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10
Jun 24

Dance, then baseball, now old

On Saturday we went to high school. I can’t remember the last time I was in a school. Probably a dozen years or more. We visited one because my god niece in-law (just go with it) was in a dance recital.

I wasn’t really paying attention to the exterior of the building as we pulled up, but I did notice this near the door. When was the last time you saw a pay phone?

If you look closely enough, you can see there’s no receiver. So maybe it isn’t a phone anymore. Maybe the school just dragged it out there and it is waiting for a garbage pick up.

The school, from what we saw, seemed nice. Very big. Old school. Hallways full of plaques marking their distinguished alumni. Some of the plaques were a little basic, but others were quite remarkable. A lot of professors and authors and civic leaders. There was a music promoter, and a touring manager for U2. There was someone who won the Nobel Prize in economics. The inventor of Lipitor went to school there. The state’s first black attorney, a man born a former slave soon after the Civil War, was a student there. His plaque said he got paid for his work by bushels of food. I’d like to have time to read more of them.

But there was dancing to watch.

Our dancer took part in two numbers, a ballet and en pointe. She looked great, danced with nice confidence and had a lot of fun. Had we all not had favorites, everyone in the auditorium would have chosen the two little girls that opened the recital as the stars. They were two young beginners, wearing shimmering three-tone tutus, mimicking what their coach was doing from the floor. They were adorable and stole the show. But all of the numbers and dancers were delightful in their own way, and they kept things moving.

I’ve been to two dance recitals. The first was a two-day recital, if you can believe that. Every group was organized by age, and they all danced to the same song. We heard that same bad song dozens of time. I was working on the video production, which meant I had to be there. It was a lot of standing, no food, and that same horrible song several dozen times. I am quite certain it scarred me. This weekend’s show was much shorter, had a unique song and style of dance for every group, and it was over in a little under two hours. It was a much better show.

After dinner we all adjourned to the ballerina’s home. That evolved into a big baseball game in the front yard. All of the adults sat in lawn chairs and watched the kids play. And me. We had plate music and everything.

This became a two-hour game. Usually because the kindergartner had to dance to his song, “Texas Hold ‘Em.” And we had no pitch count. A pitch count would have moved things along, but most of the kids were too young for that.

The day’s star dancer hit two huge home runs off of me. That’s what happens when you grove your pitches. There were also a lot of little league home runs. After everyone else went inside for snacks, the 9-year-old boy and I stayed out to play catch. (It was a little bit special.)

I was in a dress shirt and not-the-right-shoes for all of this, and so I was sore the rest of the night and tired most of Sunday.

Yesterday, I was admiring the new growth on the pine trees, (Pinus strobus, I think).

We have three in the backyard. They are growing tall and close to the house. They help block the late afternoon sun. They can’t stay forever, but we enjoy them now.

And the sky was just so casually brilliant …

It was worth noting.

It’s time, once again, for the site’s most popular weekly feature. We must check in on the kitties.

Phoebe was nice enough to pose, ever so briefly, on the landing this afternoon.

I’m a real sucker for when she puts her face on her paw.

Poseidon has recently discovered the lamp I have behind my computer.

He came to quickly realize that the light bulb gives off a fair amount of warmth, and so he’s never leaving.

Now, the only way I can keep Poe from that spot is to not turn on the lamp.

He knows cozy when he sees it.

So the kitties, as you can tell, are doing just fine. They’re ready for another fun week. As am I. And i hope you are, too!

adventures / errands / photo / swimming / Thursday — Comments Off
6
Jun 24

The Smith Zoo and Nature Center

We had three-plus inches of rain last night. Everything stayed dried that needed to, I think. I still try to walk around and check most things after the big rains. This was, I think, our third overenthusiastic participation.

This afternoon I had yet another adventure in the 21st century’s second most annoying innovation: planned obsolescence. The details do not matter. You, too, know how these stories go. This is my third such instance in the last few weeks. It’s tiring and bothersome.

Here’s the fun part, the experience today took me to somewhere I hadn’t been. When I left I had nine percent of my phone battery and I needed to use that for the map. Also, I was running low on gas.

I worried about a scenario where my phone died, and then I had to improvise a fueling strategy. I bet you can’t even buy a paper map anymore. Lewis and Clark explored the continent with more resources than I had today. They’d be proud of how I overcome the adversity. It involved getting to the interstate, choosing the correct direction, avoid the interchanges to other highways, and then guess where my station of choice is located, which is one or two exits down from the house.

I made it to the station with 50-some miles in the tank. I got home with two percent of my phone’s battery.

The Smith Zoo and Nature Center got a member today, this cute little box turtle.

Last month this frog, a big chonky specimen, stopped by for a while.

Before the frog, we heard from a noisy fox for a few nights in a row.

In between the frog and the turtle, the reptile wing was completed by two visits from a 4- or 5-foot rat snake, twice. (Not pictured, for snake reasons.)

The frog I escorted to some woods. The turtle moseyed it’s way off all by itself. I took the snake away the first time, and then two or three days later it came back. I annoyed and startled it off. If it comes back again I’m going to herd it into a bin and drive it to the woods, some miles from the house. Maybe I’ll drive him around in a circle for a while first, to dissssssorient him.

Splashed around in the pool today, and then I did some swimming. It was another day of 1,000 yards. Three of those in the last week. So I’m going to up the distance next time. Because, I thought, when I’d finished, That was easy.

And later in the evening I thought, Maybe it wasn’t.

Of course, the only thing I’ve eaten today was a bowl of granola this morning.

Now I just have to remember how to use the underwater camera again. Not every button’s purpose has been memorized by my thumb and forefinger. I guess I should use it more.

adventures / history / markers / New Jersey / We Learn Wednesdays / Wednesday — Comments Off
5
Jun 24

The long pause Wednesday

Warm today, and cloudy. I watched it all slide away. When I was prepared to go for a bike ride I stepped outside and was impressed by the humidity and that, Nahhh. Could I have made a better use of the time? Sure. Do I feel ambivalent about that? Probably — whatever.

At any rate, I had to return to the closet project. Yesterday I resized six clothes hangar bars. Today I had to resize four more of them again.

That’s what happens when you eyeball things, comfortable with the knowledge that, these things are so adjustable precision doesn’t matter and, they are going to be in a closet, so perfection doesn’t matter and, they’re going to be in the guest bedroom closet, so this will only come to mind a few times per year. So I eyeballed it all yesterday, and I ended up doing a bit more of it again today.

I did not refine my technique. Happily, I did not have to purchase any new equipment. And now the custom-sized closet system is completed.

And, somehow, it may yield us a bit more room for stuff and things.

And, after dinner, it started raining. After a time it started raining hard. And now it is raining so hard it just sounds different.

I’d never heard water roar down a drainage pipe, and now that’s happening just outside the window next to where I am typing. It is, to be sure, a sensation.

It’s time once more for We Learn Wednesdays, where we discover the county’s historical markers via bike rides. This is the 37th installment, and the 67rd and 68th markers in the We Learn Wednesdays series. These are grouped together because they’re directly related anyway as we continue our exploration of Fort Mott.

In the last few weeks we checked out the old gun batteries and had a quick look at the observation towers that helped them in their work of defending the river and Philadelphia, beyond. Most recently, we took a quick glimpse at the parados and the moat that served as the fort’s rearguard. Last time we saw the signs for the generator, plotting and switchboard rooms at. (The signs are good, the rooms were empty.)

As a park, Fort Mott has a map on a sign that will orient you to the space.

The river is on the left side of this drawing. You can see the pier jutting out into the water. (That’ll figure into this in just a moment.) Just above that you’ll see the long row of gun placements. You can see the moat, in blue, behind them.

Today, though, we’re in front of the moat, in one of the most dangerous spots at the fort, the battery commander’s station.

Back then, all of the work of fighting invaders would have started here. The people in this bunker would visually ID and chart the progress of enemy vessels. They’d relay the information they collected, by a simple phone line, to the plotting room. There, soldiers following mathematical formulas created firing solutions that would allow the defenders to put 870-pound rounds downrange, six per minute.

This is in fact a former gun position. One of the batteries, Krayenbuhl, was outmoded as technology improved, and so this went in at the same physical space.

If bad guys ever sailed up the river — looking for Philadelphia beyond — and they were fired upon by Fort Mott, they’d want to target all the observation points in kind. And the guys sitting in here, would be the target.

Remember that pier, in the map above? You can see it through that narrow slat in the command bunker.

Fort Mott became a state park in 1951, but it was a self-contained military installation in its day. They had a small hospital, a PX, a library, school and more. It closed in 1922, when another, more modern, installation opened downstream. But we aren’t done with it yet. There’s still a bit more for us to explore on We Learn Wednesdays. Until then, you can catch up on all of the older posts, right here.

adventures / music / photo / Re-Listening / swimming / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
4
Jun 24

Separation of powers

I had a nice little swim this afternoon. It was little, just 1,000 yards. I am not a wise swimmer, but I am trying to be wise here. It’s early yet, I’m still building up distance or endurance or patience. I swam 1,000 the last time I was in the pool, and so my instinct today was to swim more. I thought I’d do 1,250 yards, but then I thought, no, the sensible thing to do would be to ease into things. And so I did that.

Dove in, the water was warm. Stepped on the strap of a kid’s goggles, and startled myself. A sea creature had gotten me! Laughed at myself. Started swimming. And swam and swam. This takes me a long time, because I am a slow swimmer.

But I found a random chart, with no attribution, on a random site that says my average 100 yard swim times are on par with people 15 and 20 years younger than me. So this chart is, obviously, incredibly accurate.

Of course, the times are for normal people, not fish, nor other species of superhumans or athletes. For all we know, they could be times of people who have never swam from one end of a pool to the other. It could be some ChatGPT chart that was really about cotton candy consumption times that got mislabeled, for all I know, but it suggests I’m swimming faster than young people, and I’ll take it.

We are installing a new closet system — and, Lord do I hate anything that uses the word “system” as a piece of unnecessary marketing. This is an installation for our guest bedroom. For the previous owners, this was a teenager’s room. The closet had the cheap, ubiquitous wire rack shelves. There were sliding glass doors. They’re coming out, too.

It was my lovely bride’s job to decide to upgrade the closet. It was also her job to pick the closet system. It was my job to remove the doors.

The secret to these projects is simple for us. She can build a thing. I can build a thing. We can’t build it together. So I left her alone, right there, to assemble the system. It became my job, after that, to make it actually fit.

The system has three clothes rods. Two at the traditional height and one that is lower. One side of each rod is anchored into the walls, and the other side of each rod will be attached to this MDF shelving unit. Each of these has two rods, one telescoping inside the other. And they’re all too large to work in tandem, and two short to work alone.

So it was my job to solve this problem. To the garage! And the hacksaw! The job was to slice through six medium grade hollow tubes of aluminum.

And then I sanded the burrs away.

She’ll install them tomorrow. I’ll let her put them into place. She likes to build things. It’s the sense of control and progress, I think. On these projects, I just say, I’ll be in my office if you need me. After some muttering, she’ll have made a nice little upgrade.

A now custom-built closet system.

Let us return to the Re-Listening project, where I am writing about all of my old CDs, which I am listening to in my car, in the order of their acquisition. This is just a nice pad, a good excuse to listen to some music, and a trip down memory lane.

And we are still a few decades in the past. (Which is funny because I have new music burning a metaphorical hole in my pocket that I’d really like to get to while I still, loosely, remember their order.

Anyway, the next disc up was something a friend and co-worker burned for me. It was 2004, and I was at al.com and it was late in the year, so I was no longer new there. My buddy made this mix of remixes. It was primarily Beatles, which we had debated at length, mixed with the Beastie Boys, who I never really appreciated. It’s possible he might have been trolling me, come to think of it. But at the end of the disc, he included this track, which still holds up incredibly, incredibly well.

The rest of the remixes weren’t really my thing, but as I was listening to this on a recent night I was struck by the production values. The quality of the mixes was phenomenal, even for the early oughts.

That guy, and his wife, are still dear friends. Tonight, on Facebook, I saw photos of their son graduating high school. I held that boy in my arms when he was a newborn, and now he has a high school diploma.

And now I have to find a way to send those songs back to him. A project for next week.

But, since that mix disc doesn’t really count, we move on. I bought this next disc on January 6, 2005. It had a bonus CD. It didn’t change everything, they’d already changed everything. But, for $8.48 it proved a point I’d already realized about the importance of The Jayhawks.

“Rainy Day Music” was their seventh studio album. It debuted at number 51 on the Billboard 200 in April of 2003. They moved 19,000 copies that week. It was critically well received. Here’s a Wiki summary …

Rainy Day Music received generally positive reviews from critics. Dirty Linen described the album as “a low-key effort that features delicate harmonies, recalling California relatives such as Poco and the post-Gram Parsons Burrito Brothers”. Uncut called the album “all acoustic guitars, rich jangling melodies and heavenly harmonies” and wrote that Gary Louris “has come up with some of his most memorable compositions.” Will Hermes of Entertainment Weekly described it as “folk-rock laced with banjos, accordions, and pedal steel” and “the roots move one suspects fans have wanted for years, its classic rock flavor echoing the Byrds, CSNY, and Poco”. Mojo wrote that “their new-found economy makes for some pretty lovely highpoints” and that “Louris is unquestionably a virtuoso, playing his parts with a decorous restraint, and contributing cooing, affectingly human vocals.”

… but no one raved about it enough, for it is a nearly perfect record, even two decades later.

This was the first track, where Gary Louris and Tim O’Reagan put these beautiful, delicate little harmonies together that so typify the sound.

The (almost) title track, which comes along as the fourth track, where, even if you were new to this, you knew you had some stripped down jangly pop genius and singalongs on your hands.

This is the song that The Yankee and I sing together. She, who often mishears lyrics and sings her own, sometimes even more compelling renditions, has a nice spin on this one. For her, it becomes a song about pancakes.

I think it was a deliberate mis-hearing in this case, but we’ve done it this way for 18 or 19 years now, and I don’t want to ask.

The Jayhawks, incidentally, were the first band we went to see together. Mark Olson was back with the band for a time, and so we drove over to Atlanta to watch them in March 2005. This CD was probably the first deep batch of their songs she’d heard.

It was a solid show.

There are 13 songs on the CD, and 10 of them are stand-outs, but this has to be my favorite. Between the bus driver smiling with every passing mile, and the song’s bridge. It’s hard, I think, to feel the same visceral way about a song, after hearing it hundreds and hundreds of times over the years, but not so difficult with this song.

The bonus CD included six additional tracks. Two demos, two alternate versions of songs found here, and a classic live track and between them, I’ve gotten my $8.48 worth and then some.

One of the alternates was an acoustic version of “Tampa to Tulsa.” Yeah.

Rainy day, sunny day, every day in between. This is the record for it.

Put another way, I bought this on Amazon in 2005, which is how I could recall the date and the price. And, of course, there’s a button there, just in case I would like to purchase it again. And I thought, Yeah, OK, until I realized the CD is right next to my elbow right now.

The Jayhawks are on tour — their in Spain right now — and will soon return to the U.S., to visit the Midwest and west coast. Maybe they’ll add some fall dates a little closer to me. I’d definitely go.

And, with that, we are now only five records behind in the Re-Listening project. So we’re right on time.

adventures / cycling / Monday / photo / television / video — Comments Off
3
Jun 24

What a fine start to June

We had a party for the god nephews and niece in-law (just go with it) yesterday evening. The boys are at the age of physicality and not understanding the ability to hurt one another. How they don’t devolve in any waking moment to the most charismatic wrestling move now on television is a mystery. But they wail on each other, as kids do, in just about every other way. It’s fun for them both, of course, until it is not. They are both insanely careful around their sister, which is cute. I am still bigger than them, so I can use the news anchor voice or go stand over one when he is being a little too much. Sometimes it’s the little brother that has to be called to heel.

In other words, they’re boys.

So we recreated famous football catches and toured the basement. They were very interested in our basement, which is not nearly as cool as their grandfather’s basement, and I told them so, but they could not be dissuaded. We had pizza and macaroni and cheese for dinner. We played basketball as a last-ditch stalling effort before they finally left.

The youngest, by the way, has a girlfriend and they have kissed at school and he says they both liked it, and he is in the NBA. He is also graduating kindergarten in a few days.

Oddly enough, I wasn’t completely sapped of energy when they left last night. Must have been that real-strawberry popsicle.

The cats hid upstairs during all of this. They are not used to little people, is the best we can figure. Lately they are both quite friendly when an adult comes by for whatever reason. But these half-sized types are no good for them. They don’t really have a reason for this fear, they just know it on a run-upstairs-and-hide level, and they aren’t wrong.

When they weren’t dodging loud, smelly, pokey, little people, they’ve had a great week. Phoebe is anticipating the sun’s movement.

And she keeps a close watch on the front yard.

Poseidon, meanwhile, has the backyard under close and near constant supervision.

When he’s not taking some Poe-time under a blanket somewhere.

Goofball.

So the cats are doing just great, thanks for asking, and so are we!

I only got in 70 miles on the bike this weekend, mostly because Saturday, which I had imagined as a longer ride, was the day my body said “Hey, feet, aren’t you tired?” And my feet said, “Sure am. And what about you, back? A little stiff aren’t you?” And my back said, “Now that you mention it, yeah. And I just bet those hands are numb, too.” And my hands said “Pkkwbo fiwo iwbefnwne.” So I called it at 32 miles.

Most disappointing. It was slow, and I was well behind my lovely bride, and nothing felt especially good. And that’s why I shouldn’t ride a hard, fast, short ride the day before my longer ride, according to the hypothesis I came up with Saturday evening.

And since I was going slow, I decided to shot this hay storage. There are cow pastures on either side of the road, and that’s the leftover hay from the winter, and that should tell you how mild things were.

A version of that photo will probably wind up as one of the banners on the blog eventually.

Yesterday, I did a little recovery ride, designed to not tax myself too much. And my legs felt great on the out part of my out-and-back route. On the and-back portion I realized, Oh, there was a barely perceptible, but nonetheless helpful tailwind working in my fair a moment ago. That, of course, meant I had an insurmountable headwind on the way back in.

Anyway, today, I’m taking off, and I’ll get back to it tomorrow. In the meantime, since we’re here, let’s check on the month’s progress. May was a light month, in terms of mileage, but it’s still a productive (for me) year so far.

The green line is a projection, where I’d be if I rode an average of 10 miles per day. The ride line is where I was this time last year. The blue line charts my 2024 progress. So it’s been a productive, so far, and should be another record-breaking year.

No one is happier than my spreadsheets.

Yes, I have multiple pages of cycling spreadsheets. Never start doing this. Down this path lies madness, and mystery, and sometimes satisfaction, but usually a squinty-eyed, “How are these the data points I’m fixated on?” sort of feeling of “Huh?”

Our next door neighbor is a 1-year-old. And his parents, of course. But mostly the kid. His parents put a swing out under a tree, it is one of those four rope numbers, and it leads down to a plastic swing that looks like the manufacturer just messed up on the high seat molds and decided they could make something work out of it anyway. The boy is starting to come around to the idea of the swing, a little bit. It takes time, but it is a good swing and his parents are determined and, eventually, this will be a wonderful experience and future swings under that tree will be in the blur of memories he carries forward his whole life.

It’s an amazing tree. Huge, wide crown. Thick lush grass underneath. There’s going to be so much fun and imagination that comes to life as he continues to grow.

And he doesn’t even know yet that helicopters live in it.

Things continue to look beautiful in our backyard beds.

No jets or choppers are emerging from our greenery, though.

We are going to have some grapes again this year, though. If we can keep the pests away. (We’ll fail at that miserably.)

But it is fun to try!

I had a student ask me in the spring if I was excited that Jon Stewart was returning to The Daily Show. I’d mentioned some research we did on the program way, way back when and soon after that announcement came down and he remembered that. And afterward he asked me once or twice what I thought about the new episode.

Since it was a new media class, it seemed viable, even if these students have never even seen the product, let alone the Jon Stewart version. Somewhere along the way there was a good injection point and I said, what people forget is that, at its core, this show is a satirical critique of the media, rather than a commentary on society as a whole. And as I watched tonight’s episode I thought, This is the episode that proves my point.

His guest was Ken Buck, most recently the resigning Congressman from Colorado. And he … was not ready for this.

At the end of the interview, my lovely bride said, “He’s not happy right now, is he?” The question allowed me to return to my central thesis about the show. No, he’s not. He was expecting still another softball interview, but the difference is that Stewart came prepared, and was ready with real-time rejoinders, and names and facts. He doesn’t let things slide, which is what political operators are fundamentally trained for now.

Yes, Stewart has a staff. Yes they do four half-hour shows a week, and yes, he is only, himself, doing the one show a week and, sadly, for this limited run, but what he brings to this highly specific interview is different than every other interview you’ll see on TV, which is largely about cheaply, effectively (with conflict, if possible) filling time and getting to the next commercial break. There’s no substance in that formula. No opportunity for push back, even if you were so inclined. And many aren’t inclined. That’s one of the big problems of contemporary media, an issue Stewart has been pointing out for decades now, and perhaps never more clearly than in the A-block of this episode.

Buck wasn’t always pleased with how that went, even though it wasn’t, at all, adversarial. It could have been even less to his liking. Watch the interview, you see that Stewart bailed him out, or let a moment pass, three or four times. (Frustratingly, Stewart let one go that I wish he’d stuck with.)

It was a brilliant piece of television.