Margaret McDermott Bridge

After all these years, the bicycle/pedestrian bridge over the Trinity River here in Dallas is being fixed and will open at the end of the year. I’m happy about this – but what an incompetent shitshow it has been. For 125 million dollars you should be able to put in a hell of a bike bridge.

Bicycle Drag Races
Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge
Dallas, Texas

Strava Heatmap

As I’ve mentioned before, now that I’ve switched to Strava to track my bike rides, I am fascinated with the Strava Heatmap. If you don’t know – the Heatmap is where Strava collects information from everyone using its service and presents the runners, bikers, watersports, and/or skiers aggregate routes on a map.  Here’s the heatmap (running and biking) of the area around my house. The bright yellow horizontal line is the bike trail behind my house. Across the street is the oval where people run the track next to Apollo middle school (this disappears if you click on Biking alone). To the Northwest, along Plano Street up to Arapaho, then diagonally along the creek to Collins, is a new bike trail the city just finished. There are only a few folks using it now – and there is only a thin purple line on the heat map. I intend to ride it with my Strava as much as I can and want to see how the line becomes brighter over time.

The Heatmap is international and I like looking for odd or surprising things.

For example, can you guess what This Odd Shape represents. I was able to, even though I’ve never been there.

Acedia

I love discovering new words. Here is one, Acedia – that, unfortunately, is very useful right now.

Decluttering Is Hard—But There’s One 2-Minute Way to Make it Easier

One of my goals for the year is to up my decluttering game. I need all the help I can get.

The 7 types of rest that every person needs

Really Great Writing Prompts

I found this collection of writing prompts from Poets & Writers Magazine. They are more sophisticated than the usual ones. There are three weekly (fiction, nonfiction, and poetry) but their archive goes way back. Cool.

Writing in my Moleskine Journal outside the Mojo Lounge, Decatur Street, French Quarter, New Orleans

If you like visual writing prompts, take a look at this collection of links to museum art collections. Be careful, though – this can be a rabbit hole waste of time.

Pulp

Here’s a collection (from archive.org) of Pulp magazine, books, all sorts of stuff. Again, beware, it can be a rabbit hole. Also, rather spectacularly politically incorrect (which can be a good thing, IMHO).

Gratuitous Pulp Paperback Cover

Dance Mashups

I have found that watching these YouTube videos of dance mashups – uptempo songs with bits of dance from movies or filmed folks – makes the time on my exercise bike go by quickly (that and POV videos of people riding in beautiful places). I have a big TV right in front of my spin bike. It’s embarrassing when someone catches me watching these – but what the hell.

Here’s some examples:

Safety Dance? I actually liked this song back in the 80’s. Yeesh! Still, the remix has a good beat.