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cycling / IU / Monday / photo / running / video — Comments Off
9
Mar 20

A run, two rides, but mostly cats

Happy Monday. This week is going to be a memorable one, you can just tell, can’t you? It will. And if you can’t tell, come up for air and read the news. It’s going to be a memorable one.

But before all of that begins, we have our new usual Monday feature of checking in with the cats. Let’s see how they spent their weekend.

Phoebe discovered a new place to sit on the stairs. We have a small landing, and she’s familiar with that, but this step gives her a commanding view of the foyer, a window and escape routes up and down the stairs. I’m sure that’s how she thinks.

Poseidon spent part of Saturday night curled up in a big fuzzy blanket. I think he’s coming around to the lifestyle:

They got two new toys in the mail from a friend this weekend. They are little lizard shapes with some hardcore strain of catnip inside:

They are jealous cats, so jealous that despite there being two of the identical toys, they are fighting over the lizards. So now we’ll have to hide them.

Some naps, for whatever reason, are cuter than others:

We went for a run on a sunny Saturday. I am now tasked with running ahead and taking pictures. So my sprints should improve, because the job is to get far enough ahead that I can find a good spot for a reasonable composition, stop, turn, open the camera, frame a shot and watch the runner run through:

It’s a good chance to catch my breath, though, before having to run on and catch back up. But, check this out, same picture:

I got the two-feet-off-the-ground shot. Not bad for trying to do all of the above while winded.

On Sunday afternoon I got in my first bike ride of the year. And this evening I had my second bike ride No photos or videos of either of those. Or probably for the first four or five rides. I have to remember again where all the gears are and what all the levers on the bike do again, first.

I shot this after today’s bike ride. And I am suddenly very interested, once again, in natural sound.

The late night show produced this episode for you last Friday. The guest is one of our professors. Ordinarily my critique would be that you have to go find people outside of our own buildings. There are a lot of reasons for that, groupthink, the burden of real producing, the what’s-entertaining-to-you-isn’t-entertaining-to-everyone phenomenon, but that concept may not apply to Susan Kelly, who is quite entertaining indeed:

Anyway, for the rest of the week, and whatever else is coming to us soon, I hope your times aren’t that interesting.

Friday / Instagram / IU / photo / running — Comments Off
6
Mar 20

There’s a pun here

There was a miniature conference in the building today. I wish more people had attended. The students who were presenting their research had some interesting topics and they’d worked quite hard on their papers. Maybe it is a function of doing this on Fridays, or the subject matter, or the weather or the publicity, but this is what they saw.

The 3D printer version of a giant sloth skeleton is a good and attentive listener, though.

The sloth will be with us for two more weeks, and then he’s going elsewhere. He’s actually already moving, he’s just doing so very, very, very slowly.

That’s the easy joke. And you’re right to take the easy sloth joke. How many sloth jokes are there? Let’s count …

I went out for a run to count sloth jokes, and over the course of four miles I came up with two. There are two sloth jokes. “Google, how many sloth jokes do you know?”

…

Turns out there are somewhere between nine and 16 sloth jokes, depending on how critical funny has to be to your conception of a joke. I would tell you all nine to 16 sloth jokes but that would be very time consuming.

That’s the other sloth joke I had without Google’s help.

Anyway, I hope you, like Poseidon, are ready to leap into the weekend.

View this post on Instagram

Poseidon gonna Poseidon.

A post shared by Kenny Smith (@kennydsmith) on Mar 6, 2020 at 6:34pm PST

Monday / photo — Comments Off
2
Mar 20

Checking in on the felines

Had a nice weekend. Had a plan for all of the things I was going to do. I think I did two of them. So that was … progress, I guess. I did a lot of cat cuddling, instead, for the most part. Let’s check in on the animals.

Phoebe enjoyed a Saturday in the sun.

I’d gone outside to conduct some very important solar power experiments. When she sees someone outside who she knows should be inside, she does a great many tricks to get your attention and entice you to come back in. I liken it to human-trained dolphins. “Come look at this trick!” There’s a lot of flopping and flipping upside down. Some of it more graceful than others.

I also got the rare Phoebe cuddle:

I am the second choice here, and that’s fine. When she’s desperate, and if I can get a blanket quick enough, she’ll sit with me. About a month ago I stopped counting how many times it had taken place — because I would need to use a third hand to keep track. But when she’s really cozy she climbs up on you like this. I have had four of these now.

She disappeared as soon as I took that photo, so thank goodness for safety shots, I suppose.

Poseidon is doing just fine, too. He had a sleepy weekend:

Who could blame him? Sleepy weekends are pretty awesome.

And how was your weekend? I hope you accomplished precisely what you needed to, exactly what you wanted to, and not the first bit more.

Friday / IU / photo / television / video — Comments Off
28
Feb 20

Ever see a two-year punchline pay off?

Unannounced. Unheralded. Barely mentioned. We’re to that point now, were you don’t even acknowledge that more of this happened today:

I don’t even think that was in the forecast. So, naturally, it snowed all afternoon and into the evening. At least it will be sunny tomorrow, and we may hit 60 degrees on Sunday.

I was thinking of that as I walked up the street to Studio 5, where this took place.

We tell students you have to do a lot of boring work to get the good stuff, sometimes, and today was one of those times when it paid out.

For two years this show has wrapped every episode with the joke “Tune in next week when Jesse Eisenberg and I …” and some silly activity. Tucker’s said that for two years. Today the punchline paid out when Eisenberg, who’s in town visiting family, declined a dozen other requests and spent a few hours with our show.

At the end of the show he did a bunch of the things the show had been promising. The production went well. That video was from my phone; the actual show will be released Sunday and it has real production value. The crew were thrilled.

It was a great moment for them, and he was so gracious with his time and input. We’re all terribly excited with how it all came together.

After work it was to the grocery store. I bought many items and nearly broke the self checkout system because of it. One needs supplies, though, and sometimes a great many supplies. A problem with the self checkout is that you must put your item in the bagging area, which is finite. And if you move things out of the bagging area, or don’t put an item immediately in the bagging area, the register is not pleased. Do that enough and you start getting warning sounds. Donk! Donk! And if you do that enough an error message appears on the screen: someone will be coming to assist you.

Not that I need the assistance.

Not that anyone is coming.

It’s a symptom of our times, I suppose. A system designed to element staff has reduced staff to such a degree that there’s no one serving in an oversight capacity.

And if you’ve ever stood in line behind a person in the self checkout area — or me, this evening, I suppose — you’d wonder how prudent that is. But, hey, Friday. Weekend ahead, groceries going in the trunk …

I had to type it three times. The first two managed to come out grocers. As if I was stuffing people in the back of my car just because of where they worked. What a way to begin a terrible short story: “He never liked florists. Or butchers. Something about the way they smiled and smelled. Cashiers and stockers, they were guilty by association, and so they’d have to go, too. Not all at once, of course. There was only only so much you can steer in a cart, just so much you could put in the trunk of the car. But if you are precise, if you are crafty, you could manage before the next bulk mail circular went out, or the store owner really noticed.”

Which, hey, for the first draft of a bad short story, might be OK. Feel free to work on it this weekend, punch it into something good.

photo / Wednesday — Comments Off
26
Feb 20

Just writing about very casual photos

Bought gas this morning. Watched the rain turn to snow and marveled at how gross the parking lot looked, which is to say, a lot like a wet parking lot in semi-dark conditions. It’s the most central European experience I can offer you today. Brown turns gray and it’s too cold to qualify as dank. And it was almost the first thing in the morning. But at least the price at the pump was good:

So thank you, Kroger fuel points for the discount.

Forgot my lunch today. I guess I was just too excited about fueling up. So I had to get a sandwich at the nearby sandwich place, which meant chips. Which meant choices and new packaging and …

Cool design, I guess, so they’ve increased the cool, but perhaps not the ranch. The look suggests a chip went subatomic and left only the excess seasoning. There is a little extra seasoning. I’m not sure it required new packaging. You could give me the new chips in the old bag and I would have thought there was a new man on the special spice machine last week. The new guy is always more interested in the customer experience than the corporate bottom line, after all. But that soon passes when the veteran first shift crew talks him into toeing the line.

At which point the new guy becomes just one of the guys, on his way to being the old guy. It happens overnight. Literally. Before he knows it he’s working a double on the third shift because that guy is the manager’s brother-in-law. Everyone knows he’s the weak link, the third shift brother-in-law. No way he’d be working that schedule if the manager liked him. But you know how it goes. And so the formerly-new-guy bitterly starts thinning out the spices.

And that’s when the new design on the chip bag is outdated.

But will you even notice? There’s so much going on, if you’re not leaving big, smeary, fingerprints on everything, how could you notice it all?

There isn’t enough extra cool ranch for big, smeary, fingerprints.

I took a picture of some of the wood stain in the garage, because I needed to make a note of it for my current project. I’m going to start sanding soon. I think. I hope. So here are some stain cans.

And so now I’m spending the rest of my Wednesday evening enjoying getting to go home with some of the day still left in it. Working late on Tuesdays and then having a regular schedule on Wednesday is an unusual thing. Challenging on the at the beginning, but the back end, this is a nice feeling: free time.

Makes getting gas first thing this morning worth it, I guess.