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A first, two firsts, three firsts, maybe

This snow and ice is never going to melt. Mostly because it has nowhere to go. The conditions have not been conducive to condensation, which would hurry the process along. Instead, the air has been cold, unceasingly, and relentlessly dry. Oh, you can see some rooftops now, asphalt shingles darkened by the moisture that has sat on them for almost three weeks now, but that’s just false hope. It’s nothing but this from here on in.

Those hours of sleet we had last month seemed like a lovely thing at the time. We had all the groceries we needed, no travel planned and I’d pulled out every light source and battery we own as a therapeutic just-in-case. We never lost power. You could get out and drive again on the bigger roads on the third and fourth day — if you could get to those bigger roads.

Mostly, it’s just boring. Going outside is nice. Looking out the window and seeing grass and trees and things is nice. Instead, I just stare through curtains and blinds, thinking about the things you can’t do.

It’s never about the things I should be doing, which is weird.

Today I did class prep for tomorrow’s classes.

It occurred to me when I was wrapping that up that this was a unique day of class prep. I always spend at least the day before building or finishing and polishing the next day’s classwork. Today was the first time I have ever not had to build it all out from scratch. Ever? Ever. Two classes tomorrow, and I didn’t have to start all over to get ready. I spent my time reviewing notes from previous lectures that I am going to use tomorrow. First time ever.

The first class I taught was in … what? In 2009?

The really nice thing is that next Monday/Tuesday this will happen again. Twice in a row! But then the streak ends. Still, this is nice, and the way it should be more often. One day it will be, perhaps. We’ll see. We don’t know that, but we’ll see.

I’ve never liked “we’ll see,” but it is an inescapable sentence.

We drove over the river this evening. Parked in a parking deck. Walked a few blocks to where we were going. Shivered part of the way, because I did not carry a coat, because I didn’t realize all of that. But, hey, that’s my fault and no one else’s. Anyway, it was warm where we were going. And they had a restroom and food, and also the evening’s entertainment.

We walked into this little comedy club, which was some slightly larger room behind an empty bar. Probably the joint sat 100, 120 people. Cozy little place. Unless you were sitting right at the back of the room you probably felt like you were sitting right at the stage. It felt both dusty, but clean. And a little shopworn. Three long steps would get you across the stage and the back wall was a faded old cityscape mural.

It made me think, as comedy clubs always do, about how comedians in my hometown would brag about our venue when they played there. The Stardome was one of the best in the country, they’d say. In my very limited experience, they were right! Also, that place has a real menu. This place offered three sandwiches, three pizzas and drinks. They didn’t have a drink minimum, they had an item minimum. Extortionate so-and-sos. But I choose to think that means all of the money from tickets goes to the performers, which is a nice thought.

We saw Kristen Key this evening. She got her break from one of those comedy variety reality show things, but we discovered her on Instagram a few years ago. This was the first time she was in the same city we were in at the same time, and so of course we went. (She was also at the concert last night, and now I think she’s following us.)

Her Instagram feed is full of clips of her Q&A period, but here’s a set piece from another show, which we saw this evening.

And here’s another song.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Kristin Key (@thekristinkey)

The questions she got during this show were … not good. Someone was looking for love. Someone else’s relative is a huge fan but couldn’t make it because of a medical procedure. A third person was looking for some sort of dating advice she could share. Someone asked about her favorite song from last night’s Brandi Carlile concert. And someone asked what her favorite Winter Olympic sport is and why is not curling. She said her favorite sport was curling.

She got the standing ovation in the little club at the end, and got a little teary about it. And then she was standing out front to meet people as they left, spending several minutes with anyone that asked, which was nice. She mad a video for the person who couldn’t be there because of health reasons. We talked with her for a moment, and she, of course, told us to come back the next time she’s in town, and we will, especially since I just thought I should ask her to record an outgoing voicemail message for me.

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9
Feb 26

Right, back in the tundra

See? Very quick trip. We landed in the frozen and still not melted north before noon yesterday. Plenty of time to get some work done before the big game, and a lot of time to lament this just, ya know, still everywhere.

Maybe it’ll melt by next weekend, at which point we’ll be three weeks into this snow and ice.

It’s a little excessive, as all.

And very boring.

The wedding Saturday night was anything but. We planned leaving the hotel in time to get there and get a good seat. But you never know about traffic and it was nuts. The Uber driver said it was nuts. We agreed it was nuts. The ceremony was four miles from the hotel and you could have grow a peanut vine to maturity and harvest the peanuts in the amount of time it took to get there. And the drive mad some Herculean efforts. His second alternate route got us there, and got us there just in time. And so we saw the mother of the groom come down the aisle and heard everyone react to her dress, which was gorgeous.

She was the unmitigated star of the day, and everybody liked it that way, even her son. The ceremony was brief, but well done. The officiant had babysat the groom way back when. And the whole day was full of little circular little stories like that. The wedding cake was surrounded by the mother’s wedding skirts, which have become a family history as much as an heirloom. Everyone in their family gets their name embroidered in it when they get married. They called out the names of deceased family members during the service. There was a special table for photographs of those people. It was all quite lovely.

We were sat near the band. And when the food was done the band played. And they played for about three hours. A lot of fun. Near the end of the night, the horn section got one last moment in the lime light.

Sunday, we got up, finished packing and headed to the airport. In, out and up very quickly. An easy flight back, a little turbulence just before we landed. Out of the airport and into the 19 degree weather. It felt like 0 degrees. It felt like nothing. It felt cold. And it got about negative six degrees colder over night.

Today was about working on work stuff. Wrote my online class. Built up notes from the halftime show for a conversation tomorrow in Rituals and Traditions. I wonder if the students enjoyed the show. We’ll talk about a few stories in Criticism, and so I re-read those. Then I started lining up all of the things that need to get done in the next few weeks. It’s a lot, and at least its cold outside, so I can stay inside, and get some of it done.

And now, I have to spend the rest of the night in Qualtrics, to finish building a survey.

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5
Feb 26

Left, on a jet plane

Want to guess where I am? You can guess where I am. Here’s your first hint, I am not at home. Here’s your second hint, it’s a quick trip. Here’s your third hint, here’s the mode of travel. Or, at least, part of it.

We are attending a wedding this weekend, meaning a few nights out in hotels and restaurants and with one or two people we know. We’ll be in and out in no time flat. Getting married is one of my lovely bride’s former students. (This is the third wedding we’ve been to out of that particular cohort.) It is a black tie affair. (No pressure, other former students.)

We are also chummy with the groom’s parents, who are delightful people and I am looking forward to seeing them all tomorrow.

From the airport, and after an easy direct flight, we took an Uber to the hotel. The woman that drove was was just adorable and hilarious. She told some stories about some of her clients. And she let me lean into a few jokes about them. A little small talk with a southern woman is a thing to behold. She dodged traffic and avoided idiots and got us to our hotel.

We checked in with no problem, and then had dinner at a newly opened hipster tavern a few blocks away. I had one of those burgers that was overstuffed with condiments. You had to be careful to lean all the way over your plate to avoid dripping anything on you. Also, they had spicy ketchup which was, authentically, spicy. I don’t know what inauthentically spicy ketchup tastes like, but this wasn’t that. It had a flavor profile that haunted the taste buds, lingering there like a hint, and a memory, a smoke that won’t leave the room, a spice that burned after its welcome was worn out. Fortunately, I could wash it down with a glass of sweet tea. Another thing to behold, and I held it, right there in my hand. And then I had a refill.

Maybe another. Who can count such a joyous thing?

Tomorrow, we have meetings, and then a welcome party for the wedding. And some virtual work on this tiny little desk in our little room. It’ll all be charming, and about 25 degrees warmer than home.

We started working on a survey instrument today in Rituals and Traditions. I’m going to have the class survey members of the campus community. The survey data will, hopefully, help them in their group projects. So there I sat, keyboard in hand, typing up the suggested questions that the class came up.

We started as a brainstorming session. No question too silly. Well, may not that question, that question is silly. We wound up with about 40 questions. And then we took a pass through the whole lot of them and struck a few that probably wouldn’t help too much. We re-framed some of the questions to shape them up a bit better. And now I have to cull the 30 or so that remain. Thirty is probably too many for the type of survey we’re going to conduct, so I have to get this list down to 15 or so. And then build the survey.

Great fun!

In Criticism we watched the HBO documentary Fists of Freedom, which covers the lead up, and protests in the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City.

I like Lee Evans’ part of the story, because he seems like a fun guy. The best segment here is Bob Beamon’s record-breaking long jump. It’s a beautiful moment of filmmaking. Scrub ahead to 36:08 for that.

They called it the leap of the century, and it took something like 15 minutes to resolve the distance. In the end, he’d jumped 21 inches farther than the previous world record. (And the world record holder was in the field at those Games.) Beamon’s mark would stand for decades.

The whole documentary is well done. (Though there are some weird edits in the embedded video for some reason.) Released in 1999, almost all of the primary participants are included here. Bronze medal winner John Carlos, notably, is absent. And we’ll talk about that in class next week. This documentary, and next week’s will hopefully set the stage for how we think about documentaries over the rest of the term.

But I’m not going to think about that until Monday. For now, I’m going to relish these 35-degree lows and contemplate the sheer novelty of a 50+ degree day tomorrow. It is not that at home. Spring is about to hit, here, right on time. I know that because things will be budding by February 14th, when a normal spring should arrive. I know that because I have the curse of experience, which becomes an embittered thing in the second week of February and I see a low temperature of … 15.

At least, when it gets even colder at home this weekend we won’t be there. Until Sunday, when it gets even colder. But not here, and not right now.

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2
Feb 26

When you rebrand the weather, I am over the weather

Monday. February. Groundhog’s Day and all of that. Still snow and ice on the ground. Hasn’t budged a micro, hasn’t melted a gram. In a group chat the other day I pointed out that none of my friends back home could say anything to me about their weather until we’d been above freezing for two days in a row. As it happens, tomorrow might be the second day. It did hit 32 today. We are promised 35 for tomorrow. And so, now, another post about how the weather has impacted everything. (This snow fell 10 days ago. I’ve not had too many snows in my life where the stuff just … stayed around. I can think of two. And, quite frankly, it has lost its appeal.

Saturday around midday I was out trying to widen the driveway a bit. We’d carved out a path last week just wide enough for a vehicle and, somehow, it was only just wide enough. Well, finally I got tired of that and so I gripped the shovel firmly and determinedly, and went to work. In that time I dug out the spot behind where my car is parked in the garage, and what I estimate the space necessary behind it to do the back and turn maneuver. I also tried to chip away at a few other places that were troubling. Working up a sweat in a long-sleeved t-shirt, I used our biggest shovel to bend the ice to my will for an hour. Until, that is, my back was bent against my will.

About that time my lovely bride returned home from her morning activities and midday grocery run. We did the grocery system. She carries in an arm full of groceries and I try to carry everything else in, so she can pretend to fuss at me. In the kitchen, with all of the bags on the island, I hand her things for the refrigerator. And then I hand her the things going into the freezer. And then I hand her the things going in the pantry. Finally, I stack up the bags and put them back out in the garage for her car. There’s nothing to it, but we do this every week and it’s also important.

Speaking of the kitchen island, I happened to be in just the right place to catch this bit of anarchistic artistry.

It was how Poseidon brought the spatula to the floor, looked around and walked off. Usually, when he does cat stuff like this, he owns it. He will sit by the thing he has knocked over or broken and wait until you see it, and him with it. It’s admirable, even as it is frustrating. But, here, he just walked off. Maybe it was because a rubber spatula can’t shatter, and there’s nothing to leak.

Somehow, we both managed to stifle our laughter until he’d left the scene of the his vandalism. We wouldn’t want him to feel he was being praised for all of this, after all.

To get away from the snow and the ice — snowcrete they are calling it — I went to Tokyo for an hour or so. Saturday night, I renamed the basement “Tokyo.”

The thing about Rouvy I haven’t figured out yet is everything. This was a flat route, according to the ride profile I saw before I started pedaling. There were was a tiny bit of climbing, but nothing to write home about. The profile I saw after the ride was … lumpy.

It was 26 miles through the various parts of Tokyo. Whoever recorded this most have done so in the very early morning. There was almost no one on the roads, as you can see from that image. Also, there were a lot of red lights, and the video seemed to catch them all. It is not at all demoralizing to be pedaling your little heart out, to see your avatar pedaling his little digital heart out, but you’re not going anywhere.

Anyway, it was a good sweat. I just have to do it more. Someone motivate me.

The weather is absolutely not motivating me. It is not motivating me precisely when it should be. One day this weather will not be our weather. One day we’ll emerge from the ice age. It will not be this day, for we are still solidly, firmly, in the Pleistocene Epoch.

Right in the middle, I would assume.

Here’s the view of yesterday’s sunset from my office window.

I think I spent all day at my desk. I’m not sure what I did with all of that time. Some work was done. But there was more work to be done today. We’ll get into that tomorrow, though.

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29
Jan 26

There’s no pattern like migratory patterns

I recorded this video, then forgot about this video. Then the platform wouldn’t let me upload the video. Then it did let me upload this video. So this Monday video is now a Thursday video. But it could just as well be from today.

These geese hang out in some fields a mile or two to the south. And they’re heading back there in this shot. They’re flying back from the sloughs a few miles to the north of here. I’m not sure their schedule, but lately they’ve been flying the other direction in the early evening.

I love the geese, and the honking. I love them because I hear them passing by, and because I don’t hear them constantly.

Let’s talk about work. That’s what that image just above is about. That’s on campus … somewhere. I do not work in that building. I haven’t seen that building.

One day, when it isn’t 5 degrees out, I’ll have to take a shot of our building to use as another banner.

I was dreading class today because I felt the need to try to cram in two days worth of material in one. Going slower is better, but owing to the weather, I feel behind, hence the urge to overfill one day. Also, these were designed as two important days.

Fortunately, I’d asked the students in my Rituals and Traditions class to write a brief paper about this topic in advance, and that told me exactly where we all are, so I can tailor the presentation and cut the superfluous. I also had a colleague stop by and talk to the class for a few minutes, just to help set the table. And so, somehow, the class moved along nicely.

Later in the afternoon I had to complete the stage setting for the Criticism class, and there’s a lot to establish at this point for the rest of the term. I prepared one slide deck out of two, and had to work through varying pages of notes all out of order, hoping to make it flow, determined to make sure it made sense.

We made it through. A lot of what we discussed, in both classes, will come up a lot throughout the term, of course. And in Criticism, at least, there aren’t a lot of lectures. As I joke, they don’t want me to lecture, and today they found out why. That class becomes more conversational and Socratic, and I’m glad for it. I just need to figure out a way to make Rits and Trads something like that, too.

Happily, it was still daylight when we left campus at 5 p.m., and a bracing 6 degrees, having warmed a full 20 percent from several hours earlier. It was dark by the time we got home, however, but the days are growing longer. In just two more weeks nautical twilight will be at 6:30, and that’s the second sign that there’s seasonal hope.

There’s eight inches of packed ice outside my window right now, so it feels like a bit of false hope, but nevertheless. The sun is telling us that winter is on its way out. We’re gonna win.