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28
Sep 12

Oh, lovely, sweet Friday

Today I purchased the 2013 sticker for my car tag. Take that, Mayans.

My DMV experience lasted 33 minutes, which was the longest I’ve ever waited in my two years visiting this particular office. But it is the end of the month.

Usually the post office here takes longer than the DMV. I’m pretty sure I’ve tapped my toe in our post office for longer than 33 minutes.

This was nowhere near my longest DMV experience. I seem to mention the DMV every year. Once, in Bessemer, I read the better part of a book while in line. I seem to recall I took a two-hour lunch break to mutter at the DMV in Homewood one year. The other times I’ve bothered to quantify it have all been four, six, 20 minutes or noted as “painless.” I checked.

I’ve had a big week, coupled with a long few days, where I did too many things and now my shoulder is informing me I regret those decisions. Can’t wait to tell the ortho about it next week.

Suffice it to say, because I’m tired of even writing about it: I’ve figured out it takes precious little to aggravate my collarbone, the muscles in my one shoulder and, when that really gets going, across my back into the other shoulder and up into my neck. Maybe I should do less.

Maybe I should do like these guys:

hammocks

This is studying on the Samford quad. Hammocks are a big part of the culture here. I’m surprised the administration allows it to continue, but I’m proud they do. I’m also surprised the hammock scenes don’t make their way into more of the promotional literature they send out.

I should write a memo about that …

Nah. I’m taking the rest of the evening off from writing.

Tomorrow: the return of an old friend!


17
Aug 12

Job well done

I also did physical rehab yesterday morning. That was probably why I was so worn out by the simple task of driving around our lovely, small little town and paying for things and picking up things. I was exhausted from PT.

I cheated. The lady who was monitoring my work turned away to see after one of her other clients and I picked up the two-pound barbell instead of the one-pound. Two pounds! I’m getting ripped!

Hey, the surgeon says I am not to pick up anything heavier than a drink while my shoulder is recovering. A two-pound barbell is a big deal. Wears you right out.

Not really.

We had our weekly breakfast this morning at the Barbecue House:

breakfast

This is a big deal. The guy on the left is perhaps the best short order cook in town. Everything runs more smoothly when he’s there. The blur of motion is the guy that puts together the last touches of your plate. The lady in the back … she does a bit of everything. Our ticket is the farthest to the right, and the farthest away from being made.

They’ll call our name and I’ll go get our two plates and ask for an extra fork, because we sensibly split the hash browns. The drink refills are right there for you, in the bottom right corner of this shot. In the background you can see an Alabama quarterback getting sacked. Next to that is a bucket that has clearly been beaten half to death. I’m intrigued by it. What do they do with that bucket?

I’ll ask one day, when they’re having a slow morning.

Today was Black Cat Appreciation Day. Apparently. We didn’t know such a thing existed until someone mentioned it on Facebook. Maybe that is the point of Facebook, feeling better about yourself compared to the lot in life of people that didn’t like you in high school AND made up days.

BlackCat

I spent a while trying to take a nice picture of her, but she was having none of it. She did not appreciate that there was no tuna for her. And she knows Catember is coming up, so she did not appreciate the attention today. She’s trying to avoid the camera as long as possible, I’m sure of it.

And that’s pretty much the day. It was designed to be a day of sitting and rest and not hurting myself. I finally did this right for a change.


21
Jul 12

Cabin fever

I’d really like to get out of the house.

This morning I watched the time trial, the penultimate day of the Tour de France, and fell asleep halfway through. I nodded off during a bike race I’ve been watching for three weeks. (I slept just over seven hours last night, too, which is the most in a long time.) I had lunch over a History Channel documentary. We watched the 2010 LSU at Auburn game off the complete season DVD set. I took a picture of Cam Newton’s almost mythical run off the television screen. The announcers said “Oh did he accelerate!” and “Enjoy a young man fulfilling his athletic potential.”

Newton

I love that it is a little bit less than sharp, just like our memories. Here, then, are the pictures I took and things I wrote at the actual game.

The Yankee gave me the DVD set of the 2010 perfect season as a Christmas gift this year. We’ve been working our way through that magical year over the summer. Every week we start the game and I say “I hope Auburn wins!” Then the Tigers win and we say “War Eagle!” and “Merry Christmas!” Great gift, right?

And then, Batman Begins! When that ended, on another channel, The Dark Knight! My lovely bride made dinner, putting delicious salmon on the grill. I took a picture of it:

Grill

I really need to get out of the house. And, also, I need to be able to walk around for more than five minutes without my shoulder and collarbone killing me.

And now, to end on a more positive note, something cute:


16
Jun 12

Signs, signs, everywhere are signs

Spent a couple of hours on my bike today. (Sounds so nice I want to do it again.) I waited until the afternoon sun was dying out and the heat and the ultraviolet weren’t so oppressive and then I set out for a three stage ride. I cruised over to Opelika, intent on picking up a few more pictures for the Historic Marker Series.

As you may know — or if you don’t know or if you’ve just come back from that link and would like your assumptions confirmed — I’m hitting all of the markers in the county on my bike. I found the locations on the historical society’s website. I made a map, which heads up that page. But I’ve learned that between the descriptions and my best guesses there’s sometime a bit of discrepancy. So I’m fixing the map as I go, but I’m also spending a lot of time just cruising around looking for the signs.

wheel

So the second stage of today’s ride was riding around the downtown area of Opelika. This was little more than soft pedaling between red lights and looking confused. There were eight markers downtown. I found that I’d placed four or five accurately on my map.

I found them all. And the biggest inaccuracy was no more than a mile or two off. (That one was purely a guess anyway, so it wasn’t a mistake so much as having no real idea to begin with.) But I found them all. I dat on a bench in the shade in Opelika and had a little snack. I took all of my pictures and then pointed toward home, catching that last one on the way. Turns out I go by it every so often, but I’d never noticed it.

I also found two more signs. The ones I’m photographing are by either the state or the Chattahoochee Commission. The extras were put up by a tourism board and a church. But I was there. I had the chance to read them. Why not?

So I’ll add those to that section of the site eventually too, as always, one a week, on Thursdays.

The third stage of my ride was the return trip home. The sun was falling and the route I’d planned involved a lot of tree cover — meaning darker even a bit earlier — and I had no blinkies on my bike. In cycling the expression is to “put the hammer down.” That doesn’t apply to me, but I put it down anyway.

country

I average 24 miles per hour over the last eight miles, making it home just before the sky grayed.

And then we worked on paper ideas. Now we just have to write the paper. Meantime, we’re enjoying homemade muffins with fresh picked, locally grown blueberries. I think even the cinnamon was fair trade. It sounds far more ostentatious than it really is. But it is also more delicious than it sounds.

Best story detail of the day:

Leftfielder Nick Clark hustled in, trying to catch a sinking line drive.

“I ran up and at the very end I said, ‘OK, we’ll sacrifice my body,'” Clark said.

Clark went into a diving slide. He caught the ball.

He lost his leg.

The rest of us? We’ve lost the privilege of complaining about aches and pains for the rest of the day.

And, with the death this morning of Rodney King, the Associated Press published their Where Are They Now feature on some of the key players of his beating and the later riots. Some of these aren’t surprising at all.

Years ago I dropped my subscription to Newsweek because of a stupid cover story. And now you can see the latest cover that wasn’t. It was to be an image of President Obama in a hoodie. Here’s why they didn’t publish it:

In the old days, a cover is a cover, and that was it. Today, she says, there’s an “aftermath of imagery” one must take into consideration. Will this cover be used by white supremacists? Will it take a bad turn in its meme lifecycle?

This was to be one of their new artistic covers, because a news photograph is no longer desirable. But Diana of Wales, were she alive today, now that, they think, will move magazines! They get people to talk about the magazine occasionally, but they do nothing for news, or to buttress the once proud reputation of the old magazine. Issue sales are stagnant or barely moving. Advertising is sadly way down. Putting the president in a hoodie isn’t going to help those things.

We’re watching the Clemson-Auburn 2010 game tonight. (I hope Auburn wins!) I’m not sure how they pulled this game off. Clearly the purple and orange set clearly played better in the first half of the game and, if memory serves, for the better part of the third quarter as well. But they never quit, and there was a big hit (there were a lot of those in this game) that limited Clemson’s quarterback. And then that heartbreaking, for them, overtime experience.

Clemson came to play that Saturday night, and they gave the eventual national champions one of the three biggest scares of the year. I talked to some of their fans after the game. That was exactly how they expected the game to play out: a strong start before they found a way to give the game to Auburn.

I took pictures of that game. Had a few good ones, too. You can see some of them here. Watching it tonight, the 2011 beatdown that Clemson gave Auburn is a lot less surprising.

The two teams start the season against one another this fall in Atlanta.


17
May 12

Hey look! Something shiny!

I was going to write a bit about baseball tonight, and all through Saturday. That was originally the plan. The grading is almost done. The weather is just agonizingly perfect. That’s not a good description. Let me try again.

You know that one moment around Christmas that you aren’t obsessing over presents, traffic, wrapping paper, relatives or cooking? That moment where the moment settles on you nice and quietly? That’s the same moment you get on mild Fourth of July evenings if you get a gentle little breeze. That bit of easy peace, that’s what the weather feels like right now.

It’ll be in the 90s next week, but what we have now we have to soak up, low 80s, light breezes, beautiful skies, brilliant sun, quiet nights. Perfect springtime weather.

So the weather is behaving marvelously. I’ve made serious headway in the grading. (Almost done in fact!) This is the last weekend of regular season baseball. Our plan was to eat a lot of peanuts.

And before I could even zoom in:

Florida

Florida had a 5-0 run by the time Auburn collected their fifth out of the game. One of those nights.

This might have been the highlight:

CreedeSimpson

Creede Simpson got back to first safely. On the next pitch he’d bluff a steal. The catcher threw down to second, missed the shortstop and the ball sailed into center. Simpson stayed at first. He was, literally, staring at his shoes.

So it was that kind of night. But Florida is the second or third ranked team in the nation depending on which poll you use. These guys are almost a AAA team. Oh, look, something shiny!

crane

That’s hanging from a crane over the lot that formerly was Sewell Hall behind right field. They tore that old dorm down for a new one recently and the work crews are quickly building a new one. There are three cranes on the job right now, that’s hanging over the pine trees tonight.

Florida won 6-0 over Auburn. It was a game where not much went right. But there’s always tomorrow.

And there’s the new decoration for the top of the blog that came out of the game:

Creede