weekend


1
Mar 15

Catching up

The weekly post that adds pictures that you haven’t seen here yet. I’m not sure why I explain that. According to this I’ve written this post for more than three years now … Anyway, to the photos.

My view of Atlanta from the ninth floor of the Ramada. This is actually by the elevators. The view from my room was more fitting: a parking lot and freeway.

These chairs didn’t look comfortable, and they weren’t comfortable. Until they were. This is hard to explain. But I’d had four hours of sleep the night before, so that may have something to do with it.

My rental van. I parallel parked this brick beast. Only because the space behind me was empty at the time.

Some of our Samford students listening in on a panel, about Ebola, I think.

No one has explained this to me yet …

This flatiron is the Hurt Building, built between 1913 and 1926 nation’s earliest skyscrapers. It was said to be the world’s 17th largest office building during construction.

Now this is a light fixture. This is in the student center at Georgia State.

So we go through all of the awards, there are about 30 of them, and finally there’s the College Journalist of the Year award. They start at number 10 and we work our way up. This was around number five, when Sydney was realizing she was still waiting to hear her name.

She placed third in the College Journalist of the Year. She’s a print person through and through and, happily, has an editorial job already lined up for after graduation. She’s going to be great. She also placed fourth in the multimedia journalist category and won the sports photojournalism onsite championship. It was, she said, her first basketball game.

Allie has been hanging out with me all day.


28
Feb 15

Home at last

We are back from the conference.

SEJC

The above picture is from one of the three panels I sat in today. One was, basically, on student media troubleshooting. This one was about the difficulties student media are having at Tennessee State and Delta State. At TSU they’re getting stonewalled by their administration, at DSU, the entire program has been cut. These are bad scenes. I also sat in on a sports media panel, which was a lot of fun.

I’m exhausted. I ended up judging four categories, which cuts into your sleeping time. I think I’ve had 17 hours of sleep since Wednesday morning. So when I looked at the time and thought I’ll be asleep before 9 p.m. I was fine with that.

These guys are awesome:

SEJC

That was the funny pose, of course, from Friday night. We left Atlanta this afternoon after receiving awards in the Onsite Journalism Championships:

Page Layout Championship: Honorable mention – Emily Featherston
Copy Editing Championship: 3rd place – Halley Smith
Sports Photojournalism Championship: 1st place – Sydney Cromwell

Hey, I’ve got the laundry started and I’ve had dinner. If you’re not exhausted, you’re doing it wrong.


22
Feb 15

Catching up

The weekly weekend post with extra pictures.

Do you really mean it!? “Tell us what makes you happy and you could win tomato ketchup.”

Ketchup

I did not realize there are new griddles at Waffle House. We should go to more to see how many places have the new gear:

Waffle

This is called SkyView Atlanta. You get nine to 15 minutes or 4 complete rotations per ride. That’ll run you $13.50 for adults and $8.50 for kids. A lady I met over there said it was pricey, yeah, but you got good views.

ferris wheel

We had steaks the other night. You missed out on me almost over-cooking them:

steak

Allie is very possessive of her chair, and she has no problem letting you know about it.

Allie

Of course she’s possessive about all of her seats, which leave precious little room for anyone else …


21
Feb 15

Radford at Auburn

Slept in a bit this morning. We picked up sandwiches at the deli. We dressed warmly and headed to the ballpark. They canceled the game last night. Too cold, it seems.

I asked the visiting coach Joe Raccuia how this works. I’m guessing, purely guessing, that postponing the Friday game must be an agreement by the two coaches. He just turned and made the zipped lips motion. “I’m just the coach from Radford,” was all he said.

This was on the lineup board:

board

I think they got a bad batch of markers, because the weather was not bad today:

wx

They played a doubleheader. Auburn won both games, one in 10 innings and then the other in the regular nine frames. They’ll try to get in the third game around rain tomorrow. Aubie is ready:

Aubie

We had dinner with friends and then, somehow, magically, wonderfully, it almost seemed like bedtime.

And that was the entirety of my Saturday. How was yours?


15
Feb 15

Guster

Here are a few clips from the Friday night rock ‘n’ roll concert with Guster in Atlanta.

They do not play Airport Song anymore. Haven’t done it in years, despite the people throwing ping pong balls. A friend saw their show in Birmingham and sent me the set list. I kept asking about Airport, but he just glossed over it, ignoring my question. So, I convinced myself, it must be a surprise in the encore or something, but no.

This seems a bit odd. Airport Song was their first break into the mainstream, if you will. And 99X in Atlanta (then WNNX, now WWWQ) basically willed that song into being a hit. I’m sure it got a lot of play elsewhere, the single climbed to #35 on the Billboard Modern Rock Chart. I listened to a lot of 99X streaming over the web when I was in my internship in 1998. That song played a lot. The Clinton scandal, 99X and learning more and more about Photoshop were among the basic highlights of the year. Hearing intern jokes at work, listening to that compressed-but-streaming over RealPlayer ping pong game (and a ton of Harvey Danger) while studying pixels took up some time.

The video, as all videos must be in retrospect, was weird and underwhelming:

I have four or five Guster albums on my phone, they come up a lot when I’m running. And yet, still, I was surprised by how easy it is to forget how much you enjoy some people’s live shows. Adam talked in between songs about how the fans have stayed with the group as they have gone from a three-piece acoustic based group to this slightly more trippy electronica thing they’re doing now. And he also said they’ve been noticing that for a long time their audiences stayed the same age, young, but, lately, the audiences were now their age again. So maybe a lot of people are figuring that out.

Anyway, good show, great fun, go see ’em.