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13
Feb 11

Catching up

Where we pad Sunday with pictures that never made it to the site. Poor, sad pictures. Don’t want their feelings to get hurt.

“Come to the blog on Sunday! Everyone looks pictures on Sunday!”

Yes, that one is small, but click the image to embiggen. This one has been sitting in my iPhone for a while. This is a parking lot in Homewood, Ala. Can you guess what I was doing there? Shot, and automatically stitched together by the free Panorama app. Not perfect, but, again, it is a panaroma shot from my phone. What an age.

Sunset over Auburn, Ala.

This will not be an inexpensive repair. Lesson: always counterweight your tripod.

Sometimes the sun catches you just right.

I love peanut butter as much as the next guy, but who needs six pounds of it at a time?

Church, read, studied, wrote, raked leaves. I have one of my four comps questions now sufficiently researched. (At least I hope.) Three more (all in various stages of progress) to go!

Come back tomorrow as I fret about two of those remaining questions.

But now, The Yankee and I are going out for early-Valentine’s Day/dating anniversary dinner.

(Six wonderful years!)

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14
Jan 11

A good deed, an ending, a beginning

I caught an escaping dog this morning while out pounding the pavement. There was a collar on the pooch, so we called, wonder who was named Colby. Turned out that was the dog. A big white pekapoo, or some such, out free and intent on telling the other dogs within sniffing range about it.

When Colby’s owner caught up to us she said the dog was more trouble than her kids. He’d figured out a way to get through the bushes in the yard. Maybe the children haven’t mastered that technique yet, but the dog is escaping every time if the deterrent is shrubbery.

Anyway. That was the beginning of the day. Good deed done. The day’s going to end with a bite of frozen yogurt, so it has rounded itself out nicely.

In between there was reading and a little more reading. There was also a delicious steak dinner, my balloon post from yesterday got picked up by The War Eagle Reader. Also I had a little chat with a member of the governor’s office that is leaving Montgomery today.

Bob Riley returns home — or to his lake house, his home is getting water damage repairs, apparently — after eight years in the governor’s mansion. I was a cub reporter when he was first elected to Congress. Interviewed him on election night. He was a very nice man, who could have been self-important, but was willing to entertain questions from a kid who didn’t really yet know what he was doing.

He’s not without his critics, of course, but there’s no denying the mark he’s had on the state in two terms. And, if half of the things for which executives get credit or blame are really directly related to his efforts, it has been a good administration.

The economy has slowed everywhere, of course, but there are several vital aspects of the state now leading the way in a way that wouldn’t have been possible a decade or two ago. There are car manufacturers everywhere. Mobile is poised to become a boomtown with new naval contracts and airline deals and shipping growth. Birmingham has completed the transition from being a steel town to being a medical center and a biomedical hotbed. Huntsville will grow as more military comes that way. Education, which has never been a strong area for bragging in Alabama, got some good news just today:

The report, dubbed by Education Week as the most comprehensive ongoing assessment of the state of American education, ranked Alabama 25th among all states and the District of Columbia for overall grades and scores on the report card. This is the first time Alabama has ever ranked ahead of the national average in the overall education quality.

[…]

(T)oday Alabama students are outpacing the rest of the nation in improvements in Reading, Math and Science scores and Alabama ranked 4th nationally in gains in the graduation rate between 2002 and 2008.

Not a bad bit of news to hear on your way out the door. Also, a few huge and ancient lawsuits against the state were resolved during Riley’s eight years. He also pushed some useful ethics reform bills late in his second term.

There are criticisms, to be sure, but if inauguration day is about hope and promise, the day you leave office should be something of a victory lap. Riley — and every member of his cabinet whom I had occasion to interview, come to think of it — was always considerate to me professionally. I tried to follow along on his re-election campaign for my master’s thesis, but that didn’t work out. Even so, his people were cordial.

This evening we went out to the gymnastics meet. This was the first home meet of the year for Auburn, and the first meet in the new Auburn Arena. Pictures and blurbs below:

The answer to a trivia question no one will ever ask: Who had the first routine for the gymnastics team in Auburn Arena? Allyson Sandusky. She also won the beam routine in the Arena opener.

Kendall Swartz scored a 9.750 on bars, putting her at fourth in the meet.

Lauren Brzostowski’s 9.800 was good for second on the beam, behind her teammate Allyson Sandusky.

Laura Lane’s 9.750 was good for third overall on the floor, an event the Tigers swept.

Rachel Inniss scored 9.900 to win the floor routine. Something about this pose seems familiar. Feels like I’ve seen that three times before, around here.

The Auburn gymnastics team got their first win of the season against No. 25 LSU, 194.775-194.475. The gymnasts performed for a crowd of 4,190 on hand to see the Tigers’ first meet at the Auburn Arena and the first victory for new head coach Jeff Graba. Auburn and LSU were tied after one event, but the Bengal Tigers took a lead halfway through the meet. Auburn, which began the season ranked 15th, pulled away in their final two rotations on the beam and floor. Petria Yokay won the all-around with 38.750.

It is really nice to be at a gymnastics meet and hear “War Eagle” after events.

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10
Jan 11

I believe in Auburn

War Eagle

Win for Auburn

Power of Dixieland.

adventures / Alabama / Auburn / books / iPhone / photo / Samford — 1 Comment
6
Jan 11

The part where I tell you I dislike libraries

In college the running joke is that if someone called you told them you were at the library. Better than a parent hearing you were on a date or taking some road trip when you should have been pulling an all-night. When I was in undergrad I told my roommate to never tell my mother that if she called. She’d see right through it. I don’t care for libraries.

Books. I love books. I love to read. I’m writing this in our personal library at home. It needs a name, and we’re working our way toward one, but I feel the name of your private library should be carefully considered and evolved naturally. Unless you have a benefactor. And if someone gives you money for more shelves and books, then you name your library in their honor, send them cards every Thanksgiving and Christmas and let them borrow books whenever they want.

Anyway. I dislike libraries. Mostly because you go there with the idea of getting something done. A student goes to study. A reader goes to pick up a new book. I never checked out a great deal of books, but I’ve had to study once or twice in my academic career. And the library, I’ve found, is built for opposite purposes. There are so many books there! So much to read! So many things to learn! And, also, there’s this stuff I have to learn. I’ve come to accept this as one of the complex contradictions that make me the inscrutable individual I am.

But I had to visit the library today. There was a book or two I wished to pick up for my studies. I found them in the online catalog, made note of their numbers in the Library of Congress system and then set out for a visit.

I walked in, pulled out my spouse card and said “My wife is on the faculty here. Can I check out books with this?” The young lady deferred to her colleague. Again, then. The new person asks about fees. We’ve discussed them. I think I’ve paid something. The card works for other scanners on the campus. She makes a phone call to the department from whence the card was assigned. They’ve decided I should pay for the pleasure of checking out books.

Fine.

“How about this card?” I produce my faculty card at Samford. No.

“How about this card?” I produce my student card from Alabama. No.

This is a friendly chat, but frustrating. I’m an alum. My wife is on the faculty. I have two cards from other research institutions. But yet it will still require $20 to check out books. “That’s $20, annually, not $20 each time.” And thanks for that.

The supreme irony being that were I at Samford or Alabama today I could check out these same books from this library via the Interlibrary Loan agreements. They’d ship them across the better part of the state. Someone would even bring them to my department. This would all be done for free.

I have a better idea. The Yankee can come help. But the very nice lady quickly sends me an Email. Turns out I can check out books, as a graduate student from Alabama. So I grab a stack of books and visit one desk, the very nice lady, upon hearing all of this agrees, “Oh that’s bad.” She sends me to the first desk, who brings out the second woman. So, after five pleasant conversations and two phone calls, I have a stack of books.

And they are good, helpful books, so it all worked out.

I include this picture because there’s nothing else to tell you about but reading and writing and breaking a plate in the kitchen and starting a very small fire on the stove. I dropped a cup on the cracked plate and the little bits of paper met a warm stove eye. So there you go. So this picture, then. (Click to embiggen.)

The picture is from our New Year’s Eve Pie Day and I’ve been saving it for a slow day such as this. We were at Jim ‘N’ Nicks, where the light is a little low. In the shot with The Yankee she’s moving from menu to glance at the waiter as I took the picture. That’s why her shoulder somehow disappears. Despite all of that, this is fairly promising.

I’ve been searching for a good (and by good I mean usable and free) panoramic app for the iPhone. This one is that. The picture above was my first experiment.

For some reason it didn’t include the last photograph on the right. The app handles the stitching by itself. It isn’t perfect — but this is on a phone. If I were doing panoramas as I did on our honeymoon I would use my SLR and stitch them together the old fashioned way, by hand at 1400 percent magnification.

The big problem is that the shutter button isn’t exactly sensitive. On the upside, it makes the composite for you and saves it directly to the photo album. And it is free.

Also, I’ve picked up two other photo apps. I’ll let you know.

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31
Dec 10

New Year’s Eve

This year:

the Yankee graduated with her Ph.D.
we took our honeymoon to Italy, Greece and Turkey
the Yankee took a job at Auburn
we celebrated our first anniversary
we bought a house
we moved
we discovered we may live on an Indian burial ground
we watched a perfect season of football
I finished the coursework in my Ph.D.
we traveled to Memphis, Las Vegas, New York City and points beyond
we celebrated victories and shared in the sadness of losses
we saw many of our friends, but none of them enough
and we loved our families, but none of them enough.

It was a full, demanding, challenging, rewarding, exhilarating, exhausting, wonderful year. I’m glad you’ve shared in it with us a bit. I hope yours was as full of blessings and joy as ours, and that your 2011 is twice as promising.