Bye Bye POTS

Well, we finally exited the analog telephone age.  We cut the figurative cord.  We got rid of our analog voice telephone land line, sometimes referred to as POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) from the local AT&T affiliate phone company.  Our vestigal POTS line, which only served our FAX machine (another anolog relic), got "ported" to our Voice Over Internet Protocol telephone provider (Voipo).  No; porting has nothing to do with either Dr. Who or Scotty.  It just means we had Voipo take that phone number from AT&T. The number exists "in the cloud", but the line itself is but a memory.

This is the "end of the line" for POTS service for us.  Whatever would Alex G. Bell think?  He took "binary" telegraph lines and made them analog voice telephone.  Now analog voice lines have gone back to binary (digital).  What goes around, comes around, I guess.

Don't get me wrong, we still have telephones - lots of them.  If you dial us up on our old voice number that we have had for decades, we will probably still answer it on our Voice Over Internet Protocol phone system.  I say "probably" because VOIP is not nearly as reliable as POTS.  There's many a slip twixt VOIP and lip, but it's what we've actually been using for voice service for years now.

Dumping POTS was the phone company's own fault:  AT&T persuaded us several years ago to convert our voice line from POTS to their "Call-Vantage" VOIP phone service because it was cheaper and had more features.  Then AT&T did away with their Call-Vantage service before they had the U-Verse replacement, forcing us to go to another company, never to return.  The phone company shot themselves in the foot on that one. I'd have a hard time imagining they could be that stupid except that Scott Adams, the author of Dilbert, learned about corporate idiocy right there at Pac-Bell.

We still had a POTS line because until recently, our Internet line was via DSL, and the phone company would only provide DSL over a POTS voice line.  You had to have POTS voice service to get DSL.  So, we had a POTS line in order to get internet service, but the POTS line was only connected to a FAX machine.

Then, about a year ago, AT&T did a "mandatory transition" of DSL internet service to "U-Verse" (partial fiber optic) internet.  With U-Verse, they no longer require the POTS line for internet.  We kept the POTS line for a while because it was convenient to have it on the FAX machine, but the cost kept going up.  POTS finally just priced itself out of the market.

So now, if you send us a FAX for some reason (not sure why you would do that, but some people still do) it gets received by Voipo somewhere, converted to a PDF file, and forwarded to us by email.  You won't know the difference, but it's a heck of a lot cheaper for us; we can get your FAX without being home; and those daily junk faxes advertising cruises and recreational pharmaceuticals won't be wasting paper.

It's amazing that FAXes still exist.  The main reasons FAX machines are still used at all is because they are simple to use and relatively secure against hacking.  I'm sure FAXes could be hacked if anyone tried.  Given that our FAX machine is actually a combination printer, scanner, FAX and is connected to the Internet, it would be pretty easy to hack into.  NSA probably has a copy of every FAX sent in the last five years.  But no self respecting pirate hacker would stoop so low as to try to hack into a FAX line.  It would be like a hot rodder souping up a horse and buggy.  Mostly what they'd get would be junk mail faxes anyway, so why bother?

So now, we have obsolete FAX technology, which has been around for over 50 years, still barely clinging to life via internet simulation, but the analog voice POTS line it was designed to function over is gone.

It's a symptom of the passing of an era.  Those of you who tend toward nostalgia for some former age when supposedly things were better may sorrow for the days of wind-up watches, monochrome 12 inch TVs with vacuum tubes you had to replace and only got 7 channels, "simple" cars that got 14 mpg and overheated on the Grapevine, 2 bedroom 1 bath homes that only had one black dial telephone that you rented from the phone company, hand written letters because long distance phone calls were prohibitively expensive, wringer washing machines & clothes lines, home sewn clothes with patches, shoe repair shops, typewriters with carbon paper and erasers, getting paper books from the public library, and doing arithmetic with a pencil.  You know, back in the Good Old Days, when people were moral,  politicians were honest and government could be trusted. Yes, that last sentence is just pure fantasy, but I don't mourn for any of the rest of it either. The reason that other stuff is gone is because better stuff replaced it. There were no Good Old Days.  Bye bye POTS.  I won't miss you.

Rooting for Sinners to be Winners

In my life I have rooted for a lot of sinners.  There was OJ Simpson when I was at USC with him, and Reggie Bush long after I'd graduated.  As a cyclist and cycling fan, I rooted for Lance Armstrong, Floyd Landis, Levi Leipheimer, George Hincapie, Dave Zabriskie, that whole gang of doping cyclists.  I never mistook any of them for saints, not even when Reggie Bush became a New Orleans "Saint".  Rooting for athletes is not about thinking they are great examples of moral character.  Usually, it's just because they play for "my team."  Not to classify them with the cheaters, I also root for my children and grandchildren, because they're "my team" too.

Another thing that makes us root for an athlete is that we tend to love a good comeback story, whether it's a comeback from adversity, from injury, from retirement, from cancer, or even from disgrace.  The idea that someone can overcome the obstacles in life gives us hope.  When my wife got cancer and was feeling down about the future, I could say, well, look Lance Armstrong had cancer and he came back to win the Tour de France, so you better start riding your bike so you can too.  Yeah, OK, I got that this was over-optimistic, and yeah, I get that Armstrong cheated to do it, but still, he demonstrated that cancer  is not the end of your life.  That it turns out he cheated doesn't really change that.  It still shows that a cancer survivor can have a great future.  My daughter made her own comebacks from lots of adversity and mistakes of several sorts, which made me root for her all the more.  When Bush and Matt Leinhart (yet another sinner) were 4th down and 9 yards to go on their own 26 with 1:32 left in the game against Notre Dame, and they came back to win against all odds, did they cheat on the "Bush Push" play to score the touchdown?  Probably.  So two sinners colluded to cheat and win, but regardless, that comeback victory (at least from my side of the field) was an inspiring story of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat - of never giving up no matter how bad things looked.  Sinners can be winners too.

I also rooted for other cyclists, who may or may not be "clean" and about whose "saintliness" I know nothing.  I rooted for Greg LeMond.  He claims he alone of all cyclists of the era was the one clean one.  Maybe.  Don't know.  Even if true about that, I don't think he's any saint nor would he claim to be one.  I rooted for Thomas Voeckler and Oscar Pereiro.  Unless you are a cycling fan, you probably don't know who those are, but the inspiring thing about them was their come from behind underdog wins, and their perseverance even when they really could not win. Are they saints?  Doubtful.  Just athletes.  Don't confuse the two.  I rooted for LeMond and Armstrong in part because they popularized "my sport" in this country, which had previously been virtually ignored.  It may now go back to being ignored, which would be sad.  I hope the Amgen Tour of California survives doping.  Lance Armstrong could certainly endorse Amgen's EPO.  Worked for him.

On the other hand, I'm not a great fan of Tim Tebow:  Partly of course because he didn't play for my teams, but also, I think the whole religious athlete thing tends to turn me off just a little.  Maybe it's because it seems too much like a claim to be a saint, and that's somewhere I don't want to go with rooting for athletes.  I don't want to confuse success in athletics as in any way connected with religion.  It's just games.  And let's face it:  John Wooden is not really adored, almost deified at UCLA, because of his moral character:  It's because he won a lot of games.  He may or may not have been a saint, doesn't matter.  He won games for the home team.  While I can find meaning and lessons in athletics  I don't want to confuse morals and religion with athletic success.  Being truly great in anything requires a single minded, exclusive dedication to that pursuit, indeed a "win at all costs" dedication.  Great athletes are just great athletes, not great anything else's.  I don't expect anything else from them.

The other thing about "saints" is, they are just faulty people too.  We are all faulty.  Some may be "less bad" than others, but we are all bad.  Everyone, even saints, will lie to protect themselves, Saint Peter being the obvious example.  Perhaps only Jesus would have forgiven Peter, but only Jesus would have been moral enough not to tell the same lies.  We are all sinners.  There was a "Science File" article in the Los Angeles Times this morning entitled "Like Him, We Are All Liars" (i.e. Like Armstrong).  Sounded more like a sermon title than a science file, but true either way.  Everyone lies.  To say someone is "a liar" is simply to say that they are human: Humans are liars;  All of us.  Even dogs lie (no, no, I wasn't up on that couch, really I wasn't).

This is not a defense of Lance Armstrong.  I never met the guy, and might not like him much as a person if I did know him personally.  He cheated.  He cheated for a long, long time.  From what I hear, he is a rather prickly character (and many might shorten that word).  He rode roughly over a lot of people to keep cheating.  The cheating of Armstrong and others like him have almost destroyed professional cycling.  I'm not actually sure if it can ever come back. Doping cyclists have made cycling seem more like professional wrestling than a real sport.  I can't feel sorry for a multi-millionaire who cheated to get his money.  I don't feel sorry for him at all.  I can sympathize with his predicament, and feel grateful that I never had to confess my sins in front of the world like that, but no, he doesn't even defend his own actions, nor do I.

On the other hand, in baseball, there are admitted drug cheaters on the Hall of Fame ballot.  Football just has to be filled with and fueled by steroids.  In cycling, lots of cyclists got caught cheating, denied it, defended against the accusations, never admitted it or gave evidence against co-conspirators, got two year bans and are back in the sport, so the difference with Armstrong seems to be simply that he was more successful.  Sports have avoided doing a lot of obvious things to clean up the doping problems.  Cycling has actually done more than most sports, but all sports seem to have resisted going beyond their blood and urine testing program which has proven to be worse than useless. The drug testing program appears to be more a shield for cheaters (like Armstrong), who usually don't get caught by it, than a deterrent.  There's more than enough blame to go around.  One could get the impression that most sports authorities would rather not know.  They know how useless their anti-doping programs are, but they don't do much to fix the problem.  The prosecutors and accusers are often as bad in various ways as the cheaters.   None of that excuses Armstrong, and he says that too, but my feelings are often complicated by actually liking some of the cheaters (from my distant televised viewpoint) more than I like some of the accusers.  I think that's because I'm loyal to the sinners I've rooted for.

Would I like to see Armstrong compete again? Yes I would.  Partly because I'd like to see how he can do when really clean.  I get that he himself screwed up his chance to show his ability to complete clean.  It's one of the things he cheated himself out of, but I'm still curious.  Perhaps we saw the answer already in his 2009 and 2010 "comeback," but we don't know, either about Armstrong, or about his competition, and it would be interesting to know that.  What would it mean?  Not much, but it would be fun to watch.   Would I root for him again?  Yes I would. In fact, I'd root for that whole list of sinners and dopers again.  They're my team.  I'm not a "fair weather fan."  I've "bonded" with them.  I don't dump them just because they aren't perfect, any more than I'd quit rooting for my family if they went astray.  It's not about "believing in" an athlete.  Often, their exposed flaws just make them seem more human and sympathetic. Everyone needs redemption.

The thing about rooting for sinners and liking a comeback and redemption is that those are things we all need.  I root for sinners because I am one.  I root for comebacks because I hope for them for myself and my family.  I root for people who have been caught in lies because that could be me.  I root for people who have made mistakes because I've made lots of them.  I root for flawed people in need of redemption because I can identify with them.  I have to believe that sinners can be winners too.

Faking it

I recently received one of those "forward this to all your friends" political rant e-mails, this one (entitled "I'm Tired") claiming to have been written by Bill Cosby, nicely formatted with multiple photos of Cosby spaced through the essay.  I didn't have to read very far before I thought, "This doesn't sound at all like Bill Cosby."  Sure enough, a quick check of Snopes had a link to Cosby's own website totally disavowing the essay and the right-wing views it expressed (Cosby called the views in the essay "ugly").

What amazes me is the number of such e-mail essays there are circulating in cyber-space with opinions mis-attributed to some celebrity who had nothing at all to do with the particular viewpoints.  The ones I get seem to be mostly politically conservative, but I assume if I had a different set of friends there are probably a similar set of such things with a liberal outlook.

What always puzzles me is, who the heck creates all these false emails?  Who goes to all the trouble of making up some elaborately formatted message that lies about who wrote it?

But I still don't quite understand the phenomenon of intentional mis-attribution.  The Snopes article actually tells exactly who wrote the "I'm Tired" essay:  A former Massachusetts state senator named Robert A. Hall.  Actually, I'd think he would be rather annoyed as well to find that his words had been stolen and attributed to someone more famous.

So, someone reads Hall's essay, and thinks:  "Right On! Everyone should read this!"  But instead of passing around a link to it, they think (perhaps correctly) "But gee, no one would pay any attention to it at all because it was written by someone they've never heard of."

So then they think, hmmm, if I make up a story about it having been written by someone famous, people will pay more attention to it.  Now at this point, I'm losing their train of thought.  This essay in the first place was supposedly about old fashioned virtue, hard work, honesty, integrity, self-responsibility, owning your own problems and so forth.  How does that integrity go along with plagiarism and dishonesty about the essay itself?

Doesn't the inconsistency about that kind of blow the whole thing away?  Does this person really think that people will be persuaded about the importance of self-responsibility by being lied to?

I'm just totally amazed that someone would just make that up knowing that it is a complete lie.  I find it hard to comprehend trying to sell ideas through dishonesty.  Used cars, yes.  Vacation time-shares, sure.  Weight-loss aids, yeah: because they are just trying to make money.  But if the idea is to persuade people about virtue and what's right and wrong, no, I don't get lying to do it.  I can't get my mind into the mind-set of lying for that purpose.  I guess I could never be a politician.

I guess what really bothers me about it is that it is basically a slick salesman's trick of a sneaky sales pitch, used to try to trick people into agreeing with a political point of view. ("If Bill Cosby said it, it must be worth thinking about").  If the person doing that really believed that the logic itself was so persuasive, it shouldn't matter who wrote it.  If it requires a fake celebrity endorsement (or even a real celebrity endorsement) to make it credible, maybe it's just not worth repeating.

Letting Go Is The Hard Part

We are starting to clean out my parents' house after my father's death and my mother moving out to assisted living.  Going through things trying to figure out what to keep and what to throw is an emotionally exhausting experience.  Disposing of things that my parents were attached to involves a guilt trip down memory lane.

My cousin went through the similar cleaning out process a couple of years ago.  I helped him relocate his mother.  His mother had already lost her husband and her three older sons (I call my cousin Private Ryan) so she had lots of stuff with emotional attachments.  He said she kept asking him:  "How can we possibly throw THAT away.  His repeated reply was:  "It's easy, Ma.  You pick it up;  Hold it over the trash can; and let go."

Yup, sounds easy.  Pick it up.  Hold it over the trash can.  And just let go. 

Letting go is the hard part.

Each object tugs at the heart.  A material object shouldn't have that much meaning:  It's just a book, a table, a chair, a mirror, a tool, a hat, a ticket, a painting, a marked up calendar.  But we remember them using it, making it maybe, treasuring it.  It connects us to them, the memories, the events, our childhood, the things they did, the way they lived, the things that in part made them who they were.  It was a book they read, maybe even read to us.  It is a tool they used to make things for us.  It is the table we sat around with them.  It is the mirror she got as a wedding present.  It is the ticket to that big event in their lives that they talked about for so many years afterwards.  It is hard to let go of the objects that connect to those memories.

There's also the feeling that this stuff doesn't belong to me.  It isn't mine.  It's theirs.  They wanted it.  They kept it.  It feels like I am messing with someone else's personal and private possessions.  Part of the problem is coming to terms with the reality that they are no longer there.  My father is gone.  My mother is alive, but has moved;  moved out; perhaps moved on. Neither of them, in different ways, could take it with them. The stuff is no longer theirs. They had to let go of it.  So so do we.  Letting go is hard.

It is not just my own mementos I am disposing of:  It is my parents' mementos, or their parents', or even their grandparents'.  Some of those of course are truly precious and will be saved.  But there are so many more than can possibly be saved, that we just HAVE to get rid of.  We can only hold onto a few things.  Most of it, we just have to let go of.

To some extent letting go of the objects means letting go of the people.  Sure, people are more than their possessions, but they cannot be entirely separated from the objects they spent a great deal of their lives working for, working with, creating, accumulating and caring about:  Their collections, their hobbies, the home they built, not only figuratively, but half the house my father indeed literally built, by himself.  The plants they so carefully tended and nurtured.  The things they used.  The way they lived. It means recognizing that is all over.  Gone.  Done with.  Finished.  They don't need them any more, because they are not there any more.  That is hard to accept.  Hard to let go of.

We learn early on that honoring our parents means doing what they have taught us to do, even if they are not there to supervise us directly.  Our "conscience" is really just the conditioning they give us that makes us feel what is right and wrong without them having to tell us.  We know what they would say; what they would do; what they valued. To devalue what they valued means letting go of some of that conditioning.  It means consciously doing what we know they would not, did not, could not do.  It requires going against a part of the way they lived and how they trained us.

Letting go involves recognizing that we are not our parents.  We do not live their lives.  What they valued was what was a part of their lives.  Although much of them lives on in us, the possessions that were important to their lives are not what is important to our lives.  Our lives are different.  Times change.  Needs change.  Places change.  People change.  The things we need now are not the same things they needed then.  The lives they lived are past.  We have to let go.

It is not just about letting go of the objects, but about coming to terms with the reality that dead or alive, that part of their lives, and that part of our lives, is over.  Those possessions that used to be important to them are no longer important to them.  They did let go of that stuff, in one way or another, but left it where it was.  Now, we have to pick it up, carry it out, and let go of it.  Letting go is the hard part.

My Father Could Do Anything

My father was a do-it-himself-er.  I don't mean that in sense that he did some handyman hobby projects - he did everything himself.  Whatever it was he wanted to do, he did it, himself.  I grew up thinking he could do pretty much anything.  I still think so.  There wasn't much he put his mind to that he couldn't figure out on his own.

He died sometime Friday.  He was 93, going on 94, still driving, still working around the house, still trying to keep up the house and yard, still resisting help to the end.  He had been diagnosed by a surgeon with multiple aortic aneurysms recently, but that merely confirmed the diagnosis he himself had made some years before. The doctor needed a CAT scan to verify what my dad had deduced on his own.   He resisted going to the doctor because "they would just want to operate, put me in the hospital, and I'd die there."  I actually respected his opinion on that. He was such an independent person I just could not see him enduring the indignity and surrender of independence involved in going into the hospital and probably subsequent nursing home.  He did finally go to the doctor only because of the pain he was in.

Although he had only a community college two year education, about the time I was in the expensive University my dad had saved to send me to, he decided he should get an engineering license and started studying at home on his own.  Before I graduated, he had passed the state exams and was a registered mechanical engineer.  A lot of university graduates have trouble passing those exams.

Until recently when he was in such poor health that he just physically couldn't do it any more, he did all of his own auto repair work.  I  even remember him doing automatic transmission repair.

When I was young, he got into radio and television repair, back when it was vacuum tubes and stuff like that.  He had a bunch of antique radios he had fixed.

He built his own grand piano.  Well, not a whole piano, just one octave of it.  It was a class project in a community college course he took.  But it's a full size working, playable piano octave, complete with all the parts, strings, keyboard, case, the works.  That octave is sitting in his living room (what on earth are we going to do with it?).  I think he got into that to learn to tune pianos because ours needed tuning.

He grafted camellias and other plants.  If I recall correctly, he had a lemon tree that grew half oranges or something of the sort by grafting one onto the other.

At one point, he took up oil painting.  I don't think he had what you would call great talent at it, but he did some pretty good paintings.  Wouldn't have won an art contest, but could have entered one without being laughed at.

He developed and printed his own photographs.  Mostly black and white, but even did a little color.  He had some old, old cameras, probably still there actually, an enlarger, full darkroom equipment.  He would tape up the door and window in the bathroom to keep the light out when he wanted to do darkroom work.

I never went to a barber until I got married and left home.  Daddy cut our hair (yes, his own too, using two mirrors to see the back of his head).  Probably wouldn't win any awards in Hollywood, but I never had anyone say anything to indicate my hair cuts were crude or amatuerish. I don't think he ever got a professional haircut in his life.

He added a bedroom and bathroom onto our house.  Did everything from drawing the plans, surveying the plot, digging the foundations, framing, drywall, electrical, plumbing (back in the day when that meant pounding molten lead into cast iron plumbing), glazing, and cabinetry.  He even stuccoed the exterior to match the rest of the house.  At this point, honesty compels me to admit that he sort of ran out of steam on that project after he got the permits signed off and never totally finished the interior.  That was his Achilles heal - trying to do so many things that he left a lot of projects unfinished.  Then he re-roofed the whole house.  That roof is now 40 some years old, and about at the end of its life, but it was a good roof. He was up on a ladder checking it out two weeks ago, thinking it, like he himself, was pretty near the end of life.

He played the violin.  Not anything close to professionally, but well enough to be enjoyable to listen to.

Of course he was a Christadelphian, which is pretty much the ultimate in do-it-yourself Christianity, with no clergy and members doing everything themselves.  He wrote a magazine column on Bible prophecy, entitled Signs of the Times, for our national church magazine for a number years.   I would read the magazine and think:  "That's pretty good - who wrote it?  Really, my dad ?"  It amazed me.

He got into computers later in life than most people, because he was of a pre-computer generation, but he adapted and learned that too.  He took a class in programming and wrote a program for playing Black Jack.  He did adapt to Windows when that came along, but he had some "antique" PC's he kept going for years, because they still ran the DOS software he had set things up in.

He was church treasurer and board member for decades. Yep, he computerized that too, of course. His integrity and confidentiality were absolutely unquestionable.  The real problem I have now is that he was executor for the estates of several of the members of our church, taking care of their finances toward the ends of the lives and afterwards.  Why is that a problem for me?  Because now, we need to do what we always depended on him to do.  The complexity is so daunting.  I sure wish he was around to help me with it.

If my dad couldn't fix something, then it just couldn't be fixed.  Of course, even if he couldn't fix it, it's almost certainly still lying around his house somewhere, waiting for him to find a way to fix it after all, or at least to cannibalize the parts.  Some things he fixed that he shouldn't have, like that old refrigerator that uses 7 times as much electricity as a new one (yes, we metered it to prove that).

Oh, yes, he also found time to actually work for a living, as a mechanical engineer, designing controls for the Gas Company's long distance gas transmission lines.

Of course, he was far from perfect.  In many ways, his inability to let anyone help him was as much curse as blesssing.  Doing everything is humanly impossible.  He left way too many things unfinished: A house full of clutter of things that need doing that he couldn't let anyone do for him.  Because no one else would do it "right."  Being the stereotypical Scot that he was, Frugal MacDougall just refused to pay someone else to do something he could do himself (i.e. anything).  It would have been a sinful waste of money.  I think too that his independent ways were also driven by being shy and socially uncomfortable.  His biggest problem was that, although he could do anything, that didn't mean he could do everything.  There was only so much one man could get done.  So there were lots of unfinished projects all over the place that he just couldn't get to.

He was  kind of a hard act to follow, in many ways.  I am what I am in large part because of what he taught me about what a man can do if he sets his mind to it.  I have had to learn from others not to try to do quite everything by myself, but it's a struggle.

But in the end, for all that he could do, the thing I will remember most is that he loved me and he was proud of me.  He happily sacrificed for his family.  He did what he did to provide for his family - to give us the luxuries that he wouldn't buy for himself.  He was always there for me, and for my family, no matter what.  I guess it must be obvious I was pretty proud of him, too.

Thoughts during my Saturday morning bike ride

I got in a 23 mile before-breakfast bike ride up Angeles Crest Highway yesterday morning.  Saturday morning is the one time during the week I can go for a long ride, during my wife's areobics class.  It has become my Saturday morning break-away.

So: Early morning ride, before breakfast, before coffee, didn't have time to make and drink my morning coffee first, but wanted my caffeine fix.  Solution:  Cold coffee in my water bottle.  Not bad, actually, compared to the city water lately.

The ride up Angeles Crest is a climb.  Just up, and up, and up.  About 2000 feet of climbing this morning, though there's lots more up, up there when I have time.  I ran out of time yesterday just short of 12 miles and had to turn around. And then, of course, 2000 feet of adrenalin rush descent.  The caffeine is only necessary for the first half.  The second half provides its own stimulant.

I love riding up into the mountain highways.  There is the challenge of pushing my limits going up, the views are great, there's the rush coming down, and the fact that most of the hard work is done in the first half of the route.  The second half is, literally and figuratively, all down hill.

I can tell that keeping up with that pair of guys ahead is going to be tough when they have shaved legs -  that's a dead giveway that they are serious cyclists.

I wasn't sure about the hand signals that guy was giving me behind his seat. Was he warning me of hazards ahead, making sure I wasn't going to bump his wheel, or just dispersing passed wind?

Just because the cyclist in front of me is wearing pink socks does not mean she is going to be easy to overtake.  Never did catch up.  I did rationalize this by noting that she had the calf muscles of a male athlete.  And yes, I think she had shaved legs too, but I never got close enough to tell for sure.

I did pass a number of other riders (queue Rocky theme music). The trouble with passing someone is that then pride requires that I stay ahead, so I have to make sure I can permanently drop them before I pass them.

Firing snot rockets during a 35 mph descent is risky.  The rocket must be launched with maximum force or it may get caught in the nose-tip wind vortex and blown back in my face. 

Wonder what they do about nose blowing in the professional peloton?  A couple of weeks ago, the guy who had quietly come up behind my left shoulder about to pass me was lucky I heard him shifting cogs at just the right time.

These "new" so-called "clip-less" pedals (the ones with cleats on the bottom of the shoe that clip into the pedals) are a HUGE improvement over the old toe clips and straps.  I wasn't sure I'd like them and it sounded scary to have my feet trapped in the pedals, but I got a used pair of clipless pedals and they are SO much easier to use than the old toe clips and make pedaling hugely more efficient.  I say "new" in quotes because they are new to me, but have been around for a decade or two.  I was just out of active cycling for most of  that time.

Cycling has really caught on since I used to commute on my bike over 25 years ago.  Back then, the few times I rode up Angeles Crest Highway, I had it all to myself.  Now there is a steady stream of cyclists on a Saturday morning.  Maybe it's the Lance Armstrong effect.  Whatever the reason, I think it's great.  It's nice that I'm no longer the only crazy person climbing that mountain. 

It's also nice that I can still pass a lot of much younger cyclists.  It's a little funny though when I notice that almost ALL of the others on the mountain are much younger.  I don't feel old.  I wonder if I look it.

Replacing my old Bell Biker helmet probably helps to disguise my age a little.  That old helmet, left over from the '70s, was certainly a giveaway of my age.

Lance Armstrong has in fact ridden (down) that same road, in the Tour of Califonia.  The T of C used the route across Angeles Forest Highway and down Angeles Crest Highway, and then on down to the Rose Bowl (where I went last week), several times.  Hard to imagine racing down that road.  Going down it alone is one thing, but racing down it in a group is hard to imagine, even though I watched them do it.

I keep trying to use the mapping app on my iphone to track my rides, but it rarely works right.  Today, it did map the route, sort of, but it thought I had gone twice as far as I actually did.  Last week, it clocked me at 52 mph on a flat ride, which was probably also double the reality.  The idea in using it was so my wife could tell where I was and be reaassured that I was OK.  Glad she didn't see that reading of 52 mph live or she would not have felt at all reassured.  The fact that the phone crashes so much makes it useless at reassuring her that I have not crashed.

Spinning class is good exercise, but it really doesn't compare to actually climbing a mountain.

Funny thing though:  I have estimated that Angeles Crest would rank as several category 2 climbs in professional cycling, but actually the toughest climb on the whole route is the first couple of miles in town, just getting from my house up to Foothill Blvd.  Nothing after that is as steep.

Take Me The Way I Am

A popular song that is one of my favorites right now is Ingrid Michaelson's

"The Way I Am"

If you were falling, then I would catch you.

You need a light, I'd find a match.

Cause I love the way you say good morning.

And you take me the way I am. 

If you are chilly, here take my sweater.

Your head is aching, I'll make it better. 

Cause I love the way you call me baby.

And you take me the way I am. 

I'd buy you Rogaine when you start losing all your hair.

Sew on patches to all you tear. 

Cause I love you more than I could ever promise.

And you take me the way I am.

You take me the way I am.

You take me the way I am.

The words strike a chord with me:  The concept of love being two people who take each other the way they are.  We want acceptance in spite of, or better yet because of, our faults.

The quirky line in that song, expressing the strangeness of modern romance:  "I'd buy you Rogaine . . . " shows that while we want to be accepted for what we are, part of the reason is that we actually aren't all that happy with how we are.  We don't truly accept ourselves The Way We Are.  We want to be different; and better (with more hair, at the very least).  We want someone who will love us, even when we don't quite like just how we are.  The only reason we would long for someone to accept us as we are, with all our faults, is that we recognize that we are far from perfect, and think we are perhaps difficult to love.

If I felt that being the way I am is perfectly OK, I would feel no need for acceptance of my faults.  It is because I myself do not accept myself the way I am that I wish for someone else who would accept those things about me that I don't like but have been unable to change.

Introspective people spend a lot of time looking at their own faults and trying to change them, almost always unsuccessfully. Changing personality or character is almost impossible.  We are what we are.  We may struggle with trying to improve in various ways, but most of us make little progress at it.  I lost a lot of weight, but the factors in my personality that caused me to gain weight in the first place are still there, struggling to put it back on.  I may have changed my body, but changing my mind and behavior is something else entirely.  I don't think I am now an inherently thin person.  I still am what I was - what I am.  Perhaps a "recovering" heavy person.

But if someone else could accept and love me with my faults, then it could make me feel better about those faults.  If they can accept those faults, then maybe so should I?  Which might relieve some of the guilt over my lack of success at self-improvement.

Can we change?  Is change impossible, or just very, very difficult?  Little changes are perhaps only a little difficult, but big changes may be so difficult as to be, for practical purposes, impossible.  Changing enough to be able to accept ourselves the way we are may be too much to ask.

Much of what makes Christianity both appealing, and unappealing, is its promise of acceptance, but also its promise to change us, and its demand that we change.  We long to be changed, because changing ourselves, well, we've tried.  Lord knows we've tried.  Must we change ourselves in order to be changed?  Lord, take me the way I am.  Will you really?  Because, if I need to have more faith, well, I have what I have.  If I need to be a better person to be saved, then well, I am what I am.  Is God alone allowed to refer to Himself by that title (I am what I am)?  Does God take us the way we are?  Did God in fact make us the way we are?  Does God demand that we change? Yes, Yes, and Yes.  The Bible seems conflicted about that.  Dear Lord, take me the way I am. And then change me.  But please don't ask me to change myself, because, well, that's just the way I am.  (At this point, please avoid digressing into theology, or argument about faith vs works).

Yet even as we wish for acceptance, we may try to hide the very things we wish could be accepted.  We want to be accepted for what we are but we dare not totally reveal it, because we don't accept it, and we don't think it can be accepted by anyone else either.  I won't tell you about those flaws I wish you could accept, because I think you would judge them, not accept them.  But I wish you could magically perceive throught the eyes of love the unlovable person I know I am, and yet love me and love my faults.

Often, I would like to say to someone:  "I do accept you the way you are, I just wish you could believe that and not be so defensive all the time!"  They don't think they are lovable that way, even if I do love them.  And I don't quite totally believe they could accept all of the flaws in me either, so I can understand.

Could it be that we are not merely the person we are, but also, to some degree, we are the person we wish we were?  The fact that we have higher ideals than we are actually able to live up to, doesn't just having the ideals count for a great deal?  Perhaps I'm not really just "the way I am".  Perhaps, maybe, I am partly the ideals I admire, whether or not I manage to live that way.  I hope so.  Because I'm afraid you just have to take me the way I am.