May, 2011


13
May 11

Friday the 13th!

The only thing more terrifying is Thursday, the 13th!

My sense of pop culture, or my need to find such things funny, must have become especially detached lately. Didn’t even realize it was Friday and a 13th until I started writing this.

Happily, nothing terrible happened today. Slept in. Turned in my grades — the semester is done! Rode the bike.

We have a big hill at our house. I am convinced it might be the biggest hill in town — being officially in the coastal plains and all. The ride started with that hill. I do not like this hill in the saddle. The Yankee says “You’ll get used to it.”

Which is the thing that concerns me. That’s the sort of descent that will break something when you get casual about it. I have enough mass to build up some real speed on the thing. And I’m fragile.

So we pedaled a while, had a nice ride and then got ready for the Alabama at Auburn baseball game.

Which got rained out. Friday the 13th strikes after all.

We went out for barbecue and banana pudding instead. There’s always a silver lining in slow cooked meat. (As a general rule: if you find a silver lining in your meat you should send it back, but go with it.)

We visited Moe’s Original Barbecue, which has become a popular stop on Magnolia. I always said a little northern Alabama barbecue would do well here. The first time we stopped in the line was almost out the door. Now the college students have all gone home for the summer and it was merely full rather than packed. And, for the first time at Moe’s, I had the barbecue chicken. It was very good.

The banana pudding still isn’t anything to brag about. Now I just want Dreamland. Or Jim ‘N’ Nicks.

Our Friday night? We bought things at Walmart. We picked up a garden hose sprinkler attachment, socks, a birthday card and other small things here and there. We know how to party.


12
May 11

In the library, with the comfortable chair

Library

This is my favorite time in the new house. Sitting in a big chair, reading as the sun starts its slow slide outside. All day long should be just like this.


11
May 11

Summer is here

The seasons have changed in more ways than one. My spring classes are now completed. All that is left is to finish up the grades. Then I’ll turn my attention back to my dissertation. And sweating. With spring gone summer has shown up, starting today. Riding a bike in the 90s isn’t the best idea, but we did that today. Nice ride, too. I should ride more.

Cleaned up some comment spam. The spammers like photo blogs, like my LOMO blog, where I dumped 100 spammers, but the automated text has lately been unfailingly polite.

After that we hit the grocery store. In the figurative sense. The store is made of brick and cement and various other painful looking substances. Hitting it would just be silly when what you really need to do is pick up cereal and sandwich stuff.

Then there was a little reading. And then some more research. Finding obscure Russian scholars is proving a tough challenge. I found seven items from this small group today, though, so that’s a start.

And then there was a baseball game. Auburn hosted Alabama State in a makeup game that was pitched as Fan Appreciation Night. Most people had something better to do (and school is out, further reducing the crowd). They didn’t even announce the attendance, but it was somewhere in the Montreal Expos territory. On the official statistics they called it 1,868. Only if they counted you twice.

TheYankee

(She got counted twice because she’s extra special. )

They might have miscounted the Alabama State pitchers. They had some big guys on the mound. The starter was an all-district center in high school, was listed as bigger than Auburn’s national championship center and I believe it. They just got taller and more impressive as the night went on. Auburn got an early lead in the game and flirted with giving it away before finally winning 7-5.

Lovely night to spend watching baseball, but every night is lovely at Plainsman Park. (This weekend they host Alabama.)


10
May 11

Finals

Busy, busy day. You could spell it bizzy, but that’s just adding an extra letter and takes up more time.

Drove in to give my final exam this evening. Stopped by AAA to pick up a form they neglected to give me on my two other recent visits. The same very pleasant woman I talked with the first time was there today. She saw me playing with a map on my iPhone. She asked if I had the AAA app. I do.

“But do you have the other one?”

I do not. And if this conversation sounds at all familiar that’s because she and I had precisely this same conversation the last time I saw her, when she did not give me the form I needed.

But things happen. I had to drive more or less right by the place anyway. No big deal.

So we went to lunch at a place called Urban Cookhouse to meet with friends. They want you to buy local and eat urban. And it was spare and delicious. You could tell right away you’d soon be hungry again. But we all feel better about ourselves since this was the one meal of the day that was local and organic and probably healthy. Aren’t we the upwardly trendy types?

And then there was work. One meeting about cameras, followed by another meeting about some cameras in particular. And then a trip to UPS to package up some cameras. This took a long time, but you could have safely kicked the box down a flight of stairs, or floated on it in the ocean, without damaging the cameras inside.

And then there were Emails about the cameras, and a phone call about some cameras. And then I helped turn an office into a video location for tomorrow.

After that I helped a student with a tricky little coding problem. And then I had a snack, because it had been four hours since that spare, healthy lunch and I was starving. So I had some crackers while writing another Email about cameras.

Interject a few more camera things in here and you get the idea.

Finally came the final, where my students must present the fruit of their hard work in trying to simultaneously understand the mysteries of building a website and why the Adobe people put things in Dreamweaver as they did. The students all did quite well for themselves.

Nice guy that I am, I stuck around a little while to help with one on-going project. And the next thing I knew it was 9:30. So that meant an impossibly late dinner. My lovely bride, though is patient and likes Whataburger. It worked out.

Now all that’s really left to do is to calculate and tabulate the semester’s grades. I’m leaving this stuff out so any grading gremlins can stop by and take care of it for me overnight.


9
May 11

More than you already knew about Lombardo Boyar

Noticed this last night while catching up on the TiVo. The Hispanic gentleman they want for murdering his wife in this clip in Los Angeles-based television show Southland:

Is the same Hispanic gentleman suspected of murdering his entire family (wife, two kids and mother-in-law) in this clip of Los Angeles-based The Closer:

Both shows are on TNT, both shows have referenced Parker Center, which was the real home of the LAPD until 2009 (a plot point used by The Closer, but not by Southland thus far). Aside from occasional references to common departments the shows don’t have much crossover. But this guy, well, he’s just had a tough few years.

He was guilt in Southland, seems he’d used a skillet on his wife and his kids were trying to cover for him. He was innocent on The Closer. The pregnant girlfriend of some incarcerated gang member had a bad address and shot up the wrong place.

That actor, Lombardo Boyar, has been 75 television shows and movies, including three different characters of NYPD Blue. He’s also been arrested on CSI Miami, he ran a contraband cigarette scheme on an episode of The Shield, played a mistaken wallet snatcher on Boston Legal, a cop suspected of murder in the original CSI, a concerned bystander in Day 2 of 24 and a young tough in Walker, Texas Ranger:

(Chuck Norris, awesome even in French.)

Oh, he’s not always a bad guy. Here’s Boyar in Happy Feet.

The things you can do with a few minutes, IMDB, a search engine and a few episode guides.