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family / memories / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off on An early Father’s Day post, of sorts
16
Jun 20

An early Father’s Day post, of sorts

When we moved into this house a few years ago we discovered some unfinished attic space above the garage. We wanted to use that space for storage. When the folks came up the first time my step-father offered to help. So we picked up some lumber and he bought me some extra tools and we spent a day telling ourselves “This is an attic, no one will ever see it but us. It doesn’t have to be perfect.” It merely needed to be functional. We needed some walking and storage space.

We set about cutting plywood to fit all of the interesting angles of an attic and sweated and installed it all. When it was done I climbed out of the attic and passed the first thing back inside it to my step-father. It felt right that he should put the first thing into the space. He made it usable, after all.

The attic is valuable storage. More valuable for this, which I saw again the other day when I was putting something away in there, because we’d also asked him to sign his handiwork.

I’m glad we did that. When I’m prowling around in the attic, as I was tonight to store an extra window screen, I see that right away, and it always makes me smile. I’m grateful that he takes the time to do these sorts of things every now and again. There’s always something new to learn, always some valuable experience to gain, some time worth spending on it.

It’s a great space, but more space would allow me to organize it. So I wonder if I should put in more flooring. And what we were doing with all of this stuff in the first month or two in the house before we had this extra space.

Maybe in the fall. One summer sweat in the attic those years ago was enough.

cycling / memories / Monday / photo — Comments Off on Here’s a question
15
Jun 20

Here’s a question

Well, hello there, and welcome to the new week. Do we still mark those as units of time? Should we? I say we just stick with days and years, and every other Mondays. Vote for me, 2020, because I’m going to cut the number of Mondays in half. And if you vote for me twice I’ll have the mandate necessary to double your Fridays.

You’ve seen flimsier campaign platforms.

Anyway, so we’re on a Monday, and this is when we check in with the kitties. They’re doing great. Phoebe has become a big fan of climbing into this blanket for her evening naps.

Poseidon … well, he’s had a lot to say recently.

He’s always chattering on about something or other.

We went for a bike ride today, a simple little 19-miler to start the week. It was over familiar roads, and on one road I’ve only been on once before, last fall. There was a little spot on that road last autumn that was all but perfect. The leaf turn was just right. The sun was at a good angle. The leaves on the ground were brushed away in a pleasant display.

I was shooting video that day, a fine choice for the perfect peak day of fall riding. I tried that road that day simply as a curiosity. For three years it had been a fork to the right, always seen, never imagined. But the road sign there makes no sense for the area, so it became important to try the road. And that’s how it ought to work. New roads should be discovered by experience, not by maps.

A screen capture of the video became a photo for the top banner of the blog. Perhaps you’ve seen it on the site before. It looks like this:

Today it looked a lot like that, too, but much, much greener. A woman at the house closest to that spot was working in her yard, and a little boy was playing in the garden. It all seemed almost as perfect, so that road is two-for-two.

I don’t have video of it, because the little hill was hurting me today, which is also perfect. I’m sure I’ll be back on that road, though, and I’ll get another shot to show it’s greener state. The only question is, do you take the special right and make it routine? Or do you leave it rightly special?

Something to think about over the next few rides, for sure.

hobby / photo / Twitter / video / Wednesday — Comments Off on Got 20 minutes? There are two great videos below
10
Jun 20

Got 20 minutes? There are two great videos below

I found some fossils down at the lake yesterday. We have to spread these things out for content just now, plus I’ve been playing around with a new light box setup at home. So yesterday’s crinoid samples would have to wait. They’ve been sitting around for a few hundred million years, so what’s a few more hours, really?

Anyway, I am trying to remember how to take pictures of small things.

They look like shriveled Cheerios, don’t they? Really crunchy cereal bites with ridges. Don’t eat these, they aren’t that tasty, and probably difficult to digest at this stage.

It’s amazing, really. I’m taking these pictures and I’ll put these back out by the lake or a creek or something and maybe one day someone else will see them.

Or maybe they’ll just wait for another few hundred million years until the insect citizens of Perpaplexiconia dig through a few more feet of soil and who knows what they’ll think of tiny fossils. Maybe they’ll eat stones for their digestive properties.

Stuff from Twitter, to pad this out.

This is sort of self-explanatory. But I always wonder how people select the takeover person, and what that negotiation is like. Do you have to leave your license and car keys behind or something? Now, a full on swap for a day or so would be enlightening. I think it might be better on Instagram than Twitter, actually.

George Taliaferro is one of those people that, the more you read about him, the more you want to know about him.

He led the Hoosiers to their only undefeated season, helped end segregation in Bloomington by a few different methods:

He became the first African-American drafted by the NFL, and spent a lifetime, I mean the rest of his life, lifting up others. I regret not having had the chance to meet him before he passed away. But there are plenty of great stories about him, I mean plenty, and football is merely the way you learn about an otherwise great man.

Midway through this piece Taliaferro talks about he and the university president managed to desegregate the businesses of Bloomington. It’s a little choppy, but it goes like this: There was a photo in a popular restaurant right across the street from campus that had a picture of a championship IU team on the wall. Taliaferro said to Herman Wells, my picture is on the wall, but I can’t eat there. And Wells said, we’ll just see about that. It’s a big little story about two amazing men.

They don’t make many like that anymore, and they never did make enough of them to begin with.

I have an idea about this, don’t:

Can you imagine? One day you’re going through life’s drudgeries, the next day you’re in a pandemic, and then suddenly you’ve lost your father and your step-mother and now you’re the caregiver to five children and a stroke victim.

Where a mask, wash your hands, give the people around you plenty of distance.

journalism / photo / podcast / Tuesday / Twitter — Comments Off on Dip your toes in, the water’s fine
9
Jun 20

Dip your toes in, the water’s fine

And, now, a scene from “the beach,” which is how I mistakenly thought of the lake’s shore line when we were out there for a few minutes today. That says something about how long since I’ve seen a beach.

It was Christmas, last time I saw a beach, and that was just looking into a sound, so it might not even count. If you don’t count that you have to go back to last July. I’m not the biggest beach person in the world, but that still seems like too long.

So we were at the lake for a few minutes. It rained. I sat under an umbrella talked on the phone while The Yankee did some considerable distance of freestyle swim. And that was lunch. Down to the lake, in for a quick dip and then produce a show.

Talked to an economist today. Bottom line is … we know a lot of things, but that really just illustrates what we don’t know. We’re about to start stage four of back-up-and-at-’em here, which will be normal-ish but for some restrictions that won’t get honored a lot, I’m sure.

The good news is that the jobless claims are coming down from the spring. The bad news is they are still very high. The other bad news is that state tax revenues are taking a hit. This was not a surprise, but still, it is underway and impactful. The good news is that people are going back to work and so there is progress to be made. But don’t take my word for it. I have a minor in economics. This is an actual economist:

I have a love-hate relationship with security-footage-as-news stories. It doesn’t devalue a story, but too often it elevates a story beyond its natural worth because of suddenly compelling available video. Compelling, easily available video. (That part is important.) Or, even worse, it elevates a story because there’s video and no one else has anything better that day.

It’s a tricky thing, when visual drive messages. I see and have worked with and teach this stuff, so I consider all sides of the argument. I think we all should consider all sides of its use before using it, and that’d be a great starting point, I’d say.

And then there’s stuff like this …

Funny how video has helped bring to light rampant injustice in society. Funny how necessary that video is for this sort of circumstance. Sometimes the visuals have to drive the message.

More on Twitter, check me out on Instagram and more On Topic with IU podcasts as well.

Monday / photo — Comments Off on Go faster on Mondays
8
Jun 20

Go faster on Mondays

Phoebe is guarding my office door for me. She’s my new hire in the Keep Poseidon Out, 2020 campaign.

Poseidon, meanwhile, is trying to gain entrance by being sneaky.

It’s a real cat and homo sapiens sort of game.

We had a bike ride this evening, one of our regular routes, as it was a light and easy sort of day. Leave the neighborhood, breeze through another one, take three stop signs and then some long open stretches featuring a few turns and one turnaround and then one respectable hill. After that you hang a right and work through a stop sign and then over two hills, a few more turns and then back to the house. And, at the end of it, it came down to 48 seconds. If I’d worked a bit harder and found a way to drop 48 seconds off the total time my average speed would have gone up a tick.

You can’t do anything about that after you’re back inside and looking at the data. It’s hardly worth kicking yourself over, but after you’ve caught your breath and had some electrolytes and you’re not sitting in the saddle you find yourself thinking “Forty-eight seconds. I could surely have mustered that from somewhere.”

Getting to that next, higher number would mean nothing. I was two-tenths off of it today. Big deal! Two-tenths faster and I’m still traveling at average speed, over largely favorable terrain that I ride constantly. But it would have felt satisfying.

Here’s the thing of this ride. Somewhere along the way I lost The Yankee’s wheel. It was one of those days when she was stronger than me and I love those days because I have to work like a maniac to try to get back on and sometimes I do. Sometimes I have to use all the little tricks I know to do it, diving through corners and doing ridiculous super-tucks and going uphill in all the wrong gears and so on. But, sometimes, I can get back on terms with her pace. I had to do that in this ride. I’m not exactly sure how I came uncoupled, but you look down and you look up and it’s happened and that’s the way some rides go.

You smile at that because if, like today, like there’s an effort in you then you have to try. I had that today so I tried that today and so I watched her for several miles moving at her own fine pace a quarter-mile, a half-mile up the road, while I was yo-yoing and sucking air and then surging and ebbing until, finally, I realized that the next little bit of topography favored my ride. And I did catch her, right at the end. I was riding hard, but I think I could have ridden just a little bit more.

Forty-eight seconds. Really, that’s time I should have ticked off at the front of the ride, when you’re still behaving casually. But you don’t think of that over electrolytes, either, just that you could.

You could. That’s something special about a bicycle. There’s always the feeling of you could.

Trick is moving that from inside the house to on the road. And doing it from the start.

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