The birds, the noisy noisy birds. The messy, messy birds.
You should see the sidewalks. But it’s better if you don’t have to. And if it rained. Or someone rolled a high pressure washer outside.
Anyway, pretty day out there. But quite cold. This is a tradeoff I’m willing to accept.
Oh, and hey look! My new desk chair showed up Saturday. I put it together Saturday. The cats helped. And, right now, they’re taking turns checking out my stuff.
I’m assuming that it will prove comfortable, once the animals let me sit in the chair that I … just bought … for myself.
Which must mean it is time for cat pictures. Here’s Phoebe at rest.
And here she is, taking a nap. Yesterday, you see, was a serious sleep day.
And here’s Poseidon, wondering what I’ve done with his new chair.
He sat in it right there most of the day. After, that is, I assembled the chair, let him sit in it downstairs, spun him around a bunch, then carried the chair, and cat, upstairs. As soon as he got down, hours later, I put it in the office, and shut the door. He is very confused.
This weekend he has also discovered the joys of the space heater.
This is going to become a thing. We’re creating monsters.
As I typed this, Phoebe returned to the same position for another nap. Clearly I should be doing this at my desk and not in a recliner.
Monsters are what we are creating.
I had a nice punchy little ride yesterday, this is a part of Watopia, Zwift’s fictionalized world.
Which explains how I’m underwater there. Some of their environments are simulacrums of the real world. You can ride in a few villages of France. There’s a former world championship site in Virginia. You can ride in Central Park. You can also ride through the futuristic sky bridges of New York.
Or you ride around and up, and through, a volcano. Here’s my avatar coming down from the top of the volcano.
Of course there’d be a full moon and lava spewing. I often wonder, when I’m on this course, what it would be like if you had a different lunar phase as part of the reward. And how difficult to ride through the overwhelming presence of sulfur.
Your avatar rides, literally, on a road that goes through a volcano.
Which is a good metaphor for some people’s Mondays. Not mine. But Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Friday mornings? More meetings then you’d normally find on a volcano, though. Sometimes there is a sulfur smell, though, but, thankfully, minimal ash.
Worked from home today — also worked from home yesterday afternoon — because of a heating problem in our building. People that know what they were doing had to work in the ancient steam tunnels and that meant there was no heat on what have been the two coldest days so far this winter.
Late in the fall they went down into the tunnels to do a two day job and it turned into something like a three-week proposition. When the experts got down there they found the problem was much more extensive than they thought. We had no hot water or heat during that stretch, but at least the weather was mild.
Now, it’s bitter cold. You can almost feel it in this photo, which was essentially the look of the day.
This is not my first cold workplace environment, of course, but I sure wouldn’t mind if it was my last. I once had a studio so cold I couldn’t type. As we were taught, you faked your way into pleasantness. Never let anyone know what’s wrong on the air. This had the added benefit of making sure the boss never got repair bills from the HVAC people, too. In my last stop the newsroom and office could get just as painful. The facilities people said too few of us worked up on that third floor, so it was not a … What is the word they used? … Was it priority? They never solved that in eight winters, so, no, I don’t think priority was the word. Oh, yeah! Problem. It wasn’t a problem! And nothing was ever done, no larger complaints ever lodged, no important people ever involved, because it wasn’t a problem, because it was just a few people, you see.
Looking back, that should have been a clue.
Yesterday I had four layers on, and only four because, I figured, sitting in my office while also wearing my long coat would have been silly.
Put it this way, when we received word yesterday we could retreat to warmer conditions, and I got to the house — where my lovely bride, who was raised a frugal Connecticut yankee, manages the thermostat — it felt positively toasty in comparison.
Anyway, the people working in the mysterious steam tunnels said their work would carry over into today, so we were given the option to work from home again. This was a rare treat, indeed.
So I sat in my home office, where it was pleasant, and worked. And at the end of the work day I decided it wasn’t pleasant because I really need a new chair. I was pretty sure, but now I’m convinced. And so I found one which will arrive next week. Or sometime in 2027. It’s difficult to tell, based on this website.
It might seem counterintuitive, but do you know what you do when your backside is hurting from a worn out cheap chair that you bought 10-plus years ago? You get in the saddle.
I set an entirely pedestrian 20 mile-per-hour pace around London.
The good news, the people working in the steam tunnels got their work done today. So we’ll be back in the office tomorrow and I’ll give a silent thanks to the hardworking people that I don’t know, who kept us warm, or safe, or both. And tomorrow is good, because classes begin again on Monday. Tomorrow will be the last deep breath until the sprint to mid-March.
It’s funny how things sink in. The how and the when and then, just, the act of sinking in. It’s great imagery, you take a photograph of a memory or a great big block of text sliding into the brain matter. Finally! That thing sunk in!
Or, for some, it could come another way. That polaroid or life video on a short, endless loop, or that great big block of text, could collide with a domicile. I imagine it’s flying in from the left, with squiggles denoting speed, slamming into the side of a cartoon house. Hey! That really hit home!
Anyway, it just now hit home that I’ve been writing in this space for 18-plus years. I had to scroll through all of those Decembers in my FTP program to get to *checks notes* 2021, so I could upload this graphic.
That’s my ride this evening, a quick 20 miles over a fictional place in Zwift. And with this ride 2021 moved into the second place in the last 11 years for miles pedaled. Last year has, and will likely hold with ease, the top spot. All of this is pretty remarkable because, these last few years, I seem to be riding slower. It takes longer to go farther.
It takes dedication to go farther when it takes longer, he said, thinking it meant something more than it did.
This is the last production of the fall semester for IUSTV. It’s Behind The Curtain, one of the many new shows the students rolled out this term. They show a student video or, as in this case, an actual film project, and then talk to the creators.
This term they garnered well more than 80,000 impressions and almost 13,000 views of 81 new episodes of original, scripted, entirely student-produced programming. This does not count the many podcasts or social media hits of all different sorts on at least four different platforms.
Oh, and this is something of a rebuilding year, so we’re just getting started.
How do you feel about documentaries about comedians? The producer of this project is an IU professor. I’ve watched a long trailer, which was good enough to make me want to watch the full thing. (Which I will get around to in the next week or so.) And if you like comedians, you might like this, too.
I’ve lined up an interview with the producer of this project for after the first of the year. She’s got a book chapter in a new book that’s considering comedians as public intellectuals. Should we go for thoughtful, then, or punchlines? And why can’t I do both, simultaneously?
I also have three other shows in the can that I simply need to edit. Good shows, but not about comedians. That’ll be part of a day after the first of the year.
But that’s after the holidays, which I am officially on starting … a few hours ago.
A nice, but chilly weekend. Perfectly delightful for late November. Any time around here that you can use the word “nice” around weather in late November, in any capacity, you count yourself lucky. And the skies were cooperating nicely.
Went for a run on Sunday afternoon. It was cold, but not too cold. It was hard, but not too hard. I was slow but not too slow. Somewhere in the third mile my back locked up in a serious way. And after three-quarters of a mile trying to run around it a lot of other things went, too. Something to work on for the future. But I got a nice shadow selfie.
But look at that surprising sky!
Also, I had a bike ride on Saturday. That’s three this week! It’s almost a streak. This one was in a simulacrum of northern France. I did not notice Mont-Saint-Michel, must have been trying to catch my breath, but you can see the lighthouse.
The abbey, which is a UNESCO site, is one of the most popular spots in that part of France. It dates back to the ninth century at least, and you would see it in this brownish-orangish section just to the top of the map.
But you’re going to want to see the real Mont-Saint-Michel. It’s gorgeous.
At some point this weekend I finished The Coming Fury, the first installment in Bruce Catton’s centennial trilogy of the American Civil War. Now I have to go buy and read volumes two and three.*
It’s a good historical tome, concerning itself with all of the major events in the year leading up to, and through, the First Battle of Bull Run. One part I might never forget is when someone writes to President-elect Lincoln and basically asks what should be done about the forts in Charleston if they wind up in South Carolina’s hands. Essentially, should we get them back? Leave them be?
Catton writes:
An interesting field for speculation opens just briefly here. What would have happened – how would the ever changing situation in respect to slavery, secession, and the preservation of the Union have been affected — if in December the South Carolina commissioners had won everything they asked for? Suppose that Buchanan had given them the forts and that Lincoln had announced publicly that as soon as he took office, the government would fight to regain what had been given away? What then?
At that point Catton has, over 193 pages, starting with the political conventions the prior spring, distilled this down to the decisions of Maj. Anderson in command of Fort Sumter and a South Carolina militia captain ordered to a paddle boat in the bay. Catton has put it before you that any of the decisions these two men made, for several days, meant war or peace at any moment — even as it was obvious the people wanted to play at war — and then asked you that rhetorical question.
This is December 1960.
James Buchanan is historically portrayed as ineffectual with Southern sympathies. Catton’s characterization feeds into that. Buchanan couldn’t make up his mind, he was a poor executive in desperate need, always, of his cabinet. Then late in the year his cabinet necessarily has its makeup changed and, suddenly, Buchanan resolves himself to be made of stern stuff.
As ever, there’s more to that guy than the one or two sentences you usually hear. Lincoln, meanwhile, was playing the cagey lawyer. He was insistent that he had to get in office and be credibly* seen as the president, before he’d do or say anything more than he’d already said.
It’s insight, but I spent hundreds of pages in this book thinking “You guys should be cabling each other constantly!”
Two more work days for me. Then it’s time for a long weekend vacation. But who’s counting?
*I have already started the bidding on e-bay.
**The credibility part was important because Lincoln was portrayed by many in the early going as a figurehead for William Seward, his secretary of state. Lincoln had to prove himself the president, even to Seward, and show that to the people, while juggling the border states, each according to their need, and starting a war. So the second book is probably going to be something.
This weekend we were in beautiful, bucolic Selma, Indiana, a rural community just outside exotic Muncie, which is in Indiana. And so it was that they named the event Ironman Indiana. It’s a bit of a one-off from the Ironman company. A lot of races were shut down last year. A lot of events didn’t get the chance to make money; a lot of outstanding athletes didn’t get to do their thing. So, this year, they decided “Let’s run a half Ironman and a full Ironman on the same day in the middle of a pandemic!”
We drove up Friday evening, because The Yankee was in this race. She did her packet pickup in Muncie, indoors but there was no one around. We went to the hotel(s) — and more on that in a moment. Saturday morning she got up very early and started the race.
Here she is after the 2.4 mile swim, and the conclusion of her 112 mile bike ride. Still a great big smile …
This is just outside the transition area, so she’s slowed down enough to allow us a glimpse as she’s preparing for the run.
Again, a 2.4 mile swim, a 112 mile run, and then you wrap up a light day’s work with a 26.2 mile run, which she’s starting here.
At some point on the run it becomes a mental thing as much as a physical thing. You’ve been out there for hours. You’ve surpassed your longest workouts. It can be tedious or boring or painful or entertaining. And as this course was a series of out-and-backs, you only saw your personal cheering sections a few times. But at least the weather was nice and mild today, and downright cool after the last of the rain had passed through. Really, it was a bit of everything, and so much of this particular course is in such a delightfully rural area that the only people you would see for long stretches of time are other athletes and the occasional aid station. You spend a lot of time in your head. A lot of time.
And yet, having done half the run, 13.1 miles down and 13.1 to go, she’s still got that big smile.
Later in the evening, having slashed through the water and ground on the pedals and pounded the pavement, the finish line.
She finished, got her medal, took the publicity photos, grabbed a roast beef sandwich and sat on a bench to collect herself with her coach and his wife. And then we carried all of the tools of the Ironman trade to the car. Then she shivered as we drove back to the hotel.
We had two hotels this weekend. The first place had to put some rooms out of order, which we’re guessing, means they overbooked. But they were nice enough to reserve us a room in a much less nice hotel across town.
The sign out front inspires a lot of confidence.
But! We got a room with a king size bed, better than we were expecting in the first hotel. This place was undergoing renovations, however, and smelled funny. It probably always smells funny.
It was a smell that was even weirder through your mask.
So we settled in there Friday. On Saturday, the desk manager says to me “Checkout is at 11.”
“No sir, it is not. The other hotel booked us for two nights.”
He had our little note from the other hotel right there on the desk. He was waiting on me.
“It says here one night.”
“Yes it does,” I said. “And the attendant there assured me this was a typo on a form letter and that our visit with you was for two nights.”
“OK, let me call them.”
“Yes, please do call them. Call Chris, the manager. Call Chris at home.
He calls, asks for Chris. Chris isn’t there, because it is Saturday on one of the busiest weekends in their town. Why would the manager of a teaching hotel be on hand?
He asks for whoever was close by. He gets put on hold.
Then the desk manager gentleman turns to me and nicely says “I know this isn’t your fault.”
I said, “And I know this isn’t your fault. I also know I have two nights with you.”
At which point he hangs up and says “They were taking too long. I’m going to make them pay for it anyway.”
Which is where I say, “And when I come back tonight, my stuff is still going to be in the room, and not on the curb, and this key is going to still work, right?”
Which is a question I asked him two different ways, just to be sure we had an understanding. And we did.
You put that out of your head for the day, but after the triathlon it’s a half-hour ride back to the hotel and you’re wondering the whole way: Is our stuff still going to be in the room? Is this key still going to work? It’ll be a whole new shift of people working in the hotel this time of night. What if Robert didn’t pass along this information, and we’re tired and hungry and cold and it’s late and we’re also sweaty? No one wants a scene in their smelly, renovating hotel, in front of people putting “cigerettes” out in the flower pots.
But the key worked, our things were still in the room. The three-time Ironman had a nice soothing shower and a snack and I said, “Since we’re safely in the room I can tell you this story now … ” which she laughed at until she fell asleep.
And on Sunday, we left exotic Muncie, got a quick breakfast and drove back to Bloomington. Sunday was a low key day spent resting and cleaning. Today was a Monday; tomorrow will be a full Tuesday.
