August « 2010 « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

August, 2010

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13
Aug 10

Friday stuff

Visited the meat lab today. Students process the meat that is farm raised on campus and the savings are passed along to me. The deals are outrageous. We picked up a few steaks for the weekend, but you couldn’t go wrong with any cut of beef, chicken or even eggs. You could buy 30 eggs for less than three bucks.

Put that with the fresh peaches and okra and tomatoes we picked up at the farmer’s market yesterday and we’ll be eating well. There’s apparently a fish market, too, and if we can figure out when and where that takes place you’ll have to read about the catfish and the shrimp and whatnot.

To live in a place where the shrimp and catfish come from “down there on the left” is really cool.

So I promised you scanned things. I finally finished the Glomerata project. That only took three-and-a-half years of on again off again scanning, editing and writing. But, I’ve made observations and jokes on four years of the yearbooks. The final 10 entries. I really like the way it ended, in a more complete and, I think, better way that I wouldn’t have expected when I started this in February of 2007.

And that just leads me to the next big scanning project. When I picked up those first two books from the early 1950s I started down a path that has turned into a serious collection. I have 76 books from the now 113 volume set. I want to scan all the covers and show them off, because there are some handsome ones worth seeing. If I offer you two of those a week we can stretch that out until February.

The other project is the guide to the 1939 World’s Fair. I’ve started scanning some of the models and pictures and illustrations and we’ll make fun of them together. I’ll start showing those off next week, and it should run until Thanksgiving.

And with that I’m going to head out into the dark and thunder and find some dinner.

adventures / errands / hobby / memories / photo / Samford / Thursday — Comments Off
12
Aug 10

Part of a day in pictures

Pretty bird

The cardinals in our neighborhood are very shy. I’ve been patiently chasing them, and finally got a picture or two of the male. We played this circling, chase game around the trees in the backyard. After a bit I changed the rules and went under the tree. He didn’t expect that.

Pretty bird

Tried to get some work done on the car today, but the shop I visited had a slight problem with a key machine this morning. The guy said the repair man was coming at noon. I left my number and asked him to call me when the machine was fixed so that he may hoist my car onto it.

Because, if there’s one thing we’ve learned from amusement parks and forgotten to extrapolate to the rest of our lives, you’d rather not be the first person up on the freshly repaired equipment.

So I went to a giant antique store. I’m saving that story for the weekend. I walked the whole place, no phone call. After an amount of time that is surely beyond what it should take to fix one machine, the mechanics of which I know nothing about, I returned to the shop. The repair guy hadn’t yet showed up. So I called it an afternoon.

Time and temp

That was the temperature when we went out for dinner. In other news, this is August, but still. We had dinner at Cheeburger Cheeburger, which is a place that The Yankee and I have never enjoyed together. There were two in Birmingham, for a time, but we have no memory of a mutual visit. So this is a new experience. This is also new:

Cheeburger

Cheeburger has always displayed the Polaroids of the hungry people who’ve eaten their one-pound burger (I’ve never tried). Previously the pictures covered the walls like a wallpaper, which was an interesting expression of growth, much like a celluloid bacteria. Haven’t visited in a while? Oh the pictures have expanded around the corner and down the baseboard. That sort of thing.

The last time I was here they were moving up to the ceiling. The surrounded-by-people-promoting-their-new-metabolic-problem atmosphere was a terrific exhibition. You couldn’t help but staring at the faces and the little notes people left behind. I understand why they went to the stacks, for space concerns, but this new display method ruins the point. You don’t want to look through pictures in stacks like that. It would feel like too much work, or feel too intrusive. So you just see the stacks on the wall and go about your meal.

I wonder when they finally make the decision to throw away some of the old pictures. Maybe they have a little ceremony.

We drove around until we found a field on a quiet country road where we could see the night’s festivities. I always oversell the Perseids in my mind. One of the astronomers on the Samford faculty sent us a note where he mentioned that some experts were expecting up to 100 visible meteorites per hour if you got in a good spot. I’ve learned to temper my expectations — I want 100 a minute, like some sort of movie theater intro film — but still haven’t learned to forget taking pictures of the event. This is the one I got.

Perseids

The background are actually stars I shot tonight. I caught no Perseid meteorites on my camera (The Yankee got TWO!) but we saw several and had a great time, sitting in the dark and quiet and heat of the evening. My best picture of the night:

A plane

The plane! The plane!@

books / friends / iPhone / links / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
11
Aug 10

From the library

I am not a father. Nor will I be one at any time in the near future. But this is terrific:

Except for that one line. They just left it out there like they knew you’d hate it. They knew they should have written something else, but they couldn’t make it work.

We received flowers today from Kelly (she’s the best, you should pick up a Kelly for yourself). They are beautiful hydrangeas, which have a lot of rules.

They were dropped off by the UPS lady, who probably spends exactly .16 seconds thinking about what is in each box she’s delivering. She left it at the door, rang the bell and was back to her truck before I managed to unlock the thing.

UPS drivers wear their keys on their thumbs so they don’t have to waste time fishing them out of their pocket. You have to think, for an agency that concerned with the seconds on the margins, that they are investing in teleportation technology. Sure, you could fly it, but why would you do that when you can beam it? As appealing as that sounds, I hope it is a generation or two in the future. My step-father is a UPS pilot. He might have hauled those flowers somewhere along the way for all we know.

Just a day in the house. Added apps to the iPhone. You’re intrigued, I know. I added two voice recorders, QuickVoice and BlueFiRe, because you never know when a soundbite will break out. I picked these two because any outfit confident enough to ignore the rules of grammar and capitalization must produce a good product. And also because they are free.

One day soon I’ll make a great point of all of this to the students. The things you can produce, from your phone, for free.

BlueFiRe, if you are interested, offers you a realtime waveform while you record, which is pretty fancy. I have two computers where I can do this. I have a voice recorder, a portable studio and a mixing board that gives me levels, but this is taking place in my phone.

When you spend a lot of time at home you get an interesting feel for the rhythms of the place — the heat, the sun, the plants or people or animals or shadows, whatever you’ve got — that go on without you. Even more interesting is to see how these rhythms are established in a new place.

The cat, for example.

She’s been especially vocal lately. Very demanding. I’ve begun to wonder who has fallen down the well. And I wonder if she is ever frustrated by our lack of understanding, or our apparent lack of cat vocabulary. We get frustrated when she’s doing this at 3 a.m.

Pardon me for a moment.

I just noticed that the books in the Keeping Library are out of order. I somehow have a book on FDR between a book on Reagan and Clinton. This is a shelf based on chronological organization and, thus, this error must not be allowed to stand. Sadly, the books had existed in this state for more than a week. Meanwhile, the DVDs remain unorganized.

Started scanning things up this evening. I have a book to show you, starting later this week, and a project to finish tomorrow.

Until then, may there be no weeds in your fescue.

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10
Aug 10

Enter the band

Visited the local college bookstores today so The Yankee could make sure her texts were on the shelves. Found seven at one store, found four at the second store and met the very nice manager. Found a few at the third store. At the university bookstore we found a big stash. They are all expensive, but textbooks always have been.

I pointed out the prices. It always aggravated me when a professor was shocked to hear how much the text he or she demanded was costing the students. It is a simple enough thing, stop by the store and empathize, for just a minute. So that’s what I do.

The bookstores here let students rent books for the term. Oh you can still buy a $90 text and sell it back for $12. You can rent it for half that price and return it at the end of the term. Wish we’d had that option during undergrad.

My favorite book, Strunk and White’s Elements of Style has stayed the same low price these last 15 years. I appreciate that.

On the way back to the car we listened to the marching band. Is it football season yet? Apparently we’ll have a tribute to Frank Sinatra this year. They sound good, but the director insists you’ll hear more trumpet in this number when they are on the field.

I’m not faux-marching, I promise. Apparently I’ll need to work on hand steadying techniques before pulling out the iPhone. After this take they had a break and were then going to spend 45 minutes on Luck Be a Lady Tonight.

We put a lot of pictures on the walls this evening. Just a few more rooms to go on that project. We had a delicious dinner:

Delicious

Just add the veggies, shrimp, cooking wine, butter, salt and pepper to taste, stir over a respectable heat and serve.

We stood outside and watched the first of the Perseids (Thursday night is the big show), hung out with Jupiter to the east and tried to pick out unfamiliar constellations thanks to my new app, Planets. (That’s a great, free download.)

We had a great day. How was yours?

On the site: New, artsyish banners across the top and bottom of the blog. The blur across the top is the cardinal I vainly chased this afternoon. The one along the bottom is the yard in late evening repose. This is an excellent opportunity, then, to remind about the new banners page, meant more for me than for you, but nevertheless, see ’em again. Also, there’s a new picture on the home page.

And someone stop me: I’m thinking of redesign ideas.

hobby / Monday / photo — 2 Comments
9
Aug 10

Dead, live and published

Spent the late part of last night and several hours of the early morning sorting through the detritus of 15 years of bank statements and bills. I started this project before the move and left myself one giant box to work through. It took about four hours, just opening envelopes and sorting the material inside. I shredded it this afternoon.

And then, after about two hours of shredding, the machine just died in protest.

Not that I blame it. I question the timing — blowing up as the project rounded third base — but I understand.

The cardinal is around a lot, but shy.

I'm hiding

Not that I blame him. He’s being hunted. Allie is strictly an indoor animal, and the hunting instinct has been ground absolutely out of her. She loves to watch the birds and squirrels play. She makes this adorable little “meep” sound, but we’ve read that this is actually a sign of frustration. Not that any of this matters. She’d have no idea what to do with a bird or a squirrel if she caught it.

I'm seeking

One day a blue jay will come along and harass Allie at her window. I can’t wait.

The Yankee passed along the good news that a book chapter we wrote a while back has been published. We’re in Handbook of Research on Digital Media and Advertising: User Generated Content Consumption. The last time I read the chapter I was pleased. There are one or two small things that I could see improving considering the intended audience, but on balance I read the thing thinking We wrote this?

So, if you need a nifty academic tome and want to drop $265 on it or, incredibly, a full 33 percent more for the E-book. (I don’t set the prices or get a cut of the profit; I am just thrilled to write when asked.)