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photo / Samford / weekend — Comments Off
14
Oct 12

Catching up

The regular Sunday post where extra pictures are added to the site to give a free day’s worth of content.

This is Hodges Chapel on the Samford University campus. This was homecoming weekend, but it always looks this beautiful.

Across the way, and later in the day, they are preparing for a pep rally and bonfire before the Saturday game:

They have fire hoses and everything.

There was also a concert Friday night. Music was played. The band was not set on fire. Many people had a great time.

Downtown Opelika, Ala., where the sidewalks are rolled up at 7:45, no matter the day of the week. The cajun place we ate at on Friday night is just to the left of this shot:

Saw this in the restroom of the place we ate last night. Seemed somehow out of place:

Tom Berenger and Corbin Bernsen can’t work out their differences in Major League. Charter Cable, who is terrible, can’t work out their problems, either. Charter is terrible.

Auburn / football / friends / memories / photo / site / Twitter / weekend — Comments Off
13
Oct 12

Auburn is unfortunately bad at football

As in, unfortunately bad. And they are not just bad, but also unfortunately bad. This morning was the fourth 11 a.m. kickoff of the year, which is a good measuring stick for your team’s play.

We watched the game on television, because it was in Oxford. I tweeted things, as many of us do these days. In my mind, this is all about the coaching. The players are giving it their all, but they aren’t being put in, or finding a lot of places to be successful right now. Tough to watch, but worse for them, I’m sure.

Two of the things I wrote:

“Third and 13, stay on this side of the orange sticks, y’all.” That’s good coordinating.

You can’t figure out what Scot Loeffler is doing? Don’t worry. The players don’t understand it either. I blame the coordinator.

I feel for the seniors who are on that side of the ball. They deserve better than this. They all do, really. The coordinator, Loeffler, is in over his head. Gene Chizik apologized to fans last week. Who knows what he’ll say about a 41-20 loss to Ole Miss which allowed the Rebels to break a 16-game conference losing streak.

Auburn, meanwhile, is 4-8 in the SEC since the national championship. They’ve lost six in a row to conference opponents — four of them highly ranked — by a combined score of 192-68. So it hasn’t even been particularly close.

If you look at a head-to-head comparison of the three worst seasons of Auburn football this century, the data points aren’t close there either. This, from Justin Lee, says it all.

You decide:

or:

For something more fun than this, I’ve gotten caught up on the photo galleries. I had to catch up from almost the exact moment I ruined summer. Anyway. Here’s July. There’s August. And here’s September.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a dinner date. The Smiths are joining the Willis (Willisi?) this evening.

cycling / Friday / iPhone / photo / Samford — 1 Comment
12
Oct 12

I have many ideas about fire, it seems

As I mentioned, this is homecoming at Samford. The festivities start today, and the alumni are returning to campus:

There is a bonfire tonight. And a concert. I talked with some of the students supervising all of that. Apparently the facilities folks take care of building the bonfire and lighting it and there are professionals to tend the blaze and the area is respectfully roped off so no one can do anything silly like falling into it.

I asked how they are going to light the fire, and this might be the part where they could improve the theatricality in the future.

There is a building nearby. Someone could leap off the building, swinging from a rope attached to the adjacent flagpole and drop a torch over the bonfire fuel, just like a rope swing over a lake.

No.

Whomever throws the javelin on the track and field team could throw one into the stack of wood.

No.

They could make a play on words about the opposing mascot and have a great visual joke with that.

No.

The head coach could light the thing.

No.

They could do the archer thing, like in the Barcelona Olympics.

No.

The star running back could somehow carry through an incendiary — of course you’d want him to be able to safely escape the thing.

No.

Someone from the Air Force ROTC could fly —

No.

We could launch something from the president’s home, which sits adjacent the campus on the mountain.

No.

Well, they didn’t say no to all of the ideas. They said they’d “take some under advisement” so I wouldn’t be surprised if one of those happened next year.

Maybe a zip line from the president’s home.

(They have fire hoses and all the various safety equipment you could think of on standby just feet from the bonfire site. They think of everything. Except zip lines.)

As part of homecoming my department holds their autumn advisory council meeting. These are alumni and other local industry leaders who we interact with to make sure we’re headed in the right direction, get ideas from them, see if they can help us find extra money and so on.

I prepare a bunch of documents that we give them. Our students’ successes, our department’s growth, our challenges and what the faculty are doing. An abbreviated list of things I’ve done appeared in that document. Pretty good year:

We had dinner tonight with a friend. He’d helped us bring the new washing machine home earlier this week, saving about 80 bucks. (Shipping is expensive, even if the store is three miles away.) He’d told us about a place he’d taken a date. Cajun.

Naturally I wanted to go. He agreed it was good enough to have again. So off we went to Jimmy’s, a restaurant I hadn’t heard of in a place I wouldn’t have thought to look.

Apparently they ship in the bread daily from New Orleans, which is ridiculous. Also the seafood comes in every morning, and the shrimp I had agreed. Just wish they’d given me more.

That could have been the 16 miles and the fit test I did this morning. Apparently the bike I was riding can measure this, so I did a V02 Max test and it fell within the excellent range, as described by The Cooper Institute for Aerobics Research.

Thing of it was, I don’t think it was the workout that limited me, but the circumstances. I did that on no calories and with no water. Next time, I’ll bet my number will be higher.

iPhone / journalism / photo / Samford / Thursday / video — Comments Off
11
Oct 12

I mentioned three desserts below

Happy 10/11/12 day. Do you know where you were at 7:08:09? How about 1314:15?

This is Homecoming Weekend at Samford. Because of this and the fall break landing in the same week the student-journalists at The Crimson are publishing a paper tomorrow. So they’re putting it to bed tonight.

See? Here’s proof.

So I watched them put a bit of that together. I saw the lady that works at the local deli. She hadn’t been there the last two times I’d visited.

I thought you’d moved on, I said.

“No, I’ll never get away. Unless it is to start my own place, Liz’s. We’d have banana pudding and red velvet cake. That’s what the people here always make me bring to the potlucks.”

I promised I’d show up twice a week if she did that.

Watched part of the vice-presidential debate, but on mute because, as the rest of the world just learned, Vice President Biden says a lot more with his body than his mouth.

Had a very nice talk with the editor of the paper. She is a smart, driven young woman. Quiet at first, but vividly funny. She aspires to be a photographer, and is very talented. She’s worked for me for three years now, and our department is fortunate to have her.

We have a lot of students like that. Seems like we’re always saying that of someone. “We’re fortunate to have a lady like that in the program” or “We’re going to flunk him so he has to stay another year.”

She runs the paper much like an executive, setting the course and letting the staff do their work. And they’ve come along nicely in a short time. So now I’m going to challenge them to work even harder, make something even better. They are conscientious and diligent and I believe they will soon be making something they are really proud of.

Tonight she asked me what I thought they could do. Now she has a list. And probably regrets asking that question.

But we also discuss things like coning.

People have too much pocket change, apparently.

adventures / errands / iPhone / memories / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off
10
Oct 12

Our new addition

The washing machine hit the spin cycle and made a weird, muted whirring noise. You grow accustomed to the sounds of your life and then the absence of those things, or their replacement by other noises, is startling.

Turns out the sound was one of failure. Broken, but trying, but accepting. At the end of the cycle I opened the washing machine and found the clothes clean, but still dripping. The missing sound was the one that represents the spin cycle. The new sound was one of “Meh.”

So I took the cover off the washing machine. I removed the drain valves and the motor. I found the coupler, which I replaced on this machine last year, was in working order. I also found some brown fluid under the frame.

We called appliance folks. This, they said, was a transmission issue. That’ll run you $500, parts and labor. And you need a special tool. And how old is your washer? You may as well buy a new one.

Well.

I have another washing machine. When we got married we just kept both sets of washers and dryers. So we plugged up my washer, which I bought second hand in 2000 for $1. I used it until 2010 or so and it has since sat patiently waiting. So we reinstalled it. Washed a load of clothes. There is a foot missing, so the balance is off and the spin cycle is violent. There was water, just a little, not a lot, coming from somewhere. I could not detect the where. But I also noticed that this one, too, was showing off some of the same brown transmission fluid. I’d thought connecting this one might give us a few months to save up some money, but figured we were now down to days.

The streak of broken things in this house — the air conditioning (twice), the refrigerator, the dishwasher (twice), the shower, three toilet repairs, the kitchen sink faucet, a broken and repaired washing machine and now two permanently retired — continues. It’d be funny if it wasn’t so expensive. That doesn’t include the new roof the previous owner put on as she put the house on the market (hail damage) or the many, many times Charter has been out to not fix the cable or a few smaller things. We’ve just started our third year in this house.

There are spirits, we joke. I think back on our first night in the house, standing on the top of a six-foot step ladder painting a high wall and shudder.

It is amazing we haven’t seriously hurt ourselves. Oh I grabbed a hot wire fixing the A/C. And Brian tried to help us figure out the first dishwasher problem and shocked himself. He also created a great electrical arc. We discovered, under there, a wire nut that had burned through itself. We’ve asked electricians about that, who don’t know how that could have happened.

Meanwhile, the local Sears is going out of business, so we bought a new washing machine.

It doesn’t have the center post in the drum. It doesn’t have a transmission. It is actually very quiet. It has a digital timer telling you when the load will be completed. If it breaks it displays error messages. You are supposed to be able to call the tech support, hold the phone near the sensor and they can determine the problem. Yeah, I don’t believe that either. It plays a little song when the load is finished.

Page two of the manual says “For your safety, the information in this manual must be followed to minimize the risk of fire or explosion, electric shock, or to prevent property damage, injury to persons, or death.”

It has a stainless steel drum. It runs on an inverter direct drive motor, suggesting if I can turn it inside out I can indirectly drive the space-time continuum. There is also a child lock, which I presume is not meant to keep kids inside, and also SMARTRINSE, which is designed to save water, but wasted capital letters.

And in 20 or so years we’ll have recovered the money we would spend at a laundromat.

That’s mostly what we’ve been dealing with the last few days. I was on fall break on Monday and Tuesday. I decided to take those few days off from the blog as well. These are the first two days without at least something being published since April of 2005.

I’m fine with this decision.

More tomorrow.