Many Miles to Run Off the Rain

We looked at the skies and wanted to cry. The weather guessers had promised us good weather for the weekend's Hill Country Ride for AIDS, but Saturday's first light showed dark clouds and lightning tickled the skies. At least we didn't have three days to worry about the bad weather, like last year's ride. The system appeared so quick the TV stations didn't even have time to update their Web sites. Up in the Panhandle it snowed. Snow anywhere in Texas after March is as rare as an uncured ailment in a faith healer's meeting.

But we took to our bikes after a two-hour delay, a time when our ride director told us their biggest concern was avoiding hypothermia. We added extra layers, donned ponchos and slickers and hoped for clearing skies. (From left that's my friends Ron Wilcox and Steve Hardwick, my gal and me, all trying to pretend it's not hypothermia weather.) Although rainfall for the first three months of the year was above normal, April had been unseasonably dry. It was the 12th-driest April on record, according to the National Weather Service.

Except for April's last day, of course.

Then Texas worked its atmospheric miracle, and by lunch we had brilliant sun, warming temperatures, and rising low water crossings. That kind of turnaround happens often down here as the cold fronts pummel through, leaving postcard skies in their wake. This rider at left was one of the daring ones, taking a turn across the bridge on his saddle instead of walking his bike across and using the sandbags set down at each bridge's edge by our safety crew. It was so slick at one bridge that a SAG motorcycle rider dumped his bike twice in as many crossings.




We made our way toward Krause Springs in Spicewood, Texas, 50 miles of pedaling for our first day. The day featured an impossible hill that I managed to ride up anyway, lifted by the spirits of all those donations -- as well as the knowledge that no matter how hard it hurt, living with AIDS was much harder. Still, my heart rate was above 180 at the top of that monster. I had to stop at the summit and let my beat recede to decent levels. After shortening the ride a little to make up for our stormy delay, the organizers gave us a 100-mile course. It meant we went to bed knowing that we had to crest that hill again, tomorrow in the homeward direction.

This year my Abby rode for the first time. First-time riders are the most special, really, because they face the fearful miles without the experience that they can do this very hard thing. This year I helped lead the team of Ride Leaders, those who weat the Yellow Helmet covers to bring along riders who were building their first success. I was proudest of Abby when she rode into Pit Stop Two today, the last rider in for that leg — because she'd climbed up the hill leading out of the Pedernales River's riverbed. About a 13 percent grade, that one, the kind that makes your car change gears twice as you drive up. She defied gravity, powered by her own sponsors and more than a little prayer.

Lance Armstrong rode up that very same hill earlier that day, according to our safety crew, now in training for his seventh yellow jersey. He was riding faster than any of us amateurs, but his climb was no steeper. The Hill Country is a challenging course to climb.

More important than the climbing was the fundraising we powered. The Ride's 2005 total stood at a record $420,000 tonight when we honored those we'd lost to AIDS. For 10 minutes the names of the missing were read aloud, while the memorial tags we decorated and wore during our riding day served as backdrop for the ceremony. The sounds of the camp along the river were a mix of trickling springs and snoring riders. People dropped off into sleep wearing their ride clothes, too tired to change. For some of us, pedaling another 50 miles tomorrow seemed like a fantasy. But we'd seen a day when the weather showed us a fantastic change, so perhaps it would be possible.

Life in a Town of Liberty and Lobs

Elton John came to Austin this week to perform in a fundraiser hosted by tennis ace Andy Roddick. Roddick's established a charity foundation four years ago, even though the boy was only 18 at the time. He won $7 million in 2004 alone, and he's lived in Austin for the last several years.

In an AP story about the fundraiser, Elton wouldn't give out any details about his upcoming marriage to his partner of 11 years, David Furnish. But Elton gave our town some dap for being the coolest place to live in all of Texas:

"Austin is my favorite Texas city because it's so green," John said. "It's a fun town. It's a great music town, always has been. If I was going to live in Texas this is where I'd live."

He performed just down the street from the state's legislature, though, whose House approved a constitutional ban against gay marriage. Gay marriages are already illegal under Texas law, but that's apparently not enough of a statement for the august statesmen from places like Sugarland, Pampa and New Braunfels. That House has already voted to prevent gays from being foster parents this spring. I suppose that orphanages and juvenile halls are a better alternative to loving, caring adults. The way I remember it, pondering your parents' sex habits as a child was more repulsive than rotten egg salad. Elton might think Austin is the acme of Texas living, but he's got more sense than to bring his partner anywhere close to such bigotry. We're still working on that liberty thing down here, Elton.

At least we're not trying to work out the bad math in squirrely research studies about foster home abuse. The big lie being told on this issue: "Children in foster homes with same-sex parents are 11 times as likely to be sexually abused as those with heterosexual parents."

This mistake, based on data from Illinois, made it onto CNN during a debate on the homosexual foster home issues. The Wall Street Journal has a columnist, Carl Balik, who pulled the shaky statistics apart on this big lie. Balik said in his latest Numbers Guy column:

"This required several leaps of logic, some of which I'll discuss later. The biggest is that Dr. Cameron had no data about the makeup of homes in which the Illinois children were abused; indeed, a state DCFS spokeswoman told me the agency doesn't record whether households are same-sex. It's possible that much of what Dr. Cameron calls homosexual abuse occurred in what would be considered heterosexual homes."

Oops. So homosexuals and heterosexuals really have the same makeup, then? We're all so much more alike than different.

Ready for Tomorrow's Tiger

This blog comes to you through a Macintosh, the computer whose demise has been continuously predicted — much like our errant forecasts noted yesterday — since I started using the Mac in 1987. So many tomorrows have dawned for Mac users since then. The company's stock split this year and it trumped its profit estimates six-fold in the last quarter. Clearly, Apple is selling us things we covet. Tomorrow us Mac lovers can put a Tiger in our tanks, when the latest operating system, code-named Tiger, ships from Amazon.com and elsewhere. (This morning Tiger's No. 2 on the Amazon software best-seller list, right behind Microsoft's Encarta digital encylopedia.)

In a brilliant column on the NY Times Web site, David Pogue details Tiger's stripes. He warns us that reading about operating systems "is about as much fun as a seminar on tax policy." But then he goes on to show us the fun of using Spotlight (shown left), the new search-and-find program inside Tiger that tracks down whatever you're looking for without opening a single folder. Tiger has better security, too, something that should interest the virus-and-spyware-weary Windows users. Somehow, the Mac's new OS can now make your computer too stealthy for bad guys to enslave it in the service of sending spam to others.

Pogue is a treasure for us in the Mac community, but he's genuinely entertaining in his latest outing. Pogue, a former Broadway conductor, wraps up his summary of Tiger's new stripes by putting them down in song, to the beat of "The First Lord's Song" from HMS Pinafore

The rest of the 200 features don't fall into any one visionary category; they're an assortment of tweaks and upgrades that pile up like something out of Gilbert and Sullivan:

The Safari browser now subscribes to R.S.S. news feeds,

And its "private browsing" mode conceals the tracks of online deeds.

There are archives now, and log files, when you send or get a fax;

You can make the pointer bigger on those Jumbotron-screened Macs.

You can start a full-screen slide show from some photos on demand;

And the voice that reads the screen aloud can lend the blind a hand.

There's a password-phrase suggestor meant to make yours more secure,

And the Grapher module draws equations simple and obscure.

Then the Automator program is a geeky software clerk -

You just choose the steps you want performed, and it does all the work.

There's a lot of miscellany, lots of spit-and-polish stuff,

But it works and doesn't slow you down - and these days, that's enough.

Okay, maybe the geek in me likes tax seminars, though I'm a chronic extension filer. But I believe Apple/Amazon's got my $95 coming their way soon.

Happy Weather Forecast For Us

This has been a tough springtime to rely on the weatherman, but this afternoon we Hill Country Riders have reason to be hopeful. The National Weather Service puts a discussion of the weather conditions out on its pages for every location. It's written in real meterologist-speak, all capital letters (the kind forecasters were once stuck with on teletyped reports) and some terms not often used on the TV news:

THE COOL NWLY FLOW ALOFT WILL TRANSITION TO A WARMER WESTERLY FLOW FOR THE REMAINDER OF THE WEEK. THIS WILL RESULT IN INCREASING SOUTHERLY WINDS TODAY AND FRIDAY WITH A RETURN OF SHALLOW GULF MOISTURE TONIGHT AHEAD OF THE NEXT FRONTAL SYSTEM LATE FRIDAY. UNFORTUNATELY THE NEXT TROF THAT WILL PUSH A PACIFIC COLD FRONT THRU S TX LATE FRIDAY WILL DO LITTLE IN THE WAY TO GENERATE ANY NEEDED PRECIPITATION AS MOISTURE AGAIN LACKING. FRIDAY LOOKS TO BE VERY WARM WITH THE DRY LINE AHEAD OF THE COLD FRONT AND WILL LIKELY SEE NEAR 90-90S FOR HIGHS MOST AREAS...SIMILAR TO LAST FRIDAY. ANOTHER PLEASANT WEEKEND WITH SLIGHTLY COOLER AND DRIER CONDS. BY EARLY NEXT WEEK...THE LONG RANGE MODELS POINT TO A SHIFT TOWARDS AND MORE ACTIVE WSWLY FLOW ALOFT WHICH COULD RESULT IN DEEPER MOISTURE ALONG WITH MUCH IMPROVED RAIN CHANCES AS A SERIES OF DISTURBANCES MOVE ACROSS NRN MEXICO AND INTO WEST TEXAS. HAVE INCREASE POPS FOR EARLY NEXT WEEK INTO THE MID WEEK AS THE ECMWF AND GFS APPEARS IN FAIR AGREEMENT WITH THIS WETTER UPPER AIR PATTERN.

Translation: Warmer until Friday, but the cold front doesn't contain moisture. Windy, but not much chance of rain. Yahoo!

After last year's damp ride, this could be a spectacular alternative. Reminds me of a call-and-answer I heard on a Hill Country training ride when the skies threatened:

Ride Leader: So what do you do when it rains?

Riders [saddled and ready to pedal their bikes]: You get wet!

Weather is something we all have an opinion about, the subject we all believe we understand. But you read the discussion above and perhaps you'll see there's more to accurate forecasting.

Once upon a time in my life I wanted to be a weatherman. Upon enlisting in the US Army, I considered getting weather training as a job in 1976. The idea got nixed when I learned I had to train at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Too far out in the sticks for me then: north of Geronimo, south of Apache (town names), just a short drive to Oklahoma City. I needed an Army posting with more than one community theatre to play in, anyway. In the job I took at Fort Hood, Texas — just a short drive from Austin — I got only close enough to weatherman skills to use a radio teletype, transmitting troop and vehicle status in all caps, just like those weathermen.

And okay, they're weather-persons. But regardless of their gender, forecasters by their very discription usually try to eye some point in the future. This season it's been so volatile there has been little reason to look even three days ahead. I'll risk it today.

Publishing Before I Perish

Tonight I met with Mike Austin, my friend who's working on a novel about the US Submarine Corps in WW II. We meet at Borders Espresso Cafe to scratch out writing exercises, a way to pry loose the words to build our novels. Lately I have gained hope my Viral Times will be published. By me, if need be.

It's not "vanity publishing" anymore, either. The NY Times ran a story over the weekend about iUniverse and its "author services," which give one writer real control over content of their book, the advertising, and the media interviews. A traditional publisher is unlikely to give that kind of control to a first-time author.

Novels give us creators the biggest canvas and the widest pallette, even bigger than the movies. For years The Princess Bride was only a fabulous William Goldman novel that he never figured he could get made into a movie. (Goldman's a great screenwriter whose best-known credit might be Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.) He wrote "Bride" and then had to wait years until Rob Reiner managed to make a great movie out of it. Now we're reducing the waiting time. Such author services need to be supplemented by good editing, but control has begun to tilt toward creators — rather than purveyors — of published work.

Already Proud, But Aware, Too

My friend Linda Liebich sent me an e-mail today that touts a Navy Cross awarded to a Marine for Iraq-based duty. The forwarded e-mail, also suggests that the mainstream media is not telling such stories of the troops:

The odd fact about the American media in this war is that it's not covering the American military. The most plugged-in nation in the world is receiving virtually no true information about what its warriors are doing.

Like me, Linda thanked God for US soldiers. Why not? I was a US soldier for three years, but not in any duty that would have earned anything as glorious as a Navy Cross. I served three years in the First Cav Division during the Cold War, late 1970s.



Then I took those GI Bill benefits that I earned in uniform at Fort Hood down to Austin, to get a journalism degree.

At UT Austin's J-school I learned to rely on multiple sources of information. The New York Times is an easy target for the right-wing today, but the paper does cover the American military man. On the same day that Linda e-mailed me about that overlooked Navy Cross, the Times ran a big story on Company E, the Marine unit that sustained the highest level of casualties during 2004.

Marines are taking it hard in Iraq. But there's much more to read about field-level experience than some might believe. If the Times is too liberal for you, try Soldiers for the Truth, a Web site with reverence for the military. They're not very happy at SFTT about how those billions for Iraqi freedom are being spent in the field.

But SFTT has run a little venom about humanitarian missions, too. One column there made sport of the relief workers who provided relief for the tsunami victims early this year. In a rebuttal editorial at SFTT, another Navy pilot said the columnist got it wrong — relief is an important mission. If that kind of military mind can show respect for civilians trying to help, maybe those who bristle at any military point of view could learn to respect more militant service. We can hope.

37 Goes Into 48 Just Fine

We rode the roads in Bell County this morning, a glory tour through wildflowers and wind and cows and creeks, from Salado to Holland to Belton, right past the Stillhouse Hollow lakeside and then back. We stopped at the edge of the lake, then rode across the dam to make our way back to Salado. The 37 miles gave us a long ride which I was dedicated to doing slow, since it's my birthday. The winds made it easy to keep down the pace, pummeling us in the first hour of our 2-hour, 45-minute ride from the east, on the road between Salado and Holland at 16 MPH. The countryside was gorgeous, carpeted with yellow wildflowers on gentle hills, the highway hugged by waving flocks of primroses a-flutter in the insistent breezes.

Holland was cute, a tiny burg we entered on a main highway that became a street with oaks that arched over the road from either side. Later on there was the Summer's Mill creek crossing, built across a fine waterfall of a branch of the Lampasas River. A loose dog chased us away from the Mill's conference center, but he was all bark and didn't cross the yellow line.

Later on in the day Abby and I hosted a birthday party to celebrate No. 48 for me. I ran around the yard with a sparkler like I was 40 years younger, ate a slice of cake our friend Jane had baked from my memory of a boyhood dessert, and dropped into talk and laughter with friends out on our back patio deck and cabana. Too cold to swim today, but we gathered around the pool anyway, watching the grackles and doves take a dip in the little pond in the backyard.

Near the Top of Training Season

Today we rode the Loop 360 hills for the last time in training season. We crossed the Bee Caves and Davenport Ranch hills, tough but not the challenge of the bad boy at left, waiting for us next weekend on County Road 303. One week from today we'll be clipped in and ready to ride the Hill Country Ride for AIDS, 2005 Edition. We will stand at the start line out on 5113 Southwest Parkway on what I hope will be a clear and cool Saturday morning.

The morning has been otherwise. Last year the rain started just as we pedaled off. Thunderstorms had cancelled the first day of our ride. On that Sunday morning we rode off in a steady drizzle that spattered my glasses and made the ride-out road a sandy, muddy mess. We’ve had lots of rain in Texas this spring, too, but we’ve rescheduled and dodged the drops some mornings.

I’ve already had my success with this ride. In 2003 it was a 139-mile course, and the bike only had 10 speeds. Just because I’ve enjoyed success doesn’t mean I’m not anxious about my latest attempt. I need help from others — my teammate Abby, who’s riding her first Hill Country Ride alongside me, the SAG and pit stop angels, my friends pushing their pedals on their bikes, my sponsors and contributors.

This morning I rode with intermediate riders, the 13-16 MPH folks, as a ride leader. It was the first day I could pedal as hard as I could and still stay with my ride group. What a rush. I finished the 24 miles in 1 hour, 40 minutes. I've never ridden it faster.

That was in spite of a 20MPH headwind coming out of the north, on our way back to the Arboretum duck pond start point. In Austin the wind is often out of the south. It was odd to climb the Bee Caves Hill with the wind at our backs. But I'm always glad to have a tail wind while climbing.

I've got one more long ride, tomorrow with my friends and fellow ride-leaders Ron Wilcox and Steve Hardwick, to celebrate my 48th birthday. Then it's a five-day stretch of rest, to prepare my muscles for that hill on CR 303.

Growing More than Creosote in West Texas

Ever wonder where all those billions we've sent to Amazon wind up? Not on the bottom line, of course. The company has only put $620 million in profits down on its bottom line in the last two fiscal years against $12 billion in sales. To be fair, those profits are rising. My friend Ron Wilcox asserted last night that Amazon hadn't made a profit yet. That's the general perception, because founder Jeff Bezos ran the company for years at a loss.

Now there's millions of Bezos bucks flying out to West Texas to build a spaceport. From US News & World Report:

Virgin's Richard Branson and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen aren't the only megarich guys with their eyes on the skies. Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, another billionaire, has plans to build a research-testing site and spaceport for suborbital vehicles on a recently purchased 165,000-acre ranch near the town of Van Horn, Texas. Bezos has said little publicly about the venture, dubbed Blue Origin, other than that over the next seven years he intends to construct a $30 million, three-person ship that will take off, go suborbital, and land vertically. (Think of a rocket ship in one of those campy 1950s sci-fi flicks.)

Van Horn is so far out in Texas that it's beyond Big Bend. If you've even driven out there, you look around and think you're already on the surface of the moon. There's so much space that a spaceport seems like a natural.

For years Abby and I rode out to Big Bend in our minivan and marvelled at the lack of habitation. The desolation led me to set a big part of my novel Viral Times out there. Open spaces have become more rare in Texas and throughout parts of America. In my book I've imagined that wind power would pump up the region. But space travel would do, too, although it seems many more years away. You can already see those massive wind generators on the ridges in West Texas.

A 165,000-acre ranch isn't that unusual in that part of the state. But its not nearly as common as the creosote bush, which stretches as far as the eye can travel away from the I-10 roadways. There is so much of Larrea tridentata out in West Texas that losing it from rocket engine blasts wouldn't make much of a dent.

A Second Lawn, Just 13 Songs Away

My rental house in San Marcos has a lawn, too, so today I drove down to what we call "Rio Vista" to mow in another county. In truth, our house on Cheatham is only 13 songs away, more or less, running up and down the Interstate that links Austin with San Antonio and Dallas. I put on my iPod on the car's radio and drive, trying to remain aware of scenery that can disappear once you're driven through it hundreds of times, like I have since last spring when we bought the house.

That ride south of the city once crossed only miles and miles of pastureland, but now the road to Rio Vista is is developing boils of serious commerce. The newest outlet of outdoor superstore Cabela's has roared up near Buda, with its signs now festooned on a massive water tower as well as the exterior of a building big enough to hold a Saturn V rocket. When one of these shopping meccas for the bass-boat and backpacking set rises up, there's usually a low-cost hotel built in its shadow. Cabela's is a destination, apparently a store you can't get enough of in a single day.

The Buda store, like all Cabela outlets, will house a miniature mountain and waterfall:

A 40-foot-high mountain replica, the centerpiece of the store's open showroom, with running waterfalls and streams, a trout pond and trophy animals in re-creations of their distinct habitats. Similar mountains, each called Conservation Mountain, have been built in other Cabela's stores as monuments to wildlife and salutes to the sportsmen and women who support wildlife conservation.

The construction in Buda illustrates the progress these shoulder counties north and south of Austin covet. Hays is still learning from Williamson County how to court commerce, but the Buda sprawl shows the county is learning fast. The highway on- and off-ramps are being beefed up with yards and yards of new concrete. HEB has decided a second store in the area is a high priority, so a new supergrocery is rising on the other side of the Loop 4 interchange. The traffic now jams up at the end of those ramps at sundown, as a line of pickups and SUVs muscles into a town of less than 1,000 residents. Buda was once important to the railroad. Now it's "gonna be somebody," as Eve told Addison DeWitt in the film All About Eve — apparently somebody with something to sell you. The countryside that surrounds that concrete is not dramatic enough to warrant saving.

In the meantime, the lawn at Rio Vista is doing fine, along with the family making a home out of our second house. I treat the ride toward lawn care like a long meditation, time away from the keyboard that can spark ideas.

Write That Drug Story Real — All of It

I read last week's Hollywood Reporter to learn about Drugstory.org. The full-page ad told us "How to pace your character's dive down the K-Hole." The ad reported that Special K is "springwater laced with puppy tranquilizer," and taking it leads a dance floor party animal down the K-Hole to see "before your eyes, children flattened and pulled apart like soggy bread. This hallucinated hell lasts 24 hours, and so the next morning the victim has no recollection of the ride, the rave, or how they were raped."

Whew. I'm thinking my character is changed for life by something like that. Pacing could be a problem. Better save the K-Hole hell for a key point of the story.

The Drugstory.org site, run by the US Office of National Drug Control Policy, puts writers in touch with experts to explain how drug users live and what their drugs of choice do to them. More touching are the personal tribute Web sites linked inside Drugstory.org, places like the Courage to Speak Foundation, built around the death of a woman's son though a heroin overdose.

The Reporter ad promised first-person accounts of drug use. Even the second-person stories were gripping, like Jo Payne's account of raising her grandchild Colby when his mom died after 20 years of using drugs like meth.

But not everything chronicled comes off the dance floor. One story included prescription pill abuse; another article talked about the problem of getting prescription drugs from outside the US. A Washington Post reporter took note of the US FDA personal-use exemption, revised in 1988 "when AIDS was surging and domestic treatments were scarce. The FDA responded by saying that patients with life-threatening illnesses under a doctor's care could import a few months' worth of medications, even if the drugs were not approved in the United States." Mexican shops now sell prescription drugs at prices more people can afford.

We all know where that's led. Now pharmaceutical companies are working hard to close down the source of cheaper drugs. They even have hired a former Louisiana congressman as president of their 15-company lobby. The congressman got more than $90 grand from drug companies during his last re-election campaign, then took a seat on the committee with jurisdiction over the drug industry. Now he makes $2 million a year as head of the lobby. Apparently there's another kind of hell hole related to a drug story — the tale of how corporate drug profits remain protected by locking the gates against cheaper drugs from offshore.

What's to Become of My Bits?

Computer users ask this question once they have a relationship with a program. Everything changes in life, everything ends. For some of us it seems just as serious to lose a creative tool, or an engine of their career, as losing a friend.

So when Adobe announced it's buying its rival Macromedia for $3.4 billion, users of both companies' products asked the question above. Macromedia's users of drawing programs like Fireworks expect the Adobe juggernaut — Photoshop, Illustrator and the like — to run roughly over their favored tools. Meanwhile, some of us Adobe customers are looking over our shoulders at one of Macromedia's market successes, Dreamweaver. It looks like that product could overshadow our little GoLive program, Adobe's tool that builds Web pages.

Software can outlast a lot of things we buy today: digital cameras, minivans. I've got suits that're older than some of my software, but I don't keep them because they still fit. I have a big enough closet to house some optimism about the future of my physique. I also have a CD player still spinning the discs after 16 years, an item only slightly less amazing than our 22-year-old fridge. Things that last long are more prized than they used to be, because they're more rare.

Consolidation is the credo in the modern software industry, however, which makes even a fit product another candidate for the dustbin. Buying out your competition is an old business model, but it seems like the software bit business has more buyout fever than any other.

Really, can you imagine your favorite car maker being gobbled up by its competitor, eliminating the brand of car you love? Ford bought Volvo, sure, but it didn't erase the safe models Volvo used to define itself. Adobe bought Macromedia, an event like Black & Decker buying the Craftsman line and then removing half the tools from the Craftsman lineup.

We care because we use software to mimic who we are and how we create. Spend enough hours with GoLive while you create Web pages, or with Dreamweaver, and you struggle to change your tools. One GoLive user wrote me:

"When Dreamweaver first appeared on the scene, I have it a look and found it severely lacking. Since then, I’ve given Dreamweaver another chance to win me over every year or so. Each time, I came away puzzled by the ever-growing marketshare/mindshare of Dreamweaver."

He goes on to describe his latest attempt to use the competiting tool, and how he "hit a wall," adding that "I didn’t get any further with this Dreamweaver experiment than previous times. I’m worried the next time I won’t have any choice."

I worry too, but maybe not as much as those full-time Web developers. More than once in the last two years of cutting Web pages I've grown convinced that something's got to be easier to use than GoLive on my Mac. Comments like the one above don't make me feel so certain, however.

Dreamweaver users see their bigger market share as proof enough of product superiority. A story on a Ziff-Davis site about the merger included a user comment that “Hopefully, Adobe will be smart and recognize the market share of Dreamweaver in addition to realizing what a powerful tool it is for Web developers.”

We Mac users hear this kind of thing a lot. It's popular (see Windows) so it must be good. Nah. It's sometimes just popular. There's a way to escape being outsold. If you build something as well as a BMW, it doesn't matter how much those Fords outsell your car. GoLive, unfortunately, is no BMW. On its best days, maybe a Mitsubishi Eclipse Spyder. (We own one like the model at left, only in red, and just love its look and driving feel. We're also waiting for enough budget to replace its broken convertible top motors, a chronic component in Spyders of 1998 vintage.)

Companies do business to profit and persevere, goals that demand they prune their tools from time to time. Losing our software bits gives us a way to get ready for life's more meaningful changes: the decline in our health, advancing age, and the loss of all that we love, eventually.

Happy Birthday, My Abby-Gal

My wife Abby celebrates her birthday today. Here she's smiling at the flea market out on Highway 290, while she stocks up on blankets for her new restorative yoga practice. (Details to come soon at her Heartfelt Yoga Web site.) So today Abby has had breakfast in bed, presents still to be unwrapped, a fondue dinner with our friends and family coming up tonight. And sure, a birthday poem from her fella:

At that shiny moment
When you began
so many of us could turn toward
a sweeter chapter of our own story,
know the good part was coming up
over and over again

She's a person who's used her life to make many lives happier, especially mine.

Two Rides, One Day, Both Ways

The hills that rise east of Austin called me this morning, and I answered without too much of a struggle. Today's Hill Country Ride for AIDS led us around Decker Lake, a part of the Colorado River created when the Lower Colorado River Authority dammed up the river both west and east of the city. Decker flows from Lake Long, which is fed by Town Lake (in downtown). Further upstream are (in order) Lake Austin, Lake Travis, Inks Lake, Lake LBJ, Lake Marble Falls and Lake Buchanan. When you're north of Buchanan you're in bald eagle country.

The baddest hill on the Decker Lake ride lifts out of the Decker Creek watershed. It's one of those double-trouble hills, where you do some serious climbing only to find there's an even bigger hill waiting for you once you get to the crest. Today this was 10th gear work, the easiest in the middle ring. Gears 9-1 live on the little ring, which I was afraid I might need again after using it on the way to back to Dripping Springs a few weeks ago. Didn't need it.

Later in the afternoon I did another ride in another direction, out north along Brushy Creek, one of my favorites. What's not to like? No big hills, pretty scenery, 10 minutes from the house, lots of rest stop possibilities, good mileage. I enjoyed it all with Abby. She's back in the saddle after more than a week off, travelling to Philadelphia and back. She looked good out there on the roads, chirping out "Car Back" over and over to warn me of cars ready to pass us on the two-lane Brushy Creek and Sam Bass Roads. I'm happy to have her back after a week of bachelor living. I'm also glad to get two ride sessions into a single day. That's the kind of pace we'll both need to keep for the HCRA ride: A series of 14-to-19-mile rides with pit stops, stretching and lunch in between rides.

6,000 Miles of Smiles

Today's training ride put me over the 6,000-mile mark on my cycle odometer. That's a couple of good years' worth of pedaling, accomplished over about 27 months. Not bad for somebody who was a beginner just two springs ago. I began riding back then with my Schwinn Sprint bike, a 15-year-old relic with just 10 speeds, heavy steel wheels and shift levers on the down tube. When I started my riding in February of 2003 I probably had no more than 500 miles on that bike over 15 years of ownership. That bike was made in the days when 10 speeds were the standard. Even on the 139 miles of my first Hill Country Ride, I didn't need all ten speeds. I surely wanted some lower gears, through.

This morning's training ride carried us Hill Country Riders for AIDS around Brushy Creek's watershed in the southern part of Williamson County. It's one of my favorite rides, starting with a long stretch with the wind usually at our backs, then turning onto rural ranch roads with very little traffic. The road names are sometimes evocative of the history of this part of Texas: Sam Bass Road, named after the outlaw gunslinger; Hairy Man Road, named after, well, probably every cedar chopper who carved a ranch out of the mesquite and juniper trees.

Brushy Creek Road is the highlight of this 16 miles, smooth roadway that follows the Creek and crosses it on two new, wide bridges. No low water crossings on today's route. This year's extraordinary rain has pushed up a torrent of wildflowers, though, the Indian Paintbrushes, bluebonnets and winecups all waving in a gentle breeze. I breezed in at the very back of the pack, sweeping riders who felt challenged by the mileage. We're all someplace along that training and riding path.

It felt good to cross the 6K mark, though. I delayed buying my Allez Comp 27 road bike in 2003 until I could be sure I'd enjoy this. Now the riding seems an essential part of who I am. Volunteering for the HCRA gives me a way to give back. I think of this time of year, leading up to our ride at the end of April, as my holiday season, a time to smile while being generous with time and spirit. Over these two-plus years not all those miles have sparked smiles, but most of them have.

Will 1 Percent Matter for Freedom?

On my birthday next week, April 24, a mega-church in Kentucky will broadcast a show by satellite that will try to makeover injustice with a facelift of freedom. The US Senate Majority Leader is going to take part in Justice Sunday, a show that might reach a million people through the Internet and Christian radio and TV networks. Makeovers are so popular these days. But we ought to leave that entertainment to trashed-out backyards and bungalows. Freedom looks pretty good without the circus makeup of religious fervor on its face.

Everybody has a right to an opinion and the right to express it. The Justice Sunday opinion tries to make civil liberty sound like thievery, and intolerance sound like a birthright. Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council trumpets his side's narrow victories in recent elections. Now he hungers to cut the courts off at the knees, too. "For years activist courts, aided by liberal interest groups like the ACLU, have been quietly working under the veil of the judiciary, like thieves in the night, to rob us of our Christian heritage and our religious freedoms."

I live in Texas, and I'm well aware of how these "freedoms" look. Like some thugs' idea of freedom to drag a man to his death behind a pickup in a small Texas town, just because the man is black. Or our bike ride in two weeks to raise funds for AIDS charities — money for people who are sick and dying — a ride that needs to keep its route secret until ride day, because people came out to heckle the riders and protest the charity fundraiser.

Freedom means the permission to live a life that doesn't hurt anyone else. It's not a blank check to squash people who have different sexual preferences or beliefs about the right to life, to push them down with the weight of What My God Says Is So.

We're lucky that Justice Sunday has a reach so small. A million people is less than one percent of last year's voters. And face it, this Sabbath Day hate-fest is really not preaching to anybody but their own choir.

The rally hopes to pump up public support for ending the right to filibuster over the appointment of judges. The right has been working for more than 200 years. Now that the right-wing has packed the Senate with a majority, it's ready to remake our courts. This is the "nuclear" option talked about for months now. (That's kind of like the word "nook-kew-lure" we hear from our President. Great picture of W's grandfather at that nuclear link, sleeping on a cot during a 60s filibuster against civil rights. I guess the Bush fruit has fallen far from the tree by now.)

The fallout from this political nuclear blast has a half-life that might extend into half of what's left of my life, and yours too. Bad law is a real tar pit to escape.

Bill Frist, that Senate leader, needs to re-read the separation of church and state articles in the US Consitution, not the bible in the Justice Sunday ads. The constitution's that big document he swore to protect when his constituents gave him his job. If he wants to preach next Sunday, he ought to return to a job serving his God. He shouldn't be able to use that gavel in the ad to beat down the rights of people who don't share his faith or his preferences.

Art to Make a Double Take

Art, like beauty, can exist in the eye of the beholder, an experience I eyed in a darkened gallery today. Austin hosted Between You and Me, an exhibit of 14 videos that could really prompt some double takes. A woman eats drywall in extreme close up, gnawing like an insect. Fierce dogs bark straight on at a camera. A man meditates to the sound of a washing machine. Microphones are rubbed on faces in close up.

I walked through the exhibit at Arthouse, a contemporary gallery down on Congress and Seventh, then wrote part of a scene inspired by eight minutes of video of a woman blowing bubbles with gum. It was an Artist's Date in the style of The Artist's Way, one way to feed the muse of imagination.

Now I Know What the Bleep

My friend Laurie screened "What the Bleep Do We Know!?" for me today, and I had an out-of-consciousness experience. My friend Ron, a dedicated Buddhist, raved about the movie when it was in theatres last fall. The film broke into double-digit millions during its theatrical run, extraordinary for a documentary. The Washington Post said the picture might have even more buzz as a DVD:

When the DVD of "What the Bleep Do We Know!?" hit the market [in mid-March], it did so after earning more than $10 million in theaters over the past year and a half and trailing only "The Incredibles" among preorders on Amazon.com.

So Amazon got my $20.99 today, because the movie is deep with ideas about what we think of as reality. Too many to recount here, but my favorite was this one:

"I take a few minutes in the morning before I get up to create my day in my mind. I infect the Quantum field with these thoughts. Then I see how my world can show me a sign today that it's paid attention to any one of the things I created, and bring them to me in a way I won't expect — so I'm surprised, and have no doubt next time I can create my day."

Laurie, Larisa and I spent three hours watching the 107-minute movie, rewinding to hear things again and talking about it. Some call it pop science, others propaganda as pointed as Farenheit 911. But any movie that can combine dance-hall favorite "Zombie Nation" with a Polish wedding has got to be worth a look. Quantum physics can really rock, and rock your world.

Double Ws in Double Overtime

Double overtime victory.

Twice, in two consecutive nights.

On the road, no less.

It's never been done in the NBA before tonight. But my Spurs pulled off the back-to-back sweep against the hottest team in the league. They did it without All-Star Tim Duncan, too.

It's the most hopeful weekend us Spurs fans have enjoyed in quite awhile. Not like the Saturday night in San Antonio with the hot Denver Nuggets handed the Spurs their third home loss of the season. (And last home loss of the year, I hope. Next Saturday will tell that tale, against the Spurs' possible first-round playoff opponents, the Memphis Grizzlies.)

Maybe what was sweetest about these two overtime wins on the road was the play of one key veteran on the floor, Robert Horry. He's had a lot of important shots late in games during the past. But this weekend he made his first two late-game three-balls that mattered to the Spurs, a team he joined in 2003 after leaving the Lakers. Big Shot Bob, as he's called, sank a three-pointer to send the game into OT tonight. The Spurs then beat the Warriors, who'd won eight straight, after 10 more minutes. Last night Horry sank the three-pointer in the second overtime to win the game in the Staples Center against the Clippers.

Maybe last night he felt some comfort in shooting at Staples, where he won his fifth title ring with the Lakers.

The road wins have been tough for the Spurs this year. Without these overtime victories this weekend, the Spurs would only be a .500 team away from home.

Horry is getting his shots because Duncan has been hurt. With our big man coming back this week, the Spurs might have found the handle on putting the ball in the hoop. When a guy like Horry, with five championship rings, starts finding his shooting rhythm, the future looks brighter, even in the dark of the Texas night.

Spurs beat writer Johnny Ludden of the San Antonio Express-News gave Horry's heroics a flourish:

With one more ankle having given way and their season poised to take another turn for the worse as Sunday morning closed hard on Saturday night, the Spurs put the ball in the hands of Manu Ginobili and let him go to work.

When that wasn’t enough, they turned to Big Shot Bob.

And Big Block Bob.

Robert Horry, whose late-game heroics have made him a favorite of the locals here, buried a 3-pointer with 22.2 seconds left then stuffed Mikki Moore at the rim just before the final buzzer as the Spurs outlasted the Los Angeles Clippers 125-124 in double overtime at Staples Center.

“We all know he can hit those kind of shots, but the defensive play he made was unbelievable,” Ginobili said. “He gave us the win.”

Now I can get some rest. Two overtimes in two nights from the West Coast kept me wide awake in the wee hours, hunched over my radio listening to Bill Schoening's masterful call on WOAI. Nothing like double-overtime to get your heart rate up. Here come the playoffs.

Round That Mountain

We made our way across Round Mountain in Travis County this morning, our last long ride of the training season for the Hill Country Ride for AIDS. Today I convened the ride, making a little speech off the back of a pickup truck bed. As I climbed up the bed I joked, "When you're as short as I am, you get used to standing on top of things to be heard."

It was a good turnout, so nearly 100 riders had already pedalled off by the time I'd gotten on the saddle. I led from the rear, sweeping the sagging riders, answering my cell phone as riders and SAG drivers called for help. I helped fix a flat with Ron Wilcox, more field change experience. We had to make up the route along the way after a detour kept us from crossing a railroad track at the appointed location. Improvising, a Walgreens drug store took the place of a more familiar gas station pit stop. Round Mountain is beautiful but really rural, so bathroom options become only bushes for nearly 15 miles of the 43-plus we rode today.





The roads in this part of the Hill Country sport lots of gravel, the kind of soft spots that can lead to spills and road rash afterward. Jacob was nursing along a fresh rash on an elbow as he worked to finish the course. I still haven't spilled that bad in nearly 6,000 miles, but a crash is a part of everybody's ride, given enough miles. Jacob showed great grit in carrying grit around on that elbow all morning.

We had to cross back into Williamson County before we spotted the wildflowers in any abundance. A sharp south wind in the teens pushed down our pace, especially the last six miles back to Brushy Creek. But I felt strong and able today. Didn't need to get into my smallest front chain ring at all, not like last week out in Dripping Springs. Felt good enough to come home and mow a couple of lawns.

LP Laughter for a Song

My brother Bob sent me a laugh track today from the past, a cut from the Allan Sherman comedy LP "My Son, The Celebrity." Sherman is part of our family's past, a relic of my dad's love of comedians. Everybody loves comics, I suppose. But when you wrestle with demons like dad did, laughing out loud must have provided an exquisite release.

Sherman was a celebrity for about seven years, starting with a 1962 album that JFK allegedly loved. Sherman couldn't quite manage 50 years on earth before he died of emphysema. Must have smoked like a chimney, common behavior for funny men of the 50s and 60s. His best known song was Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah" done to the tune of "Dance of the Hours."

Bob's track came to me from Rhapsody, an online music service that competes with Apple's iTunes but denies Mac users any chance of using it. (Yeah, go figure out that business model.) You can stream Rhapsody's music or pay by the tune to burn it (99 cents). There's another option (ahem) where you capture the stream in a file on your computer for no extra charge, then make something you can burn yourself. I don't know if Allan's heirs would mind so much. Comic lyrics like these below, set to the tune "Alouette", surely must have a finite earning potential:

Al 'n' Yetta love to watch Loretta
When she enters through her fancy door.
They just love The Real McCoys,
Walter Cronkite and The Bowery Boys.

If you're younger than 30, you probably don't get any of those references except Walter. That's the upside of getting old: your hit rate on jokes gets higher all the time.

Bob sent me his MP3 file through yousendit.com, a file transfer holding service. If your mail service chokes on a big file, they can pass it along for you. They provide the gigabytes of disk, you provide the media files, you see a few ads along the way. Free, right? So much on the Internet is free, or appears to be. Or next to free, like the pennies-a-track songs on Russian site allofmp3.com. (Look for the "English" link on the top left if it pops up with Cyrillic letters). Those rascally Russians, always busting the capitalists' chops.

A Night in AAA-Minor

Tonight the batters' lightning didn't strike for the Astros' farm team like it did for the big league club yesterday. The Round Rock Express launched their first season in Triple-A ball, that level of launch and landing pad for major leaguers coming up or falling back. Minor-league baseball has been in the Austin area since 2000 at the fine Dell Diamond ballpark at left, but this is the first year we get to watch the prospects and players on the way to the Show, or hoping to get a leg back up.

The Express outfield actually fielded more major-league seasons of experience tonight than the Astros started yesterday in their outfield. That would indicate these guys might be on their way down, rather than up. The player introductions, which seemed to go on forever, included plenty of details about which major-league clubs each Express player had played on during seasons past. The local paper noted a typical example of an up-again, down-again player, Trenidad Hubbard:

The oldest player on the team, Hubbard was drafted by Houston in 1986, when teammate Taylor Buchholz was 4. Hubbard has played for 17 minor-league teams, six major-league teams, and one Mexican team. The center fielder showed he's still got it; in Round Rock's exhibition against Houston, he threw out Willy Taveras at home plate.

The movie Bull Durham is the best film to describe life in the minors, where people like the Durham Bulls' Crash Davis have "been to the Show" before returning to the bushes, still hoping to get back. But you have to hustle to get to the show. If you don't you could get an earful like this (click on the console to play the clip):

We sat, Abby and I, and Ron Wilcox and his wife Sue, along the first base-side, just like at the Astros game. But our $11 tickets got us a hundred feet closer to the action on the field. Triple-A is the best value in baseball: Major-league talent at minor-league prices. Everybody on the field is just one phone call away from the big bucks of the big leagues. Or a spiral down, of course. One Express worker grinned when we talked about the AAA upgrade the team has gotten. "Yeah," she said, "this year we don't have to sell them on the AA-level player: 'No drunks coming down from the majors, folks. Just kids moving up.' "

Tonight the game began like the Astros's win did yesterday, becoming a 1-0 squeaker that Round Rock led after five innings. The Express' Ezequiel Astacio had allowed only three base runners, but in the sixth he collapsed, giving up a homer, a double and two singles that were all hit at the right times in the right places. Omaha's Royals batted around and the Express lost its sixth straight home opener. (Last year's Double-A team, relocated as the Corpus Christi Hooks, did no better, losing to a walkoff homer down in San Antonio.) The Express had its chances, but couldn't put the hits together.

The Austin area might be honing its taste for baseball. The facility is first-rate, as good or better than lots of major league parks, but on a smaller scale. (Hey, Minute Maid Park in Houston didn't even have cup holders for its first three seasons. It's not about the baseball, but the beverages!) But tonight's opener only drew 9,620 -- the Dell Diamond holds more than 11,000 -- and lots of those seats were empty after the pitching meltdown. The Express is going to a run-challenged team this year, by the scouts' accounts. They managed eight hits but only the one run. Like the Spurs, they have to survive on their defense.

A Major League Day

I launched my MLB season today from the first base-side seats at Minute Maid Park in Houston. Great game, really worth the $41 the Astros wanted for a rematch with their postseason nemesis, the Cardinals. The Cards had just kept the Astros out of the World Series last fall, so the rematch this spring was all about who had improved more. Andy Pettitte was making his first start on the mound after last summer's arm surgery, so hopes were high in the park with the roof open on a stunning spring afternoon. It's April in Texas, so the moist Gulf air hasn't made Houston the dismal summer swamp it always becomes.

Pettitte — the first pitcher since Babe Ruth to post a winning record in every one of his 10 seasons — had a rough 2004. The trouble began last year on Pettitte's very first National League at bat. The righthander had always been an American League pitcher up to last year, so he only had 28 at-bats over his first nine seasons. He didn't even bat at all in 1995, 1996 or 1997. That's what the Designated Hitter is for. Feh, American League ball.

In this National League park last year, Pettitte tore a muscle in his pitching arm during his first plate appearance. He wasn't right for the rest of that year, managing only a 6-4 record before he went under the knife in August. Today he looked ready to repay the promise Houston paid for with an $8.5 million contract. 71 pitches, 47 strikes, 3 strikeouts. Only one home run marred a low-speed, high control day. Walked none. Bagwell and Biggio, Houston's redoubtable Bs, combined to give Pettitte a run to start with. He left after six strong innings with the game tied 1-1. Into the eighth, a 1-1 tie. Shades of 1968 baseball, a real throwback.

Then the Cardinals bullpen blew up and surrendered three runs in the bottom of the eighth. Houston touched up Julian Tavarez, who wears the Dirtiest Cap in the Major Leagues. The right-hand side of the bill is a high-funk area by mid-April, because the man grabs that bill between every pitch. Some say there's been more than sweat on that bill. Toss in the high emotion Tavarez brings to his job — he broke his hand in a fit during the 2004 NL Championship series after giving up a homer to an Astros slugger — and the Astros fans were delerious with joy as their team sent him to the showers.

Then Houston's lights-out reliever, Brad Lidge, came on to put the Cardinal batters in their place. Ledge set the place on edge when he walked the first batter, then set down the side in just 10 pitches. Houston entered the win column for the first time in 2005, tied with the Cardinals' record at 1-1. All of this put my Cincinnatti Reds into first place with a 2-0 record. A short stay for the Reds, I suspect. But April baseball is all about promise. Pettitte delivered on his, even if he didn't have his speed up yet. At times the pitch display reported things like "82 MPH Fastball," as if such a thing existed.

Pulitzers Prized from the Past

Yesterday the 2005 Pulitzer winners were announced, and the experts at Poynter were only surprised by a few. Hardly anyone was surprised because a group of judges leaked the results, according to Poynter's report.

This year featured another small-market feel-good winner in Investigative Reporting, the prize which shows the kind of "All the President's Men" moxie. Last year the paper in my birthplace, the Toledo Blade, won in Investigative for an expose on the Tiger Force. This year's winner was an even smaller paper, the Willamette Week, a weekly in Portland, Ore. that reported the state's governor had molested his 14-year-old babysitter almost 30 years ago.

Both papers who have won this award since 2004 mined the past. It seems to be a compelling playground for Pulitzer winners. The Blade's series also focused on misdeeds committed more than three decades ago. The Willamette Week won against The New York Times, revealing that thousands of vulnerable American soldiers were exploited by some insurance companies, investment firms and lenders, and The Des Moines Register for an expose of injustice in the handling of traffic tickets by public officials.

In my novel I've got a Pulitzer winner who uncovers misdeeds in camps that house plague victims, 20 years from now. I can only hope that by then the bar for investigative impact rises above traffic tickets and babysitters. The bigger papers seem to be reaching for current day misdeeds.

The literature winner Marilynne Robinson won for her second novel, Gilead, "a hymn of praise and lamentation to the God-haunted existence that Reverend Ames loves passionately, and from which he will soon part." Abolition, the Civil War and spirit mixed together across generations. Another reach toward the past.

In Drama, the fellow who wrote the Moonstruck screenplay and won an Oscar for it nabbed a Pulitzer for his latest play. John Patrick Shanley won for "Doubt." But it too is set in the past, 1964.

Half-Mast for a Pope

Today's 14-MPH winds snapped flags to attention out on Parmer Lane, the route I cycle with Ron Wilcox in the evenings for HCRA training. I was surprised to see that the flag stood at half-mast, in respect for the Pope who'd died on Saturday.

Here's a man beloved by millions, but well outside of being a head of state. He is the Church, which my country has aimed to keep separate from the State.

I say that as a former constituent of John Paul's. I was reared Catholic in Toledo, Ohio. Baptized at the tiny wooden church on Summit Street in Point Place (below) just a few miles south of the Michigan state line. Just north of that line our great-grandfather set up housekeeping after he'd left his priesthood and married his housekeeper. That's a picture of Father Joseph, who immigrated across the Atlantic from Alsace-Loraine, near the French-German border. He spawned a doctor, who fathered my dad, an engineer. We grew up Catholic because of dad's family, which included his cousin Father Paul, and another cousin Pat, who'd tried the seminary and wound up teaching Latin at Catholic high schools, including mine, Central Catholic.

By the time my dad died the Catholic church played no role in our lives. I'd been an altar boy in the 60s, but there was too much authority in a 1900-year-old institution for a teenaged boy. My father's funeral didn't even take place in a Catholic church. His death was marked at a Protestant church — that's what us Sixties Catholics always called the other side of the spiritual fence — in Point Place, a United Church of Christ where my mom and sister Tina had found their spirits lifted up. (Tina's still key to the congregation; she runs the church's youth group.) The only flag on my father's funeral day was folded into the traditional triangle for the fallen Catholic who'd served in the Navy.

I called up my father's resentment of the church for an instant when I saw that flag on Parmer Lane. Pope John Paul took office the same year dad died, 1978, and the pontiff served the third-longest term of any pope. Some have celebrated him as a man for modern times, a former actor, philosopher, scholar, poet, and author, according to another Catholic's column at Poynter.org. But John Paul hasn't changed much about the Catholic church for women like Tina or my mom. Their reproductive rights remain in limbo, I suppose, outdated thinking that enables the violence at American reproductive clinics. Catholics Against Kerry probably helped Bush win another term. Paul, and the 113 Cardinals he appointed, had a hand in that. (Catholics Against Kerry has closed its Web site. Mission accomplished, as our president would say.)

So it's not a surprise that the leader of one of the biggest slices of the US population — 67 million Catholics, in a Catholic News tally — gets the half-mast treatment alongside the highway. The next pope probably doesn't have much chance of being a man who will change the rights of women. My Aunt Lottie's fortune from a Toledo millinery business and Depression-era stock went to John Paul's Church. Ultimately the proceeds from selling our family's lakefront cottage went there, too. It might have taken the Greatest Generation women in my family to unfurl respect like that.

New Kids on an Old Trail

Today I rode the roads between Dripping Springs and Johnson City, a pair of archetypical Hill Country Towns. This HCRA training ride is one of my favorites, even though it’s among the hardest rides of the spring. We started in Dripping Springs at the administration building just off US 290, but crossed over to Country Road 190, known to the locals as Creek Road because it follows Onion Creek. This stretch is a microcosm of ranch life in Texas, dotted with a sheep farm, stands of cattle and miles and miles of goats.

We rode out on a Sunday morning that would include wind as a major character, mostly blowing from the south. This county road is sheltered from the winds by the ridge that runs down to the creek, though, and the course flows mostly downhill for the first four miles. We crossed the creek twice before riding up alongside the goat ranch, where a mother goat — that’s a doe — had just finished delivering her two kids for the year. Most does give birth in the spring, and it’s an economical arrangement: Does have two teats, instead of the four we see on cows.

The tiny kids were striving toward those teats, then pausing to be licked clean by their mother. Ellen, one of our ride leader co-chairs, had taken her camera along and got this great photo:

The ride’s hard work, 54 miles of it, presented itself almost right after the happy delivery. Abby pulled off the road with a flat just past the Henly volunteer fire station, so I got more practice changing tires. Then we both powered down US 290 for a mile or so, cars whizzing past our shoulders on a highway that didn’t have much shoulder. We turned up FM 3232, starting the long roll down the hill that leads to more work climbing out of the beds of creeks : Flat, Miller, Rough Hollow (which left me feeling both, after I’d crossed both going out and coming back.)

I lost Abby to the SAG truck after 13 miles on the ride. She’d done a great 20-miler the day before at the Rosedale Ride. Riding back-to-back days is part of our training, practice that can wear you out your first time. She pitched in on SAG duty for the rest of the morning and afternoon, dispensing peanut butter Clif bars and her usual, ample complement of good cheer.

I pulled into the admin parking lot after 2, a full five hours-plus on our hilliest training terrain. I had done well in hard winds on the return, avoided sunburn, encouraged other riders in a stab at some leadership. This was the first time for Abby on this trail, a road which now feels like an old friend to me. But this was the first bike ride where I saw a newborn alongside the road. In the Hill Country, lots of things bloom in the spring.

Dodging Bullets in Writing

Please, how about fewer bullets in our communications, okay? I can accept the fact that Microsoft's PowerPoint serves as a writing tool for a lot of business people. But there's something wrong with thinking that an outliner can lay out ideas with the efficiency, elegance and economy of a good sentence.

Amid a little good advice on writing blog entries, B.L. Ochman gives us this misguided gem:

"Use bullets whenever you can."

Puh-leeze.
Has good writing become an anathema to the Playstation generation? Ochman tells us in a breathless Web page that "The Internet has rendered traditional made-for-print press releases obsolete." Goes on to say that editors won't read a press release written by someone who's learned their skills since 1996. That you should forget what you've learned about business writing if you took a degree before 1990.

Wow, can you really teach me how to write like that? I'm not in my 30s anymore, and I don't watch reality TV — which might be the inspiration for Ochman's "Reality PR." (Oops, forgot to put the trademark symbol next to it. Who knows who might want to borrow that catchy phrase.)

Visit Ochman's own blog and count the number of bullets in her blog entries. You won't even need one finger to tally them all.

Writing is writing, and TV is TV. Try not to mix them up. Don't keel-haul the English language with the sloth that trades good sentences for fragments. Say what you mean with the least number of words. Branch to the right with verbs at the front of sentences. For a genuine primer on writing, check out Poynter Online's series of columns by Roy Peter Clark. He wrote "Fifty Writing Tools," and the only bullets in that great series are the list of tools that close out each column. Bite the bullet. Write a sentence whenever you can.

"I Do" with Pineapple and BBQ

Today Abby and I saw our friend Stan Pasquale get married for the first time at age 56. He grew up in Hawaii and relocated to Texas years ago, working for a software company that was part of my beat on the HP Chronicle. That was back in the 1980s, so long ago that everybody was stunned that Stan would be tying the knot for the first time after all those years. The wedding date — April Fool's Day — just made it even more interesting.

Stan got married at White River Studios, the movie and entertainment facility our friends own out on the Blanco River. He and his bride Coreen stood in front of tiki torches with the sunset and the river behind them to exchange vows. Stan waited a long time for this — he's uncle to a young woman he helped raise for several teen-aged years, a woman at least in her 20s when she stood up to act as mistress of ceremonies at the reception. When he finally rose at the end of a string of speeches delivered from the long dais at the head of the room, Stan got misty-eyed with the happiness he pledged to his wife. She assured us all she "would take good care of Stan."

The lovely thing about weddings is that they can bring tears to all of our eyes. We get swept away by the memory of our own happy day, when love was full of the promise it will take years to realize.

The reception featured pineapple carried on the plane from the fields in Hawaii by Stan's family, as well as brisket cooked right at the Studios, a nine-hour labor of love. We drove into the same Hill Country we will be riding on Sunday. The studios rest at the bottom of a huge hill I managed to climb in 2003 on my first Hill Country Ride for AIDS. It's wildflower season in Texas, a bumper crop from what I spied alongside the roads on the way out. You never can tell when love will bloom here, either.