football « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

football

Ow. Ow. Ow.

Being sore is a pretty lousy experience. I like to think that I have good control of my body. I can change my breathing, I can lower my heart rate. I can change the blood pressure readings on that machine at the grocery store. But I could not get the muscles in m back to unclench tonight.

It started in my left shoulder, my physical therapist tells me that has to do with muscles that wrap from the clavicle and through and around. It spread from my left shoulder into my right shoulder tonight. The Yankee said “You look like you’re about to cry.”

I told her I was trying not to move, because I had a sense that if I moved, at all, it would only get worse. Maybe, I’d thought, I can force these muscles to relax. That was the word selection in my head, and I found the contradiction delightful.

Instead I started coughing which was the opposite of not moving.

And so I’ve had upper back spasms for most of the evening and the night.

I’m ready to feel better, thanks.

More meetings today. I think I have already reached my quotient for the semester. And so I shifted to email. Well, let me just tell you, mister, I’m on the hook for a lot of email. And so I write a lot of them.

I’m due a new phone. The technology services staff passed them out over the summer and they installed mine … in a different office in a different building. I brought it to my office yesterday and discovered that someone will have to come and do something to the phone jacks to make this thing go. Gone are the days of simply plugging in a phone and hearing a dial tone. This one requires the Internet and some special pixie dust in the wall outlet.

Also it delivers voicemail directly to your email. That’s just strange.

I’m sure the innovations held therein are the biggest advancements since we abandoned party lines. This upgrade might be a step too far, too fast, though. I’m pretty sure my old office phone is at least 30 years old. Imagine giving Calbraith Perry Rodgers, the first man to fly across the country in 1911 (49 days! 70 stops!), a Messerschmitt Me 163A, which in 1941 set an unofficial speed record of 624 miles per hour. (That record was broken by Heini Dittmar, a German born just before Rodgers set on on his transcontinental feat.)

My new phone is exactly like that, only I can’t fly it.

Football season is upon us and I’m posting photographs we found last week while sifting through archives in Auburn University’s collection in honor of this most festive time of the year. This young lady is holding two tickets to the 1971 Iron Bowl. Not sure what she is standing behind and why, but this game featured third-ranked Alabama, fifth-ranked Auburn. These tickets were like cash.

Too bad Alabama won 31-7 and gave them a conference championship. I bet she was inconsolable after the game.

Auburn / football / iPhone / photo / Samford / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
29
Aug 12

Just a Wednesday

Tulane is here. They’ve taken refuge 250 miles inland so they can continue their last week of preseason preparation without worrying about Hurricane Isaac. They did this a few years ago, too.

We see them around in the hallways and in the cafeteria. These are big guys. I mean, the football players Pat Sullivan brings into Samford these days are large men — one almost accidentally knocked me over with a blind swat of his hand and I’m not a shrimp — but that’s Samford. Tulane is another thing altogether. Every one of their guys are hosses. And that’s only Tulane.

But it is nice to have them here — I don’t know what they are doing with the rest of their day, presumably studying and resting in a hotel somewhere — but they are going about the business of football practice in the morning.

There’s a guy down there, somewhere in that picture, who is calling out the stretches. He sounds exactly like Farmer Fran in Waterboy:

Anyway, a lot of meetings today. We had a lunch meeting with the office of communication and some of the student journalists. It has become an annual tradition, the pros getting to know the students. They talk about what they do, beg the students to call them at all hours of the night rather than get something wrong, and so on. They give them tips and feed them lunch. They, so kindly, offer to let the students copy and paste their press releases.

Later I explain why they won’t ever do that.

There was a meeting with a few of the editors, and then a sales meeting with the new ad managers.

I had to catch up with some faculty and do staff things. Then there was another meeting that didn’t happen, but will take place next week. I’m not sure, but I might have had a meeting about a meeting. And so on.

Dinner at Dreamland with Stephen. It had been so long since I’ve been there that I almost forgot where to make the turns. I ended up in a residential area and rolled down my window, thinking I would sniff my way to the ribs. This was not a good idea.

Naturally we had banana pudding.

Football season is upon us and I’m posting photographs we found last week while sifting through archives in Auburn University’s collection in honor of this most festive time of the year. This is Ralph “Shug” Jordan who was the beloved Auburn coach from 1951 to 1971. The back of the photograph says he’s posing with “a special fan.”

It could be Aubie. He finally came to life during the basketball season in 1979 and Jordan died in the summer of 1980. And the print of Aubie’s coat looks familiar to his original look. So we’ll call it Aubie. That’s Rep. Barry Mask, then.

Auburn / collarbone / football / history / Monday / Samford — Comments Off
27
Aug 12

School is back in session

You write out notes to yourself, little promises on what you’ll say and do and make them think. You rehearse the first class or two. You try, mercy how you try, to get over that painfully awkward business of name and hometown and major. And then you realize you still have to redo this and polish that and so on and on.

I decided to ask what was the most exciting thing about their individual summers. That’s how I’m going to start my first class tomorrow. We’ll see how it goes.

So I did physical therapy this morning, an exceedingly lonely exercise. The ladies that walk me through each individual thing generally leave me alone. They only seem to glance my way when I happen to be doing something wrong, which is good. They are very polite about those corrections, but you know what they are thinking: You will do this right in Hercules’ name!

Last week at some point I sat on a pull down machine backward. You would have thought I’d sacked her groceries wrong.

Everything is small talk because they know for how long everyone will be there. I walked in a short timer. No need to get attached to me. They are all very good and nice people who surely know their jobs. Today I saw one of the gentlemen there adjust his colleague. This happened while I was trapped in a chair doing a stretch that involves rope and pulley and counting and he just crunched the guy on a table that sounded like it was falling apart and I could not look away.

I get a massage and it takes two-thirds of the experience just to unclench. This guy did that like he was slinging a coat over his shoulder. It was almost jaunty.

Horribly, horribly jaunty.

So one of the ladies is beating up my bicep this morning for reasons that weren’t immediately obvious. I’ve complained about it there before, but not today as far as I recall. It seems that everything I complain about — and I try to tell them a different thing each visit, just to keep them hopping — is very standard. My neck is sore, that muscle connects here. My shoulder is sore, there are two muscles that attach right back there. My bicep aches, that is a pain radiating down … and so on. Today she ground it down like I broke in front of line to get tickets to the big concert.

“I know you’re only doing it because you care,” I laughed.

“I’m doing it because it is good for you,” was her immediate response.

Wow. And whoa. I appreciate professional detachment, but I know how to parse words too. And it was not me who dinged your car door. (I park way far away, just so I don’t give these people ammunition. They can hurt me.)

I’m kidding, of course. They are all very kind. I have a few more visits with them and then, hopefully, I won’t take up a spot in their calendar anymore. Also, I’m sneaking extra reps on the weights, because I think I am strong.

So that was the morning. The rest of the day was wrapped up in syllabi and emails and PowerPoint shows and old notes. What worked in that lecture? Which things did not? Can I get all this in an hour and change? This can all go on for a while, but the nice thing is that I’ve taught the class before. It gets better every time.

Oh, and also arranging meetings. I have meetings left and right. And then left again. Remarkably every meeting I’ll have this week will be one you wouldn’t mind attending. That’s how you know you have a great job, I think.

Football season is upon us. And since we went archive diving this weekend I thought I’d add a few photographs from Auburn University’s collection — everything on display peters out around 1983 for some odd reason — in honor of this most festive time of the year. We’ll have one each day. This kid is not me:

There was no name with the photograph, but I still wonder what has become of him. Where is he saying War Eagle from this week?

Auburn / food / football / photo / weekend — Comments Off
27
Aug 12

Catching up

There are extra pictures during a photo week? Yes. That’s why we’re catching up.

We recently enjoyed one of those afternoons that was simultaneously happy and bright and ominously dark. Spooky.

Just a moment later, and having turned from north to west:

You figure this out. I can buy an heirloom cantaloupe variety whole. Or I can buy two halves, already cut and seeded, for less. Hmm.

In core of the Auburn campus, seen here with Tichenor to the left and Haley off to the front right, where they have taken great pains to create a pedestrian experience. (Here’s a before shot.) Since the cars are gone students can safely walk on beautiful wide sidewalks. So let’s put food trucks out there! The one on the right is a gelato truck. The one on the right is from Momma Goldberg’s. The restaurant is literally two blocks away. (“Back in my day … “)

Is it football season yet? This week. This week. I grabbed this accidental frame while trying to get another shot of an old game off the television screen. It is avante and, perhaps, garde, but I like it:

Auburn / football / iPhone / memories / photo / weekend — Comments Off
18
Aug 12

A slow Saturday

Someone in our house couldn’t sleep last night. And, for once, it wasn’t me. I fell away to the night at around 2 a.m. — which is late enough, but sadly to normal for me — and The Yankee was up even later. She tried to keep me awake, but I have a secret weapon.

I can’t say what it is, because she’ll read this and know.

So she took a nap today, unusual for her, and I woke her up in time for a late lunch. We watched a football game from Auburn’s 2010 season, the Ole Miss game. The Tigers are 9-0 after that game. Big things could happen for this team. We’ll have to keep watching to see how they fare. But we also broke my DVD player.

I bought it probably seven years ago. I’m a late adopter on entertainment tech. Because I am cheap I was trying to not talk myself into getting one, but a colleague pointed out that it’d work for a while. And, he said, if it broke, I’d be out less than 50 bucks. Think of all the discs you could watch in the meantime!

They weren’t especially expensive even then. But I was thinking about that tonight as I took off the cover and removed the metal casing that tops the disc tray. I’d read extensively — OK, two websites — that guided me through the process of fixing your DVD player. Cheap.

After removing three screws you find yourself at the laser radiation warning. Three more screws and you’re at the center of the component. This is the most accessible technology you take for granted in your entertainment center.

First you make sure the lens apparatus is moving well. That part of the equipment sits on two rails that move it from a resting position to the reading position. Everything seemed to be in working order there. You can also clean the lens. I dug out the rubbing alcohol and dabbed at the thing with a Q-tip.

I took a whiff of the alcohol, and instantly flashed back to 8th grade biology. We had to create an insect collection, and that was the preferred method of killing the critters. Some things stick with you, like trying to center a pin into the world’s tiniest thorax, and the smell of alcohol that lingered long after the grades were handed down by the teacher.

So I cleaned, re-covered, plugged in and listened to the DVD player. Click. Click. Click. The screen said “Disc Error.” It was an incredibly cold message. What do you expect for a cheap Emerson product?

I did it all again. Click. Click. Click. No change. The websites said the next thing to do is junk it and go buy a new one. The laser is too expensive to replace, they say.

I can get a new cheap DVD player at the big blue box store for $35.

We visited the pool this evening, just to dip our toes before the rains came:

We have a neighborhood pool and it is within walking distance of our house. I’ve managed to average getting in the pool twice a year since we’ve lived here. I’m no better this year, somehow. But if I hop in every night for the next week — and if I do laps — I might sleep very well.