A photo (or two) a day meant to express everything that needs to be said. Don’t over extrapolate or strain yourself making too many inferences. They are just pictures.
I hate these pictures. They are pretty, but this time of year they just feel like summer is leaving. They are just beautiful reminders.
Here’s the same shot, just a bit farther down the road, and through the polarizer at the top of the windshield.
One of our graduate school buddies was passing through the area with his new wife and so we were invited to a cookout with friends in Wetumpka. His brother was there, along with various of his college friends who have taken us in as peripheral members of their group. We had great burgers and a fine time sitting on their back porch, talking and laughing and singing out of tune. The Yankee asked me to get her sweater out of the car.
Yesterday was our Pi Day anniversary. At a Pie Day not too long after we got married, The Yankee, Brian and I figured out when our Pi Day would be. As of today we’ve been married 3.14 years.
Pie is very important. That’s how I got her to go out with me the first time.
“Want to grab a late lunch? It’s Friday. Friday’s Pie Day.”
It was something a server at Johnny Ray’s, one of the big, local barbecue chains, had said a few weeks before. It was sound logic that day — the table of people I was with all had pie. And it worked on her, too. I blurted it out and took The Yankee to Jim ‘n’ Nick’s, one of the other chains, where we have enjoyed the majority of our Pie Days over the years. Pie is very important.
(Note the sign in the background.)
Here’s to the next Pi Day, sometime in the fall of 2015.
… And, no, this isn’t fishing for anything. Since I’ve been hurt I’ve received many fine cards and a few nice phone calls. I got an awesome tree. I got a care package with snacks — and a yo-yo! I got a great book on 20th century history. I love them all.
But the next time I have to send something to someone, I’m sending food.
Because this brisket, from our friends Kate and John, was awesome.
Awesome. It showed up on our doorstep and we baked it. What a country, as they say. Now we have several days of comfort food stocking the fridge. Our refrigerator has, perhaps, never looked this good. And our refrigerator is usually stocked with tons of delicious things.
“That settles it. The cat loves you more than she loves me!”
Those were the words I heard two weeks ago. This was just after I broke my collarbone. We had noticed that Allie wasn’t quite herself. And she was losing her hair. We looked up the reasons cats lose their hair. It could be dietary or a disease or stress. We haven’t changed her diet. And she seemed healthy enough in every other respect — just as wacky as ever. And there’s no more stress-free environment for a cat, I think, than our home.
Nevertheless, out of concern The Yankee took her cat to the vet. They performed all the vet tests. I’m sure they spelled out some things so the c-a-t wouldn’t catch o-n. (She’s a smart cat, we tell ourselves, in jest. We know how smart she is and isn’t.)
But when she came home she put the cat carrier on the ground and opened it up to return Allie to her normal environment. She recounted the conversation with the vet.
She looks small, but she’s incredibly active and kitten-like for a cat of her age. She doesn’t have any symptom of disease or illness. So maybe it is stress, the vet says. “Have you gotten new furniture? A new pet? A new kid? A new car?”
No, no, no, no … and how does a new car figure into that? What cat patient of yours told you that?
The only thing that is different, my darling wife told the vet, is that I broke my collarbone. I was in an immobilizer and sitting in the arm chair. Her chair. (It was about the only place I could get comfortable for two weeks.) The problem, as far as we could tell, is that Allie wasn’t spending her regular amount of time on me. She has an afternoon nap in my lap and there’s a part of the evening where she comes to visit me. Also every time someone stands up she acts like a toddler. “Hold me, hold me.” I didn’t do a lot of that for several days.
That’s it, the vet said. Everything else is the same. She can’t get in his lap and he’s forced her out of her chair. Only you can’t do anything about that for a while.
So she came home and said that. “The cat loves you more than she loves me! Whenever I’ve gotten ill you’ve never had to take her to the vet because she was stressed out about it.”
The next week, the very day I removed the immobilizer she was all over me again. She’d stayed away on her own prior to that.
Earlier this week I moved from the chair over to the sofa. I can sit comfortably there again. (Small victories.)
Allie?
Everything is back to normal in her world.
I would make some allusion to July rolling out and August wet-heaving its way in. But this is summer in the Deep South. You don’t even really notice it anymore after a time. The movement, I mean. You notice the heat. Can’t get away from the heat sometimes. And the heat tends to minimize your movement unless you’re in the mood for it. But June turns into July and the mercury really takes a big jump. August, as a season, never feels much different from July.
You don’t notice a change until late September. And usually that is more of a left brain “Good grief it is almost October, enough with the heat already!”
There is no out like a baker’s oven, in like a sauna comparison for today, though. Everything is just hot. To spice things up you’ll sometimes get distance thunder. We had that today, and more due in the overnight. To really spice things up you might be in the right spot every now and then to get thunder really close by. I woke up to the that earlier this week. Lightning strikes were very close, according to the old lifeguard counting trick. The thunder wasn’t loud, but Lord how it rolled. I counted three different strikes where I could hear the energy moving away for 30 seconds or more.
Rode my bike in the trainer this evening. Got an hour in. Felt really good, until it didn’t. It is amazing how much fitness you can lose in three weeks. But that is a problem of my lungs. My arm is fine. I turned the pedals standing out of the saddle, too, reducing my points of contact to four. Felt great.
So that’s right on schedule. My doctor said two to three weeks for the stationary, and next Monday is three weeks. He told me it will be four or five weeks before I can ride again on the road. I might err on the long side of that estimate though, just to be sure.
This is what I don’t understand: Professional cyclist Fabian Cancellara broke his collarbone at the beginning of April. He fell in a race in a bad way. He had a quadruple fracture. I’ve seen the X-ray, it was bad. And yet, just two months later, he won the prologue of the Tour de France and held the lead for days. I’m not making a comparison, because that’s just foolish. Cancellara is a terrific cyclist and a hard man, but how did he do that?
I’ll just console myself that he spent more time lying on the ground than I did. And I walked off. Of course, he had a bevy of doctors telling him to wait for the ambulance. You don’t get a premiere athlete up and walk him around after a spill like his. YouTube it if you like — Cancellara + Flanders 2012 should do it — I’m not interested in watching bike crashes all day.
Out for dinner tonight. Visitors were passing through town and had a craving for Niffers. That’s what people always want when they come back to town. Even, we learned tonight, the politicians. (We know politicians.) Good thing we like the place. (They now have cheesecake, the sign said.)
And that’s really the day. I rested, I read, I rode, I stretched my shoulder, I ate. It was delightful in almost every way, but I would like to be moving just a little bit more. Every day a little bit more, right?
Thinking of some of my word nerd friends, I’m going to work in a word I like, one that crept up elsewhere today and sounds fun to say. I mean the feeling of the word and not the construct of the definition the language has provided. It would ordinarily never find a special place in this ordinary blog.
Here is that word: misanthrope.
It is a person who dislikes humankind and avoids human society. A philanthropist, meanwhile, is of course, a person who tries to promote the welfare of others. We probably all know people of both kinds.
I’ve yet to meet an anthrope, however.
It reminded me, for some reason, of when I was a public speaker — one of the things I wish I were better at — I would speak to a lot of high school kids. This was when I was in college or even high school myself, which is no easy thing. Without a wide separation between the speaker and audience you have a tenuous dynamic, and, what’s more, delivering a speech to your peers is a bit of an odd experience for the speaker.
Anyway. Before the speeches I’d always talk to the important people and visit with people that liked to shake hands and do all of that. When I could I’d find the most trusting kids there and let them challenge me: give me five words I can’t get in this speech. I’d “bet” them a dollar or something, just for laughs, and take their random words: suitcase, picket fence, monster trucks, whatever.
Then there was inevitably a place in the speech where I could drop in a list of outlandish words. If I couldn’t get them all in casually, I could do it rhetorically: “You could think the most important thing on earth are puppies or suitcases or picket fences or high yield interest rates or monster trucks or misanthropes.” It was inane, but an easy private giggle.
(I never took money off of anyone. I abhor gambling. I have a distaste for all manner of betting that involves an actual exchange, I don’t even like to linger near slot machines to admire the lights and sounds, so don’t think I was stealing from trusting kids. It was something funny to do. And maybe it kept someone from being taken in by a real con.)
Every now and then, too, one of those lists of words bubbles up in my memory. They’re always worth a smile. People will think up the most random terms when you ask them to think that way.
From the PC World has Caught Up With Us Department: Friends of ours just retrieved their daughter from summer camp, where she no doubt made up many silly words and spoke in a vocabulary full of pop culture references you and I wouldn’t understand. One suspects there was swimming, and a careful attempt by camp counselors to avoid poisons of oak and ivy.
You hope the kids had S’mores and other delightful things. There was sinking. Perhaps some canoeing. The whole summer camp routine.
Except, we were told, for ghost stories.
Ghost stories are right out.
It seems that some years back, at this camp or another one, no one was clear, a particularly good ghost story was told and that turned into a problem for one of the kids. That child was quickly no doubt noticed, stigmatized and isolated, just in case things took a turn toward Lord of the Flies.
Then that poor child’s parents (and wouldn’t you like to know what kind of people they are?) found out about it. Soon after the family’s lawyer found out about it …
And now they just tell lawyer stories at camp.
I watched a movie a few days back I’ve been meaning to mention. One of those middle-of-the-day movie channel listings that never got a lot of wide publicity when it was in theaters. But it was the middle of the day, I haven’t been able to do much post-surgery, it had decent actors — and also Ben Affleck playing Ben Affleck — and was topical, so fine. The Company Men:
Yesterday was business as usual. But today, life has other plans.
So this is a big company and Affleck’s character is the first to get downsized as a redundancy. He was a hot shot sales broker who’s now adrift with a family and a mortgage he can’t afford.
“I’m a 37-year-old, unemployed loser,” he tells his wife, and himself, when he hits bottom.
And then Chris Cooper gets canned. Cooper is the kind of actor that, if I made movies, could take any role in my production he wanted. I like his work, even when he isn’t even trying hard. He tries a few things here and almost all of them are splendid. He’s a part of the old guard, you see, he came up when this big public company was just a small ship building outfit. And now he’s an executive nearing 60 and what is he supposed to do?
“I’ve got one kid in college and another going in the fall,” he worries. And he was worried when the first round of cuts didn’t even nab him.
And then there’s Tommy Lee Jones, who was one of the original people from the company. He’s the old guy with a conscience, sorta, making waves until he’s edged out by his best friend. But as Craig T. Nelson’s evil boss character reminds him, his stock options are worth millions.
So the movie is about finding yourself, or trying to, when you have lost this important part of the western cultural identity.
Kevin Costner is in this movie too. He’s a contractor. Ben Affleck’s brother-in-law. He gives him, and some other down on their luck guys, a few jobs in the winter time. He’s working overtime on a house just to get the house done so he can pay his small crew. Meanwhile the company that’s cutting people is expanding into glorious new headquarters.
The movie is meant to be antagonistic toward the evil, misanthropic (there’s that word again) corporate world. It means to portray the small business owner, Costner, who didn’t build that, as a port in the storm. The guy that does something, the man that builds something with his own hands, he’s a lot more sure of himself than a mindless corporate automaton who only moves phantom numbers.
“Easy work, huh Bobby? Pretty much like moving comp reports from the inbox to the outbox.”
Except Costner’s dealing with his own tempest. But he’s one of the good guys, and the movie all but forgets him. He’s all but a Greek hero, you see, because the economy is off — People getting fired or fear for their jobs don’t expand their kitchens, which then impacts the hardware store, so they fire a few people, and also the carpenter, this pervasive fear just manages to seep into every aspect of a community, it is almost as if there should be some economic name for that phenomena — but he’s still working hard so he can help out the even littler little guy. But he’s being played by one of the two biggest actors in the movie and is a great story, so let’s almost ignore him. It was odd.
It is nice, once in a while, to see a movie tell a story without a lot of explosions. It had that going for it. And, also, Ben Affleck.
