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They make posters at races and before the 2017 Ironman in Louisville, which The Yankee completed, we were batting around ideas. And for some reason I thought it’d be funny to make one of those old Civil War-era style letters home that you often hear read in documentaries. It got a big laugh.
The next morning someone had made that sign. We brought it home, and it is proudly on display in our bike room. It came up in a Twitter thread tonight.
— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith) January 6, 2019
If you look way down this pedestrian lane, you’ll see The Yankee:
This is a mile-long bridge, and if it wasn’t for all of that chainlink, which is at times brings up feelings claustrophobic, and then absurdly pointless, it would feel meditative. It is a relatively new bridge. It’s only about 15 or so years old, already on its second name. It was originally the Patton Island Bridge, but now it is the more elegant, and historical, Singing River Bridge, which is the name the Yuchi tribe gave to the Tennessee River.
Most of the road traffic goes over this bridge, but it hasn’t always been that way, of course. Just a few miles away, there’s a dam.
This is a view from Wilson Dam, which was built between 1918-1924 and was later incorporated into the Tennessee Valley Authority:
It is a narrow, two-lane dam. It was always a bit intimidating when I was a kid. My mom and I would drive it, one of the last little bits of road on the two-hour trip to my grandparents. And she would tell me about how she learned how to drive on that dam, in the snow.
Well, I haven’t done that. But last summer I did ride my bike over the dam. And this weekend I ran over it. (On the sidewalk.)
It has less traffic now, because of the Singing River Bridge, but it is still narrow:
Here we are on the dam, midway through our run, still on the sidewalk:
The dam, named after President Woodrow Wilson, was put on the historic registry in 1966, and boasts the highest single lift lock east of the Rocky Mountains.
And here’s the Wilson Dam, once more, from the Singing River Bridge:
It was a seven-mile run, and it was fun, the weather was pleasant, and uncomfortable. I was beginning to think my shoes might be done. And after a three-mile run today, and checking the miles on this pair of Saucony, I decided it was official:
So, at 300 miles, on the nose, actually, I have to go shopping for new jogging shoes.
Elsewhere, there was plenty of family and visiting this weekend. Heading back out tomorrow for a few more days of work, and then more holidays.
The Yankee was out of town visiting with friends and family this weekend. It goes like this: her godparents have known her parents, individually for years. Her godfather and father grew up together. Her godmother and mother met in nursing school.
Now the two of them met at their friends’ wedding. They got married. Along came The Yankee and they became her godparents. The godparents had two daughters and The Yankee’s parents are their godparents. Now those young ladies are of course grown and have beautiful families of their own. They all got together this weekend.
The oldest of those kids was up for a story. So I found myself digging through, and passing along, photos last night.
Here are two now.
This first one is from the Cayman Islands. It was a graduation trip. We were off diving for a week and the locals helped us find a dolphin. He’d just turned up one day, they said, and was very social. They figured he might have been a part of a Central American dolphin venue, where customers likely interacted with him, but a hurricane had damaged where he lived and so he was back in the wild. But he enjoyed people. He didn’t like SCUBA divers, but he’d swim with you. And if you tried to out-swim him, he’d let you know who was boss.
But to swim with a dolphin, to pet and play with a dolphin in the wild, that was a terrific experience, just one small part of a great trip.
And here’s one of The Yankee and me:
It was one of our first family trips. My bunch went to Belize, where we did a lot of diving and horseback riding and exploring Mayan ruins. We didn’t see any dolphins this time, but I did get to catch a bunch of reef sharks by hand while SCUBA diving. (I’ll have to find those pictures.) That was another great trip. Even the snorkeling selfies were great.
I put something fun on Instagram, and something funny on Twitter, today. Check them out here:
After a few years of trying, in 2005 he figured out that tiny, little no A/C church. His recording sounds like an amphitheater with a 450-member national choral arrangement in four part harmony. (Mind you, this is my phone recording a CD playback from my car stereo.) Then the guy included just about all of my favorite hymns from the book on his CD. It was worth every, I dunno, $5 he wanted for it. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
Track six is I'm Winging My Way Back Home, which has six syllables I sing better than anything else in the 750-plus song catalog.
I can't correctly sing any other part of the song right in this arrangement, but those few notes …
And here’s my Twitter tale of the day:
A quick tale about an experience that was funny right away and funnier over time because of friends, starring @SDWesq and his lovely wife. pic.twitter.com/YanGwNkEK1
— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith) November 4, 2017
These photos are just a reminder to me to carry and use my real camera more.
Oh sure, my phone is a fantastic piece of technology. It does many interesting and useful and cool things. Plus it is a phone! And has games! But if I had been carrying my DSLR when I left the building for a chilly lunchtime hour I wouldn’t have had to fake the depth of field here:
And I could have taken a proper macro. And the picture, despite my having to pull out the media card and plug it into a reader and plug that into the computer, would look better.
…
…
Excuse me. I got distracted. You see, being the first of the month, that means I had to create a new subdirectory on the site for these photos. And that reminded me that I needed to do the monthly cleaning of the desktop of my laptop. And that takes some time. There’s the unstacking, the reminiscing, the categorizing, filing and trashing. It takes a while.
What? You don’t clean your desktop regularly? Or are you saying monthly is too long to go in-between?
Yes, I always clean mine at the beginning of the month. And then, a few days from now, I’ll do the routine, monthly backing up of my phone. Unless I forget again, for something like the fourth time in a row.
I recently discovered the Chris Gethard show. And I was so glad to see Tig Notaro, who is absolutely brilliant, appear on this episode:
Here’s a cool backgrounder on that show:
And from there you can go down the rabbit hole at your leisure. But before you do … I was sitting on the sofa this evening, having one of those moments where the feeling is just right. This was that moment that you want to hang on to because the memory is the kind you’d like to retrieve from time to time, when you need to remember that you can find contentment in nothing.
The Yankee was doing something in the kitchen and listening to Pandora and Jay Farrar was singing and it reminded me of May 1, 1998.
Twenty-ish years ago @AmyRay came on stage at Midtown, having just watched @sonvoltmusic. "God bless those guys," she said.
Tonight, @JayFarrarMusic is drifting in from the other room.
She was right then, she's right now.
— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith) November 1, 2017
I had to look it up, that was May 1, 1998. Tonight’s moment was a moment populated by the memory of one sentence, said as an aside, into a microphone 19-and-a-half years ago, to the day.
