Dingo was a typical East Nashville alley mutt. She was dusty brown, & weighed 45 pounds; she had attributes of Chow Pit Shepherd & Terrier; she had a Bulldog underbite & Yorky upright ears.

Her original owners neglected her so when she escaped their yard we took her in. She was not brave but she was proud. She was not smart but she was curious. Despite the liver-killing Prednisone she took for her bad knees she lived 13 years.

A good half metric today into a bit of wind over slick leaves & up some hills at the end because I knew those roared wd be dry & safe. 7 years into this means I didn’t ruminate over the safe route back home, i just turned onto the safe roads calculatedly.

The quandary is & will be now balancing the indoor Aircycle or nearly Elliptical with the outdoor actual cycling with all its consideration concern & adaptation. Indoors is safe & taxing & controlled & often more physically challenging; outdoors is actual cycling & nothing feels better having done well.

Greed, Gecko said, Is Good; initially I said indoors 3 times a week only in the off season, but I’m thinking that won’t hold. All that difficulty so close . . .

When I fractured the frame of the Original Tibi Dabo I felt guilty for having spent so much time & energy (about 20,000 miles worth in 2 years) on so old & classic a bicycle. Most cyclists have a stable of 10 speeders for the actual cycling; the rare gems are to tinker with, pedal around the block on Sundays, show off to their friends. I rode my classic till it died.

I felt terrible.

They said they could find a similar replacement frame but I knew it wd be different. So, to survive the down time, I bought Naomi, the Belt Drive Trek (another classic which I have no right riding since she’s a Free Wheel 1 Speeder) & waited for the new Mr. Tib.

I didn’t expect her to be so much more compact & light. Her frame (By Critical) is less stiff & surprise agile. I’ll have to re-learn turning & up-hill accelerating but she’s just as Classic as she originally was.

Dingo has been very less than normal for a few days & I made the lugubrious leap toward Death instead of making a few more logical health steps. A few aspects of New Foxrock were chosen specifically for her as The Old Dog & part of me imagined that now that she had her less stressful place she made her peace against the struggle & was ready to go.

I’m a dope.

She’s now not what she was last year but 2 days of water & softer even raw food have her out walking again & sniffing after rabbits & deer. I don’t expect her to leave any time soon & it’s a relief.

Pays not to jump to conclusions; Bruce Lee talked of Conquering Haste

Dingo (who is 14 and fading faster & faster now) started out life by escaping her frankly mean owners as a few-months-old puppy & hiding under an air conditioning exhaust fan. She was terrified of everything so we took her in & gave her a strong name out of Homer: Hekate. The name is hard to spell hard to pronounce & requires too much explanation so we took to calling her Katie. As she grew older tho she stayed small & timid so I figured she needed a nickname with some power to it. Clancy wrote about a tough sniper recruited into CIA named Domingo Chavez; he was barely over 5 feet tall & a very competent killer, never at a loss. Since he went by “Dingo” to his friends, I called Katie Dingo. The name took & nobody ever called her Katie again. She never became brave but she never ran from a fight either. Lost every one of them but never ran.

Her bad days are longer every time. It won’t be long now; I’m glad to have had her.

The underbite became endearing

The increased square footage emasculated my TP Link & my solution tho technically sound (Ethernet cables run upstairs, downstairs, & to the living room) was old-fashioned & wd’ve required punching through walls & floors & even looping a wire around exterior of the house. Had the house initially been wired for Ethernet my worries wd’ve been about wear & tear – I’ve had cables die on me for no reason at all.

Mesh Networking puts large repeating antennas in the far corners of the house, capturing & spreading the signal from the router. The large net is strong everywhere. Any upgrade will be external.

Meanwhile the California Crew has fires to deal with & come rainy season increased mudslides. Staying strong here as best as possible & getting retaining walls built there now before anything goes pear-shaped. My parents did this for 60 years & stayed mostly cheerful throughout.

From the hill off Davidson I call Frisbee Golf Hill but is actually owned by the US Navy so is probably designated Navy Hill or something I can briefly at 11 mph see into the backyard of the new house. Gradually getting completed – only the deck & a bit of landscaping to go before we move in. Brief glances several times a day over a few weeks stay in the memory (more aptly in the Riminiscentia) like a stop-motion monster movie scene. We’re going to call her Foxrock – again – because of Beckett

Dad’s advice on buying a house included looking at how it handles the rain, looks in the dark, & interacts with normal street life. The first two I did almost immediately before even giving Earnest Money, but the third & most important I only just did this evening – mostly I was checking the Mosquito Quotient (none during 30 minutes of exposure) & the Dog Walking Quotient (4 friendly dogs with friendly owners).

It’s a nice place – too big by 3 rooms but not too grand

Sentire is one of my favorite words either in Latin or Italian (as well as in its vulgar French Provençal or Spanish) because it means both To Hear & To Feel equally – as though Romans knew that ears feel the movement of air.

My pun on Metric Centuries or 100 Kilometers is unavoidable; if you ride often enough you get the feel of how possible the longer rides within the given time frame. You feel the century in your legs, both its possibility & its actuality. Levels of acceptable fatigue & pain vary throughout the season, but Metrics provide a good measure for longer rides.

What in the end one is capable of (we can call it the Measure of us) starts as something felt either physically or aesthetically.

The suits are hammering out the rough details but it looks like Foxrock is ours. Now all the actual scary stuff begins. Tiny differences over furniture make us bicker – I suppose it’s relief & terror.

I’m concentrating on 3 rooms because it’s easier that way:

the “den” even though the word is in disfavor will have Dante Pound Beckett Guido & the dying Mac plus the hideous chair.

the weight room speaks for itself but what worries me is the ceiling height; the builder wants to hide the AC tentacles above the ceiling & I want them shoved to the side to give boken more swinging room.

the media space will keep the good Mac the printers & scanners but then thereby the Clutter now vaguely hidden behind a door. Plus the Echo Dot & speakers.

That much at least is right with the world