Friday

Friday / IU / television / video — Comments Off on Sports videos and rambling notes containing positive signs
5
Mar 21

Sports videos and rambling notes containing positive signs

Two sports shows form last night. Here’s the highlights.

And here’s all the talk about sportsball in the form of baseball.

And, this morning, it was back in the studio again first thing. The handful of Thursdays were we have shows late into the evenings followed immediately by Friday morning shows are reminders that I am not in my early 20s anymore. It isn’t that it is hard, or that a terrible amount is expected of me, but that I am tired. And, look, I’m not even performing in any of these shows, obviously, as they are entirely student productions. But I’m there, trying to lend a hand or get in the way, or provide moral support, or slow things down or speed things up or give notes and what not. Some days the hours get to me, is all. Small price to pay, to watch these nice people work on their craft and start to realize their dreams.

I had to give two studio tours today. That’s something I haven’t done in a year. It’ll all be a function of another new project coming to life. Just another sign, as we tried to explore a little bit the other day, of things coming back to something approaching normal.

They are holding graduation in person this term. That was announced a week or so ago. Family and friends will have to watch a university-produced program, unfortunately, but the students will get the real pomp and circumstance, which is great progress. The word has been passed out that the fall will be more in-person. What it means in practice is still being studied, but I’m guessing the goal is to make 2021 feel a lot more like 2019 than 2020. You don’t sell it that way. It seems a reasonable ambition and realistically feasible.

The show this morning, which isn’t online yet, brought in a guy offering you some workout tips you can do at home, because you’re not going to the gym just yet. I noticed they didn’t frame it as “Get that spring break bod” because our students don’t get a break this year — a concession to the virus and realities of traveling and so on. But they are going to get to watch a basketball tournament in a few days. It’s looking like their men’s team won’t be in the tournament, so it’s definitely a take-your-gains-where-you-can-get-them era.

cycling / Friday / memories / Monday / photo — Comments Off on Welcome to March
1
Mar 21

Welcome to March

It doesn’t feel like spring yet, but it’s gonna. Today, though, I’d just like to feel a bit … less. Or more. I’d like to hurt less and feel like more.

As I mentioned Friday, I had a big weekend of riding. And I’m happy to report that I toughed it out. I fueled terribly, but I survived. I think. This was my view all weekend:

It wasn’t the miles, it was the user error. And also the climbing. I could explain the fueling, but suffice it to say my caloric intake got all out of whack. And I became well aware of that reality on the way to the last climb yesterday. I told you about the Friday ride. Here you can see me in third place on the road on Saturday.

I was not in third place, but it sounds nice, doesn’t it? It wasn’t a race, to me anyway, it was just an excuse to make thousands of tiny circles with my feet, and also to get a cool aerotuck screengrab.

After Saturday’s ride featured 4,124 feet of elevation gained, Sunday was the big day of climbing. You can see even my avatar changed clothes for the bigger 33 mile, 5,617 feet gained effort.

It … hurt. Don’t let the sprint I eeked out at the mountaintop finish fool you. I was so spent I thought I was hallucinating the aurora on the iPad.

And I could barely walk when I got off the bike. (Time for new bike shoes!) After I hobbled upstairs and had a shower I started eating vegetables directly off the cookie sheet. Fueling was a problem because I wasn’t diligent about it because, at the end of the day, I’m riding a bicycle inside the house. It’s easier to be fussy about that, I realized this weekend, if you’re riding way out of town. But if the kitchen is just steps away, different story. And I’ve never really had the opportunity to climb 12,690 feet in one weekend, so I have no frame of reference for this.

It’s a big frame, and this was a great reference.

And I finished the Zwift Haute Route Challenge.

What does that mean? Absolutely nothing, but a sense of mild accomplishment. And it’s more base miles for the year.

We were looking at a giant snow mound at the local big box store.

This was the mound of our affection two weeks ago, on Valentine’s Day, after the first snow.

And here’s the same mound of our laments, a week later, as seen on February 21, after the even larger snow.

And here’s that same mound, this Saturday, on February 28th.

After a bit of weekend rain, and looking at the weather ahead this week … this thing might be gone by next Saturday. That’d be a signal almost-as-happy as returning robins and other springtime birds.

cycling / Friday / IU / television / video — Comments Off on I’m not psyched out; you’re psyched out!
25
Feb 21

I’m not psyched out; you’re psyched out!

It was a sports night last night, and the IUSTV crew brought us plenty of it on Sports Nite:

The Toss Up, which I referred to yesterday, is all about that bump, set and spike:

Volleyball is a terrific sport. It’s easy to follow, the flow of the game provides nice action, the players are accessible in camera shots and it’s a sport that has repackaged itself as a perfect capsule for TV programming. (Though I do think the TV productions should be re-constructed.) It should be hugely popular. I like to ask why it isn’t and how you get it there, and I asked the two beat writers in this program, one from the paper and one from the TV station, why they thought it was. They’ve both had classes with The Yankee, so they both answered correctly. It comes down, they said, to telling stories.

There are sixteen players on that team, and there are at least 16 great and compelling stories there, before you even look over the coaches biographies.

Most sports should feel this way. You just need the right people in the right places and right times to make it happen.

This weekend I am making it happen, if I can avoid psyching myself out. The backstory is that I got an email from Zwift about an upcoming series of rides. I mentioned it to a friend of ours and she said I should do the series.

And here’s the thing about things that are seven or eight weeks in the future: they all seem easy.

Along the way to what is, in truth, a fairly ambitious ride series, there were a bunch of workouts. I did one of each. They were fun. One of them was demanding. I’m not sure if they’ll be helpful this weekend, which started this evening.

This was the first of three stages. The whole adventure will wind up Sunday — and thus will be the pre-occupation of the entire weekend.

And, thus, the Haute Route begins, and before it’s done I’ll have tapped out 90-something miles and 12,000-plus feet of climbing. The mileage won’t be bad, but the climbs will be what add up.

Tonight I had 2,949 feet to climb in the smart trainer. This was the easiest stage in terms of the elevation gained. Tomorrow will probably be fine. The plan is just to survive and feel good about myself after Sunday’s ride.

Wish me luck.

Friday / IU / television / Twitter / video — Comments Off on Robots everywhere
19
Feb 21

Robots everywhere

Last night we saw sports shows produced, and today we can watch them online. And here they are now. This is the highlight show, all the lights that worth holding up high, and the stories to go with them.

And this is the famous talk show. They’ve got a new host this year. This is his first episode, and he’s hit the ground running.

Also last night, in another studio, one of the creative groups blocked out shots for their upcoming season. This morning there was a morning show to shoot, and so another group of people shot that. Between all of that and the Tuesday productions … it’s been a busy first week in the studio for all of them, is what I’m saying.

Our cameras are controlled from another room. We use robots to produce shows, and that’s never not neat.

Did I mention it is cold? It was seven degrees when I left the house this morning. Felt like two below. I don’t want to say I’m used to it, because I am a human being with self-awareness and a penchant for the finer things in life like, you know, desirable weather. And I can’t say I’m surprised because I am, in fact, numb to this whole thing after the last few weeks of invasive Canadian weather. But, somehow, it didn’t phase me this morning.

I looked out the window and looked at the weather and said, Well, at least the sun is out. If it has to be cold it should at least be bright. That sounds like a case of Stockholm syndrome, but it is really an acknowledgement of our dimly lit circumstance. Days and weeks of overcast skies are demoralizing, but at least, in a few weeks, maybe, that’ll be behind us … until next Thanksgiving or so.

We’ll try not to fixate on that.

Colder on parts of Mars today. And the photos that are coming back to us from Perseverance are impressive.

NASA had a little feature for that rover where you could put your name on board. They were coded on a microchip or the head of a pin or just added to a database somewhere. But I took the opportunity to put my grandfather’s name on the list with thousands of others. And then I put a lot of other people’s names on it, too. When that rover landed yesterday I was thinking of my grandfather. I bet he would be amused by the progress we’ve made toward Mars in the last few years. I have a lot of his books, and there’s a lot of real science interest there. High-definition cameras on another planet, they’re the 16th cousin 45 times removed from what we use in our television studio. Only we’re cabled and they are operating via a signal broadcast 127 million miles away.

My mother, his daughter, asked me once if the moon landing is impressive to me. We’ve always been there to my way of thinking, you see, where she was one of the many millions who watched and held their breath when Neil and Buzz landed.

It is impressive, but I love that question. It’s a great feat, but there’s no mystery about whether we can pull it off — only when we’ll do it again.

But Mars, well, we have other rovers there, sure, but that’s another planet. And there’s a video camera there now. And a helicopter. And we’re just getting started. We’re making real progress on Mars. Another planet. And we might put people there in short order. On another planet.

Until then, the robots are impressing us nicely.

I wonder if they get the weekends off.

adventures / Friday / memories / photo — Comments Off on One more of these
12
Feb 21

One more of these

Because it’s a fun trip down memory lane, and maybe I should archive the good ones somewhere better than Facebook.

Facebook: Literally everything is better than us.

I wrote this bit below a few years back and it just showed up in my Facebook Memories and, wouldn’t you know it, I put it here on the site back then, too. Because we’ve always really known that this was better than Facebook.

Facebook: Literally the worst for forever.

Anyway … I like this one. It’s almost Valentine’s Day. (That’s Sunday, fellas.) It’s hard to do much, so I got a small little handful of flowers — just some color for the house since we’re all going to be seeing snow drifts for the next week — and already they’re dressing the place up. And I picked up a brownies mix, a new brand, so we could have an adventure in a box. Because we’re celebrating the little things during a stay-at-home pandemic. And that, and maybe a walk in frigid, frigid weather will be the extent of it this year. But that’s a lot! We are well and together and healthy, and that’s the extent of what you could hope for, anyway.

Some pictures are worth remembering. Some pictures you just know perfectly. I have about 13-plus 18-plus years worth of snapshots on my website. And after Lauren, earlier today, posted a picture of the two of us from our 2013 trip to Ireland I wondered if I could recall the first one of her I uploaded.

The sun-eating one, I figured, had to be high up the list. And so I went back through our early months of knowing one another. I scrolled through the people we knew, most all of whom have kept us around, since then, until there I was, 12 16 years ago. February 2005. I remember the night I took this picture going down the highway, and that one is probably from a library, because I have always liked repetition in my pictures. These next two are at a Super Bowl party in Five Points we were invited to.

The Patriots beat the Eagles in that game. Paul McCartney was the halftime show. (I had to look this up.)

And, oh look, here are a few sunsets and clouds. And there she was. The 10th photo I uploaded in February 2005, the first one of her.

We were in her car. I know precisely where that was, two cities, two jobs (for each of us) and one car ago. She was probably taking me home after work one day. We were carpooling at the time. We’re traveling north, to soon turn west.

That next weekend we got invited to a dinner party — (thanks again, Laura!) and sometime after that we realized we were getting invited to places. That people in our little world thought of us as a package deal. I skimmed through the rest of the 2005 series of photographs. Jamie​ shows up, and so does Greg​ and Brian​. Look, there’s Justin​ and RaDonna,​ and Wendy​, too! There are family shots in there, also. There are pictures of colorful people that you pass by in life. There are blurry, low-res, sometimes underexposed pictures in the collection. There are trips and sports and bands and Lauren figures into most of all of those pictures, somehow, even though she’s not in a lot of them. That’s how you remember, though, the circumstances and the stories and the time you went to the place and saw the thing and tried the unusual item on the menu.

“Who” is how you remember those. Some are worth remembering. Some you just know perfectly.

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