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photo / podcast / Thursday — Comments Off on Listen to an actual pandemic expert, and also me
16
Apr 20

Listen to an actual pandemic expert, and also me

Another damp and gray day, so yesterday’s sunshine was all a ruse, a dastardly plot to lull one into a false sense of spring. Because why should you have a proper spring a month after actual spring began?

As burdens in life go, this is a small one. But if you’re going to tell me its spring, it should be spring. That’s not too much to ask. And it should be almost an article of faith. In fact in some cultures, it has been. But, as we are people of our times, let us put it in the modern context: if we can’t trust the planet who can we trust?

Probably the planet is getting us back for something we’ve done. No doubt we deserve it.

But think of these trees, these poor, tricked, trees!

Like we need things that can do this to deserve a sense of revenge …

Those are all photos from a week or so ago, pictures I took on my Canon and promptly forgot to upload. Now we’re giving them their fair shot at notoriety.

I talked to a real-life person today …

Epidemiologist Shandy Dearth is from the Fairbanks School of Public Health at IUPUI in Indianapolis. We talked about monitoring the pandemic’s progress and staying safe and a whole lot more.

 

I don’t know all of the ends and outs of an epidemiologist’s day, but I have enjoyed learning how they all talk about their work and the way they relate it to the rest of us.

After the interview we talked about types of epidemiologists. I figure, once I finally learn how to spell the word I should figure out what kind I want to be. Would I take on the casual, c’est la vie, attitude? Would I become a worry wart? Would I just figure the chips are going to fall wherever chips fall, and that’s into my mouth, after they’ve been on the floor? Would I be the founder of Extra Hands, LLC, a firm designed to do my work, so my hands never have to touch anything and get dirty? Would I drop a spoon and play devil-may-care since a dirty spoon shouldn’t separate me from dessert?

Epidemiologists must spend a lot of time in public resisting the urge to tell people to get their germy germs off my lawn and away from the water fountain.

But they do get to call themselves disease detectives, though, which is really cool.

photo / Wednesday — Comments Off on In the backyard
15
Apr 20

In the backyard

It is the middle of April and I read on some meteorological site — this is the problem, if you see something interesting two or three days prior and didn’t hang on to the link for citation purposes, you’re basically making stuff up — that this is the traditional last day of frost here. Oh, look, it was a government site. Probably accurate enough. The same table says the latest frost was on May 27, 1961 and that sounds like fake news.

We did have a frost this morning. We’ve been covering plants and ours are fine, Every small garbage can and beach bucket and what not have all been deployed and with good success so far. It would be touch-and-go for the ornamentals. We don’t have crops to worry about. Most of the things that get planted here are just now going in anyway, so it’s probably fine.

I mean, the grass is thick and crunchy.

I’d like to show you some of the flowering trees in the yard, because the buds and blooms never last long enough, but at least we can memorialize them here.

These are all from this morning, a few minutes well spent watching the sun poke its head up above the tree line, all sheepish.

As if that burning ball of fury is afraid I’ll be disappointed by it. As if that big burning ball of fury let me down.

But what am I? A savage? I know this isn’t the sun’s fault.

The blame here clearly belongs to the rotation of the earth. It’s not like it’s had 4.6 billion years of practice or anything.

But you know what they say. If you point your finger at the earth, you’re just pointing at the ground.

No, that’s not it. If you point your finger to the earth, four fingers are pointing back at Aristarchus and Anaxagoras.

Greek digit humor could be so ruthless sometimes.

That may seem like an awful lot for a backyard walk, but I was able to take my time with it before the day’s first meeting.

You can do that when you wake up obscenely early and can’t go back to sleep.

That’s not ever a problem I have, and brother, it isn’t one I’m intent on picking up now.

IU / journalism / memories / photo / podcast / Tuesday — Comments Off on A podcast, a random memory and three photos
14
Apr 20

A podcast, a random memory and three photos

From time to time I am put in mind of my first real camera. I was in undergrad. I was about to start the photojournalism work at the campus newspaper. Soon after would come the photography classes and so on. It was Christmas time and there must have been a really nice deal on Canons that year. I remember being at family haunts and taking those first pictures, really just trying to figure the thing out. It was a step up from the old 110s, to be sure, and what even is an aperture, anyway?

It was that phase of learning how to take pictures. There’s a certain tree, a certain outbuilding. This and that. And you think, That’s going to be a great photograph. Then you send the film off to be developed, or go to the darkroom to do your work, because wow I’m old. And then the prints come back and they are very average. Because you’re just trying to figure the camera out still, really, and it’s a nice and important element of family life and important to you, but that’s where it begins and ends and that’s really enough.

Then you go out and you take pictures of a random dead tree that grew out and above the rest of the tree line before just giving up entirely. And you think, That’s going to be a great photograph. But it isn’t. Because not all of them are great. Some days most aren’t even good.

You just need a few of those, really. If you ask for more you just look greedy.

Which is clearly what I was not on this walk, from a few more of the found photographs from last month.

I’m sure I thought to myself This trail is going to look amazing in this photograph, and I’ll remember this thought verbatim as a construct for a future photo essay on recall and subpar photography!

You can see why I was excited about that:

And! Look! A stream!

It is cold. It was cold then and it is cold now. Only two weeks have passed and while two kids were playing in it that a little further down, there wasn’t a line to get in there and give it a try. Maybe next month.

I talked with Tom Duzynski. He’s the Epidemiology Education Director at the Fairbanks School of Public Health at IUPUI in Indianapolis, Indiana, and basically a rock star. He talked about how it looks like stay at home practices and quarantine practices are working, how long it might be until we can start returning to more normal activities and what experts are continually learning about Covid-19.

I was promised audiograms, but those haven’t appeared yet. So I made my own, sorta, from the above conversation just to see what that’d be like. It’s getting some nice play, too:

I think the next person I’ll talk to will also be an epidemiologist. Let’s see if we can get them to disagree!

Actually, we won’t. It isn’t that kind of show.

Monday / photo — Comments Off on I found some extra photos from last month
13
Apr 20

I found some extra photos from last month

Spring has sprung! Again! Until it’s next inevitable retreat! Which should be in about 45 minutes!

Hey, April is shot anyway, right? May as well let this be the mercurial month of meteorology. Keep those weather folks on their toes or some such. And the flowers, and the leaves, and all of the blooming trees, like this one in the yard:

The cats are doing just grand. As we get set to begin our fifth week at home. Time flies! These guys will be monsters at some TBD return to the office.

Phoebe was sitting with me last night and couldn’t bear to watch the dramatic scene at the end of this week’s episode of Homeland.

Hard to blame her. This one was tough. Also, let the record show that I am wearing a fleece indoors because it is April, which is this month’s cruelest month, for different reasons than T.S. Eliot intended, I’m sure.

The cats have various trees and perches and bookshelves in many of our windows, because you bend your lives to the pets around you in an effort to keep them off your video calls — like we hadn’t done that before the age of Zoom. But here, Poseidon is on top of the mantle looking out at a bird or a chipmunk or something or other.

I like to think that, because he is not in his usual spot in that window he thinks he’s sneaking up on the critter outside, catching it unawares in the catching it in cat stares.

He’s a cat, but he may have high level cat intelligence. But, even as I resist the urge to mis-anthropomorphize him, I don’t want to give him too much credit.

It might go to his head.

I forgot about some pictures. See, it goes like this. The best camera is the one you have. And one always has their phone of course.

But the best camera I actually have is a DSLR. Only the mirrors need cleaning. And every so often I forget that it is the best camera I have because the best display I have is, of course, on my phone. Don’t get fooled by that, carry your camera. It is larger, of course. It slows the picture-taking down, of course. I don’t mind that part. It isn’t as easy as thumbing your way into the ones you like and then running through your minimalist resizing process. You have to get the reader, take the card out of the camera, plug the latter into the former and the combined apparatus into the computer, and the machine has to read the card and then you have to select the good ones so that you may go through your minimalist resizing process.

And then I take the pictures and I am pleased. And then I put it aside because of the extra steps. They’re just. So. Extra.

After you put it aside you forget. You get distracted. You get behind. And if you ever catch up again, you tell yourself, you’ll pull your camera out and take pictures.

And I do all of that. Then, sometimes, I forget to actually do the uploading. So now I am catching up. I have a fair stack of recent photographs to get through and we’re going to see three of them here. And that, friends, is how website padding is done.

To the Canon photographs!

Ahh, those heady days of late March, when we were already home, and we were suckered into an “early” spring, even when you know you are being suckered, the suckering sucks you in. To be twice duped is only the beginning, my friend.

Anyway, neighborhood tree blooms on a neighborhood walk. I believe it was a jeans and t-shirt kind of day.

The walk that lead me to this photo called for shorts, and it was a rare glorious day.

Perhaps this was the same day. The end of March, when you can’t get enough of all of the blooming things.

But before I could put away sweaters and jackets and things.

cycling / Friday / IU / photo / podcast — Comments Off on Why have one when you can have two
10
Apr 20

Why have one when you can have two

Here we are on a nice, hard, slow, windy ride.

Or, for at least my part of it, it was slow. There was nothing to the route. It was one of our most standard courses. I just couldn’t build anything up today. Three days of legs and my legs, I told myself, were exhausted. And before I get too far into this story …

Dr. Joel Wong is the chair of the counseling and educational psychology department in IU’s School of Education. We had a delightful conversation on gratitude, and things to try to keep yourself in good spirits and keep the morale up on the home front.

It’s an interview I wish I could have recorded three weeks ago, but it’s one valuable in all seasons. So give it a listen. And head on over to your favorite podcast provider and subscribe to “On Topic with IU.” You can now find the show on Apple, Google, Stitcher, Spotify, TuneIn and Anchor.

Back to the bike: it was kinda breezy. It wasn’t a headwind-in-every-direction day, but it was a headwind-from-several-nonsensical-directions sort of day. And, look! Here is today’s barn by bike:

We ride by there frequently. The sun is almost always in that same spot behind the building. I should ride by, on some far off day when it gets warm here, in the morning, just to see a little more detail on the east-facing side of the barn. It’s in a nice location. The gentle fields in front and back are always just grass. It never seems like much of a pasture. There are houses close by on both sides. I wonder what they use the outbuilding for.

We pedaled down to the lake, and there’s a turnaround down there, which meant I finally saw The Yankee again, since she was well ahead of me, because I was moving slow. She met me going the other direction and she met me much sooner than I’d hoped. I am sure it showed in my body language. She didn’t go all the way to the lake, she said, but turned short of it at another prominent spot. So I continued on, and I decided to make the trip the whole way down. This meant riding past a colleague’s house, and so I call out his name as I do every time I go by, just to amuse myself. And then there’s the last big left hand curve and you get to the turnaround.

I turned around, and in that same big curve away from it, my bike started wobbling. So I stopped in a safe spot — right in the turn — to check things out. Oh, my back tire is getting low. I carry a small hand pump for just such an occasion! Pump it up a bit, send a note that I’ll be noodling, even slower, on the way back in (on account of my tire) and set out once more.

And I made it about 250 yards or so. Bike wobbles again. Tire completely flat.

So there I am, in the cold and not-quite-dying light, standing in some nice people’s yard, hoping they don’t come out to ask too many questions of me as I change the tube. I had just one extra tube in my little bike bag. So, lever off the tire, pull out the old tube, pump it a bit to see if the tube has any chance of being nursed back to the house. It does not. On goes the new tube.

And now a word about tube sizes. I normally ride a 700 x 23-25 tube. Standard stuff. The 700 is a notation about the wheel’s diameter. The second number has to do with the width of the tube, in millimeters. My extra was a 700 by 18, for some reason. Now, that’s just five or six millimeters, you say. And, sure enough, you’re basically correct! But that’s also reducing the size by about a third! So this is going to be small, inside the wheel’s rim and the tire. Why did I even buy a tube that size? The other issue is that my hand pump doesn’t generate enough pressure to really fill it. So I’m going to be riding on a too-small tube for some reason, at a drastically reduced PSI. But it’ll get the job done, which is the point. I’ll go slow, not a problem today. First I just have to get out of these people’s yard with enough daylight to steer by.

There was plenty of light. I just happened to be standing beneath a tree line. And it was chilly. Here’s my “I can’t believe I’m still wearing jackets in mid-April” shadow self-portrait to prove it:

I’m not wearing those sleeves because it’s such a breathable piece of kit.

The next issue I’m considering while also appreciating the art and the majesty of vulcanized rubber on industrialized aluminum: topography. There’s one significant little hill to get down on my route back to the house, which is about 5.6 miles away from my tube change. It requires speed or braking, or both, because at the perfect bottom of the hill there is a 135-degree turn back to the right. It’s easily manageable when your bike is behaving up to par, and only a concern if there’s a lot of traffic. Traffic isn’t a problem lately, but this tire and tube thing means I won’t be riding at full ability just now.

So I must plan a different route. One with no hills because I, for a change, want to avoid any zippy little descents. Only there’s no such direct, and flat, route of which I am aware. So I went an indirect way, negotiated one little downhill (easily, as it turns out, with some help with the USPS guy who patiently held a few cars behind him without knowing the sort of favor he did for me) and added a few extra miles, which is fine. I need the miles anyway. Grateful for those. Miles are miles, but I’d prefer them under ideal circumstance and not, as I later learned, at 40 PSI on my back tire. I usually ride my tires at 110 PSI. So that’s why it wobbled constantly, I was floating on spongey, foamy rubber and not riding a rock hard ridge.

I know it was 40 PSI because I inflated the tube with a floor pump that has a gauge on it. I went back out to ride the neighborhood road to see if that solved the floaty, bumpy sensation I’d been feeling or if I’d inadvertently damaged the wheel. And that second tube promptly exploded. POP! A crisp firecracker going off a few feet from your ear.

So I’ll go buy more tubes tomorrow. That’s something I’ll be grateful for, too, Dr. Wong.

More on Twitter, check me out on Instagram. There are more On Topic with IU podcasts. There’s a website for it, too, and you can follow it on Twitter and Facebook. For my slightly more hobbyist shows, head on over to Podbean.

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