People who are fully vaccinated against coronavirus no longer need to wear masks while indoors or outdoors or physical distance in either large or small gatherings, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky announced during a White House COVID-19 briefing Thursday.

For months we have been told that the CDC is the ultimate authority providing ‘mandatory guidance’ on how we are all supposed to behave. No matter how outrageous or economically devastating, their word was law, except it wasn’t anything of the sort.

The directive above would seem simple enough. But there are complications. Here in California we still have a mask mandate, vaccinated or not. You might think Federal Guidance would trump state rules, but this is not automatically so. Anyone who wants to use pesticides or paint thinner or purchase a gas can knows that California rules are different from much of the nation.

Many large businesses have decided to follow the CDC guidance, with the caveat that state and local regulations still apply. So if you go to a Costco in Nevada or Idaho you can keep your airways free, but if you head to my Costco in Lodi you will need to cover your orifices. Both of them people! If you are going to wear the thing do it right, comfort be damned.

Of course these contradictory mandates are producing confrontations. People show up to stores and offices vaccinated and mask-less and they are being denied entry. Debates ensue. So far there are no stories of them escalating into violence, but it is early days yet.

All this leaves aside the question of whether non vaccinated people will do as they are supposed to and put masks on. The CDC guidance is for ‘fully vaccinated people’ which Stoker and I both are, along with most of my Pod and Peeps. But what is to stop someone at the door of Walmart telling the greeter they are fully jabbed when they actually haven’t been? At present, nothing. And since you do not need an ID to vote, it is hard to image that a vaccine passport is coming anytime soon. But even if you do have to show proof for the privilege of going bare faced, what about fakes? Some enterprising tavern owner in Clements got busted for selling fake Covid vaccination cards. I’ll bet he’s not the only one.

I’d like to stand up for my right to go mask free, like the CDC says I can. But I’m a wimp. The Japanese have a saying “The nail that stands up gets hammered down’, and I don’t want to get bashed. So the Costco person checking membership cards will get no argument from me.

When it comes to marriage I’m strictly a one woman man, and Stoker is she. That is her preferred pronoun. I like to say my hobbies are cycling, chess and monogamy. But when it comes to bikes I fool around.

My cycle harem consists of 3 beauties. None is really current state of the art, but they all are quality framesets built with high quality components and none of them will hinder the performance of a strong rider. Since I’m not really a strong rider, all I can say is that they make the most of my limited physical resources. And in no particular order, here they are:

The Sampson was my first really nice bike. I got it back in 2000. It has been my primary travel bike and I’ve ridden it all over the western U.S. and in Italy and France. The titanium frame will last longer than I will, but over the years I’ve changed the components from Dura Ace 9 speed to DA 10 to Ultegra 11 speed. As you see her (all my bikes have specified their preferred pronouns to be the same as Stoker’s: she and her) she weighs 18.2 lbs.

Next in line is my rocket ship, a 2014 S Works Tarmac SL-4. With SRAM Red mechanical components and HED Ardennes wheels this beauty tips the scale at about 5 paper clips under 15.0 lbs. That includes the pedals and water bottle cages too. She is stiff as a board and light as a feather, but with Schwabe road tubeless 700×25 tires at 90 psi the ride isn’t too harsh. I love this bike. It is my favorite of the three. I even do fairly well going downhill on it since the ride is so solid and stable.

Finally the most elegant and stylish of the three, a LOOK 586 Limited Edition. The frame is labeled #146/200, which gives it cachet. It is made in France, which gives it more cachet. I got it back in 2010 to replace a similar LOOK 585 that was stolen outside a coffee stop in Moraga. The thief knew what he was after: there were 13 very nice SBC bikes lined up but he took the most well known expensive one; easy to fence.

Depending on which wheels I put on the 586, she weighs from 15.4 lbs. to 16.3 lbs. Her components are Dura Ace 10 speed so I’m going to need to update at some point, since even DA does not last forever and I think these levers and derailleurs have something like 25,000 miles on them. But the big drawback is that these older DA components will not allow anything larger than a 28 tooth cassette, and I need lower gears at this point in my cycling life.

We also have a very nice CoMotion tandem and I have some very nice ‘extra’ wheel sets. If I were to add up all the discretionary income I spent on this equipment I might be taken aback, and most non cyclists would be absolutely shocked. But this good stuff brings me a lot of enjoyment and pleasure, and it is nice to have some variety in one’s cycling life. But Stoker’s ‘infinite variety’ will suffice in the relationship department.

I started writing a blog for E San Joaquin way back in 2014. The Editor of The Record invited me to write about Stockton Cycling. But I pretty much wrote about whatever I wanted, although I tried to keep it mostly apolitical.

Things went along like that for years. I didn’t think anybody was reading most of the time. But then I wrote a piece about a colonoscopy in 2017. I did the prep, that delightful prep. I arrived at the outpatient center on a very windy and rainy winter day, and then the power went out. And it didn’t come back on, so they sent me home fully prepped but un-scoped and furious at the fact that I was going to have to do all that ‘prep’ again in a few weeks.

This was on a Friday. Two days later on Sunday we were attending the Italian Gardeners Society annual members’ dinner. I know this is hard to believe, but there were over 400 people there all shaking hands or embracing and standing close together and jabbering away without a surgical mask in sight.

I walked over to say hello to my friend Don and his wife Jennifer, both of whom I’ve known for years. Jennifer told me she laughed hard when she read about my colonoscopy fail while at the same time saying she felt so sorry for my situation. I had no idea she even knew I wrote a blog but she said she read it all the time. The proof was she was aware of something I posted the day before!

So there are a few folks out there who at least scan my offerings. I know Stoker hangs on every word of every piece. But until I wrote ‘Going Digital’ I never got much attention from my overseers. That changed, as you know if you are a regular reader.

So I left E San Joaquin and payed for my own domain and now I can write pretty much what I like. But the other day I wanted to retrieve something from an earlier blog so I went to my old E San Joaquin home. All my stuff was gone!!

I thought man, they must really have not liked ‘Going Digital’. Or they didn’t like that I was writing on my own, even though The Editor suggested in a terse e mail that I probably should take my act elsewhere. I thought removing everything was a bit ‘cancelling’.

But I was wrong, the purge wasn’t just for me. E San Joaquin disappeared completely. None of the other bloggers got notice or a chance to save their stuff. Since I’m pretty sure I signed something that said they could do that, I’m not overly concerned. I would like to have been able to save the prose for my own perusal and for some ‘best of’ blog posts, but Avanti! Avanti! Dai Dai Dai! Rough translation is Forward! Come on!

Which I will endeavor to do.

Our Federal Government is working hard at printing money and giving it away to people because of the economic disruptions of the Covid panicdemic. This is fine as far as it goes; I have nothing against the occasional $2,000 check, which for Stoker and me is only a partial refund of estimated income tax we pay every quarter. And certainly enhanced unemployment benefits for people who lost jobs seem reasonable. Although if the benefits turn out to be more money that the person made working it does kind of take away any incentive to rush back into the labor market. And if would be nice if EDD wasn’t so incompetent and didn’t pay out $10 billion in fraudulent claims.

But when I heard a Public Service Ad on the radio advising citizens that FEMA has financial assistance for funeral costs of a Covid victim I was incredulous. But it is true! This is from FEMA’s web page:

Who can apply for COVID-19 Funeral Assistance?

You may qualify if:

1. You are a U.S. citizen, non-citizen national, or qualified alien who paid for funeral expenses after January 20, 2020, and
2. The funeral expenses were for an individual whose death in the United States, territories or the District of Columbia, may have been caused by or was likely the result of COVID-19.

Leaving aside the question of why unqualified extraterrestrials are not eligible, I think this carries Covid relief aid too far. FEMA is supposed to operate in emergencies. How a funeral constitutes an ‘emergency’ is not clear to me. Or if a funeral is an emergency, why should the cause of death matter? Isn’t this death discrimination? Are some causes of death ‘more equal’ than others?

The answer to this is yes. Covid is a special panicdemic, more important and more dangerous and requiring more lock downs and shut downs and mask wearing and more government ‘mandatory guidance’ than anything in Human History.

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Poor old grand dad has a heart attack that punches his ticket to heaven, and FEMA says ‘No Cash For You!’ to relatives wanting to give him a nice send off. But if you can get a doctor to say that Covid ‘may have caused’ the cardiac failure then the FEMA Funeral ATM is open for business. Put in your PIN and have a heck of a wake!

In 2003 I got serious about cycling. I had a VO2 test, and received a training plan to follow based on my heart rate. I did the training and got stronger. I even got my weight down about 10 lbs.

Training using your heart rate is good, but using both power and heart rate is better. In 2005 PowerTap came up with the first relatively affordable power meter. I bought one, downloaded some software to analyze the data, and the way I think about cycling changed completely.

Non-cyclists sometimes ask me how fast I ride. The answer is “It depends”. Which way is the wind blowing and how hard? Am I climbing Mont Ventoux or sailing down Carbondale Road? Am I sitting on Marlin’s wheel or out front trying to shelter Roberta and Margret from our version of the Mistral? Speed tells you almost nothing.

But power data tells you everything. 200 watts is the same effort riding uphill at 5 mph or 20 mph on flat pavement.

Since I’ve been riding with a power meter for so long, and since I’m kind of anal retentive when it comes to recording every piece of data about my rides, I know quite a bit about my performance over time. Perhaps too much.

The graph is called a Power Curve. Time is on the horizontal axis and my maximum power for that amount of time is on the vertical axis. For example, the graph shows that back in 2016 my highest power output for 1 hour was 226 watts. This year the maximum one hour effort is 177 watts. As you would expect when the time period gets longer the maximum power drops; you can ride harder for 1 minute that you can for half an hour.

The graph above shows my power curve for 2021 and compares it to my numbers from 2016. As you can see there is a bit of a drop off. Strava calculates something called Functional Threshold Power (FTP) from the data. It is an estimate of how much power you can generate for 1 hour. Back in 2016 my number was 245 watts. So far this year it is only 201 watts.

I picked 2016 for a reason. I turned 60 that year, and I remember thinking back then that I really hadn’t changed much as a cyclist since 2003 and the day Max Testa changed my life. But over the last 5 years I have gotten ‘less strong’ which is a nice way to say weaker.

Poor numbers this year are at least partly due to the pandemic pall. I am not motivated. I even wrote a blog about ‘the end of the affair’ with my love of cycling late last year. That has eased a bit, and perhaps if we ever get to travel and take our masks off, I’ll get enthusiastic again. I know I can do 200 watts for an hour if I have a nice lunch in Malaucene to look forward to at the finish.

Yogi Berra said it, and Stoker and I are living it.

Back in mid March 2020, many of the world’s nations went into a Covid lockdown. I distinctly recall our Governor imposing some of the strictest mandatory guidance in our 50 states, assuring us that such measures were necessary for ‘a few weeks’ to ‘flatten the curve’ and were ‘science driven’. It has been a very long ‘few weeks’.

This put a nearly complete halt to travel of almost any kind. We weren’t supposed to leave our county, even on a bike ride from home. And international travel became almost impossible to most destinations.

Stoker and I had a lot of travel plans for 2020, starting with 6 weeks of cycling in Southern France in May. Since ‘a few weeks to flatten the curve’ didn’t seem especially worrisome, I still had hopes we would be able to travel. But on April 7, 2020 Air France cancelled our scheduled May flight, and shortly afterwards my favorite touring company 44|5 did the same for the Cevennes tour planned for June 5.

Ever since then I’ve been playing the same game: I make tentative plans far enough out that the panicdemic should be over. Then I watch those plans be cancelled yet again. First we were going to try to do a custom itinerary in Belgium and southern France in July. Then we moved it into August to include a Pyrenees tour. But France was still closed to non-essential travel from abroad. Climbing the Tourmelet certainly is non-essential.

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Going into the winter of 2020-2021, we were almost certain that by May of 2021 we would finally be able to do our planned trips from 2020. But France went into another lock down in mid-April, for at least a month. And there is no sign of when the EU will welcome travelers from the US. So our May/June trip is not happening.

We are kind of hoping to do some cycling related travel in France sometime this year, but I’ve given up on advance planning. The next time I put dates on a calendar I don’t want to have to cross them out. 2022 maybe?

Saturday’s club ride was an old favorite with a new twist: Jesus Maria Road from San Andreas. I’ve been up that road over 20 times, but always starting from Valley Springs. There are various ways to make the ride shorter or longer but none of them are easy. The JM Road climb sees to that.

Our long time SBC regular Fearless (Frank Fiore) lives in Manteca and rides with some other groups, and he invited ‘The Pain Gang’ out of Modesto to join our club ride. It is more like SBC was joining them, since they had us outnumbered. They seemed a very nice bunch of very strong riders. They also had something we never have on SBC rides, a sag car! The driver offered to carry extra clothes or gear, and he had water and Gatorade available.

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We made up a big group of over 20. I am always very careful riding around people I don’t know. I’m sure they felt the same. Good thing I was paying attention. On the first gentle hill a rider (not from SBC) jammed his/her gears. The rider slowed which caused the rider directly behind (also not from SBC) to veer sharply left and into my line. I eased to the left and sighed under my breath. When it was safe I passed them both going uphill.

The so-so climbers turned out to be aggressive downhillers, so they both passed me. But when the road turned up again I caught them and decided to sit on them, and the same thing happened: another gear jam, another swerve left. That was enough for me; I backed off and headed for safer, less occupied tarmac.

I had never ridden Hwy 49 from San Andreas to Mokelumne Hill. Everyone assured me it was rideable. There is some shoulder that varies from 10 inches to almost 3 feet. But Caltrans has put rumble strips on the fog line, which means cyclists must choose between a tightrope to the right when the shoulder is narrow, or cross the bumps and ride in the lane. This is hard enough when you are in a small group, but very tricky when there are many riders in close proximity. Between the wind and the cars and the rumble strips and the other riders, for me it was a tense 7 miles to Moke Hill.

Jesus Maria used to be extremely bumpy, but the fire there a few years back destroyed what pavement there was, and recovery money included funds for repaving. And what a treat the new asphalt was! Incredibly smooth.

The group started together, but spread out on the climb. This was the hardest section of road I’ve done in a long time, and I think I did okay. Of the 20 riders there were three ahead of me and one with me when I reached the top. Strava says I averaged 211 watts for 31 minutes and 144 bpm average heart rate. Back in 2016 I did the climb in 29 minutes averaging 226 watts and 143 bpm. I know I was in better shape back then but I’m kind of surprised that I haven’t gone further backwards.

After the climb we rode on Rail Road Flat Road into Mountain Ranch. This is kind of a busy road with occasional motorists whose idea of ‘share the road’ includes laying on horns and doing a turbo diesel ‘smoke out’ to make sure the cyclists know who is boss. There were only two such occurrences on Saturday, which is about par.

We took a break at Sender’s market, and I must say most people there were quite friendly and asked where we were riding and advised us to ‘be safe’. I’ll try if you will too!

I was a little concerned about the descent back to San Andreas, because I assumed we would take Mountain Ranch Road, which has a lot of high speed traffic. But a most pleasant surprise awaited: Old Gulch Road! Narrow, completely smooth and nearly devoid of cars. Also delightfully twisting and mostly downhill. There were lots of grinning faces at the finish back at the Government Center. The sweet descent make the difficult climb up Jesus Maria well worth the effort.

I know I write a lot about the wonderful cycling roads in France, which after two years’ absence are starting to fade from memory. But on Saturday’s ride there were about 20 miles of French quality cycling. Jesus Maria and Old Gulch are right up there with the Malaucene Metric I love so much. Now if we could just do something about those rumble strips…

That is the name of a moderately hilarious book about punctuation. Yes, punctuation. I bet you didn’t think punctuation could be funny. But consider this example of the power of the humble hyphen: Extra-marital sex breaks one of the Ten Commandments, but extra marital sex ”tis a consummation devoutly to be wish’d’.

In the book title above, observe the power of the comma. The Koala Bear Eats Shoots and Leaves. This refers to the animal’s diet. Add the comma and the critter turns into a disgruntled diner who pulls out a weapon and starts firing before making its get away Note: no apostrophe makes ‘its’ possessive: add the apostrophe and you have a contraction of ‘it is’. There is a quiz later.

Now I’m not a grammar fanatic, although if you misuse ‘your’ and ‘you’re’ I’m going to quietly giggle. Likewise for ‘there’ and ‘their and ‘they’re’. On the other hand, if you misuse ‘capital’ and ‘capitol’ or fail to realize that ‘historic’ and ‘historical’ are not interchangeable, you won’t hear anything from me. I’m likely to make those errors myself.

After all, I’m not a professional writer. But people who work for newspapers presumably are. Which makes any errors or ambiguities on their part very entertaining. After all, what duffer golfer doesn’t get a little pleasure out of seeing a pro hit one into the lake occasionally?

A while back a local winery won a prestigious national award. The headline read “Local Winery Named Best in the County”. Which is true, since the county is a part of the country, but it kind of deflates the impact of the story.

Or consider this one “Attorney praises police officers being fired”. When I saw that I thought this was one brave and perhaps foolhardy attorney. Then I read the story and found out that the headline might have been clearer if it had read “Attorney praises firing of police officers.” Good writing puts the object of the verb as close to it as possible. The original headline is ambiguous at best, and I think most people reading it would conclude that the attorney was offering plaudits to the police, which the subsequent story made clear was not the case.

I know I’m behind the times. When I text I use complete sentences, capital (not capitol) letters, and punctuation. Voice texting doesn’t work especially well for me since I have to make a lot of changes before hitting ‘send’. And don’t get me started on ‘auto correct’. Their it is…

My father is 89 years old and in remarkably good health. Although he no longer farms and a tenant manages the property, he still can be found with a hoe, or a rake, or pruning shears taking care of some little details the tenant’s employees might miss.

His major job is to run the irrigation system. He consults with the farm manager about the watering schedule, then starts and stops pumps at times dictated by PGE’s Time of Use Rate Schedule. He uses a 4 wheeled ATV to check for broken sprinklers before starting the pump, and once the water is on he drives around making sure none of the sprinklers are plugged and all of them are turning.

He was doing this on Thursday morning. After checking all the sprinklers and getting his pants wet in the process, he went home to change clothes and have lunch. Then he remembered he needed to retrieve his cell phone, but when he checked his pants pockets it was gone.

The last time he knew for certain that he had it was just after he started the pump and just before he set out on his inspection rounds of the 18 acres being irrigated. That narrows the search zone down to 7,840,080 square feet.

He called me for assistance. As is usual on Thursdays I was doing the Club ride out of Wallace, but his call came through just as I was finishing. His health is excellent but his hearing is awful when he doesn’t use hearing aids. So the plan was for him to use my mom’s cell phone to call his cell number over and over, while I walked up and down the walnut rows listening for the stock Verizon ringtone while getting wet from the sprinklers.

Who among us has not done the same thing? I’ve called my own cell number using our land line to try to locate my smart phone. And yes, we still have a land line. I’m not sure why except that it comes in handy to locate lost cell phones. But usually the search zone is limited to inside the house or garage or our yard. Not the aforementioned 7,840,080 square feet!

My dad’s phone is a very old and primitive flip phone model. He doesn’t use it for anything except actual phone calls, so if you get his number forget about texting him. The financial loss would be minimal but the nuisance factor would be considerable: I’m sure learning how to deal with a new phone would not be my dad’s favorite way to pass time.

So up and down the rows I walked, getting wet and listening carefully and privately laughing at the futility of the effort. The phone was undoubtedly wet and probably not working. If it was, how many rings would it take to drain the battery? But I gave it my best shot. I’m not sure a 2 or 3 mile hike is the best recovery from a spirited bike ride chasing Marlin on South Comanche Parkway, but I wasn’t complaining and the day was warm and the cool water on my legs felt nice.

I finished 15 of the acres with no result, but as I approached the last 3 acres my dad came up to me and made the ‘broken chicken wing’ gesture. If you do not have Linden Italian farmer roots you may not know what this is. When something is exasperating, you raise an arm like you are taking an oath, but you turn the wrist down and push the elbow out while muttering something unintelligible that sounds like ‘aayeeyah’. If things are really beyond the pale, you might see the ‘double chicken wing’, which is the same gesture using both arms simultaneously. The ‘double chicken wing’ is reserved for moments of supreme frustration at the foolishness of oneself or of others. I employ it regularly when Newsom and/or Fauci are pontificating and nagging.

It turned out that the missing cell phone had slipped out of his pants pocket and into a crevasse in the mud room closet where my dad keeps his dry clothes. My mom happened by and heard the phone and answered it. So my dad did the chicken wing because he didn’t look enough in the most likely place before sending his oldest son on a walk through the orchard.

I didn’t mind. I’m lucky my parents are still healthy and don’t need much help, so when they do ask for something I hop to it. Even if I risk a broken chicken wing directed at some folly of mine.

There must be some kind of way outta here
Said the joker to the thief
There’s too much confusion
I can’t get no relief

I can hardly think of a quatrain more apt regarding the continuing Covid conundrum. I really would like some relief from the incessant reminders and/or demands to wear a mask, stay 6 feet apart from everyone except Stoker and Luke, and wash, wash, wash these Lady Macbeth hands that will “ne’er be clean”.

We are not going to France until late July at the earliest. So just to make sure that I remember what I am missing, my friend and tour guide Gerry sent me a couple of wonderful relief maps of the area we have cycled since 2014.

The top map is the area around Mont Ventoux. Our Malaucene rental house is just at the upper left of Le Geant de Provence. The lower map is the Cevennes national park where 44 5 runs a week long tour. I’ve done it 3 times and #4 was supposed to be in 2020, since postponed to 2021, and now 2022. It is certainly worth repeating; if I could only do one week long bicycle tour for the rest of my life I would pick this one. It has everything except traffic.

These maps provoke many memories. Here is the Col de Fontaube, an incredibly beautiful and tandem friendly (6% max, 3% average) climb on the way to the lovely village of Brantes for coffee. We’ve been up it 3 times. Over there is the Col de Homme Mort, which despite its foreboding name is a pussycat of a climb unless the wind is blowing. The Dentelles and Col de la Suzette, where Stoker and I encountered trucks laying fresh chipseal that forced a 2 km hike in cycling shoes. And over in the Cevennes, we have Mont Lozere and Mont Aigoual, the the gorges of the Tarn and Jonte rivers, and the causses (plateaus) between them.

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Fantastic memories of cycling adventures shown in relief maps. Which do not provide relief from disappointment. Like the fans of ‘them bums’ back in Brooklyn’, Stoker and I are chanting ‘Wait ’til next year’ for some kind of way outta here and across the Atlantic.