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memories

Commitment to topicality

I have now locked down the prep for one half of one of my classes. Unless I am forgetting something, every concept will be less than 50 years old and almost every example will be from the 21st century. It is this commitment to topicality for which I am known.

Doing this part of the work was fairly easy, owing to the class already being in place and some of the work I’ve already done to set up today’s effort. Easy enough that, maybe I should just go ahead and finish the thing right now.

Naaaaaaah.

OK, fine. You’ve convinced me. Be right back.

[…]

[Some two hours elapse]

I did it. I blame you, and appreciate the nudge, because of which my org comm class’ structural prep is now complete. Now I must simply refine the lectures which I’ll do as we move through the term, staying eight days ahead of the class, if I am lucky.

But that nudge, that guilt-tripping nudge, that rolling-your-eyes glare, has done the hardest thing to do this time of year: build momentum.

Now I must complete the work for two other courses. One of them has a To Do list with seven items (some of them still require some thought and decision-making on my part). But there’s always tomorrow, this weekend, and next week. The other class has one item on the To List. It reads: Everything. Tomorrow, this weekend, next week.

This morning I made the mistake of looking out a window. I was prepared, as I had prepared myself in sliding out of bed, readying myself to meet the day, and going downstairs, to look out of one of the kitchen windows to admire yesterday’s handiwork. Weeding was done. Two hours, much sweat, and still sore hands, but the weeding was done. And so I looked and realized that, in the patch directly below this window, I’d only concentrated on the truly obnoxious stuff. Where I should see a big patch of deep and rich browns and blacks, there are still some offending sprinkles of green undesirables.

Well, Saturday. Maybe Friday. Those two days we’ll only get up to about 87 degrees, if the forecast is anything which can be believed anymore. (Some days are more questionable than others, thanks to rank policy changes that will in no way impact us on a daily basis.) I will go back out there, do the shuffle-bend-and-squat, and pull up some more stuff. Also, I will deploy the weed eater to work around some of the features of the yard. We purchased a battery-powered trimmer last year. The guy said the battery would run about 45 minutes. I figured that, given a few experiments, I could figure out a way to get all of my trimming done in under 45 minutes. And, if not, that’s just a sign to go inside and ~~rest~~ charge up the battery anyway. If there’s one thing we all know about weeds, they are patiently persistent. No second expensive battery needed.

I figured I’d use it twice a year, but you know what? I’ve enjoyed breaking out the trimmer this year. Also, I have found it necessary. It is efficient, it works fast, and it helps.

I will also deploy the hedge trimmer. There’s one shrub in particular that has gotten out of control. I might also need to haul the ladder into the mix for this task. There’s nothing as safe as using electric-powered dual-action shearing blades while leaning well out from a six-foot rung on a ladder.

Guaranteed, doing that will take less time than the set up and tear down.

Trimming hedges is an oddly satisfying chore, perhaps because I’ve never hurt myself on the thing. Bringing something into a desired shape is fun. Removing the cuttings are less so. For may years I have used the tarp-as-drop-cloth technique, where you tried to land most of the branches and leaves on the tarp and then pour them into a yard bag. Earlier this year I tried landing them into an oversized plastic bin. That worked somewhat. The cleanup depends on the type of shrub, and that should absolutely figure into your next shrubbery purchase: How much of a problem is this going to be next year? Species, I’ve got thoughts on all of ’em.

We watched Thunderbolts last night. Did it the old fashioned way, turned out all the lights and peered into a TV screen that doesn’t show blacks very well and wondered why so many movies have dark scenes. (I’m pretty sure it is a budget-saving, drama-heightening concept.) This was a deliberately unbalanced movie. Delightful in places. Halting and evocative of “What Dreams May Come” in other places. All of that fits in with the overarching theme. It suffers, however, in the antagonist area. Any action movie that needs an abstraction as an antagonist is going to have a struggle.

From IMDB:

The fifth lowest-grossing MCU film worldwide, after The Marvels (2023), The Incredible Hulk (2008), Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), and Black Widow (2021). These are the only five MCU films to gross under $400 million worldwide.

The web tells me today, because I looked it up, that a sequel is in the works. The Marvels is an overlooked film. (Iman Vellani is brilliant.) Of course, you can’t have much of what follows (this was the 32nd movie in the MCU) without a long bet on the supposedly underperforming Captain America. The movie business is a weird business like that.

Then again, they’re just following the music business, which is even more demanding with its bottom line repercussions. This is not a new realization, of course, but you can be reminded of it with literally any followup album or musician’s story. And, as luck would have it, we watched the first installment of the two-part Billy Joel documentary this evening.

Imagine having a guy under contract that had produced The Piano Man and not being certain, for six more years, that you had a hit maker on your hands. That’s the record business. Seems obvious in retrospect, but the first half of this documentary has been “I do stupid stuff a lot, my childhood, my early career … and finally we all realized I was a star.”

So we saw the first 15 years of the five-album overnight success in part one. We’ll meet Christie Brinkley in part two, I’m sure.

Two years ago we saw Joel’s 101st concert at Madison Square Garden. (She was there, too.) The year prior he announced that he would end that historic run on his 104th show. And so my thought was that this was an important opportunity to see an event, one of the last few remaining. It was a happening that broke out into a pretty great show.

We sat way up high, well off to the side, and had a great time watching him mug for the camera.

Appreciating longevity is the gift of the moment. No one listening to “You May Be Right” and “It’s Still Rock And Roll To Me” in 1980 would have counted on concluding an MSG run 45 years later. (They’d only just discovered nostalgia in 1972, after all.) We’ve all been a part of a different kind of topical commitment, really.

memories / Philadelphia / photo / site / sport / Wednesday — No Comments
12
Aug 26

I can see mulch and top soil again

What a fine day. Productive and rewarding in several senses, but not in all of them. One can’t be productive in every sense. We weren’t designed for that. How else would we have developed imagination, hope, and ambition? How else would we have ever learned to fly, go to space, develop life saving vaccines, study the planet and what we’re doing to it? If we could do everything all at once, how would we have internalized concepts like dreams, lists, and ways to judge our neighbors against our efforts? Someone had to have the idea of emulating the birds, and s/he and their ilk were scorned for generations, until one day it wasn’t a flight of fancy, it was a flight. And you couldn’t do that or go to space or any of our other marvels, really, without the ability to create and pursue lists. We’re talking about human pursuit here! You can’t pursue everything at once. The neighbors would stare and talk.

I hope not too many people are doing that around here, because we’ve given them something to judge of late. There’s a lot of weeding to be done, but it’s been so deliriously hot. The temperatures settled into the low 90s today, however, and I went outside in the morning and pulled things out of the ground for a while.

My first job was a summertime thing working for one of my teachers. She was a horticulturist, and she had a summer side hustle landscaping one of the big houses on the mountain. The husband was a surgeon. A plastic surgeon, I think. Or a heart surgeon. Something that set him up well enough to marry a woman who descended from old money. (People knew the family name.) It was a gorgeous house, made to look ancient by the stone work that didn’t come from our red clay hills. It had a commanding view of the city in the valley below, the city her family had left a few generations before. The city where her family name was on one of the skyscrapers downtown, which you could see standing at their sink, or at their pool, or in any part of the house that looked to the northwest. They had a Rolls Royce Phantom 2 in the garage, giant oil paintings of themselves in the foyer that was, itself, bigger than any house I’d ever seen. And they had landscaping needs that meant after we’d worked our way across the whole of the yard it was time to go back to the other side and start again. I was in the 8th grade and it was incredibly hot and that job taught me a lot, namely that I didn’t want to do that kind of work. My teacher also taught me about Tracy Chapman that summer. Everyone knew Fast Car, but she talked about that debut album and the followup, Crossroads and how somehow that had inspired her to go into the Peace Corps. That didn’t make sense at the time, but I guess I can see it now.

Anyway, I was thinking about that today, pulling weeds in my own flowerbeds, stuffing lawn bags and sweating and listening to Tracy Chapman. I was also hoping none of the neighbors would walk by, notice me doing all that and giving me the nod of disapproval.

“About time he got around to that.”

“The last owners would have never.”

“No they would not.”

Yeah, well, they had kids and I’m guessing the children got sent out to do their share of the work. Or they hired someone. We’ve done that. It’s been … spotty. Sometimes great. Sometimes aggressive. Sometimes questionable.

Anyway, one man did walk by and, even across the yard, you could hear that he was on the phone. I paused to listen, wondering if he’d say “He’s actually doing it. I know. I know! No really, he is!”

I didn’t get it all today. I don’t know that I can, or want to get it all. Pretty much the entire Tracy Chapman catalog is great, much of it peerless, but it would need to be much larger for me to get of this weeding finished. Plus, there’s other work to be done. But there are things on the southern side of the house that I didn’t want to get choked out by undesirables, so I did that for a while, until it was time to come in and cool off. Because while it was only 88 degrees, I still managed to do a credible sweat test this morning. But two hours, noon, 88 degrees, and three comically large bags of now dead green things are ready to be disposed of. The bulk of the work on the south side of the house is done. I could still probably pull weeds for another hour there, plus a good 20 minute weed-eating session. But enough is enough.

Also, we had afternoon plans.

A while back we met a man at a conference who runs this development program for kids where soccer is the entryway, but they’re ultimately working to create scenarios where preschool through high school kids and beyond can build healthy bodies and minds. They have an indoor park, outdoor fields and people show up for the soccer, but find a full slate of programming and services for their community. It sounds amazing and so today we went to see the operation.

There was some high school pick-up soccer underway on their indoor pitch. No one invited me to play, thank goodness. We saw the rest of their facilities, which are lovely and growing. It’s not a community center, it’s more than that. We talked with the people that run the place for about 90 minutes. They’re six years in and still growing and doing some great work. It’s not just sport. Sport gets kids in the door, but then there is programming that helps the children learn about things like nutrition, interpersonal skills, money management, confidence building, and so on. They aren’t trying to build soccer players, the goal is to help kids in ways that matter on a real and human level. It’s quite charming, they’re very passionate about it, and it’s easy to see why.

Sport, as we talk about in classes a lot, means a lot more than just what happens on the field. In one class I teach a section on the real values of youth sport — fair play, collaboration, health, socialization, discipline, rules, respect, etc… — and that’s what this organization is after, too. What’s really interesting, to me, when I talk about those life lessons with other people that played youth sports, even college students who aren’t that far removed from it themselves, they quickly see how it helped them. We don’t always realize it at the time, but it is apparent in retrospective. It is obvious the value we can offer people. It is a mystery there aren’t more deliberate programs just like that.

And when you compare that to the infamous travel ball experience … no contest.

Stuff on the site I’d like to do, since I mentioned it … There are two or three of the old running projects I’d like to return to, and I will. I have to wrap up the local markers project. Easy enough, and that’s the one I combine with bike rides anyway. When the weather turns. I want to return to the happy habit of scanning photos from old books. It’s time intensive, and that’s the problem, but ultimately it entertains me and makes this place look, determined to follow ancient thing.

Another thing I’d like to do more is diving into old newspaper clippings. It’s a great way to learn about a place, or remember about a place. But it seems odd to do that about places where I no longer live. And the place where I do live doesn’t have a wealth of digitized newsprint online. This could devolve into a “where do you belong?” paragraph, but this is Wednesday and while all of my projects on the site ideally would have a day of the week, roughly, the old existential issue is not a Wednesday item. (Wednesdays are for markers, if you’ll recall, and they will be so once again.

These projects one need only invest the time and I say the thing I always say to myself, “After so and so … then you can do that.” And that never changes, but it at least has the added advantage of being frustrating.

Tomorrow, back to the classwork. If I can bend my fingers to the keyboard.

cycling / errands / memories / Monday / overwriting / photo — Comments Off
10
Aug 26

Weekend summaries, never as satisfying as the real thing

A midday storm is an inescapable display of power that changes a day’s entire attitude. When the winds and thunder roll in and the rain pecks at the walls and windows, that’s a thrill, a romance, a terror, a cozy companion, he wrote after careful proofreading.

That time just after the storm has passed needs a name for its sadness.

And it is. This was on Saturday afternoon, when there was no immediate need for melancholy. After an hour or so the sun was brilliant and drying everything out, as if nothing had happened and we were back to a wonderfully hot, now humid, summer day. The sort that is observed nicely from indoors, because let’s be honest about the need to be outside. And that little storm was fun, but the part that follows seldom ever is.

Anyway, we’ve had several nice summer rains of late, and they have been immensely helpful. Presently, 100 percent of our county is rated as “abnormally dry” on the drought monitor. Only 9.8 percent of it is in the moderate drought category. Most of the county has been in a drought since last October. Three months ago it was of the “severe” variety.

This is the second moderate drought we’ve experienced in three years here. In 2024, we got some rain one night in November which broke the longest consecutive-days drought in 130 years of local record keeping. It’d been two months since anything fell out of the sky. Even then, when even the people that pay close attention to these things began to get squirmy, it wasn’t like the 2002 drought, when people were having to change their habits. “My lawn! My car!” When the veggies shrivel or you’re asked to take shorter showers, that’s when people notice. If we’re emerging from a drought right now, a slow-motion, year-long effort, I don’t think it’ll figure into most people’s thinking. Certainly not the neighbors, with the sprinklers.

But if we’re emerging from a drought, it could be a lot worse. Look out west. Look at Europe. Look around.

And if you don’t look too carefully you might think that I caught this maple leaf, midflight, and with a drop of rain on it.

If, that is, you overlook the spiderweb, which I’ve obviously been doing.

Everything grows well out back. Morning sun and afternoon shade and look at the Brown-eyed Susan. It is about to break containment.

Right next to it, the honeysuckle, which we had to cut way back in the spring of last year to replace the trellis upon which it depends. I had no problem with that. Honeysuckle takes your attacks on its free will and laughs in the face of your determinism. I need to prune it more, because it has grown wild and woolly once more. Add it to the list of things I need to do when it isn’t 98 degrees outside, which is the case as of this writing.

There are so many things on that list, and I made one slight in-road yesterday. I visited Harbor Freight, my first every visit, and picked up yard bags — cheapest I could find, and yes I did an extensive price comparison because I have the internet available for my every thought.

I also had a list of other things I wanted to pick up, a note on my phone, complete with names, prices and aisles. To say I have been preparing for this trip for sometime is overstating it, the previous two sentences notwithstanding. And then I got there and —

I’d like to leave the previous shopper a note of encouragement. The important thing is that you almost tried.

Completing the job of landing the cart in the corral would have taken an additional nine steps and a sophisticated heel pivot — I know because I did it for you — but you almost did the thing that society requests of you.

It calls to mind times when I would go to the IGA in wherever it was we lived last. Someone was always leaving carts out. Mind you, I don’t cruise the parking lot looking to solve this problem, but if it’s there I will fix your shortcomings, sure. And I’ll feel good about myself, as I did the times at that IGA when I moved the carts from the handicapped parking spaces into the corral that was mounted right next to the handicapped parking spaces. The grocery store kids were taking a smoke break on the stoop and laughed at that, and, eye contact being a fate-worse-than-death in that part of the world, I gave them a look, in turn.

I don’t miss anything about that place. Well, the 9:30 sunsets in the summer were nice. They also had good multi-use paths. Seven years, those are the two things I miss.

Anyway, I purchased the lawn bags. Probably should have picked up more — but how much of that do you want to do at a time? I also picked up two corner clamps. You really need four, but they only had the two. I decided to wait on some other items on my list, but I did indulge myself by picking up two cheap tape measures. One will live upstairs. One will live downstairs. This plan accomplishes two goals, keeping the good tape measure from wandering all over the house for weeks at a time, and keeps me from having to go to the garage to fetch the good one when I need to determine the empty space on that wall over there. At $4 a pop, these two new ones will pay for themselves somewhere around 2029.

The tape measures were in one of those blister packages though, the sort that involves great risk of bodily harm to free the thing you now own. The easiest way to free the tape measure was by unscrewing the little belt clip from the back. The easiest way to do this was to pierce the blister package with the tip of a pointy Phillips screw driver. Then you unscrew it. Then you wiggle the screw out of place. The tape itself is now free of the packaging, but you must now dig out the little silver belt clip. And here it helps if you pretend like you are a 19th century battlefield surgeon trying to find a bullet, and then dig the thing out in a grotesque way for moviegoers.

Then you have to reassemble it. Now, this is a tiny screw on a cheap tape measure from Harbor Freight. You must take care with this, pretending like you are the first 21st century surgeon to use a sonic scalpel to remove a three-micron imperfection on a patient’s iris. Then you have to test the tape measure, because who knows what secondary role that screw had. Does the tape come out of the case? Yes. Does the lock lock the tape? Yes, also it has a satisfying click. Does the tape retract when you unlock the lock? Yes. Do you do all of this for the second tape measure? Yes. Does the cat look at you like he is wondering if you’ve completely lost your mind? Yes. Do you know where these two tape measures are going to be stored when they aren’t in use? Absolutely not.

Well, another day for that, then.

I am the type of bike rider that can ride the same road a lot. Some people get bored. I suppose some people find the repetition meditative. Me, I’m usually too close to hypoxia to worry about meditating. I am also the type of bike rider that likes to ride new roads, or revisit the rarely ridden roads. But, what I’ve really learned about myself is that I’m the type of bike rider who, once there is an idea in place, absolutely must do that ride.

Saturday evening I had the idea of doing some hill repeats. It’s all very flat here and I haven’t ridden a real hill in several years now and I was never good at it and it’s hot and I am not riding enough and so this was a good idea.

I recalled this road, which I’ve been up three times perhaps, and down twice. It has a hill. It’s gradual. It is also quiet, and part of it is, as you can see, nicely shaded.

People do hill repeats to get stronger — or, like me, to say they’ve done them. There’s a method to the madness of going up the same hill over and over. Probably more than one. I just decided to go up the hill, and figured I’d do it several times. And so I soft-pedaled my way to that hill, an easy 17 minute ride with no exertion. And then I went up that hill. It tops out, then goes up a bit more, and does that a few times before the road forms a T-intersection with the nearest highway. If you saw the hill in profile it looks a bit like a molar. The climb isn’t hard or long, but what I know about hill repeats is that you want the concerted effort and then the repetition. What I want out of the hill repeat is to be able to turn around safely. And this road does all of those things. So I rode the road, and figured, “I’ll do 10.” And then later I said to myself, “It really is hot out here.” And then I said, “I’ll do five.” And then I said, “I think that’s five.” And then I took the long way home, turning left at that highway instead of turning around, letting the road pull me past the veteran’s cemetery and back into town, feeling the asphalt bend to my right between the gas station and the biker bar. Apparently they have good pub grub, though I have only seen the “biker’s welcome” sign on the wall, and they wouldn’t turn me away, but I think they mean motorcyclists. The little side road I was on after that falls downhill, usually I’m on this bit of infrastructure in the opposite direction. I turn left and and then left again, past the town lake, and into downtown. I timed the red light, singular, just right. Make the right past bike shop and opposite the old fire ring, and then the left for home.

At that point I am 3.5 miles from home, I have been out for about 90 minutes, drank three bottles of water, had enough of the heat and the little hills. I am counting, in my mind, the little rises between my bike and my neighborhood. I estimated three. There were four. After the second I started thinking of the alternate ways home, because I didn’t want that last hill. At the four-way stop I could go left and then right and go up a hill on bad chip-and-seal and then do the reverse side of this climb. I could turn right and go down a hill and then up two actual hills before the final incline and … no, straight ahead was the easiest way to get there and I was just done with the heat. When I got home I was right on the edge of shivering, which is one of those early heat exhaustion symptoms. Or the sweat wasn’t evaporating because I was no longer in the wind and perspiration could finally do its cooling job.

Inside, then, more water, this time with electrolytes. Shower.

There’s a very, very small wound in the next photo, and I’m just telling you now. It’s hardly the worst thing in the world, but it is a part of the story and now you’ve been warned.

I’ve bled on a bicycle in several different ways. Crashes. Hailstorm. Whacked by a limb too far out into the road.

Some 10-plus years ago I cut myself so badly I had to turn around, go home and bandage myself up. The little rubber cover on my handlebar hood had disappeared and it hadn’t yet been replaced. Beneath that hood is a screw that holds all of the stuff in the shifter-brake area together. I reached up to adjust and grabbed the screw and sliced my pinky. It was at the beginning of the ride, and so I went back out, gauze and tape and Band-aids and such. I could follow the blood trail back out. I still have the scar.

Anyway, and here it comes, as I was getting ready to shower I noticed I nicked the ring finger on my left hand. No idea how.

It’s fine. Didn’t bleed. I’ll keep it clean and it’ll heal itself because I believe in first aid. But it’s right in that spot where the finger touches the middle finger and it’ll be a reminder, for a few days, that I have no idea how that happened.

My lovely bride, meanwhile, did an aqua bike == a swim and ride race — and she finished second. Podium and proud! We did the proper sort of celebration: Chinese for dinner, and basked with ice cream from the local creamery.

The teens running the place closed as we were there. Removed the garbage bags, shut the windows, took away the umbrellas, turned off the monitors and figured “These two are the upstanding sort who won’t cause us any problem. They’ll probably be home and in bed before 10, anyway.”

And they were right about that.

Well, I had a lot of other things I was going to talk about, but I have to save something for the rest of the week. Besides, I have written now almost 2,300 words and said absolutely nothing. You deserve a break.

friends / memories / site / Wednesday — Comments Off
5
Aug 26

Happy Birthday to the website

Two things started within 367 days of one another. On August 4, 2003, while reading a lot of Salam Pax (who may work for UNICEF now?) and Raywat Deonandan (who is definitely at the University of Toronto) and a local guy named Terry Oglesby and a few of the newfangled political blogs, I started a blog myself. It was going to be bad, I knew it was going to be bad. I thought it might get better. (And 23 years later the jury is still out.) But you know what? I had free time and no money and I needed a cheap hobby.

On August 6, 2004, some friends at work, most notably Brian McAlister, (now at Advance Local) convinced me to drop a few bucks on an actual URL because I had free time and just a few bucks.

Spending money is always tough, but I was sick of temporary sites and pop-ups and losing control of what my three visitors saw when they remembered to visit. I knew what I wanted, somewhere I could put some things from time to time, and some place I could play with coding from time to time, some place without ads.

But we must back up. A college buddy of mine, Stephen Kiser (now an economist and professor), sold me a line about how if I learned some HTML I’d add $10,000 to my salary. I was in undergrad and believed him because he was a bit older than me and seemed like he knew what he was talking about. So I spent a summer in college teaching myself how to code, and found that there was something about the process that was satisfying. I never got great at it, but I never wanted to be a computer scientist or a backend developer anyway. I was this other thing. I was the person who could write both HTML and AP Style. There was exactly no one else like that around when I graduated college. In everything else in his life, Kiser might have been right, but I’m still waiting on that extra cash. Though, writing in, or dabbling in, code figured into every job I had in those early years.

Here’s a screen grab of what the site looked like in 2006 (just the second or third version of the site).

I like sharp, clean design. I was trying to write that with as little code as possible, just for the challenge of it. I was editing the photos by hand, and in probably the hardest way possible in 2006. Because I always got bored with images — that hasn’t changed — I would regularly update them.

The general way I display the site has changed. I have the front page, of course, with all of the buttons, and most everything else I put through here, or just store on a hidden page deep within the recesses. The traffic has changed, a little. That first August I had 3,670 visits. Now I get about 200,000 a month, for some reason. Some of that is bots and various bits of code, sure, but there are a lot of people in there. May of this year was the biggest month of the site’s history, and what people saw the most that month was one of the cats being silly. Perhaps later this year the 10 millionth visitor will swing through. I wonder what will bring them in. There’s only 22 years of the things that interest me that might catch their eye.

This has been, and remains, a hobby — a place to ramble on about whatever has caught my interest, a place to memorialize photographs and other files, and the occasional thing I am fortunate enough to post elsewhere. While websites have taken a hit in popularity because of the dopamine that sits inside the walled gardens of social media, I didn’t start this to try to attract crowds. Still, it amuses me that, so far this month, folks from Belgium, Great Britain, Japan, and Canada have been on the site. Germany, Brazil, India, and other nations, too. One person, each, from Andorra, Anguilla, Bahamas, Iceland, Maldives, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe have been here. And you, wherever you are at. I’m glad you’re visiting what is, ultimately, a semi-casual, personal site.

I don’t know why you’ve come here, but I am grateful that you came back. I hope you’ll come back again.

Tomorrow, we’ll be checking in on the kitties, I’ll ramble on about school work, fret over this and that, and more.

Thanks for being a part of this.

books / history / memories / music / photo / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
29
Jul 26

I had to log into Canvas today, and more fun things

Today I started doing some back end coursework. Building Canvas shells and preparing the reorganization of things. I started some light reading. The usual, and terribly exciting stuff. But, ya know, it has to get done. And done it gets. So much so that I may do less tomorrow. Is day three too early to take a break? It’s probably too early to take a break.

I’m taking a break.

I shot this photograph, which is nothing special, while doing the weekly garbage can chore, and promptly forgot about it. I remembered it. I edited, uploaded it, and promptly forgot about it again. So here it is, a nothing special snapshot from the wee hours of Monday morning.

The clouds had more patience than me and waited me out. Then nothing happened and I went inside, which is why it is nothing special, and probably why I forgot it, twice. But it’s here, I’m here, the site is here, you’re here, and so on.

The headliner at the weekend concert was Train, which is doing one of those “celebrating 25 years of a hit” tours. So many people are doing these now it no longer seems novel. It seems impractical. It seems a problem. The problem is that so many acts I like are doing them.

Anyway, at one point they launched into a planned bit of spontaneity and played Jack and Diane. Matt Nathanson came out for the back half of the song.

And, now, allow me to point you to something that will change your opinion about that song, and give you, finally, the correct opinion about Mellencamp. It was funny, when this happened, listening to the people who knew him, his father, his sons, and their opinions of him from first-hand experience, and watching all the right people fawn and fan over the whole event, and watching the students saying, “Who?”

I have two more concert clips to round out the week. Tomorrow’s video is something you’ve never heard before, guaranteed. Friday’s video is something I’ve, somehow, never seen live before.

I had a nice little ride this evening. I set out for my time trial 25-mile loop, but it was slow. I didn’t really know that when I passed the sheep, but that’s only because I see them in the first five miles or so.

Soon after, though, the numbers looked low, so I decided to do a bit extra. On the long straight road that usually gives me a good tailwind before the final segment I had a crosswind, and instead of turning for the last seven miles home I went down to the next turn, 1.5 miles down the road, hooked a right at the little white house on the corner and then pushed on through some woods, a few warehouses, over some railroad tracks, a few more warehouses, and then finally took another right, to pass by some other warehouses, and finally the bridge over the water at a place where you sit five feet below sea level, and then into a four-stop sign town that dates back to the 17th century.

Turning left at one of those stop signs sends me through one final neighborhood and then four miles of pastureland, and then home. It was a lovely evening for a ride, a lovely ride, felt good and, yet it was somehow slower than I expected. Who knows why these things are the way they are.

We continue on with Rick Atkinson’s Fate of the Day, the second in his Revolutionary War trilogy. Terrific book and today I am again marveling at his source material.

This was just prior to the Battle of Brandywine. Lt. William Hale survived Brandywine, participated in the occupation of Philadelphia and beyond. By August 1778 he knew he was going home, his regiment in tatters. Less than 100 officers and men from the 45 Foot survived their battles and the subsequent trip home. A 1914 unit history by a Captain W. H. Wilkin of the same regiment, writes that Hale “was not a man of note,” and that his letters home “describe the war from the point of view of a British subaltern.” Wilkin, nevertheless, gives Hale’s correspondence a full chapter rich in context and granular observations of some of the battles in which he participated. Hale was 22 and fighting in America. He retired from the service a captain in 1781, married in 1783, and died in Devonshire in 1789.

Hale’s line about his esprit de corps has, of course, been used in still other books as well. How could it not? While I’ve not read those others, I can say that Atkinson is delivering another great work. If you like history of the period and you’ve somehow missed this best seller, go get it. Or get the first book, then this one. Catch up and read along!