Monday « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Monday

Cambria, San Simeon, Hearst Castle

This is Spring Break. Started Saturday bundled up and out the door to watch an 8-year-old’s basketball game. The blue team, which we were cheering for, lost. But the red team, who we also applauded, played well. Also, they had a deep bench of junior students, and the blue team had just the five players. The red team got out to a big lead, and things were looking grim — seven-minute quarters, 10-foot basketball goals and all. The referee was as strict on the fundamental rules as the NBA. And, on the blue team, everyone wanted to bring the ball up the court. That enthusiasm worked out, though. Despite going down 10, they got back to a single bucket when the final buzzer sounded. Some of the blue teamers were despondent. Others were just ready to be shuttled off to whatever else was scheduled for their busy 8-year-old Saturday.

We went to Waffle House. There just happened to be one near the gym, and I haven’t been to a Waffle House since before the pandemic began. That one was not a good one, somewhere in Indianapolis. This one was good. Except the staff were getting along harmoniously, and no fights or any other drama dominated the experience. It was just a quick sandwich and a classic waffle.

When you have the opportunity to have a waffle for lunch, you have a waffle for lunch.

Then, it was time to strategically jam things into a small suitcase. And then it was time to get in the car and drive 90 minutes. On Sunday morning we used the services of one of the many national airports. But instead of driving up early in the morning, we chose a hotel. The hotel we chose was conveniently located near one of the state’s finest institutions. I looked up the reviews. Some people like working there! Not everyone enjoys being a guest there.

Our place was nice. It was quiet, except for the highway, which was 96 inches from the window next to our bed. I listened to this for hours, waiting for 2 a.m., because if you can schedule a trans-continental dawn flight, on the day that the clocks spring forward and you’re paranoid about alarms, you should definitely consider that undertaking.

The alarms went off right on time. Up and at’em, to the parking lot, to the airport and to the plane. All a pleasant and unremarkable experience. We took off and headed west. We flew Jet Blue, our first time on that airline, because of price considerations and direct-flight convenience. Someone asked for a blanket two rows ahead of me. The flight attendant said, “Of course. That’ll be $10.” I brought a jacket, and left my wallet in my pocket. The flight was fine, the legroom was great. I watched The Burial and rel=”noopener” target=”_blank”>The Holdovers. Both were good airplane movie fare.

We landed in LAX, which was great, because that was what we had anticipated. We were early, which was pleasant. The Jet Blue experience was just fine. We got a rental car, opting for a sensible Toyota that required you to step up into, and duck down, simultaneously. These are fun!

We drove north, which was the direction we wanted to go, cheerily reading off road signs that we recognize from watching police chases. We stopped at In-N-Out and had a perfectly average burger, which was in keeping with our first In-N-Out experience several years ago: decent enough, not at all worth the hype. But we enjoyed the patio in sunny Southern California where it was in the 60s and everyone was wearing jackets and hoodies.

We continued on to our airbnb, in Cambria, the small central coastal town we’re visiting for the first half of the week. A delightful lady met us there, and we’ll be staying in the garage apartment of these nice people’s home right on top of the hill. This was our view. (We were also promised visits from deer and turkeys in the mornings, and I’m 85 percent convinced this was the selling point.) If you look in the distance, you can see it.

Enhance that photo. And, by enhance, I mean allow us to drive down to the coastline so that we may see the Pacific properly.

We’re strictly tourists until Thursday. You know what that means. A lot of photos!

This is standing on the William Randolph Hearst Memorial Beach. That pier is closed for dangers to life and limb. They really do think of everything in California.

If we were standing on the Hearst Beach, you might think, that must mean we were close to the Hearst Castle. And if you think that, you’re right, and you know where the next bit of this post is going. Here we are on the first stop of our little walking tour of the main rooms. This is the tour they encourage all of the first timers to take. (In fact, they warned us off another tour, because this one is for first timers and, hence, apparently better, but also for people just like you and me.) The guide said no food and drink, and stay on the carpeted areas. And one of the people who was on the tour, a cantankerous old woman who was just, presumably, just like you and me, said “What about marijuana?” The tour guide had half of an answer for that.

Anyway, that’s the guest house, I found out just after I took the photo, and not the Castle, or the Casa Grande, as Hearst called it. I do know a bit about Hearst the media mogul, but really nothing about his home, as you can tell.

This is more like it. This is Casa Grande, and therein are the main rooms, which is the popular first timer tour we were on, along with the older woman looking to spark up her afternoon doob. (She did not.) It’s not my style, but you can see where Hearst got his Mediterranean and Spanish influences. Much of this region could remind you of Tuscany, if you glanced at it a bit. And while the house isn’t too my tastes, the achievement is certainly worth noting. Everything built here is built atop a great big hill, and the logistics of even getting a road up here to start with was impressive. That it took 20 years, that Hearst was constantly tinkering with the plans, that he had a rock star of an architect for the entirety of the construction all figure into it, but you can’t sit up there and not be impressed by the achievement of just getting materials to this place.

As a group, we did not stay together very well, which allowed me to work several different smaller groups there in. I would stand with one cluster and mutter under my breath, “I can see what he’s trying to go for here … ”

And then I would move to another cluster and say, “Sometimes I wish we had a smaller pool like this one … ”

The taste might not be mine, and the pool may come up short, but the man knew how to pick a view.

Depending on which story you heard — and our guide told us one, but the reenactment video narrated by Donald Sutherland told us another — Casa Grande is built either on the land where he and his family camped when he was young, or on a hill near there. It’s a delightfully romantic story, and so I hope the guide had it right. But that video at the end of the tour was well-produced. I’m sure they were working from good material. This is probably the best view near the place where he remembered spending so many wonderful days as a child. And that’s plenty good.

The main rooms tour takes you into the big welcoming reception room. All of Hearst’s many guests would gather there before dinner for a drink (but not two, Hearst delighted in being a great host, but did not suffer a sloppy one). We saw the dining room, that was straight out of European central casting for a dining hall. Except, maybe, for the table, which is set for dinner, as if the Chief were going to come through those doors at any moment.

We also saw the morning room, which I am sure has a better name than that. That would have been where the guests gather to read the paper, take the sun, and someone would fetch their to-order breakfast. We also saw the billiards room. I bet you can guess what happened there.

What happened there was that our guide talked about how Hearst was always working, surrounded by his phones and the newspapers he owned. (Hearst got his money the old fashioned way, his daddy dug it out of the ground.) William was an editor and publisher by 23, courtesy of Pa, and then became a proper media mogul. Newspapers, radio, movies. Our guide then said Hearst was the social media of his day.

My lovely bride was at one end of the billiards room, with the front of the group, and I was at the other end, working another cluster of visitors, “We run into this problem all of the time. If you have two tables, some of your guests just can’t play, so last summer we expanded and now we have four in our entertainment wing … ”

So the guide said Hearst was the social media of his day. I looked at The Yankee and she looked at me and so there we were, two media pros and scholars trying not to giggle and daring each other, with facial expressions, to derail the tour and explain where she was obviously wrong.

We let it slide.

Then we watched a short film in Hearst’s in home screening room.

“Oh this is nice,” I said. “I can see what they were trying to do here. Of course ours could just be better because of the modern technology. And how we budgeted for it … ”

Hearst was one of the richest men in the world by then, of course. But in the story, I was only wearing the cheap sunglasses to not stand out, of course.

The footage we saw there was a bunch of home movie clips, filled with stars of a bygone day. Some you recognized, still. Some, when the old images came up and the tour guide said the name, you would have a moment of recognition. Others were just lost to most of us — most of us except the old woman who was looking to scurry up a little. She might have known who all of the people were. It was charming, seeing the old footage taken from the grounds, right there in the place. Just delightful.

Then we saw the other pool. It’s built beneath the tennis courts. The room leaks. In fact, the entire ceiling has been removed because it’s a mess. They blamed this on Hearst, and his changing plans, not the architect. And also common sense. If the roof is your tennis courts, then your roof is flat. So there’s nowhere for rain to run off and you’re going to have leaks.

“We learned from that mistake, too,” I said to no one in particular.

That pool, though, really is something.

(Click to embiggen.)

It’s a nice little tour. It’s worth seeing. We never thought about adding the zoo, which is no longer functioning, but you can see some of the remnants on the way up to the house itself. Only now are three or four little jokes coming to mind about how we should incorporate that in our third quarter expansion. I guess we’ll have to go back so I can try out that material on another set of visitors.

Our own tourist activities continued, with the rest of the afternoon spent enjoying the beautiful central coastline around us.

“… there is nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline no matter how many times it’s sent away.”

— Sarah Kay

“We like to walk along the beach, we are drawn by the ocean, taken by its power, its unceasing motion, its mystery and unspeakable beauty. We like forests and mountains, deserts and hidden rivers, and the lonely cities as well. Our sadness is as much a part of our lives as is our laughter. To share our sadness with one we love is perhaps as great a joy as we can know – unless it be to share our laughter. We searchers are ambitious only for life itself, for everything beautiful it can provide.”

— James Kavanaugh

“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

— Isaac Newton (or Joseph Spence)

“I marvel at the nine shades of green and three shades of blue, only separated by the irrepressible skein of white foam, the color itself which keeps some of the blues from looking gree — oh, hello.”

— Me, probably

(Click to embiggen.)

“To measure you by your smallest deed is to reckon the power of ocean by the frailty of its foam.
To judge you by your failures is to cast blame upon the seasons for their inconstancy.
Ay, you are like an ocean,
And though heavy-grounded ships await the tide upon your shores, yet, even like an ocean, you cannot hasten your tides.
And like the seasons you are also,
And though in your winter you deny your spring,
Yet spring, reposing within you, smiles in her drowsiness and is not offended. Think not I say these things in order that you may say the one to the other, “He praised us well. He saw but the good in us.”
I only speak to you in words of that which you yourselves know in thought.”

— Kahlil Gibran

(Click to embiggen.)

“People travel to wonder
at the height of the mountains,
at the huge waves of the seas,
at the long course of the rivers,
at the vast compass of the ocean,
at the circular motion of the stars,
and yet they pass by themselves
without wondering.”

— Augustine of Hippo

“He was a telephone man who fell in love with long distances; he gave up his job with the telephone company and skipped the light fantastic out of town …”

“The last we heard of him was a picture postcard from Mazatlan, on the Pacific coast of Mexico, containing a message of two words: “Hello – Goodbye!” and no address.”

— Tennessee Williams

Yes, Tennessee, the rest of the play explained itself.

“Whenever I look at the ocean, I always want to talk to people, but when I’m talking to people, I always want to look at the ocean.”

— Haruki Murakami

“I am the shore and the ocean, awaiting myself on both sides.”

— Dejan Stojanovic

More tomorrow.

adventures / Cozumel / memories / Monday / photo / SCUBA / video — Comments Off
4
Mar 24

An important story of diving strength and grace and power

We held our first backyard activity of the new year this weekend. We put a fire in the fire pit.

As ever, the order is tender, kindling, firewood.

It took a while, because someone put wet wood — and not the kindling and firewood I’ve been storing out of the elements for just this purpose — in the fire pit, but pine straw is eager to burn and when I got enough of that in there you could hear the water sizzling away until, finally, we got those relaxing looking coals to stare at.

It was a good way to mark the weekend, a great way to start the outdoor season, which should run right up until December if last year was any indication. March to December? I’d take that, happily. It was sunny again today, but rainy or damp, and cool, for the rest of the week. We’re just waiting for the mercury to climb a few degrees higher.

OK, here’s the last photo from our recent trip to Cozumel. I’ve rationed these out for two months, and that’s better than I expected. (Don’t worry, we’re going to be able to stretch out the remaining videos for a good long while, too.)

This is the photo where I once again thank our trip planner and my dive buddy. Dive buddies serve a lot of roles. They point out stuff you might have overlooked. They help verify the stories you come back with. They also help ensure your safety. (Or whatever.)

In Cozumel, you do a lot of drift diving. You drop off the boat, go to the depth of the dive profile and just let the current take you … that way. The boat above follows your bubbles and picks up in another place. When you do it right, this is peaceful, easy, diving. You learn quickly that, even with a light current, the water is in control and you make your peace with it. You’re going this direction. You’ll see some great things. You’ll miss some things. C’est la plongée. Or, I guess, eso es bucear.

You don’t swim against the current.

So we’re going along on one of our last dives, the six divers and the dive master, Max, who has worked and dove all over the world. We’re all stretched out in a line, lingering here, drifting there. I’m about the fourth one back. My lovely bride is one or two people ahead of me.

Coming the other direction is a beautiful eagle ray, which migrates through that region in January and February. You see it, you admire it, you drift on. My dive buddy turns around and swims after it to capture video footage. Max and the other four divers are impressed. She’s swimming against the current, probably 100 yards, closing the distance on a creature designed for this environment.

Max this worldly, long-professional, very cool ciao Italian man, looks at me, his eyes as wide as his mask allows. The expression for “What?” works in any language, under any body of water. I shrugged and nodded.

A little while later, we happen upon a turtle, and that tortuga is also swimming opposite us. The Yankee again turns, closes the distance, passes the turtle, and gets in front of it to take another photo. We’re at the front of the group this time, and so she swims upstream past the other five people, who are in disbelief. When she finally turned to join us once more, they were still watching. I gestured to her to show the muscles. Everybody else needed to see the gun show.

And, look, she wasn’t even breathing hard.

After the dive, Max and I are the last ones in the water, waiting to climb on the boat. He said to me that he’d never seen anyone do that, and certainly not twice. I guess he’d never been diving with a varsity athlete, a three-time Ironman, a five-time USA National Championship triathlete, who is also a FINA world championship swimmer.

It was, without a doubt, impressive, but not surprising. Not to me. I’ve been surprised by all of it before. And I need all of the air in my tank just to keep up with her.

We’re still working on her fire-building skills.

adventures / cycling / Monday / photo / SCUBA / video — Comments Off
26
Feb 24

Everything here is terrific

Friday’s snapshots I did not share … because I was busy sharing other things. (I began a look at a 78-year-old yearbook. Did you see that? You should check it out.)

My office window faces the western sky and I happened to glance up just in time to see this explosion of color above the treeline. Grab the phone, down the stairs, out the door and stand on the porch to take this photo.

And then right back inside, because I believe I was barefoot. The neighbors must think things.

The lilies are still going strong. The purple flowers, the ones with names I do not know, are well into their romantic wither and wait stage. But these guys are still offering a powerful fragrance.

It is a promise of spring to come, and it is coming soon. Surely it is now. I walked outside today and thought, This feels great! And it could be that I was standing in the sun, that I’d just gotten off my bike and my heart rate was still elevated or that 54 degrees in late February feels like a treat. It is more of a sign of things to come than a symbol of things lost. Later this week the sunset will set after 6 p.m. You can’t help but feel optimistic. I’m wearing blue and yellow to class tonight, because it is officially time for spring colors.

The cats can tell, too. I don’t know that they can. I assume they can. If they are attuned to the seasons we have enough windows for them to figure it out. They’ve seen a few birds return and there’s a squirrel or two outside tormenting them know, so maybe they know something is up, seasonally speaking. But I can’t say that for sure, of course. They haven’t told me.

I shouldn’t make them out to be readers of the Farmer’s Almanac or anything. Poseidon, after all, is still content to hibernate.

This is his cabinet. It was easier to move things around and put his little blanket in there and, when he’s being a pill at dinner time, just remind him that he has his own space.

And, then, at other times, this genius … well … you can tell for yourself.

Phoebe is not impressed by him. Not the first little bit.

I like the idea of Phoebe having a noir mood, though. That has potential.

She’s lately taken to hanging out in the cat tunnel. This is a recent development. It was always Poe’s territory, but, now, he has to share.

She’s so meek and timid, we like when she asserts herself in this way. Poe has a cabinet. He can share the tunnel.

Saturday, my lovely bride and I went for a bike ride together. Usually our schedules are just a bit off, so this is a real treat, sweating and huffing and puffing and going nowhere fast in the basement.

She started the ride on Zwift a little before I did, so she had three miles in and I had to chase her for a long time to catch up. But there are our avatars, riding alongside one another, having a grand old time in the cool down phase of her workout.

I didn’t ride yesterday — making three days I’ve skipped in February — and I got in 22 miles this afternoon. Time for that end-of-the-month push to make sure I hit the outlandish and arbitrary goals I have set for myself!

OK, we’re nearing the very end of the photos from last month’s dive trip. But I still have a lot of videos. I figure we might do these a couple of times a week, just to see how much longer I can stretch out such a wonderful trip.

And I’m being sneak with it here, too. Because I am recycling the eagle ray shot I had from my last video. But, hey, my video, my site, my rules. And the eagle rays, which are presently wrapping up their migratory season through that part of the world, are a special treat.

But wait until you see what appears right after that beautiful eagle ray, in this very video …

And now I must go to campus, where we will talk about the power of social media and large group social dynamics.

Yeah, the video is better. Watch the video!

Monday / photo — Comments Off
19
Feb 24

We had snow this weekend

The forecast called for waking up to three to five inches of snow on Saturday. It was promised to be the good, dry, powdery stuff. We looked up the amount of snow required of a snow blower — because we have a snow blower now — and the consensus was two inches. That doesn’t seem like a lot to me. Drive over it. But maybe you don’t want to. So we could shovel two inches. Only our new driveway is a bit long for shoveling.

The old driveway was a little more than a car length, which you could do with two shovels in no time, and by yourself in about twice the amount of no time. But this driveway is more imposing. We’ve shoveled it once so far, and the evening we did that it was cold. You think you’ll get out there and keep moving and get your heart rate up and your body will warm up, but that did not happen. Also, that was a good six or seven inches of snow and it had been on the ground a day or two when we got back to it. It took a while. We did enough. And that was enough of a reason to invest in a snow blower.

Which of course meant that it sat in its box in the garage for weeks because we’ve had perhaps the mildest January and February possible at this latitude. Now comes the Friday night forecast, and thank goodness there’s nowhere we have to go tomorrow, but still.

So we open the great big Toro box. There’s a snow blower inside. Imagine, for my Southern brethren, a push mower, but, instead of that place on the side where the clippings come out, there’s an ejection portal on the top. You can spin the thing so it can blow strategically to the left or right or, if you are an agent of chaos, straight up into the air. It’s shiny and new. Corvette candy apple red.

I was going to go get a quart of oil, because while we had gas, we had no oil. Except a 12-ounce bottle was included in the box. Good! One less thing to do in the half hour before the hardware store closes. So, let’s assemble the thing. This is what I did before dinner Friday night. Assembly involves five sets of nuts, bolts and washers, and then you put in the oil and gas.

There was a little matter of the nuts, bolts and washers, however. They were not included in the giant Toro box. So I spent a long, long time peering through boxes and tool boxes, tool drawers and other random places I might have put nuts, bolts and washers I’ve accumulated over the years. And what I learned is this: you don’t get as many extra nuts as you do bolts and screws.

Not only do you have to find them, you have to, of course, find pieces that will fit with one another, and the blower itself. Exactly what you should be doing at 8 p.m. on a Friday night before this week’s storm of the century. Two screws, bolts and washers were needed for the handle. I made that work. Three were needed to attach the multidirectional snow chute. Two on either side, done, but less confidently, and a third, which some does … something. You’ll probably only notice it when you’re rotating the chute or when the whole machine has rattled into action. Thing of it is, this Toro has a hard-mounted, threaded bolt post. I only needed to find a nut for it. Except I didn’t have the hardware.

Now, I figured I could tear the house apart and find the right size. But that nut, wherever it is, is doing something important already. So I strapped three bungee cords to the thing and pronounced it road worthy. The most ratchety, brand new, road worthy snowblower in three counties, I’m sure.

I decided to wait until the morning to fill it with oil and gas. I’ve done all this in good spirits, and why would I want to ruin my Friday night with issues of dripping, pouring, volume or viscosity? Besides, let’s wait to see what we actually get overnight.

We got about two inches of snow. The beautiful, wonderful, dry, powdery version. The kind that looked beautiful on the lawn, and could not stick to the patio, driveway or roads. And now we can find replacement parts for the new snow blower in our own good time. (Ensuring we don’t have to use it for a nice long while.)

Until then, welcome to our temporarily monochrome world.

Also, I noticed Friday night when I did a preemptive inspection of the fig tree, that the first signs of spring are growing in one of backyard beds. They’re a hardy sort, at least.

As I said, the dry, powdery sort of snow.

And, as an extra bonus, it looks like it only came from the one direction.

The peach tree was doing just fine.

And the pear tree in the front yard had a good grasp of things, as well. This was a delicate snow, but it knew a thing or two about balance.

Or, if you want something more colorful, the flowers inside are still stinking the place up. These look like they should be dry, brittle and crusty.

Instead they’re soft and frail, like the sleeves of an old silk blouse.

The lilies, though, they’ve really come to life this weekend.

Back outside, our neighbor puts on the best sunsets.

Can I tell you how awesome that snow was? It was quite, pretty, dry and clean. By the time I went outside to take that sunset photo and walk around the back of the yard to put a few random sticks on the stick pile, the snow was all but gone.

By today, the only evidence of any weekend precipitation was in the perpetually shady spots.

The cats did just find with the winter weather. Here is Poseidon, in his warm kitty cave, in front of the space heater.

I don’t know why he always thinks he wants to go outside. He is too accustomed to all of the comforts of indoors.

Phoebe went another route to keep herself warm.

Both were effective. And now let’s bring on the inevitable sprint to spring.

Cozumel / Monday / photo / SCUBA / video — Comments Off
12
Feb 24

You’re going to want to watch this video

Poseidon asked for a meeting this weekend. And, being staff to the cats, I was obliged to accept. The thrust of the meeting was this: He wants to sometimes go first in the site’s most popular weekly feature. Usually I operate on a “ladies first” policy, but he stamped around on me and made his point. So, this week, Poseidon will have the honor of the first check in.

You see, Poseidon is quite proud of his head-on-foot prowess.

And his hiding skills.

In that box is some poly sheeting which I need to put on the greenhouse. I ordered these sometime back, but I am waiting for the weather to warm up again — so maybe next week. Also, I might need still more parts for the job. Phoebe had the same reaction to that realization as I did.

But she’s ready to supervise from her supervising post.

My lovely bride picked up some flowers this weekend to brighten the house. They’re doing a lovely job.

Now they just have to survive the cats.

Let’s go back underwater. And we’ll do it with a video. This one is full of great fish. And there’s a wonderful up-close visit with a beautiful eagle ray. Don’t miss it.

And there are still a lot more photos and videos to come. Keep showing up, because I’ll keep posting them.

But, for now, I have to head to campus. Monday has once again gotten away from me.