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Teeming Tuesday

I’d like to try putting a few more things into a Tuesday, just to see if it is possible. Tuesdays are the fullest of days. Met with the boss. Tried, and failed, to install a new printer on my new iMac.

Called the tech guy who, happily, could not install it the first time. If it takes him two attempts I don’t feel so bad.

Had lunch. Met with the WVSU news director. We talked about Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift, who is on campus this week. She’s been in classes and student meetings and will deliver a big lecture tomorrow night. She’s got such a great story, really. But more on that tomorrow.

Tried to meet with a student, but missed. Made copies of everything for my class. Held class, delivering a spelling test, talking about news leads and doing wholesale news rewrites.

We made fun of typos. There were two on the most recent cover of Soap Opera Digest. I can’t find a link and can’t bring myself to upload it here, but the designer has forgotten their rules on apostrophes.

And then there was the paper. The students have worked on it all night. I get a question here, make a joke there and listen and tell stories. Now, around midnight, they’ve announced they’re going it alone. I offer to copy edit the first few editions with them, but they rightly want to remove me from that process. This is the moment where they pedal away, around the block and you’re just so proud to see them go.

Tomorrow they make it back from their circuit around the block. We’ll critique the whole paper. We’ll talk about how to improve their technique, steady lines, standing, brakes and falling. Hey, I might keep this bike metaphor. You’re just so proud.

I decorated a wall in my office.

Those are Stars and Stripes announcing the end of World War II. The one on the right is the Paris Edition announcing the Germany surrender. I found that paper purely by accident at a place called The Deal in an artsy Louisville, Ky. That was the same day, incidentally, when I decided to build the half-hearted black and white section of the site.

It was a nice day. I’d spent a long weekend visiting the folks. They took me to a local funky, artisan restaurant and just down the road we found that store. It doesn’t deal in antiques. Or in things that feel like antiques. Everything is from that frozen moment when your grandparents stopped trying to be contemporary. Much of it was familiar, but vague. You could understand the function of all the merchandise, but if you weren’t from the period the why could be lost on you.

We ate at that restaurant and used bookstores and a record store and that shop. It was a great day.

They were stored in a desk pretty close together, the pictures and the newspaper, and they might have once belonged to the same family. There was also a Red Cross map of Paris. The woman sold it all to me for next to nothing, just glad to get it out of her way. She’d much rather sell mid-century modern furniture and clothes.

My step-father bought me a little bookholder there, too. It is sitting on top of one of my bookshelves and holds Winston Churchill’s history of the war. A friend sold me all six volumes for $20. He bought them from a library and realized he’d never read them. I Hope to one day. Maybe I’ll bring that newspaper home next summer and read the books underneath the authentic newsprint.

The paper announcing the Japanese surrender is also from Stars and Stripes, the Mediterranean edition of the military paper. It is a bracing headline, but that too will be a teaching moment. What is contemporary and acceptable today might not be a name that people approve of years from now.

I don’t have a great story for that paper, though. I bought it from e-bay. I wish I’d asked the seller to try and explain that particular issue’s history. Someone thought enough to bring it home from Italy, or thereabouts, but now we’ll never know the details.

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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.

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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.

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8
Aug 10

Meet the new neighbors

We’re beginning to have regular visitors at the bird feeders. Here are two of them:

Pretty bird

It’s hardly nature photography — sitting in the shade on my porch, trying to be very still, waiting for the birds — but I figure if we’re going to ask the birds to come visit the least they can do is pose for a picture.

We’ll soon be doing this to our human friends, as well. Just be prepared.

For a quality reference on the local birds, including pictures, maps, descriptions and CD calls, check out the Birds of Alabama Field Guide. As soon as I buy mine I’ll know what I’m looking at. Until then, I’m woefully deficient in bird identification.