Rowan « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Rowan

What I didn’t do, and what I did

See what had happened was, I was going to ride my bike. Then I didn’t, because I slept a little bit extra. And then I was going to ride my bike, but I didn’t, because there was reading, and then lunch. And then I was going to ride my bike, but I had a nice conversation. And then I was going to ride my bike, but the rain came down in great amounts once again.

So I did not ride my bike. Instead, I spent a few extra minutes getting ready for work.

Then I went to get gas, because that’s a requirement, just like driving right past that big glowing red sign that is our laziest indicator of economic health and foreign adventuring. That number is, as you probably know, too big and going the wrong direction. But, I said, as I saw my next eight meals go into the gas tank, I don’t have to buy gas that often.

Then I went to Lowes. We have a local hardware store. It’s small. The people are helpful. If you need precisely what they have, it’s convenient. We have an even smaller one. The people there are a little standoffish. Odds are they don’t have what you’re after. So, sometimes, you wind up going to a bigger store. My problem here is that the big stores aren’t especially close. They’re near work, but its a few miles off of that, and have you seen gas prices?

I bought a shower curtain rod, because I want to use more of the space in my closet. It’s a small walk-in, which is to say that on one wall there’s a row of clothes hanging. There are two shelves above it. There is also stuff below it. In the back of the closet, which is about three feet long, is where the clothes basket sits. But the ceiling is high, and so in this little space where I can walk in to pick up a shirt, look for a hat or some bit of cycling kit, or drop clothes in the hamper, there’s a lot of wasted space above me. There are also, meanwhile, a bunch of free hangers sitting on one of those two shelves above my clothes. Hangers, of course, just become a tangle and I’m sick of that. I’ve streamlined everything in my closet because nothing matters. I put on whatever is on the right side of the rod. Dress shirts, polos, t-shirts, each sectioned off, each waiting their turn. When the clothes get cleaned and put away, they go on the left side of their section, wait their turn, and move forward. I have done all of this to minimize my time standing in that small space. Now, the time I spend there is in dealing with those empty hangars. My genius solution was to get a high-tension rod, and put everything at about eight-feet. So I had to go to a store.

Then I had to go to campus. This evening we had the first meeting of the organizational communication in sports media class. It’s org comm in a sports context. On its own, org comm is important, but not always interesting as classroom material. This way, because of the sports angle, I can bring in whatever the controversy of the moment is and we can talk about things like imaging, branding, crisis management, internal and external comms, and so on. I like the class. I would. This is the second time I’ve taught it. Last year it was a twice-a-week experience. This time it is once a week.

My goal is to figure out which model is going to be the way we do it in the future, and then begin to change things up so that, hopefully, students will as find it as rewarding as I do. I want to do that because it is a valuable class, even if they’ve not yet realized that themselves. And, if they haven’t, they explain it to me before we’re done. We’re all here to learn, I say a lot.

Happily, the class was quite engaged on this first day. It’s pretty easy when there’s something to talk about, and there’s always something to talk about in sports. Next week I’ll put them into groups.

Anyway, I took no photographs today, but remembered that as I was waiting for the elevator after class. Here’s the building across the street from the building where my office is, and, of course more weather blowing in.

The drought monitor report comes out tomorrow. Surely we’re out of this dry spell by now.

I was eager to put up the shower curtain rod in the closet. (It’s amazing what you can look forward to.) I got greedy and wanted to hang some shirts on it, too, but the thing will only hold so much weight. It took me four failures to realize that. Eventually, I settled on just the hangers. It isn’t pretty. It’s a closet solution in a closet that no one but me is ever going to see. It doesn’t have to be pretty; it only needs to be effective. I’ll let you know. You’ve come along this far, you deserve that at least.

Tomorrow, we return to 1926.

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26
Aug 26

Another day closer to being ready for the semester

Another one of my classes was locked down today. I’m sure I’ve said that recently. Probably about that class, but it is official official now. The syllabus has been uploaded. I’m not touching anything else with it, build-wise. Of course I have to work on lectures, but there’s time for that. For now, it is organized and mostly coherent.

The last thing to do was to fix the syllabus. Change the dates. Change the time and date details. Add some standard university boilerplate. Wonder why this was a nine-page document. My afternoon goal was to cut that down. Eventually, I made it five pages. Here’s how you do that.

You press the delete button a lot.

When you add things you have to delete things. Paragraphs and sentences can be made redundant. Then you can move sections around to take advantage of page breaks. Then you can reduce sentences to their Hemingwayesque destiny. Finally, you can just delete a whole two-page section with information that exists elsewhere, anyway. Voilà! Five pages!

If you’re not leaving the bulk of your work on the cutting room floor, you’re not doing your best work.

I also locked up my online presentations class with a new thumbnail image: owls staring at a computer. Tomorrow, I’ll go through my org comm class once more to make sure that it’s ready. Monday, I’ll put the finishing touches on the first week’s slide decks. Tuesday, I’ll hit the ground stumbling.

If you wanted to see the new sunglasses shelf in its natural location, and I’m sure no one did, here it is. One piece of scrap plywood for the back, two bits of leftover pine for the sides, one of the rip cut to match the other. Two other pieces of extra wood crosscut into shelves. Glue on the sides, brad nails on the shelves. Wood screws for the cleat, which was was also leftover. Six shelves, lots of sunglasses.

It does what I wanted it to do.

I hate it already.

I do not know why my lovely bride has two helmets in the garage. She can only wear one at a time. (She has at least three active helmets right now.)

The sunset looked promising from the backyard.

Over at the north corner there was a nice mixture of colors amidst the tangle of plants. The roses and the hydrangea are having a fine time of it. I think we might have developed a second hydrangea in there, somehow. Just there on the right the famous honeysuckle is sneaking into the shot.

Looking to the west, the sunset got serious quickly.

That’s a good argument to knock off work at key times. You can only catch that by chance unless you make the actual effort. Make the actual effort. You don’t want to miss views like that.

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25
Aug 26

Back to it

Today was a day of waking up at a reasonable time. I had forgotten there was a 7:30 a.m. I am not the morning person. I’m fine when I wake up, but just let me sleep in. It’s my natural condition. So imagine, if you will, the 10 or so years I did morning news. I had one job where I was in the studio at 4:30 a.m. That might the next job’s 6 a.m. arrival seem positively easy. The upside was that you had an afternoon to get errands done. The downside was you can’t, in your 20s, convince people you need to be in bed by 8 p.m.

Reader, I never was.

I was not last night, either. I only had to wake up at 7:30. This was rude enough.

Fortunately, my classes are all in the afternoon and evening.

Anyway, we had a meeting at 9:30 a.m., our first faculty meeting of the semester. This involved sitting in a classroom, reading an agenda, talking about the various items. Trying to stay on track and on schedule, and so on. (This group has a terrific sense of staying on time, and that’s a nice thing to be a part of.) It ran for six hours, this meeting. Six hours is not easing back into things. I suppose all of the work I’ve done these last four weeks have been the easing back into things. And, also, the sudden increase of email that has coincided with the work. Perhaps that has been the easing back in. (Just four more days of easing back in until the full stride begins. But I don’t want to wow you with all of that just now.)

The good news is that we’ll be on the clock for the work next week. Once we get started, then we can get started. The feeling before classes begin is an odd one. It is a stew of excitement and anxiety and you-still-have-time and you-have-no-time and there-are-days-to enjoy-yourself-so-relax and who-can-relax and, also, I-need-more-days-with-which-to-relax. This paragraph breaks no new ground — as opposed to every other ‘graph on this site. It has always felt like that. I suspect the days before a new semester begin feel like that for a lot of people. I imagine it always will, at least so long as we have semesters and people teaching in them.

And now, notes from real life.

We went out for a morning bike ride yesterday. A simple 20-miler, one of the traditional routes. I decided, wisely, that instead of trying to stay out front for as long as possible, I would ride sensible, hanging onto my lovely bride’s wheel, and then maybe I’ll still be there at the end. Going out front would have probably been a better option. She’s riding so well lately and I am not and that’s how you find yourself going 20-plus miles an hour and squinting into the distance, trying to determine if you can still see someone in the distance.

Nothing on that ride was terribly bad. She’s just super great at the moment.

Some farmers, in some places, talk about a second season. We have that here, and here’s evidence of that. I rode this same route a few weeks back and the corner was taller than me. Now, it is not.

This, if I remember my corn growing rates, is pushing the boundaries of the science, which is pretty cool. Double-cropping is a growing thing, and I need to read more about it. I can’t recall if it is efficient or inefficient. (Most likely that depends on the crop.)

For today’s bike ride I recreated a route I did three years ago, this week. It was a ride-every-road-within-shouting-distance-until-you-get-to-20-miles route. I did it at just below a tempo pace. I finished it two minutes and two seconds faster than I did in 2023. I wish it had been faster.

After my ride I finished this project. It’s the same picture I shared yesterday, because the face of it looks the same. This evening I had to attach the cleat to the back. From there, hang the cleat on the wall.

This took four screws, but they had to be precise because the cleat isn’t quite large enough. The cleat isn’t quite large enough because it is a leftover cleat that I made last summer. I got a corner cabinet and mounted it in a dead space in the garage and there sit the bike shoes and the helmet. All of this was an effort to get the bike stuff all the tool stuff. Only, lately, the sunglasses and have migrated back to the tool stuff. So, I had some extra lumber and wanted to try my new brad nailer and everything worked out well. Until I had to get those screws in. There were about three millimeters for error because, again, I cut twice and measured once on this project. It is garage furniture.

And now it is sitting on a wall cleat and holding sunglasses and it doesn’t even wobble when the garage door goes up and down.

There are no cats in this tunnel. Phoebe ran into the room for attention and settled down in her favorite spot for speculative belly rubs. I gave her a nice pet and then shot this, just because I like the way the light was playing off the tunnel.

That’s a new tunnel that my mother sent the cats. We now have two tunnels, so our jealous sibling cats can get along with one another. I’d randomly move them around the house, but these little guys are such creatures of habit I’m not sure how they’d react to upsetting their routine with such an offensive gesture.

Outside, I looked up just in time. This plane is going to London. By the time you read this, of course, the people are already there. Probably over the jet lag. I wonder what they’re doing today.

Sometimes you should look up even when there’s no rumble or roar of an aircraft overhead. Sometimes you just get lucky. Just about every time, really, if you think about it.

Think about it.

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20
Aug 26

I strained my toe trying to think of a headline

I spent the day staring at my third class, a presentations class. It’s a great idea, this class. Students have to give presentations. It’s like public speaking, but all online, and you have to prepare and present accompanying slides. It’s not my class, in the sense that I didn’t build it. The person in charge of it is making great strides with dialing it in. I also didn’t have this class initially this term, but things change and merrily we will go through the semester, offering feedback and hoping it is helpful.

It’s useful for students who think they know everything there is to know about computers and using them in these most basic ways. (I should keep count of the technical problem complaints I receive. Some of them are hilarious.) Also, it is a terrifying class for people who have a fear of public speaking. This class substitutes for the public speaking course in everyone’s curriculum, which is nice. It is up to each person to make a choice of which they’d rather do.

I think the public speaking class would be easier for a couple of different reasons, but that’s just me.

When I took public speaking, we were pretty new into the idea that everyone should have the course. They were still explaining it thusly to students: The one thing all of the employers say when we survey them is that their new hires need to be better at giving presentations as in a work meeting or board room, and that’s why everyone must take this class. So, when I did it, we met a few times in this very large lecture hall and you spent most of the semester in a smaller room, a lab, with a grad student running the lab and 12 or 15 nervous people besides. There was, I remember, one guy that was unusual in our lab. He’d spent a career in the Army. He was a paratrooper. He’d just retired. His son was in school and he figured it’d be nice to go back to school with his kid, so here was this dad, this man who talked about how one time his chute failed and the only thing that saved his life was that, at the last second, he remembered his training. He talked about how his body was broken, and the depression he left in the earth when he hit the ground. I don’t recall how high up he said he was on this jump, but it sounded both plausible and unbelievable at the same time. But, you could take one look at that guy and know two things simultaneously: he’d been through some stuff, and he could beat you up if he needed to. Nice fella.

I can’t remember anything about the grad student that ran the class, which is unfortunate. I do remember after the first time we met that person I went downstairs to a payphone and called home. I did not wait to get back to my place. I said: send me that file filing system of all of my speeches. I’m going to use them in this class. And I did.

I think I finished with something like a 114 in that class.

So I’m not usual in that sense. Just hammy enough, just desperate enough to be perceived as credible, and I stumnbled and walked and bumbled through four years of public speaking with Douglas Caddell. I hung out with some of the best young speech-makers in the state, dated a state champion, and competed in just about every contest I could get into.

Anyway, that unusual lane in high school left me well prepared for a basic public speaking class, and was probably helpful, eventually, in broadcasting career.

The best thing about public speaking back in the dark ages was that we didn’t have to make presentations. There was no PowerPoint back then. Some rooms didn’t have power. My slides today are nothing great. I built and use a university-branded template, and try not to put too many words on the slides. What you put on your slides isn’t where the game is won, but it can be where the game is lost.

I can’t give all of the good advice away for free here. If you want to know more, enroll in my class.

This is what should be on all of my slides, I’m told. The cats say if they have a weekly check-in here they should be in every slide deck I make, too. Phoebe would make great points about any topic from her hammock.

She lately went through a kitteh noir period.

You can almost hear her thinking in hard-boiled cat detective narration.

“You tell some tall tales, kid. But my tail is taller. A cat’s greatest weapon, though, is a keen eye, and her greatest ally is the dark. That’s how I came to find your man, lingering in the shadows. He’s been singing to me for weeks. If he was any more of a rat he’d sprout whiskers and a tail, but his info’s always good and it brought me here, to you. And I know you’ve been thinking that while the cat’s away, the mice will play, but the cat’s back. Playtime’s over. Hands up. I can say it with a smile, sure, the smile is free of charge. You need a smile in my line of work. The smile says ‘hello’ while your trigger finger waves goodbye … ”

Poseidon is more of a chaos comedy fan. He’s been working on his Will Ferrell impression.

“Hey mom! The meatloaf! We want it now. The meatloaf! Ma, the meatloaf!”

A few days ago he changed up our mid-day routine. I have a little bite to eat and he waits patiently. Then, I grab a protein bar and a glass and sit in a corner in the living room. He waits patiently for this. As soon as I sit down he’s in motion, and then on my lap, or curled up beside me, or climbing up my chest for a snooze. But on this particular afternoon, he insisted I would not spend those few minutes reading.

And so I did not.

Storms blew through this evening. The forecast was for rush hour. They arrived at about 7 p.m. Weather forecasting, it ain’t what it used to be. That was a choice. Apparently there was a tornado to our west and a waterspout or tornado to our southeast. Here, it just rained. We had some lightening, but the wind never really picked up. It was an oddly timed thing, as the clouds on the back end of the system lingered, the sun started it’s regular dive to the horizon. This is the view from my office just now, looking off to the north-northwest.

And now I’ll get back to work. Because there is always work.

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19
Aug 26

Pudding would have been a just reward

Much work was done. Much progress was made. My second class of the semester is now squared away. I hope I did everything right. The proof is in the pudding, and instead of a tasty after-dinner treat I mean in how the class reacts to it over the course of the semester. It’s a good class. I’ve taught it several times, online, but this will be the first time I am offering it in person. I will have the class again next spring. It will be online once again. So the last four or five days of intense scrutiny will suffice through December. If I’ve done everything right.

But now I want pudding.

I need to revisit the first class to make sure it is also set. I have an extra day for that because of the way the schedule falls. I’ll do it next week. Tomorrow I’ll start diving into my third class, which was a last minute surprise. It will all be fine when it’s all underway.

Anyway, the whole of the day was spent on that class, until about 6 p.m., when I decided I’d had enough of that. Feeling powerful in my sense of agency, liberated in my ability to tear myself away from the work computer I closed it with a satisfying click and watched the monitor dim and fade. This, I thought, is not worth the spectacle you put on it later. Don’t write too much about it.

Sometimes we give ourselves good advice.

Outside, I stopped to admire the awesome power of this one plant and its perfect spot in the yard with respect to nutrients, sun, and shade. And also this thorny vine, with which I am engaged in a duel to its death.

It has one trick, and I have one trick. It wants to see my blood and I want to see its roots. Both things may happen, but I can also wear gloves.

After dinner this evening, a tasty little shrimp and edamame dish my lovely bride whipped up, I decided to finish off the fortune cookies from last week. These fortunes still apply.

I’m not running for office, but it is otherwise not clear what I will win in November. My determination could make me victorious in a battle of wills. I could win a fight. I could determinedly emerge victorious over a mortal enemy. (I don’t have one of those, because I am a polite person in a society, but there’s still time to develop one, I suppose.) I could win the lottery, the respect of my colleagues, I could emerge victorious over a particularly sticky jar lid. Maybe a verbal debate. Maybe it’s about those little plastic wrappers that are difficult to open. Maybe a long lost person will finally give in and reply to a message because of my determination. Who really knows? The fortune cookies know, but they’re not saying. My neighbors might know, but I am told to respect their privacy, which I am quite mindful of anyway. So that was more of a reinforcement cookie, but whatever; it did its job.

Here’s the latest update in household minutiae. I have emptied and cleaned this little guy. What might I put in this delightful 12-ounce plastic bear. What is good enough to bother with, but sufficient at that volume?

So far the best answer is a homemade dry rub. But I don’t have a homemade dry rub. This could be, though, the reason to start. For beverages, I’d just use the original container, or a mug or some such. Maybe I could do something with that bottle and put it in a jersey pocket for bike rides. How fast would I go if I slammed 12-ounces of 5-hour Energy or the like? The internet tells me there are people that use these for crafts, and that’s great, but that will not be this plastic bear’s fate. No one hear needs plastic crafts. These are the dilemma of reuse.