Ignore the cold days, I said. Never mind that you’re still wearing a jacket every other evening, I thought. Pay no attention to dark and gray skies, I wrote. Budding things are life’s optimists.
Can’t get more profound than that. Here, then, are some videos I shot and put on Twitter this evening:
Slipped into a pool lane today just as my sports editor was leaving the pool. He’s coming back from a little injury and is racing in his first track meet in some time this weekend. He’s naturally very excited. So today, of course, he was just knocking out 2,250 yards in the pool.
“Hey,” I said, knowing I was going to run later and that he’s run at the same place before and that he’s a lot faster than me, “I’m going to do a few laps after this if you want to wait around.”
He was planning to run too. Because he’s young and he can do that.
“Where are you going to eat later? I’ll stop by and eat slower than you, too.”
He laughed and disappeared. I swam my 2,000 yards, feeling nauseous for the second half, thinking so that’s what that feels like.
Then I went and ran three miles, feeling better and sprinting through about 15 percent of the thing, pretending I knew about intervals. After I got cleaned up I looked up the sports editor’s best times 5K. He’s very fast. Good thing he turned me down.
Here’s the view from the track. Three black cinder walls and then one side with three of these:
I saw a great pick on the basketball court below, and then I ran my last three laps as the lacrosse team warmed up running laps below. They must have not been trying too hard, I stayed with them. But, hey, that’s two bricks in a week, and that feels great.
Things to read … because reading is always great.
I think this is the first Twitter video I’ve embedded here. This is a great video:
Here’s a newsroom with some spunk. Turns out someone set fire to the building, but the publisher is unimpressed. Fiery journalism:
We know there is a portion of the population that doesn’t like what we do here. A nice quiet chamber of commerce cheerleader that runs press releases, without asking questions, is more to their liking. Those readers don’t want to know how badly the schools are doing, lack of city services, problems in police departments and county job bids that are illegal and padded.
That would be so easy to do. We could operate on half the reporters and they’d require no news writing education, training or experience.
But that’s not what we do. We do what journalists everywhere used to do, before bowing to advertisers, money, pressure and threats and the easy road. When a newspaper informs readers in such a manner, whether they wish to be informed or not, certain risks come with that, including bullet holes in windows, occasional paint-balling and the ever-so-popular rocks.
But to start a fire? Understanding the anger or the arsonist’s lack of ability to cope with a problem is just beyond all of us here at the Rio Grande SUN. Richard Beaudoin states it very well in his letter on page A7: write a letter, come talk to us or start your own cheerleader and print what you want.
Better yet, don’t do the stupid, immature, irresponsible things that lead to your actions or words being reported in your local newspaper. The community would be better for it.
I wonder what they write when the arsonist is caught.
Monasteries, lodges and schools have all been captured and Apa says you might even see some yaks along the way.
“My hope is that when people see this imagery online, they’ll have a deeper understanding of the region and the Sherpa people that live there,” says Apa.
Previously Google has mapped other renowned locations, including the Amazon forest, Greenland’s ice fjords and wedding chapels in Las Vegas.
Don’t you wish they hadn’t grouped Las Vegas with those other places?
You can tell people all of the reasons they shouldn’t take pictures of signs, and there are plenty of good reasons, but still, when the classics come back to life, you can’t help yourself:
After nearly a decade of its pumps sitting idle, fuel is again flowing at the former Saco gas station at the corner of Dean Road and Opelika Road in Auburn.
Auburn resident Mike Woodham turned the station’s original lights back on at the Saco gas station Monday as he reopened it as Woodham’s Full Service—a gas station offering full or self serve fuel service, a full-service tire shop, oil changes and more.
“The City of Auburn has been very gracious to my kids and very good to me, and we wanted to give something back,” said Woodham, who owned Woodham’s Tire in Montgomery and has been in the auto business for 30 years. “We wanted to serve back. And the best way that we know of is what we bring to market with our tire knowledge.”
Known for its iconic Saco sign, the previous gas station closed more than nine years ago after then-owner Dick Salmon was shot and killed at the business in July 2005. According to an Associated Press article as reported by The Decatur Daily on July 24, 2005, Salmon had worked at the family-run business for 43 years.
And the store:
Not a lot has changed, and that seems to be the plan, and that’s great.
Breakfast at Barbecue House this morning, which meant I could skip lunch. Read students’ news stories all morning and afternoon, and that is always fun, right up until I imagine then trying to read my marginalia. And then there was class, where we talked about profiles and obits and got ready to point to exciting digital methods of story telling, which will last us through the rest of the week.
There were other office things, a late dinner and here we are.
Things to read … because here we are.
I’m keeping it to three, but these are three incredible Selma pieces to read. Because they are better than the headlines, I will link you with a good quote for each:
And now for another kind of fortitude, this is a strong testament of health, strength, and mind over chemo, Finding strength in triathlons:
It was debilitating. “I was 10 days away from doing my eighth Ironman,” Hackett says. “I was still training 100 percent and I had this huge, stage four tumour going.” His youngest daughter was just two weeks old. His oldest was five years old.
[…]
Hackett is on an aggressive form of chemotherapy, a regimen called FOLIRI, whose name represents three different drugs. His oncologist, Dr. Michael Sawyer, combines the regimen with a relatively new drug called bevacizumab that attacks the growth of new blood vessels. Hackett tolerates it well. “He told me he biked 20 or 30 kilometres the day before I saw him,” Sawyer says. He also ran a five-kilometre race just four hours after he finished his first round of chemotherapy.
The exercise might have something to do with it. “There are many studies, both in curative chemotherapy (to remove cancer completely) and chemotherapy to prolong people’s lives, where it appears that people who exercise do better than people who do not,” says Sawyer.
So we’ll all be at the gym a bit longer tomorrow, no?
And, finally, we’ll end with some music today. If you’re still looking for something to hate Tom Hanks in, keep looking because this probably isn’t that thing either:
Have a great and purposeful week. See ya tomorrow!
photo / weekend — Comments Off on Catching up 8 Mar 15
The post that shares pictures that you probably haven’t seen yet, because I probably haven’t shared them yet. Let’s get to it.
I don’t know why we even bother after this picture.
She likes to watch what she likes to watch.
I’ve always wondered how they get the Icee from the factory to that dispenser:
Is it just me or are police lights much brighter these days? I hope these nice officers realize their dark uniforms are not offset by the blinding lights. If anything the combination makes them feel more hidden.
The restaurant was empty, but the radio played the Jayhawks anyway. And that’s always a good thing.
The basement of my building at work has a side door that opens to a step-up courtyard patio. And the sun streams in at just the right time …
Last night I did a bit of cleaning, digging a desk out from under paperwork. I threw out a lot, reorganized a little and categorized that corner into smaller stacks of material to deal with. On a roll, I went out to the garage and straightened up one of the walls lined with things. The wall being threatened by the things, this had become necessary. On the bottom of one stack of garage wall things was a box. In that box was a collection of all of the things I wrote for newspapers and press releases and media packages in college. Also in that box there were other boxes. And one of those boxes had these inside.
These are some of my old radio airchecks. Morning shows, news, music shifts, football games. There’s a bit of everything in there. I had forgotten where in the house they were, but know we know: holding up the things that are holding up the garage wall.
Just above the box that held this box is another box. That’s a box I brought home late last year and it has dozens of old reel-to-reel tapes of my grandfather, preaching and on the radio. We’re going to have to get those cleaned up. I never heard him speak. But it turns out his voice and my voice have been sitting side-by-side lately.
Auburn / baseball / photo / weekend — Comments Off on Where you learn how the picture craze started 7 Mar 15
Slept in, by a great deal. I was going to go ride my bike this morning, but my body had other plans it seems. I slept in by a lot. I’ll probably be asleep early tonight, as well.
In between I did see an 11-inning baseball game. And I had Aubie take a selfie for me.
A lot of people don’t know this, but if you look at those two words you should be able to figure out who invented the style. Aubie –> Selfie. He’s a man of many talents.
I also cleaned a corner of the office this evening. And I sorted through some stuff in the garage. If you’re interested in any of that come back tomorrow, I’ll tell one of those stories then.
