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family / Friday / photo / triathlon / video — Comments Off
25
Sep 15

The cool report

Sometimes I think I should go back to themed Fridays. If I did, today’s theme would be ‘Man, this stuff is cool.‘

Problem: I can’t repeat awesomeness like this every week.

We went to the Southeastern Raptor Center for their bird show this evening. I only shot video of one little guy, because they flew him right by me:

He posed for pictures later:

Here’s another cool thing. If I had any talent at triathlons at all, I would do this:

And perhaps the coolest thing today is Sir Patrick Stewart. (I have this sneaking suspicion he is the coolest thing going a lot of days.) If you have seven minutes, you should watch this video. It is powerful, true-to-life stuff:

Also, the in-laws are in town this weekend. Extra cool!

family / Monday / photo — Comments Off
10
Aug 15

I’m photographing things

Back to work. Back to syllabus writing and lining up assignments and the like. It is a time intensive process, especially so when you’re preparing a new class. I’m taking over an older course and revamping the thing, so it will be a work in progress until the final. (Next year, if I’m asked to teach it again, it will be even better. Until then, it is an almost entire-rebuild.)

So that takes time and daydreaming and emailing and so on and so forth. It isn’t particularly interesting for most people, so there’s no need to get into it here.

Instead, here are a few things I’ve photographed in my homemade light diffuser box. I’m having far too much fun with the thing. I wonder if I’ll run out of interesting things to shoot before the novelty wears out.

Good thing I’ve got a lot of interesting things, I guess.

Here are two of them now. This was my grandfather’s Bible. It is the first one he ever used as a preacher. A friend gave it to him on his 16th birthday. She wrote inside that she hoped he would use it in such a way that she could say “I knew him when.”

He wrote a verse from Isaiah beneath her note.

And while that was my grandfather’s Bible, this was his father-in-law’s pocket watch:

I remember him, one of the five greats- I knew. I can’t find out really anything about this particular watch. It is like a very mass-produced piece, and not even particularly old. But it looks sharp, doesn’t it? That’s not even the diffuser box. It looks sharp in your hand, too. If I wasn’t afraid of losing it I’d buy a chain and start wearing the thing.

And it would be amusing watching the guy teaching a social media class going into his pocket to pulling that out.

family / Friday / photo — Comments Off
3
Jul 15

More family visiting

Yesterday I completed the family circuit and hit my other grandparents’ home.

I walked around outside in the woods, as I did as a child. I got eaten up by mosquitos, as I did as a child. I was not told to be careful of snakes, as I was as a child. But probably only because my grandmother wasn’t home just then to warn and worry. She was at a funeral and I was killing time playing in the woods.

And then she came home and fussed at me, as she did when I was a child. And pretty much every day of my life she’s seen me.

It is a wonderful thing to be fussed at.

She’d had a big day so she had an early night last night. I played the Facebook where-are-they-now game. This is difficult to do in a place with limited cell phone service. It is even more challenging in a bedroom with only one electrical outlet, which is as far away from the bed as possible. These things didn’t matter much in the 60s, I guess, when the house was built.

Also, the mattress might be that old, too. And while I’m not that old, I always feel like it after a night in the back room.

But a lovely morning today. Huge breakfast. I washed dishes. More visiting and then this afternoon was timed to get on the road before the rain.

So with more traveling and visiting, I’ll just point out the obvious: when eight of 11 words on a label are that important, you pour yourself a big serving.

family / memories / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
2
Jul 15

Things my grandmother grew

family / iPhone / Wednesday — Comments Off
1
Jul 15

The stars at play

We read in the paper yesterday and then watched the news where people were discussing the current Venus-Jupiter planetary conjunction.

(It is highly likely that sitting there on the sofa against the wall dividing living room from kitchen is where I first became a news junky — the news was always on and there was always a big stack of newsprint sitting around. It somehow feels now as though I can’t get enough news there. I think because you’re watching the local and evening news and reading this morning’s newspaper, but that’s just a part of my regular information diet these days. But I digress.)

So my grandfather and I walked outside on the family compound last night and we looked up into the appropriate part of the sky.

There’s Venus! And, just there! Giant Jupiter!

I pulled out my phone, powered up one of my sky apps (I have three, and no, I don’t have a problem.) and started identifying stars and constellations and twirled around in the yard like a fool until I found the space station. It was below us and to the west.

My grandfather enjoyed this.

Today, he mentioned all of this to a coworker. (Because he’s the kind of guy who retired five or six years ago and still goes to work almost every day and laughs at how the rest of us talk about our hard days.) That coworker was intrigued and wanted to know more. So my grandfather came home I heard him put together a string of words I wouldn’t have imagined coming from him that morning.

“Oh, what was the name of that app you showed me with … ”

My grandfather: digital native.

So I turned it on again. This time we looked at things in the sky from inside the house, which might have been even more interesting. Look just behind the fireplace there and you’ll see …

When I went outside I took a few screen captures from the SkyView app, because these were just fun.

The constellation Cancer because this is basically my personal crest. He looks like he’s pinching the planets:

And look, Leo the lion is playing with two beach balls!