The paper was put to bed at about 2:30 this morning. I slept for about four hours and then started this new day.
Hit the gym for squats and arms and rode 10 miles on the bike.
Visited Sam’s Club, because I need a new tire for the car. I made the mistake of arriving before my puny little membership would let me in. I could, the nice lady at the door said, upgrade my membership. But I can also wait 20 minutes and save 60 bucks. So I did.
While they put on the new tire I walked around the store. Figured this would be an opportunity to test the microphone on the iPhone in a noisy environment. Also, it was a good time to make fun of product packaging. Most of these jokes aren’t especially good, but the microphone proved better than I expected.
It is sensitive to movement. You can really tell when it is closer to my face based on the sound. Next time I’ll try an attached microphone to see what that sounds like. I’ll also not be buying a tire, next time. Already that experiment is more fun.
Returned to the office — wasn’t I just here? — and looked over the paper. Not a bad start. There are obviously things on which we can improve, and I’ve no doubt that will happen.
We had a critique meeting this afternoon where we discussed what went right and wrong and what to fix for next time. I told them of my high expectations for the year. I want them to set high goals because they can reach them. They have a lot of exciting things in the works for the year and I want them to see those plans come to fruition.
Here’s the requisite welcome back type story. Super Bowl champion Tony Dungy dropped in for a surprise visit, which also made the front page.
Had lunch with the university communications people. Critiqued the paper. Visited the library. I found a big stack of negatives and compact discs of old photojournalism assignments. I found at least one sitting U.S. Senator was in the 20-year-old stack of negatives. The special collections people in the library basement like that sort of thing.
The extended family got a bit more extended. He arrived a few days early, but is handsome and smart. Word is that he’s already teaching calculus in the nursery. I made a video for him, but managed to delete it. Just imagine it as being the funniest thing ever composed on a phone, and then reduce your expectations by 17 percent.
Returned to studying.
I purchased, and nearly filled, that binder tonight. The good news: only the last 100 pages of that are for my class tomorrow.
It wasn’t my first thought of the day, but it didn’t take long after waking up to realize that, this time next week, we’ll be watching football. This makes me very happy.
I watched, over the course of three installments, It Might Get Loud, a documentary where producers took three guitarists and put them in a room to see what happens when they stop being polite, and start talking about chord changes:
The Edge describes himself as an architect, which makes perfect sense when you hear his explanation. Jack White has this artistic struggling “I think I’m a little more important than I really am” vibe. Jimmy Page is Jimmy Page. They’re all great in their own ways, though Page of course transcends by virtue of his longevity and the genetic condition known as Being Jimmy Page.
If the producers are looking for a follow up project, I’ve just given them a title.
It is a good documentary. I’m no musician, of course, but I enjoy hearing the discussion of how these works came about. A lot of times you get the sense that there is this Thing and they wanted to Express It and eventually it made it to a recording studio, became a hit or important piece and now they have to Explain It. Trying to verbally explain this Thing which has become Transcendent must be an interesting exercise.
I watched this over Netflix. We signed up for the free trial last night. The Yankee downloaded a few things from the instant viewing feature. She’s watching television episodes on the television. I watched Full Metal Jacket — which has not aged well — on my phone. That was R. Lee Ermey’s third role, but the one that made us all aware of him. He’s done more than you realize, since.
Also, he might be the star in a sentence featuring the best ever use of the word refused.
R. Lee Ermey was involved in a jeep accident during the making of the movie. At 1:00 a.m. one night he skidded off the road, breaking all the ribs on his left side. He refused to pass out, and kept flashing his car lights until a motorist stopped. In some scenes you’ll notice that he does not move his left arm at all.
“I am in a great deal of pain, indeed old boy. But I shan’t to acknowledge it. I will not acquiesce to the sweet morphine that is mental surrender. So be a good chum, ribs, and stand fast while I flag a motorist.”
For some reason, in that story Ermey turns into a very proper Englishman in my mind.
Where was I? Oh, yes. It Might Get Loud. I had to watch it in three installments because I decided to replace the shower head. I made this command decision about 15 seconds after I broke the older shower head.
We have a slight dripping leak and I thought if I turned the plastic shower nozzle a bit tighter … SNAP.
So we visited Bed, Bath and Beyond. The Yankee walked us directly to the shower fixtures, which was a bit disturbing considering we’ve never been in this particular store. She mulled over the options.
Buying a shower head that would match the one in the guest bathroom was out of the question. The store no longer carries them. But you can get one online for 25 bucks. Of course, at the store, your options range from 29 to 99 dollars. I’m tempering my instinct to put my foot down with my guilt about breaking the shower head to start with. She buys a sensibly priced one. I suppose.
It is made by a company that calls itself Oxygenics. If you break it down, that means oxygen-born. More than air should fall from this device. The literature assures me that this might be the last shower head I’ll ever purchase. And it better be, if there’s anything that makes you feel more stupid than reading language on a shower head’s packaging I don’t know what it is.
Consider:
“The storm is coming … prepare to be drenched.”
Do you know what I do when a storm comes? I go inside. Out of the rain. So, already, we’re a little counter-intuitive in the marketing.
“A powerful, pressurized monsoon of water will envelope and sweep you away to a wonderous place.”
Again with the imagery. But doesn’t all of this sound wasteful? Oh no.
“… while saving 23% water and energy compared to industry leading brands.”
I’d like to suggest to the good people at Oxygenics that they add the word “other” to that phrase. Right now they just look like a trailing brand.
It has “1 drenching spray, 54 anti-glog spray nozzles” and is “guaranteed not to clog.” No pressure there, nozzles.
Here’s the best part, the 9 inch adjustable shower arm — mentioned by a sticker-like logo on the package, as if they weren’t sure when they designed the thing how big they could get that little rod — has two joints. From which water will spray. When you add the wall attachment and the shower head attachment itself that means there are four potential places from which water can escape.
Oh, but it has a monsoon, you see.
We visited the grocery store for a few staples. At the cash register two young men were there to help us. One was the bar code digital transfer engineer, the other the product package and dispersal supervisor. Whenever we make it to check out I try to find ways to entertain them. Who knows how long they’ve been working. It is new and clean and so happy with itself, and most of the customers are in the pleasure-zone known as Publix shopping, but you never know if the guy just had to deal with the guy that really ruined his Saturday.
So the patter today was about how we forgot our ecological shopping bags. Not to worry! I just bought a new shower head which will save 30 percent on energy. I am, as the cool kids say, offset. We hate the earth. The hemp woven, hand stitched, biodegradable hues of those items were left safely in the laundry room, where they are doing us a great service by hanging from something, so that we won’t forget them should we venture to the grocery store.
We live a mile-and-a-half away. One day the person will ask paper or plastic, I’ll remember I left the bags and ask him to hold everything for three minutes while I fetch my own.
He suggests we leave them in the passenger seat. But where would the passenger sit, my good man?
I point out that we usually keep them in the trunk, where they are also often forgotten. And then the conversation turned into one of those “A-ha! You’re my witnesses moments” that you just live for.
If we ever see those two guys up front at the grocery store again I’m going to have the world’s best follow up joke, brought to you by items on the condiment aisle, just to see if they remember.
We grilled steak. We baked potatoes and enjoyed okra. That’s a win. And next week we’ll be watching football.
The squirrels found our food. This bothers most people, but I like squirrels. How could you resist a face like this?
The car got it’s mechanical attention today. Added two new tires — for a total of six! — and then the tire guy suggested that this configuration wasn’t in keeping with state highway policies.
Otherwise the day was a traffic mess. The less remembered the better.
We managed to pick up a new grill, though. We’d considered the basic model, but I found one that was a griller and smoker for only a few bucks more. So we went across town, in the day of frustrating traffic, picked up the grill and a new cover. Brought it home, wiped it down, fired it up and made delicious steaks.
The Yankee made okra. And, in her first time out, did a great job with it. I’ll have leftovers for tomorrow.
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.
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.
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 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.
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:
We have resolved our cable and Internet connection issues.
The guy came out to do this on Saturday, but he realized that the ones and zeros they use in Birmingham are different than the ones and zeros they use here. So he was ill-prepared which, somehow, meant he had to make a return trip with new equipment today.
So the equipment was brought. Things were connected. We had cable and the TiVo liked it and we’ve returned to the modern mediated culture. Or, rather, the 20th Century version of it. Our Internet connection is presently dial-up fast, which is not what we’d agreed to. The cable guy clucked and clicked and did all manner of professional looking things on his little pad. He pronounced it an office problem and that we must give them a call.
We did, they redirected a beam from a military satellite into our router and now we have NASA telemetry humming smartly through the network at a speed which makes Brian, our personal tech guy, jealous.
I made a series of phone calls today, which naturally means navigating a series of automated phone systems. I’d never thought of these as entertaining, but now I must. And I’m considering spicing up my own phone system recordings accordingly. One guy starts out “OK you already have service …”
I do a little voiceover work on the side, mostly web-based stuff, but lately I’ve been asked to do a little voice automation work too. This guy is beginning to make me feel as if I’m doing it wrong. I am for certainty, the occasional bit of enthusiasm but, mostly, authoritative. This guy really knows how to sell his passion with outright boredom.
Later, I get a more serious recording. I’m in one of those systems that requires a verbal input on my part. I start off by asking for things very casually. And at one point when I uttered a word that wasn’t in the program I was asked for a clarification. I replied with a synonym, in fake broadcaster morning banter voice, you know the one: “I’m Coffee!” “And I’m Cream!” from The Morning Zoo crowd.
That overzealous enthusiasm did not go over well. This recording is more serious. She said “I didn’t quite get that” with a scolding tone I haven’t heard in years.
Anyway. We’re all connected. Things are taking shape in the house. I’ve reorganized the garage once again. Sweated in the sauna-attic once more while storing things of not-so-vital national security. I finally figured out which cabinet holds the glasses and which drawer holds the silverware. Everything else is mostly a mystery. (I’m still learning the light switches.)
Fun. I watched The Most Interesting Man in the World tonight:
It was immediately followed by the Old Spice Man:
No one is man enough for that commercial sequence.
