photo « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

photo

cycling / Delaware / Monday / photo / running — Comments Off
6
Nov 23

And it all made for a full weekend

The cats, what with the end of Catober last week, miss all of the extra attention. They never get any attention, of course. And so Catober is a big time of year. There’s the big comedown after that which, I think, is how we started doing the weekly check ins with the kitties. No matter the origin, this is the most popular weekly feature on the site.

Poseidon, so desperate for attention he resorts to gymnastics. A pole sault, if you will.

The etymology of sault is fun. It hasn’t been used with any frequency in almost 200 years. There should be a site that brings this language back to life, but it is not this site.

From colonial French sault, 17c. alternative spelling of saut “to leap,” from Latin saltus, from salire “to leap” (see salient (adj.)). Middle English sault, borrowed from Old French, was “a leap; an assault.”

Phoebe, never a big Francophile, is unimpressed by his catlike prowess. She can do tricks too, you can almost hear her sigh, but she doesn’t have to.

We think she’s more Italiano. When we first got these two, he’d respond to a strong Nein!. So we decided he was a katze. Phoebe did not care for the German, but we were able to get her attention by calling her a gatto, so we decided she’s Italian. They’re siblings. You figure it out.

On Friday, when I was preparing for my weekly visit to the inconvenience center, I found this red maple on my car.

We don’t have a red maple tree in our yard. Not one that I’ve found, anyway. There is a Crimson King maple, which stands out throughout the growing season with rich, dark leaves. But it diminished with no flourish, and then the tree sneezed one day last week and now half the tree is bare.

Tomorrow, we’ll discuss our trees a bit more.

Here is a leaf that is mine. I tracked this inside the house today. It’s from a plant, a golden leaved pineapple sage. I have to bring it inside … just as soon as I unscrew the planter from the railing.

That was an innovation by the previous owners. I now have to dig into this planter and remove a wood screw and wonder why, in good spirits and cheer, they decided to do that.

It was a busy weekend, athletically speaking. If, that is, you’ll allow for the most generous use of the term “athletically” possible under the constraints of our language. I had a 25-mile ride on Friday. Saturday, we enjoyed the mild weather and had a 30-mile ride. And there’s me, riding out under the canopy of color, over a carpet of other colors.

Maybe the orange gilet did not provide enough contrast in that particular moment.

We passed this guy late into the ride, just before darkness fell upon us. Think of it, he’s out working in his fields on a Saturday night. What else could he be doing? But that’s the job.

I wonder if it’s his field or if he works for the company that owns the equipment and they’ve been contracted to do the work. Who knows how that part works around here, or if it makes much of a difference. It’s getting late into a weekend day and he’s still putting in the hours. The crops that grow in that field might feed you or me, though, or his own family directly. And so he’s putting in the after-season work. I like to give that person a little nod of appreciation as I pass by.

A different version of that photo will eventually become a footer on the site.

We did a 5K Sunday. Here’s the shirt from the fund raiser.

Nine soldiers returning from World War 2 service started that place in 1946. It seems they were underwhelmed by the local VFW and American Legion options. They bounced around a few locations for a while, and interest waned, until they got their own spot in 1953. As the years marched on, they re-branded from Delaware Veterans of WWII Inc., to Delaware Veterans Post #1. Non-veterans have been able to join since the 1970s.

And they’ve been doing this little event for 25 years now. I told our group I only do runs on arbitrarily important anniversaries. Good cause, good year? I’ll run.

It’s a marginally hilly course, for a 5K, with the added benefit of my god-sister-in-law’s home. Their kids were out cheering us on, cowbells and all. You have to get in your best stride when you’re running in front of the little ones, just in case they know good form and decide to start judging you. It was good fun.

After that, we had a Sunday evening ride, a quick 11 miles of wondering why the sun was disappearing so rapidly.

Just clearing the legs out, riding easy at 18 miles per hour.

And then on today’s bike adventure, I put in 25 miles just to keep things moving. Here’s a colorful tree in our neighborhood. This one is, thankfully, not our responsibility, but we are enjoying the show at the moment.

And, not too far away, on the other end of the ride, a colorful show of a different sort.

Before I’d gotten far beyond that big orange maple I realized that this was going to be a ride for miles, not for speed. My legs felt so heavy and tired. And then I managed to produce one of my fastest half hours ever. I had a 23.18 mile per hour split in there. And then, when I turned and the wind shifted, everything returned to normal. Just like riding a bike.

cycling / Friday / IU / photo / video — Comments Off
3
Nov 23

I helped make the best program in the country

I haven’t written in this space about IUSTV since we left IU in June, but I think of them often. I have had a few brief text chats with former students, and spent a Saturday afternoon on a lovely and long Zoom call with the young woman now at the top of the station’s org chart, a four-year IUSTV member, the sort who’s really going places in a hurry. I have read IUSTV’s website and watched some of their shows. (After seven years of being so close to the product — 935 scripted episodes of TV and video productions across 15 original programs, 328 podcast episodes and almost 300 hours of live streaming — watching as a consumer is an interesting experience.)

This is something of coda.

Tonight, I received a bit of happy punctuation on my seven-year tenure there. The College Media Pinnacle Award winners for 2022-2023 were announced and IUSTV got good news. Hoosier News Source was awarded second place. This is the winning episode they submitted for consideration.

The merely tolerated organization that no one wanted — always a sore spot for me for obvious reasons — has gone national. And in my last year working with them, they went right to the top. Second place! In the nation!

It gets better. Hoosier Sports Nite was named the top sportscast in the country.

Best of ’em all.

I was lucky enough to see all of this in person, coaching and coaxing and cheering them on. And I was even more fortunate to see this. Not only were the news and sports divisions doing this good work. They were helping each other. They were building a sustainable culture, one that can serve the organization well for years to come. They were graduating. They were getting (great!) jobs. Now they’re winning national awards.

I’m so proud of all of those young men and women. And I’m selfishly glad they got this sort of recognition with programs I was a part of.

I will, of course, take all of the credit.

I went out for a ride in the late afternoon. Before I set out, I saw this tree at the top of our driveway. This isn’t my tree, so it isn’t my problem — presuming the leaves fall straight down and stay there.

That shadow in the foreground? That one is entirely my problem.

It was a 25-mile ride. A simple get-out-and-ride after a bunch of grading and vacuuming and doing dishes and whatnot. It was a good ride, the first 15 miles, anyway. I had one split that was 22.15, which is pretty fast fofr me. And then the 15 to 20 mile stretch was nothing but headwinds. It was like pedaling through gravy.

Later, I was out enjoying the last of the best light of the day. Those brief moments between the full day and the lull of the evening. The sun and the earth have conspired to rotate into that brief relationship where the light is different, but only for a heartbeat.

In that bit of magic, that regular old example of celestial mechanics, you want to absorb the event. I want to photograph whatever the light is dancing on. It’s a matter of timing, then …

And sometimes you get photobombed.

cycling / music / photo / Re-Listening / running / site / Thursday / video — Comments Off
2
Nov 23

‘On your yellow bucket seat’

Today was Copeland Cookie Day in my classes. (And so was Monday.) Dr. Gary Copeland was a professor of mine. He retired soon after my cohort, and he passed away not too long after that. He didn’t get enough time with his beloved grandchildren, and no one got enough time with a widely beloved man. He was a giant of a scholar, a sweet-hearted man who always did a lot for his students.

In one class, he’d bring cookies, put away the syllabus and talk about whatever seemed important: conferences, papers, dealing with colleagues. A lot of the most important things we learned came from that non-class.

Because of that, that’s why I have a Copeland Cookie Day. I bring in snacks, put aside the plans and, for a few minutes, we just talk about industry, courses, war stories, whatever.

After classes were over we went for a run. It was too late in the day for a run. It was too late, which made it too cold. So I only did a quick mile, but I did see this part of the far side of the sunset.

I need to find my running gloves. And start dressing better than shorts and a t-shirt. ‘Tis the season, and all. Only, I have no idea where my running gloves are. I knew where they were, in a drawer, right by the refrigerator. But that was in the old house. And that was in June, in the chaos of packing our stuff when the packers no-showed, and when it was the middle of summer when gloves weren’t exactly a priority.

Where are they now? No idea, but mother nature is a necessity.

Since we’re at the beginning of the month, let’s look at the year’s cycling graph.

The blue line represents mileage I would accrue if I road seven miles a day, a basically arbitrary number I picked at the beginning of the year when I started this spreadsheet. Seven miles, on average, seemed doable.

Then I added columns, and lines, for nine and 10 miles per day. That’s why those three lines are nice and steady, daily projections are consistent, steady, reassuring.

But that purple line, that’s the one that reflects my actual mileage.

As I say so often, I need to ride more. Tomorrow, then.

But tonight, we dive back into the Re-Listening project. I’m playing all of my old CDs in the car, and in the order in which I acquired them. Right now, we’re in the summer of of 2003, when Guster’s “Keep It Together,” their fourth studio album, was released.

This is the first Guster album where the Thunder God, Brian Rosenworcel, played on a drum kit rather than his legendary hand percussion.

A bunch of musician’s musicians — Ron Aniello, Ben Kweller, Joe Pisapia, Josh Rouse and more — appear on the record, which peaked at number 35 on the Billboard Top 200. Thirteen tracks, I like 12 of them, and I love 11 of them. It’s a record that comes up a lot for me, and so the flashes of memories span, well, two decades now.

This is the first track, which was a trippy departure to hear as the first sounds on the thing.

“Careful” was released as a single, and it went to number 30 on the charts.

This was the lead single, which the label released before the album. “Amsterdam” climbers to the 20 spot on the charts. The band said, and you could never tell if it was a joke, that they wrote this just to get the label to fund a trip to Amsterdam for the video.

I think it was a joke.

Someone told me that this song reminded them of me. All melancholy and what not. I’m not sure if she didn’t understand the song or the word melancholy. Apparently, all of the guest musicians were allowed to record one pass (and only one pass) on this song. They didn’t hear the song before they played, or told chords or instruments. I don’t understand how that would even work out, but it’s a triumph. And not about a melancholy me.

“Jesus on the Radio” is now a crowd favorite singalong. They usually do this on stage as unplugged as possible, and if you look around on YouTube tons of fan videos have been uploaded. It’s odd that the band hasn’t done more with that fervor, he said mischievously. Here’s a version with Pisapia (who toured as the fourth member for seven years) on banjo.

There is a high quality version on the “Guster on Ice” DVD, also featuring Pisapia.

Here’s a more recent version, from four or five years ago, long after Luke Reynolds joined the band.

And, as the O’Malley family proved, most anything in your kitchen can be a percussion instrument.

Not just the O’Malleys, but all of their musical fans cover it and record it and upload “Jesus on the Radio,” too. And a few years ago the band made a supercut, and somehow, despite the changes in tempo from version to version, it mostly works. Except for that one.

I could do this all day. And I usually do, on Jesus on the Radio day, March 16th. I actually have the t-shirt. It was a Christmas gift a few years back.

Here’s the title track.

I could do this with the whole album, but I’ll wrap it up with a version of “Come Downstairs and Say Hello,” a thoroughly underrated song when it gets going, and, here, with symphonic accompaniment.

You will discover, about three minutes in, why the Thunder God is so named. It’s one of the few times on that particular record when he went back to his roots. (As I recall he was basically learning how to play a drum kit while they produced this record, partly to change the sound of the record, but, I think, also to give his hands something of a break.) Also, in the second half of that version, the brass, and certain of the strings make it sound absolutely triumphant. I wish they hadn’t come into the song until then.

I have the T-shirt featur that song too. I guess I should finally buy a Guster Is For Lovers shirt, to solidify my OG cred.

Original Guster cred, that is. I go back to the spring of 1997, when Guster Is For Lovers was one of the two things they sold.

Catober / photo — Comments Off
2
Nov 23

Catober Bonus

markers / photo / video / We Learn Wednesdays / Wednesday — Comments Off
1
Nov 23

There are a lot of plants

We had a garbage can out back full of leaves and pine needles. The wind caught the lid this morning and ripped it away from the can. I just happened to see it right after this happened, so I spent a few minutes cleaning that up. Putting the leaf bag in a different can, one that will be disposed of later this week. But we’d crammed that first can with so many leaves that I had to use a tool to pry the bag out. The bottom of the can smelled, for some reason, like root beer.

While I watered the plants the mail came. In the mail were two little indoor plant lights I’d ordered for the winter time. We have outdoor plants, but I can’t bring them indoors because cats will eat them. So they’re going into the basement. The plants, I mean, not the cats. The cats are kept out of the basement, which means they time their sprints perfectly to make it through the basement door.

So I strung up the two lights in the rafters. There seems to be one place where I can hang them and plug them in. It’s perfectly placed in the basement. I brought in four plastic lawn chairs, carried the plants down and put them on the chairs and turned on the plant lights. Surely the system will get refined as we go forward. I have to come up with a good way to water the plants, keeping the water in the pots and not on the floor, for example, and I want to put those lights on a timer.

Here’s the previous owner’s quirky decision that appeared in that plant-moving process. On the front porch they left a plant, a golden leaved pineapple sage, which is quite lovely. (You can just see a part of that plant in the photo below.) It sits in a container that is designed to straddle a handrail. They drilled the container into the handrail. It did not come off the handrail today, that frustrating little container holding the lovely, stemy, leafy thing, which is showing off brilliant little red flowers right now.

It’ll dip below freezing tonight. If the plant survives this little cold snap I’ll break out the drill.

That is a sentence that does not appear in any search engines.

Across the way, the neighbor’s tree is putting on a show. It’s a great view from the front door, and the picture window, which the cats are now enjoying.

Underneath that tree is the guy’s daughter’s toys. Right in the middle, little outdoor princess sets and the all weather tea table sort of thing. When she’s there, she’s out there. And when she’s not there, the play sets are: an imagination in progress.

It must be a magical time for a little girl that plays outside all the time. The grass in her yard is a rich, nitrogen-filled green, and now there’s a brilliant yellow carpet of leaves that she gets to dance and flit around on.

He mows his lawn a lot, but it seems like he’s leaving the leaves down. Maybe for pictures, or waiting to get them all, or just because she enjoys them, I don’t know. But it looks nice. Mostly because they’re not our leaves.

We’ll have plenty.

We went across the river this evening. As a perk from our recent hang with Gritty …

… he gave us tickets to a hockey game. Flyers hosted the Sabres. Both teams entered the contest 9-4. I know, it turns out, only very little about hockey. This is my fourth NHL game, on top of a slightly larger collection of minor league games. It’s not a sport I watch on TV, so I don’t know much. But I do know this: if you’ve got twice as many shots and you’re winning three quarters of the face offs, you should probably shoot more if you don’t want to lose 5-2.

And that’s what the Flyers did tonight. “Just shoot it!” must be the hockey equivalent of “Run the dang ball!” And “Just shoot it!” was uttered by pretty much everyone in the seats surrounding the rink.

The Flyers scored in the first 50 seconds and then halfway through the first period. Everyone should have gotten up, gone to their cars and headed for home right then.

Also, the man sitting in the row in front of us ordered cotton candy for his kids.

Nine dollars. Nine dollars for a stick of spun sugar!

Maybe I should buy a cotton candy maker. Tow it around, playing music like the ice cream trucks. I’ll only charge $8 a stick.

This is the 14th installment of We Learn Wednesdays. I’ve been riding my bike across the county looking at all of the local historical markers. A bike is an ideal way to undertake a project like this; you see new stuff, you learn new things. All of it that you don’t discover at the speed of a car. Counting today’s discoveries I have listed 32 of the 115 markers found in the Historical Marker Database.

This is a VFW memorial, a new one. It replaces a 1952 marker that shows up on the database. Google Street View’s last visit, sometime in November of last year, shows an empty patch of grass in this little triangle. But we have a nice, handsome display, standing new and proud on a main road in a small town.

On the back, two small markers.

You wonder where the old markers went. Hopefully in a proud spot in homes or offices.

Also at this site, you’ll find an anchor.

There are no details on it here. It was painted black when it was last on display.

And this gun, the Quick Firing 6-pounder, a 57 mm anti-tank gun. The British and the Americans used it in in the second half of World War 2. The Americans called it the 57 mm Gun M1.

It went into service in 1942 and the Americans used it until the end of the war, but by then the limitations of this weapon were on display. It had to be towed, and some wanted self-propelled weapons. There were also other guns in the field, and probably some on the drawing board. Plus there were fewer tanks to shoot at late in the war.

The British used it, too. And so did the Russians, and the Free French. Other nations used it in the years after. Apparently you can still find it in service in parts of South America. Modern cannoneers like it today because you can still find supplies for it. Some 36,000 of these were made during the war. I wonder how many of those 80-year-old pieces are on display in little towns like this.

In next week’s installment of We Learn Wednesday, we’ll discover a quiet little park for no particular reason. If you’ve missed any markers so far, you can find them all right here.