When we came to look at this house one of the things we wondered about was which cat would notice this little ledge first. Poseidon was the obvious answer, he’s usually the more adventurous of the two. And we were right. When we got the boxes and retrieved the cats, one of the first things Poe did when he got settled was find his way onto that ledge. And for the first little bit, it was almost his territory exclusively. But lately, there’s been a changing of the guard.
Phoebe is taking over.
Last year we bought two cat caves, fuzzy sleeping bags that retain heat, basically. We got them because the cats like blankets, especially the fuzzy ones, and in cooler weather it’s a determined thing. They’ve seldom used them so far, but this week we put one on the ledge because, we figured, they might like something softer than hardwood. Yesterday, we came in to this.
With mugshots being in the news lately, Poe wanted to try his hand at one. I don’t think he realizes what they are, or why he’s so close to deserving one.
Breaking the rules, though, is hard, tiring work, so he took a nap on my arm, and on my desk the other night.
As I work on this post, he’s doing the same thing again, and in a similar position. So if anything looks crooked, or if there are more typos than usual, let’s blame him.
We had a short ride this weekend. (The on-schedule and regular lament: I need to ride more.) We set out early Saturday morning to beat the heat, and we did a nice job of that, but even still, running under some field sprayers wasn’t a bad thing.
That’s the Reinke Minigator, I believe, a quality central pivot system that’s been keeping plants watered for six decades. Does a great job, too, especially on that little corner of the road.
I’m not saying I pedaled into the spray, but I didn’t move out of the way.
Here’s a little video of the ride.
Right after that last shot I felt my rear wheel going down again. I’ve gottne pretty good at this, being in another stretch of bad inner tube luck. This makes three in the last three weeks. The last three miles of this ride I rode a bit, and pumped up the tire a bit, rode a bit, pumped up the tire. I think I had to make six stops covering that distance.
All of which means, when I change the inner tube, I’m replacing the tire, too. I ride Gatorskins, which are durable enough, but they can show wear, too, and this one is and maybe its time.
Anyway, it was a nice ride. It wasn’t especially fast on my part, because I can’t seem to get my legs to really come around. (The on-schedule and redundant lament: I need to ride more.) But it was comfortable and I felt like I could have enjoyed a much longer ride Saturday, but for that silly tube.
Later, we discussed a scenic metric century we might undertake in a couple of weeks.
Tomatoes? Still going strong, but we’ve passed the peak of the daily harvest. Another not-so-subtle shift I’m trying to ignore.
And failing at it.
We enjoyed some time in the pool yesterday, which was chilly. Another not-so-subtle shift I’m trying to ignore.
But it was warmer today. Cognitive dissonance restored!
I told myself I wasn’t going to work today, Labor Day and all that, but I did. An email here, publishing this and organizing that there. Dreaming up some new classroom ideas. I have two more days to whip it all in to shape.
The cat just jumped down, wiping out two class notebooks along the way. I guess that means don’t work any more tonight.
Not on such a beautiful evening, too. I stood outside and admired the sky for a bit before dinner. It is easy to forget how hazy it was earlier this summer after a bunch of normal days like this.
Easy to forget, at the peak of all of that, when we worried that all of that smoke would be with us all summer. Which sounds pretty pathetic next to all of those fires in Canada and … everything else if you read closely enough.
But out here, in the backyard, all of that feels a long way away, which is the whole point.
Which sounds … whatever that sounds like.
So I watched this plane fly off toward Miami. And I wondered: all of those people up there, what has there day been like?
As is so often the case with big tasks, I find that if I can break them up I can finally make real and good progress. It takes a few days of wheel spinning to remember that each time. You could say it is a shortcoming. An oversight. A stubbornness. I think of it as part of the process.
So it was that I laid out a plan to have the syllabi and material for two classes all squared away by Monday. The other, I’ll wrap up on Tuesday. And then, finally, I can think about what to do with an actual class. (Step one, haircut.)
Circumstances beyond anyone’s control gave me a late start with some of the prep. My new colleagues have been incredibly helpful with mitigated a lot of that, but, still, there’s a lot to do. Taking it on in smaller chunks gets it done, though, every time.
I have three notebooks, two piles of paper, three separate browsers, multiple tabs in each and, now, gobs of Google Drive links. There’s a lot to work through.
And so I did, until almost 6 p.m. on the Friday of a three-day weekend. Then I went for a swim.
Two days after a 2,650 yards night swim, I was at it again.
It takes about 400 yards for my shoulders to warm up. After they stop complaining and until I stop, I go through stretches where my form is bad and then my form feels extraordinarily good. There are moments where I’m breathing on each stroke, hard and strong, a puffing locomotive. And then there are these wild moments where I swim a few short laps with the most relaxed breathing possible. It never lasts, that calmness, that efficiency, but the way it all changes amuses me, and probably says a lot about my inconsistency as a swimmer.
At precisely the moment where I reached Wednesday’s 2,650-yard distance, my arms started complaining again, this time from fatigue. That’s a mile-and-a-half, so being tired was understandable, but I kept on swimming for a while longer, until I reached this swim’s little goal. Taking on the bigger thing in smaller chunks: a good approach for September.
I’d been standing in this aisle at the local hardware store for five or six minutes, waiting for someone to come by. It was 10 a.m. There was one other customer in the place. This was, I should point out, one of the two local hardware stores. One seems to have two to four people working at all time, I’ve been in there a few times and haven’t seen the same face twice. I’ve also never been there when anything was going on, which probably means nothing. Also, at that store, if you need a specific thing they have, you’re in luck. But it seems to be a small list of on-the-floor inventory.
I thought about going to the Tractor Supply. I’ve been there once. They had neither tractors, nor the supplies I needed. And that’s the sort of memory that’s hard to overcome.
So I went to the other local place. They’re all fairly equidistant, but I’ve also been to this one and I figured, for today’s obscure search, this would be the best bet.
Which led me to standing there, waiting for this guy to wander over.
I am looking for screws to mount a TV to a wall.
The guy recoiled a bit. It was physical, visceral, and you could tell. But then his customer service brain kicked in and he was happy to try to help. I had a picture of the installation manual, which showed some screws. But what I saw look like the things that go into the wall. I needed the screws that go into the wall mount. The guy said he gets this all the time. People come in, the instructions no help. These things all require precise hardware, it’s never spelled out well, and apparently never included in the box, no matter the brand you buy.
I needed these screws because, in my home office, there’s a great little mount already on the wall. And that mount is in a perfect line of sight of my Zoom angle. (Oh, the modern first world problems.) I’m going to hang a TV there and stream live webcams over my shoulder and see if I can distract anyone in a meeting using various aquarium shots and such.
So the guy helps me find the right screws. I was standing in the right place, he said. Hovering over the correct box. Inside the box are 15 little compartments, of course, of varying sizes, both diameter and length.
“These,” he said, “would be my best bet.” He said that in that way that lets you know, hey, he’s guessing too. Based on the oddly phrased material in the manual he meant.
Hey, we’re all guessing pal.
I picked four screws, noted the price and took them to the cashier. She charged me $.42 per screw, which was fair since they were listed at $.42 cents per screw on the box. On the way to the car I realized the screws I’d picked up didn’t have a flat or Phillips head, but rather a hex head. So I had to think about where all of my tools are, and which one might just maybe have a chance of fitting these little guys.
I took them to the house, wrapped up in the receipt because, it was a best bet, and also because she did not offer me anything with which to carry my four dainty little screws.
I took the screws upstairs and realized a problem: the screws are so small they slip right through the holes on the mounting arms.
Can you take back $1.68 in merchandise?
Can’t worry about that now. I had a meeting to prepare for. A Zoom meeting. There would be no TV monitor over my shoulder, just a mount.
It was a fine meeting though. A new colleague was helping me flesh out a few details of one of the classes I’ll be teaching this term. Classes start next week, this person just returned from a European vacation and she spent an hour chatting away with me. She was very generous with her time, insight and resources. It occurs to me that I need to invest in local coffee house gift cards as a thank you.
And the rest of the day was spent working on that class. In the afternoon, a whole bunch of material came my way for the other two classes I’ll be teaching. Between now and December, I’ll be fine tuning everything.
That’s an exaggeration. I hope to be caught up by Thanksgiving.
While I was having a bowl of soup as a late lunch and digesting some of the information from that meeting it occurred to me: use washers.
So I went into the garage, pulled down the Box Of Random Bits of Assembly Supplies You Must Never Throw Out and, for the first time, understood the genius of those shop workers with jugs of specific types of hardware and sizes. I don’t have a need for that, mind you, but I get it.
And I also got four washers. By some happy accident I found four the same size. (So what tool or furniture is missing four washers around here?) Happily, they all fit today’s need. And so did one of detachable screwdriver tools on the hex head screws. Four screws applied to the wall mount arms, arms and TV stress tested for weight, though the TV is light. And then I put it on the wall.
As I write this, over my shoulder there is a shot from a wildlife cam from somewhere in Europe. There’s a babbling stream in the foreground, and a giant old oak in the center background. Unseen birds are happily chirping away. This flat screen mounted to the wall, streaming a scene from halfway around the world, sits over my 1948 Silvertone radio. I like the technological juxtaposition.
(I think there’s some of this paint in the basement. I wonder if I should try to camouflage the power cord.)
I bought that radio from a retired teacher in 2017. Restoring these had become his retirement hobby.
He showed me this one, which I’d gone over to ask about, and I asked him about his process. He gave me a tour of the ones he was tinkering on in his garage, and the finished radios that held pride of place in his home. I got him to drop his price a bit on the Silvertone he’d advertised, and he helped me load it up in the car. It still powers up, you can hear the tubes hum to life. And, in the old house, you could hear the local AM station. I caught part of a football game.
I seldom turn it on, because I don’t want to wear it out. Part of the ABCs of me.
My plan was to put a Bluetooth speaker, or an under-the-cabinet streaming radio of some sort in there and just play big band music. And one day I’ll do that!
The gentleman I bought it contacted me a few weeks later, and I gave him and his wife a little mini-tour of our new building on campus. On their way out he said he was thinking of selling one of his really, really nice radios. One of the few sorts I’d really want, an early floor radio with station presets, rich with wood and history. I could put some of my old station call letters on the buttons, maybe the buttons work and you could watch the needle slide across the dial. How neat this would be! We’d talked about them for some time in his home, and I knew better than to ask. But when he visited campus he said he was maybe thinking about selling one, one day. He seemed hesitant and nervous about it, like maybe his wife had talked him into saying that. Like maybe he wasn’t really sold on the idea of selling, but he brought it up.
I said to him, with solemnity and a sincere appreciation for the work he does on those radios, If you do, I hope you’ll consider giving me a chance to make you an offer.
I kept checking my Facebook messages for the next six years, but he never wrote me. But that’s OK. He was a nice guy, and his wife was charming and I hope they’re doing well. Which … let me check one more time … nada.
Ah well, new town, new marketplace, new opportunities.
When we moved here, when I started putting my office together, the first thing I did was turn on that Silvertone. The tubes hummed up and then I scrolled the dial. You can get a good handful of AM stations out here.
I wonder about the family that bought that radio from Sears and Roebuck in 1948. What did they listen to on it? Did they marvel at stations they could tune in to from different states? When did this stop being a central focus in their home, and then just another piece of furniture? Were there kids in that house? If they are still with us they’d be in their late 70s by now. Do you think those kids, now old, have grandchildren that some them the wonders of the Internet? Think they’ve ever shown them scenes from the woods in Poland?
You know, that old man, that old woman, they are Boomers, and children of the rocket age, young adults of the space age. Maybe they caught that bug, and never let it go. Maybe their grandchildren showed them how to find the NASA streams.
So many technologies. So surprising how we can get accustomed to them all so quickly. So many wonders. So many screws.
I spent all day frustrating myself with pagination and bullet points. No matter how old I may get, no matter how much wisdom I earn, I will never have the patience for this, or understand why simple text editors and CMS tools simply refuse to do the obvious thing.
Or, failing that, why my ideas and habits are always so fundamentally at odds with the people who designed these things. Designed these things, one imagines, with a notion of serving the broader audience. If so it begs an important question: am I out of step with popular ideas about indentation?
Other things, you grow fine with. Music, fashion, well, that’s just a byproduct of not caring as you get older. Certain elements of political ideologies, what are you gonna do? How the cookie crumbles, could have used a different emulsifier, but I’m sure that was a bottom-line decision. Stuff happens, yes, in fact, stuff does happen.
But, my goodness, people should all want to use bullets and other basic formatting traits in a sane, sensible, not-at-all-programmed-by-a-sociopath way.
After I’d spent hours doing this — that’ll teach me, until the next time — which included making up brand new utterances to utter, my lovely bride came in and suggested a way around this problem. It made sense. It was easy. But, by then, I had invested six hours on the thing and who wants to blow up that sort of progress?
I was flibbertygibberted.
A little while later I had a cause to be even more frustrated because I finally went outside and it was a stunningly beautiful evening. (Literally, all afternoon was spent on this ridiculous task I’d made for myself, rather than being outdoors.) So I went for a swim.
Jumped in, goggles on and started the freestyle technique. This was my view on the starting end of the pool.
Swam for an hour. Got in 2,650 yards. I do not know what is happening.
This is not fast, but it is a respectable distance. Also, I didn’t stop the first time during the whole thing, which is absolutely a record. This was my longest swim since October 17, 2015. That was my last lap swim until last month. A lot happened in between. A lot of nothing happened in between, too. But that’s the case for everyone. Anyway, 10th swim in after an almost eight year layoff, and I’m doing some real distance again.
My heart rate, immediately after my swim, was 101. I might not be working hard enough.
Swimming at dusk, though, was a lot of fun, and just what I needed after flabdabbering my computer all day. I’m going to feel it in my shoulders tomorrow, but I might also go for another swim Friday evening.
This is the fifth installment of my tracking down the local historical markers by bike. There’s an online database with 115 markers in the county. Counting today, we’re 11 down and making decent progress. What will we learn a bit about today? We have a few more war memorials.
I’ve read that 78 local men served during the Great War, by the time it was over, 124 people had enlisted. Some 3,300 people lived in the two communities represented on that marker. In a small town any enlistment is keenly felt. I haven’t, yet, found anything online that tells me about which locals shipped out, to where or with whom. I don’t know anything yet about casualties, but supreme sacrifice leaves you with more than a suggestion. All of it was keenly felt, I’m sure.
Some of those initial 78 would have likely been in the Guard. When the war began in Europe, the local national guard was under strength, under supplied and under prepared, but still somehow better equipped, trained and prepared than it had ever been. New Jersey was one of only four states that funded 75% of the expenses of its National Guard. Some of the Guard here went to the Mexican border. Some went to Fort Dix, and then Anniston, Alabama, before heading out to France. But where the men honored here, I don’t know.
Right next to that marker is this one.
Russell Garrison also has a memorial park in his name, just a few miles away. Garrison was killed at a place called Pleiku, a strategic crossroads town, in 1967. He wasn’t yet 22.
Marvin Watson was a PFC in the Marine Corps. He died in 1969 in Quang Nam, a town in central Vietnam by the East Sea. His high school yearbook says he was known for his sense of humor. He had just turned 20.
Specialist Richard Emmons III probably got razzed for his baby face. He looked young even in his fatigues, even in his beret. And when you see the photos of him smiling, you can really see it. He was 22 years old, in a province in eastern Afghanistan he probably couldn’t have found without a detailed map before he deployed. A rocket-propelled grenade attack on his convoy. He’d been in the army for less than three years, and in-country for almost a year. It looks like the whole town came out when he was returned home.
Corporal Derek Kerns was killed in a training accident in Morocco. Helicopter crash. The Marines concluded it was pilot error. The two Osprey pilots survived, but Kerns and another, a Marine from Los Angeles, were killed. Kerns joined the Corps right after high school, and his family said he really took to the life. He’d just gotten married, and they had just had a baby. He was only 21.
And somehow, despite that, it’s the blank space beneath those two names, the air below those stories, that is really striking.
All three of those markers are next to one another, overlooking Memorial Lake, which is right beside Main Street. A pair of bald eagles live around the lake, and there’s a nice little neighborhood just across the street. The locals fish for bass and crappie there.
So we’ve learned a fair amount this week, but there’s a lot more to go. If you’ve missed some of the early markers, look under the blog category We Learn Wednesdays. And be sure you come back next week for what is a historical pre-footnote and something else, which isn’t even in place anymore.
It doesn’t sound like much, but that installment is going to be great.
Light day here, as most of my hours were spent on preparing coursework. Canvas! Where all the fun is had! It’ll probably be a light week all the way around because I’m not hardly done with all of this prep work. Classes start next week, though, so there’s some stress and relief in that. Will I hit the deadlines I’ve imposed upon myself? And if I don’t, somehow, hit those deadlines, will I have a backup plan?
There’s always a plan. Thankfully, though, they don’t get used a lot. Nothing a good solid 96 hours of concentrated attention and angst can’t address.
This evening, though, we went to Philadelphia. It was $20 ticket night at Citizen’s Bank Park and The Yankee is demonstrating her secondary fandom. Her beloved Yankees aren’t very beloved at the moment, so there’s the wildcard chasing Phillies.
The home team is hosting the Angels, and perhaps the greatest player of any generation, Shohei Ohtani. This is what you need to know. At Phillies games they pipe in bell noises when the good guys hit a home run. There were five tonight — Harper in the 2nd, Schwarber in the 3rd, Bohm in the 6th, Stott in the 7th and Turner in the 8th — so there was a lot of bell ringing. An almost standard night for a team that leads all of baseball in August home runs.
We also saw a successful squeeze play, a triple and watched the great Ohtani go 3-5, and get thrown out trying to steal third base.
It was a lovely night at the old ballgame as the home standing Phillies beat the #Angels 12-7.
We didn’t think the first thing about dinner. It was about 10 p.m. when all of the runs were put on the scoreboard and we made a shortcut out of the parking lot. Through the power of the Internet and cell signals I found the one restaurant between here and there that was still open at that hour on a Tuesday night. It was a sleepy little, brightly lit restaurant and bar with Formica countertops and giant flat screen TVs.
Outside were a man and woman and, though we didn’t hear it, one of them was apparently trying to get the other to do something that was no good. Of course this woman came in for a beer in her pajamas, which she pointed out to us all. The young bartender took our order since no one else was working in the front of the house. They offered sandwiches and a burger, so we got steak sandwiches. They hit the spot. The other four or five people that came in all knew him and one another. Truly a neighborhood joint. Just as we were leaving — cash only, and now I have three dimes and that felt weird.
What do you even do with these things anymore?
Some other baseball fans came in for their late dinner. The only restaurant open for miles around.
And most importantly, I guess, the Phillies are 2-0 when we’re in the stadium. There’s another $20 game opportunity coming up next month. Because it is easy to get in and out of there, we’ll probably go back again. And now we know when the kitchen closes, and just how casual the dress code can be.
