Poseidon asked for a meeting this weekend. And, being staff to the cats, I was obliged to accept. The thrust of the meeting was this: He wants to sometimes go first in the site’s most popular weekly feature. Usually I operate on a “ladies first” policy, but he stamped around on me and made his point. So, this week, Poseidon will have the honor of the first check in.
You see, Poseidon is quite proud of his head-on-foot prowess.
And his hiding skills.
In that box is some poly sheeting which I need to put on the greenhouse. I ordered these sometime back, but I am waiting for the weather to warm up again — so maybe next week. Also, I might need still more parts for the job. Phoebe had the same reaction to that realization as I did.
But she’s ready to supervise from her supervising post.
My lovely bride picked up some flowers this weekend to brighten the house. They’re doing a lovely job.
Now they just have to survive the cats.
Let’s go back underwater. And we’ll do it with a video. This one is full of great fish. And there’s a wonderful up-close visit with a beautiful eagle ray. Don’t miss it.
And there are still a lot more photos and videos to come. Keep showing up, because I’ll keep posting them.
But, for now, I have to head to campus. Monday has once again gotten away from me.
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!
I spent part of my free time today emailing with an old friend. We worked together for a few years, used to be geographically close enough to have the occasional family dinner with them when they were all in town. We chat about once a year or so now. It’s a pretty regular clockwork.
And I think, on my part, it is because I don’t always have new amazing things to tell my most discerning friends and colleagues about. Oh sure, there’s always the new thing in the yard, or a clever solution to a problem chore or something funny one of us said to the other, and don’t forget the latest cat antic. But the really cosmopolitan types … you need a special story for them.
So I did the big swipes. These are the concerts and shows we’ve seen. This is a museum I’m hoping to visit soon, and so on. All three of his adult children now live in the same town in Florida, and my friend and his wife are both from Florida and so it sounds like they may be looking to move back down there sooner than later. Also, they’re going to Iceland this fall.
I should go to Iceland. But maybe not in October.
Also, today, I came up with a clever solution to a problem chore. And let me tell you about this joke we shared last night …
This afternoon, on the bike, I rode the volcano circuit on Zwift. It’s a short loop, and a central point of fixation for some people on Zwift. Some people are there to chase the badges, and there’s one badge that you earn when you’ve completed 25 loops around the volcano in one ride. Until very recently, I thought this was a route involving going both around and up the volcano. This would be a 355-mile ride with more than 15,000 feet of climbing that destroyed more than your most romantic metaphors of suffering. But, no, the volcano circuit is a different route. A flatter route, and shorter. Completing 25 laps would be only 63.5 miles. This would take about three hours, which is a long time to be on a stationary bike.
I earned the 10-lap badge today. I don’t care at all about the badges. I’m interested in three things on the bike. Going as fast as I can — which is never that fast. I also want to ride as long and as much as I can — which is also relative, of course. And, to have fun.
You can’t spreadsheet fun. And trying to document the much more quantifiable speed would be demoralizing. So I concert a lot on the miles.
I’m not really sure why, but I do.
The other thing I’m concentrating on, at the moment, is consecutive days in the saddle. I wonder how long I can keep this current streak alive.
Speaking of the bike, it is time for another installment of We Learn Wednesdays. I ride my bike across the county to find the local historical markers. This is the 24th installment! And, lately, we’ve been checking out many of the markers I banked late in the fall. This is the 44th marker we’ve seen in this series. And it has to do with this 19th century building that looks not at all out of place in this downtown area.
Surrogate has the traditional “one who takes the place of another” definition in this instance. It’s been an office around here since 1710, when the Archbishop of London granted the colonial governor authority to act as the Archbishop’s Ordinary, or Surrogate General. The governor then localized that to the county level, and the surrogates looked after things like probate wills, marriage licenses, and other things that, today, we think of as county records.
Which is why this building looks out of place as it does. As the sign notes.
Today, the state has an elected surrogate in each county. That person is elected to a five-year term. A man named Smith Dorman, or another man, Benjamin N. Smith (of the Whig party) was the first to staff this building. Fifteen others have filled the role since then, including the woman currently in office, who has been there since 2006.
The surrogate court has moved down the street, and the clerk’s office is elsewhere these days, too. Maybe there are some wonderful renovations taking place inside those special fire-proof walls.
Let us return to the water! Why can’t we be in the water today? We should definitely be in clear blue water today …
My dive buddy agrees.
Sometimes you get lucky with the sponges and the coral in one shot. A version of this one is definitely going on the front page rotation when I finally get around to updating it. (Next week.)
At other times, you just can’t decide which fish to fixate on, so you stay wide, try to keep them all in the viewfinder and hope it all works out.
This is where, in the selection and editing today, I’d used the next shot because it looks like a world class photo-bombing by a wide-eyed reef fish. Alas, the exposure was lacking.
Instead, I offer you this much better photo, which will also make the front page of the site. It has the added bonus of making you wonder if I was just diving in an aquarium. (I was not.)
And this isn’t the best composition, but it is the best shot this Atlantic blue tang gave me. Look at those incredible colors!
OK, that’s enough for now. I’ll have more diving photos and something from ground-level, as well. (Which is to say it is sunny and mild, and you should go wander around outside for a few minutes when that happens.)
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.
