Enjoyed a doubleheader of baseball today. The first game was at noon, and A-Day was going on across the street. It was a busy afternoon, with people still filtering in at the end of the first game and staying through the second.
Like these guys:
The home team got beat in the first game, prompting the rally caps in the late innings. If you didn’t wear a cap you go with the rally sunglasses.
Auburn blanked Ole Miss in the second game 14-0 to take the series. We watched online as the Auburn gymnasts earned a sixth place finish at the national championships and the softball team won just down the street. Also, there was the win-either-way nature of A-day game. It was a fine day to be a sports fan.
Pizza for dinner, kitty cuddles after that. Think I’ll go read myself to sleep now.
Auburn / Friday / photo / Samford — Comments Off on A quick note on a busy, and slow, Friday 17 Apr 15
A full and busy day. Didn’t get home until 9 p.m. and there was baseball after that.
Led one class on data gathering. We talked about 990 forms and financial statements and online resources and text references and digging up story ideas from that sort of source material.
There was another class where we discussed broadcast writing and radio scripts.
Then I sat in on a bunch of interviews and all of that made the afternoon race by.
Which got a lot slower as soon as I got on the road. Two hours stuck behind this scene this evening:
It had been there for four hours before I got there and they weren’t close to having the roadway cleared by the time I inched through it.
At one point both lanes were closed, so there was a detour. And between the backup on the interstate, the other direction and the detour, they had 12 more wrecks. And one lane was shut down for more than eight hours.
A great big, rainy mess then. Hope everyone was OK — there was one injury reported — and that we all keep our sense of perspective while we’re stuck in a bad day of traffic.
Then baseball with friends. And now, I’m going to go fall asleep — pretty quickly, I’d imagine.
Another Wednesday, another full day. Class stuff in the morning, lunch, and then a class, which is immediately followed by another class. And then advertising phone calls and emails and faxes. (That’s how we upload.)
Then comes a few minutes to catch up on news and then student meetings. That’s followed closely by the newspaper critique, pictured below:
They are a swell group. Sharp, engaging, witheringly funny. They’re doing good journalism, too. If you need some promising young reporters, it turns out I know a few.
I saw this late last night and wanted to share it here today. If you’re an Auburn person, or a sports fan, you likely knew that Philip Lutzenkirchen died last year. I met him three or four times. (I don’t hang out with those guys or chase them down, but small town, BMOC and all that.) He was smart, handsome, talented, a nice fellow, well liked, respected by his peers and his fans. I wrote one of the first things about him, along those lines, after he died.
His profs liked him too, as a person and a student. (One of The Yankee’s colleagues wrote a nice piece about him, too.) Lutzie was coaching at a high school and looking forward to his next chapter when he died. A stupid, dumb tragedy that killed two boys, one a promising young man in college at Georgia and his friend, a guy just out of Auburn and a kid himself.
From that, though, comes this, which is one of the more courageous things I can imagine. His father spoke at that first hometown memorial. And he’s taken this on as a mission. Within just a few weeks of losing his oldest kid he was in locker rooms talking to high schoolers and college students. I saw him pick a kid out of the crowd, talk to him for a few moments and then send him out of the room. “And just like that, he can be gone.” Mike Lutzenkirchen sharing a raw, real, candid kind of message because, he figures, he’s filling the hole.
So here he’s talking to a room of high school athletes this week. It’s beautiful and hard and real. And kids should hear it, bad as it is for anyone to have to speak it from their own terrible personal experience.
And far be for it me to tell Mr. Lutzenkirchen how to tell his family’s story, he mentions the prom example in that speech, but he undersold it. From the Department of The Kids are Alright, comes perhaps the sweetest story you’ll find today.
Tonight was the NCAA Regional gymnastics meet. There were six teams, with the top two advancing to the NCAA Finals in Texas later this month.
I was going to shoot a whole bunch of video, but the network is less than good and the cell system finds itself lacking whenever there are more than eight phones vying for attention. So I went 20th century and watched the event.
Alabama was the highest ranked team coming into the meet, and they should be. Auburn, ranked eighth in the nation, was the second seed. And those two big teams slugged it out throughout the night. It was never in any real doubt, and, even as Auburn struggled early, they kept pressing Alabama. At the end of the night the two top 10 teams each punched their tickets to Texas.
The Tigers set a school record for an NCAA Regional score – and didn’t even hit all of their routines. Hopefully that is promising as they go forward. Auburn earned their way to the national finals, just their fourth appearance all time and their first since 2003.
Here is one video, quick shots of Bri Guy and Abby Milliet on bars for Auburn.
I shot this on my phone, from across the arena, and edited it in the iPhone iMovie app. I also just discovered that app now has a zoom feature. So that’s shot from across the building and then zoomed in. Not bad, huh?
Productive morning. Reasonable lunch. Nice chat with the dean. Two classes this afternoon, talking feature story generation in one class and profile stories in the other.
And, then, this:
So this is my current definition of spring: I am jealous of people noodling around on cruiser bikes in a cul-de-sac.
Sat with friends and had a grand time watching a baseball game this evening. Then The Yankee and I went to Mellow Mushroom for pizza and pretzels. They’ve been renovating and they moved the wacky, grinning, blinking, glowing cat:
And that’s about enough. I feel like a nice long springtime nap. Probably I’ll dream about riding my bike.
