photo

adventures / football / Monday / photo / Twitter — Comments Off on It was a nice, full, weekend, thanks
4
Nov 19

It was a nice, full, weekend, thanks

There is an alarm clock in our guest bedroom. It is blinking because of the last power outage. I walked in there one day in the last week or two and thought I should reset that. But then I realized, No, I’ll wait. ​

And now I can do it, around the microwave and the stove clock and the cars and whatever else has to be done the old fashioned way. Thank goodness your computers and phones and DVRs and tablets and thermostats change themselves these days. The miracle of technology is nearly limitless. Nearly. Maybe if I had a smart refrigerator it would change the milk for me. That’d be helpful these days.

I mean, I’d change the batteries in the smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, but, by then, I’m just so exhausted. It turns out this well-oiled machine is impacted by just the tiniest bit of melatonin.

Anyway, lovely weekend. We attended a football game. Indiana got to seven wins for the first time in ages, these poor suffering football fans. They’re going bowling and they keep winning and there’s another win on the schedule, perhaps two, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Let’s get ahead of ourselves. This is a super young team and they are playing against type in some real and serious ways.

Michael Ziemba is a junior, and he’s been around on this team so long he feels like an old man. He was in my class last fall. Nice guy. Not old at all. He had the one tackle on the night:

Michael Penix Jr. is the quarterback, and he’s had the injury bug this year, but he’s also helping to lead a team that has scored 30 points in eight games this year. He’s a redshirt freshman. So big things to come:

Here’s James Miller, another redshirt freshman. The linebacker finished with three tackles and an assist. He’s chasing Aidan Smith, Northwestern’s backup quarterback.

Hunter Johnson is the Wildcats’ stating QB, but he’s been out while his mother undergoes cancer treatment. He did play in the game, though. And, most importantly:

“She has a couple more procedures, but really the bulk of it is out of the way. The chemo is done,” he told the Tribune. “My mom has been unbelievable through all this, so strong. She hasn’t flinched a bit. It has been tough for her, but she has kept a great face. It has been inspiring to me to know she will get through it.”

This past week Whop Philyor was added to the Biletnikoff Watch List. The junior is among the nation’s best receivers. He had a quiet night. Two catches for 76 yards.

And here’s Stevie Scott scoring one of his two touchdowns on the night.

The public address announcer calls out the jersey numbers. So it’s always “Number Eight, Stevie Scott carries for 27 yards.” But it sounds like he’s saying “The great Stevie Scott … ” He rushed for 116 Saturday. The sophomore is closing in on his second 1,000-yard season.

Penix, the IU quarterback above, got hurt in the second half, meaning Peyton Ramsey came in. Ramsey was a starter in his frehsman season, started all 12 games last year and he’s been great as a spot starter this season.

But here are the real stars:

Last night we went to the theatre, he said without any sense of flair.

It’s a funny show. Full of high energy. Great performances, and it makes fun of an entire belief system.

That last part is kind of important.

But that’s not everything! There’s more on Twitter and on Instagram and many of the fine places that don’t require I change a clock.

books / Friday / photo / video — Comments Off on This week we show color
1
Nov 19

This week we show color

Took the day for myself … and I vacuumed, because thats self-soothing. Also I slept in, and had a big lunch, and petted cats and took a few things off the DVR. So it was fine. I could do more, I could always do more, but I did enough to enjoy a casual day off.

We had a bike ride this evening. It was cold and I need shoe covers. It is also the time to wear wool socks. You only need to learn that lesson once a year. But a light windjacket and gloves kept the rest of me warm. And many people were out enjoying the first sunshine we’ve seen this week. Here’s my shadow selfie, near the end of the ride:

And here’s a little video, also near the end of the ride, cruising through a pleasant little neighborhood.

It would have been better if I’d taken this video the first time through, the sun was behind me and perfect, but I would have had to get to my phone, take off a glove and so on. Somehow that seemed easier the second time through.

We return to the books! Regular readers know this feature is an examination of my grandfather’s books. Presently, we are leafing through the April 1969 Reader’s Digest. I have four of his Reader’s Digests — which means a few weeks from now we’ll have to move to some Popular Science or some encyclopedias or something. Anyway, click the book below to see the latest.

If you want to see all of the ads I’ve digitized from this issue, click here. To see all of the books — including some early-mid 20th century elementary and middle school books — click here.

And to you, I say, happy weekend! We are going to a football game and the theater this weekend. Patrons of the arts and athletics, we are. Looks like I will need that extra hour of sleep. What are you going to do with that extra hour?

IU / photo / Thursday — Comments Off on This week we show color
31
Oct 19

This week we show color

For Halloween, this fall dressed as winter. It snowed today. Pretty much all afternoon and into the night. The Yankee, who says this is the earliest she’s ever been snowed on, is ready to plan spring break. Embrace the pain of the cold and the wind. There’s five months to go. Five months of this.

Where I’m from, those monster masks were too hot to wear on Halloween. Tonight was one of those never-warm-enough nights. Five more months of this.

Anyway, more foliage! We must enjoy them while we can. That’s what this week is about around here. After the wind and this cold snap, they’ll likely all be scurrying across the ground by the weekend.

All of these are on campus which is, to be sure, quite beautiful during the leaf turn.

Twigs are less beautiful. Oh, sure, they are important. Those leaves don’t just hang there. They don’t pull the nutrients out of the very air. They just don’t put on the same show as the leaves, no matter their color of the moment.

And we’ll have a long time to enjoy those poking up into the air. It isn’t the winter or the cold or even the snow or really the grey skies, you understand. OK, it is a little the grey skies. The immutable grey skies are a part of it. But the cold and the wind and the snow all have their place. I guess. And I can stay inside to avoid most of that, like a reasonable human being.

It’s that we won’t see any signs of spring until the first week of April. The sheer necessary endurance aspect of it all. Knowing that, sometimes just after Valentine’s Day I should see green things emerging, but instead, it’s another two months of twigs. That’s the unembraceable challenge.

Now if I had a spring break every month or so, some place warm, or, heck, even mild. That’d be OK. Alas.

Anyway, happy Halloween, and happy winter.

history / IU / photo / running / Wednesday — Comments Off on This week we show color
30
Oct 19

This week we show color

Since this week we’re using color as the gimmick here, I suppose this post is in the “These colors don’t run … but I do” category.

So I’m walking in the building today and I just casually pass by the Ernie Pyle display case. And I thought, this shouldn’t be a thing you don’t even think about. It isn’t a shrine, but Ernie is sort of the patron saint of the journalism program here. He grew up not far away, attended school here, dropped out his senior year to go write at a commercial paper and then built, one column at a time, one of the most successful careers of the mid-20th century. He was killed in the Pacific near the end of World War II and he’s venerated here, almost 80 years later.

Just sitting there, is the man’s typewriter.

I believe that’s one of his domestic machines. He perhaps wrote tons of self deprecating letters and some of his better stateside professional work on this. It’s next to his medals and diplomas and books and his action figure — this is a journalist with an action figure — and some other personal effects.

Here’s the left shoulder of his European field jacket. You can still see the sweat and dirts ground into the collar. But the patch is interesting of its own accord.

Someone had to stitch that as a part of the war effort. How many of those did they make? And who sewed that on the jacket? How many of those did they make? And what did the men who saw them on other men’s soldiers think?

We know what they thought of Ernie Pyle. They absolutely loved him. They loved him because he wrote about the men, not the generals, and he endured the unendurable with them. The work he did meant it was an inevitable byproduct.

These colors I saw while running today:

It was the neighborhood 5K. It was cool, but not so bad that you minded once the heart rate got up, but you noticed it when you got the full sweat. In the last mile I saw this balding tree. The winds are coming in tomorrow. None of these trees will look the same by the weekend.

But look what the sky did in that photo. More accurately, look at what my phone’s processor did to the background of the photograph when I stopped for three seconds to frame up the shot in the third mile of my run. It’s a grey sky, but we’ve got a white one here. Which, hey, snow is also in the forecast tomorrow …

Snow. October. People are going to hear about this.

IU / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off on This week we show color
29
Oct 19

This week we show color

The week of grey, begets the month and seasons of grey. I’m not putting a picture here every day, but I’m thinking about doing so on Instagram, at least until the novelties of X days in a row wear out.

Or is that “wear me down”? That’ll happen. Second half of February. You can count on it. Anyway, there is still a lot of color to behold this week, the brilliance flaring until the chemicals dilute themselves in the cycles of the season just before our ability to misanthropomorphize it all.

That sky was today, the tree above was this weekend.

These two on-campus maples were today. They do like to show off:

See what I mean? I’ve given that maple tree meaning and purpose. I’ve given it ambition and ego. I did that in a sentence. Imagine what I can do when the clock falls back and I’ve got more reason to write, because it is dark out earlier.

I bet this leaf doesn’t see the weekend:

Now that I write that out, I wish I’d thought to mark the thing with a bread tie or something. Just to see. Maples, we say here every year, are nature’s first quitters. But there’s bound to be a tenacious leaf out there somewhere. A stubborn little thing, one where the petiole is just a wee bit stronger than all its brothers and sisters.

I did it again. I want that leaf to be strong, a signal of resistance for me and others who dread the coming of winter. But really I’m depriving the ground of important nutrients, or a landscaper a few more seconds making money with the leaf blower, or perhaps a mulch pile somewhere doing … mulch things.

Have you ever noticed the things we don’t anthropomorphize? Something to consider, isn’t it?

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →