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Pi Day

Yesterday was our Pi Day anniversary. At a Pie Day not too long after we got married, The Yankee, Brian and I figured out when our Pi Day would be. As of today we’ve been married 3.14 years.

Pie is very important. That’s how I got her to go out with me the first time.

“Want to grab a late lunch? It’s Friday. Friday’s Pie Day.”

It was something a server at Johnny Ray’s, one of the big, local barbecue chains, had said a few weeks before. It was sound logic that day — the table of people I was with all had pie. And it worked on her, too. I blurted it out and took The Yankee to Jim ‘n’ Nick’s, one of the other chains, where we have enjoyed the majority of our Pie Days over the years. Pie is very important.

(Note the sign in the background.)

Here’s to the next Pi Day, sometime in the fall of 2015.

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3
Aug 12

What do ladders, Olympics and football have in common?

I have older memories. I remember a few things that happened in the place where we lived when I was four. That’s about where it starts for me. And it is increasingly foggy up until about … I dunno … 15 minutes ago.

Sometimes I wonder about the false memories. The oldest memory I have, as I have described it, didn’t actually exist. We never lived in a place with a yard like that, I’m told. Did I see Empire Strikes Back in the theater? Or was it a re-release of the original Star Wars? Do I remember the I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke campaign? It started long before I was born, but did it run long enough for me to eventually notice? Or was that some reproduction?

Picking out what is right and what is wrong on the conveyor belt of your brain is like pulling getting that one bad grape. Squishy and bitter. And it puts you ill at ease about the next grape, too. Ancient memory is a tricky thing, but for as long as I can recall I’ve wanted bookshelves with a ladder attached to them:

I have a lot of books. We turned a room in our home into a library. It has a fireplace. This is serious. We have bookshelves in other rooms because there isn’t enough room in the library. And yet we still don’t have enough books for the bookshelf ladders. You can’t have one. You need at least two. That’s the mark of a good library.

I saw that one in a bookstore today. We hit two today, after a late breakfast. I found the book I wanted at the second bookstore. It wasn’t on the shelf at the first place, but I did see an employee playing checkers on his computer. It was slow. Bookstores here will pick up in the next few days, though, when the college kids come back to town.

You know who doesn’t come back? Anything to Olympic venues. Surf around and you’ll find plenty of complaints about facilities rusting away in Beijing or going to seed in Greece. Apparently they aren’t even showing up to begin with in London:

After a week of unusually quiet streets, idling cabs and easily navigated shops, fears of the Gridlock Games have transformed into complaints about the Ghost Town Olympics.

Experts say tens of thousands of foreign tourists without tickets to the Olympic Games appear to have decided to skip London, bowing to official warnings of stifling overcrowding — a forecast that ignored the lessons of other Olympic host cities that have emptied out during the Games over the past 20 years. In even larger numbers, these experts say, Britons themselves, including tens of thousands who normally commute to work in London, have heeded official appeals and stayed home.

Aside from that timeless crutch of the lazy journalist, “experts say” there are plenty of lessons here. The biggest two are maybe it is a good thing Chicago didn’t get the Games. Maybe bids should be limited to cities with the venues already in place or cities … elsewhere. Boondoogle: not in my backyard.

By the way. I wrote last week about Auburn’s first Olympians. Here is a picture of the first one, Snitz Snyder, taken from the 1928 Glomerata.

He ran in the 400 meter race in 1928. If he had the race of his life — the race he qualified with was a national record, 48 seconds — he might have made the medal stand. For comparison: the world record in 1928 was 47 seconds and the U.S. record today is 43.18.

Snyder came home and became a legendary coach in Bessemer, Ala. He has a football stadium named after him today. The gentleman standing next to him is the great track coach Wilbur Hutsell. The Auburn track and field facilities are named in his honor.

I did a bit of hasty counting today. At one point this afternoon Auburn athletes, as a nation, would have ranked 44th on the all time Olympic medal list. The Tigers are coming after YOU, Kazakhstan. This list doesn’t, of course, count the Jimmy Carter 1980 Games. There were a few guys on that U.S. Olympic roster projected to compete for medals in Moscow. Impressive stuff for a university.

One other Olympic note of limited use, the most retweeted thing I wrote on Twitter today: NASA is landing something on a DIFFERENT PLANET and airing it live. Your move, NBC.

You start noticing third party effects when people you’ve never heard of start retweeting you. When you see it more than a few times you start to wonder about it. I ran that Tweet through a tracker and found it reached something like 28,000 accounts. Of course not all of those people were online at the time, but that’s still a nice statistic for a piece of sarcasm. The conclusion, we’re all happy to complain about NBC.

I began following this Smithsonian blog on Tumblr last week. (Follow my Tumblr, too!) They are quick hits, and mostly pictures. I traded out a few other sites for this one. (I’m trying to cut back.) But this one is worth seeing, and this post today proved it. The person that uploaded it asked “What’d be going through your mind in this photo moment?”

I’d be thinking This is the GREATEST thing that has EVER happened to me!

There aren’t enough explanation points in that air tank. I’d suck it down to 200 pounds in no time.

Speaking of photo essays, the best one of the week is from a Birmingham toddler.

It rained today. Hard. Almost like this:

When the real serious rains blow through now we think about the 2009 West Virginia game. I wrote about that and have some nice pictures to memorialize the day. (Rain was in the forecast and I wisely left my big camera at home that night.) We sat in that over-crowded concourse for an awfully long time and I wondering: How many places could you be crushed like this for … almost an hour now and watch all of these people maintain their good spirits? Not many, I’d bet.

Is it football season yet? We’re only about four weeks away …

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23
Jul 12

One thousand words, and a picture

The alarm went off, playing some carefully calibrated and focus grouped pop tune that I’ve already forgotten. But I had to figure out how to get to the alarm. You see, it was my wife’s alarm, on her end table. She’d already gotten up — she likes to scoop me on the planned news events. Since my left arm is kaput, rolling is not a good idea. Oh sure, I could get half a roll, and then be stuck in the middle of the bed, still listening to the carefully calibrated and focus grouped pop tune of imminently forgettable quality and unable to roll either direction.

So I waited. And after a moment she came back in and turned off the alarm, apologizing. Not to worry. The carefully calibrated and focus grouped pop tune that was already forgotten.

Also, Penn State, she told me, got hosed.

I could write a great treatise about this, but others have done that already. I’ll just keep it to four sentences.

The people involved are getting theirs as a virtue of the law, as they should. This precedent-setting action, based largely on a report that would get laughed out of court, is one other universities will come to regret when the NCAA comes calling. But congratulations, NCAA, you declared you are against sexual assault; very bold. This, meanwhile, simply punishes everyone else at Penn State.

I’ve been fighting headaches today. First a bad one that faded away with the necessary pills. It returned with an ice pick that could pierce both eyeballs. This required a dark room and a nap. At the end of which I had a dream about the world’s worst spy, who was trying to break into a family member’s home. I watched her every move, being about as obvious as possible, but the dream person never caught on. I woke up cautiously. Is this headache still with me? For the most part, no. I’m still not sure what the dream spy could have been looking for in that house, or why she was wearing teal and black and white socks.

Did get out of the house twice today. Visited the drug store to pick up a refill of medicine. A student pharmacist from the Harrison School of Pharmacy at Auburn handled the transaction. She needed to see my driver’s license, a new thing for this prescription, her supervisor told us. A brand new thing, because they didn’t card me last week. Why my driver’s license is an important part of this transaction escapes me.

I said, “You should see what we’re cooking up in our basement!”

The Yankee quickly said, “We don’t have a basement!” (Most places in town don’t, for some reason.) I wondered about this ID rule. If you can’t get your drugs without a photo ID, how do the politicians against Voter ID laws think their constituents are getting their necessary medications?

The student pharmacist interrupted the thought — the nerve of her! — and asked if I had any questions about the pharmaceuticals. Yes, how many are in there? She told me, and then said “I hope you feel better” in this soft and sympathetic way.

I’ve never heard an Ole Miss pharmacist say it that way.

After my second headache and my nap and my dinner we went out for ice cream therapy. The young man that served us was snappy, happy and eloquent. We were the next to last customers. They closed in 15 minutes and they were ready to clean up, but you couldn’t phase them. Pleasant young kids who seemed happy to work. What are the odds? I asked one of them about two different ice creams that I had no intention of ordering. I was pretty sure, but you still need the descriptions. He took it with ‘How could you know, otherwise?’ ease. And then I ordered something that wasn’t even on the menu.

“Not a problem.”

The Yankee and I meet smart and charming young men and women every year in our classes. They are optimistic and cynical. They are serious and silly. They never seem like the stereotypes you might read about or conjure in your mind about “kids these days.” One of them, at 23, is running for city council in his hometown. I read the story today. The guy gives good quote, as they say.

Anyway.

We sat under the umbrella at the round picnic table eating our waffle cones. I mentioned the waffle cone is disruptive to my ice cream eating system. I work my way around a round cone, to stay on top of any potential dripping issues. Waffle cones don’t have that perfectly round top, but rather taper into something that suggests hand-crafted with care and quality. So I have to come up with a waffle cone system, because the traditional method isn’t working here. Also, there was a lot of ice cream in this cone.

We talked about the Aurora shootings — bad, and too many journalists own jump to conclusion mats — and the Chick-fil-A non-controversy. I don’t know why any executive’s stance on any issue should carry weight in how you choose to do business with that company. Ask around and you’ll find someone in every business that supports something that you hate, no matter what it is that you like or hate. None of this changes the fact that the waffle fries are delicious.

[Strunk & White note: the phrase “the fact that” is regrettable, and should only be used when emphatically pointing out something requiring great attention (e.g. waffle fries are delicious).]

If there is a company, however, that explicitly puts revenue towards some cause with which you disagree, that is another thing. But, still, we must consider the quality of what they are serving.

The ice cream therapy worked, by the way. The pain is gone and you can barely see the incision! Why, it is almost like a carefully calibrated and focus grouped pop tune that I’ve already forgotten.

Until the meds wear off.

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21
Jul 12

Cabin fever

I’d really like to get out of the house.

This morning I watched the time trial, the penultimate day of the Tour de France, and fell asleep halfway through. I nodded off during a bike race I’ve been watching for three weeks. (I slept just over seven hours last night, too, which is the most in a long time.) I had lunch over a History Channel documentary. We watched the 2010 LSU at Auburn game off the complete season DVD set. I took a picture of Cam Newton’s almost mythical run off the television screen. The announcers said “Oh did he accelerate!” and “Enjoy a young man fulfilling his athletic potential.”

I love that it is a little bit less than sharp, just like our memories. Here, then, are the pictures I took and things I wrote at the actual game.

The Yankee gave me the DVD set of the 2010 perfect season as a Christmas gift this year. We’ve been working our way through that magical year over the summer. Every week we start the game and I say “I hope Auburn wins!” Then the Tigers win and we say “War Eagle!” and “Merry Christmas!” Great gift, right?

And then, Batman Begins! When that ended, on another channel, The Dark Knight! My lovely bride made dinner, putting delicious salmon on the grill. I took a picture of it:

I really need to get out of the house. And, also, I need to be able to walk around for more than five minutes without my shoulder and collarbone killing me.

And now, to end on a more positive note, something cute:

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19
Jul 12

Reflex is a dangerous thing

I had a great day yesterday, coaxing myself into being studiously lazy. This, I thought over and over, will be good for my arm. So I did my little therapy and didn’t overdo it otherwise.

It is easy to overdo it, actually. Even the smallest general exertion can wear me down right now. I suppose that is the surgery and everything that comes with it. Or maybe I just pound the ground when I walk and my shoulder is tired of absorbing things. It feels like there’s a giant water balloon in there. If I fell in a pool right now I’d sink left shoulder first, I’m certain. Between that and being transfixed by the swelling and self conscious about caring for it have entirely changed my self-perception.

I talked with some of the little kids in my family on the phone today. Yes, I’m OK. No, I’m not in the hospital. Yes, I had surgery. Yeah, that hurt a bit. The helmet kept me from having truly horrendous, medical problems and I am very lucky, so wear your helmet, kiddos. This is my role to the next generation in the family, serving as a cautionary tale.

They asked me if I’d come ride with them at their house when I could. Of course I will. But for now I have to take it easy and rest and do everything one-handed and so on.

And then I was making myself a little grape snack later in the evening. I rinsed off the beautiful green treats and dropped them in a mug. I overfilled the mug and the last three grapes rolled off the mound, onto the counter and ultimately the floor. Naturally I reached out to try to catch them. Of course my left hand was the closest. And this produced the most remarkable pain in my shoulder and collarbone, the site of my Monday surgical procedure.

I spent the next few seconds yelling, and the next few moments remembering to breathe. Finally I had to look at the incision. Did I tear it? No. Did I break something? I don’t think so, there’s titanium in there now, after all, but still, this sensation … Did it hurt?

For four hours.

So, no, I’m not going to write about this every day. I’ll deliberately find other things to write about because I know you don’t care that much. But it is important to remember: don’t do that. Sometimes you have to allow yourself to lose a little produce. Moving without thinking can be a remarkably painful thing.

At least I can sleep in my bed again. Did that for the first time since I wrecked. And I slept about six hours last night, which might also be the best rest I’ve had in a week. Between that and already feeling improvements, morale is definitely high.

We walked around outside for a few minutes today talking about trees and shade and wondering why our elm sheds so much. If ever you need kindling, we can set you up. How there’s any tree left up in the canopy is a mystery.

Brian stopped by for a few minutes, on the way from here to there. He did not want to see my incision — not that I blame him — but we of course discussed the recovery since he was there two weeks ago for the injury.

Also this evening we visited the little vegetable store this that is tacked onto one of the plant nurseries in town. I took a lot of quick pictures there to post later on the Tumblr blog. I finished uploading the discarding fishing lures I found on the pier at Orange Beach there today, so it needs new content.

So be sure to surf over to my Tumblr and check that out. And if those pictures don’t captivate you, there’s always Twitter.

More, as they say, tomorrow!