Thursday « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Thursday

Ow. Ow. Ow.

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.

food / iPhone / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
23
Aug 12

Photo week – Thursday

A photo (or two) a day meant to express everything that needs to be said. Don’t over extrapolate or strain yourself making too many inferences. They are just pictures.

Come have a tomato with me! We picked up our basket o’ vegetables today, and there are four giant, beautiful red ones in the bottom. I still have two or three left from last week’s basket.

I love a good tomato, but in our house I am the tomato eater. And if you don’t eat them with almost every meal they pile up.

I don’t care for cherry tomatoes too much. I’d rather have grapes. We have a ton of grapes.

Come have grapes with me!

Auburn / errands / iPhone / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
16
Aug 12

A day out

No. A thousand voices scream out at once. No. The voices were all kids and kids-at-heart. No one is ready to see hints of fall. The left, logical, side of the brain says: Squash. The right, intuitive, side screams: Autumn!

And that, in mid-August, is not cool. There will be a time for it, late September, perhaps. That day is not now.

This was at the locally grown, artisanal vegetable place where we purchase an exceedingly abundant basket of vegetables each week. Fresh food, charming people, delightfully disorganized basket procurement process.

That was our last stop of the day. We bought gas, which is riveting. Riveting!

We shop at Sam’s for gas as often as not. They’ve reduced the entire petroleum purchase experience entire an almost sterile environment. Sterile for stone, cement and gas, at least.

There are eight pumps, allowing for 16 customers at a time. There is no store, no cash, no distraction. You focus entirely on the task of purchasing the cheapest gas in town. (Only the prices are going back up again. Cheap is relative.) They have one person staffed there, presumably in case something catches fire.

It is interesting how you can grow so accustomed to the absence of that interaction. The pay-at-the-pump model has removed every human interaction from fueling your car. At Sam’s they’ve stripped it down to solitude. One nice lady, unlike the rest of her colleagues who just stand around, actually mingles with the customers. The first time she does it can take you by surprise. In the last two years, though, I’ve been learning about her life in 15 second increments. I’ll have to start writing that down.

We visited the pharmacy to pick up new medication. We drove through the worst traffic in town. Three of the biggest intersections downtown had no power. Also this is the first week of the semester crush — too many extra families and too freshmen who are still learning their way around town, when to drive and when to lose their keys — that overburdens the local roads.

Police officers were directing traffic. You wonder how long they spend on that at the academy. Do some of the cadets adapt to it better than others? Is there a special commendation? When the intersection goes dark do the dispatchers call him in to run the show?

Does he then think “And I really wanted to take a nap under the overpass today!”?

We visited the meat lab. You buy select cuts from the university at big discounts. It gives you the feeling of living in an old-time company town, spending your income at the company store. But who cares? We bought two New York Strips and four pork loins for 20 bucks.

If only there was a charcoal lab on campus. We’d probably grill every night.

The next, and last stop, was to the market for the vegetables and seeing the squash above.

This, believe it or not, was a big day out. (I can’t complain because, you know, summer … ) Sitting inside for more than a month now hasn’t been ideal, but I’m bouncing back. I wasn’t exhausted when we got home. But I was sore.

I blame the vegetables.

Those baskets are heavy.

Later: Grilled the steaks in a mild, moist August evening. Put on just enough charcoal to kiss the meat, we had okra and mashed potatoes, both from the vegetable basket. Everything but the seasoning was raised nearby. I feel like I need an imported dessert, just to throw things off.

journalism / links / Thursday / Twitter / video — Comments Off
9
Aug 12

A collection of recent things

I wrote this on Twitter early Monday morning. “21st century living: I just watched an explorer LAND ON MARS on my phone. Top THAT, every century that’s come before us.”

“And almost immediate pictures from Curiosity via Odyssey orbiting above. Pictures. From Mars. Immediately. From MARS.”

Here’s the first color panorama:

I wrote: “People that think space is no longer interesting or exciting aren’t paying attention to space.”

Meanwhile, back on earth, we’re trying to overcome the other front page news. And Will Ferrell isn’t taking it well:

Check out this feature from the New York Times on how all of history’s great sprinters stack up to Usain Bolt. This might be my favorite time piece in a very long time.

Related: the oldest Olympians.

The politicians want your Pandora play lists. But mostly just your email. My Pandora thinks I should really contact an electrician in Kalamazoo, such errors in the algorithms might throw off the campaigns. That would make for an interesting fall.

This was the headline: Pat Dye speaks out on Penn State, Sandusky: ‘If you caught your brother… you’d turn his ass in. Or kill him.’

Well, yeah.

A bit of journalism geekery.

Speaking of journalism: I have a great respect for the people that craft effective longform journalism pieces, particularly the good profiles. They frequently carry the reader through a story in such a way that the unfamiliar, or opposed, often becomes familiar or even likable. That’s what you expect to happen there. “He is the coach of the team I hate, but I tell ya, he’s got a story. And despite wearing different colors — and that just boils my bottom — he almost seems like a human being.” That sort of reaction.

Not this Urban Meyer fluff piece. It just seems … sad … in ways you don’t really want to worry about. Wright Thompson did a fine job, so it isn’t the reporter, but the subject of the profile. Thompson gives Meyer the black-and-white treatment. There’s 1986, enjoying football, and 2006, where you can’t find glory in the glory of winning games gloriously on the fields of glorious battlefield which was, in many respects, viewed by the masses as rapidly approaching glorious. Thompson plays Meyer as a guy trying to find himself, the dad, husband, pal, as opposed to being overrun by That Guy. He leaves it so that you think, maybe, Meyer can get back there, and keep the signed contract he had to make with his kids. Maybe he will; there’s hope for all of us! But you get this suspicion that when Thompson reflects on this piece in a few years, he’s going to be disappointed. That isn’t the journalism, that’s the subject matter.

The best essay I’ve read this week, is a slightly older one, on prison and tattoos. It defies excerpting, but here:

Another popular pattern—though it makes one shudder to think of the process by which it is inscribed upon the skin, or the consequences if a mistake is made—is the spider’s web on the side of the neck. Occasionally, this is spread over the whole of the face, even over the scalp. At first I assumed this design must have a symbolic meaning, but having inquired of many bearers of it, and having been assured by them that there is no such meaning, I am now satisfied that it is its intrinsic beauty, and a certain vaguely sinister connotation attached to spiders’ webs, that attracts people to the design and induces them to adorn themselves with it. Moreover, I vividly recall the scene at a murder trial in which I testified. The judge and counsel were embroiled in a learned discussion of the finer points of mens rea, watched by the prisoner in the dock and his family in the public gallery—all of whom, down to the nth generation, had spiders’ webs prominently tattooed on their necks. Never was the class basis (as the Marxists used to call it) of British justice more clearly visible: two classes separated by, among other things, a propensity on the part of one of them to self-disfigurement.

Today’s terrible story of Europe: More abandoned children as Europe austerity wears on.

Someone could do a regular feature on the terrible story about Europe of the day, couldn’t they?

To take your mind off that, here’s one from the Games in England:

Mark Worsfold, 54, a former soldier and martial arts instructor, was arrested on 28 July for a breach of the peace shortly before the cyclists arrived in Redhouse Park, Leatherhead, where he had sat down on a wall to watch the race. Officers from Surrey police restrained and handcuffed him and took him to Reigate police station, saying his behaviour had “caused concern”.

[…]

Worsfold, whose experience was first reported by Private Eye, claims police questioned him about his demeanour and why he had not been seen to be visibly enjoying the event. Worsfold, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2010, suffers from muscle rigidity that affects his face. He was released after two hours without charge or caution.

“It could have been done better. I was arrested for not smiling. I have Parkinson’s,” he said, adding that he realised the officers were working long hours and trying to control the event properly, but they had not, in his case, acted correctly. He said he did not want to make further comment until he received a response from Surrey police.

There is not here, of course, but that is increasingly becoming a less desirable sounding place. This regrettable overreaction doesn’t help. But, hey, they kept this guy from worrying anyone. I know people who deal with Parkinson’s and I struggle to imagine having to see them in a position like this.

Tomorrow: a doctor’s appointment, and something really fun!

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2
Aug 12

Yes, I’d be a cat in my home

“That settles it. The cat loves you more than she loves me!”

Those were the words I heard two weeks ago. This was just after I broke my collarbone. We had noticed that Allie wasn’t quite herself. And she was losing her hair. We looked up the reasons cats lose their hair. It could be dietary or a disease or stress. We haven’t changed her diet. And she seemed healthy enough in every other respect — just as wacky as ever. And there’s no more stress-free environment for a cat, I think, than our home.

Nevertheless, out of concern The Yankee took her cat to the vet. They performed all the vet tests. I’m sure they spelled out some things so the c-a-t wouldn’t catch o-n. (She’s a smart cat, we tell ourselves, in jest. We know how smart she is and isn’t.)

But when she came home she put the cat carrier on the ground and opened it up to return Allie to her normal environment. She recounted the conversation with the vet.

She looks small, but she’s incredibly active and kitten-like for a cat of her age. She doesn’t have any symptom of disease or illness. So maybe it is stress, the vet says. “Have you gotten new furniture? A new pet? A new kid? A new car?”

No, no, no, no … and how does a new car figure into that? What cat patient of yours told you that?

The only thing that is different, my darling wife told the vet, is that I broke my collarbone. I was in an immobilizer and sitting in the arm chair. Her chair. (It was about the only place I could get comfortable for two weeks.) The problem, as far as we could tell, is that Allie wasn’t spending her regular amount of time on me. She has an afternoon nap in my lap and there’s a part of the evening where she comes to visit me. Also every time someone stands up she acts like a toddler. “Hold me, hold me.” I didn’t do a lot of that for several days.

That’s it, the vet said. Everything else is the same. She can’t get in his lap and he’s forced her out of her chair. Only you can’t do anything about that for a while.

So she came home and said that. “The cat loves you more than she loves me! Whenever I’ve gotten ill you’ve never had to take her to the vet because she was stressed out about it.”

The next week, the very day I removed the immobilizer she was all over me again. She’d stayed away on her own prior to that.

Earlier this week I moved from the chair over to the sofa. I can sit comfortably there again. (Small victories.)

Allie?

Everything is back to normal in her world.

I would make some allusion to July rolling out and August wet-heaving its way in. But this is summer in the Deep South. You don’t even really notice it anymore after a time. The movement, I mean. You notice the heat. Can’t get away from the heat sometimes. And the heat tends to minimize your movement unless you’re in the mood for it. But June turns into July and the mercury really takes a big jump. August, as a season, never feels much different from July.

You don’t notice a change until late September. And usually that is more of a left brain “Good grief it is almost October, enough with the heat already!”

There is no out like a baker’s oven, in like a sauna comparison for today, though. Everything is just hot. To spice things up you’ll sometimes get distance thunder. We had that today, and more due in the overnight. To really spice things up you might be in the right spot every now and then to get thunder really close by. I woke up to the that earlier this week. Lightning strikes were very close, according to the old lifeguard counting trick. The thunder wasn’t loud, but Lord how it rolled. I counted three different strikes where I could hear the energy moving away for 30 seconds or more.

Rode my bike in the trainer this evening. Got an hour in. Felt really good, until it didn’t. It is amazing how much fitness you can lose in three weeks. But that is a problem of my lungs. My arm is fine. I turned the pedals standing out of the saddle, too, reducing my points of contact to four. Felt great.

So that’s right on schedule. My doctor said two to three weeks for the stationary, and next Monday is three weeks. He told me it will be four or five weeks before I can ride again on the road. I might err on the long side of that estimate though, just to be sure.

This is what I don’t understand: Professional cyclist Fabian Cancellara broke his collarbone at the beginning of April. He fell in a race in a bad way. He had a quadruple fracture. I’ve seen the X-ray, it was bad. And yet, just two months later, he won the prologue of the Tour de France and held the lead for days. I’m not making a comparison, because that’s just foolish. Cancellara is a terrific cyclist and a hard man, but how did he do that?

I’ll just console myself that he spent more time lying on the ground than I did. And I walked off. Of course, he had a bevy of doctors telling him to wait for the ambulance. You don’t get a premiere athlete up and walk him around after a spill like his. YouTube it if you like — Cancellara + Flanders 2012 should do it — I’m not interested in watching bike crashes all day.

Out for dinner tonight. Visitors were passing through town and had a craving for Niffers. That’s what people always want when they come back to town. Even, we learned tonight, the politicians. (We know politicians.) Good thing we like the place. (They now have cheesecake, the sign said.)

And that’s really the day. I rested, I read, I rode, I stretched my shoulder, I ate. It was delightful in almost every way, but I would like to be moving just a little bit more. Every day a little bit more, right?