Friday « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Friday

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26
Sep 25

Happy Friday

We have a new art scheme on the front page. This is the general theme. I think we can use this one through autumn.

The photos are from a delightful little road I like to ride on from time to time. I’m sure you can understand the appeal. And it occurred to me that I could just ride through there every so often and take photos as the season progressed. We’ll see how it goes, and, for a time, enjoy the brilliant colors of the season.

When it gets down to sticks we’ll have to change it up again, but that’s not for a long time yet.

Right?

I was out wandering about in the southwestern part of the property and happened upon this white rose which is growing near one of the garden arches. I don’t think I knew we even had a white rose out there.

I’m not sure the white rose knew it was there, either. But it’s given a lovely early fall surprise to the yard, and so I suppose we should thank the previous owners for putting it there, or for the bird or wind that did the job.

It amuses me to still find and learn new things about the place. We’ve been here 27 months or so, and I just recently found that rose. (Maybe it was a bird or the breeze.) But there are still things to learn, little dents and divots to uncover in odd little corners to try to understand. A family of five lived here, and three of them spent their entire childhoods here. It’s a lovely thing to think that this mark or that scratch is a small part of some story, an accident they remember or don’t, a lasting scar from a beloved pet. Some things are just done for expediency, of course. And when you find them, you roll your eyes and wonder why. And then you wonder why you still haven’t found bags of cash they conveniently forgot when they moved out. Because they conveniently forgot one or two of those, right?

After all of this time, these sorts of discoveries are obviously smaller. But no less fun to think on.

So it probably was a bird or the breeze.

Whether you’re looking for birds, putting your nose in the breeze, or doing some other thing this weekend, I hope you have a good one. We’ll see you here Monday; maybe there will be something of substance coming our way in this space next week.

adventures / cycling / Friday / photo — Comments Off
19
Sep 25

Our hydrangeas do not fluoresce at night, but …

Fridays are meeting days this term, it seems. I sit on a lot of committees and they all demand a bit of time. Friday is the most common day of the week that everyone has ~~available~~ on their calendar, and so there we all are. In Zoom, in person, you name it. Last week it was an experiential learning committee. This week a student relations committee, and so on.

Also, I need to call together a committee I chair. Note to self …

One day, when I am not pulled in four other directions, I will consider making a photo study of the hydrangeas. Their flowers are lovely throughout the season, whether upright, or bent over by the weight of rains.

There’s a unique trait to some hydrangea plants. Did you know that? The color of many hydrangea blooms acts as a natural pH indicator for it soil. Blooms that are blue are living in acidic soil. Those shrubs with red or pink sepals are growing in more alkaline soils. White varieties, such as ours, grow white in either soil. But you can manipulate the color of some of the flowering shrubs in this way. This is thought to be a singular trait of the hydrangea.

Our yard is full of plants and trees that aren’t from around here. The landscapers that put all of this in, long before we bought the place, were going for a united floral nations theme. And the hydrangeas are no different. Their taxonomy was first discussed in Virginia, there are more varieties of this sort of plant in east Asia. We have two. One by the northern gate and one by the backdoor. They both sit in the shade of the house. One gets a perfect dose of morning and midday sun. The other lives in a bit more shade. They’re both huge.

I just can’t get them to survive, upright, a late summer heavy rain. The water comes down, sits on those leaves and pulls the whole thing over. But they do flower lovely, and even at this later stage of their season, they are satisfying to look at. (But I’d prefer them upright.)

We did a 20 mile bike ride this evening. It was a late start for reasons of work and ennui. So we did most of the time trial route. It was almost curtailed by the new neighbor’s angry dog. He was out in the yard and aggressive. Took nips at both of us. No skin was broken. One sock was punctured.

Usually, when you’re riding, you can see a dog coming. Being field-trained in trigonometry, they’ll often take a good angle. But they don’t understand gearing, and you can usually mitigate the interaction. And then there’s a good old fashioned yell. In my experience, every dog speaks the parlance of my people, “GITOHNOUTTAHEA!!!” works surprisingly well. And no dog is expecting a spray from a water bottle.

But all of that works when you’re up to speed. Since this dog lives directly across the street, all of the dynamics were absurdly different, and I was reduced to using bike frame and tires as a shield when he came back for a second try and we were, stupidly, still standing there.

The neighbors never came outside to observe the ruckus.

Which is good, I suppose. That’s not how I want to meet the new people. We weren’t here when they moved in and we have so far just been waving at one another, all pleasant like, but “Hey, could you watch out for your dog?” might set a tone.

But also bad. My concern is for the young families that walk their kids through this strip of road, the other cyclists that come by, and the people down near the end that drive way too fast on a closed residential street. And, you know, we’re on this road too.

Anyway, it was a pleasant ride, and now we’re going to bring in the weekend with a local outdoor pizza. what a pleasant way to start a lovely few days.

Have a lovely few days yourself. We’ll catch up on Monday.

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12
Sep 25

Fire from the years

I wrote this out in outline form, went away and did some other stuff, and then came back to it. The first two notes were

Meetings.

Chairs.

I had meetings all morning. One of the meetings, no kidding, was about another meeting in a few weeks. At the end of meeting we discussed future dates for other meetings. It was run efficiently, and with good cheer. I took the notes. We ended right on time, having completed the full agenda which was, again, mostly about another meeting.

That other meeting will be a brief appearance. A few people from this meeting will attend that meeting and discuss what we do at these meetings.

There will be slides.

The next point on my list was “Chairs.” I have no idea what I meant to say there.

On today’s bike ride I tried out some new sunglasses. I needed to update my drip.

The frame better matches my helmet and the lenses are blue, though it doesn’t seem obvious there. The lenses are also bigger than any glasses I’ve worn before, but that’s the style, and aren’t we slaves to style?

The problem is right at the top, just above the bridge of the nose. It rubs right into the interior part of the helmet. It seems like there should be some space or flexible bend there or something, but alas.

The little Giro logo rubbed off the front of my helmet, I think from one day when I was working on a flat tire and leaning on the saddle. I’ll scrape it off eventually, but for now, it amuses me. It looks like bad video game faux text.

This was the sunset at the end of the ride.

We timed that up pretty well, but only because we were going fast. I had a few massive splits — well within the “fast” category. I can only do that for four or five miles at a time, though, and humility comes to me quickly, usually in the form of a headwind. Sometimes a small hill.

Here’s another shot from Radio City Music Hall’s iconic neon. We had a nice visit there on Wednesday to see Melissa Etheridge and the Indigo Girls. It was my third time seeing Etheridge and … I dunno … the 10th or 12th time I’ve seen Amy and Emily, but it was my first concert at Radio City.

And so here’s “Kid Fears,” with Etheridge singing Michael Stipe’s part. That song is now 36 years young, but all of the people that have come through to sing along keep it fresh. Listening to the crowd enjoy it is still a great deal of fun.

I think I’ll put one more clip up on Monday. They had another special guest at the end of the show, and it’s worth pointing out.

But that’s for Monday, and now it’s time for the weekend, which I will spend doing some work for next week’s classes. The life of glamor that I can tell you about …

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5
Sep 25

Saw an aerodrome, was transported

After a day of reading and prepping and typing away at my keyboard, I went for a little early evening bike ride. The wind was up, my legs were down and it was slow, but that’s OK. We got vaccinated last night and so I blame the quality of the ride on the conspiracy theories floating through my system.

There was a new-to-me road I wanted to see so I pedaled my happy little self toward the winery, but turned right before I got there, marveling at how I was easily doing 18 and 19 miles an hour up this hill on Wednesday, but doing considerably less than that today. I turned right and then left, and went down this road.

This looks flat when you’re on it and in this photograph.

But it is actually a little downhill. It bends off to the right at the tree line and then toward a creek bed. But the wind comes from that direction, usually, and it is actually a difficult down hill some days. Some days I have to shift to an easier gear to get down the hill. Some days coming from the other direction, up the hill, is easier than going down the thing.

In fact, today going down it felt unusually strong and I was doing about 17, but with minimal effort. And with no legs and post Covid vaccine (which we got last night) I felt a bit sapped and didn’t want to put any effort in. Later, as I reversed this route exactly, I came up the hill almost twice as fast.

That road alters reality, is what I’m saying.

I enjoyed some nice time under the trees elsewhere along the route.

And then I finally worked my way over to the new-to-me road. There used to be a little airport here. It was originally named after the town, but then it got a new name in 2021, when a private company bought it and dubbed it the Spitfire Aerodrome.

That’s just a great word. A great combination of words. It’s evocative of times far enough away that we mistakenly romanticize them. No one says the aerodrome without thinking of dirigibles or dashing pilots with silk scarves and leather jackets or barrage balloons or search lights piercing the sky and … they closed the joint in 2023, to make way for yet more warehouses no one needs.

I rode there it just to see what was at the end of that road. How often can I see an aerodrome? What’s there is a fence, through which you can still see two or three buildings, which look to be in still-good shape. The runway seems to be intact, as far as small municipal runways go. This is the view on the way back out.

I got back just in time to clean up for dinner, and fill the evening with tales about how the new microchips ow floating in my system have made me even slower.

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30
Aug 25

The steps we take

It never ceases to amaze me how the foundational stuff comes together just in time. Life will through you all manner of curve balls, of course, but if you know what needs to get done and know how long you’ve got to do it, you can can usually get it in. Maybe it’s a touch or a feel or just an overdoing it. Anyway, here, just four days before classes begin, I can see the path to the finish line, which is actually the starting line.

And if that starts to sound like I’m re-trodding the same trodden land, you’re probably right.

I’m not sure what I’ve done that hasn’t been done or re-done. I do know what is left to do.

Anyway, this afternoon I compiled master sheets for departmental social media, which is a role I was recently asked to take on. Two of my colleagues had the job, and they supervised a student who ran the socials. My colleagues are extremely busy, and this took something off their plate, and I’m happy to help. So I learned over the summer that the department’s social media began with a real go-getter student. But she graduated. The nerve. We have another student running the bulk of the content creation now, but she graduates this December.

And this is where I draw on my 15 years of student media. The first task is to build institutional history. So master sheets. All the passwords. Baseline analytics. Consistent messaging. The second task is my learning from the student we have working on this project right now. And then we’ll have to hire a new one, because students graduate.

The nerve.

Yesterday, I talked with the chair briefly about what we want out of this role. It was enough to let us know we should talk at a bit more length about it. Today, I had a meeting with someone in the alumni office about their social media efforts, because we think that one of our secondary audiences might be our alumni.

Then I wrote a bunch of emails. And then updated my syllabi with last minute YOU MUST INCLUDE info.

And then I wrote and rewrote and rewrote again my first message for my online class.

Tomorrow I’ll polish some things in my in-person classes — which will be the sort of thing I do all weekend. I’ll also have to update my PowerPoint templates because in today’s meeting I learned that a logo we’ve been using since August 1st is now obsolete. And this is where you become aware that the re-trodding is really just your tripping all over yourself.

There are many delightful seasons that come to you when you linger around a hydrangea. The budding and the burst of leaves are the first. Then, of course there are all of the moments surrounding the flowering petals. Ours are white, and they’re brilliant in their moment. One of the two troubling stories a hydrangea will tell is when the rains come. Ours grow so big that they held more water than they can shed. The weight bends the branches bend over and that’s the way they’ll stay, even if they eventually do dry out. It’s a lasting story. But it yields to this surprisingly lovely one.

The Yankee cut some of the flowering stems. Watching the delicate ways the colors change is an unexpected treat.

And I guess those colors are a theme. Because look at this accidental photo I took. I don’t even know when it happened. What do you suppose is out of focus here? What’s that different color in the bottom corner? And is this even oriented correctly?

We enjoyed some local corn this evening. Fresh off the stalk, fresh off the farm, fresh off the grill.

We have three months that make for real seasonal change, and we’ll, very soon, be in one of them. When we reconvene on Monday it’ll somehow be September. Who is ready for that?

If you, like me, aren’t ready for that, don’t miss a moment of the weekend.

Ehhh, that’s good advice every weekend.