Monday

adventures / football / Monday / photo / Twitter — Comments Off on It was a nice, full, weekend, thanks
4
Nov 19

It was a nice, full, weekend, thanks

There is an alarm clock in our guest bedroom. It is blinking because of the last power outage. I walked in there one day in the last week or two and thought I should reset that. But then I realized, No, I’ll wait. ​

And now I can do it, around the microwave and the stove clock and the cars and whatever else has to be done the old fashioned way. Thank goodness your computers and phones and DVRs and tablets and thermostats change themselves these days. The miracle of technology is nearly limitless. Nearly. Maybe if I had a smart refrigerator it would change the milk for me. That’d be helpful these days.

I mean, I’d change the batteries in the smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, but, by then, I’m just so exhausted. It turns out this well-oiled machine is impacted by just the tiniest bit of melatonin.

Anyway, lovely weekend. We attended a football game. Indiana got to seven wins for the first time in ages, these poor suffering football fans. They’re going bowling and they keep winning and there’s another win on the schedule, perhaps two, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Let’s get ahead of ourselves. This is a super young team and they are playing against type in some real and serious ways.

Michael Ziemba is a junior, and he’s been around on this team so long he feels like an old man. He was in my class last fall. Nice guy. Not old at all. He had the one tackle on the night:

Michael Penix Jr. is the quarterback, and he’s had the injury bug this year, but he’s also helping to lead a team that has scored 30 points in eight games this year. He’s a redshirt freshman. So big things to come:

Here’s James Miller, another redshirt freshman. The linebacker finished with three tackles and an assist. He’s chasing Aidan Smith, Northwestern’s backup quarterback.

Hunter Johnson is the Wildcats’ stating QB, but he’s been out while his mother undergoes cancer treatment. He did play in the game, though. And, most importantly:

“She has a couple more procedures, but really the bulk of it is out of the way. The chemo is done,” he told the Tribune. “My mom has been unbelievable through all this, so strong. She hasn’t flinched a bit. It has been tough for her, but she has kept a great face. It has been inspiring to me to know she will get through it.”

This past week Whop Philyor was added to the Biletnikoff Watch List. The junior is among the nation’s best receivers. He had a quiet night. Two catches for 76 yards.

And here’s Stevie Scott scoring one of his two touchdowns on the night.

The public address announcer calls out the jersey numbers. So it’s always “Number Eight, Stevie Scott carries for 27 yards.” But it sounds like he’s saying “The great Stevie Scott … ” He rushed for 116 Saturday. The sophomore is closing in on his second 1,000-yard season.

Penix, the IU quarterback above, got hurt in the second half, meaning Peyton Ramsey came in. Ramsey was a starter in his frehsman season, started all 12 games last year and he’s been great as a spot starter this season.

But here are the real stars:

Last night we went to the theatre, he said without any sense of flair.

It’s a funny show. Full of high energy. Great performances, and it makes fun of an entire belief system.

That last part is kind of important.

But that’s not everything! There’s more on Twitter and on Instagram and many of the fine places that don’t require I change a clock.

cycling / Instagram / iPhone / Monday / photo / video — Comments Off on This week we show color
28
Oct 19

This week we show color

I looked outside Saturday and saw many colors. I like the many colors. We do not go into the wilderness and write essays about it. Not like before. Now, we put on our shoes and, this time of year, check the thermostat to see the external temperature so that we can dress accordingly and then grab our phone and go take photographs. So I did:

It wasn’t cold. But that’s coming, and that right quick. Right now, in fact, the color of the Midwest is upon us: grey. That’ll be the default and unassuming look until, oh, April if we’re lucky. Sure, there will be a few blue-sky days, but you can no longer take those for granted. Sunday was a beautiful goodbye. The season of drear, with a dash of Cimmerian, is upon us. But not yesterday. Egads, yesterday was beautiful.

Just look at that sky over the same tree:

We took a bike ride and wound our way down to the lake, to see about the leaves down there. We took a few pictures. And this is now the wallpaper on my phone, because we make photobomb wallpapers around here:

Even the ground had a moment yesterday. I just shot this as I walked by a tree. How many colors are in there?

On the way back to the house, I sought out a road I discovered because of some random overwriting I was doing here on the site last month. Geese were flying overhead and I looked at their basic route and found the nearest pond and saw this road on Google Maps and thought, I should ride that one day.

And maybe I picked the most perfect day of the season to make this come true, I don’t know. I rode down it, a mile of shade and leaves and alternating beams of light and twists and turns and fun. At the end, where pavement turned into what I presume is a long gravel driveway I turned around and thought, I should record this. So I rode back up it, one handed, up the hill, and had a great time. Just here, when the light changed and I happened to be watching the road through the screen, and it lit up in a golden hue while the phone’s sensors tried to catch up to the circumstance. That was the moment, and the ride was worth it and I knew in that explosive refrain that it was, in fact, the day for this road. That moment was this moment:

You can see the whole road, slightly accelerated, here:

And here’s our view of the lake from down by the water’s edge:

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Maybe you'd like a scenic view of the lake …

A post shared by Kenny Smith (@kennydsmith) on

So a nice weekend, then.

More on Twitter and check me out on Instagram as well.

adventures / Monday / photo / video — Comments Off on Just add weekend
21
Oct 19

Just add weekend

A fine fall weekend we had. It wasn’t long enough, but it was perfect and I didn’t do enough with it. So, yes, perfect indeed.

One would think that after a certain number of autumns you would be able to solve this contradiction. First you’d have to realize, though, that it isn’t a contradiction at all. But it is very much a thing.

Those pesky things.

Anyway, we had a lovely little bike ride on Saturday. It was a nice and warm and sunny day. We did it in the little ring, the point being lighter pedaling and a higher cadence, or something. We took one of the very traditional routes and cut it in half. Just the beginning and the end, if you please. And somewhere pretty early on I got dropped, long before it was respectable to be dropped to be frank.

But then there was the turn around and just before I got there, we crossed paths:

And then there were six-and-a-half miles back to the house. I chased on for about five of those miles before I finally got to close her down. That last mile was spent trying to bridge the final bit of the gap and get on her wheel. It was probably 20 minutes of pedaling like crazy, I had no more to give. How racers do that and then attack over the top escapes me.

Saturday night we sat on the deck and made S’mores and looked at the stars, which was pretty perfect.

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Just saying.

A post shared by Kenny Smith (@kennydsmith) on

On Sunday afternoon … we went for a walk.

Here’s the maple in our backyard:

We have a fruit tree which doesn’t bear fruit …

And we have a little creek that runs through the woods immediately behind our house. And I love being in the woods. A straight branch here, an almost right angle there, there’s so much personality to slowly feel your way through. Tracks, sounds of critters, curious holes in fallen trees, it all makes for a lovely experience.

This is well down the road, and almost into the string of houses on the other side of the woods, which are just as peaceful and full of magic and possibility:

It’s hard not to be romantic about a place like this:

The colors are just starting to go, too:

And we met a new neighbor, too. Behold, the friendly green frog:

She said he was also having a fine weekend. We’d probably heard her the night before. I’d like to her song all year-round. Alas.

More on Twitter and check me out on Instagram as well.

adventures / cycling / Monday / video — Comments Off on Let’s go ride bikes!
14
Oct 19

Let’s go ride bikes!

I’m more than a little disappointed in the HD quality of this upload, but it is a clip from a nice little bike ride this evening:

“My offseason goal,” The Yankee says, “is to perfect the cycling photobomb.”

I’m not sure if the deliberately done, on demand, photobomb is technically a photobomb, but that composition has style. Which is good since it also has some focal quality issues. I’m going to blame the one handed, barely breathing, back camera, keep-it-on-the-road nature of the moment. That’s where the authenticity is, by the way. That’s where the vulnerability is.

Anyway, it was a nice ride. Just using the little ring, thinking about high revolution more than speed. As I have neither, it was just a nice excuse to be outside with my best girl. The shadows are longer, the days are shorter, there’s a bit of different color in the sky, there was a chill in the air once the perspiration began, et cetera.

It made my Monday. What made yours?

More on Twitter, and check me out on Instagram as well.

Monday / television / video — Comments Off on A TV show’s trailer is the high water mark here. Really.
7
Oct 19

A TV show’s trailer is the high water mark here. Really.

It was a low-key weekend. Oh, there were plans, goals even. There were tasks to be performed and achievements to be met. It turned into one of those days where you have the big ambitions and then meet none of them. It turned into a weekend of those days.

But, hey, I did have a lovely dinner with friends one night and at least I got all the laundry done and the dishes washed.

This trailer came out. Perhaps you’ve seen it already:

And then someone at Gizmodo broke the whole thing down in almost frame-by-frame detail. The people doing that should get an advance screening, just as a reward. It’s OK, I can wait another day.

Mostly I’m relieved the Data bit is a dream. It’s going to work out better that way.

So maybe CBS All Access is the service I’ll pick up. At least until someone does a skin service for all of these things. There’s a marketplace for that, legalities be damned.

Anyway, today was a long day that just kept getting longer, somehow. It concluded with a meeting that began at 7 p.m. An important meeting, and I was happy to be a part of it. But I left the office at 8:15. Then I went to the wrong place, because it was that kind of day, before going to the right place. It’s the same store, on basically the same street, just 2.8 miles and a 12-minute drive apart. That’s good franchise planning, and accounts for my general confusion in this instance. (But only this instance.) After that, the next place I had to go closed precisely one minute earlier and the people inside just looked at me as if they were struck dumb by the prospect of a customer, in general, let alone the hour. If I’d chosen the first stop correctly I could have made it to the third place prior to the store closing. But that’s Monday for you.

Very well, then, back tomorrow, when the morning side crew will be no less surprised, because who stops by a store on a Tuesday morning anyway?

After that failed customer experience we finally had dinner, about an hour before the chosen restaurant closed. So there were two tables filled, which was nice. A quiet restaurant for two! The nice young lady who served our table (better than the humorless lady who would just rather … not) really wanted to do her cut work and go home, so she was happily elsewhere. And, happily, we’re a pretty low maintenance table.

Anyway, in a few minutes I plan on trying to fall asleep. Perhaps I’ll fall asleep reading some news site. I just hope it’s not the comments. Or maybe it will be the comments. What a thing to fade off, too, comments on some news story that seemed like a good idea at the time when you opened the tab, but now that nine tabs are open, you start to question the choice. And so you read the comments. And then you drift off.

That’s how you get a head start on Tuesday.

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