Friday

Friday / photo — Comments Off on In the caldron boil and bake
30
Oct 20

In the caldron boil and bake

Met three witches this morning. Not the double, double toil and trouble sort, but three members of the local coven.

What, you don’t have one of those where you are? You better google that.

The morning show was in the studio this morning and they brought in three nice local ladies who told their story and cast a protection circle and talked about one of their other coven-mate’s almanac of the witching life. You can apparently purchase it on Amazon, or pick it up at the library. I don’t believe they said the name of the book, however. The witches whiffed on the sales pitch.

One of the show’s co-hosts asked, inquisitively and curiously and politely, “How has this helped you do good in the world?”

The woman says “It’s helped me stay sober for 15 years.” All the answers that followed may or may not have been immaterial.

Elsewhere, judging high school news programs, emails, Zoom meetings, and so on.

It was a surprisingly sunny day, however. And after spending most of it under the warm embrace of fluorescent lights I enjoyed the walk to the car so much I walked a block beyond where I parked. This is what happens when you impulsively change your parking habits on a Friday morning.

But it let me see these leaves:

I suppose I was too busy wondering what I would do with my evening. There was no late night in the studio. No errands to run. No workouts to work out. What a wonderful feeling!

So I took a shower and started the laundry and we went on a walk around the neighborhood. Saw these trees:

And now the weekend is here. Full of so much possibility. And it will be exactly like every weekend since March, but still! The possibility! The freedom! The sleeping in! The fewer obligations! The laundry!

Friday / photo — Comments Off on Almost Old Home Friday
23
Oct 20

Almost Old Home Friday

Up and in the general direction of ’em this morning. It was alarm that I didn’t want to hear this morning, and, fortunately, it wasn’t cold. Because if it had been cold I would have found a reason to stay in bed and go back to sleep, or wherever you go when you feel guilty about not getting up.

So I got up, feeling not guilty at all, and generally pleased with being right on time. And that it wasn’t cold.

I tried raspberry jelly on my toast, which was a first. I’ve decided to swap to a simple toast breakfast, and then had the further decision to branch out into the fruit preservative world. I’m a strawberry or apple guy, but there’s no reason I can’t try other things. Other things not including orange marmalade, which is disappointing and bad.

That was the memory I had at the grocery store on Monday: orange marmalade is just about the only orange product I can categorize as offensive. I’d waited until there was no one on the bread aisle — which is, I assume, how everyone is shopping these days — so that I could stand along among the jellies and ponder my options. My first observation: there are a few options, but not as many I’d imagined. There’s grape, no thanks. Strawberry, sure. I picked up a raspberry to try, and a blackberry flavor. There are a few combination offerings, generally those last three in various combinations. There was nothing exotic, however, at our giant, giant grocery store. The second observation was that you can’t pick up any jelly in a small sample size. If I don’t like blackberry I’m stuck with a fair amount of it for a good long while.

I also had an apple and peanut butter to make it a truly indulgent morning. Then I went to the office and waited until it was time to go into the studio. I watched Michael and Julianna and their crew and guests produce an episode of the morning show.

I’m a big fan of the events calendar.

And Lydia dropped in for a visit. She was one of the people that willed this show into existence in 2016 and 2017. We made them work for it, bringing this show to life, and it was worth it. She co-hosted the show for two years before she graduated. And they won some big awards in that time.

Lydia, who is one of those people who can do anything amazingly well pretty much the first time, is on her way to becoming a big shot at Adidas’ corporate offices. She does digital publishing, and nothing surprises me.

We sent that photo to the woman she created and co-hosted the show with. She hosts a prominent celebrity-entertainment show on YouTube these days. So they ran this show and now one lives in Oregon and the other is in Los Angeles.

And I’m in a place where we’re gearing up for the next four months of dreariness, where tonight’s barbecue is a rare treat, rather than a staple. (It wasn’t even good.)

But at least I got to try new a new jelly?

Friday / IU / photo — Comments Off on My favorite leaves, my favorites leave
16
Oct 20

My favorite leaves, my favorites leave

Quite day on campus. Fridays were always a little slow, in the Before Times. You’d occasionally have a meeting or two, maybe a production or three, but we don’t run a lot of classes on Fridays for various scheduling reasons.

But now, in the During Times, our building is all that much more quiet. Most people aren’t even working in the building, after all. So I sat in my little office and had a little Zoom meeting and ran through a little round of emails and a little To Do list and another Zoom meeting and wondered about how the day was lovely, and I was indoors.

The day was lovely. At the end of it, at the end of the week, the walk to the car and the regular beginning of the unloading into the weekend was also lovely. The sun was at just the right angle. The leaves still just the right degree of chipper to create a nice little glow …

That blurry bunch of leaves, that’s the sort of memory we keep. Falling leaves and fallen leaves and they blur together, first on the edges, then in the middle, just like a bad television flashback sequence.

You think about that, not about what the rest of it means. About what’s here — later, what was there — and not what’s not.

The weekend? The weekend will be nothing special. Spectacular in its normalness. Normal in its spectacularness. Unvarying in its events. Nothing special. Perfectly special. Perfectly normal.

Friday / photo / running — Comments Off on This is about a slow run
9
Oct 20

This is about a slow run

Slow day, highlighted by a slow run. Everything else felt quiet, sleepy, uneventful in every way. This leaf pile, my first leaf pile find of the season, had more charisma (and color!) than anything else I saw in the wide world today. Maybe everyone and everything is taking a deep breath and so the leaves think they’re going to take this moment and take advantage.

It was just getting started. An ambitious little collection of decaying matter. And naturally occurring, too, gathering, as it was, behind a car in a parking lot.

Most likely it got scattered when the driver backed over them a few minutes later.

It brings back memories of racks and blisters. Everyone is having a little moment right now, I’m sure. Go ahead and work your way through that. We’ll wait.

…

Better? Ready? Good.

Hey, could be worse. You could have to rake these leaves:

I saw that on my evening run. It was almost precisely at my turnaround point. And, after that, on one of the neighborhood trails:

And then these berries, just at the 5K point.

It was my first run in two weeks. My first 5K since May. But it was too nice and warm this afternoon and I’ve been too sedentary the last few days and anything worth doing is worth overdoing, right? It will probably feel like it tomorrow morning, too.

Friday / television / Twitter / video — Comments Off on Into the weekend
2
Oct 20

Into the weekend

Phoebe was a happy model for today’s addition to Catober. She’s hanging out in the hallway. She likes to sit there and wait for you to walk by so she can stretch out and demand pets. She’s a cute little highway robber of belly rubs.

There’s a little post it note on the door behind her. It’s for Poseidon, who is always trying to get into my home office and cause trouble. The sign is meant to keep him out. That’s why it is posted at cat-eye level. It does not.

We have a debate about whether he can read the sign, or if the verbiage is too sophisticated. He’s obviously just ignoring the sign. Phoebe can come into my office occasionally, because Phoebe is a good girl.

Here’s a talk show from last night. They talked about sports. Sports are what they talked about. Baseball, and it’s 4,725 post season teams, deserve attention, and you can get most of it right here:

And another set of students were hard at work in the studio this morning. They had a great guest and a fun time and things went smoothly for them. And someone has finally added a calendar feature to their programming:

After the show was over and we wiped down all of the consoles and the cameras and everything else everyone touched, they all went about their days, going … wherever they all go. I went to my office and whiled away the day worrying over a To Do List.

I think I cut it down to something manageable for next week. I have an important letter of recommendation to write and dealing with a bunch of file transfers. And about a half dozen meetings already on the books, and some voiceovers to work through and some audio editing to tend to and whatever other things that haven’t appeared yet … It’s nice to know a little about what’s in store next week, is what I’m saying.

Take this weekend, for example. It’s gray and damp and cool this evening and so there wasn’t much to that. There’ll be lunch and a bike ride tomorrow and then a video chat and football. I’ll do some housework. Sunday there’ll be breakfast and looking out the window and a lot of reading and maybe some football and that’s the weekend. It’s nice to know a little about what’s in store. One day the weekend schedule will change itself. I won’t know how to act. They all kind of run together at this point, is what I’m saying.

But things are just grand. Everyone here is healthy. The cats are happy. Dinner was good. I get to sleep in tomorrow.

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