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links / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
8
Dec 20

Things you should and shouldn’t do

Woke up tired. I’ve been waking up tired. And by tired I mean, tired. Anyone else doing that lately?

Anyone else grimly making jokes about why that may be happening? It’s not like I’m not getting six or seven or even eight hours of sleep — you should do that. There must be something else to it, right?

So I googled it — you should never do this — and it apparently has a technical term. It’s called “fa-teag-way.” It must be Italian.

Turns out, if you read the web — you should skeptically do this — that there are so many possibilities for it as to make you think that it’s probably none of them, or beyond your ability to successfully isolated and test the variables. Changing your “sleep environment” is no easy thing, after all.

“Chances are,” Healthline says, “your morning grogginess is just sleep inertia, which is a normal part of the waking process. Your brain typically doesn’t instantly wake up after sleeping. It transitions gradually to a wakeful state.”

So I search for some scientific documentation — you should always do this — on “sleep inertia.” Take it away, Dr. Lynn Marie Trotti in the National Institutes of Health journal Sleep Medicine Reviews:

The transition from sleep to wake is marked by sleep inertia, a distinct state that is measurably different from wakefulness and manifests as performance impairments and sleepiness. Although the precise substrate of sleep inertia is unknown, electroencephalographic, evoked potential, and neuroimaging studies suggest the persistence of some features of sleep beyond the point of awakening. Forced desynchrony studies have demonstrated that sleep inertia impacts cognition differently than do homeostatic and circadian drives and that sleep inertia is most intense during awakenings from the biological night. Recovery sleep after sleep deprivation also amplifies sleep inertia, although the effects of deep sleep vary based on task and timing.

It’s an interesting paper. Probably I’m just groggy.

Completely neglected the cats yesterday. Not in real life, mind you, but in this mediated space. The cats are great. Happy and snoozing and bathing and eating and annoying us at all the wrong times, knowing they can solve that problem by being cute and cuddly for 90 seconds.

Here’s Poseidon catching a nap on the stovetop cover.

He loves the radiant heat from the stove eyes. The other night he jumped up too soon and got a little warm. He jumped up and stepped a little too close and hoped off quickly, all before I could cover the distance. His cat-like reflexes served him well, and he was fine. And it hasn’t dissuaded him from one of his favorite napping places. But maybe he’ll learn to wait for the cover to get put back into plact.

And this is Phoebe, who was caught playing on the computer again.

She was googling cats. You should never do that.

adventures / cycling / Monday / photo — Comments Off
7
Dec 20

If you could be here you could have some

This is not a food blog. This is not a food blog because I am not a good food photographer. I am not a good food photographer because, sometimes, the things you see aren’t even food, but other times food photography requires extra lights and settings that I don’t want to employ and, ultimately, food photographers are some of your more talented photographers. I suppose I could improve my rather poor food photography abilities, but, ultimately, I’d rather eat the food.

Nevertheless, occasionally we try something new and tasty, and I want to brag on the delicious meal my lovely bride made. Recently I happened on a new recipe for red beans and rice and she decided to make it and we enjoyed that this weekend and it was quite tasty.

And I’m going to get a couple of lunches out of the leftovers, too!

The other thing about food photography is that sometimes what looks great on a plate might not always look great in a picture. But sometimes the shapes and textures work out. Because, also, she made sizzling cornbread and it’s pretty great.

If you get a Pac-Man shape in your day, you should document it.

If you’d been here for it we would have shared, but these are the times we live in, where we enjoyed that delicious meal just off camera of a video chat. But we could at least tell people about how good it tasted, and how she did a great job with the preparation and I did a pretty decent job clicking that link and exploring the recipe anyway.

All of it was delicious.

We also had a nice chilly bike ride this weekend.

That’s toward the end, where I notice from some great distance behind that she’s reaching for her phone and I have to try really hard to catch up. It’s a big ask, most rides. She’s very fast, even when’s soft-pedaling for a photo, as she was there.

Friday / photo — Comments Off
4
Dec 20

The week with bad titles, part five

Today, a bit of wabi-sabi.

That’s a deck post. And wabi-sabi, Wikipedia tells you, is:

In traditional Japanese aesthetics, wabi-sabi is a world view centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of appreciating beauty that is “imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete” in nature.

Characteristics of wabi-sabi aesthetics and principles include asymmetry, roughness, simplicity, economy, austerity, modesty, intimacy, and the appreciation of both natural objects and the forces of nature.

I’ve written about this here before, about keeping some of the wear and tear in a house as artifacts of previous owners. Long ago we cleaned up the markings that noted all the kids that used to live in this house. We’ll get the rest of this place painted one day, when we feel we can safely get painters in. There are two or three bigger gouges that I’d like to correct, but there are nicks in some places which I want to keep. It’s part of the story of the place.

It’s all small and cosmetic, but keeping one or two things here or there might let you imagine the children playing here, the joy their family had, the lives they were living here. Oh, sure, those little corners of molding at the foot of a few doors, that’s from furniture moving in or out, or a zealous vacuuming session. The one place on the windowsill in one of the bedrooms, I have no idea what that was, but I want to hear the story, a story I’ll never know, and I hope it’s better than “We were moving out with our hops and dreams and clipped it with a dresser.” Some of these other marks might be from imaginary gun fights or adventurous car races or a time a grandmother — three generations lived here, together — just leaned a little too far to the right. Some of those should absolutely stay.

I bet those kids had a lot of fun on the deck out back. It’s held up by that post pictured above. And that post isn’t just a post. It could be a base for hide-and-seek or part of a doorway to the yard and the woods and the creek beyond. That big tall chunk of wood could have been anything.

And, to a kid, the imperfect and impermanent might be just the opposite.

Plus, you’ve got an entire national concept behind it. And, with wabi-sabi, you don’t have to replace things quite so often.

history / Indiana / photo / site / Thursday — Comments Off
3
Dec 20

The week with bad titles, part four

This area is rich in limestone. The campus is full of local stuff. Courthouses around the state feature stone that was ripped from the ground around here. The stone was the necessary ingredient for the move Breaking Away‘s subtext.

We watched Breaking Away when we moved up here. The Yankee had never read it. It’s still a fine film, and I wonder how townies feel about it. It still holds up, even if the locals would tell you there are some geographical problems. And I’m older now. Growing up it was a movie aimed at me, the child. Today I’m much, much closer to the dad’s age than the young kids who really make up the movie. The dad’s big speech, which probably raced right by me each time I saw it as a kid, really sank in differently that last time we watched it.

And it’s popular far and wide. Indiana’s limestone is what you see at the Empire State Building. The U.S. Holocaust Museum, the Federal Trade Commission, the National Archives, the Department of Justice, Wilson Center, the EPA, NOAA, the Department of Commerce and more, they all came from here. Federal courthouses, churches, college campuses across the country, tons of them feature Indiana limestone.

At the height of the industry, the state sent 14.5 million cubic feet of dimension stone to all of those projects, most of it coming from this region. It has certain attributes that make it both aesthetically pleasing and professionally easy to work with. Even today, those cutters quarry 2.7 million cubic feet of Indiana Limestone each year, and it generates about $26 million annually in revenue.

And it all started right here, or, rather just a few miles up the road. The first real digging of limestone in Indiana is the subject of this installment of my old and forgotten, and now remembered and almost completed historical marker project. I’m showing off all those beautiful painted signs in the county. I rode to all of them on my bicycle. This particular one is the second-furthest away from the house, in fact, so enjoy. Click on the image to see this particular entry.

The marker itself, which you can see by clicking over via the image above, is a bit removed from the location it celebrates. You can’t, in fact, see the old quarry (it failed in the 1860s) by road, or even from the bird’s eye view of Google Maps. But there’s some more local history sitting in the center of the park in that sleepy, small town, population 200. (Stinesville was laid out 28 years after the quarry began, which was when the rail line showed up. The post office arrived five years after that.) The bonus photo you’ll find in the post is of a locally important bell. It came from a church established in 1894, just 67 years after that first quarry was dug. The community saved the bell in 1995, and I bet there’s a story behind that which the web isn’t telling us, and it was put in that park in 2005. So it’s been there 15 years now. I wonder where it was for the 10 years it was being saved.

Oh, here it is, in a local historical newsletter, from 2006. It seems the church building has had several lives. First it was a congregation for Lutherans, and then it became known as the First Christian Church. It was badly damaged in a 1964 storm, though, and a few years later the church was sold to a private individual. All the contents were auctioned, including the bell. And then in 1995 the bell was going to go on the market again, but the community preserved it. Later, the church building, not made of limestone, was repaired, renovated and is now a private residence. Happy ending. And, in the summer of 2015, the last time the Google car came through, it needed a fresh coat of paint. I believe it’s had one since then, and now that I know what I’m looking for, I’ll check on it when I’m out that way again. But the lawn was well-kept! So, like all of us, it’s in progress.

If you’d like to see two county’s worth of historical signs and the places they’re highlighting, go to the main page.

photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
1
Dec 20

The week with bad titles, part two

‘Tis the season. ‘Tis the season. Right?

I’m something of a purist with this. The season begins in December, after Thanksgiving if you’re desperate. Respect, as my wife says, the turkey.

But I’ve seen stores where the season begins before Labor Day. And this is right out. Respect, I say, the Halloween candy. And, you know, the joys of autumn.

Anyway, we have put up trees. Because cheer was needed, and how would the cats react?

We have four trees. The cats are fine with them. Minimally interested, actually. It’s odd. They’re into everything, using a sort of one-two, high-low concept. The two cats are like toddler-adolescent versions of the old Ali wind up punch. One is always bluffing for the other. It’s a study in discipline and small group communication, and it happens every day. Each distracts for the other so that one can get where we don’t want them to be, or chasing plastic or food, or the plastic which they seem to think is food. They can hardly be bothered to be in the trees.

I said we can’t put out the good ornaments because these monsters will destroy them. About once a night a cat will go under one of the trees. And you’ll see them sniffing around it then. Once, Poe was goofing around in the lowest branches, probably trying to figure out how he could use them to ambush his sister.

Still, we can’t put out ornaments.

Two are smaller things out by the front door. One has all white lights in the foyer, and that multi-color guy is in the living room, and I rather like the reflection it casts on the television screen.

Poseidon is back under that tree and rustling around it as I write this. So, no ornaments. Definitely adds some cheer. And happy December!