Monday


12
Feb 24

You’re going to want to watch this video

Poseidon asked for a meeting this weekend. And, being staff to the cats, I was obliged to accept. The thrust of the meeting was this: He wants to sometimes go first in the site’s most popular weekly feature. Usually I operate on a “ladies first” policy, but he stamped around on me and made his point. So, this week, Poseidon will have the honor of the first check in.

You see, Poseidon is quite proud of his head-on-foot prowess.

And his hiding skills.

In that box is some poly sheeting which I need to put on the greenhouse. I ordered these sometime back, but I am waiting for the weather to warm up again — so maybe next week. Also, I might need still more parts for the job. Phoebe had the same reaction to that realization as I did.

But she’s ready to supervise from her supervising post.

My lovely bride picked up some flowers this weekend to brighten the house. They’re doing a lovely job.

Now they just have to survive the cats.

Let’s go back underwater. And we’ll do it with a video. This one is full of great fish. And there’s a wonderful up-close visit with a beautiful eagle ray. Don’t miss it.

And there are still a lot more photos and videos to come. Keep showing up, because I’ll keep posting them.

But, for now, I have to head to campus. Monday has once again gotten away from me.


5
Feb 24

For a brief moment, I was ahead, and now I’m behind

On Saturday, a finer day was never made, I tried the Cascadian Farms blueberry granola with a box of store brand raisins. Once again, the raisins were undefeated in augmenting the flavor profile of what I put in the blue breakfast bowl.

This morning, I tried mixing the first two varieties, Bob’s Red Mill Honey Oat and Bob’s Maple Sea Salt. I added raisins, of course. And, so far, the mix of these two have been my favorite. But I have also learned something uninteresting today.

Basically, photos of granola in a bowl all look the same. So my breakfast experiment will continue — this week I have to try other mixes and then soon I’ll perhaps go pick up some other brands and flavors to try.

You’re broken up by this decision, I know, but the kennysmith.org visual editor has sent out memos. Memos.

Another memo has just come down, in fact, reminding me to get on with the most popular weekly feature on the site. So let’s check in with the kitties.

It’s so cute when Phoebe covers up her eyes to go to sleep. She’s very serious about her relaxation.

Poseidon does it, too. Though, lately, he’s been interested in balancing on legs and feet.

We have a joke about the two of them, siblings. My lovely bride notes when they’re doing the same thing.

Come play with us. Come play with us.

Then I say, “You’re freaking me out!” Because it’s weird when they do the same things together. And she laughs. The cats are unimpressed, because they’re cats.

But, as you can see, they’re doing just fine.

We’d all be doing better if we were diving, I’m sure. Today’s feature from our recent trip to Cozumel is a video. There’s some great footage here, including a closeup of a turtle.

  

And, of course, we’ve many more photos and videos to enjoy in the days to come.

I’m now on a nice little streak of consecutive days in a row on the bike. This weekend I set a personal best in that regard. Today, unrelated to that entirely useless notation, I received the monthly email from Strava. I always love this part.

That’s about right.

On Saturday I had a big ride. A long climb from virtual sea level up beyond the virtual snow line. This, Zwift calls the Epic KOM. It’s 5.9 virtual miles up hill. None of it is particularly steep, but it does not relent. About five miles in, you get above the virtual hot air balloons.

And then you reach the top of the climb. After that, there’s a bonus climb, a .68 mile ascent averaging 13.6 degrees. If i am not mistaken, that’s still the steepest climb on Zwift. Strava tells me I’ve done it seven times now, and regret each visit. Saturday was my second time up that climb in a week, and perhaps my third best effort up the thing. (In January of 2021 I was minutes faster, according to my ride notes.) Also, the view at the top is pretty nice. If you can still see straight when you get there.

So that was 30 miles Saturday. I got in 28 miles late last night. And I did 22 miles this afternoon. Somehow, this is how the day got away from me. So, now, I must return to campus.

If you’ll excuse me …


29
Jan 24

Not exactly quotidian, but close

Saturday morning meant a continuation in the granola experiment. This is flavor two of this brand, and also my third granola ever. I believe this one is the basic offering from Bob’s Red Mill. Last week I tried their maple sea salt variety. On its own, it was a bit over-sweet. I tried it with some raisins and that was much better. But, Saturday, and today, I gave this one a shot.

It’s a bit cleaner, a bit simpler. And quite tasty. But it is missing something. And while I’m no taste expert and even less of a granola connoisseur, that might be as precise as I can get.

Today, I put a box of raisins — the generic store brand of raisins, which is always the preferred dried grape — in the bowl. And today, this tasted like a favorite cereal of my youth.

Crispy Wheats ‘n Raisins was introduced in the late seventies. It found its way in our cereal cabinet, the low one to the left of the oven, alongside the Froot Loops and Cookie Crisp and Rice Krispies and Apple Jacks. Only one of those I ate so much of I can’t consider eating today. It seemed like Apple Jacks got stuck on the grocery list every day. But despite all of those hyper cereals, Crispy Wheats ‘n Raisins was the best. Sales plummeted somewhere near the turn of the century and General Mills discontinued the brand. But it was good stuff, and definitely the best raisin-based cereal. This bowl this morning is the closest thing I’ve had to that taste. I’ll have to remember this combination.

Phoebe likes it too. She’s in danger of ruining her good girl reputation with her aggression for milk. She’ll sit and stare and if you get distracted by things like putting the milk cartoon back in the refrigerator, she’s over in a flash.

You’ll note that she’s not on the countertop, which is against the rules. She’s on the box which is on the countertop. We don’t have a rule against that.

And when she gets down, Poseidon is ready for his shift.

Buncha jailhouse lawyer cats around here.

Poe is much better about milk. It’s one of the few times when he isn’t an active bother. When I’m done, I’ll give Phoebe a tiny bit. Poseidon sits patiently and watches. This is the only time he will allow her to do a thing when he doesn’t insert himself. I’ll give him a tiny little sip of what’s left, just so he can have a taste. But not too much.

This big bad cat can’t handle his milk.

This weekend I finished Studs Terkel’s Hard Times. It’s an oral history of The Great Depression, with interviews all conducted in the late 1960s. Terkel worked for the WPA’s Federal Writers Project during the depression, particularly in radio. He spent a significant part of his career keeping the craft of oral history alive. A few decades after this book, he would win the Pulitzer Prize for another oral history series. That book is in my queue, as well. But, today, The Great Depression!

He traveled all over the country talking to people from all different walks of life, and different generations, about life in the 30s. And some of these stories are tough, but just as many of them are comically funny. I don’t think any one anecdote can explain the time to the rest of us, but it’s pretty obvious that one person’s experiences can inform us about them. And so, in this book, you get dozens and dozens and dozens of people’s experiences.

In this collection, at least, I think you can group people into one of three broad categories. You had people who lost everything, of course. And some of them learned to survive, and some learned how to thrive. Among them, you’d see people have a wide array of reactions to what the U.S. government did, or didn’t, do to solve the problems of the day. Among them, you find a certain group of people, particularly those that were young and previously of some means, that had a eye-opening experience when their parents lost it all.

In the second, smaller group, you’ve got people who weren’t directly impacted by the depression, or at least, a generation later, wouldn’t admit to anything of the sort. Throughout, people talk about how people who lost everything reacted, how they felt it was a personal failure, how that informed everything about them for a time, if not forever. But in this second group, you would have some people who weren’t touched by the Depression. People who thought others who were down on their luck deserved to be there. Or they just didn’t see it at all. No soup lines in my town, no apple sellers on my corner, this sort of thing. No direct exposure makes denial that much easier. And this second group would be people full of people in this general condition.

The third group of people would be the youth. The children of people who experienced The Depression. Teens and twenty-somethings in the 1960s. Unless Terkel was cherry picking, these young people were almost entirely ignorant of the Depression. At best, you’re left with the impression that people didn’t want their kids to know about their struggles. And sometimes bliss looks dumb.

Last night I started a new book, something I picked up for the Kindle. It starts with the death of Terry Tempest Williams’ mother. And it grows from there.

Mother tells the daughter that all of her journals are hers, but don’t read them until she’s gone. And soon after, she dies. Later, the daughter feels ready to look in those journals. They’re all neatly arranged, waiting. They’re all empty. And, from this, the author has put together 53 other essays on womanhood, memorializing her mother, musing on her faith and filling the empty places.

It’s lyrical in its own way, and it feels like a journal. I’ll probably be through it in a few sittings. I didn’t really know what I was getting into with this one. The title and the blurb were intriguing, good reviews on Amazon and sometimes that’s how you uncover something you wouldn’t otherwise happen upon. It’s a fast read, When Women Were Birds. I bet, by the end, the already accomplished writer will find her true voice.

And if you don’t want to read, we can always go diving. Let’s go!

Here are a few more shots from our recent trip to Cozumel. Here’s one of me. My dive buddy took this one.

I think it’ll eventually wind up as one of the rotating banners here on the blog.

And if you think that a photo of me means I’m running out of other fish of the sea, nope.

In this one we have three or four different species, including grunts and a stoplight parrotfish and an angelfish.

Also, the classic pufferfish flyover.

But, for my money, this is still the best fish in the sea.

Tomorrow, more underwater scenes, something on the bike and something about campus — where I must go to right now — ya know, the usual Tuesday stuff.


22
Jan 24

Short, but there’s a video and nine photos

We loaded up the car in Connecticut and drove back on Saturday. Luggage, two cats, two cat carriers, and all of their stuff, which we brought up in plastic bins. Poseidon knew what those were about. When the bins appeared, he knew he was ready to travel.

  

For the entirety of the drive back, they told us about the great time they had at my in-laws. Meow this, meow that.

While we were enjoying our visit in Connecticut, it was snowing here on the inner coastal plain — where the heavy land and the green sands meet. We had six inches or so. When we got off the highway, the surface streets looked like this.

And the neighborhood looked untouched. But it only looked that way, one of our neighbors cleans the road for us. Handy, helpful guy. He makes the roads passable, which is more than the county does.

Had to guess at where the driveway is. And then had to guess where the turn in the driveway is. At least the pear tree helped us find the right hook.

So we shoveled. It was cold. Never got warmer, despite the shoveling. Just stayed cold. We dug out around the new tire tracks, decided the rest will melt by Wednesday, and went inside.

The cats settled themselves in just fine. Phoebe got right back to her observation post.

Poseidon, of course, jumped on everything, immediately.

If the idea of all of that snow is discomforting, let’s go back to Cozumel!

No! Really! Let’s go back. It’s warm there. And you can take your time and enjoy the staghorn coral formations.

Also, they have the The stoplight parrotfish (Sparisoma viride).

And blue sponges!

And juvenile stoplight parrotfish!

And the yellowtail snapper! Which isn’t that rare! You can see it from Massachusetts to Brazil! But see it in Cozumel!

This is brief, because, having spent an afternoon prepping, I have to go to class now. Time to shape minds once more.


15
Jan 24

We’re back, but I’m still diving in my mind

We are back in the United States. Snow is coming down. Saturday I was sweating in pure humidity. Today I am wearing layers and not going near doors or windows. Going to Mexico in January was a smart move. Coming back to winter wasn’t as smart.

Put another way, when I walked onto the tarmac yesterday afternoon at the aeropuerto in Cozumel it was 84 degrees and brilliantly sunny. When I walked out of the airport at the end of our travels, it was 26 degrees, with a wind chill at 15. A 70 degree swing is inconsiderate.

But the trip back was easy. We’ve been to Cozumel once before, around spring break last year, and the airport there was a disaster. Even the locals were stunned. On this trip, we asked several of the frequent visitors about their experiences and they’d never had a problem. They assured us that two hours at the airport is plenty, when three hours wasn’t close to enough last year. Spring breakers breaking things, then. That had to be it.

Sure enough, two hours was about right. Returning the rental car, easy. Checking in, no big deal. Security, moving briskly. (Though the Yankee lost two plastic-tipped crocheting needles to the security theater gods. Just two. They overlooked, entirely, a whole sleeve of other equally dangerous plastic pointed weapons of the fabric arts.) We made it through and only had to wait about 10 minutes before the plane started loading.

Outside, then, one last time in the Mexican January. On the plane, and into the air. We landed in Atlanta, got through Customs — Atlanta does this better than anyone else on this side of the country, in my experience — found a little spot for a bite to eat, and a TV with the playoffs. It was in Atlanta where we said goodbye to my mother. Her plane was this way, our plane was that way. It was in Atlanta where she booked a hotel. Better to extend your vacation in a Holiday Inn Express for a day or two than spend the last few hours driving through ice. The weather, yesterday, was worse in Alabama than it was in the northeast. We got snow today, but they had snow and a dangerous few layers of ice beside.

We got about four inches.

They had about seven inches. Plus the ice. Also, most of the roads around here will be treated and passable tomorrow. down there? Who knows.

But enough about the cold stuff. Let’s look at a few more shots underwater.

It’s even warmer in video! Please press the play button and float along some of the beautiful formations around the Palancar reef.

Fish and coral and sponges of Palancar reef, Cozumel, Quintana Roo, Mexico.

She doesn’t breathe. She really doesn’t.

While we devotin’ full time to floatin’ under the sea!

Here’s another perfect brown bowl sponge (Cribrochalina vasculum) specimen.

Under the sea we off the hook
We got no troubles
Life is the bubbles
Under the sea

My mom, getting her dives in …

This is the blue chromis (Chromis cyanea) — a damselfish. It is a shallow water fish, living on reefs, or swimming just above them for plankton. They are often collected for aquariums. You can see why.

Their biggest threat is the expansion of the lionfish, which is an invasive species throughout the Caribbean and Atlantic east coast. Another concern is the loss of live corals, but there’s not a lot of data there yet, apparently.

Here’s another example of some beautiful purple rope sponges.

And so we’re back, but I have enough photos and videos to pad out the site for days and days.