Monday « Kenny Smith | Omnes hic sumus discere.

Monday

Monday / photo / running / Samford — Comments Off
7
Dec 15

Adventures in packaging

We raced. This is my bib number from this past weekend.

I’ve built up quite the collection of these recently. Now I have to figure out something to do with them. I’m thinking of framing them and hanging them up. Why not?

Anyway, that was a number from a fundraising run from the nearby elementary school. We run the route from time to time and we were here and so we ran it on Sunday afternoon. The aunt and uncle of a friend of ours are in town and when the uncle found out about the run he decided he’d go to. So The Yankee ran the 5K and the retiree and I ran the 10K. He did it in blue jeans. I finished second in my age group.

It wasn’t a large group.

Anyway, despite the term being over it is back to work. I am making hundreds of phone calls to high school students this week. Do you know when you call high school students? At night, of course. And I am calling them from the office, because that’s what I was told to do. Because you need to be an office to use a phone and make calls you’ve been making for years. Something you volunteered for once that has become a part of your yearly efforts.

More fun than all of that, I went shopping and was picking up Christmas toys. And saw these …

Dad was happy he found something to bond over with Billy. Until the next arrow, when things took a turn for the worse. Arrows don’t turn, Dad knows, but after some doing, he managed to convince the investigators.

“What’s that? My cocktail is ready? Excellent!”

Tomorrow, she’d pour herself a double.

Packaging is a lot of fun this year. I’ll share some more pictures throughout the week.

Alabama / Auburn / family / football / Monday / photo — Comments Off
30
Nov 15

The Iron Bowl

So one of these guys is my second cousin. The guy on the left is his high school buddy. They play football together. The friend has been to big time football college football games before, SEC games even. This is my cousin’s first big game. And an Iron Bowl is not a bad way to start, young man.

They bought tickets from a friend of ours and their moms said they could come and the spent the weekend and had a grand time. Also, they saw Bo Jackson. Hey, Bo, how many Heisman trophy winners did we see this weekend?

Close. We actually saw three, and that’s a pretty good afternoon.

In the stadium, down at ground level. Pretty decent seats and the guys got on the big screen for a super long time. Their moms liked all the pictures I took of them.

I made a Boomerrang and turned that into a gif. This is no more or less psychedelic in any of those formats.

Alabama won, of course, but Auburn kept it close. They had a good time. I’m glad we were able to show it to them.

And just like that, that’s my last Iron Bowl, my last Auburn game. A pretty decent run, lasting 21 years, but it’s over.

Auburn / football / friends / memories / Monday / photo / video — Comments Off
23
Nov 15

Stuff from the weekend

There was a football game, and a flyover:

I took this picture:

And that’ll be the last of it, one way or the other. It is a sad thing in its own way, which I didn’t expect.

Also I snuck up on Allie and took this picture:

And she was completely oblivious when I took this one:

So I discovered yesterday that the cat likes graham crackers. Of course she likes graham crackers.

Finally, I ran in a fundraiser 10K yesterday. The Yankee did the 5K and I did the last half with the uncle of a friend of ours who was in town. He heard about this run and thought, “Hey, I’m retired, let’s impulsively run a 10K in jeans!” And he did. I want to be like him one day.

I finished second in my age group. I got an ornament and a gift card.

journalism / Monday / Samford — Comments Off
16
Nov 15

I want to ‘complain’ about some of my students

While we followed the horrible news from Paris last night our news editor learned that 11 Samford people were in the City of Light. (All are safe and accounted for.)

Naturally, she went to work, writing about that story. This made me read copy on a Friday night and fire off a few salvos of emails. And then they interviewed one of those people Saturday and wrote more. So I had to read that and write another few emails, praising our staff, advising them, giving them (hopefully) helpful ideas for their coverage. And now they’ll go talk to more of them, and all of this will no doubt repeat itself. Because a news editor, an English major who wants to work in museums, cares an awful lot about doing it right.

This happened on their Friday night and over the course of their weekend. This was in addition to their regular school week and the other jobs some of them have. It happened after they were in the newsroom until 2 a.m. on Wednesday morning putting together a newspaper and then spent three hours with me, until 9 p.m. on Wednesday night, talking about that issue. And they’ll do it all again tomorrow and Wednesday.

You have to be dedicated to work with student-journalists, because they are incredibly dedicated to their jobs. They care about their community and their pursuit of good journalism. Sometimes that means they work every day. Would that more did. Student-journalists don’t often get the credit for it that their output deserves, but it is gratifying to work with students so invested in the work they are doing, beyond the normal scope and scale in which they work.

memories / Monday / photo — Comments Off
9
Nov 15

Memory week photos, day one

It was fun showing off old photos last week and following them down memory lane. So let’s do that this week. As far as I can recall, I haven’t published these pictures anywhere. We’ll try to do a theme for the week. These are all about signs or words.

Here’s two now.

The first one is a sign that shows you the Homer Spit in Alaska.

The Homer Spit is a 4.5 mile long geographical landmark on the southernmost tip of the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska. You’ll find docks for hundreds of boats, camping, fishing, eagles and the longest road into ocean waters in the entire world, taking up 10–15 minutes to cover by car. In 1899 a railroad track connected the docks to the coal fields on the bay and that helped built the town. The 1964 Alaska earthquake shrank the spit and killed most of the vegetation. Today it is mostly gravel and sand and tourism fronts.

We were there with Jessica and Adam and the bald eagles. A few of the hills and the eagle that shows up in the banner here on the site are from the Homer Spit or nearby.

Have you been to one of those restaurants where people stick their money on the wall and write a clever message?

In this restaurant there was currency from all over the world. That was one of the more clever ones.