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Clever and witty title

Trying something new for my bike rides. Since we live on the hilliest part of the coastal plains (despite being 180 miles from the coast and about 120 miles from the nearest mountain foothills) you can’t leave the house without pedaling up and down something.

Since I’ve noticed it takes six or eight miles for my legs to warm up, and since the hills here hurt when my legs aren’t ready, and since I’m not a very good cyclist anyway, I’m looking for somewhere flat to start.

Problem: there’s nowhere flat to start.

I have found a two-and-a-half mile loop with just two hills on it. So I’m riding that a few times before the actual ride begins. Those five miles make one of our standard routes 31 miles, which I can do without too much trouble, despite the hills. (I’m a wimp.)

All of this to say, if you have a good topographical map you can share, I’d love to borrow it for a while.

Productive day today. Did a bit of research, fired off the many important emails. Read a lot and booked hotel rooms for an upcoming conference.

The conference is in February, but it is one of those college towns where there’s not much there besides mountains and woods. The locals told us to book early, because if you aren’t in one of the two establishments in town you’re staying at a tavern 13 miles out of town. After that you’re looking at 20 and 30 mile commutes from Super 8s.

So I called the local Hampton Inn and asked for their policies and their availability for hotel rooms in February. (And felt an immediate sympathy for people working the phones at hotels. Oh the questions they must hear, over and over again.) They had something like 10 rooms left. In addition to this conference which will bring several hundred undergrads, there’s also softball, equestrian and men’s and women’s basketball in that tiny town that weekend.

Glad I booked early.

Did an interview today. I’m accustomed to conducting the interviews, but today I was the subject of one. The experience is a different one. This is in response to an idea that a lot of people had and the subsequent little essay I wrote about Unrolling Toomer’s a few weeks ago. It got re-printed on The War Eagle Reader
and picked up in one of the fan forums, too. Online this idea has taken on a life of its own. In practice it is growing a little more slowly. But there’s another interview to be done this weekend, too. So maybe we’re on to something.

So, naturally, I treated the interview like a stand-up, saying everything I could to one open-ended question. Only took two takes, but it worked out well. We’ll see the finished product next week.

Waiting for pizza.

Mellow Mushroom is the best pizza place in town, and one of the busiest places in town. I wonder how things would go if they had a second pizza oven. Maybe folks wouldn’t have to wait an hour for a table, and then the better part of another one waiting on the food.

Dining out on a Friday before a home game is tough. Life is hard, right?

iPhone / journalism / photo / Samford / Tuesday — Comments Off
20
Sep 11

Do not be dissuaded by the gray atmosphere

Rain today.

But it is like summer isn’t even trying anymore. Summer knows this is her last official week, and is conceding the point. The rain was just a sprinkle, a pat dropping of precipitation. There was nothing dramatic about it. It was probably even cold.

So maybe summer is slinking off. Maybe that will make way for an actual season of autumn this year. Maybe there’ll be months of the stuff, instead of days. Maybe we’ll grow weary of crispy mornings, sharp colors and the fragrant smells of the grill and evening fires. Maybe the crickets and the katydids will stick around, and the lightning bugs, too, but the mosquitos will be pushed off in an evening breeze.

It’s a pipe dream, but a good one. Summers are lovely and long. It will be mid or late October before the seasonal average high dips below 75. There may be troughs and cold fronts and odd chills in there, but there will also be the spikes. Beyond a certain point temperatures flirting with 90 are a bit demoralizing. That point is October 17th.

So we’ll see how that goes this year.

Class today. Students working on stories, some of them are quite strong. All have promise. Fifteen kids given one assignment and there are probably nine different angles they’ve explored. These can be interesting times in the development of young student-journalists.

Some of those stories will possibly be in The Samford Crimson sometime soon. That bunch of student-journalists, a bit older than those in today’s class, are working on their latest issue now. All of this is great fun.

Like sports teams, each year’s staff has their own personality. This year the Crimson has more guys on the editorial staff. There’s more talk of fantasy football teams than sorority functions. They all work hard, though, each staff going late into the night, and early into the next morning at the beginning of the year.

So far this year’s new staff has finished their paper at 5:30 a.m., just an hour before it went to press, and then 3:30 a.m. last week. At least I think that was the time last week. I find it hard to remember now. I can’t imagine why.

Auburn / iPhone / photo / Samford / weekend — Comments Off
18
Sep 11

Catching Up

Poor rickshaw guy. They made him carry six people and their cooler. Hope they gave him a nice tip.

The professionals now clean Toomer’s Corner by hand:

Sunset over Montgomery.

Clouds over the Samford campus.

For more pictures, including all of Catember, go to the September photo gallery, which is now live.

history / photo / site / Tuesday — Comments Off
13
Sep 11

Busy week

Even my deadlines have deadlines. And those deadlines aren’t very patient. So things will be brief. Very brief.

Class today, based on the same lecture I taught to another section last week. The laughs weren’t there this time. And some of the jokes were even better! It happens. Small group dynamics are interesting things. Maybe they’ll find the next class more to their liking.

Saw this on the morning drive:

Some octagons get all the luck. Some just get to see all the sites. Good thing it picked up the truck. Those many flat sides to an octagon make rolling around a difficult proposition.

Geometry puns! Free of charge!

Updated a page I wrote in July. Last winter I did a piece on Dean Hallmark, Texas boy turned Auburn man turned World War II hero and prisoner of war. I’ve been corresponding with his fourth-cousin, the family historian. Last month he and I had the chance to meet in person. Today he sent me an email containing the update. Interesting echoes from the 1930s.

That’s enough for now. Back to newspapering.

Auburn / history / iPhone / Monday / photo / Samford — Comments Off
12
Sep 11

It was either the quilt or Microsoft Word

Oh the things you can get done on a Monday!

Set some hours. Wrote a lot of emails. Volunteered myself onto a panel. Worked on my car. Read and tinkered with two papers. Watched some television. Washed my car. Vacuumed the floor mats.

The floor mats, people.

Sure, when you throw it down into one fast list it doesn’t seem like much, but there’s some heft to that list.

At least three of those things involved Microsoft Word, after all.

And since you’re not interested in any of those things in the slightest, have some pictures. I found this quilt hanging at the city library yesterday:

The quilt was sponsored by American Field Service of Auburn, which now has a different name, I believe, but is a youth organization. Each panel is a little bit of the local history — and judging by the content, somewhere from the mid-late 1970s — so this safely fits into the realm of folk art. Here’s Old Main:

Old Main, built in 1859, was the first building on Auburn’s campus. Classes were held there. It served as a hospital during the Civil War (when the university was closed). It was destroyed by fire in 1887 and replaced by the iconic Samford Hall.

Here’s the lathe, which has now remarkably been mentioned here twice in the span of eight days:

Built in Selma, Ala. during the early part of the Civil War it was intended to make military supplies for the Confederates. They tried to move it to Georgia to keep it from being captured, and it was ultimately buried in Irondale, near modern Birmingham. It later was moved to Columbus, Ga. and worked through the end of the war boring cannons. After the war it was used in the coal iron industry. In the 1950s it was presented to Auburn. Also, the legend goes, if you stand in front of it under a full moon and say some random thing or another it will move three times and make all your dreams come true. Or something.

People don’t talk about it much anymore, I guess most everyone who can relate to it are all gone now, but the rail depot was a vital part of the community. It even figures into the football lore. The depot still stands. It was a realty office for three decades after the trains stopped rumbling through. Now it is empty and is considered a state sight in peril.

Reading that link you’ll learn it was the third one in town, designed by a student in 1904. The last passenger ticket was sold in 1970. Here it is today.