The question isn’t “Can he pad out a full weekend from his short trip?” The question is “How long should he do it for?”
I think at this rate I could drag it out another three or four days, but we’ll wrap it up tomorrow. Wouldn’t want to be too showy, right?
We walk by this theater every time we visit Savannah. I really do enjoy their signage. And as we walked by in the daytime early in this recent trip I said I’d like to see it again at night.
On the last evening of our trip we made a special walk back over that way. It’s nice when you can accomplish some of your humbler goals.
Oh, did you notice the snowman in the box office in the first photo? I think he’s there every year.
Did I shoot video of all the blinking lights? Of course I did! Do I have something planned for it?
Not yet! But eventually!
Meanwhile, here on campus, it is time to catch up on all the videos we’ve missed in the last week or so. There are quite a few, so settle in. And, no they won’t all be for you, but there is something for most everyone here. Allow me to interest you in one or two.
This is a sports talk show, and they’re breaking down the end of the regular season of college football. This was a really enjoyable show.
More sports! This is the show that starts at the radio station. Here they are talking about Indiana football and basketball. After they do it live on radio, they take the cameras down and put the footage up.
The late night show goes full holiday! And partial Grinch. And there’s an important post-credit scene, so you’ll want to stick with it.
Speaking of the holidays, it’s time to decorate gingerbread houses. And you can get present-shopping tips from the morning show crew:
Behind the Curtain looks at a new student film. Yes, an honest-to-goodness film. Some people are still shooting on that. As I am not an expert I assume the reason has to do with “artistic choice.” But there’s much more here on all of that.
And here’s the news show I watched on Tuesday night. I mentioned that our meteorologist signed off here. She’s been with the show since her freshman year, but now she’s graduating. A senior at the green screen, but a freshman at the desk. The circle is also revolving. And, because it’s a news show, there’s a lot of news here.
Time for the haps and pop culture … haps …
Remember, Tuesday, when I told you about the all female a capella group, Ladies First? They sang two songs on this show. And there’s a nice interview with a few of the members of the group, as well.
That show has done a good job of varying up their guests and that’s a nice little feather in their cap. This semester they’ve also had an Olympic silver medalist Andrew Capobianco, a student from the university’s Latino Cultural Center, the student government president, local mask makers, and more. They’ve also shot all kinds of people-on-the-street pieces and lots of studio fun. They’re always hustling, which is a lesson that serves us all well.
And that’ll do for now.
Tomorrow, we’ll be freshening up the front page of the website. And there will be a few other things to help point us to the weekend. Be sure to stop back by!
Just a bit of the nature from Savannah. A lovely Southern Red Oak (Quercus falcata) was near our place. I love how the green of chlorophyll is fighting it out with the red of inevitability here.
Such spirit! Whereas this fruit tree looks like a cheap Renoir knockoff. But the joy
Some of them, I think, don’t even turn there. But this little bit of color right here made me realize: I should be in a place where the leaf turn takes place in December.
It’d be nice to be around these Maidenhairs (Ginkgo biloba), too.
It’s just fun watching their leaves fall.
And back to work today, hence my cool campus banner, there. This evening marked a turning of the page for these two guys.
I had them in a class in their freshman year, and I’ve had the good fortune to work with Will and Jackson for IUSTV sports ever since. My favorite thing — I mean the absolute best part of my job — is watching the freshmen grow and mature into leaders and, ultimately, the people they’re going to be. It’s a great time of change, those three or four years, and it’s a unique thing to be a very small part of.
Will is setting out to be a play-by-play guy, Jackson is going to be working for some big sports franchise before long. I’ll miss them here. We all will.
At the end of their sportscast, the producers put in a sneaky little package all about these guys. And as that rolled everyone in the control room came out to be with them for the final shot. I’m not sure if that’s ever happened before.
It speaks, I think, to the place they have helped build over all of that time. Which means they’re leaving us something stronger than they started with, that we’re better for the experience.
I don’t know how many 21-year-olds get that, I doubt I did, but it sinks in eventually.
The daily duds: Pictures of clothes I put here to, hopefully, help avoid embarrassing scheme repeats.
It was new tie Wednesday. And an almost new pocket square. It was one of those clearance purchases that help get you over the line for free shipping. You know the ones, there’s a carefully calculated formula that always puts you three bucks under that line, so now you have to spend another 25 minutes looking for something that costs four bucks that you actually like. But it saves you 34 bucks! Or whatever the shipping would cost. So you click, click, click until you find something and then you think “Ha! I spent more! I showed you! I win!”
They know exactly where they’ve got us with that carefully calculated formula. (But I would like to understand how that pricing structure so often almost works … )
Well, sneaky actuarial type person, I did win. I like this one a good deal.
This is a citrine geode, from Brazil. It formed in a volcanic lava cavity about 100 million years ago. It took years to recover and prepare for display. It’s one of the largest known citrine geodes. It’s just sitting there in a hotel in Savannah.
It’s one of those pleasant mixtures of old and new, which some places with a good sense of history can highlight. There’s new walls and clean, modern, steel and cement, and also exposed and distressed bricks that have seen a century or more of history around them. And maybe much more. This hotel sits along the river, and a lot of the stones found around this area were used as ballast on ships. When they weren’t needed, they got pulled from the boats and put back to work in the buildings and roads and so on. This Marriott, for example, is the old power plant, which dates back to 1912.
You look around and you can imagine the years of work and sweat and all of things, both terrible and wonderful, that passed by these walls. You walk through the floors where the Marriott’s guest rooms are and you’ll pass by the old smoke stacks. It’s a neat, new, old place. More towns need places like this.
Anyway, nearby is this amethyst geode, the deep purple offset by these large calcite crystals. The whole of the hotel lobby is like this.
Amethyst is a purple variety of quartz. The Greeks wore it. And they made drinking cups out of the stuff, thinking that amethyst somehow kept them sober. The ancient Greeks, it seems, were big Facebook users.
There’s not a sense of scale here, but a small adult could comfortably climb into this one, and that’s not fake news.
This citrine geode stalagmite is almost as tall, as I am. Citrine is also a quartz. The color is brought about by subatomic impurities, but — I just learned — natural citrine is rare, and most are heat-treated amethysts or other smoky quartz. I read how you can tell, the difference, but not until after we left. (Oh well! Have to go back!) Brazil is the leading producer of citrine. There’s a long-standing superstition, across several cultures, it seems, that it will bring prosperity. And, again, almost my height.
Look at this giant amethyst throne!
I never knew I needed a stegosaurus fossil display until I saw this one. Spiky tails, mysterious back plates, what’s not to love?
You can get toys and models and even cookie cutters, but you can’t buy a complete stegosaurus fossil on e-bay. Maybe I should set up an email alert.
You can buy trilobite fossils. But none as big as this.
Researchers at the American Museum of Natural History would tell you the trilobite could grow as large as 28 inches, so about as twice as large as these monsters.
This hotel has so many fossils on display this specimen of nautiluses is almost hidden. Not for me. I know you have to work for the best views. I’m willing to pace around aimlessly and hold up others, to see the best things.
Or … just go right outside the front door, where this almost 7-foot tall quartz is on display. The display placard says it weighs almost 10,000 pounds.
Oh, and when it was discovered it was even larger.
There should be a placard about that experience.
Just outside again, and you’re on River Street. All of this is in the newly revitalized portion of the street. Last year was big for this tourist area. We took a moment to appreciate the bridge we ran over on Saturday. This is a limited panorama of the Savannah River. Click to embiggen.
And here we are trying to figure out what is on the lens of The Yankee’s camera.
We traded selfies with a nice young couple. I took a few on their phone. They took a few on ours. I don’t know what they’ll do with theirs, but if the guy is smart he’ll make some cool keepsake of it. Me? I’m turning this one into an ornament.
I make ornaments every year. We can fill an entire tree by now. And we can’t display them because a cat will break them, he typed with an almost inadvertent sigh.
We went into one of the speciality shops for a present or two, and another for a treat. And in one of those stores I got photos with which I’ll update the front of the website later this week. Here’s a tease.
And here’s something tasty, just because it was there. By the time you’ve read this, it will all be eaten. (By someone not named me.)
All of the above was on Monday. We traveled back to Indiana today. Woke up way too early, said auf Wiedersehen our friends, and caught an Uber to go to the airport. This happened well before daylight for two reasons. First, for some reason the airports are now suggesting you arrive two hours early. Second, people vastly overestimate the amount of time it takes to travel through unfamiliar airports.
Because I have been in it twice now I can safely say this: Savannah’s airport is small. And because we were driving out in the dark, we met no traffic. Arrived at the baggage desk with no one in front of us. Spent more time weaving through an excessive amount of queue barriers than actually passing through security.
We needed to be there half an hour early, not two hours early.
We were there much closer to two hours early.
Uneventful flight to Atlanta. Said goodbye to the last of our friends there, and then had to head farther north. Landed in Indianapolis, where it was 18 degrees. Everything here was uneventful. Luggage. Shuttle to the car. Drive back to Btown, lunch, and then I spent the better part of the afternoon in the recliner.
And then I went to campus. (Hence the cool banner there.) Yes, this is my day off, I went to work. And I was there until about 8 p.m.
That’s … dedication? We’re going with that. Dedication.
Also, I knew there would be a musical performance. This is Ladies First, IU’s all-female a capella group.
More from them in this space tomorrow.
And this is Caroline Klare. She just wrapped up her last weather hit for IUSTV and now she is getting set for graduation. She’s been doing weather for IUSTV since her freshman year. October 2018, I think it was.
Whatever the date of her first forecast, she’s easily used that green screen behind us more than anyone else. And she already has a (non-broadcast) meteorology job lined up. They’ve been waiting on her for about a year, it turns out. And that makes perfect sense. She’s a thoughtful and kind person. She knows her stuff. And she’s incredibly smart, with a wisdom, I’ve always thought, beyond her years. We’re going to miss her around here.
So I went to work on my off day to watch the news. It was the last news production of the term. That’s worth going in for. Also, I tried to make a dent on catching up on email. Maybe it’ll mean tomorrow won’t be so daunting.
But we’ll still be on vacation here, tomorrow! Plenty more stuff to work our way through for the sake of the website. Come on back to check out what should be a pleasant diversion for a Wednesday.
Yes, this is Monday, but I’m writing about Monday. The next few days will be in arrears. It’s a vacation thing and I’ll somehow cope with the difficulty of the problem.
Spirits were high before the 10K. Here are most of us. Anne was on the course doing a 5K because she’s an awesome overachiever. The Yankee, Brooke, Andre and Stephen and I all did the slightly less ambitious 6.2 mile run over one of the tallest bridges in the southeastern U.S. We had to run the bridge twice.
Anne ran the bridge three times. (She also finished in second in her age group.)
This is at the starting line. Limited field by design. Everyone had to show proof of vaccination and all of that. Here, I thought, is a sign of maturation as a human and my bowing to inevitability. The joke I used to make right here was “Look at all of these people I have to pass.”
(Knowing I would never pass all of those people. I have landed on the podium in exactly two foot races as an adult. Both, you might say, were of a limited field.)
But, today, my joke was “Look at all of those people that don’t have to pass me!”
And here we all are, after weaving through many of the beautiful squares in the historic district we finally have our first good view of the bridge we’re about to go over.
And one of the views from atop the Savannah Bridge.
This is the largest single ocean container terminal on the U.S. eastern seaboard, and the nation’s fourth-busiest seaport. It is a cable-stayed design, and it’s 185 feet from here to the river below.
Off the bridge, around a cloverleaf, up one little kicker and around a little right hand turn you’ll find the finish line, and your medal, and some fruit and other healthy snacks.
Speaking of food … We tried a new place for dinner Saturday night, on account of the mileage we’d already enjoyed. Plus it got good reviews, and we’re going to give Cha Bella another good review. It’s a farm-to-table concept, a term that’s lost all meaning, I think, but Saturday night it meant tasty. We had a gnocchi appetizer.
I had a tasty grouper entree, which did not photograph very well, but it was tasty. We tried the cheesecake, which had a goat cheese blend. It was a super creamy dish, and every now and again, you got that hint of goat cheese.
It was a delicious outdoor dining experience. And we made everyone go back with us again on Sunday night. Because there were other things to try.
And, look, if you have different servers on different nights and they both react the same way when someone orders a specific dish, you get that specific dish. This is the hog chop.
And I’m pretty sure I don’t need to ever have another pork chop in my life. But I also wonder why everyone doesn’t make their chops like this one. Because they should.
And this weekend I also had the opportunity to enjoy a few ghost signs. This was one of the better ones. Everybody knows, Uneeda Biscuit.
That’s a 19th century brand, made it all the way to 2008, when Kraft (which took hold of all of the old Nabsico properties in 2000) discontinued it. The old original Nabisco, NBC (itself a product of three different mergers) rolled out the Uneeda campaign in the 1890s, when no one said things like “rolled out the campaign.” Within a year or so, NBC was selling ten million Uneeda biscuits a month.
I don’t think I ever had a Uneeda, which you’d, of course, today call a cracker. But I did have some good biscuits this weekend.
Tomorrow, we have to leave Savannah and travel back to Indiana. But I probably have two more days of content to work through here. Anything to extend the trip.
First things first, we had to have breakfast at Clary’s. Longtime readers know we always go to Clary’s. Usually we go multiple times per visit for the delicious breakfast and friendly staff. We are doing all of our dining outdoors this visit, and they don’t have many tables on their sidewalks, but after the briefest wait …
Clary’s is something like 118 years old now. Luther Clary founded it as a drug store. Later it became a soda shop and, eventually, the diner we have today. And it figures heavily into the Savannah lore.
We got a little table overlooking Jones Street. This allowed for the traditional Clary’s photograph.
Here’s the first one, which was from our second visit. This was 16 years ago.
Here’s another visit, and from the same table, this time in 2007.
And here’s a photo from the same table on a 2012 visit.
We go to Clary’s a lot.
We’re not just here for the food this time, of course. There’s a 10K that six of our group of nine are running tomorrow. Anne will be the winner.
She’s a natural born runner. And the rest of the group have been putting up some really nice times in their recent runs. Whereas I … well, to say my recent training has gone poorly would be an insult to poor training. The run is tomorrow and I’m just going to have a nice time and try to not be the last person on the course.
I walked seven miles or so today, though, and that counts as training, right?
