Autumn ends
If you're walking on eggs don't hop
Bicycle season ends when the temperatures dip below zero. I’ve made the 10K commute to/from work in the city for the last five months. Recent rides have become very technical in order to shave off a few seconds here and there. The bike parkour equivalent of the countdown scene in the movie Blue Thunder, according to Google Fit, the app that keeps track of everything. It nags me about the twenty-one minute record I need to beat.
Riding fast and fluid through Kyiv can be dangerous. When it comes to braking, I often jump off the bike and slow down on foot, and I also can use my foot on the back wheel like a brake (in an emergency). But usually I try to keep riding.
Everyone crashes from time to time, even with breaks. Staying focused and aware of the jackass in your rear-vew mirror is the best way to stay safe.
Hypoxia is a life-threatening emergency for fish. An hours-long electricity outage last night killed one of our freshwater angels. Her siblings are sluggish. I read that you can pour hydrogen peroxide in the tank to increase oxygen levels in an emergency, but I’m afraid that might kill the catfish.
I am of late – for the first time, and possibly the last – finding myself engaged in the most enjoyable pastime of teaching Ukrainian children how to swear in English. Of course all children come equipped with a threshhold of gullibility, and by any measure it is low, low behaviour for an adult to take advantage of this eagerness to learn, in any language. Nonetheless I hope that some time in the future one of them will have opportunity, when called out or sassed upon an English-speaking street, to shoot back with one of my recommended rejoinders.
Fuck off and die.
A recent surge in linkery to some of this site’s more pointed comment on bloodthirsty tyrants and demagogue paste-up artists might lead to a conclusion that all that goes on here is potshot-taking and war-adjacent content milling, when nothing could be further from the truth: regular readers of ukraine@war will attest that most material posted here is gently evocative, quietly reverent, and more often than not, as Lex Fridman would say, focused on building community, on uniting rather than dividing.