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hobby / Monday / photo — Comments Off on Winter showed up
15
Feb 21

Winter showed up

That was some weekend, wasn’t it? Cold, ominous, and with inexorable weather rolling in for everyone. We had our usual Chick-fil-A on Saturday, a video chat that evening, and took a walk on Sunday just before that weather started making it’s presence known locally.

It came in two waves here. One, last night, with a couple of inches of new snow. This on top of the three or four inches we got last week that never had a chance to melt. And the second wave is coming upon us now, and late into the evening. Forecasters suggest we’ll be getting an inch of snow per hour for a while.

I went into the office today, because that’s what you do. And 15 minutes later the email came down: Work from home, people.

So I left at 2 p.m., because it was really starting to come down. I park in a parking deck at work, and my car was dry, but it was snowing enough to accumulate on the windshield and roof while sitting at a single red light. That, to me, seems like a lot of snow.

So you drive slow, and stay well back. Fortunately not a lot of people were on the roads. I suspect the stay-at-home, the day’s work-from-home and just the wisdom of staying out of this foolish weather kept people safely indoors. Just before I made it to our neighborhood I could see the car ahead of me fishtailing in a roundabout. An ominous sign. After that, three-quarters of a mile, and the treacherous and unkempt roads of the neighborhood, lay between me and my safe, dry garage. So I slowed down even more, because that seems like a thing to do, and Icrept in. You could run it faster. But I made it, just in time to see the birds.

If that cardinal doesn’t impress you, perhaps you’d like to see the eastern bluebird.

We had three at one time, which was a lot for this time of year. These little thrushes should be in the southwest right about now, but they are back, so I’ll take that as a sign.

They come and go through the shrubs and trees and bird feeders. Eventually the bluebirds gave way to warblers.

I would have thought the birds would be all in their nests right now, and building roofs.

The snow makes for a neat backdrop, no?

The cats are doing just fine. They are warm and dry. They probably want to go outside, but I think they’d decide against the idea when their paws got cold. They are lightweights, like me.

They can’t be perfectly untroubled by what’s going on outside. Phoebe is hunkering down, for some reason.

She’s lately developed a new pose that involves swimming over the shoulder.

Poseidon doesn’t know what that’s about, either.

When he’s not traumatizing his sister, or trying to figure out what she’s up to, he’s taking a great interest in laundry. It’s hard to fold sheets when he’s climbing inside of them.

I eventually turned a fitted sheet into a hammock for him and gently swung him back and forth until my arms got tired. I thought it might drive him away, but he liked it. Eventually I set the cat-carrying-sheet back on the floor and wrapped him up inside. You could hear him purring from six feet away. Eventually he climbed out a bit, so I folded the sheets around him. He was perfectly happy to stay like that for quite a while.

Pretty smart cat, sometimes, wouldn’t you say?

adventures / Friday / memories / photo — Comments Off on One more of these
12
Feb 21

One more of these

Because it’s a fun trip down memory lane, and maybe I should archive the good ones somewhere better than Facebook.

Facebook: Literally everything is better than us.

I wrote this bit below a few years back and it just showed up in my Facebook Memories and, wouldn’t you know it, I put it here on the site back then, too. Because we’ve always really known that this was better than Facebook.

Facebook: Literally the worst for forever.

Anyway … I like this one. It’s almost Valentine’s Day. (That’s Sunday, fellas.) It’s hard to do much, so I got a small little handful of flowers — just some color for the house since we’re all going to be seeing snow drifts for the next week — and already they’re dressing the place up. And I picked up a brownies mix, a new brand, so we could have an adventure in a box. Because we’re celebrating the little things during a stay-at-home pandemic. And that, and maybe a walk in frigid, frigid weather will be the extent of it this year. But that’s a lot! We are well and together and healthy, and that’s the extent of what you could hope for, anyway.

Some pictures are worth remembering. Some pictures you just know perfectly. I have about 13-plus 18-plus years worth of snapshots on my website. And after Lauren, earlier today, posted a picture of the two of us from our 2013 trip to Ireland I wondered if I could recall the first one of her I uploaded.

The sun-eating one, I figured, had to be high up the list. And so I went back through our early months of knowing one another. I scrolled through the people we knew, most all of whom have kept us around, since then, until there I was, 12 16 years ago. February 2005. I remember the night I took this picture going down the highway, and that one is probably from a library, because I have always liked repetition in my pictures. These next two are at a Super Bowl party in Five Points we were invited to.

The Patriots beat the Eagles in that game. Paul McCartney was the halftime show. (I had to look this up.)

And, oh look, here are a few sunsets and clouds. And there she was. The 10th photo I uploaded in February 2005, the first one of her.

We were in her car. I know precisely where that was, two cities, two jobs (for each of us) and one car ago. She was probably taking me home after work one day. We were carpooling at the time. We’re traveling north, to soon turn west.

That next weekend we got invited to a dinner party — (thanks again, Laura!) and sometime after that we realized we were getting invited to places. That people in our little world thought of us as a package deal. I skimmed through the rest of the 2005 series of photographs. Jamie​ shows up, and so does Greg​ and Brian​. Look, there’s Justin​ and RaDonna,​ and Wendy​, too! There are family shots in there, also. There are pictures of colorful people that you pass by in life. There are blurry, low-res, sometimes underexposed pictures in the collection. There are trips and sports and bands and Lauren figures into most of all of those pictures, somehow, even though she’s not in a lot of them. That’s how you remember, though, the circumstances and the stories and the time you went to the place and saw the thing and tried the unusual item on the menu.

“Who” is how you remember those. Some are worth remembering. Some you just know perfectly.

photo / site / Tuesday — Comments Off on All snow all the time
9
Feb 21

All snow all the time

Had a fair amount of snow overnight. We were supposed to get one to three inches. We’d already gone out, around 11 p.m., to shovel the drive. And then, around midnight, the forecast was updated to four to seven inches. I checked before turning in and the driveway and sidewalks were already coated again.

I didn’t shovel again. This morning I just drove over it. A good refresher for what the roads around here look like.

I don’t know anything about cleaning roads, and I’m not sure who does.

We live in the county, and our road isn’t plowed. But the next road gets addressed, and working up to the main road is a progression. Our road was just snow, the next one was a slushy mess, the following road looked like it had just rained. The big four-lane road was basically dry. And that was the best of it, the closer you got to downtown and campus, the more the quality degraded again.

At home, we received this much snow.

We won’t see any temperatures above freezing for a week or more, so this, our first proper snowfall of this winter, won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. This weekend will be bitter cold. And then, if next week’s forecasts are to be believed, we could add another 10 inches to this. And then maybe spring will show up, he laughed, knowing that won’t happen until April.

April.

That’s a long way away.

There are new images on the front page. The general idea is finally coming together. I am quite pleased with it and this will be the style for a while, and I’ll change the photos from time to time. Until I get bored with this idea.

Anyway, click on this photo and you’ll go to the front page and see what I’m talking about.

Now I can spend more time working on another photo project. Good a way as any to while away the winter.

hobby / Monday / photo — Comments Off on Photos to start the week
8
Feb 21

Photos to start the week

This weekend we received a red-bellied woodpecker as a backyard guest.

That’s just what they’re called. He didn’t explain the discrepancy. (The red crown distinguishes the gender, by the way.)

Look at this little guy:

One of his friends gave me my best photo yesterday, bird division:

Of course the cats like the birds. They have strategically placed spots with great sight lines of the menagerie taking place just beyond their reach and on the other side of the inexplicable transparent walls.

What must pets imagine of glass, and us?

Anyway, Phoebe is taking a break from the bird watching. She has the most intense relaxation face you can imagine:

Last month we noted that Poseidon likes to watch car chases with us. Apparently they make Phoebe a little more nervous. She couldn’t watch last week’s historic car chase.

Poseidon, meanwhile, has found himself a hammock bridge. Like he needed the help, or a new place to sleep:

Last night he decided to have a bit of water fresh from the mountain stream.

Better than the several bowls he has available to him.

More tomorrow. Check out the Instagram account that Phoebe and Poseidon run. Keep up with me on Instagram, too. And don’t forget my Twitter account.

See you there!

photo / Thursday / Twitter — Comments Off on Questions of a different kind of distance
4
Feb 21

Questions of a different kind of distance

I helped moved a few things from one room to another room today. And, when we were done with that we all sat down, carefully distanced — because we are conscientious about this sort of thing, except for the one guy, who, look, I happened to have a tape measure on me at the time and I ran out several feet of tape and pointed this out and I know you to be a smart individual, step back — and properly masked and all of the usual things, because we’re almost a year into the routine of it, now. Except the one guy, I guess.

Oh, if he were the only one, right? But there’s always the one person, in any walk of life, in any scenario you might think up. Parties, the game, the store, in a social distancing context, there’s always that one individual. And I chant “patience and grace” to myself, and, these days, I’m grateful the mask covers 64 percent of my facial expression.

Anyway, he left, and there’s no point to his presence in this story, or to the story, really. But he went about his day and we all sat down to chat and I sat on a chair that had this sticker on it.

Because, eventually, we all take turns being that guy.

I remember covering a hurricane once where the pre-landfall story of dubious origin was that the authorities were patrolling the areas under evacuation orders and handing out toe tags to anyone that had stuck around. The point being, that there’s a certain type of personality that doesn’t take a hurricane seriously. So, maybe this comparison won’t stand out the way the expert would have hoped. At some point, you get it or you won’t get it. Eleven months in, I’d argue, we’re well past that point. Nevertheless:

The first thing about this is, Well, that was obvious and apparent as a potential problem. The second part is, the sample size is, obviously, demographically skewed. So this is what you’ve have to work from as an observer.

Take this incredible woman’s story, for example.

The third, and equally important thing is, this won’t get better as we slide down the age scale.

What if we brought in the people from Chick-fil-A, Amazon, the IRS and each community’s most successful delivery start up and start a super group?

Don’t you just love when your brain seizes on a bit of history?

I spent some time looking through the online records. Mr. Hall was a man of some achievement and professional notoriety. As always, you’re getting the thinnest of outline notes in newspaper form. But what I’ve learned leaves a lot of interesting questions that you’d like to have answered these many decades hence.

So if anyone knows their grandchildren or great-grandchildren … send them my way for a quick conversation.

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