All are well here after another quiet weekend. We had a bike ride on Saturday morning and had the traditional weekly Chick-fil-A. Chatted with some friends that evening and did a lot of reading yesterday. It was a pleasant way to spend another stay-at-home weekend.
The cats are having a fine time of it. Poseidon enjoyed checking out the box their food came in.
We have to hide the bag because, eventually, he’ll become interested in the plastic and begin to chew through it. He’s a continual piece of work. But the box proved a good distraction for putting the food away in a closet that he will sprint toward should the door open at any time, day or night.
Phoebe had a nice night of it. This is comfortable.
She stayed like that for more than an hour.
I’m back to running, after a six week layoff. I’ve decided to concentrate on pace for a while, so I’m working on bringing down mile times. Today was my fourth run back and I’ve chipped away 35 or 44 seconds from that first run, depending on which of the two equally suspect apps you prefer. I bet, now that I’m writing these numbers out, that I’ll hit a wall later this week, but everything feels pretty good so far.
I’ve no illusions of ever seeing any of the actually respectable times of my youth. Not that youthful anymore, after all. But I’m just in the top quartile for my age group, and today’s pace puts me in the top half of the 17-21 cohort.
The biggest differences being they could probably breathe when they were done and they’ll be able to move tomorrow. It’s sometimes an open question these days.
I walked by this little turtle right after my run.
He wasn’t especially happy to see me, but we’ve only just met. So I took a quick picture and let him go on his way. You don’t disturb turtle buddies when they are on a mission.
Well, it’s another Monday, so let’s check in on the management team. Phoebe has been lounging as comfortably as ever this week:
She’s good at finding the sun. And she’s intent on her naps:
Poseidon was supervising dinner from his overhead perch the other night:
But he was less interested in a weekend video chat:
We went for a nice little bike ride on Saturday. We are good at this route. We manage to time the hardest part of the route with the hottest part of the day. One particular stretch has a deceptive little hill to climb, and the critical part of those three miles there is no shade to enjoy. Also, the county put convection oven elements in the road’s asphalt through there, so you get baked from both directions.
After you finish the climb, though, you get a fun two-mile descent and you eventually find yourself looking at this view:
And then along came this boat. For a 20 mile per hour photo I guess it works out:
Today, today has been a perceptively slow day. And I’m not talking about my run, har-har. It was my first run in seven weeks. Mostly it was a deliberate choice. And then I slightly rolled an ankle trying to avoid a cat. It was a minor thing, but since no one is chasing me, it seemed wise to rest it. This weekend I guess I decided that I’d rested enough. So I set out for a little one-mile run today, because I want to go fast again.
I haven’t been fast since high school or so, and I never will be again, but I can set some baselines and goals. And my new one-mile baseline is slow enough that I can, hopefully, cut out big chunks at a time. So here’s to tomorrow.
I had a tough bike ride on Saturday. This was my only photo, and I was basically back at the house and worn down and had pretty much given up on the whole thing for quite a while, anyway.
Sometimes it is like that. Some days you feel great. Great! And somedays are off. Or some days you just feel lousy about the whole thing. It is always better to have done it. That’s the constant. Even on the lousy rides, like this one on Saturday. I had a headache in the middle of the it, which might be a first for the thousands of miles and the few thousand hours I have spent staring down at handlebars.
But the speed was about … average for what I’ve come to expect lately. So call it an uneven evening ride of pushing through. I stayed with The Yankee for half of it, anyway. She took a different route and I just turned around at one point. She came in about 10 minutes and with an extra two miles or so. Hers was better than mine, which is always nice.
Which leads us nicely to the weekly cat pictures. This is perhaps the cutest one I took of Phoebe this week.
But it is not the best one I took of her. I’m saving that series for a rainy day.
Poseidon was very sleepy this weekend. When he wasn’t being demanding, challenging, loud, too aggressive or otherwise overbearing.
So normal cat stuff, I guess.
Cats.
Back on campus today. We spent six hours in Studio 5 tearing down a set. Last year they built a set for an apartment for one of the production classes. Somewhere along the way it was decided that the set wasn’t sufficient. So, after many meetings, it was decided that this set was coming down.
So today we took ratchet to bolts and pry bars to nails and it all came down and the soundstage is a soundstage again.
People also balanced lights in suspension system hanging in the rafters and we tore down an ancient wall fixture which required brute force, which is why they keep me around.
Someone also put in an order for a dumpster for all the stuff that was due to be disposed of from the studio. We filled the loading dock with debris and it will go a long way toward filling the dumpster.
When it got down to the point of removing tape from the floor I knew it was time to leave … just as soon as the tape was cleaned up.
It was a productive Monday, I suppose. I stopped by the grocery store on the way to the house. I was intent to count the masks to no-masks, but gave up when it was 11-2, masks and I needed to find the most direct route to the areas of the store I needed with the fewest people between points A, B, C and D.
All of the products I wanted were there. I picked up all of the products I wanted. I breezed through the self-checkout and hustled outside, so I could go directly to the domicile in the most indirect route possible. There’s road work, you see. So I had to go through a neighborhood that we usually ride bikes through and I had to remind myself the car and the bike approach things differently. Also, the hills are much smaller with an internal-combustion engine at your disposal. The music is better, too.
Back inside, groceries put away, showered, snacked and then catching up on the day’s email and then dinner and, now, this. It wasn’t exactly a full day, but it was full enough. There were people and achievements and a place to sit down at the end of it, so full enough indeed.
Covid-19 / IU / Monday / photo / video — Comments Off on Tigers, fireworks and back on campus, oh my! 6 Jul 20
We went to the nearby feline rescue this weekend. It was our first time out of the house for anything more than groceries or takeout or exercise since March. The place made at least a passing effort at taking everyone’s temperatures and masks were required. Smaller groups would be preferable, but they were limiting it to 10 people per tour.
It’s hard for people to stay out of each other’s way when they’re gazing in wonder.
Or just, you know, in general.
Anyway, our tour was supposed to last for 45 minutes, but it’s slow out there so our guide let us linger so everyone could get their national geographic photographs. We stayed on the property for just about 90 minutes. They have 150 or so cats they take care of — it’s a rescue and you heard some of the bizarre and some of the sad stories — and a few dozen of them were on display for the gawkers.
And it was a warm day, being July. So there was a lot of shade for the cats, which was nice to see and no doubt appreciated by the animals.
They’re a mixture of oblivious to people …
And oddly curious about you. In fact, they’ve probably seen more people than I have in the last few weeks. And they get their space, too. So it’s a happy little setup, as these things go.
And almost all of the tigers were interested in me.
This guy seemed to know it, and he was telling me RUN!
As in, “No, please, go. I feel the need to chase something down … ”
Here’s a thing you learn about tigers when you’re just a few feet away from them. All the sounds a house cat makes, a giant cat makes too, and they scale up. Just the sound of one of these massive things giving himself a bath gives one a lot to think about.
And the cats really liked me.
Almost all of them. Maybe it’s because I’m a Tiger. Maybe it was something I was wearing, or my animal magnetism, or that I’d slathered myself in chicken juice before we got there.
And, look, I don’t want to question the craftsmanship of a professional here, but when a tiger is casually walking directly toward you, you have a moment to think about the durability of a chainlink fence. There’s just enough time to hope that guy had a good day at the fence factory. No hassles at home, no aching joints, no in-law distractions or musings about his weekend on the lake. Just good, solid, earnest, pride in his work.
You don’t have enough time, though, to consider the plant that makes the nails, whether the second shift was on their game when they made the ones holding the fence against the wood. And, goodness knows when that wood was installed and it may be rotten already. You don’t have time to think about those things, or the team that assembled all of this here in 19Who Knows When.
You become keenly aware of the idea, percolating in your head and not yet verbalized, that all of this would merely slow down a properly motivated machine like this.
I liked how she was sneaking up on me from behind the maple tree. Completely fooled me.
There were two of these on our part of the tour today. Got a glimpse of one, and while I try to avoid the fence aesthetic, it couldn’t be helped here, and I hope you’ll overlook it. How beautiful is this creature?
Anyway, a warm day also allows for the indulgence of a cool bath. All of the tigers have giant plastic barrels. Those big heavy duty things that are in no way a simulation to tender human flesh because the barrels are much more sturdy. They are playthings. All of the barrels are destroyed.
The tigers don’t destroy their baths though. They’ve got this whole thing figured out.
“Wanna come in for a dip? It’s hot out.”
“But it’s so nice in here … ”
Thanks, tiger, but no thanks.
Fourth of July was even more subdued than normal. No big civic events. We almost saw the little parade one of the nearby neighborhoods runs. We rode through the route on our bikes twice. Just missed it both times. We were the beginning, and the end of the parade, then.
We had cheeseburgers and corn off the grill, and cheesecake out of the fridge. Everything was delightful.
The neighbors, who have been working on their ballistics and trajectories for several days now, put on quite the impressive display. Had to be the better part of a mortgage payment. Anyway, this isn’t how you properly record fireworks, of course, but this is how I always remember them, fuzzy and dreamy.
There were just things exploding every which direction. And neighbors elsewhere were launching things from decks. Here’s to prevailing winds and sensible precautions and the good old American technique of eyeballing flammable projectiles. But the big show was still going on. And it went on and on.
This was the fourth of five finales. They had a good time, and many of the neighbors approved. It was festive when there were few festive things taking place out of sensible precaution. How he managed to keep the really big explosions out of the woods that were just feet away is a mystery.
And, to his credit, they stopped promptly at 10:30. It’s a decent gesture and makes sense. He had to get up early the next morning to clean the debris.
(He did not.)
Back to work today. It’s my first time working in the building since mid-March, 116 days for me. Everything else has been work-from-home, which we are both fortunate enough to be able to do. I’ll be back off and on campus sporadically for a while, in the hopes of having a semester. And then, if things go according to plan, we’ll have an oddly structured semester. A lot of things have to go right for that, however, and while that is the plan and the hope, it’s easy to be skeptical about it.
But! Yet! We are still a considerable ways removed. It is impossible to say from this vantage point what our reality will be in August, September and October. Why would you want that sort of certainty in your daily routine, anyway?
So today, we moved furniture. Large rooms will stay the same size, but their capacities are considerably reduced. Our commons, which would seat 50 something is down to 17. Our largest classroom has a fire code of 72, or thereabouts. It has a covid code of 21. Our standard sized rooms will seat eight plus an instructor. It’s going to be a strange school year, to say the very, very least.
So after this morning’s bike ride I got cleaned up, donned a mask went to campus and got sweaty again flipping tables and stacking chairs. When this comes up I like to smile and say “This is why I went to college. And grad school!”
Also, today, Harvard went entirely online. And the U.S. government said “If your school goes entirely online and you’re an international student, you must go home.” It’s going to be a strange, sad school year. We’re going to be a hybrid institution. I’ll be doing a lot of my work from home, and I am incredibly fortunate in this respect. That’s been a lesson for a lot of us this year, hasn’t it? You can be both in a fortunate situation and still not in an ideal situation.
But tigers!
cycling / Monday / photo — Comments Off on And here’s how we start another week 29 Jun 20
Here’s a shot from a weekend bike ride. This was just after a turnaround spot, just after I got passed and dropped for the rest of the ride. I was well and truly put away for the rest of the day. I saw her here, caught one more glimpse and then rode alone for 40 more minutes.
Some days she’s too fast, and some days I’m too slow. And I wasn’t even moving terribly slowly during this ride, which could only mean that she was moving quite fast indeed. Fortunately, I don’t mind riding alone.
She wasn’t on this road, which invites you to slow down and enjoy the narrow lane because it is a continual, slow incline for just under two miles. But it pays you off with a nice reverse S-turn, just after this photo, that I was in no way capable of enjoying.
So I spent the rest of the little climb thinking “The last time I was here, I could really race up this road.” So I guess I’ll need to try this again some day soon and try to give it a little more effort.
You know who gives the perfect amount of effort, every time? Phoebe. She’s got this whole thing figured out.
She also likes to take naps in blankets. She gets in them herself, usually completely hidden, but on this given evening she poked her head out to make a Phoebe wrap. Look at those little freckles on her cute nose.
Poseidon, in his natural water habitat.
You know how you can dissuade cats from doing things with a water bottle? If I shot Poseidon he just looks up at you. “What?” But he’s discriminating about it. He’ll wait until water is coming out of the sink at the proper rate before he sticks his head down there to have a sip. He also likes the shower.
And basically everywhere you don’t want him to be. This is a jump-on-the-kitchen-counter-and-over-to-the-fridge-and-in move. He can do faster than I can write it, much faster than you can read it.
He’ll turn around and find some plastic to chew before you can figure out how he got there. And, like all cats, he’s quite talented at increasing his mass by 40 percent and making each joint uniquely inflexible on demand.
Like he’s been in quarantine or something.
It should be an interesting week ahead. I have a fun podcast on tap tomorrow. And we have a three-day weekend ahead. Maybe, instead of sitting in the home-office I’ll spend Friday lingering around the library downstairs. Fortunately I have a few days to figure out what my holiday plans might be. There are no fireworks, but the signs say a nearby neighborhood parade is still in the works. For now.
