At the beginning of 2010, I decided to start keeping track of my swim workouts. To do so, I’ve been using Ugomo, a very useful web-based workout log with some social media features. Ugomo lets you track workouts and your weight, set goals, and visualize your workout data in various ways. If you’re a runner or cyclist, it also lets you map rides/runs and store your regular routes. You can also see what other people are doing and comment on their workouts, although in my experience this doesn’t happen much on the site.

I set a goal of 365 miles over the course of the year, which I knew was a pretty ambitious mark. I started out pretty well, swimming five or six days a week; I was even ahead of my goal pace by the end of February. But little things like finishing my dissertation; giving two recitals; trips to Seattle (twice), Maine, and Britain; and moving across the country really cut into my pool time. Luckily, I now have access to the wonderful outdoor pool at the University of the Pacific, and I’ve been able to make up some of my lost ground. I didn’t make it anywhere close to my original goal, but I did manage to swim 208 1/4 miles this year — roughly the distance from the White House to 30 Rockefeller Plaza in NYC (as the crow flies). Thanks to Ugomo, I also know that I spent a total of 5 days, 8 hours, and 27 minutes in one pool or another.

Even at my fastest in the last year, I was still a ways off my best times from high school, which was the last time I swam competitively. Then again, I haven’t tested myself in an actual meet situation recently. I hope to up my total distance during 2011, and maybe I’ll also find a Masters meet or two in which to participate. But, even if I am past my swimming prime, I’m still in better shape than I’ve been in years. Plus I think think that swimming, more so than other forms of exercise, gives me lung capacity and breath control training that benefits me as a woodwind player (perhaps more on that in a future post). I’ve had my last swim for this year already, but I look forward to starting anew in January.

Team 701: Musicology Mayhem

Yesterday morning, Veronica, our friend Patrick, and I participated in the Devil’s Challenge Triathlon at Devil’s Lake State Park, about an hour northwest of Madison. We entered as a relay team — I swam (quarter mile), Patrick biked (15 miles), and Veronica ran (3 miles). We decided earlier this summer that we wanted to attempt a relay triathlon, and had been more or less training since then. We took a trip to Devil’s Lake last weekend to scout out the course and to do a dry run. Still, having never done this sort of thing before, we weren’t quite sure what to expect on the actual day of the race. We left Madison at a quarter to 6 yesterday morning so that we’d have plenty of time to park, pickup our registration packet, and warm up before the 8 a.m. start. We got there with plenty of time to spare, and set about mentally and physically preparing ourselves.

A Later Swim Start

At the race, individual triathletes were organized into starting waves, largely by age and sex divisions. A funny thing about relay teams like ours, though: we were put in the very first wave, which is otherwise reserved for elite competitors. So, you have the fast, hardcore, experienced people grouped with people who aren’t up to doing the whole triathlon themselves. I suppose this makes a certain amount of sense; relayers are free to expend all their energy on each leg of the race, whereas individuals have to pace themselves.

Swimmers Exiting the Water

So, I lined up on the beach with the elite athletes and the other relay swimmers. Since we were the first ones to go, all the other athletes and many spectators were behind us, cheering and making noise. When the starter horn went off, we all ran out into the water towards the first buoy. Not having had the chance to observe any starts, I just followed the people in front of me. The lake was very shallow (I could have walked the whole swim course), so the decision of when to switch from running to swimming was an important one. There was a big crush getting around the first buoy, then the pack started to thin out somewhat. Through most of the swim, I had plenty of room to maneuver. After rounding the second buoy, I swam shorewards until the water became too shallow to get a good stroke. Once on shore, I had to run up a short flight of stairs and sprint a fair distance to where Patrick was waiting with his bike.

Patrick Rounding the Last Curve

I made pretty good time in the water, so much so that Patrick wasn’t quite ready when I arrived. While he threw on his helmet, I transferred the neoprene timing chip anklet from my leg to his and ducked out of the transition area to find Veronica and my towel. After drying off and changing, I grabbed my camera, and started shooting pictures of other competitors. When the first cyclist came roaring down the final hill into the park, I wished Veronica good luck and set off to catch Patrick. From the spot I picked, I couldn’t see very far up the last downhill curve. But, a couple of pro photographers were standing farther up the hill, and I used them as an early warning system; when they reached for their cameras, I knew a cyclist was approaching.

Veronica Running

After Patrick came tearing by, I went to try to catch Veronica at the start of her run. I didn’t get any good pics then, but I managed to catch her later at the finish. Once she’d run across the line, we all hung out for awhile waiting for the results to be posted. We ended up doing pretty well for our first time out: 9th out of 38 relay teams. We were 6th in our division (co-ed relays). I beat my target time (8:00) by more than a minute, Veronica beat her target by nearly three minutes, and Patrick came very close to his target (he would’ve beaten it if his front derailleur hadn’t malfunctioned mid-race, leaving him with only his big chain ring for climbing hills). Our final time was 1:26:43. You can see all the results here (they put us under Veronica’s name, rather than that of our team: Musicology Mayhem). All in all, it was a lot of fun, even if we did have to wake up at 5 a.m.

Click here to see all of my photos from the race. Soon, we should get a link to the pictures taken by the pro photographers. If there are any good ones, I’ll link to them as well.

This year, my mom and I celebrated Christmas Eve with a group of friends in Carson City. We had a massive collaborative dinner (12 people, 6 of whom cooked and/or baked), and settled in to do our white elephant game after dessert. A fair amount of stealing went on, as well as some much complained about — but perfectly legal — family collusion. My mom ended up with a B.B. King 2-CD set, and I got a pocket electronic Yahtzee game. My gift entry, which I’m surprised to say was actually desirable enough to change hands at least once, was this:

It’s not just a figurine of a cowboy using an outhouse — it’s a Christmas figurine of a cowboy using an outhouse. “And where does one purchase such a thing?” one might ask. Why, at one of this country’s finest retailers, of course: Walmart. It’s part of a whole line of “Cowboy Christmas” items, most of which seem to have little or nothing to do with Christmas. I must say, there was a lot of awful crap under $10 to choose from at Walmart, but I knew as soon as I found this that I had a winner.

Click for more photos

I suspect that this was related to Geek.Kon, which was going on all weekend in the UW Humanities Building (which we musicians share with historians, artists, and scholars of the Abrahamic religions), but I’m not sure of that. Apparently this isn’t a unique idea; I found a couple of other examples here and here. I kind of wish I’d been around to see the biker’s arrival or departure, to see what (or who?) rides in the coffin.

It is not uncommon, as I walk from the library or music building to the bus stop late at night, to see people carrying around buckets of brightly-colored sidewalk chalk, stopping every few feet to claim another blank area of pavement. These sorts of ads are usually fairly simple, owing to the necessarily one-at-a-time method of creation as well as to the ephemeral nature of chalk — indeed, of most things that are tramped upon by thousands of feet throughout the course of a day. Occasionally the chalking becomes more ambitious; a number of 20-foot wide peace symbols come to mind.

Near the end of the spring semester, I spotted what is definitely my favorite bit of chalking so far. It was done on the wall of a building, and parodies so well the style and tone of other more serious chalk advertisements:

Click for a larger version

Yesterday afternoon, Veronica and I went to a taping of the Jeopardy College Championship at UW’s Kohl Center. I’d been excited about Jeopardy coming to campus since it was announced sometime last fall. I’d initially hoped to audition for the college shows, but only undergrads are eligible. Bah. Oh well, seeing the show live was lots of fun, anyway. We attended the last of four tapings (conducted over the space of two days), so we got to see the two final games of the tournament. It was very interesting to see how a game show is filmed and how many people are involved in putting it on.

As we entered the arena, we were handed shiny Jeopardy pom-poms and towels to wave for the benefit of the cameras as we cheered. Once basically everyone was seated (there were roughly 3500 people in attendance), we got to watch the contestants play a quick practice round. Then the show’s 83-year-old announcer Johnny Gilbert took the stage and told us a bit about how the taping would proceed, what our cues to applaud were, and when to be quiet. He warned us that if anyone yelled out an answer, they’d have to stop taping, disqualify the clue, and start again with a substitute clue. Amazingly, this never happened.

Our View of the Set

The shows themselves were fun to watch, but the best part of the whole experience was the commercial breaks. During these, Alex Trebek would wander the aisles, answering questions posed by audience members and telling stories. He’s really quite funny, and was obviously playing to the college audience. When asked what he plans to do if he ever retires from the show, he started walking back to the stage and replied “I’ve thought about founding a charitable organization of some sort, to try and do some good in the world.” Only when he’d almost reached his podium did he add “… or maybe I’ll just stay home and drink.”

During my visit, I was puzzled by a diagram painted on an interior wall of the friary. Various people quickly informed me that it’s a Guidonian hand — an early musical teaching device that I’d somehow missed in my music history classes. In addition to asking about the diagram here, evidently I also sent a question to someone at the mission via e-mail.

I say “evidently,” because I don’t recall sending such a query. But, yesterday, I received the following message:

Dave,
The hand on the wall of the friary (convento) is called the Guidonian hand. Starting around the 11th century, monks pointed to the knuckles and fingertips to indicate pitches to be sung. This range of notes on the Hand is also called the gamut. Generally, Catholic choirs in small areas were made up of young boys. The hand helped them learn chants for the mass, but it was used mostly for the first two years. After that, staff notation was learned. Hope this helps!

Yesterday. I visited the mission in June 2005.

Comically, the sender’s signature contained a link to a customer satisfaction survey. I’d take the survey, but I’m not sure whether it would be more appropriate to give high marks for “Responding to all messages… eventually” or “Cleaning up after one’s lazy predecessor.”

This past weekend, Veronica and I went to the Wisconsin State Fair in Milwaukee. The fairgrounds are very close to where her family lives, so she’d been to the fair in many previous years. But, this was my first experience with this — or indeed any — state fair. We spent a few hours at the fair on Saturday afternoon and managed to eat ourselves silly. The picture at right is only the tip of the iceberg.

Riding the Skycars

Three of the main things that one associates with fairs are rides, animals, and food. We largely skipped the first category, although we did take the skycar from one side of the grounds to the other. That offered a pretty good view of about half the grounds from above, but it’s rather tame as rides go. It’s only thrilling if one is scared of heights, and I can’t imagine that there are too many acrophobic adrenaline junkies in the world.

Tiger-Colored Hen

We didn’t watch any of the actual animal competitions, although we did venture into the rabbit and poultry barn. Sadly, there weren’t actually any rabbits, but there were all sorts of interesting fowl. The bulk of the animals on display were chickens or related species. There were chickens big and small, portly and lean, fluffy and svelte. Some had gorgeous multi-colored plumage, and others had very impressive combs. I took a few pictures, but failed to make note of the names of any of the breeds.

Hustling Hogs

The one real animal event we took in was one not associated with the actual livestock judging — the pig races. Not actual contests, the pig races are staged five times daily by the outfit that owns all of the racing animals. The winner of each race wins only a handful of Cheetos and a t-shirt for a member of the crowd. The races aren’t solely for swine — each set of races includes regular pigs, Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs, goats, and ducks.
The various racing animals were fun to watch, but I was almost more amused by the race announcer. He was trying very hard to make a his southern-drawling light tenor into a gritty movie trailer voice-over bass. Despite his best efforts, it ended up sounding like a bad, slightly effeminate, occasionally hyperventilating impression of Jimmy Stewart. He also felt the need to end almost every statement with “right here at Hogway Speedway.”

Creampuffs are Messy

In our one afternoon at the fair, we ate an absurd quantity of food, most of it pure junk. We started out with a corn dog, then went for roasted corn on the cob (coated in melted butter, of course). We were given free snack sticks at the pig races — sadly they were beef, not pork. From there, we went to the Cream Puff Parlor and snagged one of the traditional dough-and-whipped-cream treats along with a Blue Ribbon Brownie. We’re holding these two in the picture at the top of this post. After not quite finishing those, we hopped the Skycar to the other side of the grounds. There, we stopped by the Herb Kohl milk stand, which sells 25¢ cups of flavored milk in your choice of strawberry, chocolate, cherry vanilla, root beer, or mocha. We visited the poultry barn, then headed to the Wisconsin Products Pavilion. There, we got a grilled cheese sandwich. Our final food purchase was a s’more on a stick — more on that later.
At an event such as a fair, at which people are likely to walk around while they eat, portable foods are the way to go. But, what to do with something like grilled meat or a sticky caramel apple. Why, put it on a stick, of course! While this makes sense for some things, the practice of putting foods on sticks has moved past utility into pure novelty. The state fair website includes a page of food facts, on which they claim that more than 40 foods on sticks are sold at the fair. I think that they’re fudging the numbers a bit, counting chicken shish-kabobs separately from beef shish-kabobs and so on, but there are still quite a few. I made it my mission to find and photograph as many foods on sticks (or at least signs depicting such comestibles) as possible. I managed to document eleven, although I didn’t bother with some of the more common examples like ice cream bars and kabobs.
Here, for your viewing pleasure, are pictures of foods on sticks:

Caramel on a Stick	Corn Dog on a Stick	Rice Krispie Treats on Sticks
Fruit on Sticks	Cheese on a Stick	Cheesecake/Bananas on Sticks
Pork Chop on a Stick	Caramel Apples on Sticks	Marshmallows on Sticks
	S’more on a Stick	&nbsp

Sagging S’more

The primary criteria for whether a food can (or should) be put on a stick is whether it has sufficient structural integrity to successfully adhere to the stick throughout the eating process. The s’more on a stick failed this test miserably. In a standard campfire s’more, the rigid graham crackers provide a strong platform for the gooey marshmallow and melty chocolate. No so in the stick version. The core of the thing was all melty marshmallow goo, hardly the sort of thing that will hold fast to a stick. A thin layer of chocolate covered the marshmallow, and a soft graham cracker breading (kind of like the cornbread on a corn dog) enclosed the whole thing. The graham breading tasted bad, the chocolate was low-quality, and even the marshmallow filling (how hard is it to screw up the taste of marshmallows?) was horrid. The thing started to fall apart even before the first bite, and I was obliged to finish the thing with my fingers. But hey, now I can say I’ve tried a s’more on a stick. Yay.
Check out the gallery to see more pictures of food and fowl from the fair.