2021 mileage: 1593.2
This morning while riding our stationary bike (beginning just past 6:30), I watched the 1997 movie Titanic. My reason for choosing this lengthy film (3+ hours) was that I wanted to do a long ride, and it enabled that! 42.2 miles, in 3 hours and 6 minutes.
2021 mileage: 1551.0
Today on the stationary bike, I rode a solid 2 hours (27.9 miles). First, I watched the second half of the movie South Pacific, which I had begun yesterday, and which contains the following song (ahead of its time, I think):
"You've Got to be Carefully Taught"
Then after this, for the second hour, I did a virtual ride on the Great Canyon Road in France.
2021 mileage: 1523.1
Today I backed off, and settled for a mere 90-minute ride. While I pedaled, I watched the 1958 Rodgers and Hammerstein movie musical South Pacific. I waffled, trying to decide whether to finish the movie today (it would have been a bit over an hour more), but in the end, finally decided to do that tomorrow, so that I could turn back to composition today.
One thing that highly interested me about the movie was to see that a leading character (Luther Billis) was played by an actor who was very familiar to me—Ray Walston. He played the title role (“Uncle Martin”, as shown in the following picture) on the light television science fiction comedy My Favorite Martian of the early to mid-sixties, to which I was addicted as a boy. It surprised me because (foolishly) I had no idea that his career had included any other roles than the Martian.
2021 mileage: 1501.9
This morning, I did a good, solid, three-hour ride (40.9 miles, which put me over a new mileage milestone for the year -- 1500). First I watched the movie musical Oklahoma, which I had begun yesterday .. but today, rather than restarting it from where I left off, I returned to the beginning and watched the entire thing.
Then for the final 45 minutes, I did a virtual ride at Lake Tahoe (in the Sierra Nevada, straddling the line between California and Nevada), which enabled me to complete most of the loop around the lake.
2021 mileage: 1460.2
During today's ride (27.1 miles in 2 hours), I continued my survey of classic movie musicals, first finishing up the final hour and ten minutes of The King and I (1956) which I didn't finish yesterday, and then I watched the first hour or so of Oklahoma (1955). I had intended to do a much longer ride today, but instead, like yesterday, I allowed myself to be lured away by the desire to return to composing on the big project that's currently engaging me.
2021 mileage: 1433.1
During today's ride, I watched another classic movie musical: The King and I (1956 film of an Oscar Hammerstein musical). I had planned to watch the entire movie (2:13), but as I got into it, I found myself terribly eager to return to composition, to work out some ideas that had occurred to me in connection with a big project I'm undertaking. So I cut my ride short, ending it after one hour (14.7 miles), and will finish up that movie tomorrow.
2021 mileage: 1418.4
Passed another mileage milestone for the year today (1400), as I did another 3-hour ride (41.5 miles). During the ride, I watched My Fair Lady, which is one of my very favorite musicals, though I had forgotten that, as it has been quite a few years since I had seen it. The movie comes from 1964, and contains many absolutely delightful songs, including one of my very favorite, On the Street Where You Live.
I learned it, appropriately, when visiting my former wife, Deb, long before we were married, at her parents' house in Minnesota (on the street where she lived), and would sit at the grand piano of her mother Shirley, happily reading through music (both playing and singing it). Today, though I can no longer sing, I happily moved my mouth along with the words in memory, as the tears flowed down.
2021 mileage: 1376.9
Today I got back to a good, solid ride, pedaling briskly from 6:30 to 9:30. In those 3 hours, I chalked up 43.1 miles.
For the first 75 minutes, I did a virtual ride in Norway, where the scenery was much as I remembered it from our July 2019 trip there. I was on a road that mostly ran beside a fjord (a fjord being "a long, narrow inlet of the sea between high cliffs, as in Norway and Iceland, typically formed by submergence of a glaciated valley"), with blue sky but occasional clouds drifting in and out of the surrounding mountains.
Then for the latter hour and 45 minutes, I watched a movie that Michelle and I like very much: 2017's The Greatest Showman.
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2021 mileage: 1333.6
This morning I settled for quite a short ride (18.8 miles, in 1:21). At first, I planned to watch In the Heights, an early musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator of the hit musical Hamilton. But the dialogue of this 2018 performance was unintelligible, and as much of the charm of rap music comes in its verbal felicity, I decided a couple of minutes in that I just couldn't do it. So I switched and watched Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella.
A couple of weeks ago, I had watched the 1965 color television production of it with Leslie Ann Warren in the title role, that had so charmed me as a boy. But today I found a treasure. CBS had broadcast (in black and white, of course) a live performance of it on March 31, 1957. (On that date, I was precisely 2 weeks old, having been born March 17. Needless to say, I don't remember the broadcast. 😎)
Julie Andrews plays the title role; and provides a more current introduction to the broadcast at the beginning. This was years before she starred in Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music, so it is quite a treat to see her younger. The production (available on YouTube) is a kinescope—a recording of a television program on motion picture film.
2021 mileage: 1313.8
After yesterday enjoying one of Gene Kelly's two big musical hit movies (Singing in the Rain, 1952), I decided to watch the other today (An American in Paris, 1951), and this enabled me to do a two-hour ride (25.8 miles), which is shorter than I like, but still not inconsiderable.
The following excellent advice appeared yesterday in the Facebook group Cycling Over Sixty:
2021 mileage: 1288.0
This morning I settled for a shorter ride (22.7 miles, 1:43), while watching the 1952 classic, Singing in the Rain.
2021 mileage: 1265.3
I am indescribably grateful for our stationary bike right now, as the coldest stretch of weather in years has descended on us here in Ann Arbor. Last night (early this morning) it plummeted to -16°, and this afternoon it has heated clear up to a balmy 19° right now (at 4:00 p.m.).
During my ride this afternoon (3 hours, 41.1 miles), I continued with my survey of classic movie musicals, watching the 1971 film version of Fiddler on the Roof. And at the song Far from the Home I Love, memories swept over me.
After Michelle began her music education degree at Michigan State, she finished it at Olivet College, where I taught. And as part of her scholarship requirements, she had to take voice lessons and sing on a student recital. As the teacher of voice lessons, I taught her, and she did this song in recital. As she was primarily an instrumentalist, I recall her saying how nervous it made her to be standing out on the stage without a music stand in front of her. 😎
2021 mileage: 1224.2
During today's ride (150 minutes, 34.1 miles), I watched the 1961 movie West Side Story, whose brilliant music by Leonard Bernstein I have known and loved for nearly half a century, though I had never before seen the movie. This helped to propel me past a new mileage milestone, too (1200 for the year).
2021 mileage: 1190.1
I was impressed once again today with a tremendous sense of gratitude for our stationary bike, as I had to do some errands early this afternoon, and saw how snow-covered and unridable the sidewalks and trails in our area are.
This morning, I rode 2:09 (27.7 miles), watching the movie Carousel (I returned to my survey of classic movie musicals).
2021 mileage: 1162.4
Today began early. Unable to sleep well (as always), I got up and rode for 2 hours, beginning at 3:45 a.m., while watching the movie The Way. This 2010 film, starring Martin Sheen, was recommended to me a couple of years ago by my friend Steve Johgart, and is about a journey on the Camino, or pilgrimage, to Santiago de Compostela in Spain.
2021 mileage: 1135.7
This morning on NPR, I heard an interesting item on the book Another Day's Begun: Thornton Wilder's Our Town in the 21st Century. Realizing with a start that I had never seen this renowned classic, I decided to see if there was a movie version of it available on YouTube. Indeed there was—a very fine 1977 production featuring Hal Holbrook. So I watched this during my late morning ride.
I rode for a solid 2 hours, covering 26.1 miles.
2021 mileage: 1109.6
This afternoon, I rode 2 hours and 11 minutes on the stationary bike (doing 32.0 miles in 2:11, while breaking another mileage milestone for the year), while watching the movie Shadowllands, released late in 1993 (just after I got out of my 6-month plus stay in the hospital. It has to do with an episode late in the life of my favorite author, C.S. Lewis (1898-1963). In the early fifties, he met an American author, Helen Joy Gresham, when she was visiting England. The movie (in which Anthony Hopkins plays Lewis) deals with the development of their relationship, their eventual marriage, and her death from cancer, and the way Lewis had to come to grips with that.
2021 mileage: 1077.6
Today I scaled way back, and did a mere (but brisk) two-hour ride on our stationary bike (32.8 miles). For the first half of it, I watched Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, a popular and sparkling musical, in a production of which my son John played Josep over two decades ago.
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat - Jacob and Sons
Then for the latter part of the ride, I went to California, and did a virtual ride in San Francisco, which began downtown and then took me across the Golden Gate Bridge. There is a dedicated walkway so that on the bridge, one need contend with other riders and with pedestrians, but not with vehicular traffic.
2021 mileage: 1044.8
Our nephew Ben works as a nurse at University Hospital here in town, and he worked overnight last night and again tonight. This picture of Ben and his wife Katie with my mother ("Grandma Hellie") is from their wedding in May 2017.
Because of his work schedule, Ben asked us if he could stay with us today and sleep. As the futon where he will be is in our 'Blue Room,' which also houses the stationary bike, I knew I'd have to ride early today if I wanted to get one in, so I just got up about 4:15, and was on the bike from 4:40 till 7:40 (42.7 miles).
I am working my way through a list I've compiled of classic movie musicals, and during today's ride I watched Guys and Dolls. This 1955 movie is undeniably dated, but still, enjoyable to watch. I remembered the story somewhat because they had done the musical at Emerson back in 2006, with Michelle serving as music director.
Anyway, this good solid ride today helped me to kick down the big mileage milestone (1000) that yesterday's ride had left me just short of.
2021 mileage: 1002.3
I scaled back today, and only did a two-and-a-half hour ride instead of the three hours I did both Sunday and yesterday. It put me over 1000 miles for the year, and I am delighted to now have the opportunity to ride on our stationary cycle ... today is (atypically) sunny, but when I began my ride at 1 p.m., it was a nippy 19° (though now it has soared all the way to 22°). However, colder temps await us ... by 4 a.m. tomorrow, it's supposed to be down to 5°.
Yesterday I wrote (and posted on my Facebook page) the following brief scrap of relevant doggerel:
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For my virtual ride today, I went to Italy and enjoyed a brilliantly sunny ride through the hills of the Tyrolean area (the northern part of the country). Thought: I wonder if Italians hold their foot up and point to it to show where they live, the way we Michiganders do with our hand to show where we live in the Mitten. 😎
2021 mileage: 961.3
Today I did a 3-hour ride (44.7 miles) on our stationary bike for a second straight day. I decided to do a virtual ride on part of the route for the Tour de France. The entire video is just shy of 4 hours long, but I felt that would be a bit too much of a project to attempt, so I scaled back to do only 3 hours. 😎
Tour de France route virtual ride
Also, today's ride put the odometer on the bike over 1000 miles, since Michelle and I did our first ride on it, on New Year's Day. But of the 1026 miles on it so far, she has undoubtedly done the majority of them, since I am so sluggish. 🤣
2021 mileage: 916.6
Since I am never able to sleep in anyway, I decided I might as well put the time to good use today, and so got up and rode our stationary bike from 4:30 to 7:30 a.m. This nice lengthy ride allowed me to watch the movie version of the musical Les Misérables; and at a ride of 44.1 miles, it put me over a new mileage milestone for the year (900).
2021 mileage: 871.5
This afternoon I did a brisk 1:52 ride on our stationary bike (27.7 miles), watching two very enjoyable pieces of video.
The first was a 10-minute video clip that I learned about through our Facebook group St. Olaf Choir Alumni. First it must be said that to make choral music my life's work had been my goal since the age of 16, and thus I was a proud member of the St. Olaf Choir (St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota), in the late nineteen-seventies. The St. Olaf Choir is arguably the country's finest college choir, rich with tradition and influence in the development of choral singing in America. This was an interview from public television in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis/St. Paul), with Dr. Anton Armstrong, my longtime friend and my neighbor in the baritone section of the choir during 1976-78.
Interview with Anton Armstrong
After this, I watched another science fiction romantic movie (like yesterday), this one from 1980, the year after I graduated from St. Olaf—Somewhere in Time. But today's movie had the beauty of having been filmed here in my beloved Michigan, on Mackinac Island.
In the following clip, the male lead, Richard Collier (played by Christopher Reeve) first sees the beautiful portrait of Elise McKenna (played by Jane Seymour). The later part of it backed by the lush strains of Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, which appears several times in the movie.
During my student days at St. Olaf College, I worked at WCAL, an NPR station on campus. The station started on November 23, 1918, when several students and their professor in a physics class broadcast a coded message from the campus to a home in Northfield. These students kept experimenting and added voice transmissions to their radio broadcasts. What resulted was WCAL, which was officially licensed by the U.S. government on May 6, 1922.
At any rate, this iconically beautiful music by Rachmaninoff was our theme music for a very popular morning program of classical music that we presented, "Top of the Day."
2021 mileage: 843.8
Last night we received the most severe winter weather we have experienced here in Ann Arbor, Michigan in two or three years. Several inches of snow, and increasingly cold temperatures made me extremely glad for our stationary cycle! When I began this morning at just past 10:00, it was 16°, and now at just past 1:00, though it is brightly sunny (an unusual winter feature for Michigan), it is 18° with a wind-chill of about zero.
Anyway, I decided to begin my ride with some southern warmth, and went to the Lone Star State to ride virtually for an hour on a trail which mostly runs beside the Colorado River in Austin, Texas. The video, however, was taken by a runner, and has no music added, so the accompanying sound track takes me back over a decade, to when I could still run (or, as a more athletically gifted friend likes to say, I would "run"), with the sound of footfalls and labored breathing.
Then for the latter part of my ride, I watched a movie my daughter had recommended to me a couple of years ago. She made this recommendation knowing full well of my lifetime fondness for science fiction—the 2015 romantic fantasy movie The Age of Adaline is about a woman born in 1908, who experiences a unique and remarkable medical condition at age 29 that stops her aging, and it ends with her 2015 death in a car accident, still looking as though she is in her twenties.
At any rate, this combination allowed me to ride (virtually) 38.3 miles, in 2:44.
2021 mileage: 805.5
I could have ridden outside today, had I wanted to bundle up and brave the 30° conditions. But instead, I chose to stay warm and ride our stationary bike.
Having yesterday watched Mary Poppins during my ride, today I watched Mary Poppins Returns, the long-awaited and greatly anticipated sequel to the 1964 classic. The sequel was released in theaters on December 19, 2018, and Michelle and I watched it (with great rejoicing) on New Year's Eve—though, I must say, it now seems impossibly long ago that there was once a time when we could all gather in a theater!
The movie is very high on star power. Julie Andrews could not reprise her title role, being now 85 years old and unable to sing any longer because of unfortunate results from throat surgery in 1997. While this is most dismaying, Emily Blunt does a splendid job as Mary Poppins in the sequel. DIck Van Dyke, who plays a key role in the first film, appears in the second (as a different character), performing this astonishing dance near the end of the film.
The sequel also features Hamilton creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, as Jack (the lamplighter), as shown in this song:
"Trip a Little Light Fantastic"
The movie also features Meryl Streep as Mary's distant, exotic, cousin Topsy:
Meryl Streep in "Turning Turtle"
At any rate, it made for a good ride, of 2 hours 6 minutes (30.2 miles).
2021 mileage: 775.3
This morning I went very 'old school' during my ride and watched a movie from 1964—the classic Mary Poppins. Living at Devils Lake, we were 20 miles from the nearest city (Adrian), and so never went to movies when I was a boy. But I've become intensely fond of this one in recent years.
At a running time of just a bit over two and a quarter hours, it made for great accompaniment to my ride today—30.3 miles in 2 hours 18 minutes.
2021 mileage: 745.0
At the end or a morning I devoted mostly to piano practice and composition (working on a setting for chorus and piano of Psalm 103), I did a brisk hour on the stationary bike (14 miles), while watching, first, 40 minutes on the YouTube channel of Marianne Kim, the piano arranger whose work I like so much, and then for the last part of my hour, I watched the first episode of My Favorite Martian, a light science fiction comedy (1963-1966) starring Ray Walston and Bill Bixby—the first two seasons were in black and white, and the last season was in color (though I don't believe we had gotten our first color TV yet). I remember it well because it was the show I was watching when the tornado that devastated our area of Michigan struck on Sunday evening (Palm Sunday), April 11, 1965—I remember I was watching it on the living room floor, in front of the TV, and when a Tornado Warning came on (very unusual at the time), I went to warn the adults. I'm glad I did, as later, after it was all over, we found a large plank had been driven right into the spot where I was sitting.
9:15 p.m.
Tonight I did a second hour ride (going more briskly tonight, for 15.8 miles), a lovely scenic virtual ride by Lake Garda (in Italy), which was the locale for a chase scene in the James Bond movie Quantum of Solace.
2021 mileage: 715.2
Good, solid 3-hour ride this morning ... I watched The Sound of Music during it (a movie I love dearly), and this worked out perfectly, as the movie is just a few minutes under 3 hours long.
During the 3 hours, I rode 41.2 miles, to push me over a new mileage milestone (700) for the year.
2021 mileage: 6002.0 I am seeing the old year out with a day off -- something I hate to do. But a combination of factors brings it about: (1...
