This is complete filler, as much or more than you normally find here. But it was a low key day — that’s nice to say again — so I’m sharing a few pictures from last week and catching things up on the site.
I saw these at Angel’s Antiques, the place where I bought a grill. It was not an antique, but new and cheap. I am at least one of those things, hence buying a grill there. I also bought two more Glomeratas there. I stopped shopping after that. As Jeremy Henderson said, “That place is like crack.”
A site dedicated to Pennsylvania beer history notes “In the forties and fifties Schmidt’s was famous for Tiger Head Ale, a brand acquired from the Robert Smith Ale Brewery after prohibition.”
They had facilities in Pennsylvania and Ohio and this can has survived for decades. It is still full, too. On the side is a price. On the bottom there’s another sticker which reads “Not for consumption.”
There’s no chance of that.
Someone took all of their ticket stubs from old Auburn games and thought they should cover this box with them. Inside, out, bottom and top are full of tickets, mostly from early 1990s games. In a few decades from now this will seem incredibly cool, now the box is just waiting in an antique mall. Time is funny like that.
This is from a coffee company in Iowa. Apparently the bag dates to the 1960s, which almost works with the graphic style. Other than seeing a few bags for sale online I can’t much more about the people. Was it good? Did it taste better at altitude? Was it really parachuted on customers? Were they expecting it to fall from the sky?
Speaking of pictures, I caught up on the photo galleries, which haven’t been this neglected in ages. The July gallery, destined to be a bit underwhelming, is finished. The August gallery has finally been built and is now in progress. Only took half the month.
Visited the meat lab today. Students process the meat that is farm raised on campus and the savings are passed along to me. The deals are outrageous. We picked up a few steaks for the weekend, but you couldn’t go wrong with any cut of beef, chicken or even eggs. You could buy 30 eggs for less than three bucks.
Put that with the fresh peaches and okra and tomatoes we picked up at the farmer’s market yesterday and we’ll be eating well. There’s apparently a fish market, too, and if we can figure out when and where that takes place you’ll have to read about the catfish and the shrimp and whatnot.
To live in a place where the shrimp and catfish come from “down there on the left” is really cool.
So I promised you scanned things. I finally finished the Glomerata project. That only took three-and-a-half years of on again off again scanning, editing and writing. But, I’ve made observations and jokes on four years of the yearbooks. The final 10 entries. I really like the way it ended, in a more complete and, I think, better way that I wouldn’t have expected when I started this in February of 2007.
And that just leads me to the next big scanning project. When I picked up those first two books from the early 1950s I started down a path that has turned into a serious collection. I have 76 books from the now 113 volume set. I want to scan all the covers and show them off, because there are some handsome ones worth seeing. If I offer you two of those a week we can stretch that out until February.
The other project is the guide to the 1939 World’s Fair. I’ve started scanning some of the models and pictures and illustrations and we’ll make fun of them together. I’ll start showing those off next week, and it should run until Thanksgiving.
And with that I’m going to head out into the dark and thunder and find some dinner.
Visited the local college bookstores today so The Yankee could make sure her texts were on the shelves. Found seven at one store, found four at the second store and met the very nice manager. Found a few at the third store. At the university bookstore we found a big stash. They are all expensive, but textbooks always have been.
I pointed out the prices. It always aggravated me when a professor was shocked to hear how much the text he or she demanded was costing the students. It is a simple enough thing, stop by the store and empathize, for just a minute. So that’s what I do.
The bookstores here let students rent books for the term. Oh you can still buy a $90 text and sell it back for $12. You can rent it for half that price and return it at the end of the term. Wish we’d had that option during undergrad.
My favorite book, Strunk and White’s Elements of Style has stayed the same low price these last 15 years. I appreciate that.
On the way back to the car we listened to the marching band. Is it football season yet? Apparently we’ll have a tribute to Frank Sinatra this year. They sound good, but the director insists you’ll hear more trumpet in this number when they are on the field.
I’m not faux-marching, I promise. Apparently I’ll need to work on hand steadying techniques before pulling out the iPhone. After this take they had a break and were then going to spend 45 minutes on Luck Be a Lady Tonight.
We put a lot of pictures on the walls this evening. Just a few more rooms to go on that project. We had a delicious dinner:
Just add the veggies, shrimp, cooking wine, butter, salt and pepper to taste, stir over a respectable heat and serve.
We stood outside and watched the first of the Perseids (Thursday night is the big show), hung out with Jupiter to the east and tried to pick out unfamiliar constellations thanks to my new app, Planets. (That’s a great, free download.)
We had a great day. How was yours?
On the site: New, artsyish banners across the top and bottom of the blog. The blur across the top is the cardinal I vainly chased this afternoon. The one along the bottom is the yard in late evening repose. This is an excellent opportunity, then, to remind about the new banners page, meant more for me than for you, but nevertheless, see ’em again. Also, there’s a new picture on the home page.
And someone stop me: I’m thinking of redesign ideas.
Just to catch up from yesterday: Watched the World Cup final, pitting a disappointing Netherlands versus an underwhelming Spain. Referee Howard Webb tied his hands early with cards and that hurt the game. Spain were the better team, so the outcome is neither a surprise nor upsetting, but the manner of the resolution was unfortunate. It is a shame, really. A game, no, the game was too easily swayed by one person who wasn’t even playing.
I’d rather have seen the two sides play, but Netherlands didn’t really oblige us of that either. The legendary Oranje temper came to play late after it was clear their game plan wasn’t going to work. Spain just kept moving until the opportunity presented itself, as they had the entire tournament. The resolution was unsatisfying for everyone not already a fan of La Roja. And now we have to wait four more years.
(I watched every game. Had a great time doing it.)
We visited Ann Taylor yesterday, marking my second time in almost as many days. The Yankee visited again today, but I declined. A third time in a week was just too much. I consoled myself at the Apple Store. I did not buy anything, but did play on the iPad. I’m no better at the air traffic controller game on a touch screen than I am with a mouse, making me believe I’ve made a good career choice there.
Played with the new iPhone, which has plenty of promise. The video is incredible. The speed is good, apps look strong and so on. Now they just have to convince everyone that antennae issue isn’t a flaw, but a feature. The first time someone calls that you don’t want to talk to? Finger over the antennae and disconnect. No more “I’m going through a tunnel!” That doesn’t work when the person on the other end knows there are no tunnels in your tri-state area.
And then there’s Facetime. It will, of course, catch on when there are enough phones in circulation. If the technology holds up there won’t even be any other way to look at this. (I’d like to be able to record Facetime, but that will come too.) So acknowledging the value and quality of the HD cameras and the opportunity that comes with Facetime I’d like to point out what is really important, the commercials.
These will be the most evocative commercials since the really good reach out and touch someone ads.
Is it a coincidence that both campaigns are for phones?
Upgraded WordPress tonight. The first step, the helpful tutorial says, is to back up your files and database. I’d assumed that WordPress was doing that for me and that all of these important messages I’ve been sharing with you were being preserved on some off-site, off-the-mainland island guarded by the mist from Lost, powered by the trees from some M. Night Shyamalan movie who were advised by aggressive ninjas amped on Red Bull and dozens of John Woo explosions.
These being important messages, and WordPress having been a free service I’d only assumed they went this extra mile. Turns out a guy named Earl, asleep in a rickety old chair leaned against a dingy wall next to the On/Off button has been serving as my backup. Earl, I read in the forums, doesn’t read none too good. But I don’t hold that against the guy. He’s got a lot of blogs to back up. It is only reasonable to expect reading comprehension to deteriorate over time and volume.
So I read on, now knowing that every moment I waited the threat to my data grew exponentially. There is no threat quite like the one you know you aren’t sure about.
The second step and the subsequent 15 steps became too much to consider this late into the evening. I found a widget that will back up my site automatically, so WordPress can do this, they just don’t offer outright. Safely backed up — I chose Email, offsite FTP, three Scandinavian children memorizing things in a limerick and a bird using a chisel and hammer — I could proceed to the next steps of the upgrade.
Which were, fortunately, incredibly easy steps. Click this, click that and you’re done.
I started playing around with the capability to host multiple blogs through 3.0, which kept me up late. Just to see if I could make it work I started an irregular snapshot photograph blog. (I back-dated a few posts, just to give it something to do.) The first few steps involved in starting that second blog using the new WordPress interface are a little more confusing than necessary, but once you get that figured out it the CMS is once again as you’ve come to know and love.
Elsewhere, there’s Tumblr, Twitter and the rest of the site. Tomorrow there will be … something. Be sure to come back and check it out.
site / weekend / World Cup — Comments Off on Saturday: World Cup, gym, being sore 10 Jul 10
Watched the World Cup consolation game this afternoon. Germany and Uruguay, two of the teams I’m less interested in, play in what is typically the most interesting game of the tournament. There’s less of a concession to strategy in the consolation game for obvious reasons. The battle for third place was not stuck at midfield. In fact, after the first few minutes the ball seldom lingered there.
Germany won, 3-2, but Uruguay, true to form made it a mystery until the very last kick. They could have tied it at the whistle, but the last freekick smacked the crossbar, and everyone was sent home from the rainy game.
Tomorrow’s game, the final, probably won’t be quite so entertaining. Both Spain and Netherlands are saying otherwise and we’d all like it if that comes to pass. Don’t be surprised if that isn’t the case.
Forgot to mention the estate sale story from yesterday. The woman was selling everything, house, contents and all. I talked the briefest little bit with her husband. The Yankee, talking with the woman, learned that her first husband had died and she later remarried. They have a home together in Atlanta and she was trying to get everything out of Birmingham.
She said she was having a real estate sale, having hired a company that does that type of work. But, she had fears that they wouldn’t take the job for all of her things. She once owned a used book store, you see — hence the massive collection — and she was now having an everything-must-go sale before she had the estate sale.
Big day at the gym. The Yankee gave me a new work out regimen to try. So I did legs and then back and then road 20 miles on the bike. I watched the rain fall. I watched the sun come blaze down into an excessively humid afternoon. I did not see a rainbow.
After that, the store, home, dinner, brownies, a lot of stretching and groaning from the gym and now this.
Site stuff: I’ve added a new page to the side of the blog after I updated the banners. I’ve been wanting to do this for a while, and if I’d thought to do it from the beginning of this style I’d have a comprehensive list. But I think I have a big chunk of the photos that have graced the top and bottoms of the blog. This page will no doubt be more for me than you — but that’s probably always the case. If you’re interested, though, you can see a lot of old familiar scenes, with a little note for each image, on the new banners page.
Four new items made it to Tumblr today. Follow me there, if you like. Check me out on Twitter, too.
Tomorrow: The World Cup final and other adventures.
