24

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7
Jun 10

Did I mention I had 798 things to read?

It took two days, fairly constant, dedicated days of reading, to chop my RSS reader down to just a few dozen items. But I also waded through all of my Email, too, so it has been a productive two days, I suppose.

We made cheeseburgers tonight. Brian came over to watch the series finale of 24 with us. He turned us onto the show at the start of the fifth season. Somehow we managed to watch all of the back episodes between DVDs and syndication since then — and now all of those Nina jokes make sense! — and have always enjoyed making fun of it with Brian.  We realized this evening that we’d never had a 24 watch party with him, so this was fitting.

And the finale was good for what it was. It did the jobs it needed to. It had a few minutes to satiate the anger-management crowd, it wrapped up what turned out to be a good plot for the season and gave Jack an opportunity at redemption (even as they did the Dark Knight ending) it had a few howlers. It wasn’t excellent great, but the endings for this show have always been awkward.

I’m certain that if a movie weren’t in the works the last 30 minutes of the show would have been entirely different. Seems I’m not the only one. So now we wait for the movie.

Nothing else to wait for here. I’ll be editing honeymoon pictures starting tomorrow. I wonder how long that will take.

24 / Monday / errands / memories / photo / site — No Comments
17
May 10

Of Kens and trees

Had lunch with Ken, my former boss. I met him more than six years ago — where did all of that time go? — in an almost two-hour interview. That was the day when I began stepping away from radio and into a future that focused more online.

Ken had been the online editor of a major newspaper and was the editor-in-chief of the state’s most trafficked newsite, al.com. He’d hold that job for more than a decade. I remember we talked about the job, of course, how the site worked, what sort of web work I’d done and so on.

I remember asking about the possibilities of doing new things. And in my four-and-a-half years working for Ken the site went from merely hosting the daily news for The Birmingham News, Huntsville Times and the Press-Register to becoming a full-fledged modern site. We ran blogs. I developed a regular podcast program. I added the first news videos to the site. We covered hurricanes, lots of them, developed political ad strategies and had big plans for the future.

My time there let me read some great thinkers about the evolving possibilities for news online. Many of them help influence my thought, teaching and research today.

So it was great to have a nice long lunch with Ken to talk about his latest projects. He’s a sharp, thoughtful man who puts ideas into practice, and you learn a lot by brainstorming and daydreaming with him.

Stopped by the bank, the friendly people. Now we’re up to introducing ourselves and shaking hands when customers walk in and when they leave. The security officer is holding the door with a smile. Ultimately what I needed can be taken care of over the phone. It will most likely be an automated process. I expect the recording to be painstakingly polite.

Made a few shopping errands in the late afternoon, most notably to the local bookstore. Books-A-Million is based here in Birmingham. It is the third largest bookstore in the country. Not bad for a company that started as a corner newsstand in sleepy little Florence in 1917. I wrote a few days ago about Trowbridge’s, which started in that same city just a year later.

Where that first corner newsstand — built from discarded piano crates and catering to out-of-towners constructing Wilson Dam (which, I’ve just learned, has the highest single lift lock east of the Rocky Mountains) — resided I don’t know. The store that came from it closed a few years ago. It is now Billy Reid, an overpriced clothing store. You can buy a t-shirt that you can order for $51 dollars. That’s on sale.

The sales in the bookstore weren’t much more impressive. And, Books-A-Million, the third largest book retailer in the country, seems a bit dead on a random Monday afternoon. I found a bird watching book I want. I copied the ISBN number and found it later online for half the price.

I’m not a bird watcher, but I know people who are. They take great joy in sharing their latest finds with others. I’m also reading about Theodore Roosevelt’s birding passions and I have this notion that dedicating a little time to bird watching could be restive and relaxing.

The problem is that I know only the most basic birds. Trees, fish, most livestock, dogs, sure I can break all of those down into different species and breeds. Birds? I’m pretty clueless. This book details the ones we see in this state. It has a map for winter and summer months. It organizes the birds by their physical characteristics in a simple and clever way. It has a CD which, I assume, is a study on the bird calls.

So it looks like I could be planting bird feeders in the fall.

Grilling

Grilling

We grilled steak tonight. It was a big meal for a big night. This is the next-t0-last episode, ever, of 24. It starts with the entrails of the guy Jack killed last hour. It ends with a preview of the finale where Jack promises to finish what he started. And then he smiles.

In between he kidnapped the former president. Again. He squealed quicker than a former president who’s just been trapped, shot at, gassed and choked should. From there we learned that Russian diplomats and fireplace pokers don’t mix.

I’m really wondering about that smile. I’ve been offering predictions about the outcome of the show for the last several weeks, revising the plot as the show dictates. I think he’s smiling while taking aim at the guy at Fox that canceled the show.

Did you see the new picture across the top of the blog? That’s the field behind my great-grandparents place. It sits fallow after his passing, but that’s the place where my great-grandfather tilled the land and let me “play in the dirt.”

The last photograph of my great-grandfather

The last photograph of my great-grandfather.

I was in college and he’d still ask me when I was going to come play in the dirt. I told stories about that field in most every speech I ever gave in high school. The picture on the front page is the oak tree in their front yard. If there are no cars rounding the curve, or coming down the hill from the opposite way, you can hear every thought you’ve ever uttered all at once.

That’s the peace of the place. No matter where you are in your day — or your year or what have you –  you can always use a reminder of what soothes you. Today you can share one of mine.

If you keep reading this site this place might snooze you, too!

Have a great Tuesday!

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10
May 10

My grandmother could beat up Jack Bauer

I spent lunch with my mother and grandparents. Visited my great-grandmother before church and spent last night with my other grandmother.

Not too long after I arrived, though, my cousin brought her three boys over for a visit. They have three children, four and under. The youngest is only eight-months old, content to take it all in. The oldest are big fans of drag racing and toy cars were required to move at high speeds, and volume, across my grandmother’s coffee table.

She didn’t mind. She was holding the baby, and was content to ignore the chaos.

The deeper into the drag racing we went the louder the cars became. You’d think they’d get hoarse, but no.

Old cars

Old cars I played with as a child are seeing use again.

I remembered details about a lot of the cars — there is a full case of them. The one on the left was the General Lee before I scrapped all the paint off of it. (The guy in Hazzard didn’t do a decent paint job, apparently. In one of my demolition derbies it began to flake away.) The jeep didn’t roll well. I liked that plastic Thunderbird because it always soared off ramps well. Also my grandfather had two sitting outside. The Mercedes was always handled with care for some reason. Even then the value of a brand was apparent, I suppose. The truck, there are two or three just like it, doesn’t haul very well. They were, however, quite successful in the demolition derby.

So that was last afternoon and into the evening. My grandmother and I visited for a while and then I found my way into one of her extra bedrooms. It has been one of those days where I could never get ahead of being tired, so it was an early night.

She made pancakes this morning. And then her sister-in-law came over to go to town with her. That woman is a whirlwind of chaos and compliments and walked in the door ready to fuss over this and that and do this and that. It is nice to see, and I understand the sentiment, but I also agree with my grandmother.

“It’s a wonder I ever got along before these people came to take care of me.”

My grandmother is one of the most completely giving, unassuming people I know. She’s fiercely independent and more than capable of doing her own dishes or getting her own umbrella or any of the other things we all try to do. We know it, too. We’re just trying to be helpful, of course. She just laughs at us.

So I drove back across the county for lunch with my mother and other grandparents. We went to Trowbridge’s.

Trowbridge's in downtown Florence, Ala., since 1918.

Trowbridge's in downtown Florence, Ala., since 1918.

It seems that in 1917 Paul Trowbridge of Texas passed through on his way to a dairy farmer’s convention in North Carolina. The next year, after purchasing property, he started a creamery and ice cream shop. Somewhere along the way they started selling food. During World War II they added their famous chili. Breakfast was added to the menu some time later. There’s a painting on the back wall of Trowbridge’s a generation ago. It looks almost identical to what you see today.

The chilidog isn’t what it used to be, but the straws still float in the Coke bottles and the ice cream is still delicious. I haven’t been in years, but I snapped a few pictures. You can see them, along with a few shots from Mother’s Day, in the May photo gallery.

After lunch I pointed the car back toward home. There was some library time to be had, then a delicious spaghetti dinner with The Yankee. We watched 24, which might have given us the most crazy hour of television in that show’s history. We knew enough to eat early. Something about that upcoming interrogation just made us think torches applied to skin wouldn’t go over well alongside a nice meat sauce.

That was a good choice.

And that was a guy Jack Bauer didn’t even care about. This show may go and redeem itself altogether in the final few hours. I expect the write in revival campaign will begin accordingly.

Anyway. Check out the photo gallery. Speaking of pictures you might have noticed the new banner across the top of this page, neatly wrapping up the neon from Las Vegas. There’s a new picture on the main page, showing off a handsome view from my grandmother’s home. Tomorrow the Tumblr will return, alongside various random things on Twitter. One of my classes has their final tomorrow. I’ll wind down this and that as the semester comes to a close. We’re really in the home stretch now.

Oh. That headline? Entirely true.

24 / Monday / Samford / errands / memories — No Comments
3
May 10

Jack Bauer doesn’t have time for Dreamweaver

Clouds over Hoover

The days are starting to slow down. I was home before dark tonight. That’s a tremendous moral victory. Never mind that it is still daylight after 7:30 in the evening. That still means I’m home before 7:30 in the evening.

Today, despite the feeling of a slowing of the Pace of Things, was a full one.

There was a termite inspection. (There are no termites.) A very nice gentleman walked around, through and under every thing, just to be certain. He gave me his paperwork, “I’ve been here, the termites haven’t” to sign and off he went, into someone’s home for half an hour.

You wonder if he wonders about these people whom he meets briefly each day. As I might have mentioned here before I worked at Stanley Steemer during high school, cleaning carpets, complimenting people on their pets and the fine pictures of their children and selling things. It must have looked odd. “Nice picture of your son and daughter there, sir. You must be proud.” I am 16. His kids were older than me.

I always wondered about these people, whom I got to meet. I often think of the guy who told me, between puffs of his cigarette, that he’d just been diagnosed with cancer. The lady that was obviously in a bad domestic situation, what ever became of her? The wealthy family with two kids in college? What achievements of their children are they boring their friends with down at the country club? People’s photographs say a lot, of course, and they are often willing to brag about this or that. It was an always changing adventure to meet five or six families a day.

This guy though, the termite guy? He’s more concerned about a snake falling on his head. In all of my tales from the high school carpet cleaning days — and I’ve got great stories — none of them start with “One day this snack just dropped out of the rafters … ”

There was the purchase of a gift card. (The only way to shop.) Walk in to Best Buy, wave off the gentleman who’d like to give you a flier. Pick up the appropriately themed plastic card. Tell the cashier how much you want on it, zip, beep, done. The cashier and I were both on the phone during the entire transaction. It was beautiful.

There was the picking up of a handsome framed piece for the Crimson’s outgoing editor. We took the newspaper plate from one of the year’s issues, had it matted and framed and gave it to her tonight. The people at the Framin’ Shoppe know me. We do this project, and a few others together every year. They notice the subtle changes in the order before I do. We don’t do a great deal of business with them, but they have a great eye for detail.

I love framing things. I wouldn’t mind if it were a bit cheaper. If I could afford it I would cover every inch of wall space with neatly framed photographs and profoundly important looking shadowboxes. I’d have more floorspace because everything would be hanging up. People would come visit us and think “This is a life invested.” Or “Quick! Invest in matting stock!”

I placed an order for the catered dinner I’m throwing tomorrow night. I visited Roly Poly, as that is the tradition I established. Order a platter, share it with the student journalists.

This is a very hard order for me to place. I’m not fond of even picking restaurants — my reasoning is sound, whenever I pick a place something goes horribly wrong with the dining experience — and now I must order for a group of people with different tastes.

Fortunately Roly Poly names their platters. Since they don’t have the Roly Poly Platter (when in doubt, order the thing named after the restaurant, you know that dish works) they have the All American Platter. Problem solved.

I taught a class for two hours. The students have been laboring away in our sweltering Mac lab (I wonder if they have given it a creative name this spring) learning how to build themselves a portfolio website in Dreamweaver. Some of these pages are really quite impressive.

And then we had the annual Journalism and Mass Communication Barbecue Picnic Awards Banquet and Hootenanny. They just call it a picnic because that fits on the program better.

We give out awards and honors and scholarships. Students are recognized. We eat. The dean tells great jokes. The students then make fun of the faculty. Everyone has a nice time.

And after all of that I still managed to make it home before dark. I had to help The Yankee find her cell phone. This took about 35 seconds. For my troubles I was able to remind her to not lose her cell phone for the rest of the night.

We watched 24 a couple of characters didn’t see that coming, did they?

There is a reasonable discussion going around that this is the best season of 24. I’m not sure if I have a favorite — and the common subplots of the series are too rampant at this point for me to pick this as my favorite — but it is an entertaining ride, these last few weeks.

I’m being vague in case you are behind, dear reader.

I almost wish I didn’t know that a Jack Bauer movie was forthcoming. That’d let the danger and the ambiguity and the concern over Jack’s stability linger in the air. Since a.) Kiefer Sutherland is the executive producer b.) Jack Bauer does the clock narration c.) We see him in next week’s previews and d.) there is a movie coming we know that nothing fatally bad happens to our hero. A little suspense at the end wouldn’t hurt.

My (this week’s) prediction: The series ends with Jack soaring down a zip line into Vladimir Putin’s office and screaming at him. Putin, or his composite character facsimile, pulls off a rubber mask to reveal that he’s Charles Logan. Logan pulls of his mask to reveal that he’s Logan’s ex-wife. She pulls off a mask to reveal that the person really throwing the switches is Teri Bauer.

Jack will have an emotional breakdown, black out and wake up on the set of Lost. He quickly deduces that the smoke monster is really just the steam from the Hot Tub Time Machine movie. He will be transported back to the set of Lost Boys, but with all of his knowledge intact, so that he can avoid making The Cowboy Way and Cowboy Up.

Write it down.