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The Wednesday haul. Minus a few.
As I was out there picking them up, two people walked down the street with their dog. “You should set up a farm stand,” the guy said.
I know right? You want some?
“Really?”
Yes sir!
He walked up into the yard. “Are you sure?”
The tree isn’t hardly done yet. Here’s some for the road.
And so I gave him a big handful of peaches for their walk.
Now to load up the neighbors.
Just another mild, gray August day. Weird in the ways that any day can be when it’s warm, but pleasant, but overcast. Is this cloud cover? Is it Canada on fire? Why do both feel equally ominous when clearly one is worse than the other?
I went to campus today to visit with a colleague. We are discussing a class and she has been most generous with her time and thoughts and we had a nice hour-long chat today. I came away from it with several pages of notes. And now I can complete my preparations for that class. The rest will just be execution.
Pretty soon I’ll have two of these classes under control. I’m not sure if I am behind schedule or right on time. It depends on when the thought occur.
I also went downstairs to the classroom I’ll be in this fall to test the equipment and play some videos. I had seven to try and six worked perfectly. The other will too, in time. And, for that, I have time. That class only needs a few supplemental sets of notes and two extra bits of source material before I can call it done. And that’s what the rest of this week will be about.
But if you ask me right now, it’s that other other class that’ll keep me stressed out between now and December. So far, it is just a few pages of notes. Helpful, structurally useful, but hardly complete. Fortunately, I live with, and share a campus office with, a person who knows all about that class. The material I know. The sequence of the class is what I have to wrap my arms around. And being fully prepared is what next week will be about.
When I got home my lovely bride was off riding her bike and doing a run with the tri club. So I set off for a quick evening ride. Just 15 miles to be moving in the breeze. To feel a few raindrops on my skin. To enjoy those brilliant August skies.
This was our basic “You’ve got an hour to ride” route. It’s a simple out-and-back, and there are a few places you can add a loop or two to make an easy 20 miler if you like. But let me demonstrate to you what I’ve been complaining about, when I’ve lately been complaining about the wind.
When I headed out, NNW, I get to the next little crossroads town and there are two flag poles. Flag poles, hold flags, of course, and flags are useful for telling a story. On the way out, I passed two flags that said “right-to-left crosswind.” And a reasonable one, too, these flags were on full display, and that wasn’t surprising because I had been experiencing for 18 minutes. When I came back reversing my course and on my way home, 12 minutes later, the first flag said “left-to-right crosswind.” The other said “headwind.”
Look how close together these flagpoles are!
I’m hardly an expert in this, but Strava tells me I’ve passed by that spot, at least going one way, 48 times. So I know a little bit. And it doesn’t take a northern European or a meteorologist to look behind that fire station and see that the background doesn’t change between in that short a distance, 269 feet!
But the wind surely can.
We’ve been on an animal cracker kick lately, and I’ve noticed that we somehow purchased the generative AI version of animals. These are the animals from Pandora, better known to the Na’vi, than us.
And if they aren’t “James Cameron Presents: Animal Crackers” just which planet are these mutant animal crackers from?
Someone decided that Zoom meetings should last an hour. That’s probably too long, but you can get a lot of stuff done in an hour. And that’s a good thing. There’s always the pleasant surprise when some of them wrap up even more quickly. On the other hand, sometimes they can run longer. And at 90 minutes today, I tried the first of the “thanks” and “goodbyes.” Later, I was more successful with the “thank yous” and “get outta heres.”
It was a beneficial meeting. I got a page full of notes. Some clarity was brought to plans. We have two separate steps of action to take, and also another new role for me at the office.
If anyone is keeping track, I’m now sitting on five departmental committees, and chairing one of them. I’m also on a university committee. And then I have this new thing, which has to do with social media, which I regard as a hazing prank. There’s also the Center, for which I write. I wrote something today, in fact. And then I am doing new class preps seven, eight and nine this term. I have been here four terms so far.
The social media thing is directing a student employee who is working on departmental socials. This is as hard as you want it to be, and can be as fruitful as you want it to be. The good news is that I have a returning student to help light the way, and it is a person I’ve had in two classes, so we have some familiarity. And we have a meeting set for tomorrow, now. So two meetings, two days in a row, and it’s July.
I’m not even on the clock, technically.
Speaking of social media, I braved Instagram today, trying to search for something from both my memory and the even more vague and forgetful algorithm. Finally got frustrated with the whole enterprise, which led me to this funny, not self-referential haha, but also not self-aware haha.
It doesn’t become self-aware, in my view, until it cleans up its act.
The thing I wrote, which should be published later this week, is a 1,200 word column about baseball. It’s not hard. It’s fun — except for the part where my computer crashed. That was a setback. And that took up most of the rest of the day, a day which was just too hot to do anything else but to sit and sweat. And have meetings.
The herb I mentioned last week? Spearmint. And, friend, we have a lot of it.
Not pictured: the rest of it.
You can use it in teas, salads, ointments and chew on the leaves. (The novelty of that one wears off quickly.) You can preserve it. Why you need to preserve spearmint escapes me. You can’t get rid of the stuff.
I have also, today, settled on the schedule of my Criticism class. I selected two more great readings for it today. One or two more of those and the full outline will be complete, leaving me just the course, the syllabus and the slides to make. So I’m on schedule? Because, like everyone else, I forgot there is a 31st day in July. Yay! More time to work during my time off! (It’s a good thing.)
I worked on a class meeting today. That means, if my notes hold up, one more day’s work is prepared — at least in brief. There’s always some refinement, some bright idea, some thing that has to tie in, or some other thing that has to carry over. These things, in my experience are never done. But if we can all leave a class with two or three things to really ponder and learn from, we’re doing something right.
Also, I have discovered my first meeting of the new term. It will happen next week, a full month before the term begins. And that’s how it begins, in dribs and drabs in the months when you are off the payroll. Funny, that.
I had a nice bike ride this evening. One of the better ones of the year, which I suppose makes up for the last several mediocre experiences and outright failures. Probably it is meant to carry over through the next several of each, as well.
Went out fast, and with a tailwind, apparently. And I worked so hard on the way back in to keep up the speed that I forgot to take a photo. So here’s a bit of asphalt, right at the end.
So that was an 18-mile outing, and I was done in an hour. You can do the math. Even I can do that math.
I recall reading somewhere years ago that, for amateurs (which needs the added superlative “very” in my case), riding 12-15 mph was slow, 15-18 was considered average, and 18-21 was fast. So this, then, was one of those brief times when I was approaching fast.
Also, when I got back in the measurements say the headwind was 13 mph. I’m terrible in the wind, so I must have gotten quite aero today.
You might recall that in April we had to do some work on the honeysuckle. It was growing over a trellis, but the trellis was rusting through. The trellis was rusting through because it was made of a cheap metal and that’s just the nature of cheap products. One time last year the wind got into the honeysuckle, which was top-heavy, and pulled the whole thing down. We carefully stacked it back up, put some pavers on the feet of the trellis to way it down and hoped for the best. And it worked. But, this spring, we realized that rusted metal doesn’t heal itself, so the old trellis had to come out, which meant we had to do some surgery on the vines, because it was woven in … about like you imagine vines would do. In extricating all of that, which was the best part of an afternoon, we found just how deep into the earth the old trellis’ post hoc anchoring went. The old owners of the house had sunk some metal rods into the soil, here where the heavy land and the green sands meet. Some of it was pretty cheap itself. But two of the pieces were honest-to-goodness rebar, and those were put in with enthusiasm.
All of that came out. The honeysuckle got cut back out of necessity and for shaping purposes, and I was a little nervous about the whole thing. For one, it’s a plant. And we’re stewards of the thing now and I’m a bit overmuch about that. For another, its honeysuckle, and it’s easy to want to cheer for something with this much character. Plus, it’s honeysuckle in a garden, over a trellis. And the triplets who lived here probably ran through that, hid behind it, and wondered why the flowers were so stingy with nectar. (This species is stingy with nectar.) And it is easy to be sentimental about that.
Sometimes we are haunted by our own ghosts, and the ghosts of others. It’s difficult to know which ones are the most welcoming, or the most distracting.
I remember saying aloud, “It’ll be fine. It is honeysuckle and you can’t kill this stuff.” I didn’t feel it, but I said it. And then I remembered something important a few days later, as we waited and hoped it would bounce back from a hard spring pruning: It is honeysuckle and you can’t kill that stuff.
And here it is today.
You can’t kill that stuff. But now we’ll find out if it can learn through that sort of stubbornness. I am trying to train it to grow over and down the other side of the trellis. We’re a little way over halfway there.
All of this makes me wonder what I might do if it wasn’t so hot out. Just the 80s today, but it’ll hit 93 tomorrow and the heat index for Friday is forecast to reach 110. I do not do as well in the heat as I once did, and I’m old enough to admit that to myself now.
But hey, the summer is the life for me. Except for the class prep. And the meetings.
Today’s heat index finally quit at 103 degrees. At some point after that, with the daylight fading and things still as sticky as possible, I set out for a little bike ride.
And this is how you know it is hot and humid. Usually, because of the speed and the wind … let me rephrase … because of the “speed” and the wind you don’t feel a lot of sweat. For a person that can sweat a fair amount, this was a weird sensation to grow used to. I could be out on an extremely hot day and, aside from a bit of it getting into my eyes, I never seemed to sweat — at least until I got home.
About halfway through today’s short little ride, though, I noticed that every inch of my clothing and most of my skin was covered in perspiration. The dew point and the humidity were the same. There was nowhere for the moisture to go.
Not too long after that I ran across this sign. I was on one of the usual roads, and they’d been advertising this closing, so it was not a surprise.
Today might have been the first day of the closure, which was supposed to begin yesterday. And here I remembered one of the many virtues of the bike. I can go where a car can’t go.
The work has something to do with an overpass. In addition to the closure and detour signs, and the barrels, they’ve got barriers up on either side of the bridge. Presently, they are set up to allow a zig-zag access, presumably for the heavy equipment that should be arriving tomorrow or the next day. I suppose you can still get through there in a car, but you’d have to work at it. I didn’t have to slow down.
I might have sped up on the overpass, though. Who knows why they’ve got that bit of the road closed.
Anyway, it was a usual route, one that has the benefit of being well-defined, and quite in the evening. It’s easy to race the darkness on a route you know well.
Here’s a bit of it I don’t think I’ve photographed before. That’s probably not my fault, it’s the asphalt.
There was no wind for this ride. Not even a breeze. And it seems that I can still do an almost decent ride when I’m not battling the breeze. My computer was pleased. Pleased to be going fast for once.
That’s not fast, but respectable by my standards; I’ll take it. I’d take a little cooler weather, but I’m not going to get that in the near future.
