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...
