Grandfather Mountain

Once a month, Nina and I set aside a whole day to spend together doing something fun or adventurous (ideally, both). Today we drove to Grandfather Mountain, a privately owned preserve about 80 miles from Asheville. It's a lovely place, with stunning views in every direction.

It's been a while since I bragged about the beauty of western North Carolina by sharing some photos, so let's fix that now. (Right click/open link in new tab to see them full size.)


The aptly named Split Rock:

Immediately adjacent to Split Rock is this one, which they call Sphinx Rock. Yes, the entire thing (estimated to weigh 4000 tons) is resting on the small rock under it.

The Rickety Bridge of Certain Death. Well, that's what it felt like walking across. It's possible that's not its official name.

Grandfather Mountain actually has several peaks on the same base. This is the tallest one, seen from one of the more accessible ones.

Just a few random dramatic views:

Here's a couple of shots rendered in black and white, all Ansel-Adams-like. (People often say his work was nearly as good as mine.)

And finally, here's a cute river otter from one of their animal habitats:

Oh, one more thing: On the road up to the summit, signs identify one short stretch as "Forrest Gump Curve." Turns out that a bit of Forrest's famous run was filmed there. You can see it in this clip, from 3:58 to 4:04--just six seconds long.

WSOP photos

My friend Elizabeth Wolynski has compiled some of her fine WSOP photographs into a video. I especially like many of the black & white portraits in the first couple of minutes.

Knoxville, Tennessee

Nina and I went to Knoxville, TN, yesterday for her early birthday present of tickets to a James Taylor concert. We spent the day doing some sightseeing before the main event.

First we took a long walk through the lovely Ijams Nature Center. A log just a few feet from the Tennessee River was studded with hundreds of mushrooms. I decided this photo of some of them worked best in black and white:

This is a "geologic fold."

Bee on a sunflower:

This magnificent creature is a red-tailed hawk. It has an irreparably damaged wing, and therefore can't be released back into the wild, so the nature center rehabilitated it and uses it for education about raptors. Her name, unofficially, is Tiger.

Next we went up into the Sunsphere, a structure built for the 1982 World's Fair. I have no good photos from that part of the day.

Then it was on to the Knoxville Museum of Art, just a stone's throw from the Sunsphere. One intriguing piece was this one, by Devorah Sperber. It's constructed of spools of thread:

There's a spherical lens on a post in front of the work, and when you look through it, you see this:

This is one of the creepiest sculptures I've ever seen. It's made of silicone, and it's extraordinarily lifelike:

We had dinner at Sunspot, a funky restaurant on the edge of the University of Tennessee campus. Highly recommended if you're in the area.

And then the concert. I didn't try sneaking any videos, like a lot of people were doing. (See here, for example.) But it was great. Even after 45 years or so of performing and thousands of concerts, there was not a single second when I got the impression that he was "phoning it in." He looked and felt fully engaged with the music, his band, and the audience for every song. I'm delighted to have seen him live.

Except for the heat and the humidity--OMG, the humidity!--it was a thoroughly delightful day. I'm lucky to have had such a wonderful companion to share it with.

Color Run

There was a "Color Run" in my neighborhood this morning. I took some photos, which you can see here.

Date with Cardgrrl

Once a month, Nina and I schedule a whole-day date. For March, it was yesterday.

We started with some flowers for my girlfriend--Gerbera daisies. (Right-click/open in new tab for maximum embiggification.)

Then we were off to breakfast at Biscuit Head, which is not only the best place for breakfast in Asheville, NC, but in the whole wide world.

Our next big plan was to head to a place called Max Patch for a hike. But there were lots of things to stop and see on the way there. First we spotted a burned-down house, which required exploration.

Much of the winding road to Max Patch follows the course of a lovely stream, which has many little rapids like this one:

This was the sight at one scenic overlook, on our heavily overcast day:

On the last few miles of the climb up to Max Patch, it began to snow. There was a brief window of time when the snow coated the tree branches, but was melting when it hit the ground, creating an effect lovelier than I could capture in photos, though I tried.

When we finally arrived at Max Patch, it was too cold, snowy, and windy to make for a nice hike, so we basically just turned around and drove back down the mountain. But the trip was a worthwhile adventure anyway.

Out next stop was an appointment for an hour in a hot tub. The Hot Springs Resort and Spa has a bunch of hot tubs fed by a natural geothermal spring, so that the water is a constant 102 degrees year round. The tubs are in private enclosures, some lined up along the French Broad River, some along a stream that feeds into the river. (We were told that tubs 5 and 8 are the best positioned, but we didn't know that in time to request them.) It was a lovely, relaxing way to spend an hour.

This is me, getting in the way of you seeing the nice view that we had from the tub (photo by Nina):

Then we headed back to Asheville, to the opening of the annual orchid show at the North Carolina Arboretum. There were so many spectacular orchids on display that it was hard to pick just one--or even just a few--to show you.

Our last stop was dinner at an excellent Nepali restaurant in downtown Asheville, Cafe Kathmandu.

Finally, we went back to Nina's house for a couple of cutthroat games of Quiddler.

And that is what it's like to spend a whole day with my girlfriend. I kinda like it--and her.

Training a cat

As most cats with a regular feeding schedule will do, Lucy is prone to an hour or two of yowling when she thinks it should be dinnertime. Because, you know, on any given day I might FORGET TO FEED HER or something if she doesn't insistently remind me.

Fairly soon after adopting her, I resolved to extinguish this behavior, lest it drive me mad. So I instituted a simple rule: even if it's her dinnertime, she doesn't get fed until she has been quiet for five straight minutes. This has been remarkably effective, and it's rare these days (maybe once a month or so) that I have to actually enforce it. She just knows that meowing to remind me to get her food backfires.

I was feeling pretty darn clever at having trained her this way. Instead of putting up a fuss, she instead developed a habit of crawling into my lap, if I'm at my desk, or onto my legs if I'm on the sofa and just waiting quietly for dinnertime.

Lately, however, she has developed an alternative way to communicate the fact that she's hungry--one that doesn't run afoul of the vocalization rule: She jumps up on the couch, where I'm relaxing in front of the TV, sits on my chest, and stares at me, eyeball to eyeball.

It looks a little something like this:

Here's the reverse angle on the staredown:

I bought a tablet computer a while ago, and some nights recently I've been playing games on it instead of watching TV. When that happens, she carefully steps over the tablet, planting herself between me and it. I haven't been able to get a selfie of that, because it makes me laugh so hard.

If I still have not gotten her food after what she deems to be an adequate time, she just lies down to continue giving me the message:

The only thing that breaks her concentration--other than me actually fetching her dinner, of course--is taking pictures of her posturing. Then she's all like, "Hey, why u take pikchur uv me? I did not giv u mah permishun."

The whole thing is just completely hilarious, and if my neighbors are listening through the walls, they must wonder what has me laughing like a maniac every night lately.

It's also completely ineffective, because her food time is set in stone at 9:30 a.m. and 9:30 p.m., and will not be moved earlier on the basis of any cat entreaties, no matter how intrusive, pathetic, funny, or insistent.

It does make it rather difficult to either play computer games or watch TV, though. So I gently move her down to my legs, which is where she has usually settled for our snuggle time. Every few minutes, though, she crawls back up to my face, just to be sure that there is no chance I have forgotten to FEED THE CAT.

It would be impossible for me to forget to take care of such a delightful, endearing creature.

Rust

One of Nina's favorite photographic subjects is rust. (See here if you don't believe me: http://www.somebeaut.com/tag/rust/) Her enthusiasm for it has been a little bit contagious. In appreciation, I hereby present the Ode To Rust, developed from objects that my father, brother, and I passed in our walks this week during a family get-together in my sister's semi-rural town in northern Utah.

Click on the first picture, and then on the right/left arrows to move forward or backward in the series.

Ode To Rust 

Cyclocross at Biltmore

Yesterday Nina and I tried what was a completely new experience for both of us: watching a cyclocross race. It was held at the famous Biltmore Estate, which is just a couple of miles from Nina's house. Cyclocross is sort of like a steeplechase for cyclists. It's cross-country, meaning mostly not on pavement, but with nasty obstacles thrown in, like giant mudholes, and hills that are too steep to ride.

Nina has a new camera, and we both thought it would be fun to try our hands at fast action shots. It gave me a new appreciation for professional sports photographers. It is not easy to anticipate what will be worth taking a picture of, when it will happen, how to frame the shot to capture both the action and the competitor's face, and do all that while being aware of light/shadow conditions, obstacles, extraneous elements, and a hundred other things.

We watched a 45-minute race that actually included separate men's and women's races with staggered starts. We paid no attention to who was winning, but just enjoyed watching them negotiate tricky spots on the course. Much of our time was spent at a nasty series of hairpin turns coming steeply down the side of a hill. The men were mostly looking pretty stoic, but the women tended to wear their emotions on their faces, showing pain, determination, alarm, or even elation:

But before getting to coast around those downhill twisties, they first had to get up the hill. There were only two ways to do it--push the bike, or pick it up and carry it.

(Do not adjust your set. The sky really was that blue--no digital enhancement.) 

Well, that's not quite true. A very, very few of the strongest competitors were able to ride straight up--which, when you're standing on the side watching, looks like you're seeing something physically impossible transpire before your very eyes.

But you know who I admired most? It wasn't the elite cyclists whose incredibly muscled legs let them defy gravity. It was this woman:

She is obviously not as highly conditioned as most of the other racers. She may not love having to buy her spandex clothes in larger sizes. She was not in contention for one of the prizes. She clearly doesn't have as many hours in the saddle as others, which you can tell from the way she has already taken her feet off of the pedals in anticipation of having difficulty managing the gnarly turn she's about to hit. (We watched several people take tumbles when they misjudged it.) And I suspect she noticed that some of the bystanders snickered as she rode past. But she was out there giving it her all, while those judging her were just standing around. She could absolutely beat me around that course, and probably many of them, too. Plus, she's working on getting better at it, while I'm sitting on my butt in front of my computer. So my hat is off to her for taking on the challenge instead of just vegetating.

Speaking of the spectators, they were having a grand old time, what with ringing cowbells and cheering on friends and/or giving them a little friendly trash talking, sometimes through megaphones. Two stood out. First was this woman:

She obviously knew a lot of the riders and would taunt them by name as they sped by. Sometimes she would reach out and poke them with her stick, offering to give them a "hand." (Nobody seemed bothered by this. I gather that these are highly  informal competitions.) Her best moment came in that super-tricky turn. She yelled through her megaphone at one rider, "No front brake! NO FRONT BRAKE!" [Wipeout.] "Told ya!"

But nobody was having a better time than this kid:

He'd shout and ring his cowbell as loudly as he could at just about every rider that came his way. His enthusiasm was delightful and contagious.

I enjoyed the few minutes we had to watch the cyclists relaxing near the finish line, while waiting for the last stragglers to come in. Notice that this young woman is in bike shorts and a short-sleeved shirt, but sweating, while the more sedentary among us were freezing despite heavy coats because of a nasty cold wind.

All in all, it was a fun and beautiful afternoon at Biltmore.

Addendum: Nina's pictures are here.