Today I finished a 10-page document — or was it 11? — that I’ve been working on this week. There’s nothing quite like the joy of the final Final-Save clicks. And then you have to send it off. Fair well, my little document friend. I hope you do well, and that is why I saved you as a PDF, so that your formatting will stay consistent across 10 pages. Or was it 11?
And then, of course, you have to upload the thing. At which time you must complete your jump through the rest of our modern day hoops. Computers can be amazing. What we’ve tasked them to do can sometimes seem silly. Near-instantaneous communication and large batch data transfer is still impressive. The amount of Captcha buttons and Verify You Read This boxes you have to click, not so much. The price we pay, one supposes.
Or perhaps it’s like the very small meme. A person from pick-a-century would not be impressed by your cell phone. They would marvel at your spice cabinet.
The accuracy of that meme insured it would stay small. People that take everything in that cabinet for granted might not be the best people to depend on for establishing the zeitgeist.
Anyway, that project is done. And now I will repay myself with more free time. Which I will start to calculate on Tuesday. But first, the weekend. And, then on Monday, some work. But after that, look out, To Do List.
I return to the yard, because the weather was nice and the sunlight demanded it. And, in the backyard, we see another promising signal.
Ponder with me, for a moment, the lateral bud scales here.
Buds are the embryonic branches or, in this case, I think, flowers in a dormant state. They’re just waiting for a few more degrees of mercury. But aren’t we all?
I’ll have to remember to sit under this branch when they start offering some real shade. It might be a nice place to spend part of an afternoon reading.
As I walked back around to the front door I saw this out of the corner of my eye. It was one of those instances where it took a half of a beat for it to register. I backed up, stood still and let my eyes lose focus until my brain caught back up. The flash of color, the difference between the grass and the golden hour, that’s what caught my eye, surely. And it couldn’t be growth on this shrub already, surely. It was not.
Merely the remnants of last fall’s pruning. We all take a bit of that with us, I think.
Finally, I am getting used to seeing things in their naked and trimmed condition. The landscaping was overdue, and so this felt not only radical, but radical for a long time. Now, it is no longer startling, but it took a good long while to adjust.
Which means, I hope, that I’ll be able to see the green march of the seasons coming along just any day now.
He said, knowing that’s not yet the case, but rather trying to will it into being nonetheless.
Back under water, then. Best fish in the sea!
I know, I can’t believe I got a shot of her with bubbles in it, either.
A version of this one is eventually going on the front page of the website. (The SCUBA theme will return there next week!)
And I invite you to enjoy a few lovely sponge photos.
If that one wasn’t cool enough, I know you’ll be impressed by this larger specimen.
And when we come back to the diving section on Monday, we’ll have another great series of video clips to enjoy. But, first, enjoy that weekend!
I had a lovely chat with a former student today. I had her in a class when she was a freshman and knew her all four years of her time in college and, today, I have the great good fortune to call her a friend. She is, and was, a talented human being. She sat in the back of the classroom, quiet as could be, but she took in everything. Everything.
One of her classmates and friends was loud and over the top and could command and intimidate anyone in a room. She was funny, but Sydney just sat in the back and soaked in everything.
Outside of the classroom she became a staff writer and then a section editor for the campus paper I advised. Her senior year, she was the editor-in-chief of her campus paper. She was also the section editor of two local community papers her senior year. She also carried a 4.0 GPA. She also was honored as one of the top journalists in the south that year. I’m telling you, this woman is talented.
Two years ago now she was on a New York Times team that won a Pulitzer Prize, and if you think I don’t find ways to insert that into conversation you haven’t been paying attention. She’s a book editor and still writes for The Times. Even better than all of that, she does all of these other things. In the last few years she’s taught herself to sew and knit and cross stitch. She has taken up, as an adult and just to try it, aerial gymnastics, and she’s getting quite good at it. She has discovered a green thumb. Late last year she and her husband moved to New England. They are way up there, and enjoying their first real winter.
I was telling her how much I admire all of the things she does. As is typical, I laid it on pretty thick. As is typical, she downplayed everything. She said, “My life is full of more things that bring me satisfaction and make me look forward to the future than I’ve ever had before, and that’s not nothing.”
Something about this young woman, her freshmen year in the back of my class, I knew she’d figure it all out. And now here we are.
There isn’t a term for it, short of the greeting card cliche, but it is so heartening to watch people you like thrive. And to watch them discover the things that make them thrive. Oh! It comes from years of mentally cheering for people daily, and then getting semi-regular dispatches. To see people, who I knew best as students, continue to find ways to learn and challenge themselves well into adulthood, it’s really something.
In my teaching philosophy, I’ve always written that I hope to help teach the value of a true education: the joy of learning.
Best part is, Sydney isn’t the only person I know who has embodied that. Maybe that means I’m on to something. I hope so.
A quick spin through the side yard, just to share some different photos. I got lucky with the light on this shrub, which enjoys a nice golden tint in the late afternoon sun.
This stone path doesn’t go anywhere magical, but it seems like it should, doesn’t it?
We have two-and-a-half stone paths, and one of them does seem like it should go to Narnia. Not this one, though, it just takes you to the utilities. But look! There between the stones!
Is that a periwinkle? An euonymus? Whatever it is, the ground cover is emerging in early February! I am heartened once again!
Maybe I’ll get to the backyard tomorrow.
But, today, we must return to our underwater lair. And if we can’t actually do it, we’ll do it with some photographs from last month. To the deep! And before you do it, I’ve already done. I was humming the opening bars to “Baracuda” at about 65 feet here.
This was our dive master on one of our boats. He was serious until he realized he didn’t have to be. And then he was hysterical. Big laugh. I think his laugh amuses him, too. He reminded me of Carlos Mencia, a little bit. Apparently, in his day job, he’s some sort of underwater welder. So he takes strangers diving as a side hustle.
Imagine that. You get on a boat and that’s where you meet people and, to some degree, you’re kind of responsible for them. Now do that and make great jokes that grizzled vacation veterans haven’t heard before. This is the life of a dive master.
Also, he took this photograph for us.
He was very gracious with his time to do that. We wound up getting quite a few photographs. One day I’ll put that on social media and see if the university will share it. And if they do, this will be a new thing, taking that flag to interesting places and so on.
Also, he wanted to take a photo with the flag, too.
But he never asked what a Rowan was, or what that owl was about. He just wanted a photo, which was cool.
I think I can get about two more weeks of photos out of that trip. And, of course, there are quite a few more videos to upload, too. I may be able to pad this out to spring yet!
It was 44 degrees and sunny outside today. And the days, as Wendy Waldman wrote, are getting longer. I’ll take that.
I talked to a former colleague today. He’s in Las Vegas working on Super Bowl productions. He said it was raining and cold. So maybe I have the better end of the deal today. Who can say.
Anyway, I have some writing to do and some grading to get to … so let’s work through a few things quickly here.
In class last night we talked about selected readings of Marshall McLuhan and Ibrham Kendi. This particular group seems unimpressed by McLuhan, which means I should have prefaced the assignment a bit better, but they were good sports about the reading, and several fine points were made in our discussion. I think I’ll show the class the first 90 seconds of this video next week. “And you … are numb to it.”
From Ibram Kendi, we discussed a chapter of the book that inspired this upcoming documentary.
The chapter that they read and talked about comes earlier, and focuses on Portugal, and Prince Henry, and an influential book. I think the assignment is powerful given the times and, sometimes, the personality of the class augments that. But the basis of the reading, for our purposes, is about the timing of the book written by Henry’s biographer, Gomes Zurara, and Portugal, and soon, Europe’s increased navigational skill. Circumstance meets opportunity, meets economics, basically. Or, at least, it seems so from way over here in the 21st century.
But if that is to be a documentary coming next fall, I wonder if this particular reading will stay in the syllabus for much longer after that.
When I taught this class last fall, the Kendi conversation was a bit different. So often these things just come down to the dynamic of the people in the room. I know that to be the case, and yet it always impresses me, one way or the other.
Just so you don’t think there were no photos of me diving in Cozumel, there were. Here’s me and Jennifer the turtle.
So we’re checking this turtle out, and she’s wedged herself into that little rock and coral formation pretty good, such that I wondered, for a moment, if she was stuck. You stay a reasonable distance away, because you’re not trying to harm or even spook the creatures. And after we’d been there a moment or two the turtle seemed to realize that we weren’t going to do her harm, and so just sat there, ignored us and allowed us to take pictures.
These are drift dives, and there are seven people in the water. But what a drift dive means is that not all seven people are in the same place. It’s hard to swim against these currents — more on that on another day — and so you c’est la vie in bubbles. You see this, you miss that. With Jennifer the turtle, then, was the local divemaster, me and my lovely bride. The dive master, at one point, takes his fin off to try to show a sense of scale, because that turtle was very large. We’re all moving around, taking turns giving the best views. At one point the dive master is just to my left and I hear him scream. Underwater, of course, that sounds like “RAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!”
Now, I know that only the three of us are here. I know where all three of us are in relation to one another. And I know it’s this guy, the professional. The first three synapses that fired were “The dive master is yelling,” and “It can’t be good that the dive master is yelling,” and “What will I need to do for this man, and then what?”
All of which happens, of course, in the moment it takes to turn my head to look at him, to my immediate left. I see him there, wide eyed, and he’s pointing back across me, to my right.
We’d been so focused on that turtle that we hadn’t seen the shark, sleeping just four feet away from us.
This was a nurse shark, and nothing to be scared of. The yell was more of an “OHMYGAH! LOOK WHAT WE ALMOST MISSED.”
This was funny because when we got back to the surface and he was telling the other four divers about it, he tried to tell the story like we had somehow missed it, but for his expert eye. Someone pointed out that he was the one making the “RAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!” noise.
And that someone …
He also said, did the dive master, that believe it or not, he named that turtle. He was the pleasant jokester sort, and so I asked, with a big grin, if he meant right then. No no, he said, several years before. So that’s Jennifer the turtle, and it was lovely to meet her. And her shark neighbor.
Let us quickly return to the Re-Listening project. This is the one where I am playing all of my old CDs in the car, in the order in which I acquired them. And today’s installment puts us in the late summer or early fall of 2004. It was a good time for music collection, if you were around people with musical tastes you liked, or if you had a good library close at hand. If you had one or both of those, and a CD burner, you could add to your collection quickly and inexpensively. Both of those two things will be the case in a few of these upcoming installments. The library, in this instance.
I borrowed from the local municipal lending institution, R.E.M.’s “Eponymous.” I did not own a copy of a single R.E.M. song at that point. Hadn’t needed to. But here was a greatest hits and here was the clean copy at the library and i had one of those giant cylinders of blank CD-R discs at the office.
And so …
Because this is a greatest hits — I think in the most artistic possible meaning, which is to say they wanted to fulfill their contract with I.R.S. and get onto their new deal at Warners, and a greatest hits record is a good way to check a box on a list — there’s not really a great point to dissecting this. And since it was a library addition, I always thought of it is a catalog addition, something to round out a corner and fill up a part of a CD book. It’s great, but I never listened to it all that much because, basically, most of these songs were always on the air somewhere, it seemed like.
I was struck, listening to this yesterday, though, how the tracks improve over the course of the CD. The instrumentation, the lyricism, the production values, all of it. The tracks were shared on “Eponymous” in chronological order, so that makes sense. And somewhere around “Driver 8,” which was off their third album, you can hear the full band understanding they were going to reach their real potential.
So that’s fun.
Also, and there’s no really good way to illustrate this, but while you’re basically listening to the first wave of modern rock music there (Remember, it’s the early 1980s and the boys from Athens are the absolute antithesis of everyone else playing anything at that moment. So we’re talking R.E.M., The Pixies, Camper van Beethoven and not much else.) you are also hearing the stuff that inspired the next 15 or 20 years of music.
They called it quits in 2011, of course. They’ve denied reunion rumors and said no in countless interviews in the years since. It’s easy to believe. And probably the right choice for everybody involved, but still a bit unfortunate for fans.
Update: And just a week later, this happened. There’s a touring act commemorating the 40th anniversary of “Murmur” and that show was in Athens and look who all got on stage. Reportedly, this was the first time they’d been together in 17 years.
On Saturday, a finer day was never made, I tried the Cascadian Farms blueberry granola with a box of store brand raisins. Once again, the raisins were undefeated in augmenting the flavor profile of what I put in the blue breakfast bowl.
This morning, I tried mixing the first two varieties, Bob’s Red Mill Honey Oat and Bob’s Maple Sea Salt. I added raisins, of course. And, so far, the mix of these two have been my favorite. But I have also learned something uninteresting today.
Basically, photos of granola in a bowl all look the same. So my breakfast experiment will continue — this week I have to try other mixes and then soon I’ll perhaps go pick up some other brands and flavors to try.
You’re broken up by this decision, I know, but the kennysmith.org visual editor has sent out memos. Memos.
Another memo has just come down, in fact, reminding me to get on with the most popular weekly feature on the site. So let’s check in with the kitties.
It’s so cute when Phoebe covers up her eyes to go to sleep. She’s very serious about her relaxation.
Poseidon does it, too. Though, lately, he’s been interested in balancing on legs and feet.
We have a joke about the two of them, siblings. My lovely bride notes when they’re doing the same thing.
Come play with us. Come play with us.
Then I say, “You’re freaking me out!” Because it’s weird when they do the same things together. And she laughs. The cats are unimpressed, because they’re cats.
But, as you can see, they’re doing just fine.
We’d all be doing better if we were diving, I’m sure. Today’s feature from our recent trip to Cozumel is a video. There’s some great footage here, including a closeup of a turtle.
And, of course, we’ve many more photos and videos to enjoy in the days to come.
I’m now on a nice little streak of consecutive days in a row on the bike. This weekend I set a personal best in that regard. Today, unrelated to that entirely useless notation, I received the monthly email from Strava. I always love this part.
That’s about right.
On Saturday I had a big ride. A long climb from virtual sea level up beyond the virtual snow line. This, Zwift calls the Epic KOM. It’s 5.9 virtual miles up hill. None of it is particularly steep, but it does not relent. About five miles in, you get above the virtual hot air balloons.
And then you reach the top of the climb. After that, there’s a bonus climb, a .68 mile ascent averaging 13.6 degrees. If i am not mistaken, that’s still the steepest climb on Zwift. Strava tells me I’ve done it seven times now, and regret each visit. Saturday was my second time up that climb in a week, and perhaps my third best effort up the thing. (In January of 2021 I was minutes faster, according to my ride notes.) Also, the view at the top is pretty nice. If you can still see straight when you get there.
So that was 30 miles Saturday. I got in 28 miles late last night. And I did 22 miles this afternoon. Somehow, this is how the day got away from me. So, now, I must return to campus.
Today I started the last test group of the first granola experiment. I began with four brands, have tried three and, after two rounds of this one I’ll start combining varieties. But, first, we’ll try Cascadian Farms. It started in Washington, was acquired by General Mills and now is managed by Rodale, a legacy organic research and production concern based in Pennsylvania.
I wonder where the blueberries came from.
These aren’t bad, though the blueberry is a fruit that I don’t automatically think of as a breakfast offering. Or, really much at all. But they work pretty well here.
Tomorrow, we’ll see how blueberries and raisins mix. I suspect it’ll be just fine, but I am looking forward to mixing these different brands and flavors. And then, in a week or so, trying some new versions of granola.
Yes, my skin is positively growing from all of these healthy breakfasts.
It’s probably the raisins.
I had to do some writing today. This writing had to be similar to something I wrote last week, but different. Also, I had to answer student questions. Similar, but different. And I also began prep for a Monday night class, where we’ll be talking, among other things, about Marshall McLuhan. You know the one, the scholar famous for “the media is the message.” Different, but similar.
Also a bit different, I’ll do a late night bike ride this evening because I just couldn’t muster up the energy to do it this afternoon.
Besides, I had to find a few new SCUBA diving photos to share from our recent trip to Cozumel.
Dosing these out was the best idea I had, I think. There could have been a post with dozens of photos and videos. But, instead, I’m getting weeks and weeks of material, and I’ve barely scratched the surface of the videos.
I’ll add another one Monday, but, first.
I’d mentioned the coral restoration projects that are underway. That’s happening in a lot of places, including in Mexico’s beautiful waters. Here’s a staghorn coral site, now.
And there’s my dive buddy! I’m pretty sure this was after her ascent on the conclusion of a dive.
She probably still has about 1,500 PSI in her tank there.
Who doesn’t like a nice wide shot, now and again? This one is definitely going on the front page of the site, which is a project I’ll get around to updating in a week or so.
Sometimes I get lucky and almost get the colors just right. I’m sure this was at a shallow spot and the sun was at precisely the right angle because I never get this right. It’s a lot more colorful than my point-and-shoot photography oftentimes suggests.
And, here, I’m not sure which parts are healthy and which parts are in trouble. But, usually, when you see two different colors on the corals or sponges, one of them is less desirable.
All three of those might show up on the front page. But you should really see what we have for this space next Monday. It’s almost enough to make you want to skip ahead into the next work week.
