Well, Easter was lovely, and quiet. The weather was perfect and we spent the afternoon in the backyard, relaxing in the shade. We had lasagna for dinner, which was delicious. And it was all very calm and productive in it’s own way.
On Saturday we went for a bike ride in the wind.
Not pictured: the wind.
The gusts were gusty, and could push you around. There were two hills and a lot of wind. Did I mention the breeze? I did set eight PRs over the 25 Strava segments on the day’s route. Even my shadow was tired.
We saw this beautiful bit of scenery somewhere between here and there.
I was only able to manage that composition because of the headwind.
The cats were unimpressed by the breeze, housed as they are. They probably slept through it all.
Phoebe was doubly insulated in her little box fortress. (If the cats don’t take over the joint their boxes surely will.)
Poseidon was sitting on my lap the other night and stuck his head through the side of the rocking chair for some reason and it makes sense because you see him staring at the camera, but that’s the wrong takeaway. My phone wasn’t there when he put his head through the rails. The phone was a reaction to his more spontaneous action. The real conclusion, then, is that he’s a weirdo.
And here you can see the rare moment where they are getting along nicely.
I woke up feeling much better today than I did yesterday, to be sure. Yesterday, waking up was exhausting and a little painful. The aches and pains got better as the day progressed, and I rested a lot. Today I put my feet on the floor feeling normal and almost refreshed.
And then I walked the block-and-a-half into my building on campus and was utterly wiped out. Winded. Hands-on-my-knees just finished a sprint sort of condition. But it passed. And by the end of a day at the office I felt much better. I guess that’s what work will do for you sometimes.
By the time I took this photo, standing in the backyard and looking to the south-southwest at 8:10 p.m., I felt as normal as any other day.
And just like that sunset, he said poetically, my side effects with my second dose of the Covid vaccine are already fading into memory.
Now bring on those super powers.
Here are two shows I didn’t see produced last night, so we can watch them for the first time together. And it looks like they’re trying something a little new here. I could spell it out for you, but I don’t want to spoil your fun.
And from one masked up, socially distant show to another, here’s what’s up this week, with What’s Up Weekly. (It stinks that they have to do this in masks, but I’m proud of how they’ve gone along with that since they came back to campus, and how they’ve adapted to all the other things put before them. “You need a suggestion for how to talk about yourself in a job interview, talk about rolling with the punches and continuing to put your best foot forward, no matter what the old guy insists to foist on you as safety precautions,” that’s what I tell them.)
That was a fast show this week. I guess there’s not a lot going on. Good! It’s not just me …
More here in this, a no April Fools’ joke zone, tomorrow.
IU / photo / television / Tuesday / video — Comments Off on The only thing I didn’t phone in today was this post 30 Mar 21
Took off from work today. Called in sick, by which I mean I woke up at about 7 a.m. and wrote a message in the Slack app and went back to sleep.
Here’s the bottom line. If you’ve ever been sick in your life you’ve felt worse than I do today. I almost have a headache. I almost feel like I have a sore throat. I have the mildest fever modern technology can observe. I am supremely tired. In fact, I’ve spent much of the day in bed. My chief complaint, then, doing my part to stay safe and help ensure the safety of the people around me, is general fatigue.
Well, I’m tired a lot anyway, so a long nap is a nice treat. And so long as I don’t have to move around a lot I can forget how weary I feel. Tomorrow will be a bit better, I’m sure. And the next day, too. And we’re already counting down the days to full vaccination, two weeks from yesterday.
After that we look forward to safely, carefully, seeing vaccinated family. My in-laws are already considering dates to visit, and that’s great! They’re vaccinated and outside their own two-week window, and so we can soon have a nice reunion soon, after some 17 months apart.
That’s what it will take, pragmatic choices, careful decisions. We’ve done that for a year. We’re comfortable continuing in that way. There won’t be any big crowded events or restaurants or exotic travel in our near future, but that’s OK. I appreciate the idea that we’re all a part of the field study. Experts are trying to determine how the vaccines and the real world are working together. And when you think of it in that light a slow and careful transition to more conventional behavior seems like obviously the right choice.
For the immediate future, then, my vaccine will feel a lot like a mental relief. The efficacy data of all of the shots are incredibly promising. People that have devoted their life to this work are very encouraged about what they’re coming to understand and what it will mean for us. And, until that’s written in stone, I can behave cautiously. I’ll be wearing masks at work for the foreseeable future anyway, but in two weeks I’ll feel better about our prospects in general. Some weight may be lifted. Perhaps I’ll lesson the decontamination procedures at the door of the house. Personal Space Guy won’t feel as invasive, eventually.
I’m still going to be mystified by Can’t Cover My Nose Man, though.
Now we’ve just got to get the rest of the populace on board. The concern has to be in the laggard adopters of the vaccine. We are all just treading water until everyone gets a bandaid on their arm.
I saved the cats until today, because it seemed like there wouldn’t be much more going on here. They are doing great, of course. Mostly because they did not get shots this week.
Phoebe has the serve.
She looks as tired as I feel, here.
I’m not sure what Poseidon was doing under the table, to be honest. Maybe he’s practicing to become a repair cat. Who can tell with him.
He seldom explains himself, after all.
Probably he spends most of his time wondering why we think he should feel compelled to explain himself. That’s a cat thing, surely.
There is a podcast to share. This is the one I recorded and edited last Friday. I referred to it vaguely in this space, as well. And now you can listen to it. It was a delightful conversation about children and teens and a year of Covid. There’s a fair amount of “Kids are resilient, but …” And it’s a fine conversation about a fascinating topic with, unfortunately, few definitive answers at the moment.
I came to find, after the fact, an old feature story about Jerry Wilde, the professor I’m talking with there. Some years back he received an organ transplant from a former student. What an impression one person must have made on the other, to inspire them to do so in kind.
And to wrap up a day where I’ve done nothing but sleep and have all of this to show for it, this is a show the late night crew shot in Studio 5. It’s getting meta and awkward, but that’s all in character.
Saw another pharmacist today, got another shot. Pushed groceries into the little room because my lovely bride, who had arrived early at the store, did some shopping. She was getting her second dose in another room. Today an older gentleman jabbed me in the arm. White hair, white coat, giant needle, very official. He could have been anyone though, couldn’t he?
He said he wasn’t counting how many people he’d been giving shots to. Said he’d his first dose. Said I needed to relax my arm. Said I didn’t bleed but, and I quote, “I’ll give you a bandage anyway, so if anyone asks you to do any chores you can point to it and go ‘But uh uh, my arrrrrrrrrrmuh.”
So there I was in a pharmacist’s office, getting a minor medical procedure with major implications, while a rack of ribs sat in a cart behind me.
I thanked him, with eye contact, so he knew I meant it, and pushed the groceries back outside where my wife was standing. She was looking at her phone, pretending to wonder where the groceries went. She had her second shot. I had my second shot. We sat in some chairs to make sure we had no major reactions. We watched the very end of a car chase from Los Angeles on our phones. This is how things are done.
After we waited for a bit, we got gas and went to the house. We put away the groceries and stood by the kitchen counter and discussed how we were fortunate to have gotten through this to the degree that we have. And that was it. She rode her bike on the trainer, I could already feel the side effects coming on, so I just sat down and marveled at the world.
I think I may play hooky tomorrow and wait on my super powers to kick in.
Before our Saturday bike ride I finally changed out the Look cleats on my shoes. I probably should have done this in the fall, but it’s one of those things I don’t think about until I’m already riding and then, hey, too late. Recently my shoe came out of a pedal while I was standing out of the saddle and going uphill and how I remained upright is a mystery. And that adrenaline spike is also a motivation.
So these are the old ones, showing some six years or so of wear on them.
I have no idea how long cleats last for other people. It has to do with how you beat them up while walking around more than how much you ride or anything like that. But I do know that I eeked just about as much life out of these things as I could. And, so after lunch on Saturday I put on these pretty new ones.
So you can sorta tell, in all the places the plastic has been destroyed, how they were prone to user error when they were clipped into pedals. If there’s no there there, you can’t really expect these things to work to maximum efficiency. I’m sure engineers have a term for this concept.
This was part of our ride, a 26-mile route intent to give us our first real hill of the year. This was before the hill, but after the detour. A road was washed out — it’s always under water, seems like — and so we had to find a new hill. No matter! We were in a good place for hills. It found us soon after this.
I saw this little scene about to happen up the road so I had to pedal hard to catch up to capture my masterpiece. Almost all of the colors in her kit were reflected by nature in this photograph. Needed more flowers.
And fewer hills.
We were going up one, remember. I needed fewer hills than one.
Indoor riding this winter allowed me to climb pretend versions of famed climbs from all over France. And while that was fun and challenging and probably beneficial in some way, I am not convinced it helped with actual climbing that much. Or maybe it did. I’ve no real way of knowing. I only know this, at the end of this little climb that was about 240-feet of total ascent, I was ready for more of the flat parts.
I shot a little video of this, so that we could end this on something better than just the idea of huffing and puffing slowly and inefficiently.
I think this part is important. We got our vaccines today. I said, I’m going to sit here and nurse this sudden prickly throat, and The Yankee said “I’m going to ride my bike.”
As promised some two weeks ago, there is a new look to the front page of this humble website. Here is a hint as to the current theme.
And you can see the whole presentation if you just click this little link. That’s from a little flowering tree in the backyard. In a few more weeks it will meet it’s full glory. But we’ll probably be featuring a different look by then.
Quite day today, for the most part. I worked on questions for an interview I recorded late this afternoon. The last official act of the week was editing it. I’ll publish the thing on Monday. It was pleasant. A thoroughly delightful chat with a delightful guy. And, like so much of life, there were few concrete answers. You know that going into a lot of things, it doesn’t ameliorate the feeling after the fact though. He said as much, at one point, too. Occupational hazard for him, you see. He’s spent his whole career in that world. He recounted a conversation he had when he was in college. A friend of his who was studying physics just couldn’t comprehend the inconclusive nature of the soft sciences. You could sum it up as ‘I could work a lifetime on a problem and not be able to see it through. Or know the result. Or know if I was correct.’
I guess we all make peace with some sort of limitations.
Or, maybe, if the idea of that makes you a little twitchy — as it does me — the limitation is misplaced. The journey is the destination and all that. I’m sure a great many books have been written about that approach for the goal- and the task-oriented. There’s a bookstore shelf full of those somewhere. Each with a less satisfying resolution than the last. They say things like, Sure you need provisions from the grocery store, but did you see those clouds in the sky? And have you ever really wondered how those things made it to the store and then found yourself at a working farm asking questions about the history of dairy farming? And why did you drive there, anyway? What does that say about us? That we are slaves to cars, the ultimate sign of freedom? And what of the lives you touched along the way?
Anyway, while it was a little perplexing from an issue-conflict-resolution perspective, it was a fine interview. I’ll put it here Monday.
We do have some sports videos for you. Students produced these last night and they were ready for you, piping hot and fresh, this morning. Highlights and updates, updates and highlights:
And if you want to hear people pick their favorite baseball teams as a pre-season analysis, then we’ve got you covered there, too.
I had a conversation about changing sports just to see how the strategy would change. What if you took two timeouts away from basketball? What if you really only played those last five minutes anyway? Say the XFL had the opportunity to really explore their rule changes before Covid came around, what does that do to your play calling? What would happen if the NCAA took a rooting financial interest in elevating women’s basketball and tried to make, you know, money off the thing? What would that look like? Suppose there weren’t end-of-inning resets for baserunners in baseball. What takes place then? Why not send the Detroit Tigers and the Pittsburgh Pirates down to AAA ball for a year, since they clearly aren’t playing well where they are?
(The answers are: The games would be 15 faster. The games would be 90 minutes shorter. It gets more aggressive. We may never find out because the NCAA is full of shortsighted leadership. Also, they’d pass the buck until they could claim the victory as their own, brought on solely and only because of their fearless leadership. You’d routinely have baseball games will final scores like 19-8, fewer utility infielders, more speed, larger pitching staffs and team psychologists to help ballplayers cope with it all. And who says the Tigers and Pirates aren’t already playing minor league ball?)
I had this conversation with some students who haven’t yet been bored enough to think up things like this. But there comes a day, some day when the only game they can watch are the Detroit Tigers … and they’re going to start thinking these things through.
But hopefully it won’t be on a weekend. A weekend! Which is upon us now! Have a delightful one!
