Book 10 of 13 of 2013: Diary of an Early American Boy 1805, by Eric Sloane

I haven't been reading or writing as much as I was hoping to so far this year, but here's where I stand:

1. Born Standing Up

2. The Snowman

3. Hindusim A very Short Introduction
4. Borders of Infinity
5. The Coma
6. Buddhism A Concise Introduction
7. Child 44
8. The Emigrants II Unto a Good Land
9. Vagabond Volume 1 (French Translation of a Japanese Manga Comic)
10. Diary of an Early American Boy 1805
11. Never Coming Back: A Novel (My first Kindle loan from my mom)
12. The Kite Runner

Now onto this book!

Did you read "My side of the Mountain" by Jean Craighead George when you were in elementary school?  I did, and I loved it.  That book is about a young boy who goes to live in the Catskills on his in own the wild.  He builds a shelter in a tree, hunts and fishes, captures and trains a Peregrine Falcon, and generally is a boy-scout-bad-ass.  The story contains wonderful details on how he creates his life in the woods, and to a boy who would eventually grow up to be an engineer, this was heaven.  The "how-to" aspect of the details easily engages a child who wants to know how everything works.

"Diary of an Early American Boy" contains many of the same details.  In fact, that's what most of the book is: a detailed description of how a farmer in New England would have lived shortly after the revolutionary war.  It's a History Channel special in book form and I would have loved it as a kid.

Eric Sloane makes the comment in the story that "in those days" people took pride in making their own belongings and fixing something that was broken rather than running out and buying something new: because often they couldn't.  This comment struck a chord with me: mass consumerism irritates me, even though I know I participate as much as anyone else. 

I have an electric tea kettle that my sister got for me as a Christmas gift back when I was attending grad school.  Since growing in to a coffee snob, I started using it several times a day, when the mechanism that switches off the heating element once the water is boiling stopped working, I started to jump at the opportuniy to spend $100 on a new kettle with a built in thermometer and a spout specially designed for pour-over coffee brewing but I had just finished Sloane's book at the time and I took his words to heart...also, it was a gift from my sister.

So...it's working again now and I'm $100 richer in savings :-)

Le Tour and happy birthday U.S.A.!

One of my favorite American pro cyclists was cut from the Tour on Tuesday.  Riding in his first Tour de France, Ted King was caught up in a crash on the very first stage.  He suffered a separated shoulder, but still rode his bike the last 7 miles or so into the finish.  After visiting the hospital, he started and finished the 97 mile 2^nd stage, started and finished the 90 mile 3rd stage, and started the TTT (Team Time Trial) on the 4^th stage.

For my non-cyclist friends, a TTT is a special stage where each team races by themselves over the course (usually less than 40km).  They ride in a straight line so each rider on the team can take a turn at the front pushing through the wind while the others rest.  This type of racing takes a great deal of coordination and focus.  However, because of his shoulder, Ted couldn't ride his regular TT bike and had to use his road bike fitted with aero bars.  Because of the last minute switch, the timing chip was not added onto the road bike. 

At the start of the TTT, Ted was dropped almost right away by his team, and they had to push on without him.  He rode his bike alone along the 15km course at an average speed of 28mph at an average power of 365 watts and finished in 32:24 (with a separated shoulder) per his SRM power meter computer.

http://t.co/bebYFMBL0e

Because the timing chip was missing, the race judges had to base his time on visual observation of when he crossed the line and credited him with a time of 32:32 (I have yet to see a photo that shows this, but maybe one came up).  The fact that his power meter showed 32:24 doesn’t matter.  To make the cut, he had to finish within 125% of the winning team’s time.  The official time was 7 seconds short.

Ted is a domestique rider.  His job is not glamorous, and his function is that of a team player without much personal glory.  His job is to sit at the front of the peloton for long periods and keep the breakaway riders from getting too far ahead.  This allows his super-sprinter teammate Peter Sagan to swoop in at the finish and steal the win.  In a grand tour (Ted has ridden the Giro D’Italia twice), this often amounts to riding as hard as you can for several hours, falling to the back, and then riding up a mountain before you get up tomorrow and do it again.

Ted’s mother and father flew into France and arrived after the TTT to see him race his first Tour, but he had already been cut and couldn’t start the 5^th stage.  Ted’s father is a stroke survivor, and it is not easy for him to travel to Europe.  In support of his father, Ted leads a charity bike event every year for the Krempels Center: a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the lives of people living with brain injury from trauma, tumor or stroke.

http://kingchallenge.org/king-connection/

Although I have absolutely no sense of what it is like to be a professional bike racer, I always identified with this 30-year-old American who graduated college with a degree in economics and writes slightly nerdy blog posts about, for example, a great new recipe for pumpkin soup.  Here is someone, I feel, who is representing us fellow US citizens quite well over in France right around the birthday of our country. 

Happy birthday U.S.A.!