Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

adventures / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
05
Dec 24

A gleaming yellow lovelight

I made it through all of the grading and message sending at probably 3 a.m. this morning. This followed a sensible “Don’t stay up too late” missive, which I dutifully acknowledged and then ignored, because there is copy editing to do!

Which was great because soon after a student helpfully sent me a note explaining that one of the links I shared was busted. Stupid hyphen. (New band name! Called it first!)

Check your work, check your work, I have said at least 64 times a year to students for the last 18 years. And the one time I didn’t check my work, because it was late … I 404ed someone. Just great.

I am mortified.

Anyway, the link got fixed this morning. Other emails will come and go and I will do my best with them all, and hopefully the instructions and advice I offered my classes will be useful and well received and acted upon in a timely fashion.

Here’s a great Christmas tree!

No, there is not an angle you can shoot this from to not get a building of some sort in a background, somewhere. You can make the complete circle, 360 degrees, and no one has figured out a place to put this with a clear backdrop, or at least an iconic one, for the Insta.

The foreground matters more, anyway. Look who’s in that ornament!

I look forard to smiles like that. Ornament smiles are great smiles.

video / Wednesday — Comments Off
04
Dec 24

Bob Wilson, please pick up the white courtesy phone

Going through my phone; finding things I’ve never used here before. I’m taking a break from writing messages to students to clean a few things off my phone, that’s how my Wednesday is going. How’s yours?

Anyway, this was on a flight from here to there, I forget which. I could look, but that’s not the point. We were in the emergency exit row, which is great for legroom, plus you get this teeny tiny little porthole to look out of, and wonder.

Expect more of this sort of place holding filler the rest of the week, and perhaps next.

photo / Rowan / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
03
Dec 24

Never not grading

I am reading students’ reactions The Social Dilemma, a docu-drama on Netflix. They have to watch the full program and then describe one phenomenon that jumps out at them, and then apply one of the concepts or theories we have discussed in the class this semester to try to better understand it.

Why any of us, including myself, continue to use social media after going through one of my classes I’ll never know.

Well, for me I know. News.

In my other classes, I am looking over slide decks and quizzes and other papers. I’m not sure if the goal is to stay in the curve or get ahead of it. Maybe I’m just preemptively trying to get in the curve.

At any rate, this was my view today.

It’s important, every so often, to look up, and to look out.

cycling / Monday / photo / site — Comments Off
02
Dec 24

And so we start December, and the mad dash

Took mom to the airport for the sad and tearful goodbyes today. Drove home in the late afternoon’s dying sunlight. I was back inside before she was on the plane, but she has safely returned home and I have turned back to work, and the grading of things.

Before I began that, however, I did the monthly computer rituals. Cleaning old files from the desktop, adding the site’s page visits into a useless spreadsheet, updated a few other running files, and so on. I also updated the November cycling chart, which always amuses me and bores you.

The blue line is this year, and you can see that, compared to 2023’s red line, I’ve had a successful increase in my mileage, be it ever so humble. For some reason, in 2021 or so, I added a 10 mile per day projection line to the spreadsheet, and it seems to have outlived its usefulness.

It appears I’ll handily accomplish those two goals, of besting last year and the 10 miles per average, so I’ll turn myself to other, slightly more impressive goals. Goals which I most likely won’t achieve, because of the holidays. But they are out there, nevertheless, and we shall approach them with vigor, and alternating days of tired and enthusiastic legs, I’m sure.

This is funny to me because these are small numbers, really, but they seem YUGE.

Also today, I have updated the banners here on the blog. (You know those rotate, right? The one on the top and the one on the bottom change each time you load or refresh the page. You knew that, right? You also knew there was a banner on the bottom too, right? Because you read the entire page every time you come by. There’s only five posts per page, and that’s not too much to ask of you. I mean, come on.)

So now there are 116 banners randomly loaded across the top of the page, and 118 randomly loaded banners populating the bottom of the page. I should probably cull those two lists. That sounds like a great winter project. So click reload a lot between now and sometime in February to see them all. And don’t forget to scroll down to the see the ones at the bottom, either.

Poseidon always checks out the bottoms of the page. He’s very diligent and curious about the goings on around here.

(When it’s typed well, he caught the errors. When there are typos, he was off the clock.)

Phoebe, on the other hand, is much smarter, and she doesn’t care about any of this. Just so long as her picture makes the site, so that the week’s most popular feature is here every week.

We’re going to finish the year with something like three-quarters of a million visitors, according to the site statistics I looked up today. Why, I have no idea. The cats have it figured out, and they thank you.

As for me, I am now in the home stretch of two classes, so things will be light in the next few weeks. And after those two classes wrap up I’ll be finishing with two other classes. So there are liable to be some thin days in here this December. But there will be something more often than not, and we’ll of course always have the weekly check in on the cats. It is the most popular weekly feature on the site. (They know it, and they make me type it, too. Marketing geniuses, these kittehs.)

Friday / photo — Comments Off
29
Nov 24

And so we come to the end of November

Oh, I forgot to say, if you’ve enjoyed the food you’ve eaten this week … if you’ve eaten this week … thank a farmer. I don’t know what all the people that work this corner of God’s soil do, and where it fits in, but you’re never more aware of the interdependence of things than when you stop to think about how it works together. Then you can’t help but be impressed.

On average, U.S. farmers plant about 90 million acres of corn each year. Most, about 40 percent, is used as the main energy ingredient in livestock feed. You might not eat the grain in these silos for a variety of reasons.

It could be because the corn you enjoy comes from the heartland, or just closer to you in general. Even more likely, the grain that goes into those giant containers sitting out there in a quiet November sunset are grown for livestock. (You enjoy a different variety than the kept animals do. I could go into this, but I would have ag econ flashbacks.)

Anyway, it’s an impressive system, sometimes held together precariously, but there are always some hardworking people involved at the root and fruit, meat and peat, and salt and pepper levels of the system. Some of them have worked the land for generations. Some work it for corporations. Some are working it for their future generations, as a part of international relations.

Be thankful for that, too.

These were photos from the end of what was probably my last outdoor ride of the year. I titled it “I need it to warm up; no way that’s the last outdoor ride,” because it was not a good ride. But it won’t be warm soon, and so I took my bike down to the basement, where it will sit on the smart trainer and, starting soon, pedal me through several months and many miles on Zwift.

April 9th was my first ride outside this year. November 26th was probably the last one. Some seasons are just too short.