What a beautiful day today! Gloriously warm in the sunshine. Nice and mild in the shade. Everything you want in a day you weren’t expecting.
I don’t think I even looked at the forecast yesterday. Too busy doing other things. After getting set a new driver’s license I had to take the garbage to the inconvenience center, a trip so unremarkable that I spent the rest of the evening, and today, trying to convince myself that I had, in fact, taken a garbage can, a giant bin of recyclables and three big bags of weeds to the drop off spot.
Yes, I did that yesterday. And it was a lovely afternoon, too. That’s two days in a row! I spent the rest of yesterday afternoon, though, doing class prep.
Thursdays I’m on campus all day. Today, all day meant six hours or so. In class we started talking about audio, which was fun for me. Easy prep, and a good two weeks of complexities. Luckily for the students, or unluckily, I happen to know a thing or two about sound.
We’ve also been talking about commercials, since they are working on spots of their own as an assignment. This let me do my Bud spot exercise. I show the class this 2014 Super Bowl ad.
Then I do a 7:52 second breakdown of all of the shots and angles. Made a special, timed, edit and everything. Matching text and shots. The first year I did this the class applauded, which only encouraged me. When I did it for the second class today they took an entirely different approach, making me think I should rethink the spot I use for this exercise.
They found the commercial … lacking. Emotionally exploitive. Without purpose. I asked them why they thought so, and they explained it somewhat, making some good points along the way. It is some of those things. Curious, as this was one of the best received ads of that particular Super Bowl. It made wonder if commercial tastes are changing, and could they change in just a decade. Either way, they’re thinking critically, those students, and that’s a great thing.
Just outside my class there’s a large hydrangea busily giving up the ghost. Even in this vulnerable moment, it has a deep, handsome beauty to it.
Our drive home was at the perfect time of the evening. There seems to be something special about the autumnal sunsets here. Maybe it’s because I haven’t seen a lot of them in the last several years, or at least it seems that way. But, as I showed you yesterday, my home office windows face west, and there’s just one house and trees across the way. It gives me a nice view. If, however, you can catch the sunset out in the open, it’s a spectacular time of year for these lovely views.
Looks like I should turn this one into a painting, or something.
But not tonight. It’s been a full day, and there’s baseball and football on, but no notable commercials.
I was walking from the control room into the studio — two back-to-back doors — just before a taping began tonight when my phone rang.
My phone never rings.
… The Yankee on the phone, clear as can be. She’s had a bike accident. She’s OK. Deputies are coming and so is an ambulance and people have stopped to help. She’s going to the hospital because she’s sure her collarbone is broken and where am I.
When I got to the hospital, she was off getting some scans. Some of her things were in the examination room they put me in, while I waited for her to come back, I studied her helmet, which had done its job and was destroyed.
They pushed her bed back into the exam room and, friends, there’s just no way to prepare yourself to unexpectedly see someone you love in a neck brace. The scans revealed that brace to be an unnecessary precaution in this case, and the next year started right there, starting right here.
She was going through that intersection when the driver of a red pickup truck caused her to crash, and then drove off without stopping. Someone else did stop to help. Her kid called the police, she called me, collected the bike and called again to check on us later that evening.
I told that woman that my wife had the three broken ribs, a broken collarbone and who knows what else. We later added a likely concussion, weeks without sleep, and a fractured shoulder blade to that list.
The surgeon was great. He’s a triathlete himself. Or he was. (It sounded, for a time, like treating her injuries had psyched him out of road riding.) He taught me a new term. Her collarbone was a comminuted fracture. He described it like this. Go out into the driveway and stomp on a small stick until its just pulverized dust. Sometimes that happens to bone. Comminuted fracture.
I didn’t sleep for more than a week. She couldn’t sleep for more than two, but the surgery, a week after, stabilized the bones — what was left of the collarbone anyway — and that was a big step.
I was fortunate to be able to stay home and take care of her those first two weeks. Her mother came for a week, and then her bestie drove in and took over the house, letting me go to work and take some naps. And, between us, we got to week four, where the patient progressed to feeling terrible.
She had months of checkups and a half-year or so of physical therapy. She got PT homework that she still has to do because, a year later, her bones are still mending. And in light of all of that, she got, we got, pretty lucky. All of that pain, hard work and the frustration involved in simply trying to get back to normal made us very lucky, indeed.
I’d like to tell the guy driving the red pickup truck where he can go, but he’s already in Bloomington.
Do you know where we were today? We were on our bikes, on a sunny, windy day, marking the anniversary.
She’s still not 100 percent, but she’s getting stronger, a process that’s been underway since her first ride back, in early March. It was almost six months off the bike, much of that under doctor’s orders. The six months since she’s been slowly regaining her confidence, which is an
When I broke my collarbone, in a 2012 accident that was plenty bad, but not nearly as rough as hers, it took me almost six full months to even want to ride again. It was 11 months for me before I noticed I had a moment I wasn’t hurting, and a year almost to the day of my surgery that I realized there were times when I didn’t feel protectively self-conscious about turning my head or shoulder. It took me more than 14-months — and a second and third specialist and more PT than I’d care to admit to — before I wasn’t in some sort of constant pain. If anything, she might be a tiny bit ahead of schedule, which doesn’t surprise me at all.
This is what I learned then, what I’d forgotten since, and what I’m reminded of today, having looked back at my own little recovery process: every little normal thing is a huge win, and they’re all worth celebrating.
We had a man from the electric company scheduled to come out this morning and do electric company things. You know the deal, you spend hours on the phone with people and machines and hold music and finally you get someone scheduled in a two hour window on the busiest day of your week. My lovely bride has been handling all of the phone stuff. We were both scheduled to be here to meet the fellow.
You can tell where this is going already, can’t you? Guy never showed up. She called the company again.
“What’s the deal? When is he coming out?”
The person on the other end of the line was all What did he say?
“He never showed up.”
What does the paperwork he gave you say?
“He wasn’t here. He brought no paper, or himself.”
At least the lights come on when you flip the switch. You wonder how, sometimes.
But, hey, it gave me more time to iron. No wrinkles on me for class today.
And how’s that going? I’m doing so well I have even ironed clothes for Monday night’s class.
Unless you meant class. How are my classes going? Just great. Two of them today. One was better than the other, but only because they both can’t be equally awesome. And because I probably did a better job in one than the other.
After two in a row, though, and almost six hours of prattling on, I am quite talked out by the end of the day. It’s been, probably a few decades since I’ve done continual talk and projection. At least it’s just one day a week.
We talked about pre-production, post-production, sampling rates and quantization. We also discussed frame rates and aspect ratios. In the next class, they’ll be pointing cameras at subjects and shooting video. It’ll get pretty fun from there.
What’s really fun is, after a full day of classes and dinner, you can start handling the inbox, and the grading. This will take a few minutes.
Let’s dive back into the Re-Listening project. You know this feature. I’m listening to all of my old CDs in the car, in the order in which I acquired them. It’s fun; a few trips down memory lane, some singalongs, and I get to write a little bit about it here. So let’s dive in.
It’s 2003, though this CD was released in 1998. That means I probably bought it in bulk at a used record store. I can’t say which one specifically, but I am guessing this is from a little downtown shop in New Albany, Indiana. We used to go there for the fall festival and that store sat on the corner and, every year, I’d come out with a handful of discs. That’s just a guess, because I have no memory of buying this, but it makes sense considering the discs that surround it in my little collection.
Most assuredly, though, I bought it on the strength of the moderately successful alt radio single, track one, “Pensacola.” It takes a second or two, but it builds nicely.
Country-flavored new-wave rock would be the correct guess. As indicated by song titles like “Pensacola” and “Pull the Weight, Virginia (Innocent Lucille),” this North Carolina quintet is heavily into poetic Americana, but its “In the Gloaming” sounds less like the Band or Son Volt than REM. (Indeed, the disc’s guest musicians include ex-d.B. Peter Holsapple, who used to supplement REM’s guitar sound on tour.)
It’s not that Jolene never gets earthy or gloomy. Even when it does, though, the group retains an early-’80s-rock sense of dynamics: Songs like “16c” and “So Sleepless You” contrast brooding verses with bombastic choruses or bridges. More common are such brisk tunes as “Wave to the Worrying” and “Star Town,” which feature jaunty rhythms and rippling guitars. It’s not a style that Jolene can make sound fresh, but the band plays it with skill and assurance.
That’s a lot of styles to throw in one column, into one band, or especially one record.
This is the band’s second record, and there’s some atmosphere in the instrumentation, but for the quality mixing and mastering, there’s just … something … missing overall.
It’s pretty clear, from the liner notes alone what they’re after here. Blurry photos, oddly mismatched fonts showing snippets of whoa deep lyrics, deliberately poor kerning. These guys were trying to ride the alt movement for all they worth. And, in 1998, they were just on the backside of that wave.
By the time I got this in 2003, it was probably just something I listened to for that one single. When I played the whole thing this time through I was looking for a second song to like. Sometimes, though, it’s difficult to get past something’s texture to enjoy its taste.
By the time I picked up “In The Gloaming” the band was spent. They’d parted ways in 2001, having produced five records on three small labels and supporting some pretty substantial bands.
This is the song I’ll play while trying to find out what’s become of the five members of the group.
One of the guys, Rodney Lanier, died young. He’d been diagnosed with cancer, and though this band hadn’t played together for years, they all came back together for one more show with their old friend.
Mike Mitschele is a front man in Alternative Champs. You might also hear his music in The Righteous Gemstones. Dave Burris played in a few other bands, and has since turned to film making and been a producer of reality television. John Crooke is doing marketing out west, released a few solo projects and is still playing, from the looks of things. Mike Kenerley was the drummer in Jolene. It looks like he continued on and played with a lot of notable bands over the years.
Up next in the Re-Listening project is Wyclef Jean’s “The Carnival.” People have written scholarly articles, more than a few, about this record. It’s difficult to say something new about such a widely well-received record that’s now 26 years old.
So I’ll just say this. With the exception of the comedy bits, so familiar in the 1990s, this album holds up better than almost anything in the Re-Listening project
It is solid, throughout. Better than “The Score” in several respects, “The Carnival” debuted at number 16 sixteen on the US Billboard 200. Certified as double platinum in the U.S. in just over a year. Funkmaster Flex is on here. Lauryn Hill and John Forté, of course, but also the Neville Brothers and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. There was a coming together on this project.
I remember we used to play this song on our campus radio station before anyone had an idea that it’d be a single.
Critics loved the record, while also writing a bit dismissively about the samples. Released in 1997, people were still trying to figure out how they felt about samples, I suppose. (Look who won, right?) It’s funny in retrospect, I suppose, but the answer to that question was always in the lead single.
The Bee Gees didn’t care for the finished product, but Jean’s audience did. It climbed to 45 on the Hot 100, number three on the Hot Rap Songs chart. This song, and the album, often landed on those “Top of the Decade/All Time” lists that people compile.
I’d ironed yesterday. All of my things were together. The only thing left to do was wake up, check, have something for breakfast, check, get ready to go to campus, check, and, finally, have my first day of the new school year … on the third day of the new school year …
And so that was the first half of the day.
Our schedules are pretty similar on Thursdays, just like the old days, so we drove in together, just like the old days. And I mean the old days, going back a lifetime or two ago. The mid-oughts. There was a gas crunch, as I recall, so we carpooled. Some days I would drive her to Red Mountain and drop her off at WBRC. Some days she would go over the mountain and downtown to Pepper Place to put me in my office at 6 a.m. I have vague memories of that, and they’re not vague because of the early call time. This was 17, 18 years ago, I think.
And here we are today. My lovely bride had to get her newly issued computer. (Still waiting, myself.) And the place to go for that is just one building over from where I’ll spend the semester. We cruised through two full parking lots and finally found a spot behind the building. We walked around the front, said our good lucks and I went inside. She went on for hardware and to teach two classes elsewhere on campus.
I wandered most of the halls until I found my classroom, plenty of time, clock on my side. I think it would have been more direct, though, if I’d just gone in the back door. Such is life in a new place. There was a class still underway in my class, so I decided to walk the halls until I stumbled upon the offices of one of the departments I’m working with and met a few people. I sat in the copy room and checked a few emails, whiled away some time and then headed back to that class.
This is where I invoke the memory of a guy I used to work with. Chris was an MCO at a television station but, before that, he was an RN.
Chris, I said one day, if you can do that, why are you doing this?
He pointed at the screen, punched a bunch of random buttons on his panels and, with a wicked grin, cranked the chroma key, changing the color of everyone on the TV screen at that moment, and surely making people watching at home wonder if they were having a mental or physical episode. But it didn’t last long because with deft and practiced hands Chris reset everything to its proper position and the TV show continued on.
“No matter what happens here, nobody died,” he said.
I’ve repeated that to myself as a joke for all of the years hence — I mean it that way here, too — but that’s grim.
There were 15 people in my first class. A few non-traditional students, a range of people freshmen-to-seniors, and a lot of interested faces. We talked about the class and all of the usual first day things and, before I knew it, I was ready to send them on their way.
There’s just long enough between that class and my next one to sneak a comically late lunch, so I did that, finishing a sandwich as the early arrivals for the next group trickled in.
There are 15 people in that class too, a range of college experience, but mostly freshmen. We talked about the class and syllabus. It’s the same class, and so I realized pretty quickly that I’ll live in fear, all semester, of wondering what I’ve omitted because I think I said it, and what I’m repeating because I’m afraid I’ve omitted it. Also, the very tip of my nose started itching. No idea why. But you know noses. Once you address the matter, it just gets worse. It’s hard to make a point about the exercise planned in week 10 of your course when you’re trying to scratch the first two layers of epidermis off your nose. But, before I knew it, I was tired of talking. The second class wrapped a bit earlier than the first, but it was after 5 p.m. and no one minded. All of the important information was still conveyed.
All of the brave and hearty ones, the ones who stick in the class, I’ll see next Thursday.
It’s an intro to production class, They’ll be learning about camera movements, shot composition, audio capture and a bit of light production. They’ll go into the studio and do some mock leads and tags. It’s a lot of fun. I hope they have fun. I really hope I can teach them a fair amount.
After class, waiting on my ride, I had time to run through some email, and start building a calendar. This won’t be a conventional schedule, this semester — I’m beginning to wonder if there’s ever going to be a conventional schedule — and so now I’m trying to decide what to do with my free time and when to make my free time. But first, the basics, what day is the first day of my week? Is Thursday the first day of my week? Is Thursday the last day of my week?
And that was basically my day, because almost six hours of listening to myself talk is just about enough, thank you. Except at home, there was a bit of early grading (syllabus quizzes are easy points, and it makes the diligent student hunt for details within the 12-page document) and starting to think about how to set up next week’s classes. Oh, and my third class, which will begin next Monday.
Right now, the early vote is for Thursday to be the last day of my week. Though I’m considering something innovative: making Monday both the first, and last, day of the week.
Later, I decided to change my bike tires. I’ve had three flats on my rear wheel in the last three weeks. One could be wear. Another could be anything. A third, that’s probably user error. Plus my tires were mismatched in age. I don’t remember which is the newer. And the one on the front wheel looks like it could fall apart any day now.
So, before tomorrow’s bike ride, two new tires. Here’s how that went tonight.
I took the front wheel off the bike. Struggled, in a most unusual and almost embarrassing way, to remove the tire from the wheel. Finally got that off, and then started putting this guy on.
Gatorskins are great. They’re heavy. They’re durable. You wouldn’t race them because of all of that, but I don’t race. They’ll run forever. One of these has been on my bike for two years. My receipts say I last bought a set in 2013. So tonight’s effort should serve me well for a good long while.
The downside to a Gatorskin is that they are difficult to put on the first time. (The secret, if you can’t get it completely fitted, is to heat the stubborn bit of the tire with a hair dryer.) But I’m getting better at it. (No hair dryer needed.) Tire on, tube in, tire seated. Inflate.
Take the back wheel of the bike, remove that tire. I found a little sliver of metal inside that had escaped my earlier notice. So I know what caused at least the third flat.
Speaking of, the tube on the front wheel is leaking inside the brand new tire.
And this is why you don’t immediately slap it back on the frame, I said to myself.
Which was a nice thing to say, since it was congratulatory. The wheel wasn’t back on the frame, but I did have to take the tube out. I found a tiny leak right in the seam. Maybe I damaged it. Maybe Continental tubes are the most temperamental tubes on the market. Anyway, old tube out, new tube in. Gatorskin seated. Inflate.
Back to the rear wheel then. Repeat that process. Decided I’ll keep both old tires. One can go on the trainer. The other … well, in a bit I’m going to google recycling and repurposing bike tires.
Both are inflated. Neither are mounted on the bike frame. Let’s see what they do overnight. (Update: They were fine.) And now I’ll have two new tubes and two new tires for tomorrow’s bike ride. It’ll be a great day. And this one was good, too. But I hope yours was even better.
I’d been standing in this aisle at the local hardware store for five or six minutes, waiting for someone to come by. It was 10 a.m. There was one other customer in the place. This was, I should point out, one of the two local hardware stores. One seems to have two to four people working at all time, I’ve been in there a few times and haven’t seen the same face twice. I’ve also never been there when anything was going on, which probably means nothing. Also, at that store, if you need a specific thing they have, you’re in luck. But it seems to be a small list of on-the-floor inventory.
I thought about going to the Tractor Supply. I’ve been there once. They had neither tractors, nor the supplies I needed. And that’s the sort of memory that’s hard to overcome.
So I went to the other local place. They’re all fairly equidistant, but I’ve also been to this one and I figured, for today’s obscure search, this would be the best bet.
Which led me to standing there, waiting for this guy to wander over.
I am looking for screws to mount a TV to a wall.
The guy recoiled a bit. It was physical, visceral, and you could tell. But then his customer service brain kicked in and he was happy to try to help. I had a picture of the installation manual, which showed some screws. But what I saw look like the things that go into the wall. I needed the screws that go into the wall mount. The guy said he gets this all the time. People come in, the instructions no help. These things all require precise hardware, it’s never spelled out well, and apparently never included in the box, no matter the brand you buy.
I needed these screws because, in my home office, there’s a great little mount already on the wall. And that mount is in a perfect line of sight of my Zoom angle. (Oh, the modern first world problems.) I’m going to hang a TV there and stream live webcams over my shoulder and see if I can distract anyone in a meeting using various aquarium shots and such.
So the guy helps me find the right screws. I was standing in the right place, he said. Hovering over the correct box. Inside the box are 15 little compartments, of course, of varying sizes, both diameter and length.
“These,” he said, “would be my best bet.” He said that in that way that lets you know, hey, he’s guessing too. Based on the oddly phrased material in the manual he meant.
Hey, we’re all guessing pal.
I picked four screws, noted the price and took them to the cashier. She charged me $.42 per screw, which was fair since they were listed at $.42 cents per screw on the box. On the way to the car I realized the screws I’d picked up didn’t have a flat or Phillips head, but rather a hex head. So I had to think about where all of my tools are, and which one might just maybe have a chance of fitting these little guys.
I took them to the house, wrapped up in the receipt because, it was a best bet, and also because she did not offer me anything with which to carry my four dainty little screws.
I took the screws upstairs and realized a problem: the screws are so small they slip right through the holes on the mounting arms.
Can you take back $1.68 in merchandise?
Can’t worry about that now. I had a meeting to prepare for. A Zoom meeting. There would be no TV monitor over my shoulder, just a mount.
It was a fine meeting though. A new colleague was helping me flesh out a few details of one of the classes I’ll be teaching this term. Classes start next week, this person just returned from a European vacation and she spent an hour chatting away with me. She was very generous with her time, insight and resources. It occurs to me that I need to invest in local coffee house gift cards as a thank you.
And the rest of the day was spent working on that class. In the afternoon, a whole bunch of material came my way for the other two classes I’ll be teaching. Between now and December, I’ll be fine tuning everything.
That’s an exaggeration. I hope to be caught up by Thanksgiving.
While I was having a bowl of soup as a late lunch and digesting some of the information from that meeting it occurred to me: use washers.
So I went into the garage, pulled down the Box Of Random Bits of Assembly Supplies You Must Never Throw Out and, for the first time, understood the genius of those shop workers with jugs of specific types of hardware and sizes. I don’t have a need for that, mind you, but I get it.
And I also got four washers. By some happy accident I found four the same size. (So what tool or furniture is missing four washers around here?) Happily, they all fit today’s need. And so did one of detachable screwdriver tools on the hex head screws. Four screws applied to the wall mount arms, arms and TV stress tested for weight, though the TV is light. And then I put it on the wall.
As I write this, over my shoulder there is a shot from a wildlife cam from somewhere in Europe. There’s a babbling stream in the foreground, and a giant old oak in the center background. Unseen birds are happily chirping away. This flat screen mounted to the wall, streaming a scene from halfway around the world, sits over my 1948 Silvertone radio. I like the technological juxtaposition.
(I think there’s some of this paint in the basement. I wonder if I should try to camouflage the power cord.)
I bought that radio from a retired teacher in 2017. Restoring these had become his retirement hobby.
He showed me this one, which I’d gone over to ask about, and I asked him about his process. He gave me a tour of the ones he was tinkering on in his garage, and the finished radios that held pride of place in his home. I got him to drop his price a bit on the Silvertone he’d advertised, and he helped me load it up in the car. It still powers up, you can hear the tubes hum to life. And, in the old house, you could hear the local AM station. I caught part of a football game.
I seldom turn it on, because I don’t want to wear it out. Part of the ABCs of me.
My plan was to put a Bluetooth speaker, or an under-the-cabinet streaming radio of some sort in there and just play big band music. And one day I’ll do that!
The gentleman I bought it contacted me a few weeks later, and I gave him and his wife a little mini-tour of our new building on campus. On their way out he said he was thinking of selling one of his really, really nice radios. One of the few sorts I’d really want, an early floor radio with station presets, rich with wood and history. I could put some of my old station call letters on the buttons, maybe the buttons work and you could watch the needle slide across the dial. How neat this would be! We’d talked about them for some time in his home, and I knew better than to ask. But when he visited campus he said he was maybe thinking about selling one, one day. He seemed hesitant and nervous about it, like maybe his wife had talked him into saying that. Like maybe he wasn’t really sold on the idea of selling, but he brought it up.
I said to him, with solemnity and a sincere appreciation for the work he does on those radios, If you do, I hope you’ll consider giving me a chance to make you an offer.
I kept checking my Facebook messages for the next six years, but he never wrote me. But that’s OK. He was a nice guy, and his wife was charming and I hope they’re doing well. Which … let me check one more time … nada.
Ah well, new town, new marketplace, new opportunities.
When we moved here, when I started putting my office together, the first thing I did was turn on that Silvertone. The tubes hummed up and then I scrolled the dial. You can get a good handful of AM stations out here.
I wonder about the family that bought that radio from Sears and Roebuck in 1948. What did they listen to on it? Did they marvel at stations they could tune in to from different states? When did this stop being a central focus in their home, and then just another piece of furniture? Were there kids in that house? If they are still with us they’d be in their late 70s by now. Do you think those kids, now old, have grandchildren that some them the wonders of the Internet? Think they’ve ever shown them scenes from the woods in Poland?
You know, that old man, that old woman, they are Boomers, and children of the rocket age, young adults of the space age. Maybe they caught that bug, and never let it go. Maybe their grandchildren showed them how to find the NASA streams.
So many technologies. So surprising how we can get accustomed to them all so quickly. So many wonders. So many screws.
