Monday « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Monday

Up the west coast a bit

We woke up in Dublin on Sunday, which was great, because that’s where we went to sleep on Saturday night. The conference was over. I had spent time grading and working and finishing and delivering presentations. My lovely bride had spent her time running the conference and presenting and generally being awesome. (I never have that last requirement, which comes as some relief.) So, come Sunday, we were ready for a day with less to do, which meant, of course, we packed up our things, hailed a cab, and drove to the airport. There, we rented a car and departed the airport, reacquainting ourselves with driving on the left.

It’s an alien thing, and we’re now taking bets on who messes this up first by driving on the wrong side of some road. Also, we’re working on the terminology for the turns, which is the real challenge. Driving on the left and turning left makes sense, but you still have to wind up in the ~~right~~ correct spot. So it’s “tight left.” Driving on the left and turning right is fundamentally at odds with gravity, religion and the economy. So far, we are using “wide right” as our reminder to one another.

Anyway, we drove through some real countryside, heading across the island to Galway. Roughly, this route.

In the middle of nothing we found the need to satisfy hunger pangs and happened across a gas station that had a miniature food court stapled on to it. It was crowded because the local villages were holding weekend St. Patrick’s Day. While we waited — and waited — for your our food, St. Patrick himself wandered in. Good outfit, giant staff, clean white synthetic beard, awfully modern sneakers.

We arrived at our hotel, The Twelve, a fine modern hotel suite experience, where we stayed for approximately 17 hours, all of which was working, or sleeping. Before dinner I bent over the computer working on my TRP contract for work. It’s your self-report. Your what-have-you-been-doing-these-last-few-years report. I’ve been writing all of this for weeks and it’s actually a useful exercise. There are places where you can be reflective and philosophical and, if you allow for it, you can perhaps learn something about what you’re doing. Its the creative process of writing and self-discovery. Those parts were what was already done. Last night I was just putting all of the parts together, creating the internal links, making the PDFs. And then it was dinner time. We set out to meet our friend Sally Ann, her husband, and her student who presented at the conference. We went to a fish and chips joint and had a lovely time. Then it was back to the hotel, and back to work. After a few more hours I realized that the entire day’s work was for not. All that I have been coached to do is not what the CMS demands. That was a little moment of joy. Well, gather yourself, jot off a few emails, tear down the product you’ve made and send it in its individual parts. This document has grown to 88 pages. That’s what I’ve done the last two years. And much of that time felt like it was working on this. But it is submitted. One more thing off the list. And no small thing. Happy to have done it, happy to be finished with it. Wish I’d timed the whole effort, just to see what it took.

I didn’t even think about it at all over breakfast.

A good Irish breakfast is a fine thing. Lots of flavors. Some of them make no sense to my American sensibilities, but all of this was good. And it’s filling. I didn’t want anything until dinnertime, which is good, because after breakfast, after getting out of the room (hampered by a broken shower and solved by going to the room right next door) we were in the car and on our way.

We are driving about the northern portion of Ireland to see The Wild Atlantic Way. Here is a little video montage of the day. More below.

First, we hit Silverstrand Beach, which might not be on the Wild Atlantic Way. It’s about 250 meters of beach, meeting Galway Bay and stiff winds out of the west. Also, on the other side of a jettied pile of rocks lies this lovely cliff face.

(Click to embiggen.)

We’re finding a lot of shells with holes in them like this. Maybe we should make a necklace.

We stopped by Trá an Dóilín, Coral Strand, a beach filled with the remains of a seaweed called maerl, which has been pushed ashore, crushed by the water and bleached by the sun, it looks like coral. Maerl, when it is living, is a nice purple-pink color and in large quantities creates a spiky underwater floor. Scallops shelter in this prickly little carpet.

In the summer, this place will be dotted with snorkelers, looking for jellyfish and wrasse in these clear, cold waters. Historically, vessels called hookers would be at sea here. The shallow draft of the hookers meant they were good for the bays and the inlets, shallow waters and rougher seas. They’re not work boats these days, but for the last 50 or so years they’ve been pleasure craft. They host regattas for the hookers these days. It’s a small three-sail boat, with a lot of heart. One sailed all the way to New York in the 1980s.

Here’s a wider view of Trá an Dóilín.

(Click to embiggen.)

Then, we visited Glinsce. Not big enough to be a village, but important enough for a quick stop. The nearby sign had a helpful pronouncer, “gl – EENSH keh.” This area is important for its local fishing economy. The coastline here is quite rugged, and there are piers sprinkled along the coast up and down. We’re at one of them here.

Fishermen went out on row boats called currachs, simple wooden framed vessels that had a hide or canvas stretched over it. During the Drochshaol, the Great Famine of the mid-19th century, the government encouraged more production out of the fishing industry, and so they built these piers and boat launches and the local boatbuilding industry took off.

The fishermen named their boats after saints sometimes, like Caillin, a 6th century Irishman. He is said to have studied in Rome, returned home, to this area, and started a monastery. Every other thing you can find out about him is fantastical, but scholars are apparently certain he was actual person. The boat builders put a little bottle of water from St. Caillin’s holy well into the keel off the vessels.

Let’s go see a castle!

No, that’s not it. That’s just some modern piece that’s meant to hide the house and BMW just behind it. Only kidding, this medieval-style gate dates back to 1815. The castle, about a half a mile walk down a sodden, muddy path, was built between 1812 and 1818. (There was a house and a Beamer right behind the gate, though.) Please stare at these cattle we passed on our way down that path as I tell you the tale.

She was not pleased with me getting so close and kept throwing hay at me until I got the message. It takes me a while to get the message.

Anyway, these castle ruins are near the town of Clifden. It was built for a man named John D’Arcy, whose family had owned thousands and thousands of acres in this area for centuries. Indeed, the original estate of Clifden Castle originally covered more than 17,000 acres. D’Arcy, a balding man with a prominent nose and worried eyes, grew this little area, and government funds helped the impoverished. By 1832, some 1,257 lived in 196 houses in Clifden, which also boasted schools, churches, a brewery and other industries. But a lot of this came at great personal expense. He died in 1839 and the land passed to his son, who wasn’t quite as good at managing things as his old man. Then again, it might not have been entirely the younger D’Arcy’s fault. The Great Famine came along just a few years later. Many of the people living on the lands fled or died, and the family went bankrupt.

Some wealthy Englishmen bought the castle, and it was a holiday escape for their family for several decades. Ultimately, it fell into ruin before the Great War. A local butcher bought the land for grazing, but that leads to an entirely different story we don’t tell around the cattle.

We walked carefully down the rutted tractor path, downhill and up, curving this way and that, trying in vain to keep water from seeping into our shoes. And then, at the final bend, we were stopped by water that was shin deep. I know this because I watched a man in rain boots walk back up from the castle toward his car. He said it would not be worth walking the rest of the way down, and I trusted his advice. This was our best view.

And then we headed on up Sky Road.

We’d been on Sky Road for a bit, but just after the castle it forks and you can take the Lower or the Upper Sky Road. Guess which one we did. And I don’t know that the steepness gives the road it’s name, but I don’t know that to not be the case, either. Up here, you get a grand view from up here over Clifden Bay and the offshore islands, Carricklahan East.

And you get the wind. Big gusts. All day long the wind would move you around. When we got here, the car was pointed downwind, and the breeze ripped the car door out of my hands and very nearly off its brand new hinges. This, believe it or not, was a relatively calm moment near the top of Sky Road.

It tops out at about 492 feet above sea level, which is, of course, just off to your left as you drive in this direction. In addition to the Atlantic, and the islands, you can also enjoy views of the fields, cut up into patches of heaths and grasses. The shoreline gets rugged here, as we are drawing a bit closer to the northwestern corner of the island, and the seabirds are making themselves ready for the spring. They’ve been told the sun may come out this week.

Improbably, especially given today’s wind, we saw a sign that described a growing national cycle network and this area has four loops, ranging from 16 to 40 kilometers. Today, the wind was blowing at close to 50 miles per hour. There were no cyclists, to be found … but only because we couldn’t find a place to rent bikes.

Our last stop, in the day’s dying light, was at the Aasleagh Falls, a picturesque place between where we’d been and where we were going. I was driving, following the GPS, and missed the turn. But I took the next turn, which worked out better because we went through a parking lot and down a path that went from charming country villa access to deeply rutted single track road, surprisingly quickly, before meeting an equally eroded path at a severe angle. You could only turn right. The GPS recalculates, and it wanted me to go left, but there’s no way I was making the angle in a car I’d only just met, while also driving on the wrong side of the car. So we got out and walked that direction while I pondered how I was going to back a car up out of the mess I’d just put us in. And then we found that there was a gate that was locked on that original road, so this worked out better anyway. So long as we could exit. And so long as no one locked the other gate.

We have a bag full of protein bars and warm clothes and a tank full of petrol. We could rough it.

The falls were lovely, you saw them from the side in the video, above, and you can see them in the distance here.

This is the Erriff River, which flows into Killary Harbour and then the Atlantic Ocean. So, if you come at the right time of year, you’ll see salmon jumping those falls. But I know you want to know how we got out of there. We didn’t! I am writing this from the back seat of the car! Guess who is mad at me?

No one, because we did not get stuck. I drove to the right, found a turnaround spot, and then gunned it back up that rutted path. We traveled on to the fabulous Knockranny House Hotel, an incredibly charming place in Westport. The only problem was getting in, because we timed it such that just before us in came a group of people who were very drunk, or who had never stayed in a hotel before, or quite possibly both.

I don’t know what the Irish version of “Count to 10 customer service” is, but the poor woman at the welcome desk was doing just that. Fortunately, those people got situated, after much trouble and deliberation, and went to the right. We checked in in under three minutes — I timed it — and went to the left. Here at Knockranny they have a restaurant that, a few years back, was somehow judged the best hotel restaurant in the world. This sort of honor seems silly and exclusionary. (There’s a lot of hotels in the world, and there’s a great little diner attached to the side of one in Tangier you just have to try …) But let me just say, this restaurant, The Fern Grill, was quite extraordinary. We’ll eat breakfast there in the morning before we set out for more adventures.

But, first, I have to write some students. I wonder if I should tell them where I am.

adventures / Monday / photo — Comments Off
9
Mar 26

We’re going on an adventure

You’ll have to guess. And this will take some doing. Here are all the hints you are getting. Look carefully, and maybe you’ll be able to figure this out from context clues.

We are going back to 2020!

Or at least dressing our faces that way, because germs, man. So you see a mask. And if you look near the top right corner there’s a hint. I’m wearing an overstuffed blue hint. Also there’s another hint covering my ears.

It’s a plane, yes, congratulations. But to where? You have until tomorrow to figure it out.

cycling / Monday / photo / Rowan / site — Comments Off
2
Mar 26

The month of lions and lambs

Happy Monday, and happy March! We have survived the brutal months. Now, the month that makes the difference. All of the snow has mostly melted. Spring, overdue, has been promised. It has not yet been received here. It will be received with great interest when it shows up. And we’re getting close. We’ve had some mild temperatures. We’ve had sunny days, like this weekend. Now we just need to put it all together … and we will … and then keep it that way, until late November or so.

I better not be writing paragraphs like that very much longer.

It was a productive weekend, all spent right here at my desk. I did the monthly cleaning of the computer, updated the monthly spreadsheets, created new subdirectories and updated some boilerplate code. I put the February page of my master assignment calendar behind me. (I have several task-specific calendars running and when the stress of things hits my move is to make another calendar. Late last month I made the master panic calendar, filled it out through May, noticed almost every moment between then and March 28th was spoken for and then set about marking things off the list. Nowhere on that calendar is there a note to make another calendar. Five is sufficiently silly.)

I settled on two new documentaries for class. One of them will be a midterm, and I finished writing that today. The other we’ll watch in class. I’ve had it on my radar for some time, wanted to watch it, want to write something about it. About 14 minutes in I knew it was going into my Criticism class, too. I’ll pretend like this was all by design, because it should fit perfectly.

Also, I finished the draft of that work packet. Presently the thing clocks in at 29 pages, with all of the appendices to go. I wrote the service and research and professional development sections last week. I detailed the teaching section, filling up the maximum seven pages. I have two years of classes, peer observation, student reviews and subtle notes about the future to get into just seven pages. It took some doing to make it fit. Happily, all of the scores from my teaching evaluations are good. The lowest score I’ve registered in the last two years was about the difficulty of a class. Message received: that class will be more demanding and challenging if I get to offer it again.

I’m taking today off from that packet. It’s time for a break from thinking about myself. Besides, I have to think about tomorrow’s classes. Tomorrow evening I’ll do a dead tree edit of the packet, and then send it to a colleague who has generously offered to make sure I’m not omitting anything. After that, final corrections, final assembly, PDF the thing, and send it in. All of which takes place by mid-March. Not the longest thing I’ve ever written. Not the most tedious thing I’ve ever written. But it is a lot of me. Call it … maybe 60 or so pages? I can’t say yet. The checklist, though, tells me I have to have TWO tables of content. That’s always a signal.

On to more important things. We need to do the weekly check=in on the kitties. Phoebe would like you to know that she is not on the table. She is on the runner. And nowhere in the contract does it say she can’t be on the table runner.

Poseidon, himself no slouch when it comes to jailhouse cat lawyering, finds the argument a bit tiresome. Though you can be comfortably certain he’ll be doing much the same thing tomorrow.

So the cats are doing great. Lots of cuddles and big purrs over the weekend. Everyone is doing great.

I did manage a few quick rides. On Saturday, I was in Switzerland! This is just to the northeast of Zurich. I rode up and out from the small rural, forested village of Mosnang and over to the equally small and wonderfully charming Kollbrun. This route was part of one stage of the Tour De Suisse in 2024 and, while I did not see that particular race, I can see why.

I only wish that the person who recorded that route had done so on a brighter day. Switzerland is stunning most everywhere you look. Beautiful lakes, mountains a plenty, gorgeous values, and a huge array of glorious architecture. You can see ancient Roman, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassical, Art Nouveau. But there’s just a little too much Modern and Post Modern architecture, some of which is bordering on Brutalist. Much better to be among the trees and the hills and the rivers and streams. Even if it’s just my basement.

Anyway, here’s that route.

And this evening I rode in Corsica. (But still my basement.)

The last four rides have felt really nice on the trainer. This is notable because everything prior to that, since November, has felt bad or worse. I was getting demoralized. Now, though, I want to see what kind of trouble I can get into riding uphill on Rouvy. I did that tonight. I found myself a little Cat-2 climb that let me climb 1,110+ feet over 3.82 miles. Saying I rode in Switzerland on Saturday, and tonight in both Corsica or Mallorca, where I powered up that hill, is nice, but I’d also like to go outside. I’m ready to not be in the basement.

If for nothing else because I’m kicking myself by how little I’ve done down there this winter.

But spring is coming in now. That’s what the top of this post told me, anyway.

adventures / Monday / photo / sports / video — Comments Off
23
Feb 26

Big snow, big winds, big visuals

All of our recycling sits in the garage. It waits there, impatiently, until my own impatience tells me to do something with the leaning tower of cardboard I’m assembling. Fortunately, I don’t have to make the trip too often these days. I think I go about once every three weeks. And Saturday was that time. Get that stuff out of the garage so we can walk around a little easier, and not have it threaten to bury me, a fine coating of paperboard and other, heavier, recyclable products. So I backed out the car, put two bins — one large and one small — of our mixed recyclables, and all of the deconstructed cardboard. Drove it all over to the inconvenience center. It’s a fine place, about seven miles away, and they take all of these things and more. Also, they’re not terrible strict, so long as you arrive before they close and back your vehicle into the unloading area. These are the rules and you must follow them.

If you do not, you will incur his wrath.

That bear has been sitting there for … a while. The gentleman that manages this facility for the county is seldom in his little office here, too much work to do around the site, but that bear never misses a shift. There’s a story with this guy. He was fished out of, or saved from, one of the waste bins and now he has this role. I hope he is well compensated.

Did you notice the sky in that photo? Here’s another Saturday view. It was about 50 degrees that day. I did the recycling in a t-shirt. No way, I thought, is it going to snow as predicted. And they predicted a lot. All evidence before hand to the contrary.

Sunday was not bright and blue, but gray and chilly. I watched the men’s Olympic hockey gold medal game. That was fun. Then, at the end, a few of the guys brought Johnny Gaudreau’s sweater onto the ice.

That’s touching. Gold medalists are skating a sweater with Johnny Gaudreau’s name on it.

Gaudreau, and his brother Matt, were killed by a drunken motorist while riding bikes in August 2024.

[image or embed]

— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) February 22, 2026 at 11:00 AM

We did some research on local cycling attitudes immediately after they were killed. I presented it to the city and at an academic conference. We were able to help create a little something useful from it. I try not to forget that the day before they were killed, I was out on a ride, just one road over, at about the same time of the early evening.

The man that killed them is still in jail, awaiting trial. He has a procedural hearing later this week on one element of his case. He has a wife and two children, and so the impact here is widely felt. Johnny had a wife and two kids. They were expecting their third. Matt and his wife were expecting their first. The brothers were back in town because their sister was supposed to be married the very next day. There’s absolutely nothing but sadness around this story, and it’s a widely known bit of business. There were a lot of dusty eyes at that gesture.

After the players got their medals, they all skated to center ice for a group photo. And then two of them held up a finger, a wait-a-sec finger, and skated away. Soon they came back, two children in tow. Those are two of Johnny Gaudreau’s children.

Meanwhile, as the weather loomed, people stopped to add things to the ghost bikes memorial where they were killed. Someone shimmied up that pole and mounted an American flag. Everyone seems to agree he should have been with the team, winning and celebrating with the boys. But for a guy that had too much to drink, was angry, driving aggressively and did all of this in one horribly impulsive, accidental moment.

I’ve been told the memorial continued to grow throughout the afternoon.

And then, later, the snow came. I went to the basement to turn a few miles over on my bike. There was a bit of dust out on the cooler spots in the yard. When I came up an hour later, we had an event. And then the winds came, gusting up to about 40 mph.

It looked like this around dinner time, and every weather model projected snow through about noon today. That it was 50 degrees Saturday meant nothing at all come Sunday night. Sunday night, it was this.

Monday morning, after the traditional chocolate chip pancakes required of a snow day, it looked like this in the driveway, which takes the both of us about an hour to clean.

We had about 14 inches of snow. Mostly light and fluffy, and easily maneuverable by shovel. Perhaps a bit less so by snow blower. The better news is that was the drier variety, and the sun was out to do its work. A fair amount of it melted down today. Unlike the last snow and ice storm that was historic for its staying power, the evidence of this storm, historic for being a blizzard, should all be gone by next weekend.

Is it the weekend yet?

Monday — Comments Off
16
Feb 26

Woem woem

Everyone here is fine, but we’ve spent the evening watching the kitties closely. They had a planned visit to the vet today, going in first thing, and they enjoyed a dose of anesthesia. After they woke up and it wore off they were eventually allowed to come home. My lovely bride went to pick them up and got a good report from the office. She pulled into the drive, kitties in tow and I went out to help. One cat per carrier, and neither of them feeling like themselves, and varying degrees of stoned and mad.

The carriers have a top door and a side door, and the side door seemed like the right idea in the moment, and it was. They were still too goofy to jump well. They walked all around the house in slinky postures. Hyper aware, and confused and intent. It was a little bit silly and a little bit pitiful. Phoebe wanted to be near Poseidon for some reason, and he was mad at the whole world. And so it was kind of like that the rest of the night, watching them try to return to normal. Medicine here, special food there. Cats want to be up high, but you shouldn’t be on a counter top when you are refamiliarizing yourself with having four legs. It was a dental appointment, and everything went fine, but its weird watching two basic cat personalities not behaving up to spec.

So that was much of the day. Worrying about them, doing school work, then worrying over them. And then wondering how they feel, and if they’ll feel like normal tomorrow, and if they’ll like us again tomorrow. And trying to keep them from falling over this or off that.

And also watching the snow not melt. The slightly warmer temperatures arrived this weekend. The rain did not. And so it’s all still out there.

I learned this weekend that the way they measure it here is a bit different. Not how much fell, or when it fell, or the quality of the snow, but how much it sticks around. Someone has a chart somewhere and it shows the days when X number of inches of snow just … stuck around. The tote board marking the longevity of three inches of snow goes back to the 19th century. And this particular snow is now climbing up the charts. This is the third most persistent snow at that depth, though we got more snow then, and we still have that or more in our yard. They’ve not recorded a more stubborn snow here in more than a half century.

The moisture in the air will help. That we have a week of days above freezing will help. That some nights we’ll stay above freezing will help.

But that snow is sticking around. It has nowhere to go. It is the guest at the door who is not taking the hint. We are now in the fourth week of this nonsense.

Tomorrow, the cats will, I’m sure, bounce back nicely. We’ll go to school. The snow and ice won’t go anywhere.

But, now, I’m going to go grade things into the wee hours of the morning.