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1
Jan 12

Catching up — New Year’s edition

Happy New Year! And in order to look ahead we must look back. Previously I’ve written posts detailing of all of the interesting, important and neat thing that happened in the previous year. I’m not going to do that this year. The archives are in the column to the right if you are interested, but the short version is this:

A.B.D.
Conferences in Troy, Little Rock, Boston, Portland, and St. Louis
Visited Bermuda, Notre Dame, Gulf Shores, D.C., and others
Took a much needed summer break
I rode my bike about 1,000 miles, but not nearly enough
I worked a lot, but not nearly enough
We generally had a terrific, lovely year

So with done, let’s empty the last few photographs from late in the year that I’ve been holding for just this post.

This is a second cousin of mine. Apparently he had an appendectomy in the summer and later in the year the hospital turned him into a newspaper advertisement. His great-grandmother, my grandmother, showed me this ad at Christmas:

Tyson

Feel free to enjoy this delicious blueberry muffin recipe:

Blueberries

Toys R Us, on Christmas Eve. Spooky place:

Tyson

The Yankee, as a child at the beach. She still flashes me this smile:

Tyson

Tomorrow: 2012 jokes!


15
Dec 11

Sick, making this a photo day 4

I feel like I’m about 65 percent of myself again. I’ve been stuck in the house for four days, so it seemed a good time to get out.

I visited the DMV. Most people have a problem with that, but I’d rather go to the satellite office of our DMV than to the local post office. I had to renew my license today and was done in less than six minutes.

Still coughing, but still breathing. The coughing is more of a real cough than the sound of all of the ancient gods engaged in a battle royale in the next room, as has been the case the past few days. I haven’t had any fevers since Tuesday. My congestion has just suddenly disappeared. It seems I’ve rounded a corner.

The biggest problem now is a lack of energy and endurance. But, then again, I do have a birthday coming up.

Speaking of birthdays, when I turned 30, almost to the minute, I came down with a little bug of some kind. “Nothing too serious, happens all the time. I’ll be rid of it in a day or three,” or so I thought at the time. Kept that thing for weeks.

This better not be like that, but I think I’m getting better.

Today’s photo is from the World War II memorial in Washington D.C. We went into the capital after the game on Saturday night. I haven’t discussed that here yet, which probably works out well. I still have content after a week of doing nothing!

Anyway, they call this the Freedom Wall. It holds 4,048 gold stars, each representing 100 servicemen and women who died or remain missing from World War II.

Stars

Hanging 405,399 stars would have been too imposing. Just the 4,048 is impressive enough.


7
Dec 11

Reload early, reload often

More grading. All day, it seems.

This is downtown Homewood, late in the evening. Had dinner on the southside with a college buddy. This was part of the drive afterward:

Homewood

Normally this road isn’t so empty, but Homewood rolls up the sidewalks by 9 p.m., even during the Christmas season.

A wide version of this is now one of the rotating footers at the bottom of this page. There are now 17 of those. The bottom of the page has to catch up, though. There are 38 images in the header. Reload often!

More grading tomorrow, and the last class of the semester.

Pearl Harbor links. One of my uncles, if I am remembering this story correctly, was at Pearl Harbor soon after the attacks. This is him, a few years ago:

R.C.

Here’s a story from yesterday about some young local boys who rotated through there in 1943 on their way to the Pacific front.

Every now and then I tell a story about something like this, because it astounds me that a lot of these people were my students age. Like these kids, who happened to be in Hawai’i to play football when the Japanese flew in. That’s a great read. And it is hard to imagine those could be my students.

Historic Page Ones.


30
Oct 11

Catching up

If you thought everything was just a little bit prettier on the plain, some days I would be hard-pressed to disagree with you. Take this sun set over the Ole Miss Auburn game in Jordan-Hare Stadium, for example.

Sunset

Time for the fan pictures, because why not. Lots of people out at the game, some of them dressed very warmly against the chill mid-40 temperatures. She was with her grandchildren:

fan

Watching the game from underneath the scoreboard.

fans

I believe she stayed involved in the game until the Rebels were being blown out.

fan

You see these guys at sporting events these days. I heard him talking. It was … unexpected for some reason.

fan

You laugh, but her head was warm:

fan

As always, more pictures can be found in the photo gallery.


21
Oct 11

Hedge hogging

The most productive accomplishment of the day was in trimming the hedges. This is no small thing, as our house is surrounded on three sides by shrubbery. I’m not sure why the southernmost side is bare.

Everything along the front, save the door, the sidewalk and the garage, are bordered with green, growing things. All but one segment was trimmed. The lucky ones — and isn’t that just like a bunch of bushes, bragging to their neighbors? “You got chopped up, but I’m still here. Look at me grow! — I left alone because they’ll probably be dug out of the ground in a few weeks. Others along the front got lowered, including one that borders the garage. We’ve developed a little contour into it for the car’s side mirror.

There are also two at the end of the drive. These must be maintained to preserve the proper turning ratio as one backs out of the drive. This requires the acquisition of surveying tools, and chalk lines. I am the only person in America going through such precise measurements.

The unintended benefit, or consequence, is that one of them is growing around the mailbox post. I’d let it grow over the thing, but that would probably violate some nuance of the neighborhood and only make the mail carrier mad.

I do all of this, by the way, with the 24-inch Black & Decker Hedge Hog, which is like mounting an M-60 onto Excalibur and plugging an extension cord into the hilt. You hit the trigger, feel that dual blade action, wave it above your head and know: your kingdom is only limited by your vision.

And municipally recognized property lines.

Trimming up the northern side of the estate required the ladder, because there are some bushes on steroids on that side of the house. Two of them would have been easier to reach from the roof.

So I’m standing on the top of a multi-use ladder. We have a transformer of aluminum that makes shapes that are only limited by your imagination, and not its contortion. I dutifully set the ladder into a standard A configuration, straddling the center hinge point with a foot on either side. I realized I couldn’t reach the very back of the bush. OK then. So I find myself standing on the top of the A, in the hinge-point, waving about a whirring 24-bladed saw with shark teeth moving at 2,900 strokes per minute.

My kingdom is suddenly a lot less interesting from this vantage point. I climbed down quickly.

The curious thing about the greenery here is that there is a lot of variety. Once the offending shrubs are out of the front there will only be one place surrounding the entire structure where you see two of the same species next to one another. I haven’t yet decided if that’s a feature or a bug. If you had to dig them all up, every annoying root, what would you replace them with? Uniformity or everything that could grow in this climate?

And that’s the sort of thing you think about as you rake away the leaves leavings. That’s some way to start your Friday evening.

YouTube Cover Theatre, where we see the talent that people have, until the advent of webcams and the Internet, people were hiding in their homes. Since Irecently watched the George Harrison documentary, we may as well check out covers of some of his work.

The Beatles weren’t my band. I like them fine, they just don’t belong to me. Wrong generation. But, if I had been in the right group, I think Harrison would have been my favorite of the bunch. And since you can’t have Harrison without the band, we’ll start with a cover of All Those Years Ago:

That looks like an impossibly difficult tune and he did a nice job. Then he leaned back against his den’s wood paneled walls and enjoyed the rest of his evening.

This cover of My Sweet Lord has received 26,000 views, which may be the largest count that we’ve ever seen in YouTube Cover Theater. Aside, is it just me, or has this song always sounded like it should be appropriated as commercial bed music?

One of the cool things about the Beatles, I would think, would be introducing what has essentially become timeless music to kids. I mean the clean cut, less drugs portion of the catalog. And while this is essentially a Paul McCartney tune, Harrison wrote the main riff, which is enough of an excuse to show a cute cover by a father serenading his daughter for her second birthday.

When she’s older she’s going to be humming Beatles tunes and won’t remember why. Then she’s going to stumble through her dad’s YouTube uploads and it will all click. It will be adorable.

Hard to believe it has been 10 years since George Harrison died. I was doing a network newscast at the time, the last segment of which was a 30 second spot and outro. That day I just played this song for 30 seconds and signed off:

Just for fun, here’s a recreation of Harrison’s Bangladesh Concert with members of Wonderous Stories, Alan Parsons Live Project and more, covering Wah Wah:

Other things happened today, too, emails and organizational things. We’ll have wrapped up the latest big project at work by the first part of the week, it seems my part has largely been completed, except for showing up at the various events next week. Homecoming at Samford means advisory council meetings and wall of fame induction ceremonies and all of the attendant activities.

With those things now completed I can return to other work. Like digging up shrubs.