It was a Sunday afternoon swim. And then there was a Sunday afternoon outside, reading in the shade. Then, the clouds darkened to the southwest. We went inside.
Took a shower, sat in my studio office space, where I am typing this right now.
Then the rains came. We’ve been soggy for a week. No big deal. Then there was one great big gust of wind. For that one moment, it felt like the siding and the windows were fighting to stay where they were, or deciding if they’d rather be somewhere else. And then it stopped, as wind does. And you immediately forget about it, as you do.
A few minutes later, my lovely bride says to me, from somewhere downstairs, “We’re going to have a problem when this is over.” So I went to see what that was about.
What that was about was a pine tree. We have three of them tucked up right next to the southeastern corner of the house for some reason. Just sitting there and growing, here on the inner coastal plain — where the heavy land and the green sands meet. We’d talked with someone about removing the three of them one day, for safety purposes.
Now we only have to remove two of them.
Meanwhile, on the northern corner of the house, a chunk of the Bradford pear tree was sheered off. The previous owners let this thing mature and grow too large and it is a weak tree and guess what we have to deal with now?
One of the black cherry trees in the backyard also has three or four big limbs high up in the canopy snapped off. Some of the trees on the other side of the yard lost some smaller limbs.
The first order of business, after the storm stopped, was checking on our neighbors. Everyone was OK. Joe the Younger, who lives next to us with his young family, had one sickly, stubby ancient tree take a big hit. The lady diagonal from us has some limbs in her back yard. Joe the Older and his wife, directly across from us, lost some stuff in the woods behind their house. Behind us, our neighbor just installed a new greenhouse, one with an automated window that opens and closes based on the temperature. He said it was askew.
So we got the worst of it. And we were lucky.
Joe The Older came outside and said he was going to go check on the farm and his horses, and then he’d be right over with the chainsaw. The farm isn’t far away, and he was back soon. He only has some leaves on the ground over there, he said. And then he cranked up his chainsaw like it was Christmas morning and we cut that pine tree out, and then cleared the garage door. Then we chopped a lot of that wood for the fire pit and started moving the branches around. I did about four more hours of that today.
The power was out for about six hours. I took my second shower of the night, letting the rain wash dirt and bits of wood and bark and sawdust off of me.
My heart hurts about the black cherry tree; the wallet will hurt about the debris removal. Everyone is OK.
On the one hand, we went from home to here in a day.
On the other hand, it took a full day to get here.
Pretty much everything that happened in getting here was my fault. We woke up this morning and I didn’t really have a good sense of our timeline. So I took a little too long in getting out of the house, just like I took a little too long last night in finishing my packing and cleaning.
We were going to use a park-and-ride lot, but there wasn’t enough time for that. It didn’t seem a problem at all until my lovely bride said “Drop me off at the terminal so I can check in our bag, go park and I’ll meet you inside.” So we’re calling audibles.
I did that. Dropped her off, got the checked bag out of the trunk, and then headed to the garage. At our airport, a large and old and tired and almost grimy feeling place, you have to then drive all the way around to get back to the parking garages. Each terminal has it’s own garage. Hopefully I parked in the right area. It’s a big place. A lot of driving. A lot of signs and lanes and it’s dark and, thank goodness not yet busy on the roads around the giant facility.
The roads weren’t busy because everyone was inside.
The Yankee has taken part in the TSA financial shakedown program. I pass through the security theater the old-fashioned way. The signs say I’m 41-45 minutes from security. The line goes around the corner, around another corner and halfway down a long, long hall. The doors close on my plane in 49 minutes. Thankfully, the blue shirts have a mandate to keep it moving when things back up. In times like these your shoes and your belt aren’t so scary and the best people are looking at the X-ray machines, so your devices don’t have to come out bags. Best of all, you just go through the old metal detector and not the slower back scatter machine.
They kept it moving. I made it through security in 30 minutes. That meant it was time to run.
So I ran.
The door on the jetway was closed, but only because the gate agent has to close it behind her when she goes down to do her count. She let us on the plane, easy as you please. In fact, another family came down after us.
We flew to Detroit without incident. From Detroit to Cancun I watched The Boys in the Boat — what if Disney did a movie about rowing crew during the Great Depression and then showed the kids from Washington beating the Übermensch in their home waters in Berlin, and what if all of the aters, Washington and Berlin, were actually English? Because it is a long flight, I also watched The Courier — what if Benedict Cumberbatch was a Cold War-era business man recruited to do a bit of spying for her majesty? Both based on true stories. Both good plane films. I’d probably watch The Courier again first.
Into Cancun without incident. Through customs in record time. That process has really changed. Take a picture, march on in. We walked by all sorts of customs and passport control booths and tables waiting for someone to say “Senor! Senora!” but they did not. We might not even be here, technically.
The Yankee had arranged a private shuttle to our resort on Playa del Carmen, and now we are here. Nice sprawling place, too. It is raining and windy. We are here to dive, starting tomorrow. In the last several days, though, a tropical storm has formed in this area. It has moved on, across the peninsula and heading west-northwest or so, but there’s still a lot of energy in the air.
On Saturday we went to high school. I can’t remember the last time I was in a school. Probably a dozen years or more. We visited one because my god niece in-law (just go with it) was in a dance recital.
I wasn’t really paying attention to the exterior of the building as we pulled up, but I did notice this near the door. When was the last time you saw a pay phone?
If you look closely enough, you can see there’s no receiver. So maybe it isn’t a phone anymore. Maybe the school just dragged it out there and it is waiting for a garbage pick up.
The school, from what we saw, seemed nice. Very big. Old school. Hallways full of plaques marking their distinguished alumni. Some of the plaques were a little basic, but others were quite remarkable. A lot of professors and authors and civic leaders. There was a music promoter, and a touring manager for U2. There was someone who won the Nobel Prize in economics. The inventor of Lipitor went to school there. The state’s first black attorney, a man born a former slave soon after the Civil War, was a student there. His plaque said he got paid for his work by bushels of food. I’d like to have time to read more of them.
But there was dancing to watch.
Our dancer took part in two numbers, a ballet and en pointe. She looked great, danced with nice confidence and had a lot of fun. Had we all not had favorites, everyone in the auditorium would have chosen the two little girls that opened the recital as the stars. They were two young beginners, wearing shimmering three-tone tutus, mimicking what their coach was doing from the floor. They were adorable and stole the show. But all of the numbers and dancers were delightful in their own way, and they kept things moving.
I’ve been to two dance recitals. The first was a two-day recital, if you can believe that. Every group was organized by age, and they all danced to the same song. We heard that same bad song dozens of time. I was working on the video production, which meant I had to be there. It was a lot of standing, no food, and that same horrible song several dozen times. I am quite certain it scarred me. This weekend’s show was much shorter, had a unique song and style of dance for every group, and it was over in a little under two hours. It was a much better show.
After dinner we all adjourned to the ballerina’s home. That evolved into a big baseball game in the front yard. All of the adults sat in lawn chairs and watched the kids play. And me. We had plate music and everything.
This became a two-hour game. Usually because the kindergartner had to dance to his song, “Texas Hold ‘Em.” And we had no pitch count. A pitch count would have moved things along, but most of the kids were too young for that.
The day’s star dancer hit two huge home runs off of me. That’s what happens when you grove your pitches. There were also a lot of little league home runs. After everyone else went inside for snacks, the 9-year-old boy and I stayed out to play catch. (It was a little bit special.)
I was in a dress shirt and not-the-right-shoes for all of this, and so I was sore the rest of the night and tired most of Sunday.
Yesterday, I was admiring the new growth on the pine trees, (Pinus strobus, I think).
We have three in the backyard. They are growing tall and close to the house. They help block the late afternoon sun. They can’t stay forever, but we enjoy them now.
And the sky was just so casually brilliant …
It was worth noting.
It’s time, once again, for the site’s most popular weekly feature. We must check in on the kitties.
Phoebe was nice enough to pose, ever so briefly, on the landing this afternoon.
I’m a real sucker for when she puts her face on her paw.
Poseidon has recently discovered the lamp I have behind my computer.
He came to quickly realize that the light bulb gives off a fair amount of warmth, and so he’s never leaving.
Now, the only way I can keep Poe from that spot is to not turn on the lamp.
He knows cozy when he sees it.
So the kitties, as you can tell, are doing just fine. They’re ready for another fun week. As am I. And i hope you are, too!
We had a party for the god nephews and niece in-law (just go with it) yesterday evening. The boys are at the age of physicality and not understanding the ability to hurt one another. How they don’t devolve in any waking moment to the most charismatic wrestling move now on television is a mystery. But they wail on each other, as kids do, in just about every other way. It’s fun for them both, of course, until it is not. They are both insanely careful around their sister, which is cute. I am still bigger than them, so I can use the news anchor voice or go stand over one when he is being a little too much. Sometimes it’s the little brother that has to be called to heel.
In other words, they’re boys.
So we recreated famous football catches and toured the basement. They were very interested in our basement, which is not nearly as cool as their grandfather’s basement, and I told them so, but they could not be dissuaded. We had pizza and macaroni and cheese for dinner. We played basketball as a last-ditch stalling effort before they finally left.
The youngest, by the way, has a girlfriend and they have kissed at school and he says they both liked it, and he is in the NBA. He is also graduating kindergarten in a few days.
Oddly enough, I wasn’t completely sapped of energy when they left last night. Must have been that real-strawberry popsicle.
The cats hid upstairs during all of this. They are not used to little people, is the best we can figure. Lately they are both quite friendly when an adult comes by for whatever reason. But these half-sized types are no good for them. They don’t really have a reason for this fear, they just know it on a run-upstairs-and-hide level, and they aren’t wrong.
When they weren’t dodging loud, smelly, pokey, little people, they’ve had a great week. Phoebe is anticipating the sun’s movement.
And she keeps a close watch on the front yard.
Poseidon, meanwhile, has the backyard under close and near constant supervision.
When he’s not taking some Poe-time under a blanket somewhere.
Goofball.
So the cats are doing just great, thanks for asking, and so are we!
I only got in 70 miles on the bike this weekend, mostly because Saturday, which I had imagined as a longer ride, was the day my body said “Hey, feet, aren’t you tired?” And my feet said, “Sure am. And what about you, back? A little stiff aren’t you?” And my back said, “Now that you mention it, yeah. And I just bet those hands are numb, too.” And my hands said “Pkkwbo fiwo iwbefnwne.” So I called it at 32 miles.
Most disappointing. It was slow, and I was well behind my lovely bride, and nothing felt especially good. And that’s why I shouldn’t ride a hard, fast, short ride the day before my longer ride, according to the hypothesis I came up with Saturday evening.
And since I was going slow, I decided to shot this hay storage. There are cow pastures on either side of the road, and that’s the leftover hay from the winter, and that should tell you how mild things were.
A version of that photo will probably wind up as one of the banners on the blog eventually.
Yesterday, I did a little recovery ride, designed to not tax myself too much. And my legs felt great on the out part of my out-and-back route. On the and-back portion I realized, Oh, there was a barely perceptible, but nonetheless helpful tailwind working in my fair a moment ago. That, of course, meant I had an insurmountable headwind on the way back in.
Anyway, today, I’m taking off, and I’ll get back to it tomorrow. In the meantime, since we’re here, let’s check on the month’s progress. May was a light month, in terms of mileage, but it’s still a productive (for me) year so far.
The green line is a projection, where I’d be if I rode an average of 10 miles per day. The ride line is where I was this time last year. The blue line charts my 2024 progress. So it’s been a productive, so far, and should be another record-breaking year.
No one is happier than my spreadsheets.
Yes, I have multiple pages of cycling spreadsheets. Never start doing this. Down this path lies madness, and mystery, and sometimes satisfaction, but usually a squinty-eyed, “How are these the data points I’m fixated on?” sort of feeling of “Huh?”
Our next door neighbor is a 1-year-old. And his parents, of course. But mostly the kid. His parents put a swing out under a tree, it is one of those four rope numbers, and it leads down to a plastic swing that looks like the manufacturer just messed up on the high seat molds and decided they could make something work out of it anyway. The boy is starting to come around to the idea of the swing, a little bit. It takes time, but it is a good swing and his parents are determined and, eventually, this will be a wonderful experience and future swings under that tree will be in the blur of memories he carries forward his whole life.
It’s an amazing tree. Huge, wide crown. Thick lush grass underneath. There’s going to be so much fun and imagination that comes to life as he continues to grow.
And he doesn’t even know yet that helicopters live in it.
Things continue to look beautiful in our backyard beds.
No jets or choppers are emerging from our greenery, though.
We are going to have some grapes again this year, though. If we can keep the pests away. (We’ll fail at that miserably.)
But it is fun to try!
I had a student ask me in the spring if I was excited that Jon Stewart was returning to The Daily Show. I’d mentioned some research we did on the program way, way back when and soon after that announcement came down and he remembered that. And afterward he asked me once or twice what I thought about the new episode.
Since it was a new media class, it seemed viable, even if these students have never even seen the product, let alone the Jon Stewart version. Somewhere along the way there was a good injection point and I said, what people forget is that, at its core, this show is a satirical critique of the media, rather than a commentary on society as a whole. And as I watched tonight’s episode I thought, This is the episode that proves my point.
His guest was Ken Buck, most recently the resigning Congressman from Colorado. And he … was not ready for this.
At the end of the interview, my lovely bride said, “He’s not happy right now, is he?” The question allowed me to return to my central thesis about the show. No, he’s not. He was expecting still another softball interview, but the difference is that Stewart came prepared, and was ready with real-time rejoinders, and names and facts. He doesn’t let things slide, which is what political operators are fundamentally trained for now.
Yes, Stewart has a staff. Yes they do four half-hour shows a week, and yes, he is only, himself, doing the one show a week and, sadly, for this limited run, but what he brings to this highly specific interview is different than every other interview you’ll see on TV, which is largely about cheaply, effectively (with conflict, if possible) filling time and getting to the next commercial break. There’s no substance in that formula. No opportunity for push back, even if you were so inclined. And many aren’t inclined. That’s one of the big problems of contemporary media, an issue Stewart has been pointing out for decades now, and perhaps never more clearly than in the A-block of this episode.
Buck wasn’t always pleased with how that went, even though it wasn’t, at all, adversarial. It could have been even less to his liking. Watch the interview, you see that Stewart bailed him out, or let a moment pass, three or four times. (Frustratingly, Stewart let one go that I wish he’d stuck with.)
It was a brilliant piece of television.
books / cycling / Monday / photo — Comments Off on This is mostly about books, and I’m good with that 27 May 24
It’s been since roughly early March, but I feel like I’m catching up on things around here. Which means this is the week I will catch up on things. Which mean something important and pressing will come along to distract me. Something will make me realize this is a false feeling, and that I am, in fact, behind on all of the chores and hobbies and other things I’m just behind on. I will find that note on my phone that has the list of things I want to do, and things I should do, and things I need to do, and then I’m instantly behind the eight ball once more. This is the way of things. But, for the next day or two, this is a good feeling.
So, please, no one write anything on the web. If I’m caught up, I don’t need you adding anything to the To Do stack.
Aaaaaaand … there it is, I just realized something I’m behind on. Oh well, I’ll get to it Thursday, maybe.
Besides, these guys demand all of my attention anyway. Demand it.
We’ve created monsters.
I wonder how long we will leave this box on the kitchen island since Phoebe has made it her own.
After an afternoon of box-sitting, she was ready to quietly sit next to us and take a little nap.
What, in the world, is cuter than that?
Not to be outdone, Poseidon would like to show you his sleeping technique.
How is that comfortable? And it’s easy to say “He’s a cat,” as if that explains anything. But that guy is as spoiled as can be. Not, his cat cave is sitting on the ottoman, because the cat cave alone wasn’t good enough.
So the cats are doing just fine, thanks for asking. And, once again, it is self evident why their weekly check-in is the most popular regular feature on the site.
This weekend, I discovered we have berries.
Who knew? Not me.
This, I assure you, is the moon.
The timestamp says I took that at 11:09 p.m. on Friday night.
Also, I had a 35-mile bike ride, but we’re just going to treat that it’s not even a big deal, in an effort to normalize longer bike rides. I’ll just say this, 35 is sort of the mental barrier. Once I get through that, I’m ready to go out on actual longer rides, and that’s the plan. I’ll continue increasing the mileage because the goal, as ever, is to take nice, long, enjoyable, bike rides. Tomorrow’s ride will be longer than Saturday’s, and so on, for a while.
This weekend we also returned to our best summer weekend system: reading in the shade on Sunday afternoon. Yesterday I read the great Willie Morris’ Yazoo. Morris was from Yazoo, Mississippi, but while he was working as the editor of Harper’s Magazine he made several trips back to his hometown to follow along with how his unique small town was handling integration.
(Most small towns think they are unique. Some of them are. Yazoo may be. How they handled integration, at least in those early stages, was different from most.)
Morris, being a liberal Southern Democrat, and more so while he was living in the north, was hopeful about those early days, as you might imagine one would be about a place he loved. He became haunted by what happened in the longer term. None of that is an author’s fault, when you expand on a longform article to turn it into a book, the book becomes a bit of amber, and the stuff frozen inside of it can be right, or wrong. What we get, from our modern vantage point, is a glimpse of a particular moment in time, 1970, and just more of Morris, the tremendous reporter and writer.
As I’m sitting there, a little insect flew onto the left margin of the page, sat there for an eyeblink, and then hopped-zipped into the pages. It was eager to be in the book. Perhaps it was eager to be a part of the book. One with the book. Or maybe it wanted to fly to Mississippi, and then thought better of it, because it quickly zipped away.
It’s a musty old book, in that delightful, yellow-paged pulp way. Probably the insect’s impulse had something to do with the paper’s aging process. And, almost as quickly, it thought better of it, and flew away. It was one of those things in life that seemed important, important enough that you wanted to share it, even as you knew, in real time, you had no way to do it, or the feeling, justice. And so here I am.
Anyway, I started it yesterday, I finished it yesterday. I’m pleased to have done so, as part of my quest to read pretty much everything possible that Willie Morris wrote. It isn’t all grand, but if you read Terrains of the Heart, you’ll understand the impulse.
I forgot to mention this entirely, but since we’re on the subject of books, last week I finished Marching Home. The subhead is “Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War.” Subtitles are a terrible modern publishing necessity, but they hit the nail on the head in terms of the thesis.
It turns out, we’ve never been especially good at supporting veterans. I knew that. It goes back to the Revolutionary War and has been a shame and sometimes downright shameful part of the American condition. These guys had it no different.
One part was physical, and one part was the rest of the north wanted to get on with it. Another part was, psychological therapy just wasn’t a thing yet. That’s seeing a 19th century problem through a 21st century lens. It is a thing we caution people about when reading about historical periods, but it’s easy to do, and easy to return to.
Another one would be: 19th century alcohol might have been less than helpful. The descriptions of some of the people in this book beggars belief. But the whole thing really does seem a shame. And while this is, of course, a book about the Union army, reading it makes the humanist wonder how these same real, gritty, daily problems impacted the soldiers who fought for the Confederacy, too. As lousy as some of the northern infrastructure was for dealing with these problems en masse, it would have necessarily been hard for those guys, too.
After I finished that book, which was well-written and seemingly exhaustively researched — almost 40 percent of it were footnotes and other after matter — I asked the random number generator to pick another book from my Kindle queue, and I started in on Rising Tide. Again, the subtitle, “The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America” tells the tale. (Why not just use that as the title?)
Where I am, as of this writing, is still about 50 years prior to the flood, but it has been a fine read, and very digestible. These two pages are the bulk of what has been offered in terms of hydrology.
Even something like the movement of water is written in a lean-in style, to author John Barry‘s immense credit. And if these two pages intrigue you, even a little bit, this is a book for you.
I’m five chapters, I think, in. We’ve met three main players. Two of them were surveyor-engineers. One of them was fast, and the other fastidiously, obsessively thorough. The former died in the Civil War. The later did not, and, thus far, has proven to be something of a megalomaniac who becomes the head of the Army Corps of Engineers. And he’s just about to run, head-first, into the third main character, a captain of industry who Barry has thus far portrayed as an irresistible object.
Speaking of which, I think I’ll go back and continue on. When I last looked in, they were just getting to the problem of the legendary sandbars.
