Friday night we saw Bert Kreischer, who is as clever and frat-tastic as ever. He played two shows at Butler, and we stood outside in about 20 degree weather until almost the published curtain time, which meant the actual start was, of course, later. Someone said he started the first show late, and that it went long. So the rest stood to reason. That meant we were going to get extra comedy, but first we had to move seats. Because I sat in the wrong row. Joke’s on me!
Anyway, the show was terrific. If you like bawdy material it works. He can put the whole room in his hand and give them whatever he wants. The crowd control of it all might be the most interesting thing. They’re just stories. Stories he’s spiced up for maximum impact, and often even the tangents are deliberate, but how he can hold a room for 90 minutes just telling tales is interesting.
Near the end he basically took requests, because he’s reaching some interactive iconic level of comedy now. I assume that’s owing one part to his talent, but another to the times in which we live, how there are bits online everywhere, and how he has embraced the intimate part of fandom that social media creates as a bit of his act.
And of course he has to tell The Machine story because, as he said Friday night, a Facebook version of that story changed his life and put him where he is today, which is selling out shows across the country and about to premiere his third Netflix special.
The Facebook version of The Machine story works, he said, because the Facebook algorithm put a key, but unnamed player in the actual story as a top commenter and she verified the whole thing. You can look the whole story up on YouTube. It’s 10 minutes or so long, and if you like bawdy, over-the-top humor, you’d find it amusing.
If that’s not, however, your thing … errrmmmm … here are two quick cycling videos!
The Yankee got her tri bike. And this weekend she braved some cool temps and finally gave it a try. (It’s a cruel thing to buy yourself a bike in February and wait.) The fit isn’t there yet, but she looks pretty pro, don’t you think:
If that one is a little blurry I blame my upload connection and her speed.
But watch this one, she’s coming right out of the screen!
I’ll never be able to keep up with her on that thing.
Also, it is my turn to buy a bike. Hmmmm …
I should mention this:
Yesterday we had sun for a record-breaking fifth day in a row. I don’t remember the last time we saw the sunshine for five consecutive days. Maybe November, for sure in October, if I had to pick a definitive time. Certainly it has never happened here in February. Yesterday, even, we got all the way up to 56 degrees — making for an excellent afternoon for a run. Maybe this sort of weather will happen some more.
It rained all day today. We’re due for snow on Wednesday.
Monday / photo / running — Comments Off on There’ve been worse weekend ideas on Mondays 17 Feb 20
There’s a difference between personality and style. Personality, at its most basic, demonstrates characteristics that help the rest of us distinguishes one character from another. You can see this in siblings. You can see it in twins. Style, meanwhile, is a way of doing a thing. I am talking about the connotation of style that is to do that thing in an appreciable way. Appreciable in the sense of I see the nature of how you handled that, and I admire, sir or ma’am, your elan. Style.
This cat has personality, at the very least:
That personality is usually: Let me aggravate you as much as possible with my understanding of where you don’t want me and my immediate, continual and pressing need to always be in or on those places.
His sister, who I managed to take just one picture of this weekend, has a style. She’s aloof and insistent on very much having her way in controlling whatever is going on. Not in a bad sense, it’s just about her terms. And if you can’t oblige that, well, she needed to be somewhere else right now, anyway.
Here was my original Valentine e-card on Saturday:
And here’s a picture from Saturday’s run:
It was a nice-enough day. Generally cloudy, occasionally a bit of sun, and finally warmed up to 43 degrees. Still that snow, though. So we had a nice easy neighborhood run, and then ran through the next neighborhood, too. Got about four miles out of it, and in no particular hurry.
More from the weekend to pad out our tomorrow. Hey, if your weekend goes to fast, just look back on it with a fond nostalgia for the next two days. Then, before you know it, you’re already at Hump Day. You’re going to spend your Thursday and Friday thinking about the next weekend anyway …
Did I mention it snowed this weekend? Had a bit Saturday. We ran through flurries on Saturday, and around some leftovers. There has to be a name for that pesky bit that never disappears because there’s no direct sunlight because there’s no sun, right?
Look! Here’s proof we ran in temperatures supporting snow.
I think this can also serve as the marker of the day when I decided I’m over running in the cold for the winter. This dovetails with my desire for spring, which is arriving just on schedule. According to the many decades of my keen observation, that should be kicking in next week, if I lived in a sensible place. But here, it’ll be two more months. First there will be a fake weekend of spring, and then it’ll snow into April with the sole purpose of demoralizing us all. But while it isn’t spring, I’m ready for spring. And I’m ready to run in spring, which means my outdoors activities might get a bit selective in the coming days, because we won’t see 40 again until next weekend.
(But, if you give me something in the low 50s I’m going to go for a bike ride, and I won’t even wear all the winter stuff. Just some of it.)
We had a bit more snow on Sunday. It was the best kind. It was big, fast and arrived with minimal adhesion properties. Looked nice in the video though:
At the grocery store this morning, one item of note:
They’re changing the design on the packaging. I’m not going to get into a breakdown of this sort of thing. There are people who do it at great length, with a zeal that puts them between completist and exhaustive. And they probably do it much better than I could. But the new design, on top, is worse than the old one. I go to this grocery store for two items and this is one of them. The other item recently went through a label redesign, too, and I have only so much bandwidth to dedicate to visual identification. Designers, keeping this in mind, keep the changes relatively small, which somehow makes them more significant.
The new orientation of the pastries gives away the game: it’s the same pop tart. I already miss the motion of the flavor banner, and the backlight-style treatment of the branding. Except for the font used for the pastry count. That’s an improvement. Going from two strawberries to one, though, seems the wrong move. The whole thing seems the wrong move.
But that’s a Monday. And, hey, as Mondays go, that’s about the worst of it for me. Which is nice. And I got it out of the way first thing in the morning, which is better. And it didn’t snow today, so there’s also that. And we might see the sun later this week. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Well, that was beautiful. Yesterday, I mean. Sunny. Warm. The sort of day where you go outside bracing for one season and are left to marvel that you’ve somehow been transported to an entirely different season. Or that your human notions of space-time are finite and limited. Or that a different weather system has moved into your region. One of those things. Definitely the second one.
Anyway, it hit 62 degrees, so I ran 6.2 miles. And, in the breeze, there was a tumbling tumble-crape myrtle.
I walked outside to run and heard that thing scratching its way down the street. So, of course, I had to follow it a while. It left the road once, and went deep into someone’s yard before stopping, such was the breeze. I retrieved it, put it back in the middle of the road and it blew around some more. I’d managed to walk five or six houses down the road before I decided I had enough footage to make that oh-so-compelling video. You can cover a pretty decent distance if you’re busy staring in a viewfinder. Or at your phone screen. There’s probably a lesson in there somewhere.
Just a lovely run. Started too strong. Stayed fast. I dropped almost five minutes off of my last 10K over the same course. And I thought that one felt good. It must be the shoes.
Now I just need them to make me fast.
So it was sunny and warm yesterday. Today it was almost warm and overcast, so I only ran a 5K today, faster than I have in a good long while. And now I’ll let my legs rest a bit.
Are we padding this out with tweets? We are padding this out with tweets.
How are you? Did you miss me? I would understand if you didn’t. There’s a lot of stuff out there to see and read and watch and hear and do. And if it isn’t in our faces all of the time, we might not even be aware of it’s absence. We are consumerists of the moment. It has probably always been this way, since society reached beyond some arbitrary critical mass of saturation, but let’s blame it on the Internet.
Shame on you, Internet. There’s just so much of you. So much so, that people won’t even notice me. Or, most critically, notice if I’ve taken the day, or many, off.
Which is what I’ve done. It was a nice idea and I’m pleased with having done it. I haven’t written anything here, or on social media, though I have kept up a little. I’ve just done the other things in life. And, I suppose, that means I’ve had a little extra time. So I have accomplished more stuff! Well, yes and no. Mostly no, but also yes, in a pleasing enough manner. I read four books. Two of them were essay collections edited by Edwin Grosvenor, one on The Civil War and one on World War I. These were both good. It was, I said to a friend, like reading well-written longform Wikipedia posts on specific subjects. I also read Al Roker’s story about the 1900 hurricane in Galveston. It was a book that tried to walk a line between people who want to know about weather and, yet, no know nothing about weather. It is a great and tragic and amazing tale, one somehow lost in the modern zeitgeist. But the book could have done with another editing pass or two. Also, I finished a book about the archeology of the battle of the Culloden battlefield. We visited there a few years ago, and the interpretation is well done for casual visitors. Most battlefields are difficult, for me anyway, to visualize and understand. Not so, Culloden. Part of that is because of the work that’s been done to return the hallowed ground to what it looked like in 1746. And that’s because of thoughtful scholarship like that found in this book.
Things that have happened since we spoke last…
I got sick! There were about six days of feeling rough, eight days of eating zinc and vitamin supplements and cough drops like candy, and three of those days where I was laid quite low. After that, another week of idle coughing and throat clearing. But I’m fine now. It was, as you might expect, a fine way to bring in the new year. But, with that out of the way, I’m good to go and be virus-free until about 2026 or so.
I returned to work after the holidays, of course. (As did you! Was your office different? Mine was exactly the same.)
The beginning of a semester brings its own odd pace. Two or three weeks in, as we are now, the rush of the start is over and we slip into the rhythm of the term. But, in addition to that early semester rush, we’ve also been working toward a project that just wrapped last Friday. CBS Sports was here, producing an episode of We Need To Talk. They used our studio, some of our students and talked to and about a lot of the local sports world. This is the only clip they’ve put online so far:
It was a good show, a good experience for the people who took advantage of it. And, most importantly, we can move on to other things.
Let’s catch up on everything else with photographs.
Poseidon is still getting into everything. We try to keep him out of the laundry room, but he’s fast. And he knows precisely what he’s going for, the bag randomly sitting between the dryer and the ironing board:
We’ve had gray skies:
A lot of gray skies:
It’s just positively charming in its perpetual dreariness. (It’s not.)
We’re averaging one day of blue sky a week. But on one particular blue sky day we had a nice sunset:
It should just happen more often, is all.
I’ve been running, of course. Even as I was trying to get over my head cold. And I have had the opportunity to use the running light that The Yankee got me for Christmas:
It casts a giant arc of light. Probably looks weird coming at you, but you don’t miss things on the sidewalk or path or road. And it inadvertently spotlights deer. Now we both have one of these ONE80 lights, and we’re big fans. If you run, or work outside at night, or need something that’s ridiculously bright and long-lasting and hands free, this is the one you want.
Also, it has been cold, of course. But happily, so far this year, it has been an unseasonably mild winter. Even still, cold enough.
Only a few days this month have been really bitter. And that’s plenty for the year, thanks.
I got to run with Venus, which you can see in the twilight here:
The Canada geese are just moving back and forth from one pond to another around here.
They think, this is south enough, I guess. They are mistaken.
There is a running path behind our house. It has little tendrils that extend out to the road in front of us, but otherwise, it just exists unto itself, ending in a fallow field on one end and almost seven-tenths of a mile away it ends in woods. It is one of many paths around the city, and we’ve been told that they’ll one day all be connected, which would be a great feature, if you think about it. The realization of that goal may well be long after we can be bothered to care, or live here. But there is a bit of progress on our local stretch of pedestrian asphalt. The path behind us has been extended a bit, recently. Now it goes back and behind the newer developments on the road. Meanwhile, one of the other paths (which joins the larger network on one end and just … stops … on the other end) is growing toward our little path. One problem: the creek in between. Well, that problem has been solved:
Now those two paths just have to link up.
Also, the ponds recently froze:
Definitely the kind of weather I want to be outside in. Fortunately they haven’t been frozen solid. Here’s a shot of a larger pond, just a day or three later. And if you squint at the fuzzy background in the distance it almost looks like that’s some sort of alpine village, which would be an upgrade.
It has been cold enough for the cats to cuddle:
Phoebe is also doing just fine:
And now we’ll try to get back into some normal routine around here, too.
