There is a chipmunk. Being a chipmunk he tends to move very quickly. The cat has, to my knowledge, never seen him. She is not the most attentive indoor hunter of things outdoors. She’s not the most attentive hunter of things indoors, but I digress.
Anyway, the chipmunk took the time to sun himself today. I was able to get a shot from a fair way off. I have now documented the chipmunk:
Aubie came to visit us at the game tonight. Aubie has a flashing problem:
No one in the family has bothered to confront him yet. I think everyone is waiting for the right time.
He also sat with us for awhile, until the children came calling. Aubie is a ladies man, but he’s all about the kids, too. And so, after a time, he was off to hug little girls and tousle the hair of the young guys.
All of this during a baseball game that Auburn lost to Jacksonville State 6-1.
Grading papers. One student wrote “This class has shaped how I view journalism and will be foundational in my future studies in this major.”
That made my day.
And then I graded on. And on and on.
Still not done.
Two new things on Tumblr, here and here. A lot, lot more on Twitter.
Also I converted that not-quite-good Toomer’s Corner thing I wrote last month into the Big Stories format. You might have read it here or on TWER, but it is a different way of seeing it. Sometimes that makes all the difference. I’m going to use that format for things every now and then. I expect there will be a few additions this summer.
Which is on the way, by the way. Summer, I mean. We hit 79 today. We’ll be in the 80s tomorrow.
Talking with my grandmother Sunday I told her that I knew she’d been frustrated by the spring, with the cold temperatures. She said it was the coldest spring she could remember. And she said she wouldn’t complain about the summer at all. When it gets here.
We held the last critique meeting of the school year for the newspaper. The newsroom closes down for the summer. Some people graduate, others take a deep breath. I thanked them for their hard work. I bragged on them, despite the huge error in the headline of the lead story.
Class was held. Things were discussed. Everyone’s mind is outside because the beautiful spring weather has shown up and it all feels very real and, finally, incontrovertibly here.
The newsroom folks gave me two doughnuts. That’s how you end a Wednesday:
Made it home in time to see the last half of the baseball game. Auburn hosted Samford. Everyone wanted to know who I would cheer for. Samford pays me so …
Auburn won 9-3, in yet another comeback. Both teams are in their respective conference post-season hunts. The two teams have almost identical conference records. Samford hits for power, Auburn has lately been looking for any hits that drive in runs. They’ve spent their conference schedule getting beaten up by the baseball teams in the country. Auburn has won both of the two mid-week games this season.
The last time Samford beat Auburn was March of last year, at Samford, and it was dramatic:
Here’s a mystery: After tonight’s game The Yankee, Adam and I caught dinner at Mellow Mushroom. I don’t think I’ve ever noticed this on the ground next to the door. I’ve boosted the contrast so we can see it a bit more clearly:
It says “Heard & Swope 1905.” A quick search of the genealogy sites tells me there was a Sylvester McDaniel Swope (1852-1923). He was a preacher in Talladega, which is about 90 minutes away today. It was a little different in his day. But Sylvester had a son in 1877, Arthur, who married Addie Lee Heard. Arthur is buried here in Auburn, so maybe these are the right people. (There were 31,000 people in the county and about 1,600 in the town at the time. How many different Heards and Swopes could there have been?)
The first gas pump was four years away and the year before there a total of 37 party line phones in town. Those tidbits, and this picture, come from Logue and Simms’ (1981) incomparable pictorial history.
That map is from 1903, when College Street was still Main. See that empty spot at lot 34? I think that’s where this Heard & Swope marker would go in in 1905. You can count the front doors today and it makes sense, for the most part. But I’m not sure what Heard and Swope were building. Yet.
Every year, at the end of the year, I buy dinner for the people who work on The Samford Crimson. There is a giant platter of Roly Poly.
That night was tonight. We commemorated it with a Twitter photograph:
Not everyone is there, of course, but there is a fair amount of talent sitting at that table, and a good bit of potential beyond that, too.
Later in the evening, we’d worked our way down to the “I-can’t-believe-it-is-over” end. The outgoing editor and the incoming editor, putting this last paper to bed:
Katie Willis, who aspires to run her own photography business, handed the reigns to Zach Brown, who draws philosophical stick figures for fun. We asked Katie to consider running the paper last year on the basis of her success at everything and a year’s experience as the editor of the literary arts magazine on campus. She is an incredible talent and she proved it again this year.
She’s worked for me in some way or another all four of her years on campus. I’d like to find a way to prevent her from graduating, just so she has to stick around for one more.
Zach, meanwhile, is someone I met in perhaps his second semester in school. I gave him advice on his website and watched him handle everything in the class with ease. He’s a thinker, sharp guy. He’s been the opinions editor for the last three semesters and one of those people who, you can tell, is probably going to do big things. I expect him to start doing those big things next fall with the paper.
We get some fantastic students in our program. At the picnic last week the faculty sat and observed many of the seniors, who’d naturally circulated to the same tables. We were impressed by the collection of their talent. The hardest working of them all come through the Crimson and spend time working over InDesign and getting their hands dirty with newsprint. And even when the seniors move on, there is always another group of promising students who eagerly jump in as freshmen and sophomores. Would that they all did, but I’m proud and grateful for all those that do.
And so at the end of the night, right around midnight, they sent the final copy to the publisher. The last speeches, the last jokes. Everything was commemorated with Vine, which is how things must be done these days. Programs were closed. Lights were turned off. Doors were shut.
New ones are opening.
And then my phone rang: “My car won’t start. Can you help me?”
Sure. Of course.
College.
If there’s anything better I haven’t found it, and only because I’m not looking.
This evening was the annual JMC Awards Picnic. We do this inside because sometimes it rains in April. But it is a picnic! A catered by a local barbecue joint, linens on the table, animal crackers in little bowls on the linens on the table, extra pie for everyone picnic.
The faculty give out awards for outstanding student media work, top grades, the various academic and leadership organizations, announce summer fellowships and so on and on. The students give out awards to the faculty as a big joke to wrap up the night. Everyone has a lovely time.
Here’s Dr. Jones and two award-winning students now:
There always seem to be just the faintest hint of dust and allergens in that room. You watch these people grow and develop and in four sudden years they are sitting at the front tables and cleaning up on all of these awards and getting ready for The Next Step and it stirs you. There are a lot of hugs and a great deal of laughter. And the students get a bit philosophical about the whole thing too:
I am so blessed to have spent four years in the @samfordjmc dept. I can’t imagine a more encouraging community of students and professors.
Tonight, though, there was a real sadness about us, too. Around noon came the official word that a student was found dead in his room this morning. He was only a sophomore, but it is clear he’d made a huge impact on the community. We’ve been collecting these reactions all night:
To be in such a loving place is a wonderful thing. It all says so much, and so little, of our time in this place.
I’ve just this now learned an interesting thing about WordPress. When you are in the Dashboard, after you’ve clicked Posts you get that list of entries you’ve been writing about. Some people, and I’ve seen you, have many different posts in progress at one time saved as drafts. I don’t usually write drafts, unless I’m interrupted, but it happens every so often. And it happened last night when the computer popped and the screen turned gray.
Well, OK then. I stared at it for a respectful amount of time, checked the plug, the battery, did the random search on the keyboard for the Any Key and then rebooted the thing. It all came right back. Somehow rebooting the machine, restarting the browser and restoring the tabs meant that I’d created two versions of the Sunday post. I published one, didn’t realize I had the other and it stayed on as a draft.
Write me! Write me!
I didn’t notice that until just now. I have two posts titled Catching Up. Well, click, examine, verify. Problem understood. Now it is time to run the resolution protocols, initiate. So I did all that, realized the draft could be deleted …
No! No! Not me!
And clicked Trash — if ever there was a more prescient judgment of the thing you’ve been working on, there it was. When I clicked Trash that joker disappeared.
There was no “Are you sure?”
“Really sure?”
“Cause we think it’s Trash. Mullenweg says so right there. But if you want to keep this around, you might think about Cancel.”
“No?”
“OK then.”
“Last chance.”
“Seriously.”
“Can’t you hear your words dying?”
“Fine. Let it be on your head.”
“We can’t drag this out any longer. This platform powers 16 percent of the web you know.”
None of that. Just gone.
I’ve just written 300 words on the a delete function. (It took about two minutes. It will not be trashed.)
So a lovely Monday. The sun was out, just a hint of warmth in the air. We hit 76 today, which is just two degrees off the average. I believe I’ve said it three times already this year, but spring is finally here. And if we’re proven wrong again we’re all going to write Al Gore a note.
After purchasing locally grown, artisanally-made carbon offsets printed on fair trade, Brazilian rainforest hand-woven stock. When those come in, and we’re shivering in May, we’d write the former vice president and congratulate him on his success at beating back global warming. The suggestion would be that maybe he turn down the air conditioners in his mansion, close the doors and windows and let us get on with the season.
But it has been lovely today, even for Mondays, which are never really all that bad. I had a burger for lunch, because it is Monday and I do that every other one or so. I watched this clip that landed in my Twitter feed:
It truly is all of the things Ray Hudson said, and so was Hudson’s call. If you don’t know the sport I can’t explain to you how impossible it is to do what Lionel Messi just did. What Hudson suggests is that Messi is a mutant, and that might not be far from the case. He’s short, but fast. His pace over the ball belies his size. He has amazing control of everything, himself, the ball, sometimes defenders and maybe the tides. He has the benefit of playing on a terrific team with other potent weapons and in a system that benefits him perfectly. All of these things are true. It is also true that, for the last three years or so, he’s been not far from becoming the greatest player of all time. And he’s only just entering his prime.
Not nearly as good as all that, but 60 Minutes recently produced a package on him:
Anyway, yes, a beautiful Monday. Everyone is smiling on campus. What’s not to smile about? The sun, the sky, progress!
Someone asked me last week about teaching at Samford. What are the students like? I get this question from time to time. It is a good question, because I get to talk about what they are, and what they are not. I’ve had students who take spring break trips to Jamaica, but not the tourist part, the part where they go do mission work. I have students who’ll spend a summer involved in third-world countries, doing their part against this or donating to that. They are, by and large, extremely motivated, caring people.
“I’m a Homewood PD Officer. I was in the drive thru at McDonalds last night about midnight – I work night shift -to grab a quick dinner. There was a car load of Samford students in front of me. When I got to the window to pay I was informed that the students had paid for my meal. It was a small gesture but it was a bright spot in my shift. Please share this on the page – with any luck they will see it and know it was greatly appreciated.”
In class today we discussed movies and the trade publications of journalism. A student stayed late to work on her foreign language homework. Two others were designing an advertisement sample.
I saw a former student who is shooting a video package and we talked about his summer plans covering political activism in Washington D.C. He’s interning at a church right now, too. Multiple internships are important these days.
Most are drawn to hard work, which suggests they can be successful. They all seem to come from places that make them care about the things around them, which gives me great hope that they might all be content.
If, that is, I warn them about this delete function in WordPress before it is too late.
I’ve forgotten this, but we’ll make up for it now. Normally I add these links at the end of the week, just to be synergistic, but have neglected to do so the last several weeks. So here are things I’ve posted on my campus blog:
Also there are two new images on my Tumblr blog, which has once again returned to action. The first one is here, and has a long quote, which all the Tumblr kids go crazy about. The second one is a drawing involving babies and hearts. What’s not to love?
And, of course, there is always much more on Twitter as well. Tomorrow, more Tuesday than anyone knows what to do with, also the spring picnic!
