photo


13
Feb 11

Catching up

Where we pad Sunday with pictures that never made it to the site. Poor, sad pictures. Don’t want their feelings to get hurt.

“Come to the blog on Sunday! Everyone looks pictures on Sunday!”

Homewood

Yes, that one is small, but click the image to embiggen. This one has been sitting in my iPhone for a while. This is a parking lot in Homewood, Ala. Can you guess what I was doing there? Shot, and automatically stitched together by the free Panorama app. Not perfect, but, again, it is a panaroma shot from my phone. What an age.

Sunset

Sunset over Auburn, Ala.

Camera

This will not be an inexpensive repair. Lesson: always counterweight your tripod.

Trinket

Sometimes the sun catches you just right.

PeanutButter

I love peanut butter as much as the next guy, but who needs six pounds of it at a time?

Church, read, studied, wrote, raked leaves. I have one of my four comps questions now sufficiently researched. (At least I hope.) Three more (all in various stages of progress) to go!

Come back tomorrow as I fret about two of those remaining questions.

But now, The Yankee and I are going out for early-Valentine’s Day/dating anniversary dinner.

(Six wonderful years!)


10
Feb 11

Snowy Samford

Started snowing in Birmingham around 6 p.m. and didn’t let up, they say, until around midnight. It didn’t snow enough to cancel classes, but there had been a great deal of sledding in the wet stuff and the roads seemed to stay in good shape.

Not sure if it ever really got above freezing today. Everything seemed to stay in place, and the imagined stillness that comes with snow was a nice sight … to see from indoors.

Here are a few pictures from campus this afternoon.

ReidChapel

Bikes

Icicles

Is it spring yet?


6
Feb 11

Catching up

Pipes

What do you suppose these are for? It has something to do with water drainage or re-routing or something like that. It is part of an elaborate repair and upgrade plan on a Samford building. It prompted a few interesting quotes in the paper this week.

“We’re not getting anything out of it. It doesn’t benefit any of the people living in it right now … It’ll benefit the freshman class of 2011.”

Well, then.

StepSingBanners

Step Sing, Samford’s big song and dance revue, is coming up. The cafeteria is covered in banners, which give you a hint of the shows you’ll see. I think I see a Journey bug back there. Don’t stop believin’.

Frozen

Frozen roofs, warm hearts. It would only get colder.

Sleet

Because it sleeted for hours and hours, covering the ground in ice, closing the campus and causing havoc on the city’s roads. This is my windshield after just a few minutes.

SeeHat

This is at Provino’s, the Italian restaurant in Auburn. it is date place, pretty good food, nice people. I took this picture to send to my mother. Apparently I did this as a child. “Look mama, see da hat!”


4
Feb 11

Just another Friday

Woke up to the rain, and the rain may have it. The rain did have it, all day. All through hours of reading and countless Emails detailing the details of things which ought to be detailed and still more things lacking in detail. But, in the interregnum between Emails details will form.

My inbox is now sending me notices that I’m running out of space. This must not stand. Tomorrow I’m deleting the junk and the sent mail and the trash, first thing. I need the space so that I can receive further information about the details.

I’ve booked rooms for an upcoming conference. Finally just picked a place, now that I have a headcount. We’ll be staying two miles away, meaning we can put on the game faces on the drive over.

Even the hotel booking requires more details. I’m told I must procure a special form, call again and fax it to the hotel desk.

And since the hotel has accepted my AAA discount I had to call to inquire on the whereabouts of my new membership card. My AAA membership was given to me as a gift from my step-father last year and I’d thought of letting it lapse. But then the College Park Battery Debacle changed my mind. So I renewed the membership, but never received the card.

Turns out they have our old address in the system. Which is unfortunate, of course, because the post office, in cost cutting measures, has committed themselves to forwarding only some of our mail. It takes nine-to-12 business days to get the new card. That might be cutting it close. So they’re going to Email me a temporary card. That’s probably going to take eight business days.

We busted a camera in December. Apparently it was mounted on a tripod, but the tripod had no counter weight. A gust of wind knocked it over, and gravity did the rest. The LCD screen took the brunt of the blow.

LCD

These things will happen. These things, I’ve learned today, will be expensive.

It took two separate efforts and seven phone calls to find the right people to give me details, though. The guy in Illinois who does the work says he’s complained to Panasonic about the price. I’m sure he wasn’t the first. I know he won’t be the last. Finally we can get it fixed, though.

And the day went on like that, accomplishing the little things so they can be moved out of the way for bigger things. It seems backwards, somehow, but that’s the way of it some days.

I wrapped up my evening making more recruiting phone calls. That’s a fun thing, calling high school students looking to make their big college decision. Many of them are very excited that you’ve called. It is time-consuming, though. You think you’re making great progress and then you look over the spreadsheet to see just how far you have to go. But at least the young students are usually very interested in hearing from you.

After dinner we went to the gymnastics meet. Auburn didn’t have their best outing tonight, but it was enough to take a comeback victory over struggling Kentucky, 194.625-194.450. Here’s senior Rachel Inniss, striking a Heisman pose. I wonder if anyone has mentioned she’s doing it backward.

Inniss, according the university release, claimed her fifth individual title of the season and her third on floor, tying her career-best 9.900 for the fifth time. So maybe the backward Heisman is working out alright.


3
Feb 11

Ice? Ice.

That was after lunch. There was a little bit of falling ice before barbecue with Brian. And it really picked up on my way back to campus. By the time I’d parked I was faced with having to walk through that.

Two hours later, the ground looked like this:

Ice

That’s just ice. The sidewalks were slippery and the roads were getting worse. The university canceled classes, including mine, to close early. That decision was just in time. After putting a note on the door, gathering up all of my things and stopping by the boss’ office I made it off campus with pretty much everybody else. It took me half an hour to go the 1.8 miles from the campus to the interstate. The roads got a little slippery and everyone in the city left work at precisely the same time.

After that, apparently, everything got worse. There were plenty of reports of bad roads, fender-benders, an accident with a fatality up north and lots of stories of no progress on the roads.

I found one slippery spot, on an overpass, and soon after outran the traffic and then the freezing rain.

So I spent the evening making recruiting phone calls for our department. One very nice lady asked how the weather was.

“Well, today isn’t the right day to ask that question … ”

She laughed. They were getting ready for it to land on them, she said.

So I worked through the evening on phone calls until it got to late to do that. We had dinner with our friends Shane and Brian. Shane’s father is in town, and he walked in with his Airborne veterans hat on. He cuts an imposing figure, but is a nice guy. Turns out his grandfather was close friends with a former president of Samford. Small world.