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photo / Thursday — Comments Off on More evidence of spring
2
Apr 20

More evidence of spring

Standing in the sunshine in the backyard and feeling fine.

It’s a sentence I should be saying all the time now. But the weather here isn’t as predictable as all that. Nice to enjoy this today, though. Here’s one of our flowering trees:

I like leaves, but we’ve waited this long, dear new friend, why not let the blooms have the spotlight a bit longer?

I wonder what it means when the style and the stigma are different colors on the same branch, never mind the same tree.

Whoever planted this tree, I thank you. Wish you’d put in an entire lawn of them.

We’re due another fine day of weather tomorrow. That’ll be two in a row. Wonders, friends, never cease. Sometime they just take a while to arrive is all.

IU / journalism / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off on Tonight on #IUZoomington
1
Apr 20

Tonight on #IUZoomington

Since I was just yesterday briefly opining about why some bike rides are better than others, I won’t do the same again as it pertains to today’s bike ride, which will definitely be categorized as among the others. The why was actually known, today, however. The Yankee said “Let’s go find some hills,” and that is why that ride was hard and it was slow.

And also cold, which is what you want out of April Fools Day: no jokes and an almost bitter chill.

This evening I held a Zoom chat, #IUZoomington we’re calling them, with my old friend Chris Pollone. You’ve seen him on NBC stations around the country, as he is a national correspondent and a producer for the network. We all worked in Birmingham at the same time, and he’s very generous with his time. It’s one of the great things about this business: people are always willing to do this sort of thing:

Students who took part in the discussion, I think, learned a great deal from a pro’s pro. I’m going to try to have weekly #IUZoomington sessions with broadcasters through the rest of the semester. It’s not the same, but it could be helpful to those who want to take part.

Of course, after the fact, being TV nerds we talked about how we could have all added monitors to make over-the-shoulder graphics and such.

This was … let me count now … my seventh or eighth or so professional Zoom. I’ve had a few people join me in classes this way and conducted a few interviews this way, but now we’re all experts in the format, or soon will be. That total doesn’t count the occasional video chat with friends, of course. Somehow they’re the same, but different.

I wonder how everyone else’s dynamics work. Obviously, for a more formal meeting style the roles can be pretty clear — and there’s a lot of listening and waiting.

What if the circumstances are different? What if it is like this, a more casual setting? If you are the supposed host do you feel the need to keep the conversation moving? I feel as though I need to have two open-ended questions ready to go at all times. It’s a party host function, I guess. I invited you here, and so I must make sure this doesn’t devolve into something wasteful. If you’re an invitee, though, do you bring more of a reaction-style to your computer screen? No board games necessary, right?

It’s flat, a coworker said, and you can see that. Everyone is just beginning to figure out the dynamics, I suppose. But it’s almost as good as being there, and you don’t have to drive home afterward, or clean up everyone’s dishes when they leave. Is it allowed to have a a nice show-and-tell? Maybe that becomes weird. I think there’s a cat show for cat people in this format. I also want, even in these basic chats, for there to be multiple camera angles and graphics (I’m making my own out of paper and tape.) and games on the screen. What would liven up a chat more than a handful of Connect Four games you’re playing against each person in the room?

You know what would? Custom backgrounds. And that’s where I’ll be spending some of my time later this week, making more of them.

adventures / cycling / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off on Still a few leftover pictures
31
Mar 20

Still a few leftover pictures

We’re going back to our roots!

When I took that photo I thought, Wow, that’s a lot of roots. But, somehow, it seems like less now. Maybe that’s a compression of the whole scene into a computer monitor rather than the several square feet of ground the tree’s lateral branches. Maybe I was just impressed by being outside.

This was a sad sight.

In the background you can see a field where, in happier times, soccer and football and whatever else is played by the little kids. It’s a nice park floating just above the nearby middle school, surrounded by a quiet walking path. But there can be no swinging, and no monkeying around on the monkey bars. The climbing parts have been fenced in. There were still a few kids playing in that field, however.

This was from our bike ride yesterday, which was a nice and easy ride.

I don’t know why some days are nice and easy, and others feel like the most inept demonstration of human ability possible. But in that little ride, I established four new PRs on various segments and felt about as strong as seems likely, so it was the former.

You would think the sport, at the professional levels at least, would have caught up to science on this, but no. We are left to acknowledge that, sometimes, we have good legs. And then, other times, we resign ourselves to realizing we don’t have good legs, we merely have meatsicles that just hang there and feet that pedal squares. Sometimes it is a demonstration of physical grace and power and ease. Other times that fish that doesn’t need a bicycle could do it better than you. And that’s always the day when you see people you know out on a ride of their own.

adventures / Monday / photo — Comments Off on No really, it is spring now, apparently
30
Mar 20

No really, it is spring now, apparently

First things first, this is a panorama, or almost a panorama, I took on a weekend walk. Click to embiggen.

Let us do our regular Monday with the cats. We have a strict Not On The Counter rule that the cats ignore. Lately, they’ve found a loophole. The Yankee received this package in the mail some time back and it’s just been sitting on this out-of-the-way corner. And so the cats jump up on the counter and sit on the box where, as Phoebe demonstrates here, she is not on the corner:

They are also chewing on the box, both of them. They don’t eat it, they’re just destroying it bite by bite. I pick up the bits on the floor every day, and I am pretty sure they haven’t really thought this through. When they eat the box, they’ll be back on the counter, and we will set them in on the floor again.

I’ve been asked why we always see pretty pictures of Phoebe, and pictures of Poseidon in his hijinks. Mostly it is because Phoebe is a good girl. And Poseidon does things like this:

Note the feet. Note the balance.

Now, note the cuteness:

Now, note this wackadoo:

Computer? Enhance:

Found on a run this weekend, art which transports you from where you are, to, well, wherever this is going:

It isn’t awkward at all when the homeowners notice you taking a picture of this. Or when you realize the artist was an adult.

Just down from where I took that panorama picture at the top of the post, after you’ve walked down the hill and over the footbridge, there are two tennis courts and a small playground and a nice long walking path. It’s just down a second hill from an elementary school, and, as you might expect, there are a lot of kids in a nice spot like that. The teachers know that, too. And so up and down the path, they’d come out and left notes for their kids:

It’s the cutest, saddest thing. Imagine the progress a teacher has made with those kids all year long, and it’s over in March. They haven’t canceled school for the year yet, but it’s coming. And from the point-of-view of the teachers, the big and little worries they must have. For that teacher it came down to the one message. Keep reading.

I think I got in trouble for reading too much. If class bored me, and many classes did, there was a book in my lap. How do you scold a kid like that? Meanwhile, you’re worried about that child on the other side of the room that is in a real struggle? And now you, a compassionate teacher type, know they won’t be there in your class, to benefit from your training and experience in a formalized setting for a good long while.

Spring is showing up. In the backyard:

These are all from one tree. And the blooms won’t stick around long enough, but what they portend is welcome:

I think of that Moritsugu Katsumoto line a lot: “The perfect blossom is a rare thing. You could spend your entire life looking for one, and it would not be a wasted life.”

Who knows if they’re all perfect, or if the poetry there is really about the aspiration, or even the pursuit. It’s a nice thing to think about while you’re staring at the edges of fragile, fleeting things.

Here we are down by the creek:

It was a nice weekend to see the beginning of things to come.

cycling / photo — Comments Off on It’s Friday, let’s go ride bikes
27
Mar 20

It’s Friday, let’s go ride bikes

Left work about 15 minutes early to go on a bike ride. And by “left work early” I mean “announced in the four different platforms in which we are presently communicating (because the first three weren’t sufficient), that I was going for a bike ride.”

So we set out for a pleasant little 30-miler. Someone told me in the fourth communication platform, eschewing the other three mediated formats, to be careful. I take this advice to heart every time it is offered. Fortunately the traffic broke our way:

That’s the benefit of getting out just a few minutes early. You can beat the crowds that don’t exist. Down that road is the local lake and, even on a slightly chilly and predictably gray day you’d expect to see one or two boats being pulled down for the weekend float. But not today.

So we went through the three neighborhoods, long roads with houses and big yards really, that we normally cruise through on that route. We came back up the same direction, over the big hill which has the ice cream shop sitting tantalizingly at the bottom of the descent, the big hill which sometimes I can get over in one gear, and sometimes I need to the whole cassette, and on neither occasion have I ever wheeled my bike in there for a cone, but one day I will. There’s a big false flat sprint after that, a hard right hander into some rollers and then a left turn before two long stretches of road where you can really build your pace or completely lose your wits, and then we saw these guys:

And then on the last little bit we worked on the art of moving fast, but trying to look casual about it.

She’s doing somewhere between 22 and 25 miles per hour right there. That’s not a put your head down and grit your teeth pace, or anything, but it’s a fair clip, for me at least, with one hand and in a small gear ramping up to the last descent at the end of the ride.

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