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Thursday

It was a pretty full day

Had the big anniversary dinner last night, which also means the anniversary self-portrait, traditionally taken right about on this spot, the “Oh, yes, we should take a picture” spot.

We had reservations at the marvelous Warehouse Bistro — a local five-star restaurant that is hidden in the oldest industrial park in neighboring Opelika. All the big signatures are on the wall. You get the impression that a lot of powerful deals are made there.

We now have an “our usual table,” even though we go there once a year. It is a bit out of our normal price range. But the food is so good.

Here’s the New Zealand rack of lamb:

Try the … well, try everything. It is a five-star restaurant.

Rode a quick 19 miles today. Had dinner with our friend Jeremy. Did some research and planning — turns out the Harvey Updyke trial, which was set to get underway this week, was continued once again. That got scrapped this morning when the judge, concerned over this guy’s inability to stop telling members of the media he poisoned the fabled trees at Toomer’s Corner, media exposure and jury fairness, delayed the trial again.

The guy has talked to ESPN, Finebaum, Finebaum again and been featured in a thin television documentary that had a theatrical release. People have heard of him. This has all been an indecipherably, convoluted defense strategy, I’m almost convinced of it. (Finebaum, because he knows it is good for his business, has decided that Updyke has been punished enough. Last one out turn out the lights.)

(Incidentally, good on The Plainsman’s reporter for striking up the conversation that led to the story linked above. Word is that Updyke told the reporter he did it without being asked. The reporter was supposed to be working on something similar to a sympathy piece, but realized his story changed right in front of him. Of course he wrote it. The Plainsman called it a confession, and treated it like this was news. It was not. Updyke has been saying this since February of 2011. Also they missed on the age of the trees by 60 years. Facts are important, tricky things. But it was nice hustle nonetheless. Now the young student-journalist has been subpoenaed in this case. Nice start to a journalism career, that.)

The timing of this scheduled appearance had been fortuitous, though, because we’d fashioned a little project around it. But the decision today scrapped that plan. Worked out well, though. Our new plan fleshed out as a much better idea.

Incidentally, we’re 16 months out from his arrest, and still nothing more than an arraignment and depositions in bizarro-Updyke land.

Did a little packing tonight. Put the brand new bike rack on the car. Read every direction in the booklet. This is important. There are cars behind us that would like our bikes to stay on our new bike rack. And we’d really rather not trash our bike.

Tomorrow we’ll be on the road again.

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14
Jun 12

Wheels and bolts and things

My bike at rest. It deserves it.

Not because I’ve been riding a lot, but because yesterday was just hills.

Lots of hills. I rode this one over and over again, finally quitting when my times stopped improving.

So I did 15 miles of hills yesterday. That’s a lot of stomping on the bike for a guy with big feet like me. Thirty more miles today. Just as I got back home I glanced down at the odometer.

That’s for the year. So I’m only about 450 miles behind where I want to be on the year. I’ll catch up eventually.

The story about the faucet: This would be a great entry to the running page on fixing things in our house. I don’t have a category for it. It is too late to add one now and I’d probably just name it something hateful anyway. But we can now add to a list of repair jobs that include the air conditioner (twice), the shower, refrigerator, dish washer (twice), washing machine, the toilets (three times between them) and more.

We’ve lived here for less than two years.

So the kitchen faucet developed a drip. We found a certain way that you could turn the nozzle and the handle to minimize the problem. This worked for a while. And then it stopped working. And earlier this week the drip almost became a stream.

I’ve tried to take the faucet apart before so I could replace the washers, but the water is so hard here that all of the innards (plumbing term!) were fused together. I tried this for a few days. I tried this with WD-40 and various other things found in the cabinets and garage.

Having failed at this simple task I decided to just replace the entire faucet. So out from the cabinet came all of the cleaning supplies. Under the sink went my head. The supply lines, I discovered, were also fused on the faucet end. OK, then. I’ll just take it apart and pull the supply lines up from the top and buy new stinking supply lines with my brand new faucet that has to be installed because I can’t take the old one apart to install $.75 worth of rubber gaskets to it.

I’m thrilled.

The supply lines were disconnected from the bottom. I disconnected the sprayer nozzle. I freed one of the nuts that attaches the faucet to the sink from underneath.

The sink, you’ll notice if you spend enough time in the cabinets, is a great two tub cast iron deal. This is the most sturdy thing we own, I’m certain of it. That and the other nut that is attaching the faucet to the sink. That joker was fused with the bolt in the worst way. But underneath that nut was a concave washer type thing (more plumbing terminology!). It, too, was rusting.

And so it was that I found myself donning goggles, grabbing a screwdriver and just stabbing the crap out of that washer type thing. The plan was to punch out so much of that rust-crusted impediment and then just pull everything out from the top.

Which, eventually, I did.

So we went to Lowe’s and bought a new faucet. Nothing they had matched exactly, but that’s OK because we needed a working sink.

And we got in trouble at Lowe’s too! They have those rolling ladder step things and we moved one into the aisle to inspect the faucets above our line of sight. An old guy with a ponytail and a red vest took exception to this. I understood his point — safety is important — but he also understood mine. There is no one around in the store to give you any help. I know this because I’d done this exact same thing on this exact same aisle for more than 10 minutes last night. There were no red vests to be found. So I went to Home Depot, which is literally right across the street. And I stayed on their faucet aisle for even longer, and there were no orange aprons to be found.

Which brought up a great conversation about all of this online. In the middle of which came the Home Depot social media person with the “Oh no! Sorry to hear that! Which store were you in?” It might have been rude, but I said “Is it unfair to say “All of them”? Based on the responses I received from others the rep on floor help is staggeringly poor.”

The social media person did not write back to that.

The Lowe’s red vest with the ponytail came back later, as we were wrapping up our choices, and commiserated on the faucet problem. He knew they had a floor problem. I’m sure the Lowe’s managers do too; they just don’t care. Home Depot? Same thing.

But it gave me time to see things like this, the paper towel holder!

You’ve never seen such excitement for such a prosaic tool! It holds your paper towels! Above the countertop! It holds! Paper towels!

This, at a glance, is simply disturbing:

A jaundiced hand emerging from the wall, holding some sort of Matrix device. Or is it from Alien? Or is it Elvis’ alternative universe microphone. Don’t sing into this one though, you’ll just drown.

Or you could go into our backyard:

It rained a lot today.

Oh, and I installed the new faucet. Took eight minutes. It better work for years.

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7
Jun 12

The cat is mad at us, and I might not be pleased myself

We’re back home. I unpack the laundry — Not clothes. You do not take dirty clothes to someone else’s place to clean, of course. You leave with clothes; you return with laundry. Home, if you’ve ever wondered, is where you do your laundry. — and throw it in the basket or, sometimes, in the washing machine as soon as I arrive home.

The Yankee … she does something. I am usually too fixated to notice. Unload car. Unpack suitcase. Hide suitcase from myself so as to trick the eye that there are no more trips, no more windshields, insulting airport experiences or unusual pillows.

Typically this works. She’s petting the cat, I’m distributing the suitcases, the backpacks and whatever else we have going on. Eventually Allie comes to me, we’ve missed each other, but I want to have these things out of the way. And she’ll camp out in the suitcases if they’re left sitting around for too long.

We’ve been gone a while, but we have someone who is kind enough to spend some time with Allie every day. Check the food and the water and pet her. You’ve never seen a cat crave more from “hoomans” than this one. And so all night last night it was stamp, stomp, meow, head butt, yowl, stamp, stomp.

We don’t have the heart, yet, to tell her we’re leaving again tomorrow. The suitcases, it turns out, didn’t go very far.

At least all of our trips are really great trips!

This is the scene at the Crepe Myrtle Cafe, the local market where we get a lot of healthy food. This is some sort of onion flower:

We get this entire basket of fresh fruits and vegetables every Thursday. Most of them are grown very nearby. The girl that sold them to me today asked if I needed help carrying them to my car. Time to get that hair coloring product, apparently.

I mean, this basket is packed solid and gets hefty after a while, but really. I can handle it. And if I can’t, I’ll be in a commercial for one of those Rascal scooters. Delicious veggies, though:

Finally, got a chance to ride my bike again. Did 28 miles today, working on the backside of the big hill in town. There’s less traffic there, it has two great bends and is nicely shaded in the afternoon. I was timing my speed up it, going up and then down, up and then down. When the time started falling I moved on.

Elsewhere in my ride, I found a new personal best. I’ll have to double check, but I think I might have been speeding:

I believe I could get another mile or so out of that stretch, actually. Something else to shoot for.

FInally, my grandmother is feeling a bit under the weather. We went card shopping. This is the one I did not get:

The inside:

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31
May 12

Travel day

Busy, long, early, full travel day. Here are video clips I shot on the Saugatuck River.

I woke up at 5:30 this morning. More tomorrow.

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24
May 12

Local media shake-up

Last night David Carr ran a piece on his Media Decoder blog pointing to big changes coming to the Times-Picayune in New Orleans.

The T-P management found themselves behind the curve. Many of their employees heard the news elsewhere. It was a morning of scramble in New Orleans. In Alabama the next domino tipped. Sister papers in Huntsville, Birmingham and Mobile all announced their similar changes. Starting this fall their dailies will be gone. There will be a greater emphasis on the online news content. They’ll publish a dead tree version three times a week. A new company, Alabama Media Group, is being formed:

The change is designed to reshape how Alabama’s leading media companies deliver award-winning local news, sports and entertainment coverage in an increasingly digital age. The Alabama Media Group will dramatically expand its news-gathering efforts around the clock, seven days a week, while offering enhanced printed newspapers on a schedule of three days a week. The newspapers will be home-delivered and sold in stores on Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays only.

A second company, Advance Central Services Alabama, will handle production, distribution, technology, finance and human resources, and will be led by current Birmingham News President and Publisher Pam Siddall. Both companies are owned by Advance Publications, Inc.

Driving these changes are rapid advances in how readers engage with news content across all platforms, print and digital.

Carr likely tipped their hand, forcing this announcement before Newhouse and Advance had hoped. But there is also a sense of inevitability here. The writing has been on that particular wall. These are market trends, economic realities and publishers moving with their audiences.

Now, before anything else: Clearly there are tough, uncertain days ahead for many employees, and that’s more than a little regrettable.

There will also be a lot of opportunities in store, as well.

The reaction I’ve read (see below) from the community has generally been one critical of the paper reduction. Interestingly, few have discussed the news outlets’ online growth. Perhaps people feel too deeply about the newspapers, despite their shrinking circulation. Perhaps they don’t have faith in the ability of the company — with many of the same staffers, mind you — to do the job online. One person’s interpretation of the reaction is as good as the next. Alabama Media Group needs to get out in front of that, and I’m sure they will. But, between today’s news and the new site rollout, they’ve had a busy week.

Some readers will initially be marginalized. That will be unfortunate. (Someone might have suggested that that number is declining for a variety of reasons, that subscriptions for the papers here and elsewhere have been in decline for years. Also, the numbers for the website have soared. They probably then suggested they are taking the long view. Wouldn’t that be refreshing for a news outlet?)

How many people who take the paper will feel they’re getting less of a service when this goes into effect? Think quality over quantity. I’m hoping it is a really great three-day paper which buttresses an incredible online effort. If that happens it will be driven by the strength of great reporting on the site.

The question we must really and seriously consider is “How will these developments serve the community?”

If it puts more people in coverage areas and reaches under-served communities, great. If it means more watchdog journalism, marvelous. There will need to be more than mullet tossing pictures from the beach and A-Day coverage from the quad — but I’m a traditionalist. If the coverage is there, and the coverage is good, good things will come.

This is a sea change rather than a sinking outlet desperately signaling they’re drowning. Hopefully the staff (there are plenty of hardworking, talented people at each paper and at al.com) that stay on and the readers/viewers they work for will give it a good chance.

The idea is that The Huntsville Times, Birmingham News and the Press-Register will continue on, expanding their coverage with more reporters on the ground. Those outlets, which have long been sister publications, will become much more collaborative. There will be growing pains. There will also be streamlining. The key, as always, will be in the quality of the content. If the quality goes up, the communities win.

The Montgomery Advertiser will this fall become the state’s largest daily. Gannett recently announced they’ll soon be putting that publication behind an online paywall.

Here is a collection of the reactions found on Twitter in the hours immediately after the announcement. These are representative rather than exhaustive. I gathered these through Twitterfall, using key word searches relative to the cities, publication names and parent company ownership. They are arranged here chronologically.

Disclosure: I worked for Advance at al.com for four-plus years, long before all of these developments came to pass. Good people; good company.