climbing like a monkey on amphetamines. The name is “Heaven” spelled backward and is pronounced nuh-VAY-uh, which mostly makes me think of lotion.
What might be most frightening, though, is the story gave at least part of the credit for the name’s popularity to the fact a member of the Christian rock band P.O.D. named his own daughter Nevaeh, a fact he apparently revealed on the MTV show “Cribs.” In other words, America is taking it’s baby-naming tips from a show where mid-level celebrities show off their cars and swimming pools. And, apparently, their newborns.
When I mentioned the growing popularity of Nevaeh to someone in my office he threatened to name his firstborn son Lleh. I would never go that far, although might name one of my children Yrotagrup, which I would of course pronounce “Frank.”
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