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cycling / IU / Monday / photo / running / video — Comments Off
9
Mar 20

A run, two rides, but mostly cats

Happy Monday. This week is going to be a memorable one, you can just tell, can’t you? It will. And if you can’t tell, come up for air and read the news. It’s going to be a memorable one.

But before all of that begins, we have our new usual Monday feature of checking in with the cats. Let’s see how they spent their weekend.

Phoebe discovered a new place to sit on the stairs. We have a small landing, and she’s familiar with that, but this step gives her a commanding view of the foyer, a window and escape routes up and down the stairs. I’m sure that’s how she thinks.

Poseidon spent part of Saturday night curled up in a big fuzzy blanket. I think he’s coming around to the lifestyle:

They got two new toys in the mail from a friend this weekend. They are little lizard shapes with some hardcore strain of catnip inside:

They are jealous cats, so jealous that despite there being two of the identical toys, they are fighting over the lizards. So now we’ll have to hide them.

Some naps, for whatever reason, are cuter than others:

We went for a run on a sunny Saturday. I am now tasked with running ahead and taking pictures. So my sprints should improve, because the job is to get far enough ahead that I can find a good spot for a reasonable composition, stop, turn, open the camera, frame a shot and watch the runner run through:

It’s a good chance to catch my breath, though, before having to run on and catch back up. But, check this out, same picture:

I got the two-feet-off-the-ground shot. Not bad for trying to do all of the above while winded.

On Sunday afternoon I got in my first bike ride of the year. And this evening I had my second bike ride No photos or videos of either of those. Or probably for the first four or five rides. I have to remember again where all the gears are and what all the levers on the bike do again, first.

I shot this after today’s bike ride. And I am suddenly very interested, once again, in natural sound.

The late night show produced this episode for you last Friday. The guest is one of our professors. Ordinarily my critique would be that you have to go find people outside of our own buildings. There are a lot of reasons for that, groupthink, the burden of real producing, the what’s-entertaining-to-you-isn’t-entertaining-to-everyone phenomenon, but that concept may not apply to Susan Kelly, who is quite entertaining indeed:

Anyway, for the rest of the week, and whatever else is coming to us soon, I hope your times aren’t that interesting.

Friday / Instagram / IU / photo / running — Comments Off
6
Mar 20

There’s a pun here

There was a miniature conference in the building today. I wish more people had attended. The students who were presenting their research had some interesting topics and they’d worked quite hard on their papers. Maybe it is a function of doing this on Fridays, or the subject matter, or the weather or the publicity, but this is what they saw.

The 3D printer version of a giant sloth skeleton is a good and attentive listener, though.

The sloth will be with us for two more weeks, and then he’s going elsewhere. He’s actually already moving, he’s just doing so very, very, very slowly.

That’s the easy joke. And you’re right to take the easy sloth joke. How many sloth jokes are there? Let’s count …

I went out for a run to count sloth jokes, and over the course of four miles I came up with two. There are two sloth jokes. “Google, how many sloth jokes do you know?”

…

Turns out there are somewhere between nine and 16 sloth jokes, depending on how critical funny has to be to your conception of a joke. I would tell you all nine to 16 sloth jokes but that would be very time consuming.

That’s the other sloth joke I had without Google’s help.

Anyway, I hope you, like Poseidon, are ready to leap into the weekend.

View this post on Instagram

Poseidon gonna Poseidon.

A post shared by Kenny Smith (@kennydsmith) on Mar 6, 2020 at 6:34pm PST

collarbone / running / Wednesday — Comments Off
4
Mar 20

Working through an owie

Sometimes I can pop my upper back from a seated position by raising my hands above my head and rotating my torso with a particular style of torque. Did that on Monday, and as I did, my back popped, as did my shoulder, in a most unfortunate way.

That set off a sequence of painful sensations — sore shoulder, muscle spasms beneath and beside the scapula, pain across the collarbone and into the neck. Right in this area, which was on fire for a day and change:

More scapular stabilization dysfunction, then, and how did I walk around feeling like this for the second half of 2012 and almost all of 2013? (I’ve had one or two other re-occurrences and each time I’ve said the same thing. How did I suffer through this for that long? It only took three hospitals, three different surgeons and two different sets of physical therapy to make a collarbone tolerable.)

Anyway, at the office today I concentrated on some of those therapy exercises and I found an empty wall and did the tennis ball tricks. And then, walking down a ramp (it’s a quirky building) my neck popped and started feeling better.

I could feel it immediately, everything was starting to loosen up. My neck started popping at the slightest provocation. All of the muscles in my back, having flared for two days, felt better, but exhausted. I could move freely! But it also felt as if the slightest provocation could start the whole thing over again.

So naturally a three-and-a-half mile run was in order. Best I’ve felt in two days, somehow.

The moral to the story, I guess, is this: Never raise your hand.

I wasn’t even volunteering for anything at the time. And if volunteering requires any big arm movements right now, I probably would think twice about it.

Back to being the idea guy, then. I’m pretty good at that.

photo / running / Tuesday / Twitter — Comments Off
18
Feb 20

To get us through a Tuesday

Since we’re trying to mentally stretch out weekends around here, and since we were just talking about the sky and the weather and all of that. This is what it looked like during Saturday’s late afternoon run:

Not too bad. Sunday was an even more picturesque day. The Yankee had a rest day planned, but she said “You should go for a run and enjoy it.”

Meaning the weather, I think, which is more likely than enjoying the run. It looked like this:

And so I got in five quick miles. Quick for me. At one point I was running a 6-minute-and-change pace. During several phases I had a comfortable seven-minute mile pace. And then my legs or my lungs would remember I’m not a teenager anymore.

After a run like that, though, you get to use the compression boots. And so I did enjoy that this evening, and it inspired my last Valentine of the season:

Something about all of this meant I was a trending topic on Twitter:

It wasn’t me, but The Jet. This happens from time to time. I’m going to claim it anyway, of course.

Tonight, we had to move around one of the cats’ play things. They protested, as cats do, by sitting on it:

Sit-ins have a long tradition of respect. You wonder if the animals have been checking things out on Wikipedia when you aren’t looking. Maybe there’s more to it than you realize when your pet does the “I know you don’t want me in here, but I’m going to flop down, roll over, go cute and limp” routine. It could be a powerful social statement, when the cat tries to get into your closet.

Go check me out on Twitter, I might be trending! And there’s more on Instagram as well.

Monday / photo / running — Comments Off
17
Feb 20

There’ve been worse weekend ideas on Mondays

There’s a difference between personality and style. Personality, at its most basic, demonstrates characteristics that help the rest of us distinguishes one character from another. You can see this in siblings. You can see it in twins. Style, meanwhile, is a way of doing a thing. I am talking about the connotation of style that is to do that thing in an appreciable way. Appreciable in the sense of I see the nature of how you handled that, and I admire, sir or ma’am, your elan. Style.

This cat has personality, at the very least:

That personality is usually: Let me aggravate you as much as possible with my understanding of where you don’t want me and my immediate, continual and pressing need to always be in or on those places.

His sister, who I managed to take just one picture of this weekend, has a style. She’s aloof and insistent on very much having her way in controlling whatever is going on. Not in a bad sense, it’s just about her terms. And if you can’t oblige that, well, she needed to be somewhere else right now, anyway.

Here was my original Valentine e-card on Saturday:

And here’s a picture from Saturday’s run:

It was a nice-enough day. Generally cloudy, occasionally a bit of sun, and finally warmed up to 43 degrees. Still that snow, though. So we had a nice easy neighborhood run, and then ran through the next neighborhood, too. Got about four miles out of it, and in no particular hurry.

More from the weekend to pad out our tomorrow. Hey, if your weekend goes to fast, just look back on it with a fond nostalgia for the next two days. Then, before you know it, you’re already at Hump Day. You’re going to spend your Thursday and Friday thinking about the next weekend anyway …