We went out for a date on Saturday night. This, and our ghost walk last night, are our first date nights since early August, when we went to the USA National Championships in Milwaukee where my lovely bride competed in two races. So those weren’t really dates, but adventures.
So these were our first dates since … June. Switzerland.
That’s not true. We did go to the lake one day last month.
We’re very exciting people.
So it was a date night to Indy on Saturday night. We had dinner at a little Irish pub we like.
Perfect weather. We were the only people sitting outdoors. Very odd.
We also went to the joint where the Pacers play, because this guy was giving a performance of a different sort.
I laughed so hard — at stupid stuff of the sort that isn’t even my style of humor — that I was in pain. Bert is simply telling (embellished) family stories and is just now hitting his stride.
It rained yesterday, so it was a good day to stay inside, except for when we went to the grocery store, in the rain. Today, it rained and looked even more grim.
My contribution to the cause today was this. I finally finished this video project we’ve been working on. Helped one of our students lay out his graduate capstone project and saw another event canceled due to … apathy, I guess it was.
A student knocked on my door today and told me this.
This evening I wrote a little essay about that, which likely won’t get picked up anywhere. I also stopped by the sporting goods store to get some new weights. The Yankee is now able to upgrade part of her PT, and she needed some 2.5-pound plates.
Someone shoplifted in the store while I was waiting to check out. The guy working the door thought it, I thought it. Nothing was done — injury liability and insurance I am sure — even as the woman all but telegraphed her guilt. She then wandered around outside for a while, going to the farthest part of the parking lot before coming to a blue Taurus parked right by the door. She drove away.
And so did I. At the house I replaced our license plates, and did the monthly cleaning of my computer desktop.
There’s another video, a better one, at the end of this post. This photo, taken earlier this evening, offers a visual cue about what you’ll see in just a few hundred casual words, and after a few weekend photos.
Keep scrolling down to see that video.
We had an incredible weekend of weather. I didn’t even know what to do with it. Just warm and bright enough to feel like it could and would go on forever. Not so warm that you’d believe it to be true. And somewhere in there, amid the sun and the shade and the breeze, you can be held in a powerful grip of indecision.
We took a nice little walk on Sunday. Saw this wooly bear caterpillar, which was very much in a hurry to get to wherever it is that caterpillars go.
On the nearby goat farm they’re putting in another asphalt path. I look forward to exploring that when they remove the construction tape. One must respect construction tape, but this looks all but done.
How many colors can one tree sport, anyway?
This is on another path, and with more colors.
I got photobombed …
It doesn’t pop in the photo as well as it did in the daylight, but this tree is both yellow and red. It was fantastic, and that’s another problem of autumn. It’s too temporary — despite what I said above.
We stood under the trees and felt the breeze and caught the leaves.
If you don’t know what to do with a fine autumn day, catch the leaves.
Another work week has begun. My contribution to the cause today was this. Three-quarters of a running project are completed, and the rest will wrap up later this week. And then I’ll talk about them, perhaps, unless something more interesting takes place that day.
(Cheer for something more interesting.)
We set up a new system to show off student media work on the big screen. Wednesday we’ll roll that out. I also met two scholars visiting from France.
I got to the house just in time to take a quick bike ride. Got back in before dark, could have gotten a bit more out of the ride if I’d put a little thought into the route, but, no matter, it was 20 miles.
Went slow on this road, just for these views. Hopefully the video is worth it.
And now it’s time to get ready for tomorrow. The faster we get to it the faster I can get through it. Also, the quicker I can get to bed the quicker I can … fill my weary head with useless ideas like that Bryce Harper video. Pretty good one though, wasn’t it?
Here are a bunch of photos from what turned into a lovely weekend. (Next weekend is forecast to be nice, too, but the leaves and the sun worked out this weekend and you don’t count on that twice in a row around these parts.)
I went for my first bike ride in, quite a while, actually. The Yankee insisted I go ride. I think she’s tired of me hovering and worrying over her. So I had a 31-mile pedal and it felt like the first ride in quite a while, actually.
I went down the best autumn road in town. This is our seventh autumn here, somehow, and I’ve only taken this road twice. Some things should just be used sparingly, ya know?
And with views like this, you could see why I wouldn’t want to spoil it, right?
And so I huffed and puffed and counted my blessings that I was able to ride this road on one of the best days of the season, just for a quiet few minutes with no cars and these views.
Here’s a video of it, which buffered and compressed poorly, it seems. I may have to try this again, but, really, it’s the light and color we are after here, and definitely not the bouncy part in the middle.
Woods at the bottom of that same road:
That old road turns into a fork, to the left is a gravel drive and to the right, a gravel road.
But when you’re on a road bike, and don’t have gravel tires, you can’t be too curious about what lies further ahead. It’s probably just another house or two, anyway.
Here are some other leaves. You can never capture autumn, not really.
You need to smell the leaves.
And you need the suggestion of chill in the air.
That flicker of the sun glancing and dancing through the leaves is helpful, too.
You need the sound of the breeze dancing through the trees.
And the crunch of another season under foot.
That’s what you need to really appreciate autumn, before it is all just sticks pointing to the sky.
I was just wondering … have you ever felt like a tree?
I’ve sat under trees and slept under trees and measured trees. I’ve watched trees and identified trees and cut parts of trees away. I’ve climbed them and used them for lean-tos and projects and umbrellas. I’ve planted them and dug them up and helped haul them away and, once, I portrayed a tree in an acting exercise. (Some of these things I’ve done poorly.) But every so often, I look at this tree behind our house and I wonder if I have felt like this tree.
Not yet. But in a few days, this tree hits a particular moment in its annual cycle and I can relate. It isn’t a one-with-the-earth moment, but recognition of the versimilitude of another living thing. And there’s a good, real moment, where I feel like I have a basic sense of what it must be thinking.
He said, determined to start the week off with some proper anthropomorphism.
Anyway, after a late evening on campus I went to the deck to supervise the starting of the grill and looked up and there was the tree, sending the maple tree signal in a beautiful warm day’s gloaming hour, and I thought, “I know. I understand.”
Exactly what, I can’t say. But it seemed important to feel empathetic at the moment.
I need to catch up on notes to the Re-Listening Project, before it all gets out of hand.
Get it? Out of hand? You got it.
Man, not even the tree laughs at that joke.
Anyway, I’m just listening to all of the old CDs in the car. Second time through them all as a chronological study of my music acquisition in this specific medium. These aren’t reviews, but sometimes they are the memories that mark time. All of these discs (eventually) cross a few genres and periods. They’ll do so in a haphazard way; there’s no larger theme. It is, a whimsy as music should be. And at this particular point in the CD book I’m both buying new music and replacing things from cassettes.
Hey, it was the ’90s.
Here’s some 1995 alt rock from Dishwalla, the pop-version of industrial music. Who cares. The lead singer, J.R. Richards, had a great voice, and they put on a fun live show in April of 1996 when I saw them in support of their debut album, “Pet Your Friends.”
Richards split his pants on stage. He was quite embarrassed by that, but was eventually able to laugh it off. Rock ‘n’ roll jokes were, no doubt, made. They were opening for Gin Blossoms, who were the musical King Kong of the moment. For half a second, maybe, it seemed like Dishwalla would join them up there. “Counting Blue Cars” hit number one on the alternative charts. The record went gold and sat atop the Heatseekers chart. They were musically adventurous.
Here’s the second track off the record.
If this song doesn’t make you want to rush, rush, to a mall and buy 1990s clothes I don’t know what else I can say.
I always thought — and apparently modern me agrees with young me — that the first half of this record was the best part. There are six really nice tracks on here, but there’s a fall off. And the back half of the record has a different mood.
Then, in September of 2015, this happened.
Dishwalla is playing over the PA in this grocery store. Who in 1996 could have seen that coming?
Richards liked that tweet. I like to imagine he was just sitting around in-between production sessions (Dishwalla is still a band and Richards is still making music, though he has left the group) doing random word searches.
I say it was random because the next month, in a different grocery store, I heard Dishwalla again, but he didn’t like that one. Maybe he was on vacation.
After Dishwalla comes Joshua Tree. And my memory is a little fuzzy here, but I’m fairly sure this was one of those that I bought to replace the cassette version. Worth it in every respect, though, right?
I remember this clear: At my college radio station everyone was tasked with listening to new music. What songs were good? What were radio friendly? What had profanity and where? They’d always done this. I assume they still do. It was a rite of passage. Anyway, when U2 released Joshua Tree the label sent the station an actual vinyl album. And on the bottom right corner of the album jacket was a little sticker. The practice at that time was to list three or four songs and put some stars by it. (This was U2’s fifth album, and the one that would set the standard for the rest of their career, but whoever reviewed this had no way of knowing that, of course.) That person also wrote on the sticker “And on the eighth day God handed down this record …”
Some other DJ had come along later and slapped another sticker next to that one. “We get it. You like this album.”
Some 25 million copies later, having sat atop the charts in nine countries, run up the flag pole for a 20th and a 30th anniversary re-release … safe to say that reviewer wasn’t the only one.
I wonder how that second person felt every time they heard one of the five singles on the radio, because that happened to that poor cynical soul a lot.
The only problem with this record is that it demands long, wide open roads, and woe unto you if you have to run the gauntlet of red lights when Larry Mullen Jr. is setting up the rest of the band.
The last disc was a greatest hits collection of Prince’s work. Some of it, I felt then as now, you should have a copy of close at hand. Some of the tracks here are aging poorly. Some still stand as seminal classics of a pop music genius.
Also, “I Would Die 4 U” is due a renaissance. (Odd that Stranger Things hasn’t licensed that.)
Prince’s falsetto, while impressive, gets too much attention. The genius is everywhere else. I’ve always wanted to know who said “What happens if you record a blues song as Iggy Pop?”
And why does that work? It works, I’m pretty sure, because it is Prince.
And that should be enough music for today. Not to worry. I still have a few more records to catch up on. Come back tomorrow for more tunes!
Back to work today. Catching up on meetings and the things I couldn’t do while working from home last week. Some things are virtual, some things you just need to be there. Fortunately, everyone has been understanding and most gracious with my absence last week. Family comes first, and that’s a nice perk.
I’ve worked places where that wasn’t the case.
I’d say this has been a great chance to slow down, except that everything seems to have sped up. But on Friday The Yankee’s mom came to town to see about her daughter and help out. That was a big morale boost. And this weekend she worked through those early days of surgical recovery. She’s also a week-on from the big crash, and so, on balance, she’s starting to move better.
On Sunday afternoon we all even took a walk.
When I got to the office I saw that the Poplars Building, which we’ve been documenting in this space since August, is now all gone.
They took that second half in a week. But you should see all the rubble that’s out of our view there. Maybe we can take a look at that this week.
Also, the leaves have started turning. Something about them seems off this year. Subdued somehow. Maybe I just caught it in poor light at the wrong time of day, and early in the turn.
There will be a few more days of opportunity to poorly demonstrate the leaf turn. I’m sure I’ll try.
I started, oh, almost two weeks ago now, reading Andrew Ritchie‘s Major Taylor: The Extraordinary Career of a Champion Bicycle Racer. I’m about 20 percent of the way through it now, but the beginning sets the stage. Late-19th century, a young black man rides a bicycle as well as anyone at the peak of American interest in cycling, both as a pastime, but also the sport.
“The fastest humans on earth.” Crazy, but it’s worth reminding ourselves to think in those terms.
Taylor was from Indianapolis, he’d moved with a mentor/employer to Massachusetts, and he’d signed with the League of American Wheelmen, the sport’s governing body of the time. He was 17 or 18 here.
Within the next year he’d be a world champion, and a world record holder.
He was, in fact, the first African-American world champion, of any sport. He died nearly penniless. He’s been all but forgotten outside of his adopted Worcester, Massachusetts, and some vibrant-and-growing cycling groups. Major Taylor will have a renaissance, you can just put your ear to the wind and feel it coming, on your left. His is an intriguing story.
