Sounds you don’t want to hear at your surgeon’s office: an electric drill.
Not just a drill powering a bit pushing a screw through wood, but that screeching screw in a knot and the drill doesn’t have enough mustard to force it through sound of shrillness.
That was late today. One of the ortho’s assistants was impressed to note I was not in a brace, but it has been a while. She didn’t know the case. She did tell me to be careful climbing onto the examination bed, so maybe she did know the case.
Anyway, took another X-ray. The doctor asked me to raise my hand over my head, I can. He asked me to put my hand behind my head. I can. He said he was pleased with my progress and that I was making an excellent recovery.
I told him I’ve felt pretty good the last few days, at least when I don’t overdo it. I’m having muscle spasms, but we think that might be the driving.
He told me the pain will go away by Christmas.
In happier news, I work on a beautiful campus:
That’s A. Hamilton Reid Chapel, which I’ve posted here a few times before. It was built in the image of the first Baptist church built in the Americas which was, apparently, in Rhode Island. You can see the resemblance.
The coolest science video you’ll see today, where a Stanford scientist explains how his team’s research is besting steroid-enhanced performance.
“What we can do” he says in the video, “by extracting heat from one hand, is we can dramatically improve performance.”
So we’re all re-purposing our ice chests this weekend, right?
Any day that starts with fruit and grading can’t be bad, right? I think so. Also, apple slices are delicious.
I’m a phase eater. Sometimes I eat a lot. And then, for a brief while, I’ll eat very little. There’s nothing consistent about it, except when I’m in the habit of eating the same things over and over. Lately I’ve been on a fruit kick, which is not particularly interesting to anyone but me, and only then given how many bad-for-me things I typically ingest.
There is a boy in my family who apparently reminds me of me — how he talks and walks and laughs — and I think, “Poor kid.” And then I text his mother and say “If he is like me tell him to study harder and eat fewer candy bars.”
“Enjoy more grapes.”
So I had a small fruit tray for breakfast and graded quizzes this morning. I had lunch with one of our recent grads. We had barbecue, my first ever trip to Saw’s. It is a small little place in a roadside strip mall. There are maybe eight tables inside, we had the corner window. The lady at the register is managing chaos, but thanks everyone who writes out a tip. It doesn’t feel particularly clean, but you can’t make respectable barbecue in a place that aces the health code rules.
A young man brings out your lunch on paper plates. They leave you alone otherwise, despite the lunch crowd and the few tables. There are framed newspaper articles and magazine covers on every inch of the walls. There are license plates above the doors. It is all a thin and perfectly random homage to a sub-genre of food.
Longtime readers know barbecue would be the center of all of my food streaks if it were actually healthy. All things in moderation though, even slow cooked, pulled pork.
Back on campus I had a brief meeting with the editor to discuss distribution patterns and then a visit with my chair, who’s the nicest guy around, and some students about various student things. I wrote plenty of emails.
The guy that can fix my office phone called my cell. He stopped by near the end of the day. This is what he did: glanced at my phone, followed the path of the two cords coming out of it with his eyes, picked one up and plugged it into the wall.
The phone paused, lit up and turned on.
Naturally, I feel like a dope. Turns out he’d had to do some electrical work in a panel in a Jeffries tube somewhere in the building. He did that after I called to complain that my phone wouldn’t work. I didn’t know that, and hadn’t thought to test the highly technical technique of plugging the phone back in to see if it was working this week where it did not last week.
So I spent a few minutes playing with the settings. Turns out you can run your computer off this phone. You can both phone home and phone the Internet from this Cisco IP device. It does not have the ringtone from 24, however. I’m sure there’s a way to do — yes there is.
The engineer that fixed the phone left his notebook in my office. It looked important, so I called his office and someone was still there. He answered his phone, on this same server networked phone. Sounded like he was standing in my doorway.
Pin drop nothing, I could hear the creases in his slacks settling.
So I walked the book over, because this is one thing the phone won’t do. The phone guy will thank me in the morning.
He’ll send an email, no doubt.
Hot day today, even into the evening. I believe she had the right idea:
She does it, her owner said, more than he would like. But the fountains at Samford are just so tempting.
Burr and Forman, by the way, are not buried beneath that fountain. That is a large regional law firm. Some 55 of their lawyers graduated from Samford with their undergrad or with their JD from Cumberland.
Class, I taught it. Twenty more topics on Associated Press Style and things we think your English brainwashed you into thinking.
They take it very well. Every time I teach this class I expect someone to stand up and hurl a book across the room. “I am PRO Oxford comma!”
But it never happens. They are good little note takers. I point out the different styles is all, and I’ll leave it to you to decide what you really feel about the great comma debate. And then I tell the story of an English major friend of mine who I managed to get so worked up he was willing to fight. Over a comma. (But not sentence fragments, as it turned out.)
One of my students seized on the question about three slides before I was ready today. “What about that comma?” I was so proud.
I gave a quiz, which everyone took with that second week of class spirit. Let’s see how they feel about that in November!
Met with the online editor. Met with the editor-in-chief. Did a little extra work on class stuff and on a paper. I finished all of the early-semester administrative stuff that I can think of.
I called again about getting my new phone. Did I mention this? We received new phones over a period of the summer when I wasn’t here. So they installed it in a copy room that belongs to another department. Someone passed this information along. I retrieved my phone. The old 1973 model in my office no longer worked. It was as if a storm had cut the line, or perhaps a bad person.
So I plugged the new one in sometime last week. Nothing. A different bad person had come along and severed this connection to the outside world. Dramatic music plays.
Finally got in touch with someone that had an answer. Turns out you can’t just plug these in and go. This phone, dig this, needs the Internet. And it seems the outlet in my office wall was installed in some bygone pre-Internet era. A guy will come by.
I never saw this person — but to be fair, I move around on campus a lot. So I called today, to hear that someone had been assigned the chore of plugging in my phone and souping up the phone jack. The person I talked to today said that guy had left me a message.
On my phone.
Which does not work.
Other technology news: I discovered a missing keyboard. But that’s getting ahead of the story. I discovered our newsroom had a missing keyboard. Naturally I asked around. Someone had stuffed it into a desk drawer. Let’s not even ask why.
Meanwhile, I managed to discover that a second keyboard was possessed. Remember the scene in Ghost — of course you do — where Sam types his name on the bad person’s keyboard and Jerry Zucker wants to evoke Shakespeare and Poe, but not have you realize how those guys did it so much better? Just the word Sam, over and over in that green monochrome?
I have an Apple keyboard doing that. Only my ghost thinks his name is either 9999999 or ———. Perhaps there are two of them.
The other keyboard, the one that was in a desk drawer, is just dead. Maybe that is why it was stored away. I plug both of these keyboards into other machines and I get the same response. 9999999 or nothing at all. So, tomorrow, I get to visit with the nice Tech Services people again.
In a shocking bit of news I visited Walmart. And it was not an unpleasant experience at all. I do not know what to make of this. They have a little fruit package, red apples, green apples, grapes and cheddar cheese, that I enjoy. Pre-cut, cheaper than anything else and a nice snack.
How should I interpret this? Walmart as a quick and painless shopping destination?
A cashier was wearing feathers as earrings, like the synthetics of the 1980s, so someone was making a statement. But you don’t disqualify for that. These are the reasons you go the big box stores, right?
Finally, videos: Cee lo Green played with Prince. One of them still brags about that to everyone they know:
And this is a strong contender for the title of Why I Love the Internet This Week. I believe it might be the video the Internet created itself for:
Auburn opens with Clemson tonight in Atlanta. This will be the third year in a row the two teams have played — and it’ll be nice to see them play someone else after this.
Meantime, Auburn needs to exact a bit of revenge for their treatment on the road last season. In honor of this, the 39th meeting between the occasional rivals, here is a picture from the 13th game in the series. It was October, 1916. Auburn won 28-0. War Eagle was an expression no one used yet, but we’ll say it over the picture anyway.
This picture is from the 1917 Glomerata, which I own, but is a cover I’ve not yet uploaded. You can see quite a few more here, though.
UPDATE: Auburn lost 26-19 in something of a strange contest. Both teams seemed to avoid the end zone for a while. If just a few plays changed Auburn wins. If a few other plays had worked out differently Clemson would have won in a walk. Up next for Auburn: Mississippi State.
Samford, meanwhile, thrilled a sellout crowd at Seibert Stadium by driving 50 yards in the final moments of a game to set up a field goal in the waning seconds to defeat Furman 24-21. It was the Bulldogs first ever win in a Southern Conference opener. How ’bout them Bulldogs?
Being sore is a pretty lousy experience. I like to think that I have good control of my body. I can change my breathing, I can lower my heart rate. I can change the blood pressure readings on that machine at the grocery store. But I could not get the muscles in m back to unclench tonight.
It started in my left shoulder, my physical therapist tells me that has to do with muscles that wrap from the clavicle and through and around. It spread from my left shoulder into my right shoulder tonight. The Yankee said “You look like you’re about to cry.”
I told her I was trying not to move, because I had a sense that if I moved, at all, it would only get worse. Maybe, I’d thought, I can force these muscles to relax. That was the word selection in my head, and I found the contradiction delightful.
Instead I started coughing which was the opposite of not moving.
And so I’ve had upper back spasms for most of the evening and the night.
I’m ready to feel better, thanks.
More meetings today. I think I have already reached my quotient for the semester. And so I shifted to email. Well, let me just tell you, mister, I’m on the hook for a lot of email. And so I write a lot of them.
I’m due a new phone. The technology services staff passed them out over the summer and they installed mine … in a different office in a different building. I brought it to my office yesterday and discovered that someone will have to come and do something to the phone jacks to make this thing go. Gone are the days of simply plugging in a phone and hearing a dial tone. This one requires the Internet and some special pixie dust in the wall outlet.
Also it delivers voicemail directly to your email. That’s just strange.
I’m sure the innovations held therein are the biggest advancements since we abandoned party lines. This upgrade might be a step too far, too fast, though. I’m pretty sure my old office phone is at least 30 years old. Imagine giving Calbraith Perry Rodgers, the first man to fly across the country in 1911 (49 days! 70 stops!), a Messerschmitt Me 163A, which in 1941 set an unofficial speed record of 624 miles per hour. (That record was broken by Heini Dittmar, a German born just before Rodgers set on on his transcontinental feat.)
My new phone is exactly like that, only I can’t fly it.
Football season is upon us and I’m posting photographs we found last week while sifting through archives in Auburn University’s collection in honor of this most festive time of the year. This young lady is holding two tickets to the 1971 Iron Bowl. Not sure what she is standing behind and why, but this game featured third-ranked Alabama, fifth-ranked Auburn. These tickets were like cash.
Too bad Alabama won 31-7 and gave them a conference championship. I bet she was inconsolable after the game.
