Podcasts about Wellfleet

Despite what might be in your head, the 25-mile path from Yarmouth to Wellfleet is not just a bike trail. There are runners and skateboarders and walkers, many of us with dogs.

This week: A controversial house in Wellfleet, threatening to fall into Cape Cod Bay, gets demolished. Pocasset Mental Health Center is spared for now, as Governor Healey acknowledges a Cape community outcry. And the rising cost of homeowners insurance is making for some painful choices.

When Walter Baron built his workshop on a side road in Wellfleet 40-odd years ago, he knew what he wanted to do: Build boats.

A Wellfleet mansion in danger of collapsing into the ocean and threatening oysters prompts some old stories from Arcand in tonight's edition of the New England Nightly News.

A pirate ship jammed with treasure. The worst storm to ever hit Cape Cod. The mythical shipwreck-- 280 years later, found. Everything in this swashbuckling tale (full of impossible things that really did happen) occurred because of Maria Hallett. Did she turn witch, to curse her lover's ship, or to save it? Join us on location at Real Pirates Museum in Salem, MA. Music featured in this episode includes: Blow the Wind Southerly by Anne Norman; Blow Boys Blow and Goodbye Fare You Well from the Library of Congress; and compositions generously shared by Cooper Cannell, Brian Bolger, Patrick Patrikios, Wayne Jones, Jesse Gallagher, and Jimena Contreras. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week: That million gallons of radioactive water that could be released from the Pilgrim nuclear plant would stick around in Cape Cod Bay for at least a month and track close to shore; that's according to a new study just out. Also, Provincetown is experimenting with new ways to address flooding in its downtown. And, a dead minke whale washes ashore in Wellfleet.

Great Island in Wellfleet is a beautiful pearl on the Cape Cod National Seashore's necklace, the most dramatic of a handful of islands strung along Cape Cod Bay, linked by sandy strands.

Stoughton police has their social media hacked, schools have new directives to keep phones out of the classroom, and Wellfleet dives into the internet. Stay in "The Loop" with #iHeartRadio.

21 August 2024 - WELLFLEET, MA -  As the demand for Wellfleet's Food Pantry has grown, the organization's space needs have too - and it has now reached a point where it needs a new home. It expects to be a temporary trailer this fall, but has fingers crossed the town's Senior Center might provide a longer term solution.

The effectiveness “revolution” is colliding with the AI-spawned efficiency uprising and it's leaping the early consensus AI use cases in marketing around automating personalised content and communications. So much so Mark Ritson choked on his Wellfleet oysters when Jon Lombardo and Peter Weinberg told him they were leaving top jobs at the LinkedIn-backed thinktank, the B2B Institute. Then they told him why. Ritson promptly joined their venture, along with what Weinberg calls “the advisory board to end all advisory boards”.  Thus the synthetically-enhanced AI marketing outfit Evidenza was born. The founders argue their new piece of “synthetic customer” tech, which starts with creating AI copies of target customers, can create an annual marketing strategy, category entry points, messaging and positioning at a fraction of the cost of traditional market research and in a fraction of the time it takes for a marketing team to do the same. They claim it completes major research projects in minutes – and have proven their digitally synthetic customers match real customer responses it took some of the world's biggest brands long cycles to gather. “It can imitate essentially anyone by gathering and synthesizing massive amounts of data,” per Weinberg, including almost impossible-to-reach professionals, like airline chiefs, or the bosses of mining companies. Which is exactly what Evidenza did in a head-to-head test with EY Americas CMO Toni Clayton-Hine's actual survey data – and “reached 95 per cent of the same conclusions,” per Weinberg. EY “has been a fantastic client ever since.” But as well as synthesizing customers, the system also synthesizes marketing strategy and science: Imagine on one side a synthetic combination of Mark Ritson, Professor Byron Sharp teamed with ad effectiveness maestros Peter Field and Les Binet. Then on the other side, hundreds of synthetic CEOs, CFOs, CTOs, CIOs, CMOs and each of those functions linked to the nuances of different industries and categories. Put them all into an AI blender, and you get what Lombardo and Weinberg think is an efficiency revolution in marketing fused with the effectiveness revolution from the marketing academics. The upshot for marketers? “A finance-friendly marketing plan that used to take months now takes maybe minutes, but more likely, a day,” per Weinberg. According to Lombardo that's good news even for traditional market researchers. “Everyone is going to get better. Average is over.” So what's left for the humans? The synthetic duo say the smart stuff - experience, strategic frameworks and brand and category nuance, for instance - that makes the machines do better. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

To plant a fig tree in our climate is an act of faith. Most figs are native to the tropics—and in the heat and sweat of this world they do amazing things. They've co-evolved with a wasp that crawls into the fruit and pollinates it from the inside out.

In 2015, Jess Tsoukalas was living in Wellfleet at a rental property that the tenant before her had planted with an abundance of fruit trees.

  Thank you for tuning in to Episode 280 of the Down Cellar Studio Podcast. Full show notes with photos can be found on my website.   This week's segments included:   Off the Needles, Hook or Bobbins On the Needles, Hook or Bobbins Brainstorming From the Armchair Crafty Adventures Knitting in Passing In my Travels KAL News Events Life in Focus On a Happy Note Quote of the Week   Thank you to this episode's sponsors: Stitched by Jessalu   Off the Needles, Hook or Bobbins     Silver Spoon Socks Yarn: A Whimsical Wood Yarn Company Pixie Toes Socks in the Silver Spoon Up My A$$ colorway Needles: US 1.5 (2.5 mm) Pattern: OMG Heel Socks by Megan Williams ($5 knitting pattern available on Ravelry ) Ravelry Project Page About the yarn: peaches and pinks with gray/taupe. At my gauge it is striping (~2 rounds per color). I purchased this yarn at Yarncentric event in Maryland. Started in May 2023. Finished on June 28, 2024 Total for Stash Dash: 262 meters   Baby James' Cozy Clusters Blanket Pattern: Cozy Clusters Baby Blanket by Leelee Knits (free & paid options available on the LeeLeeKnits website) Yarn: Caron Cinnamon Swirl Cakes in the Slush Colorway (purchased 3). 1 skein of Loops & Threads Impeccable in Colorway 01110 [Navy] for the border Hook: I (5.5 mm) Ravelry Project Page Bobble Border instructions from this blog Finished size- 30.5 inches wide by 38.8 inches tall (not including the bobbles) Finished on July 2 Total for Stash Dash: 1,010 meters (833 meters Caron Cakes [2.25 skeins] - 178 meters Loops & Threads- less than 1 skein)   Trish's New Orleans Socks Yarn- Cat Tails Yarn in the Chartreux Base (75% Superwash Merino, 15% Nylon, 10% Silver Stellina) in the Christmas Bonfires Colorway (part of the Down in New Orleans Collection) Needles: US 1.5 (2.5 mm) Pattern: OMG Heel Socks by Megan Williams ($5 knitting pattern available on Ravelry ) Trish purchased in New Orleans in 2024 (exclusive colorway for the Quarter Stitch). $34. Finished on July 3 Total for Stash Dash: 259 meters   American Ewe Turn a Square Hat Yarn: American Ewe Worsted Tweed in the Terrace Mountain Colorway Pattern: Turn a Square by Jared Flood ($5 pattern available on Ravelry & Brooklyn Tweed website) Needles: US 5 (3.75 mm) & US 7 (4.5 mm) Ravelry Project Page About the yarn: 3 ply Merino/Rambouillet Shaniko Wool (89%) with 6% acrylic and 5% rayon flecks. The colorway is a natural with brownish tweedy bits. I purchased the yarn for $15 at Adventures in Knitting in Harwich, MA on the way to visit friends who were staying in Wellfleet. They had a cool display of "used needles" for $4 each. I bought bamboo US. Modifications: I use worsted weight yarn and knit the smallest size, omitting the increases after the ribbing. I knit 6 inches before the crown decreases. Total for Stash Dash: 99.8 meters (109.2 yards), 51 grams   Portland Socks Yarn: Urth Yarns Uneek Fingering in Colorway 3024 Needles: US 1.5 (2.5 mm) Pattern: OMG Heel Socks by Megan Williams ($5 knitting pattern available on Ravelry ) Ravelry Project Page About the yarn: self striping yarn- cornflower blue, dusty orange, yellowy green, peach, magenta and purple. I purchased the yarn at Knit Wit Yarn Shop in Portland, Maine. You can purchase the same yarn online from them. I held a strand of navy blue nylon thread along with yarn for the heel flap and gusset to give more strength to the heel. I used the Lemonwood Mini Minder (also purchased at Knit Wit) and knit the vast majority of this pair of socks in 2 days walking around Portland, visiting breweries and hanging out with friends. You can see a video I made of this project on Instagram. Total for Stash Dash: 254.7 meters   Welcome to Litchfield Spinning Project Fiber: I purchased two 4oz braid of fiber from Into the Whirled in the Welcome to Litchfield colorway (1 braid Texel & 1 braid BFL Tussah Silk) along with 1 gray  (The Traveler on Cheviot base) braid to ply them together. Twist direction: singles = Z plied = S This means when I'm spinning, my wheel is spinning clockwise and when plying my wheel is moving counter-clockwise. Ravelry Project Page I didn't fully spin the gray Traveler colorway braid. Finished Project- 3 braids of 3 ply yarn: 184g= 252.2 meters (275.9 yards) ~Aran weight Total for Stash Dash= 252.2 meters x 4= 1,008.8 meters   Book Holder Yarn: Lion Brand Wool Ease Roving Stripes in Daisy & 1 other mystery colorway (lost the ball band), Premier Yarns Parfait Chunky (mustard) & Knit Picks Wool of the Andes Worsted Ravelry Project Page Hook: 9.0 mm (M/N) I took inspiration from this pattern on Ravelry. (Boho Book Nook crochet pattern- but I was using MUCH chunkier yarn and I didn't want to use the same textured stitches) I chained 21 sts and worked with 20 hdcs across each row- working in the third loop after the first row. I wasn't going to have enough of the Lion Brand Roving to make the whole thing, so I held the Wool of the Andes double for the part that would be covered. I worked a single crochet around the edges, and then sewed the front to back in just 1 spot on either side. I used a chain for the loop to tack it up on the wall. Total for Stash Dash: 128.1 meters   Declan's Adrift Socks Yarn: Patons Kroy Stripes in the Adrift colorway Needles: US 1.5 (2.5 mm) Pattern: OMG Heel Socks by Megan Williams ($5 knitting pattern available on Ravelry ) Ravelry Project Page About the colorway- short stripes (about 3 rounds each) with 3 shades of blue- navy, denim and cornflower plus orange and brown. Total for Stash Dash: 278.2 meters   Deschain Pattern Deschain by Leila Raven Needles: US 9 (5.5 mm) Yarn. Rowan Creative Linen. Colorway 00624-   Gray. Worsted weight 50% Linen / Flax, 50% Cotton. 200 meters / 100 grams. Bought 4 skeins. Used a little more than 2 Size: Smallest (54 1/4 in bust) Calls for 16-22" positive ease. I should have around 19" Ravelry Project Page Originally finished July 10, 2021. I ripped out in 2024 because the back was far too short. I ripped out the sleeves (tossed) and unseamed the back and front. The instructions call for the back to be 12 inches but the front falls about 17 inches from collarbone to the bottom hem. I knit about 14 inches on the back and then worked a few sets of German Short Rows before the bottom hem instructions. I tried a few options for sleeves and then decided I"d just sew up the ends in a way to tuck/hem the ends under and I love that. In the end I made the body longer and the sleeves shorter Total for Stash Dash: 424.0 meters (463.7 yards), 212 grams   First Point of Libra Cowl Pattern: First Point of Libra Cowl by Laura Aylor Needles: US 3 (3.25 mm) Yarn: Barnyard Knits, Fuse Fiber Studio, One Twisted Tree (shop formerly own Prairie Girl Danie) + other leftover sock yarn Ravelry Project Page Yarn purchased at Vogue Knitting Live January 2020 with Lauren. Planned to make a 2 color shawl. Cast on My Cryptonite by Melanie Berg and never got more than a couple inches in. Here's the Ravelry Project Page for the shawl that's now frogged. I started in October 2022. My November 2022 notes say- I'm losing mojo on this and I don't think it has to do w/ the pattern or my yarn. I like it... but its not getting finished before my trip to the UK so I will need to find other wooly accessories to bring with me. I picked up again July 2024 and it flew off the needles! Modifications: In Section 4, I skipped adding color 4 & 5 (1-3 only). Skipped Section 5. Finished size: 21 inches around. 15 inches tall. Total for Stash Dash: 406 meters   Vera's Christmas Stocking Pattern: Christmas Stockings to Knit and Crochet from Family Circle Magazine. Available in this web archive link. I've also saved it to my podcast Gmail Google Drive in case it disappears! Yarn: Knit Picks Wool of the Andes in Red, Everglade Heather and White Hook: F (3.75 mm) Ravelry Project Page Total for Stash Dash: 456.5 meters   8,353 meters for Stash Dash Over 4,500 meters added since the last episode!   On the Needles, Hook or Bobbins   Wool Ease Hexagon Blanket Pattern: Basic Crochet Hexagon Pattern & Tips from Make Do and Crew Website & YouTube Tutorial Yarn: Lion Brand Wool Ease Thick & Quick. Centers in colorways- Fern, Coney Island, Seaglass, Slate. Borders- Wheat & Oatmeal Hook: 10mm (N/P) Notes: started in April 2022. I never talked about it on the podcast.  Inspired by an instagram post from Lion Brand. This WIP has been taking up a ton of space in my craft room ever since. When the pump in my dehumidifer went and we had to move some things to get at it, I decided I had to get this WIP done. 2 rounds of color- 1 round of wheat or oatmeal 18 were done. 30 finished now   Berry Bliss Socks Yarn: Hypnotic Yarn Plush Sock (75% SW Merino/25% Nylon) in the Berry Bliss Colorway (May 2024 Yarnable Box) & Legacy Fiber Artz Glitzy Toes (pink mini from 2023 Advent Calendar) Needles: US 1.5 (2.5 mm) Ravelry Project Page About the yarn- lemon yellow, sherbet orange and pink. I worked the first heel in a pink sparkle yarn from Legacy Fiber Artz because I have some spiral striping going on and didn't want to disrupt it. Progress: I've finished the heel on the first sock.   Rafa's Hat Yarn: Malabrigo Rios in the Cielo y Tierra colorway Needles: US 5 (3.75 mm) Pattern: Rafa's Hat by Joji Locatelli (free knitting pattern available on Ravelry) Ravelry Project Page: About the yarn: blues/tans that is almost striping at my gauge. The hat is a 1x1 rib that has a cool purl ridge detail. Progress: I've worked two repeats of the pattern   Cold Goat Farm Spinning Fiber: Cold Goat Farm Batt- I believe its Merino/Mohair but there are no details on the business card in my bag. I think I purchased it at Rhinebeck 2023. Twist direction: singles = Z plied = S This means when I'm spinning, my wheel is spinning clockwise and when plying my wheel is moving counter-clockwise. Ravelry Project Page   Brainstorming Connections socks! Have you heard about them? You take your Daily NY Times Game- Connections Results and put them into colorwork socks. Suzanne told me about them- and recently saw and loved Wendy's! Here's a link to Wendy's Connection Socks Ravelry Project Page.   From the Armchair Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto. Bookshop Affiliate Link. Amazon Affiliate Link. Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt. Bookshop Affiliate Link. Amazon Affiliate Link. I'll Just Be Five More Minutes (and other tales from my ADHD brain) by Emily Farris. Bookshop Affiliate Link. Amazon Affiliate Link. We Were Never Here by Andrea Bartz. Bookshop Affiliate Link. Amazon Affiliate Link. Margo's Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe. Bookshop Affiliate Link. Amazon Affiliate Link. Feed by M.T. Anderson. Bookshop Affiliate Link (not available). Amazon Affiliate Link. Briefly Perfectly Human by Alua Arthur. Bookshop Affiliate Link. Amazon Affiliate Link.   Note: Some links are listed as Amazon Affiliate Links. If you click those, please know that I am an Amazon Associate and I earn money from qualifying purchases.   Crafty Adventures I found a small hole in my Mabel Style cross body sling bag and decided to use embroidery floss for a better hold and to add a bit of visible mending color. I received great customer service when I reached out to them! I'm in the midst of a massive studio clean out. It started w/ issues with my dehumidifier and it's really spiraled from there. I'm excited to see how it all comes back together.   Knitting in Passing   Aila FaceTimed me from a friend's house after buying a crochet dinosaur kit at the dollar store. The next day after pool day and dinner we practiced chain and single crochet.   In My Travels Dan and I spent a long weekend in Portland, Maine to celebrate our 20th Anniversary. I was able to go up a night early to attend the knit night at Rising Tide Brewery. I loved meeting Heather from Rising Tide and Jenn & her husband Chuck from Knit Wit. Friday morning, I visited Knit Wit Yarn Shop's new location and then walked around. Dan, Dana and Sheri arrived and we met at Duck Fat for lunch before showing them around to some of our favorite breweries. Saturday we visited local shops and more breweries before going to see comedian Kathleen Madigan. Sunday, I did some shopping while Dan watched soccer then we enjoyed some drinks together and ended up back at Rising Tide where there was a 6p Burlesque show so Dan got us tickets. Really fun end to an awesome weekend.   KAL News Pigskin Party '24 will kick off in the fall (specific date TBD). We're looking for Sponsors for this season. Interested or know someone who is? Sign up for my email newsletter and click the box saying you're potentially interested in sponsoring events and you'll get first dibs on spots. And/or email me for details!   Other current & upcoming events: Summer Bingo with Monica & Cortney of the Craft Cook Read Repeat Podcast Colors of Fall with the Yarniacs Podcast Group. June 20- September 22 Summer Spin In with the Two Ewes Fiber Adventures Podcast Group- May 27 - September 2 Summer Sock Camp with the Crazy Sock Lady The Knit Girllls are hosting their annual Stash Dash Event from May 24-August 31,2024. Here's a chatter thread for stash dash 2024! Stash Dash will run from May 24th-the end of August. Craft all the things and see how your FO pile grows! This is a competition only against yourself. Discord link: knit girllls discord Jasmin (of the Knitmore Girls Podcast) & I are competing again this year. Check out my Stash Dash Spreadsheet here     Events Flock Fiber Festival- August 9-11 in Seattle, WA FIber Revival: August 10 in Newbury, MA Adirondack Wool & Arts Festival; September 21 & 22, 2024 in Greenwich, NY (GREEN-Witch) Vermont Sheep & Wool: October 1 & 2, 2024 in Tunnebridge, VT NY Sheep & Wool Festival (aka Rhinebeck): October 19 & 20, 2024 in Rhinebeck, NY Sierra Nevada Yarn Crawl, (CA and NV) - Sept 12-15, 2024 Cape & South Shore Yarn Haul (MA) September 14-17, 2024 Lambtown, Dixon, CA - Oct 5-6, 2024 For more West Coast (US) event- check out the Seattle Knitters Guild Site.   Know of an event I should spread the word about? Let me know!   Life in Focus   Tune in for a health Update on BostonJensMom   On a Happy Note Dan and I took vacation the first week of July. Monday after Portland we just chilled. Tuesday I took Mom for whole brain radiation, then to visit my grandmother (her mother) and out for lunch. Wednesday/Thursday we visited friends renting a house in Wellfleet (Cape Cod) and Thursday/Friday we visited friends in Falmouth. Friday morning we picked up Riley from Camp and brought her to our house before she and I headed to Hornstra to get ice cream for lunch (because that's what vacation is for!) and over to my parents to the pool for the day. Monday 7/8- I met up with my friend Megg to do a 5+ mile beach walk before she headed out to Ireland for the month. Wed 7/10  Mom and I stayed in Boston to save her the back & forth daily for treatment. We met her friend Jacky for lunch. I went back to work in the afternoon. After work, we cooled off in the hotel pool and then had dinner, played Uno and bar trivia at The Hill. We stunk but it was fun! Sunday July 14th pool day at my parents. Jenna, Dave, Gabriella and Zach came over. Within a few hours they were both jumping off the diving board! July 17-18th Mom and I stayed in Boston again after her Radiation treatment. We hit the pool and fared slightly better at trivia but it was hard to be out as long. Mom's energy was much lower, she was coughing more and couldn't speak above a whisper. July 21st we had a pool day at my parents. Jeff, Millie and Garret, Jenna, and the 2 kiddos, Kris, Will, Aila and Matt. We celebrated Will's 17th birthday. Mom's hair had started falling out and the blank spots at the back of her head looked like a butterfly! Mom told us to go find some Sharpies and color it in! It was a hard day for her and by extension us, but this added a bit of fun and whimsy to it! Millie even attached little plastic gems to parts of the butterfly. After the "temporary tattooing" we shaved off the rest of her hair to help w/ the shedding. July 23rd- Mom's last day of Whole Brain Radiation! Coming home to a beautiful bouquet of flowers from Dan. Getting 2 massages this month after missing my scheduled on in June for our Portland trip! I always feel like I need it but I've been going up on weights at the gym and my upper body was screaming!   Quote of the Week “I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine.” -Emily Dickinson   ------ Thank you for tuning in!   Contact Information: Check out the Down Cellar Studio Patreon! Ravelry: BostonJen & Down Cellar Studio Podcast Ravelry Group Instagram: BostonJen1 YouTube: Down Cellar Studio Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/downcellarstudio Sign up for my email newsletter to get the latest on everything happening in the Down Cellar Studio Check out my Down Cellar Studio YouTube Channel Knit Picks Affiliate Link Bookshop Affiliate Link Yarnable Subscription Box Affiliate Link FearLESS Living Fund to benefit the Blind Center of Nevada Music -"Soft Orange Glow" by Josh Woodward. Free download: http://joshwoodward.com/ Note: Some links are listed as Amazon Affiliate Links. If you click those, please know that I am an Amazon Associate and I earn money from qualifying purchases.  

19 July 2024 – WELLFLEET, MA – In late June, Wellfleet saw the biggest mass stranding of dolphins in U.S. history. It was uncharted waters even for the experienced rescue teams. In the wake of the stranding the rescue team is trying to answer the question of why it happened and why there is a steady annual increase of these events on Cape Cod. Unprecedented in numbers it made headlines wide and far and had a whole community engaged in the rescue efforts. Pattie Walsh, rescue volunteer worked tirelessly to save 146 stranded dolphins during four fateful days.

And we are back. With reports from Provence and Wellfleet both this is a gossip filled episode you won't want to miss. All that and MORE on the ONLY ART PODCAST. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/benjamin-godsill/support

I've been hearing about the Herring River Restoration Project since I moved to Wellfleet in 2004. Restoring tidal flow to the 1100-acre saltwater estuary, which was diked in 1908, is an effort that's been decades in the making — and hands-on work finally began in early 2023.

HOUR 1 - Road Show No.7 from the legendary Beachcomber in Wellfleet! Wiggy is humbled by all the support the fans show the show Curtis points out that the only name Bill didn't mention was Kraft

The extraterrestrial comedy podcast where we probe someone who is officially the most successful pirate in history, Black Sam Bellamy. Black Sam came from humble beginnings, a young British Navy sailor who turned treasure hunter in order to secure the marriage of Sam's true love (Sam had to get rich or die trying). Things went a bit sideways however when Sam found that the 1715 Treasure Fleet had already been recovered (well, the easy bits at least) meaning that Sam had no quick and easy treasure to achieve his goal. What's a skilled man of the sea to do when in need of money? That's right, PIRATE. Black Sam Bellamy would come in to contact with famous pirates Henry Jennings, Benjamin Hornigold and Blackbeard and join the Flying Gang but Sam would become more successful than all of them, depending upon how you define success… From storming ships naked to deceiving ships with fake flags, Sam earned well over one hundred million dollars in today's currency. At the height of Sam's success however, Sam longed for love. Allegedly. Truthfully. At this very same moment, it is alleged that Sam's love, who had encountered misery whilst waiting for Sam, placed a curse on Sam. Sam, unaware of the misery of his love, would one day return but this day may just have been Sam's last. Was witchcraft responsible? Alongside that, we ask whether a pirate can be truly good if they put everything to the vote… All that and more on this week's file.     Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/butitwasaliens   Store: https://butitwasaliens.co.uk/shop/     Probe us: Email: butitwasaliens@gmail.com Instagram/Threads @ ButItWasAliens Twitter @ ButItWasAliens Facebook: @ ButItWasAliens - join Extraterrestrial Towers     Music:  Music created via Garageband. Additional music via: https://freepd.com - thank you most kindly good people. As it's a pirate episode, we had to easter egg and include our favourite music from Rare's formerly exclusive Xbox title Sea Of Thieves, courtesy of Microsoft and composed via the magical Robin Beanland. Those tunes included Maiden Voyage, Summon the Megalodon, Shipwreaks and We Shall Sail Together. We closed out the episode with the usual 'Staff Roll' aka credits theme from Nintendo's 1990-1992 Super Mario World from the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, composed by Hero of Sound Kōji Kondō.     Sources:  Wikiwand: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Samuel_Bellamy    Historical Society of Old Yarmouth article on Mary ‘Goody' Hallet: https://www.hsoy.org/blog/2023/3/16/mmrensabce8y1twvpa1ka6a4hfokvv    Wicked Yankee blog detailing Mary Hallet: http://wickedyankee.blogspot.com/2011/10/mary-hallet-witch-of-eastham.html?m=1   Pirates Love Fandom stub on Mary Hallet: https://pirateslove.fandom.com/wiki/Maria_Hallet   Real Pirates podcast - 4 episode series on Black Sam Bellamy.

IT'S HAPPENING IN YOUR REFRIGERATOR: Deutero-Fung, a mold spore with big ideas, attempts to rally his fellow mold spores into blooming immediately and take over the apartment-verse, but Hyphae-Fung, a mold spore with even bigger ideas, warns the community that blooming early will be a mistake. Look out! Cuz it's Happening in your Refrigerator! Written by Greg Kotis Directed by Jonathan Cook Performed by Sol Baird as "Deutero-Fung"; Brad King as "Hyphae-Fung"; and the cast of Urinetown the Musical at Le Chat Noir Theatre as the mold spore community. Intro/Outro music: JK/47 About the writer: GREG KOTIS is a two time Tony™ Award winning author of many plays and musicals including Urinetown (Book/Lyrics), The End of All Flesh, I Am Nobody, The Truth About Santa, The Sting (Lyrics), Lunchtime, Give the People What They Want, Michael von Siebenburg Melts Through the Floorboards, Yeast Nation (Book/Lyrics), Pig Farm, Eat the Taste, and Jobey and Katherine. His work has been produced and developed in theaters across the country and around the world, including Actors Theatre of Louisville, American Conservatory Theater, American Theater Company, The Apollo (West End), The Brick, the Eugene O'Neill National Theater Conference, The Geva Center, Goodspeed, Musicals, Henry Miller's Theatre (Broadway), Manhattan Theatre Club, New York Stage and Film, New Line Theatre, The Old Globe, Perseverance Theatre, Roundabout Theatre Company, Soho Rep, South Coast Rep, The Saint James (Off West End), The Tank, and Village Theatre, among others. Future projects include ZM, an original musical about teenaged fast-food workers trying to survive a zombie plague. Greg co-founded Theater of The Apes with his wife Ayun Halliday (www.theater-of-the-apes.com), and is a member of the Neo-Futurists, the Cardiff Giant Theater Company, ASCAP, and the Dramatists Guild. He grew up in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, lives in New York City, and is the proud father of India and Milo. You can watch the full video of this episode at https://www.youtube.com/@GatherbytheGhostLight Gather by the Ghost Light merch is available at www.ghostlightpubs.com (Ghost Light Publications) If you would like to further support this podcast, please visit Gather by the Ghost Light is increasing public knowledge of emerging writers and actors (buymeacoffee.com) If you enjoy this podcast, please please please leave a rating on your preferred podcast app! For more info or if you wish to contact us, please visit www.gatherbytheghostlight.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Every have those late night thoughts? Are they different when you're in your van? Mine are. We'll also visit Wellfleet, shop Etsy, clean our black tanks, and learn why conduit is a good thing.  Travel with us on the Danube River through Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, Germany and the Czech Republic! Details at: bit.ly/CofCDanube24 If you'd like to support this podcast, please visit BuyMeACoffee.com/BuiltToGo   This tree was watching me NEWS Promaster Superhigh Roof https://www.ramtrucks.com/ram-promaster/cargo.html Citan coming to US? https://www.edmunds.com/car-news/mercedes-benz-citan-compact-van-under-consideration-for-us.phtml GM cancels van plans? https://gmauthority.com/blog/2024/02/gm-may-have-canceled-next-generation-chevy-express-gmc-savana-vans/ TECH TALK Conduit is a good thing https://amzn.to/4acADlL PRODUCT REVIEW Kleen Tank Solution https://kleentank.com/tank-solution-recipe/ A PLACE TO VISIT Wellfleet Drive-In Theatre https://www.wellfleetcinemas.com/drive-in-theatre/ Some links are affiliate links. If you purchase anything from these links, the show will receive a small fee. This will not impact your price in any way.  

Wally is the youngest in his family of many, MANY brothers and sisters. It seems that everyone has their pearl, except for Wally. Wally sets out on a quest to search for his pearl. Is the pearl out in the ocean? Does Wally have to go far to find his pearl? What if the pearl is not that far away at all? Tune in to find out where exactly Wally finds his pearl. Wally the Wellfleet Oyster is written by Elise Shaver and is available for purchase HERE.Thank you so much for listening. Please share this episode with another friend who perhaps is searching for happiness outside of themselves. This book teaches children (and some adults) how to truly find their magic (and their pearl) by searching within themselves. Bye for now.Victoria aka Mama VSupport the show

Welcome to episode 224 of the Löw Tide Böyz - A Swimrun Podcast!We've got a great course preview for everyone this week. Joining us from Cape Cod to talk about Swimrun Cape Cod are New England Endurance Events Race Directors Kathleen Wheeler and Andy Scherding. This event is taking place on Sept. 21st in Wellfleet, Massachusetts and it's going to be awesome! You don't have to take our word for it, just listen to our conversation with Kathleen and Andy later in the show!Special welcome for anyone that is new to the show and the sport of Swimrun. We think that we'll have a bunch of folks that will be registered for Swimrun Cape Cod so we wanted to encourage everyone to head over to our website where we have a ton of resources to help new Swimrunners get to the start line feeling prepared and stoked for the adventure. You can also DM or email us anytime with your questions.But first…This episode is brought to you by our friends at FORM Swim. They recently released their new Smart Swim 2 goggles and these things are a game changer!  Training UpdateTraining for ÖTILLÖ Whistler has begun. We're about 100 days out from the big day and stoke levels are reasonably high already! Lots of swimming and running in various permutations over the next few months. #LFGShoutout/Feats of Endurance ComboWe're doing a combo shoutout this week to all of our Swimrun and Swimrun-adjacent friends who ran the 128th Edition of the Boston Marathon this past Monday. We might have missed some of you but big shoutouts to Sarah Monk, Keith Lindquist, Kanoa King, Phil Saenkov, Lily Kriv, and Danny “Da Monsta” Divinov. Bit blanket shoutout to everyone else that towed the line.Make sure to sign up for our LTBz Strava Club and join Swimrunners from around the world as they train for stuff.Show BusinessWe're going to be doing an AMA-style show in the next few weeks so DM/email/messenger pigeon us with all your burning Swimrun questions. If we don't know the answer, don't worry because we probably know who does.Swimrun Cape CodIt was great to chat with Kathleen and Andy. We have been in contact with them since they announced the race last year and I was literally in Boston last year the day before what was supposed to have been the inaugural edition of the race when it was canceled because of BLEEPING Hurricane Lee. (Rest assured that Andy and Kathleen had insured the race so every participant that wanted one, got full reimbursement of the registration fee.) That did not deter them from keeping it on their robust race calendar and, at time of this podcast's release, have virtually sold out both distance offerings. In this conversation we get the entire story of how a Swimrun race was born and the labor of love that it took to create an event that is at once uniquely New England and very much a Swimrunners dream course.Registration might be sold out but if not, we highly encourage you to not wait and sign up for Swimrun Cape Cod.And as a bonus, the race was recently featured in Outside Magazine. Check it out!Enjoy!~~~That's it for this week's show. If you are enjoying the Löw Tide Böyz, be sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast player and leave us a five-star rating and review since that's the best way for people to discover the show and the sport of Swimrun. You can find us on Apple Podcast, Spotify, and on YouTube. Check out our website for Swimrun resources including gear guides, tips, how-to videos and so much more. Also make sure to check out our meme page @thelowtideboyz on Instagram. If you have any suggestions for the show or questions for us, send us a dm or an email at lowtideboyz@gmail.com. Finally, you can support our efforts on Patreon…if you feel so inclined.Thanks for listening and see you out there!-  Chip and Chris

There aren't many things that will get me out of bed at 5:30 in the morning. But bagels—or really just the prospect of learning how to make them—is one. Recently, I stood in Wellfleet's Bagel Hound with owner Ellery Althaus, while the windows were still dark, staring a pile of dough.

Beau Valtz is standing in his Wellfleet kitchen in front of a giant pile of fresh garlic.He's wrapping heads of garlic tightly in tin foil.

On this exciting episode we celebrate Nora's birthday a day early with her sister and renowned musician, Lydia Parkington. Lydia gifts us all with TWO exclusive performances on guitar and cello. Tune in to hear epic tales of the Parkington Sisters early days, all things cello and song writing from a professional, rooster feuds, the surprising world of classical music and orchestras.  0:00 - Intro 3:30 - All About Lydia Parkington: Cellist, Guitarist, Singer Songwriter and All Around Awesome Human 4:25 - The Making Of The Parkington Sisters Band 8:40 - Craig Reminisces On Meeting The Parkingtons 9:20 - How Is Nora As An Older Sister? 13:50 - The Infamous Rooster Story 19:27 - Wellfleet, Cape Cod 22:00 - All Things Cello From A Professional 29:55 - Lydia Performs JS Bach's Cello Suite No. 1, Prélude by memory 33:15 - Performing with Orchestras & Symphonies 36:55 - The Dangers of Classical Music 39:50 - Music Theory 42:25 - Craig Receives His Flowers 46:40 - Advice On Songwriting 57:00 - Connection Between Audience & Live Music 1:01:33 - Craig's 3 Truths And A Fib 1:06:30 - Lydia Performs "Sailor Song" On Guitar  Visit our Website : www.fredtheafghan.com/stubbornlypositive Join Our Patreon Pack for Video Episodes: www.patreon.com/StubbornlyPositive Follow us on Instagram! @StubbornlyPositive

It is the dead of winter and Episode 131 will try to bring the warmth. It begins with a trip back to a long-since-forgotten Cape Cod establishment. The Chequesset Inn of Wellfleet, the Grand Resort of the Outer Cape, was an oasis of luxury in the late 19th and early 20th century. However, it has been all but lost to time. We'll look back at its story this week.For 70 years one magazine has captured the world of athletics better than all others. Sports Illustrated has been more than just a sports magazine, it became a cultural institution. Anyone who is anyone in sports has been either on the cover or extensively written about in the magazine. With questions looming about its future it's appropriate to go Back In the Day and cover the legacy of Sports Illustrated.There is a fine line between innovative and impractical. This week's Top 5 is going to cross way over that line as we look at some of the most ridiculous, dangerous, and downright stupid inventions ever. On a brand new This Week In History and Time Capsule we look at the importance of Bob Marley. Few people have transcended their industry to become a cultural icon in quite the way Bob Marley did and we'll look at some reasons why.For more great content become a subscriber on Patreon or Buzzsprout!Helpful Links from this EpisodeThe Lady of the Dunes.comPurchase My New Book Cape Cod Beyond the Beach!In My Footsteps: A Cape Cod Travel Guide(2nd Edition)Kiwi's Kustoms - EtsyDJ Williams MusicKeeKee's Cape Cod KitchenChristopher Setterlund.comCape Cod Living - Zazzle StoreSubscribe on YouTube!SI 100 Greatest Sports PhotosBob Marley.comChequesset Inn Photos - Wellfleet Historical SocietyListen to Episode 130 here Support the show

One of the most beautiful spots in Wellfleet, or for that matter, on the entire Lower Cape, is Old Wharf Road. It is one of those headlands that, along with Indian Neck and Lieutenant's Island, thrust out into greater Wellfleet Harbor.

Be careful about giving a coffee table book to your architecture-lovin' spouse for Christmas, because one day, you might have a new Modernist house by a famous architect - plus a railroad - on your property.  Joining us is Seattle brand designer Lou Maxon and his long strange journey to build a Tom Kundig house with a unique Kundig gizmo on rails. Later on, returning podcast guest Peter McMahon of the Cape Cod Modern House Trust shares his group's wildly successful preservation of Modernist cottages, including their new campaign to buy and restore the Marcel Breuer house in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, largely untouched since Breuer died over 40 years ago.  

He might not be the most famous pirate, but Black Sam Bellamy may have been the most successful: when his ship wrecked in 1717, it took Sam with it, along with an astonishing 4.1 tonnes of gold and treasure. Forbes estimated that at his death, the "Prince of Pirates" was worth more than $120 million. And he did it all for love. This week on the podcast, we talk to Dr Jamie Goodall about Bellamy's doomed romance with the "Witch of Wellfleet," Maria Hallett, his unusual battle tactics, and how the Whydah was found again in the 1980s. Jamie also offers tips for finding pirates in your own family tree--chances are, you may have one or two.

The Vital Role of WetlandsWetlands are critical ecosystems that play a fundamental role in maintaining the stability and well-being of both local and global environments.  Coastal salt marshes, flooded and drained by tides, and often composed of deep mud and peat, provide a wide range of ecosystem services that contribute to biodiversity, water quality, carbon storage, and climate regulation. Biodiversity and Habitat ConnectivitySalt marshes are incredibly diverse habitats and serve as breeding grounds, nurseries, and foraging areas for a wide range of aquatic and terrestrial species. This biodiversity helps maintain ecosystem resilience and adaptability in the face of environmental changes. Wetlands also provide essential habitat connectivity by serving as corridors for the movement of species between different ecosystems and supporting genetic diversity and species' adaptation to changing environmental conditions. Natural Water RegulationSalt marshes act as natural water regulators, storing excess water during periods of heavy rainfall, reducing the risk of floods in downstream areas. During dry periods, wetlands slowly release stored water, helping to maintain steady streamflow and prevent water shortages. Wetlands are natural filters that improve water quality by trapping sediment, nutrients, and pollutants from runoff and wastewater. Further, coastal wetlands act as natural buffers against sea-level rise and storm surges. They stabilize shorelines, protect coastal communities from erosion, and reduce the impacts of extreme weather events.Greenhouse Gas SequestrationSalt marshes are among the most efficient ecosystems in terms of carbon sequestration. The plants in salt marshes, including grasses and other vegetation, absorb carbon dioxide and convert it into organic matter. This organic matter is then stored in the soil, where it can remain for long periods, effectively acting as a carbon sink. In fact, tidal marshes can sequester carbon at a rate 10 times higher than tropical rainforests. Salt marshes also play a role in regulating methane emissions. Some wetlands, known as "methane sinks," actively consume methane from the atmosphere through specialized microbial processes, effectively reducing its impact as a greenhouse gas. Methane gas has significant atmospheric heating qualities, and in turn excess emissions have negative environmental impacts. The carbon storage and methane regulation services provided by salt marshes have a direct impact on the global climate. “ Because methane is “both a powerful greenhouse gas and short-lived compared to carbon dioxide, achieving significant reductions would have a rapid and significant effect on atmospheric warming potential” the EPA states. By storing carbon and reducing methane emissions, wetlands help to mitigate the greenhouse effect.The Nitrogen Cycle and Coastal WatersSalt marshes are a key component in the nitrogen cycle as well. These ecosystems filter and process excess nutrients that can enter coastal waters. Excess nitrogen runoff from agricultural activities and urban areas can lead to harmful algal blooms and dead zones in coastal waters. Salt marshes act as natural filters, trapping and transforming nutrients, which helps maintain water quality and support marine ecosystems. Conserving and restoring these ecosystems is crucial for both mitigating the impacts of climate change and maintaining the overall health of coastal and marine environments.Human BenefitsSalt marshes and tidal wetlands provide critical services to humans as well, including protection of infrastructure from coastal hazards, and habitat protection for economically important species. A large majority of U.S. wetlands today have been lost or degraded due to human activities, primarily related to development of coastal wetlands. NASA scientists conducted an analysis of salt marsh ecosystems changes and degradation from 2000 to 2019, and they found the loss of these ecosystems resulted in an “estimated net global emissions of 16.3 Teragrams of carbon dioxide across the study period, an annual equivalent of emissions from approximately 3.5 million motor vehicles.” Feedback and interactions among natural and anthropogenic drivers have altered the stability and persistence of coastal wetlands, and continue to accelerate carbon emissions and atmospheric warming.Restoration Efforts and ChallengesDr. Kroeger and his team's latest salt marsh restoration project occurred at Cape Cod National Seashore (CCNS), which encompasses a diverse range of ecosystems, including coastal dunes, salt marshes, woodlands, and freshwater ponds. Salt marsh restoration efforts within CCNS focus on restoring tidal flow to marshes that have been affected by human alterations. This involves removing or modifying structures that impede natural water movement, allowing marshes to recover and thrive. The CCNS ecosystem restoration project also used numerous tools such as prescribed fire and construction of new culverts constructed in Hatches Harbor to allow for greater tidal exchange. To date, twenty culverts have been replaced, restoring natural tidal exchange to more than 300 acres of coastal wetland habitat. Currently, plans are underway for additional tidal restoration throughout Cape Cod, including the Herring River Restoration Project in Wellfleet. Involving almost 1,000 acres of former salt marsh, the Herring River is the most ambitious and largest tidal restoration project in New England.Wetland restoration faces many challenges including sediment starvation by dams and dikes, land subsidence from oil drilling and river channelization. River sediments often dumped into gulfs instead of marshes deteriorating the foundations of these wetlands. Excessive agricultural run-off containing high quantities of nitrogen are also damaging these ecosystems by crippling root growth and causing algae blooms and dead zones. Increased frequency and force of natural disasters, such as hurricanes and sea level rise, due to climate change exacerbate restoration efforts too. Another barrier is the high costs associated with restoration. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates restoring and preserving wetlands costs between $170-$6,100 per acre, with lower costs in rural midwestern areas and higher costs in populated coastal regions.Who is our Guest?Dr. Kevin Kroeger has studied coastal ecosystems since 1990, with focus on a range of topics including fluxes and biogeochemistry of nitrogen in groundwater discharge to estuaries and wetlands, estuarine water quality, and carbon and greenhouse gas cycling and fluxes in coastal wetlands. Dr. Kroeger is currently the lead of the Biogeochemical Processes group at Woods Hole Coastal and Marine Science Center in Massachusetts. Dr. Kroeger also received his PhD in Biogeochemistry from Boston University's marine program, an M.S. in Marine Sciences from the University of Connecticut, and a B.A. in ecology from the University of Tennessee.  For a transcript of this episode, please visit https://climatebreak.org/salt-marshes-ecosystem-powerhouses-in-climate-regulation-and-biodiversity/

I'm walking the woods on a beautiful fall day looking for fungi with Alex Emmons.He points out dead oak trees and explains how they have a symbiotic relationship with mushrooms.

Seth Rolbein, a journalist living in Wellfleet, talks about an 1820 fire that had a major impact on the Cape's 20th-century development boom.

Spooky season kicks off with this tale of the Witch of Wellfleet and the Missing Pirate. We tell the tale as it's remembered, but then deconstruct the folklore and try to get to the truth of these stories. Check out our Subscription Service where we have a bundled our bonus material from Missing, Crawlspace and Dark Valley shows! Ad-free episodes and more at https://missing.supportingcast.fm/ Link to sign up for the 5k for PIFTM: https://runsignup.com/Race/MA/Reading/RunForTheMissing Follow us: IG: https://www.instagram.com/crawlspacepodcast/ TT: https://www.tiktok.com/@crawlspacepodcast YT: https://www.youtube.com/crawlspace Twitter: https://twitter.com/CrawlspacePod FB: https://www.facebook.com/Crawlspacepodcast/ Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/crawlspace-true-crime-mysteries/id1187326340 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/58cll3enTW2SNmbJUuLsrt The music for Crawlspace was produced by David Flajnik. Listen to his music here: https://www.pond5.com/artist/bigdsound Check out the entire Crawlspace Media Network at http://crawlspace-media.com/ Music by Aleksey Chistilin, Ashot Danielyan, SoulProdMusic, Sound Gallery By Dmitrytarasfrom Pixabay. Aleksey Chistilin: https://pixabay.com/users/lexin_music-28841948/ Ashot Danielyan: https://pixabay.com/users/ashot-danielyan-composer-27049680/ SoulProdMusic: https://pixabay.com/users/soulprodmusic-30064790/ Sound Gallery By Dmitrytaras: https://pixabay.com/users/soundgallerybydmitrytaras-11640913/ Sources:  Episode artwork from the Cape Cod Times: https://www.capecodtimes.com/story/news/1999/10/31/eastham-love-that-will-not/51021695007/ Whydah Museum: https://www.discoverpirates.com/ https://www.discoverpirates.com/store/#!/Real-Pirates-Book/p/96764209/category=26273434 https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g41922-d10440759-Reviews-Whydah_Pirate_Museum-West_Yarmouth_Yarmouth_Cape_Cod_Massachusetts.html https://www.amazon.com/Expedition-Whydah-Worlds-Excavation-Treasure/dp/0060192321 https://seeksghosts.blogspot.com/2013/09/massachusetts-witch-of-eastham.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Bellamy http://wickedyankee.blogspot.com/2011/10/mary-hallet-witch-of-eastham.html https://www.geni.com/people/Mehitable-Goody-Hallett-the-Witch-of-Wellfleet/6000000010764221773 https://www.treasurenet.com/threads/the-tragedy-of-goody-hallett.72361/ https://ghosthuntinginnewengland.com/2022/01/20/old-barnstable-gaol-jail-the-tale-of-goody-hallet-aka-the-witch-of-wellfleet/ https://www.grunge.com/1071481/the-tragic-story-of-black-sam-bellamy-and-the-witch-of-wellfleet/ http://newenglandfolklore.blogspot.com/2014/08/sam-bellamy-maria-hallett-and-wreck-of.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whydah_Gally https://www.capecod.com/lifestyle/the-story-of-the-jenny-lind-tower/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_Lind_Tower https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1715_Treasure_Fleet https://www.forbes.com/2008/09/18/top-earning-pirates-biz-logistics-cx_mw_0919piracy.html?sh=6ae3be4c7263 https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-jun-01-sci-pirate1-story.html https://alexandramalloy.wordpress.com/2016/10/08/folklore-treasure-and-discovery-on-cape-cod/ https://joshuashawnmichaelhehe.medium.com/the-witch-and-the-pirate-724f631174e2 https://www.amazon.com/Bellamys-Bride-Search-Maria-Hallett/dp/1596292547/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The International Fund for Animal Warfare says it quickly mobilized this week to save some stranded dolphins struggling off the coast of Wellfleet. WBZ's Nichole Davis has more on the rescue.

Queenie and TT reflect on their relaxing time at the beach, though they realize they didn't accomplish their planned activities. They did enjoy two cannabis-filled weeks and were able to visit their favorite dispensaries in Provincetown--Haven and Hennep, as well as Cape Cod Canna in Wellfleet, where they had very positive experiences with the staff and were able to purchase a variety of products. This week's question: would you rather have the power of telekinesis or telepathy? Our Closet Disco Queen Pot-Cast deals with legal adult cannabis use and is intended for entertainment purposes only for those 21 and older Visit our Closet Disco Queen Pot-Cast merch store!Find us on Facebook and Green Coast RadioSound from Zapsplat.com, https://quicksounds.com, 101soundboards.com #ToneTransfer

Welcome to episode 193 of the Löw Tide Böyz - A Swimrun Podcast!We've got a great episode for everyone this week. Joining us in studio G is Dr. Justin Ross. He's a sports psychologist/zen master out of Colorado and someone who we've been talking a lot about on the show since we learned about him from the morning shakeout podcast. We had this conversation right before leaving for Sweden and it seems fitting to share it upon our return. But first…Training UpdateIt feels really nice to say that there is no longer a 70km ÖTILLÖ-sized elephant in the room and we can get back to a more realistic training volume. No rest for the weary though as Chris is headed to Massachusetts for the inaugural Swimrun Cape Cod.ShoutoutWe're giving a blanket shoutout this week to everyone that reached out to us to either wish us well in Sweden and/or checked in on us afterwards. We mention it often that it's always super humbling to see all the support that we receive from everyone and we appreciate it more than we can adequately express.Feats of EnduranceKeeping the theme going, we're giving a blanket award to everyone that raced (and volunteered) at ÖTILLÖ last week. We've said it before but it's worth repeating that everyone that lines up at the start of that race gets all of our respect, regardless of outcome on the day.Make sure to sign up for our LTBz Strava Club and join Swimrunners from around the world as they train for stuff.This Week in SwimrunNow for the news.It doesn't happen often but there are not one but two Swimruns taking place in the U.S. this weekend. Over in Washington, Ödyssey Swimrun Orcas Island is taking place on Sunday, Sept. 17th. We love this race and can't recommend it enough.Over in Massachusetts, New England Endurance Events is hosting its inaugural Swimrun Cape Cod. The race takes place in the town of Wellfleet and has been sold out for a couple of months. Make sure to check out the podcast next week for our race report of this new race.Over in the U.K., Swimrun Oxford is taking place on Sunday Sept. 17th. Thank you Mike Phillips for putting this race on our radar. It looks like a fun one so head over there if you're able to support this local event.That's it for this week. Reach out to us if there's anything that you'd like for us to mention on the show.Show BusinessIf you haven't already, please consider leaving a rating and review for the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whatever platform you listen on. This is the best way to help other people discover the show…and it helps us justify the effort to our wives.Dr. Justin RossIt was really great to chat with Dr. Ross. As we mentioned at the outset, we discovered Justin at the start of the year and began incorporating his methodology in our build up to ÖTILLÖ. In this conversation we chatted about his background and approach, the importance of self-awareness, what it means to be “in it,” and so much more. You'll want to get your notepads out for this one.You can learn more about Dr. Ross on his website.Enjoy!~~~That's it for this week's show. If you are enjoying the Löw Tide Böyz, be sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast player and leave us a five-star rating and review since that's the best way for people to discover the show and the sport of Swimrun. You can find us on Apple Podcast, Spotify, and on YouTube. Check out our website for Swimrun resources including gear guides, tips, how-to videos and so much more. Also make sure to check out our meme page @thelowtideboyz on Instagram. If you have any suggestions for the show or questions for us, send us a dm or an email at lowtideboyz@gmail.com. Finally, you can support our efforts on Patreon…if you feel so inclined.Thanks for listening and see you out there!-  Chip and Chris

Skype of Cthulhu presents a Call of Cthulhu scenario. A Covenant of Salt by David Northcutt. May, 1921 Wellfleet, MA The ill-fated guests plunge deeper into the strange characters surrounding them, while death stalks every corner. Dramatis Persone: Jim as Keeper of Arcane Lore Steve as Dr. Benjamin Reynolds, Doctor Rachael as Grace Pang, Professor Meredith as Helen Hughes, Reporter Gary as Jasper Lewis, Government Official Randall as Joseph Demko, Retired Police Officer Download Subcription Options Podcast statistics

Skype of Cthulhu presents a Call of Cthulhu scenario. A Covenant of Salt by David Northcutt. May, 1921 Wellfleet, MA Guests at a charming inn are pulled into a mystery by terrible events. Dramatis Persone: Jim as Keeper of Arcane Lore Steve as Dr. Benjamin Reynolds, Doctor Rachael as Grace Pang, Professor Meredith as Helen Hughes, Reporter Gary as Jasper Lewis, Government Official Randall as Joseph Demko, Retired Police Officer Download Subcription Options Podcast statistics

Director Ivy Meeropol's expansive documentary, After the Bite focuses on the impact that a 2018 fatal shark attack on a boogie boarder has on the town of Wellfleet, Massachusetts rocked visitors and residents in the idyllic summer community of Cape Cod, forcing them to respond to the encroachment of apex predators. With the numbers of sharks increasing every year, Ivy Meeropol's expansive documentary AFTER THE BITE explores the repercussions for this beach community when rapid changes in the natural world begin to clash with a cherished way of life. Great white sharks have dominated headlines in recent years, as their deadly interactions with people have increased in the waters stretching from Maine to the Cape and Islands. Those charged with protecting the public have been forced to address the risk of serious injuries with stop-the-bleed kits mounted at public access beaches, warning billboards, the use of shark-tracking apps, spotter planes and new training programs and protocols for lifeguards. A portrait of an interconnected community of people and wildlife, AFTER THE BITE features a range of voices from different sides of these issues and considers the larger question of how far humans can push nature before it bites back. Director Ivy Meeropol (Bully. Coward. Victim. The Roy Cohn Story. Indian Point) joins us to talk about blending into the Cape Cod community of Wellfleet, enlisting the experts like Lisa Sette from the Center of Costal Studies; Dr. Greg Skomal and Meg Winton of the Atlantic White Shark Conservatory, to talk about the science and the lifeguards, conservationists, fishermen, journalists, paramedics, town residents, and activists to talk about the impact of the dramatic changes taking place since the tragic death of Arthur Medici. For more go to: hbo.com/movies/after-the-bite Subscribe to MAX.com

Seth Rolbein, a journalist living in Wellfleet, thinks back to the day a young lady special to him met the Governor.

Today my guest is Laurel Ryan! Laurel is the owner of Nautically Northern, a handmade jewelry line that features signature designs and customized pieces that are personally hand stamped by Laurel herself!  Laurel started her business after moving to Wellfleet, a popular coastal town located on Cape Cod Massachusetts. Laurel and I visit Cape Cod together as she unveils how Nautically Northern landed in 250 stores across the country, Canada and the Virgin Islands. Follow Laurel @nauticallynorthern on facebook & instagram & nauticallynorthern.com Follow Jen @wickedsaltylife on facebook & instagram & wickedsalty.com

Avi Freedman, CEO at Kentik, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss the fun of solving for observability. Corey and Avi discuss how great simplicity can be deceiving, and Avi points out that with great simplicity comes great complexity. Avi discusses examples of this that he sees in Kentik customer environments, as well as the differences he sees in cloud environments from traditional data center environments. Avi also reveals his predictions for the future and how enterprise M&A will affect the way companies view data centers and VPCs. About AviAvi Freedman is the co-founder and CEO of network observability company Kentik. He has decades of experience as a networking technologist and executive. As a network pioneer in 1992, Freedman started Philadelphia's first ISP, known as netaxs. He went on to run network operations at Akamai for over a decade as VP of network infrastructure and then as chief network scientist. He also ran the network at AboveNet and was the CTO of ServerCentral.Links Referenced: Kentik: https://kentik.com Email: avi@kentik.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/avifreedman LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/avifreedman TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Most Companies find out way too late that they've been breached. Thinkst Canary changes this. Deploy Canaries and Canarytokens in minutes and then forget about them. Attackers tip their hand by touching 'em giving you the one alert, when it matters. With 0 admin overhead and almost no false-positives, Canaries are deployed (and loved) on all 7 continents. Check out what people are saying at canary.love today!Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I'm Corey Quinn. This promoted guest episode is brought to us by our friends at Kentik. And into my social grist mill, they have thrown Avi Freedman, their CEO. Avi, thank you for joining me.Avi: Thank you for having me, Corey. I've been a big fan for some time, I have never actually fallen off my seat laughing, but I've come close a couple times on some of your threads.Corey: You must have a great chair.Avi: I should probably upgrade it [laugh].Corey: [laugh]. I have been looking forward to this conversation for a while because you are one of those rare creatures who comes from a similar world to what I did where we were grumpy and old before our time because we worked on physical infrastructure in data centers, we basically wrangled servers into doing the things that we wanted them to do when hardware reliability was an aspiration rather than a reality. And we also moved on from that, in many ways. We are not blind to the modern order of how computers work. But you still run a lot of what you do in data centers, but many of your customers are in cloud. You speak both languages very fluently because of the unifying thread between all of this, which is, of course, the network. How did you wind up in, I guess we'll call it network hell.Avi: [laugh]. I mean, network hell was truly… in the '90s, when the internet was—I mean, the internet is sort of like the human body: the more you study it, the more amazing it is that it ever worked in the first place, not that it breaks sometimes—was the bugs, and trying to put together the technology back then, you know, that we had the life is pretty good nowadays, other than the [laugh] immense complexity that has been unleashed on us by everyone taking the same technology and then writing it in their own software and giving it their own marketing names. And thus, you have multi-cloud networking. So, got into it because it's a problem that needs to be solved, right? There's no ESP that connects the applications together; the network still needs to make it work. And now people own some of it, and then more of it, they don't own, but they're still responsible for it. So, it's a fun problem to solve.Corey: The timing of this episode is apt because I've used Kentik myself for a few things over the years. And to be fair, using it for any of my personal networking problems is a bit like noticing, “Oh, I have a loose thread here on my shirt. Pass me the chainsaw.” It's, my environment is tiny and it's over-scoped. But I just earlier this week wound up having to analyze a day's worth of Flow Logs from one of my clients, and to do this, I had to spin up an EC2 instance with 128 gigs of RAM and then load the Flow Logs for that day into RAM, and then—not kidding—I ran into OOM Killer because I ran out of RAM on this thing.Avi: [laugh].Corey: It is, like, yeah, that's right. The network is chatty, the logs are immense, and it's easy to forget. Because the reason I was doing this was just to figure out what are the things that are talking to each other in this environment to drive up some aspects of data transfer costs. But that is an esoteric use case for this; it's not why most people tend to think about network observability. So, I'm going to ask you the blunt question up front here because it might be a really short episode. Do we have to care about networking in the least now that cloud is the default in most locations? It is just an API call away, isn't it?Avi: With great simplicity comes great complexity. So, to the people running infrastructure, to developers or architects, turning it all on, it looks like just API calls. But did you set the policies right? Can the things talk to each other? Are they talking in patterns that are causing you wild data transfer costs?All these things ultimately come back to some team that actually has to make it go. And can be pretty hard to figure that out, right, because it's not just the VPC Flow Logs. It's, what's the policy? It's, what are they talking to that maybe isn't in that cloud, that's maybe in another cloud? So, how do you bring it all together? Like, you could have—and maybe you should have—used Athena, right? You can put VPC Flow Logs in S3 buckets and use Athena and run SQL queries if all you want is your top talker.Corey: Oh, I did. That's how I started, but Athena is, uh… it has some challenges. Let's just put it that way and leave it there. DuckDB is what I was using and I'm much happier with it for a variety of excellent reasons.Avi: Okay. Well, I'll tease you another time about, you know—I lost this battle at Kentik. We actually don't use swap, but I'm a big fan of having swap and monitoring it so the OOM Killer only does what you want or doesn't fire at all. But that's a separate religious debate.Corey: There's a counterargument of running an in-memory data store. And then oh, we're going to use it as swap though, so it's like, hang on, this just feels like running a normal database with extra steps.Avi: Computers allow you to do amazing things and only occasionally slap you nowadays with it. It's pretty amazing. But back to the question. APIs make it easy to turn on, but not so easy to run. The observability that you get within a given cloud is typically very limited.Google actually has the best. They show some topology and other things. I mean, a lot of what we do involves scraping API calls in the cloud to figure out what does this all mean, then convolving it with the VPC Flow Logs and making it look like a network, and what are the gateways, and what are the rules being applied and what can't talk to itself? If you just look at VPC Flow Logs like it's Syslog, good luck trying to figure out what VPCs are talking to each other. It's exactly the problem that you were describing.So, the ease of turning it on is exactly inversely proportional to the ease of running it. And, you know, as a vendor, we think it's an awesome [laugh] problem, but we feel for our customers. And you know, occasionally it's a pain to get the IAM roles set up to scrape things and help them, but that's you know, that's just part of the job.Corey: It's fascinating to me, just looking from an AWS perspective, just how much work clearly has to be done to translate their Byzantine and very strange networking environment and concepts into things that customers see. Because in many cases, the things that the virtual machines that we've run on top of EC2, let alone anything higher level, is being lied to the entire time about what the actual topology of the environment is. It was most notable, for me at least, at re:Invent 2022, the most recent one, where they announced they have a TCP replacement, scalable, reliable data grammar SRD. It's a new protocol entirely. It's, “Oh, wow, can we use it?” “No.” “Okay.” Like, I get that it's a lot of work, I get you're excited about it. Are you going to talk to us about how it actually works? “Oh, absolutely not.” So… okay, good for you, I guess.Avi: Doesn't Amazon have to write a press release before they build anything, and doesn't the press release have to say, like, why people give a shit, why people care?Corey: Yep. And their story on this was oh, it enables us to be a lot faster at letting EBS volumes talk to some of our beefier instances.Avi: [laugh].Corey: And that's all well and good, don't get me wrong, but it's also, “Yay, it's more reliable,” is a difficult message to send. I mean, it's hard enough when—and it's necessary because you've got to tacitly admit that reliability and performance haven't been all they could be. But when it's no longer an issue for most folks, now you're making them wonder, like, wait, how bad was it? It's just a strange message.Avi: Yeah. One of my projects for this weekend is, I actually got a gaming PC and I'm going to try compression offload to the CUDA cores because right now, we do compress and decompress with Intel cores. And like, if I'm successful there and we can get 30% faster subqueries—which doesn't really matter, you know, on the kind of massive queries we run—and 20% more use out of the computers that we actually run, I'm probably not going to do a press release about it. But good to see the pattern.But you know, what you said is pretty interesting. As people like Kentik, we have to put together, well, on Azure, you can have VPCs that cross regions, right? And in other places, you can't. And in Google, you have performance metrics that come out and you can get it very frequently, and in Amazon and Azure, you can't. Like, how do you take these kinds of telemetry that are all the same stuff underneath, but packaged up differently in different quantos and different things and make it all look the same is actually pretty fun and interesting.And it's pretty—you know, if you give some cloud engineers who focus on the infrastructure layer enough beers or alcohol or just room to talk, you can hear some funny stories. And it all made sense to somebody in the first place, but unpacking it and actually running it as a common infrastructure can be quite fun.Corey: One of the things that I have found notable about your perspective, as particularly, you're running all of the network ingest, to my understanding, in your data center environment. Because we talked about this when you were kind enough to invite me to your company all-hands offsite, presumably I assume when people do that, it's so they can beat me up in the alley, but that only happened twice. I was very pleasantly surprised.Avi: [And you 00:09:23] made fun of us only three times, so you know, you beat us—Corey: Exactly.Avi: —but it was all enjoyed.Corey: But always with love. Now, what I found fascinating was you and I sat down for a while and you talked about your data center architecture. And you asked me—since I don't have anything to sell you—is there an economical way that I could see running your environment on top of AWS? And the answer was sure, if by economical you mean an absolute minimum of six times what you're currently paying a year, sure you can get there. But it just does not make sense for any realistic approach to doing this.And the reason I bring this up is that you're in a data center not because of religious beliefs, “Of, well, this is good enough for my grandpappy, so it's good enough for me.” It's because it solves the problem you have in a way that the cloud providers clearly cannot. But you also are not anti-cloud. So, many folks who are all-in on data centers seem to be doing it out of pure self-interest where, well, if everyone goes all-in on cloud, then we have nothing left to sell them. I've used AWS VPC Flow Logs. They have nothing that could even remotely be termed network observability. Your future is assured as long as people understand what it is that you're providing them and what are you that adds. So yeah, people keep going in a cloud direction, you're happy as houses.Avi: We'll use the best tools for building our infrastructure that we can, right? We use cloud. In fact, we're just buying some reserved instances, which always, you know, I give it the hairy eyeball, but you know, we're probably always going to have our CI/CD bursty stuff in the cloud. We have performance testing regions on all the major clouds so that we can tell people what performance is to and from cloud. Like, that we have to use cloud for.And if there's an always-on model, which starts making sense in the cloud, then I try not to be the first to use anything, but [laugh] we'll be one of the first to use it. But every year, we talk to, you know, the major clouds because we're customers of all them, for as I said, our testing infrastructure if nothing else, and you know, some of them for some other parts, you know, for example, proxying VPC Flow Logs, we run infrastructure on Kubernetes in all—in the three biggest to proxy VPC Flow Logs, you know, and so that's part of our bill. But if something's always on, you know, one of our storage servers, it's a $15,000 machine that, you know, realistically runs five years, but even if you assume it runs three years, we get financing for it, cost a couple $100 a month to host, and that's inclusive of our ops team that runs, sort of, everything, you just do the math. That same machine would be, you know, even not including data transfer would be maybe 3500 a month on cloud. The economics just don't quite make sense.For burst, for things like CI/CD, test, seasonality, I think it's great. And if we have patterns like that, you know, we're the first to use it. So, it's just a question of using what's best. And a lot of our customers are in that realm, too. I would say some of them are a little over-rotated, you know, they've had big mandates to go one way or the other and don't have the right, you know, sort of nuanced view, but I think over time, that's going to fix itself. And yeah, as you were saying, like, the more people use cloud, the better we do, so it's just really a question of what's the best for us at our infrastructure and at any given time.Corey: I think that that is something that is not fully appreciated or well understood is that I work with cloud technologies because for what I do, it makes an awful lot of sense. But I've been lately doing a significant build-out in my home network on the perspective of yeah, this makes sense for what I do. And I now have increased number of workloads that I'm running here and I got to say, it feels a little strange, on some level, not to be paying AWS on something metered by the second whenever I'm running a job here. That always feels a little on the weird side. But I'm not suggesting I filled my house with servers either.Avi: [unintelligible 00:13:18] going to report you to the House on Cloudian Activities Committee [laugh] for—Corey: [laugh].Avi: To straighten you out about your infrastructure use and beliefs. I do have to ask you, and I do have some foreknowledge of this, where is the controller for your network running? Is it running in your house or—Corey: Oh, the WiFi controller lives in Ohio with all the other unpleasant things. I mean, even data transfer between Ohio and Virginia—if you're on AWS—is half-price because data wants to get out of Ohio just as much as the people do. And that's fine, but it can also fail out of band. I can chill that thing for a while and I'm not able to provision new equipment, I can't spin up new SSIDs, but—Avi: Right. It's the same as [kale scale 00:14:00], which is, like, sufficiently indistinguishable from magic, but it's nice there's [head scale 00:14:05] in case something happened to them. But yeah, you know, you just can't set up new stuff without your SSHing old way while it's down. So.Corey: And worst case, it goes away irretrievably, I can spin a new one up, I can pair everything locally, do it by repointing DNS locally, and life will go on. It's one of those areas where, like, I would not have this in Ohio if latency was a concern if it was routing every packet out halfway across the country before it hit the general internet. That would be a challenge for me. But that's not what I'm doing.Avi: Yeah, yeah. No, that makes sense. And I think also—Corey: And I certainly pay AWS by the second for that thing. That's—I have a three-year savings plan for that thing, and if nothing else, it was useful for me just to figure out what the living hell was going on with the savings plan purchase project one year. That was just, it was challenged to get that straightened out in some ways. Turns out that the high watermark of the console is a hundred-and-some-odd-thirty-million dollars you can add to cart and click the buy button. Have fun.Avi: My goodness. Okay, well.Corey: The API goes up to $26.2 billion. Try that in a free tier account, preferably someone else's.Avi: I would love to have such problems. Right now, that is not one of them. We don't spend that much on infrastructure.Corey: Oh, that is more than Amazon's—AWS's at least—quarterly revenue. So, if you wind up doing a $26.2 billion, it's like—it's that old saw. You owe Amazon a million dollars, you have a problem. If you owe Amazon $26 billion, Amazon has a problem. Yeah, that's when Andy Jassy calls you 20 minutes after you make that purchase, and at least to me, he yells at me with a, “Listen here, asshole,” and it sort of devolves from there.Avi: Well, I do live in Seattle, so you know, they send the posse out, I'm pretty sure.Corey: [laugh] I will be keynoting DevOpsDays Seattle on August 1st with a talk that might very well resonate with your perspective, “The Modern Devops: A Million Ways to Die in Production.”Avi: That is very cool. I mean, ultimately, I think that's what cloud comes back to. When cloud was being formed, it's just other people's computers, storage, and network. I don't know if you'd argue that there's a politics, control plane, or a—Corey: Oh, I would say, “Cloud? There's no cloud; just someone else's cost center.”Avi: Exactly. And so, how do you configure it? And back to the question of, should everything be on-prem or does cloud abstract at all, it's all the same stuff that we've been doing for decades and decades, just with other people's software and names, which you help decode. And then it's the question we've always had: what's the best thing to do? Do you like [Wellfleet 00:16:33] or [Protion 00:16:35]? Now, do you like Azure [laugh] or Google or Amazon or somebody else or running your own?Corey: It's almost this generation's equivalent of Vi versus Emacs.Avi: Yes. I guess there could be a crowd equivalent. I use VI, but only because I'm a lisp addict and I don't want to get stuck refining Eliza macros and connecting to the ChatGPT in Emacs. So, you know. Someone just did a Emacs as PID 0. So basically, no init, just, you know, the kernel boots into Emacs, and then someone of course had to do a VI as PID 0. And I have to admit, Emacs would be a lot more useful as a PID 0, even though I use VI.Corey: I would say that—I mean, you wind up in writing in Emacs and writing lisp in it, then I've got to say every third thing you say becomes a parenthetical.Avi: Exactly. Ha.Corey: But I want to say that there's also a definite moving of data going on there that I think is a scale that, for those of us working mostly in home labs and whatnot, can be hard to imagine. And I see that just in terms of the volume of Flow Logs, which to be clear, are smaller than the data transfer they are representing in almost every case.Avi: Almost every.Corey: You see so much of the telemetry that comes out of there and what customers are seeing and what their problems are, in different ways. It's not just Flow Logs, you ingest a whole bunch of different telemetry through a variety of modern and ancient and everything in between variety of protocols to support, you know, the horror that is network equipment interoperability. And just, I can't—I feel like I can't do a terrific job of doing justice to describing just how comprehensive Kentik is, once you get it set up as a product. What is on the wire has always been for me the arbiter of truth because computers will lie to you, but it's very tricky to get them to lie and get the network story to cover for it.Avi: Right. I mean, ultimately, that's one of the sources of truth. There's routing, there's performance testing, there's a whole lot of different things, and as you were saying, in any one of these slices of your, let's just pick the network. There's many different things that all mean the same, but look different that you need to put together. You could—the nerd term would be, you know, normalizing. You need to take all this stuff and normalize it.But traffic, we agree, that's where we started with. We call it the what if what is. What's actually happening on the infrastructure and that's the ancient stuff like IPFIX and NetFlow and sFlow. Some people that would argue that, you know, the [IATF 00:19:04] would say, “Oh, we're still innovating and it's still current,” but you know, it's certainly on-prem only. The major cloud vendors would say, “Oh, well, you can run the router—cloud routers—or you could run cloud versions of the big routers,” but we don't really see that as a super common pattern today.But what's really the difference between NetFlow and the VPC Flow Log? Well, some VPC Flow Logs have permit deny because they're really firewall logs, but ultimately, it's something went from here to there. There might not be a TCP flag, but there might be something else in cloud. And, you know, maybe there's rum data, which is also another kind of traffic. And ultimately, all together, we try to take that and then the business metadata to say, whether it's NetBox in the old world or Kubernetes in the new world, or some other [unintelligible 00:19:49], what application is this? What user is this?So, you can ask questions about why am I blowing up between these cloud regions? What applications are doing it, right? VPC Flow Logs by themselves don't know that, so you need to add that kind of metadata in. And then there's performance testing, which is sort of the what is. Something we do, Thousand Eyes does, some other people do.It's not the actual source of truth, but for example, if you're having a performance problem getting between, you know, us-east and Azure in the east, well, there's three other ways you can get there. If your actual traffic isn't getting there that way, then how do you know which one to use? Well, let's fire up some tests. There's all the metrics on what all of the devices are reporting, just like you get metrics from your machines and from your applications, and then there's stuff even up at the routing layer, which God help you, hopefully you don't need to actually get in and debug, but sometimes you do. And sometimes, you know, your neighbor tells the mailman that that mail is for me and not for you and they believe them and then you have a big problem when your bills don't get paid.The same thing happens in the cloud, the same thing happens on the internet [unintelligible 00:20:52] at the routing. So, the goal is, take all the different sources of it, make it the same within each type, and then pull it all together so you can look at a single place, you can look at a map, you can look at everything, whether it's the cloud, whether it's your own data centers, your own WAN, into the internet and in between in a coherent way that understands your application. So, it's a small task that we've bit off, but you know, we have fun solving it.Corey: Do you find that when you look at customer environments, that they are, and I don't mean to be disparaging here, truly I don't, but if you were to ask me to design something today, I would probably not even be using VPCs if I'm doing this completely greenfield. I would be a lot more cloud-first, et cetera, et cetera. Whereas in many cases, that is not the right path, especially if you know, customers have the temerity to not be founded within the last 18 months before AWS existed in some ways. Do you find that the majority of what they're doing looks like they're treating the cloud like data centers or do you find that they are leveraging cloud in ways that surprise you and would not be possible in traditional data centers? Because I can't shake the feeling that the network has a source of truth for figuring out what's really going on [is very hard to beat 00:22:05].Avi: Yes, for the most part, to both your assertion at the end and sort of the question. So, in terms of the question, for the most part, people think of VPCs as… you know, they could just equivalent be VLANs and [unintelligible 00:22:21], right? I've got policies, and I have these things that are talking to each other, and everything else is not local. And I've got—you know, it's not a perfect mapping to physical interfaces in VLANs but it's the equivalent of that.And that is sort of how people think about it. In the data center, you'd call it micro-segmentation, in the cloud, you call it clouding, but you know, just applying all the same policies and saying this stuff can talk to each other and not. Which is always sort of interesting, if you don't actually know what is talking [laugh] to each other to apply those policies. Which is a lot of what you know, Kentik gets brought in for first. I think where we see the cloud-native thinking, which is overlaid on top of that—you could call it overlay, I guess—which is service mesh.Now, putting aside the question of what's going to be a service mesh, what's going to be a network mesh, where there's something like [unintelligible 00:23:13] sit, the idea that there's a way that you look at traffic above the packets at, you know, layers three to more layer seven, that can do things like load balancing, do things like telemetry, do things like policy enforcement, that is a layer that we see very commonly that a lot of the old school folks have—you know, they want their lsu F5s and they want their F5 script. And they're like, “Why can't I have this in the cloud?”—which I guess you could buy it from F5 if you really want—but that's pretty common. Now, not everything's a sidecar anymore and there's still debates about what's going on there, but that's pretty common, even where the underlying cloud just looks like it could just be a data center.And that seems to be state of the art, I would say, our traditional enterprise customers, for sure. Our web company customers, and you know, service providers use cloud more for their OTT and some other things. As we work with them, they're a little bit more likely to be on-prem, you know, historic. But remember, in the enterprise, there's still a lot of M&A going on, I think that's even going to pick up in the next couple of years and a lot of what they're doing is lift-and-shift of [laugh] actual data centers. And my theory is, it's got to be easier to just make it look like VPCs than completely redo it.Corey: I'd say that there's reasons that things are the way that they are. Like, ignoring that this is the better approach from a technical perspective entirely because that's often not the only answer, it's we have assurances we made as part of audit compliance regimes, of our SOC 2, of how we handle certain things and what those controls are. And yeah, it's not hard for even a junior employee, most of the time, to design a reasonable architecture on a whiteboard. The problem is, how do you take something pre-existing and get it to a state that closely resembles that while not turning it off for a long time?Avi: Right. And I think we're starting to see some things that probably shouldn't exist, like, people trying to do VXLAN as overlays into and between VPCs because that was how their data s—you know, they're more modern on the data center side and trying to do that. But generally, I think people have an understanding they need to be designing architecture for greenfield things that aren't too far bleeding edge, unless it's like a pure developer shop, and also can map to the least common denominator kinds of infrastructure that people have. Now, sometimes that may be serverless, which means, you know, more CDN use and abstracted layers in front, but for, you know, running your own components, we see a lot of differences but also a lot of commonality. It's differences at the micro but commonality the macro. And I don't know what you see in your practice. So.Corey: I will say that what I see in practice is that there's a dichotomy where you have born-in-the-cloud companies where 80% of their spend is on a single workload and you can do a whole bunch of deep optimizations. And then you see the conglomerate approach where it's giant spend, but it's all very diffuse across 1500 different applications. And different philosophies, different processes, different cultures give rise to a lot of these things. I will say that if I had a magic wand, I would—and again, the fact that you sponsor and promote this episode is deeply appreciated. Thank you—Avi: You're welcome.Corey: —but it does not mean that you get to compromise my authenticity and objectivity. You can't buy my opinion, just my attention. But I will say this, that I would love it if my customers used Kentik because it is one of the best things I've ever seen to describe what is talking to what that scale and in volume without going super deep into the weeds. Now, obviously, I'm not allowed to start rolling out random things into customer environments. That's how I get sued to death. But, ugh, I wish it was there.Avi: You probably shouldn't set up IAM rules without asking them, yes. That wouldn't be bad.Corey: There's a reason that the only writable stuff that I have access to is generating reports in Cost Explorer.Avi: [laugh]. Okay.Corey: Everything else is read-only. All we do is to have conversations with folks. It sets context for those conversations. I used to think that we'd be doing this as a software offering. I no longer believe that actually solves the in-depth problems that people have.Avi: Well, I appreciate the praise. I even take some of the backhanded praise slash critique at the beginning because we think a lot about, you know, we did design for these complex and often hybrid infrastructures and it's true, we didn't design it for the two or four router, you know, infrastructure. If we had bootstrapped longer, if we'd done some other things, we might have done it that way. We don't want to be exclusionary. It's just sort of how we focus.But in the kind of customers that you have, these are things that we're thinking about what can we do to make it easier to onboard because people have these massive challenges seeing the traffic and understanding it and the cost and security and the performance, but to do more with the VPC Flow Logs, we need to get some of those metrics. We think about should we make an open-source thing. I don't know how much you've seen the concern that people have universally across cloud providers that they turn on something like Kentik, and they're going to hit their API rate limiter. Which is like, really, you can't build a cache for that at the scale that these guys run at, the large cloud providers. I don't really understand that. But it is what it is.We spent a lot of time thinking about that because of security policy, and getting the kind of metrics that we need. You know, if we open-source some of that, would it make it easier, plug it into people's observability infrastructure, we'd like to get that onboarding time down, even for those more complex infrastructures. But you know, the payoff is there, you know? It only takes a day of elapsed time and one hour or so. It's just you got to get a lot of approvals to get the kind of telemetry that you need to make sense of this in some environments.Corey: Oh, yes. And that's part of the problem, too, is like, you could talk about one of those big environments where you have 1500 apps all talking to each other. You can't make sense of any of it without talking to people and having contacts and occasionally get a little bit of [unintelligible 00:29:07] just what these things are named. But at that point, you're just speculating wildly. And, you know, it's an engineering trap, where I'm just going to guess rather than asking someone who knows the answer because I don't want to look foolish. It's… you just three weeks chasing your own tail. Who's the foolish one?Avi: We're not in a competitive business to yours—Corey: [laugh].Avi: But I do often ask when we're starting off, “So, can you point us at the source of truth that describes what all your applications are?” And usually, they're, like, “[laugh]. No.” But you know, at the same time to make sense of this stuff, you also need that metadata and that's something that we designed to be able to take.Now, Kubernetes has some of that. You may have some of it in ServiceNow, a lot of people use. You may have it in your own text file, CSV somewhere. It may be in NetBox, which we've seen people actually use for the cloud, more on the web company and service provider side, but even some traditional enterprise is starting to use it. So, a lot of what we have to do as a vendor is put all that together because yeah, when you're running across multiple environments and thousands of applications, ultimately scrying at IP addresses and VPC IDs is not going to be sufficient.So, the good news is, almost everybody has those sources and we just tried to drag it out of them and pull it back together. And for now, we refuse to actually try to get into that business because it's not a—seems sort of like, you know, SAP where you're going to be sending consultants forever, and not as interesting as the problems we're trying to solve.Corey: I really want to thank you, not just for supporting the show of course, but also for coming here to suffer my slings and arrows. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you? And please don't respond with an IP address.Avi: 127.0.0.1. You're welcome at my home at any time.Corey: There's no place like localhost.Avi: There's no place like localhost. Indeed. So, the company is kentik.com, K-E-N-T-I-K. I am avi@kentik.com. I am@avifriedman on Twitter and LinkedIn and some other things. And happy to chat with nerds, infrastructure nerds, cloud nerds, network nerds, software nerds, debate, maybe not VI versus Emacs, but should you swap space or not, and what should your cloud architecture look like?Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:31:20].Avi: Thank you.Corey: Thank you so much for being so generous with your time. I really appreciate it.Avi: Thank you for having this forum. And I will let you know when I am down in San Francisco with some time.Corey: I would be offended if you didn't take the time to at least say hello. Avi Friedman, CEO at Kentik. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this has been a promoted guest episode of Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a all five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry comment saying how everything, start to finish, is somehow because of the network.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

Hour 1 The road show is back and the crew is at the Beachcomber in Wellfleet .  Greg Hill is awarded a Marconi! The crew give their leads  Alex Verdugo is benched by Alex Cora

An alcohol ban goes into effect at Cape Cod National Seashore's Cahoon Beach in Wellfleet from May to September. The ban prohibits alcohol consumption and possession of open alcoholic beverage containers on its property around Cahoon Hollow Beach this summer. The ban takes effect May 20 and continues through Sept. 10. Officials describe the new regulations as a response to an increase in alcohol-related safety issues at Cahoon Hollow over the past few years.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse joined to discuss about his career-long mission to confront dark money in politics, with a focus this week on Clarence Thomas and other gift-receivers on the Supreme Court. We opened the phone lines to ask listeners whether it's a problem that no one in America seems to care about Supreme Court ethics. Michael Curry discussed the SJC's ruling on the Holyoke Soldiers' Home, plus GOP leveraging the debt ceiling to make cuts to federal health programs. He also touched on McKinley Schools getting renamed for Mel King, and the legacy of civil rights activist Harry Belafonte. Sue O'Connell joined to give updates to the Brian Walshe saga, California teetering on red-state boycotts, the death of Jerry Springer and Biden's embrace of "dark Brandon" memes. Jared Bowen also touched on the passing of Harry Belafonte. He reviewed art-world happenings, including a gallery of work by Alison Elizabeth Taylor at the Addison Art Gallery, and The Apollinaire Theater Company's "Dance Nation." He'll also talked about Gov. Healey's commitment to the arts and his recent sit-down with her on Open Studio. Patty Larkin is a singer/songwriter based in Wellfleet, MA. She played a couple of songs ahead of a benefit show in Lexington. We ended the show with spring sports. Have your ear drums been blown out by screaming parents at Little League? Are you an umpire who had to retire early to avoid abuse from parents? We asked people to call in.

The Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater (W.H.A.T.) launches its 2023 season later this spring. W.H.A.T. returned to live performances last year following a two-year COVID shutdown and Producing Artistic Director Christopher Ostrom says 2022 audiences were noticeably younger than pre-pandemic crowds.   Past coverage of the W.H.A.T

Welcome to episode 169 of the Löw Tide Böyz - A Swimrun Podcast!We are graced by greatness this week on the show! Joining us is the legendary triathlon coach and founder of Purple Patch Fitness, Matt Dixon. We're serious…he's our guest this week! This was an awesome conversation about training, life and balance and we can't wait to share it with you.But first…Training UpdateQueue the air horn! Chris is back in the pool! It wasn't pretty but it's safe to say that the Böyz are back to our regularly scheduled training!ShoutoutOur shoutout this week goes out to Andy Scherding. (Keep this name in mind for later in the show) He recently donated to our Wild Swimrun Wild Youth Initiative fundraiser and we really appreciate his support to help get more women and girls into the sport of Swimrun!Wisdom Nugget of the Week“Always do what you are afraid to do.” - Ralph Waldo EmersonFeats of EnduranceThis week's winner is Tony Portillo. He ran the Hat 50k in Maryland over the weekend in what he self-described as “gloriously muddy conditions” plus took over an hour and twenty minutes off of his 50k PB. Strong work Tony!Bonus award to friend of the pod Will Ramsey for running the Terrapin Mountain 50k a few weeks ago. It was a beastly looking course with over 7,000” of climbing over the 31 miles. Way to be!Make sure to sign up for our LTBz Strava Club and join Swimrunners from around the world as they train for stuff.This Week in SwimrunBefore we get to the news we have a special race director report from our friend and  Race Director of EX Swimrun Nicolas Roman with a preview of their 2023 events.Now for the “news.”In the bummer department, on our last TWIS we shared a new race announcement for Swimrun Whistler. Well, fast forward a few weeks and now we are sharing that the race is being postponed until 2024. Swimrun is indeed a rollercoaster of emotions because we have a new race alert to share! Swimrun Cape Cod is a new event taking place on Cape Cod in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. This is a point to point race through some of the inland ponds and it looks great. The race date is Sept. 16 and they are offering two distance options (a short course and a super short course) for both teams and solo athletes. A long course will be added in 2024. If that wasn't enough, sign up and use the code LOWTIDE to save 20% off of your registration!So we're still net plus one in the Western Hemisphere Swimruns department.Over in the UK, Swimrun Coniston announced their 2023 race date. The Full and Sprint course events will take place on Sept. 24 in the “wild and rugged UK landscape” of Coniston. We believe that the courses will be similar to the now defunct Breca race that used to take place in the area.Staying in the UK, “The Original Welsh Swimrun,” Love Swimrun Llanberis, is scheduled for June 17th and will offer a 6km sprint course and a 16km long course. According to their website, both courses are tough so make sure to check out that event!If you happen to be in the UK a week before Swimrun Llanberis, head on over to Nene Park, Peterborough in Cambridgeshire for As Keen as Mustard's event on June 10 and 11 offering everything from an intro friendly 5km to sporty 39km Swimrun distance options. They are calling the 39km event the “Hot Mustard” distance and we're here for it!Looking for other Swimrun events to race? Check out the UK-based Swimrun.com's race calendar that breaks down events by country. Jon and Fred are doing an awesome job building out their website and it's chock full of great content for beginners and seasoned Swimrunners alike.Finally, are you looking for a Swimrun partner and wish there was an app to help you find someone? Some of you might remember us talking about a Tinder for Swimrun app called Swimder all the way back on Episode 4 of the podcast that we thought someone should develop. Well, fast forward 3 years and Nicolas Remires of Envol Coaching is doing just that! Luckily it's called Swimrun Connect which is a much better name than Swimder. Check out his gofundme campaign and help crowdsource the new app that he is developing.That's it for this week. Reach out to us if there's any Swimrun news that you'd like for us to share on the show.Show BusinessMake sure to check out our YouTube channel to see our latest video all about the Pull Buoy Simple Mount. We explain why we like this setup for Swimrun and include DIY instructions for making your own.Matt Dixon, Founder of Purple Patch FitnessIt was so great to catch up with Matt Dixon. We both have a long history with Purple Patch Fitness and it was fun to chat with Daddy Dixon about his athletic roots, his evolving coaching philosophy, Swimrun training and so much more. This is definitely a “get your notepads out” conversation.You can learn more about Purple Patch Fitness and all of their offerings on their website. Make sure to check out the Purple Patch Podcast as well for weekly wisdom from one of the best in the business. Enjoy!That's it for this week's show. If you are enjoying the Löw Tide Böyz, be sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast player and leave us a five-star review. You can find us on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google Podcast, and on YouTube. You can also follow our meme page on Instagram. Email us at lowtideboyz@gmail.com with any feedback and/or suggestions. Finally, you can support our efforts on Patreon…if you feel so inclined.Thanks for listening and see you out there!-  Chip and Chris

A woman's body is found mutilated in the dunes of Provincetown, Mass in 1974. Weeks earlier, Steven Spielberg had been nearby filming the horror classic JAWS. But decades later, can Stephen King's son, author Joe Hill, believe his eyes when he sees a nearly identical woman working as a background actor in the classic film?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Bike Report… Here is a slightly more scripted version of my 2 day ride across Massachusetts.   I scheduled it as a 4-day adventure.  This is one of those things that you learn from doing long or hard or ultra-type events.  Give yourself some buffer time. I have always violated this rule.  Partly because my life has always been busy, or I have convinced myself that it was, and I had to rush to get to events and then rush back.  I have always tried to not be that guy who talks too much about this stuff at work.  I realized early on that this is my obsession, and the rest of the world may or may not give a shit.  I've been more than willing to talk about it in depth when asked, or in this purpose-built forum for that outlet, but I have always taken pains not to be THAT GUY in the office.  As a result, most of the people I've worked with know vaguely that I train all the time, but seldom have the gift of knowing exactly what or when I'm doing an event.  That vagueness allows work activity to crowd around the events and I find myself running a marathon in the morning and jumping on a plane in the afternoon.  I think it also fits that egoistic self-image I have had of being the indestructible man that can pop in and out of events that other people can't even fathom.  Even my acts of humility are ego-centric! There are advantages to not buffering time around an event.  If you show up just in time for the event it doesn't give you time to think too much about it.  You can get much more adventure in the day by not being prepared and not knowing the course, etc.  Just show up doesn't fit many peoples' brains but I enjoy the adventure of it.  If you jet off after the event you don't have time to wallow in your misery. But the disadvantages of this cramming in events, especially big events, are manifold.  You can make mistakes that you could have avoided by being just a bit more prepared.  Like, for instance, not thinking about how the temperature drops below freezing in the mountains at night.  And, most regretfully, you don't really get a chance to let it sink in.  Many of those races I've run are just blurry memories of a fast weekend spent somewhere doing something hard.  I've found that no matter how good shape you're in, a multi-day event will mess with your thinking ability.  It's best to take a day off after because you're going to be useless anyhow. For this ride, I took 4 days off to ride around 250 miles in 2 days.  I enlisted my wife to crew for me.  I suppose this is one of the advantages of having a long-term relationship.  You can just casually drop something like this… “Hey, take Friday and Monday off we're going out to Western Mass and you're going to follow me while I ride across the state for 2 days.” And that doesn't end the relationship.  … Day one was Friday.  We got up and I took Ollie down to the local kennel when it opened at 9AM.  This was Ollie's first time being kenneled – so it was a bit like first day of school for your kids.  I had a pang of sadness driving back to the house in my truck with the passenger seat empty.  I had done my best to make sure all my stuff was organized.  We drove out a pretty section of Rte 2 west into the Berkshires and the Mohawk Trail.  Western Mass is a pretty place.  All hills and farms and little; towns. Those same little towns that you'll find in Vermont or New Hampshire.  A bit of a tourist trap but really pretty without being entirely off the map. We took the new truck with my bike in the back. I prepped my bike earlier in the week.  I washed it and cleaned the chain and derailleurs as best I could.  It's a messy and dirty job.  It requires using a degreaser and a toothbrush.  Kids, this degreaser chemical is very dangerous.  Remember to wear rubber gloves and safety glasses when you're cleaning your bike chain.  Once you get it all sparkly clean then you can rub a little bike grease back into the chain and sprocket.  This really helps the efficiency of the drivetrain and keeps the shifting action clean.  You can ride on a dirty chain, but it will slow you down and eventually something will break. I wore my old Northface water backpack.  I think it holds more than a liter.  It has enough room to carry my tools and food and whatever else I need comfortably.  That old pack is like a second skin for me.  I've worn it in many, many ultras.  For tools I carry a small pump and a multitool.  In my underseat pack I carry an extra tube, levers and a patch kit.  I had one bike bottle in the cage on the bike for just water.  I actually found this bike bottle by the side of the road after the local triathlon.  It was perfectly new from one of the local bike shops.  You may think I'm crazy, and you'd be correct, but I washed it out and it's fine.  I prepped up enough 24 oz water bottles with Ucan for the ride and put those in a cooler with ice.  I made some protein smoothies too, for emergency meals, extra fuel if needed and recovery.  Smoothies are a good source of clean calories.  The 24 oz bottles of Ucan mix I stuck in the back of my bike shirt on both sides for the ride.  This provides clean fuel with some electrolytes. This sounds like a lot of stuff, but it was all the result of what I had learned in my training over the summer.  I knew I could get 4+ hours of hard work in the heat with that set up.  A liter or so of clean water in the pack.  A full bottle of water in the cage and 2 X 24oz bottles of fuel mix in my shirt.  That may sound uncomfortable to carry, but it really isn't bad on a bike.  You've got the mechanical advantage and can carry a lot of stuff comfortably.  I stopped at a grocery on the way out and bought a handful of Cliff bars and other packaged edibles.  I also had my favorite pitted dates in a baggy.  All this fuel went into the back pack.  Then there was the electronics. I decided to use Google Maps with the bike route option selected.  This meant I would have to have my phone with me, and it would have to stay charged.  This is a challenge because having the maps open for navigation all day long drains your phone battery very fast.  Especially when you're riding through the mountains in the middle of nowhere.  Yes, it also uses a ton of data.  If you don't have an unlimited plan, don't do this at home kids.  Where to put the phone?  While I was training, I started out putting the phone in a plastic bag in my backpack. But that is a pain in the ass because you have to stop and get it out of the pack to use it.  So I bought a fairly inexpensive handlebar mount for it.  It's basically a stretchy rubber cage that I attached right in the center of the handlebar.  In this set up the phone is inches from my face and easy to access. If it rains you can put the phone in a plastic bag before you put it into the holder.  That plastic bag makes it harder to use the touch screen, but for my ride both day were sunny, so I mounted it au naturel. Next question was how to keep power in the battery.  This worked out way better than I expected.  I bought a pair of those charging bricks from the internet.  I didn't know how long they would last.  I had a plan to swap the charge brick out for a fresh one if needed in the middle of the ride.  I put one in the under-seat pack with the cable running along the frame tube up to the phone.  At first, I thought I'd have to zip tie the phone cable in place, but I was able to snake the cable around the top tube in such a way that it was attached to the phone and the battery pack with no slack.  That worked great.  I didn't know if this pack would give me 30 minutes of juice or 30 hours of juice.  That's why I got two.  I figured I could hot swap them out when I met Yvonne during the ride.  But as it turns out I had nothing to fear.  Even burning all that data with the GPS and radio on the whole time the charge pack kept the phone at 100%.  To cap this all off I had my Mifo ear pods.  These are little, wireless ear pods, that I trained all summer in.  They fit snuggly in the ear and had both the stereo headphones and a microphone for talking. It was a great set up. I listened to podcasts and audio books all day.  I had my phone right in front of me so I could even skip commercials!  I could also make and receive phone calls without even slowing down.  And the Google maps lady was instructing me with turn-by-turn voice commands the whole time, so I wouldn't get lost.  It was awesome! Besides that, I wore normal bike Chamois shorts with underarmour sport undergarments.  I lathered up all the risky bits and my under carriage with Squirrel's Nut Butter.  I had this left over from my last ultra.  It works great as an under-carriage lube.  I also wore a knee sleeve on my left knee, which is the one that was giving me trouble.  I wore my Garmin 235 watch but did not use the chest strap.  I don't really need to know my heart rate with that much precision when I'm riding.  It never gets anywhere near max.  That was my set up.  Was I nervous?  No, not at all.  I was confident I could do it.  It wasn't that much of a stretch.  I was happy to be off on an adventure.  To be spending some time out of my home office with my wife.  Friday we got out to North Adams in the afternoon after a casual drive on a nice day.  We had a nice lunch.  We drove around North Adams, Williamstown and Williams college.  We had an early dinner and I set the alarm for 5:00 AM. … Saturday morning I got up with the alarm and made a cup of coffee.  The sun wasn't going to come up until closer to 6:00.  Making room-coffee in the dark I mistakenly had a cup of decaf before I realized my mistake.  I loaded up all my stuff and woke my wife up to drive me to the starting point.  … I'll cover the ride itself in a subsequent episode.  … Continuing with my bike report.  Let's pick it up at Day 1 of the ride. This is the one part of the ride that I had done some actual research on.  My original plan had been to find the marker for where Massachusetts, New York and Vermont touch in the western corner of Massachusetts.  But, on Googling the map I saw that the point was actually back in the woods a good distance with no real road access.  And it looked like the access trail was on the Vermont side which added significant miles to the trip. Given that I was riding my mountain bike I could probably find a way to make that work; but consulting the map again it would make the trip very long.   It would add some unknown trail miles right out of the gate and I didn't really think I'd have the time to go up and plot the route. To avoid that little bit of drama and the extra miles, I looked around the map to see what the closest town was to that point.  I discovered that Williamstown was right there in the upper corner and had a hotel I could use points at.  So, I booked that.  This was probably about a month out.  Then I started looking at potential bike routes.  I did this by using the bicycle option on Google maps.  It's a swell tool, Google maps.  If you choose the bicycle option it will keep you off the highways and find any available rail trails.  The first pass route, starting from the hotel was 256 miles, which seemed doable in 2 days.  Unfortunately Gooogle Maps also provides the elevation profile.  You have to understand that Massachusetts is relatively flat state.  We've got rolling hills.  Lots of rolling hills.  But we don't have any mountains.  Any real mountains.  As it turns out our tallest mountain is mount Greylock.  Mount Greylock is only 3489 feet tall.  As it also turns out Mount Greylock is in Adams Massachusetts.  Adams, as it turns out is just to the east of Williamstown.  I had, in my hubris created a route that had me climbing the highest point in the state first thing in the morning on the first day.  I have not doubt I could do it, but it caused some consideration.  I decided that it might be a good idea to start on the top of the mountain ridge.  Which, in fact would shave about 20 miles off the ride.  That seemed like a reasonable thing to do.  My race, my rules – as McGillvray always says. I really wanted to get out and drive some of the route, but did not really have the bandwidth.  An opportunity arose, like they sometimes do, when my running Buddy Frank suggested we go for a motorcycle ride one Friday afternoon a couple weeks before my scheduled ride.  I took him up on it.  On a brilliant August afternoon we rode the length of Route 2 out to North Adams and Williamstown.  I checked out the hotel.  We did a bit of poking around the towns.  My plan was to ride as much of the bike route as possible on the way back home.  Frank had to bail but I was able to trace the route up out of Adams on an old 2-lane highway, 8A. I knew that where 8A met 116 would be about the peak elevation and I rode to that point on my motore cycle. Let me tell you it was not an encouraging route.  It was a few thousand feet of steady climb, some of it quite steep, on roads with no shoulder.  Bad roads too,  beat to crap roads.  And in places the Google route actually routed me through some old hilltop farms on a dirt road, which was quite scenic and everything but not good for making time on a bicycle.  That reconnoiter of the climb up and out of Adams over the steepest, highest ridge in the state sealed the deal for me.  I made a mental note to have my wife drop me off at the high point. I mean it wasn't that I thought I couldn't do it, it just seemed unnecessary to the project.  If that climb had been in the middle of the ride, or even at the end, I would have been more optimistic about it. But given I was planning on a century a day, I didn't want to burn all my matches in the first hour.  … Going into the ride I had trained over the summer.  Basically 3-4 rides week with one of those being along ride on the Saturday.  I managed to get my long ride up to somewhere around 70-something miles.  I also got some good data on nutrition and fluid consumption, especially in the heat of the summer.  A couple of those long rides were really hot days  This is how I figured out that I could carry enough to get through 4-5 hours on a hot day before I needed a pit stop.  On a cool day I could ride all day on the same water and fuel.  Back to the route.  Since I was shanghaiing my wife into this adventure I thought I should at least consider making things palatable.  Looking at the possible routes and where we would end up at the end of the first day I realized that it was close to Foxboro, which of course is the home of the New England Patriots, who my wife loves.  And the Hotel at Patriot's Place, it turned out, was another I could use points at.  Now it was coming together.  Looking at the revised route, with the new start point and the planned end point, that gave me about 120ish miles for Day 1.  That seemed reasonable.  Next I had to figure out how long that would take me.  Since I was riding my mountain bike I wouldn't be able to go as fast.  I knew form my training I was averaging around 15 miles an hour.   Doing the math on that would give me a 8 hour day.  But, in training, I knew the routes and was pushing pretty hard.  I didn't want to push that hard on the ride, because I had a long way to go and didn't want to burn out.  If 15 was the top end guesstimate, what was the worst case?  I figured if I really got in trouble and slowed way down, I'd still be able to manage 10 miles an hour.  That would give me a 12 ish hour day.  Which was still within the daylight hours.  I definitely didn't want to be out on the roads exhausted in the dark.  I wasn't as concerned about the second day.  I knew that part of the ride was pretty flat and when I got onto Cape Cod I would know where I was.  I would be in familiar territory.  … On the morning I got all my stuff packed up and ready and loaded into the truck.  She wasn't super happy about being woken up at the crack of dawn from her comfy hotel bed to drive me to the drop off.  She got exceedingly less happy as we wound through the old farm roads and up the mountain.  Finally as she dropped me off I was bubbling with excitement.  I was nervous and happy and ready to roll. She was in a foul mood.  From her point of view, I had just driven her into the middle of nowhere and abandoned her.  I had to stop her and give her a speech.  Something like “Listen, your role here is to support me, not to bitch at me.”  Which seemed to bring her around. And I was off… It was cool, in the 60's and after 6:00 AM when I finally launched.  The first sections flew by.  Literally.  Because I had started on the top of the ridge there were these long downhills where I was probably holding 30 miles per hour for miles at a time without touching the pedals.  Of course what goes up must eventually come down and there were some good size climbs as well.  For those climbs I took it easy, stayed in the seat and used my gears to conserve energy.  My strategy on this first day was to not do anything stupid.  I had looked at the maps and tried to find some really obvious places for my wife to meet me.  I settled on a grocery store in North Hampton that was about 25 miles in and then another grocery store in Worcester about 77 miles in.  That would give me 3-4 hours of riding before each pit stop.  I wrote all the stop addresses and approximate distances and times out for her – which if you know me, is probably the most organized I've ever been for an event.  I usually just wing it. That first 25 miles was wonderful.  Lots of downhill, some interesting back roads.  The traffic was light.  I took it easy and enjoyed myself.  Pulling over when I needed to, pull over and staying hydrated.  The ear buds and the phone worked like a champ.  The phone stayed fully charged and the nice lady from Google was reading turn by turn directions into my ears.  I had my phone right in front of me on the handlebars and could sort through podcasts and fast forward when I needed to skip commercials.  This is where my first logistical mistake got me.  With my wife needing to go back to the hotel to check out, she couldn't catch me for the first stop.  I had just assumed that with me being out on the road for 8-12 hours she would be able to leisurely follow along and take side trips as she wanted and still have plenty of time to catch me.  But this first morning with here having to go back to the hotel and me flying down the hills there was no way she was going to make that 25 mile stop.  It was ok.  I had her on the phone through the earbuds, so we weren't lost or panicking, I was just going to need to push through.  I had my wallet and my phone with me, so I probably wasn't going to die. At the same time as this stop got aborted another wonderful thing happened.  I found the Norwottuck Rail trail that runs 11 miles from North Hampton through Amherst on a beautifully maintained trail.  Amherst is where the University of Massachusetts is.  The trail has a nice bridge over the Connecticut River.  It was a joy to be spinning along on a rail trail.  They even had porta-potties.  I stopped and ate some food and enjoyed myself immensely in this section.  It was now mid-morning.  And it was starting to heat up.  The next section through the hills towards Worcester was challenging.  Lots of construction.  Lots of hills.  More traffic and bigger roads without much tree cover.  The day peaked out around 95 degrees and sunny.  It was hot.  As I was grinding the hills in the heat I realized I wasn't going to have enough fluids to make it to the next stop.  I was losing too much sweat in the baking heat.  My energy was good but I was getting dehydrated.  With another 40-50 miles to ride and another long day coming I uncharacteristically pulled over to a gas-station convenience store.  I bought a liter of water and a Gatorade.  They were ice cold.  I drank all the Gatorade right there and it was mana from heaven.  My feet were falling asleep from all the climbing.  I was soaked with sweat.  My butt was sore.  Back on the bike feeling hot and tired and a little bit nauseous I cranked through the city hills to where my wife was waiting in the parking lot of a big grocery store.  I drank some more water, filled up my fluids and swapped out two more bottles of UCann.  I was beat.  I took my shoes off and let my feet air out a bit.  It was a welcome respite.  Knowing the evils of spending too much time in the aid station I bid her adieu and mounted back up for the final push of the day.  But, I did feel a bit refreshed.  The last chunk was a bit of a grind.  I had another 40-something miles to push.  At least the sun was starting to go down, but I was worn out.  Two things happened that made the day longer.  The first one was I lost one of my earbuds.  I was screaming down a hill and felt it coming loose.  I tried to grab it with one hand.  I thought I had caught it and trapped it in my shirt.  But I couldn't brake with one hand .  By the time I was able to slow down and stop it was gone.  I dis a desultory search along the length of the shoulder of the road on the hill, but it was gone.  It wasn't a total loss.  I still had the left one and could still here the navigation and everything else.  It actually was kind of nice because with only one I could hear the noises around me better.  The second thing was a detour.  I was watching the map click down.  I knew I was under 20 miles form my destination.  All of a sudden the road was blocked!  There was a detour.  And as I followed the detour, of course the map was screaming at me.  So I had to stop and zoom in and out and see how to backtrack around the detour to get back on route.  It ended up adding 6+ miles to the day.  Which doesn't sound like a lot, but it happened right towards the end for maximum emotional impact! Finally, as I was turning into the back parking lot of Patriot's Place in Foxboro, I heard a noise.  That noise was the loud leaking of a punctured rear tire.  That's right.  Less than a mile away from the hotel I picked up something in the back tire.  I road it until it went flat and called my wife.  And I called it a day. I was tired, sore and hot.  There was no way I was going to change a flat tire by the side of the road for the priviledge of riding ½ mile to the hotel.  I stopped the Garmin at 127.78 miles, 10:03 total time for an average speed of 12.7 Miles per hour. Yvonne came and rescued me.  We took some pictures.  I cleaned up.  We went out for dinner in Patriots place – Pizza and beer.  I slept well, wondering what it would be like to get back on the bikein the morning for another full day of riding. Outro…  So that's where I'll leave it.  I'll pick up on Day 2 in the next episode.  To take you out I'll give you an update on where I'm at.  Right now I'm freezing. It got cold today.  It's the first day of autumn here in New England.  I'm a cold weather guy, but it takes a few weeks for your body to adapt.  And it's dark when I get up in the morning.  Winter is coming! Fitness-wise I still tread the crooked path.  I started a body-building campaign 3 weeks ago, on the first of September.  It was going great.  Really was.  I felt strong.  My balance felt good.  My legs had some bounce in them.  I would recommend this beginner body building program. A question you might ask is what's the difference between weightlifting and body building.  That's a good question.  Both involve lifting weights.  Body building is lifting weight to shape the muscles.  Which I didn't really get until I started doing this program.  Think about it like shading in a picture that makes a feature stand out.  Body building is weightlifting for muscle growth in specific places.  Which, on my old body, doesn't' make a hill ‘o beans of difference, but it's kinda fun to see the muscles changing shape in a very short period of time due to this focus.  Kinda fun. But that fun came to an abrupt end last Friday when I was pulling a dumbbell off the rack at an odd angle and threw out my back.  I know you're getting that schadenfreude felling, aren't you?  You thinking, “I know that idiot was going to over-do it and hurt himself.” Yup.  I'm that idiot.  But in my defense I wasn't actually doing a weightlifting exercise at the time, I was pulling the weights off the rack.  So at least a week off.  Couldn't straighten up for a couple days.  Lots of pain.  A trip to the chiropractor, who by the way is on a first name basis with me.  What does it say about us that our doctors are always excited and happy to see us? Speaking of which my physical bloodwork didn't turn up anything awful but…  But… They did add a note to tell me that my cholesterol doubled in the last year.  Not running + shitty diet = bad cholesterol.  I immediately went on a plant-based diet.  I needed to anyhow.  I was just too have and it's not healthy. My plan is to restart my body building next week.  To take it back to day 1, because I was only 2 weeks in, and lower the weight, focus on the form.  At the same time the Dr. wants me back in 90 days to check that cholesterol.  I will eat plant-based until then and most-likely lose 15-20 pounds in the process. And next week, drum roll please, I meet with the knee Doctor.  Maybe he'll have some new ideas.  I tell you what, this cool weather makes me want to head out into the woods on a run.  If all those things come together just right … I might end up being a mediocre old guy. I'll take it.  As we say it's all frosting on the cake at this point. The warranty has expired and there's no expectations except opening your eyes and smiling in the morning.  Smile baby, And I'll see you out there. … Day 3… Hello again friends.  Let's wrap this race report up.  If you haven't been following along, this is the third in a series of recaps for the 250 bike ride I did this summer across Massachusetts.  I budgeted 4 days for the trip with 2 days of riding bracketed by a day of buffer on both ends. This is Day 3 of the trip and Day 2 of the ride. As I recapped last time Day 1 of the ride from Savoy Mass to Patriots Place in Foxboro ended up being 127.7 miles based on my Garmin.  It was a challenging hot day through the back roads and hill towns of western Mass that took me just over 10 hours.  I did not stop my Garmin at any point, so that 10:15 includes all the breaks.  I have learned that whenever I stop my watch at a break I inevitably forget to turn it back on.  I hit a detour and had a flat at the end that slowed me down a bit as well.  After dinner on Saturday night I changed the tire and tube of the flat.  I had 2 extra brand new tires with me.  As I have recounted earlier, I was riding my Mountain Bike.  I bought some small block tires with a less aggressive tread.  These were not road tires, per se, but they were closer to road tires.  But by the time I got to this ride they had worn significantly from all the road training.  Especially the rear tire, where I picked up the flat.  I decided to swap out the whole tire and tube for new.  Partly because it was easier than monkeying around with the old stuff, partly because it was time.  I left the front old front tire on.  It was in better shape and I didn't see a need to do the work in my tired state or to introduce more variables at that point. I cleaned up the bike a bit.  Put some more lube on the chain, got all my gear ready to go for the next morning, set the alarm and slept like a rock.  Both of the hotels we got for this trip were newer properties and really nice.  No problems at all.  Nobody gave me a hard time dragging my dirty, smelly self and my big bike through the hotel.  As a matter of fact, there was a wedding going on at the Patriots Place hotel and my wife saw Rick Hoyt. I did not go in and say ‘hi' but apparently one of the Hoyt clan was having a wedding reception in the hotel. Day two I had about 120 miles on the plan.  My first pit-stop planned was at a Starbucks 40 miles in to meet Yvonne.  I had scheduled 3 stops into this day thinking that I might need them.  I'd need to get across southeastern Mass from Foxboro to the Cape Cod Canal.  I'd need to get over the Canal.  From there I would find my way over to the start of the Cape Cod Rail Trail that runs from Yarmouth all the way up to Wellfleet, where I'd meet my wife again and have just a short push up top Provincetown to the end.  When I got up in the morning it was cool and foggy.  I felt good.  Part of the unknown about this trip was how it would feel to get back on the bike on that second day.  Turns out it felt fine.  On this day Yvonne didn't have to get up to drive me anywhere, I departed from the hotel and made my way out through the parking areas of Gillette Stadium to get back on route.  I had the same set up with my phone mounted on the center of the handlebars and wired into a battery pack under the seat.  I had my one remaining left ear pod in with the nice Google Maps lady giving me the turn by turns.  I had purchased an audio book for the ride called “Team of Rivals' about Abraham Lincoln's presidency and cabinet.  There I was peddling easy in the cool morning mist through the back roads of southeastern Mass learning all about Salmon Chase and Edward Stanton.  Fascinating stuff. The geography of southeastern Mass is different from the northern and western parts of the state.  It's mostly flat and near the coast.  There are cranberry bogs and small cites.  I rode through Bridgewater in the early part of the day which is a, how shall we say, ‘working class' part of the state.  I got yelled at for jumping a 4-way-stop.  And he was right.  We Massholes are very particular about some things, 4-way-stop rules being one of them.  There was a fair amount of road construction in this section where I had to deal with the sticky new road and the prepped, grated gravel.  Some of the back roads were a bit beat up.  My legs felt fine.  I was able to keep my nutrition going fine.  My butt and feet were okay.  All systems go.  Answering that question of ‘how would that second day feel?'  I felt fine.  I was also able to spend more time in the aero position which helped me relax. I met up with Yvonne at a Starbucks in Wareham.  She managed to get there ahead of me!  I fueled up and had her order me an iced coffee.  She came out with a hot coffee, which was fine, but I just got off the bike from riding 40 miles and really wanted an ice coffee.  After much waiting on the Starbucks brain-trust, I finally got my iced coffee, but I wanted to get going so I put it into one of my bike bottles which was an awesome treat as a rode the next few miles. As I got closer to the canal I was on some busy roads through Wareham and had to pay attention to not get run over by tourists.  The next big unknown for me was how I was going to navigate the canal.  Google maps seemed to think it was possible.  I would find out.  The Cape Cod Canal is a waterway that cuts straight across the base of the arm of Cape Cod from south to north.  It was created 100 years ago so that ships wouldn't have to go all the way around Cape Cod the long way.  It is about 17 miles long running from Buzzards Bay in the south up to Cape Cod Bay in the north.  For the purpose of our narrative the canal cuts right across our route.  We have to get over it.  There are two big Army Corps of Engineer bridges over the canal.  The Bourne and the Sagamore.  These are old-style high bridges to allow ship traffic to go under them.  They are two narrow, highspeed lanes in each direction with a high sidewalk on one side.  They were not designed for bicycle traffic. Back to the story.  Again the Google Maps did a great job of finding rail trails for me to follow.  It popped me out on the southern end of the canal and onto the canal trail.  This was another one of those cool discoveries for me.  It turns out there is a beautifully maintained bike trail that runs the length of the canal on both sides.  This was about 50 miles into the second day, and it was late morning by the time I hit the canal trail.  It was a gorgeous, sunny day.  Lots of people and families were out on the trail.  It routed me up the west side of the canal under the Bourne Bridge and all the way up to the Sagamore, where, apparently I'd be making that crossing. I had to get across one busy road to circle around the back and up onto the raised sidewalk of the bridge.  This sidewalk is raised up above the road surface by a tall granite curb.  There is no railing. So you are a couple short feet away from the screaming metal hellscape of 4 narrow lanes of highspeed traffic.  The signs said to walk your bike.  I did not.  But I did stop at the apex of the bridge arch to take a video with the boats way down below in the peaceful canal.  One funny thing was that the sidewalk was covered with pennies and other coins.  As far as I could determine people were throwing coins out the window of their cars over the sidewalk and railing into the canal.  Like a big wishing well, I guess.  I think this custom goes back to the Romans paying tribute to the water gods.  The pennies that didn't make it over the railing gathered up on the raised sidewalk.  I wonder if there's a notice for boats in the canal to be wary of high-velocity coinfall? Once I got over the bridge it was a quick button-hook back down to the canal trail on the other side.  It was starting to get hot again, but the trial was beautiful, paved, wide, and of course porta-potties! Yay.   The next bit of road was the dicey-est part of this day's ride.  After I got off the rail trail I had to navigate Rte. 6A which is an old, windy, narrow highway with no shoulder and a lot of disappearing shoulder that dropped off into sandy nothingness. I met Yvonne again at another coffee shop around 70 miles in and was in very good spirits.  The ride was going well.  I felt fine.  And I now knew everything there was to know about 19th century American politics. AND I was about to get on the Cape Cod Rail Trail which was home territory for me.  This 25 mile stretch of paved rail trail was where I had been training all summer.  Or at least on those weekends when I was down at my house in Harwich.  But, I had to get over to the rail trail in Yarmouth from the coffee shop on 6A where I met Yvonne.  This ended up being harder than I thought.  First I had to deal with 6A again and then I had to cut across the ‘Arm' of the Cape from north-ish to south-ish to pick up the trail.  One thing most people don't know about Cape Cod is that it is quite hilly in the interior.  Not hilly like Colorado or even like where I live but lots of pesky little rolling hills.  And finally it turns out Google Maps is confused about where the western trailhead for the trail is.  The maps routed me to the middle of nowhere with no trails in sight.  Luckily I knew generally where I was and was able to route to a landmark next to where I knew there was a trailhead in Dennis.  But, it wasted a lot of time and energy.  Once on the trail I was on easy street for a couple hours.  It was still a hot day but the trail has great cover and it's easy going.  Which was good because I was into the 90's mile-wise and was starting to feel the cumulative tiredness of riding for two days straight.  The next and last stop was at the Wellfleet trailhead at the north end of the trail.  This would put me about 100 miles in and just a short push up to P-town.  What happens here is that the rail trail ends and you have to get back on the roads to get the final bit up.  This was probably the low point of my ride, if there was a low ride.  I was pretty tired and looking forward to the end.  As I pulled in and met Yvonne she somehow was under the impression that this was were I was going to stop.  She got mad when I told her, no, I'm going up to P-town.  Not a great point in the journey to get in a fight with your crew.  She went off in a huff.  I climbed back on and cranked my tired legs up 6A again towards the end.  You can use back roads to kind-of zigzag around rte. 6A at this point but I was too tired to mess with it and mostly stuck to the big road.  Which sucked.  It was hilly and trafficky with no cover and my legs were trashed.  In this section I was battling a bit. Finally I got onto the access road that runs along the bay up into the town.  This was a pretty, flat section with the ocean on your left.   It's funny how the big miles at the beginning of the ride seem to fly by but those last few seem to take forever.  It was here that I walked a hill.  What happened was, I was coming down a slight hill into an intersection with the intention of using my momentum to get up the other side, but a car cut me off and I had to come to a complete stop.  I couldn't convince my trashed legs to grind up the other side, so I took a break and pushed the bike for a little bit.  Before long I was getting into Provincetown proper.  Now, one thing I had not thought about was how difficult it would be to get through the center of P-Town on a Sunday afternoon.  P-Town in August is a bit like Carnival.  It's a 200 year old fishing village that has thousands of party-ers dumped into it.  Tiny roads filled with stop and go cars, tourists, scooters, it was Bedlam.  And here I am, fairly wobbly on my big mountain bike trying to navigate it all without crashing.  And then I was turning out onto Macmillan Pier.  I rode all the way out to the end and hit stop on the watch at 123.73 miles and 10:15 for an average pace of 12.1 MPH including all the stops.  My wife called me, which was good because I thought she may have abandoned the project and gone home.  In fairness to her it was a pretty big ask, and probably not the best use of her weekend. She wasn't able to get into the downtown and was idling at a parking lot a few blocks away.  I got some bonus miles riding over to her.  We threw the bike in the back and took off back down the Cape to Harwich where our house is.  All-in-all I was pretty pleased with myself and the ride.  In terms of difficulty, it really wasn't that hard, but it was the right adventure for me at this point in my journey.  We stopped at our house just long enough to shower and change and got back on the road.  Yvonne was sick of travel and wanted to get home.  I wouldn't need that 4th buffer day after all. Turns out we got turned around trying to short cut across the suburbs back home, but we got there eventually.  And we slept in our own bed that night. The next day I felt fine.  No hangover at all from the riding.  I could have easily gotten back on the bike for another day.  I did have some saddle burn that took a week or so to heal up.  Overall, I find bike riding to be easy in the endurance sense.  My heart rate stays low, even in these long, hot, back-to-back rides.  It's a good workout, but it's never hard.  I never felt like I was at the edge.  Maybe that's what I need at this point in my life?  Who knows.  So that's it.  Two days, 250 miles.  127.7 in 10:03 on the first day and a slower 124.73 in 10:14 on the second day.  Found some new trails.  Had an adventure. … So what's going with me?  Well, it's taken much longer to get over throwing my back out than I would have liked.  I tried to restart the weightlifting last week but it was too soon, so I'm taking this week off as well. I'm feeling quite sad and broken around this latest setback.  Not being able to do something, anything to stay fit, makes me squirmy.  I suppose it's another good lesson in resilience, but who among us takes their foul-tasting medicine well?  My company shut down travel for the rest of the year which means I've been trapped in my home office looking at the walls far too much.  I feel a bit like a recluse.  Without the daily run or the daily workout it makes the walls close in.  I guess it's time for me to take up some new hobbies, like competitive lawn bowling or pickleball.  It's all very confusing and transitional for me to be sliding into my 60th birthday on this dust ball not knowing what the future holds.  I had my follow up appointment with the knee Dr. and he was not very encouraging.  I've got an MRI tomorrow and then a follow up.  I really miss running on these cool fall days.  Ollie-Wollie the killer collie is doing fine.  We get out for our walk everyday.  He's 3.5 now and getting much less crazy everyday.  I've got no races or projects on the calendar except the Mill Cities Relay in December.  I am planning on restarting the body building campaign as soon as my back lets me.  And, depending on what the MRI reveals maybe I can work some light running in over the winter.  … At this point I guess I have to tell a story.  My company requires us to use two volunteer days a year.  On the surface this is a great thing.  In reality it's hard for me to find and plan something important to volunteer for during the work week.  I have friends that work at homeless shelters or habitat for humanity and all sorts of other charities, but for some reason I find it hard to coordinate with official charities.  Last year I used my two volunteer days doing trail maintenance in the local trails that I run.  Basically I hiked the trails, picked up trash and cut/moved deadfall.  I always discover that I have to use these days about this time of year when time is running out.  This year I decided to take a Friday off and pick up trash on the roads around my house.  I figured I could clean up those roads that I used to run every day.  It always bothers me to see the trash along our beautiful New England roads.  I don't understand why people can't just keep it in their cars until they get where they are going?   So, last Friday I took a volunteer day.  It was a bit harder than it should have been because my back was still really sore and I couldn't bend over or lift very well, but a deals a deal.  I went to a section of road near my house which is part of a 5-mile route I've run 1,000 times.  It's an old road.  In this section I targeted, it runs flat through a swampy area and there are no houses. With the dry weather this summer the water table is low, and thus more of the swampy parts are accessible.  I drove my truck over there and parked about midway in the section.  I took out a couple big black plastic trash-can liner bags and got to work. It felt a bit strange being by myself out walking and picking up trash on a Friday during the day.  I didn't know if maybe someone would report my ‘strange behavior' to the local authorities who would come and chase me off for not having the proper permits or something.  I began filling my bag with cans and bottles and bags and wrappers that I could get to.  It was maybe a ¼ mile stretch.  I stayed off the shoulder as much as I could to stay out of the road and away from cars.  There isn't that much traffic here, but it's an old road with narrow shoulders and I didn't want to cause anyone to swerve.  When I got to the end of the road I crossed over and turned around to walk the other side.  A strange thing happened when I was midway down the other side.  A passing car slowed down and pulled over.  The driver rolled down his passenger window to talk to me.  “Here we go!” I thought to myself.  I've offended someone or something.  The guy leans over from his driver side and shouts out the window at me, very earnestly, “Thank you!  Thank you for what your doing!”  He was incredibly earnest.  Apparently somehow moved by me dragging a trash bag of beer cans down the road. He may have said some other praiseworthy things before driving off.  Frankly I had my (one) headphone in and was listening to a compelling science fiction story.  I really didn't know how to respond.  I guess I probably smiled and nodded my head in acknowledgement.  I finished up that side of the road and completed the circuit back up the other side to my truck.  Collecting two bags of miscellaneous cast-off refuse.  When I sorted it out the next day, I found that the majority was recyclable.  I even got some money for returning the cans and bottles.   The lesson here is that you think that what you are doing is a small and, maybe, even a meaningless act in the grand scheme of things.  I wasn't feeding the hungry or helping the homeless or solving world peace.  But, what I did on that day, that small action, apparently had a large impact on a fellow traveler.  I always use the metaphor of ripples in a pond.  Every act we take, no matter how small, crates ripples that spread out in ways unknown to us.  Make that act an act of kindness and it will spread kindness.  Make that act an act of helpfulness and it will propagate helpfulness.  Even small actions change the world. Thanks for staying with me on this bike narrative thing and I hope you enjoyed the narrative. With any luck I'll see you out there. Chris,