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adventures / Bloomington / IU / Monday / photo / video — Comments Off on If you’re keeping count, this is week 17 of the year
25
Apr 22

If you’re keeping count, this is week 17 of the year

Let’s get this week started off the best way possible, by recounting our weekends! It’s as good a way as any to work through the reality of a Monday, I suppose. So, most importantly, how was your weekend? Great and warm and as precisely relaxing or fruitful as you planned, I hoped.

Mine started at the track. I left the office to catch the end of the Women’s Little 500. I briefly talked with the race director on Wednesday and it didn’t occur to me until later that I should have asked him why they start the thing at 4 p.m., when most of us are working. We ran into a guy we know who is a professor at a nearby school. We’ve had dinner with him before, worked on a paper together, used to hang out a bit socially, when that was a thing. This was the first time I’ve seen him since before Covid. Since then he’s bought a house, gotten married and had a child. The kid is already solving mid-level mathematical equations apparently. Time flies.

On Saturday was the men’s race. They take 200 laps around the track that surrounds the soccer field. Here’s the start and finish.

There were just three crashes. One was small and early in the race and the three or four guys that got tangled up in it popped right back on their bikes. One other I missed, and the guy seemed to be OK-ish when they hustled him off the track. And the last was in turn four of the white flag lap. They never threw up the caution flag — perhaps they have rules about that, or they just messed up — but this one was in the lead group. One of the guys was still crawling off the track when the remains of those hard-charging riders came back around 30-some seconds later. Most importantly, the group of eight contenders was whittled down to three or four guys, and that was the race.

Also, if you are wearing your best overalls, but somehow forget a shirt, a copy of the newspaper is highly adaptable.

Let’s check in on the cats. Here’s Phoebe at play in the cat tree.

And here’s Phoebe catching up on her time in the sun.

You can’t see it from the angle here, but Poseidon is sitting with his back legs on the sofa, and his front legs on me and his torso is hammocked in mid-air.

He seems to think that’s comfortable.

He also seems to think he’s a model.

I saw this car on Friday. I’m still surprised this was the first time I’ve seen this car around here. You think you’d notice that. It does stand out.

And, finally, a bloomington tree in blooming bloom.

Spring is upon us, thankfully.

adventures / IU / photo / Thursday — Comments Off on In the wind down
21
Apr 22

In the wind down

I had a delightful moment of id today. I’ve been wrestling with a website that wouldn’t let me log in. No email. No password. But I kept getting these messages which said they’d send the requisite information to my email, which they apparently don’t have. (Despite saying they did.) There was also a helpful phone number to call if all of this didn’t work. So, after a few days of this going on in-between other things, I called the number.

A very helpful person finally caught the other end of the line and, after she verified I wasn’t a dribbling idiot and I demonstrated my grasp of erudition and and reason, she set about helping solve the actual problem. This required reciting, several times, the requisite information. Finally, she was ready to create my account — he one that didn’t exist, but which the database was pretty sure it did somehow, maybe a nickname or something, perhaps. Before she could click the final click, she had to read me the terms of agreement.

She said that I could agree at any time. And she said that with the studied patience of a professional. There was a little emphasis on any time. It stood out. It wasn’t declarative. It didn’t sound like a complaint. But she wanted me to know I could agree at any time.

And dear internet, I did this for you. I have never, in my life, been more interested in the terms of agreement. In that moment, you would have felt the same way. So she read them all.

But at the end of it, I could finally log in.

I also had a moment of herculean achievement. Normally, I run my day on email and two or three calendars and some notepads and the crucial points from all of that get distilled into a notecard. Usually a day fills a card front and back. Some days I get to do other creative things with the back of the card, like observations or notes about some item from the front or tic-tac-toe. But the card seems to fill itself up nicely, thank you.

But today I managed, after several tries, to distill the next week onto two cards. A sign of the last stage of the semester. It was a beautiful sequential list, a slug, a time, date, location, day-of-the-week stuff. The only thing left to do was to remember what each slug meant, and what was required of me for each point. One week. Two cards.

It was immediately, immediately, made obsolete by the next email that floated in.

This is a class a colleague is offering in the fall. I am trying to reconcile the clever top line and Topic 1.

I think it is clever. And I know the professor running the course, and it should be a good one. But if it’s a class on social media manipulation someone should really lean into the notions contained in that graphic. Have some fun with it. Make the art such that, if you invert it, or flip it, there are secret messages to let students know you’re in on the joke.

Maybe there’s one in there already, and I just haven’t caught it yet. But I am looking. I’m looking every time I walk by the signage and this image is on the screen. I’m also counting the fonts.

We have an apple tree in the back yard. We discovered this just last year. First year since we’ve been here that it produced fruit. We looked forward to seeing them get ripe, but the squirrels had other ideas. They ate every single apple.

I haven’t found a countermeasure yet, but I’m sure I’ll find something on Google that will in no way be effective.

But at least the tree is blooming now. (In the final third of April, it surely ought to.)

I noticed that when we were sitting on the megadeck this evening. We stayed out there until the sun got too low and the temperatures fell and the fire element went out. I took that as a sign to go inside.

friends / IU / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off on The last sports show of the semester
20
Apr 22

The last sports show of the semester

I took a picture of a monitor showing someone taking a picture of a jib camera, which was shooting video of the person taking a picture. I wish I knew how to be more meta than that. Plenty of people can, but I’m just shooting from the hip, which is why this is framed so awkwardly.

Anyway, it’s basically senior night for the sports crew, so I got to take pictures with some of our graduating people. I keep a folder of them now, so I can pull out the right picture at the right moment and make them remember the little people.

Here’s Ta, who is going home to work for a company called Main Stand where he’s going to do just incredible things. We all know this to be true because he does incredible things on a regular, daily basis already.

Here’s Jevan, who will surely be making his next big announcement any moment now. He anchored tonight, his last show. He wore the same suit the first time he sat at the desk a few years ago. It was a conscious closing of the circle, I think.

His classmate Sean is also destined for great things. He’s been with this bunch for two years, but he’s been so instrumental in seemingly everything that it feels like he’s been there forever.

And it was also Old Home Week. This is Justin. After working with the sports crew here for a long time, he graduated last year. These days he’s doing local news at KEPR in Washington state. I remember when he and I talked about this, and about the job interview, and I asked him if he thought he could enjoy news, because it’s a different animal than the sports he’s always focused on. And, I said, you have to want it, because the news is demanding of your time and attention and your emotion.

He loves it.

He came back to visit his brother, who is also about to walk. He also talked to all the young IUSTV people tonight. That was just the coolest thing.

They’re all quite cool, honestly. Being around them was the best part of my day. Even when they made jokes at my expense. (Sometimes I set them up so nicely, they can’t not make the jokes.)

(Usually that’s a deliberate choice on my part.)

Bloomington / IU / photo / television / Tuesday / video — Comments Off on Just the regular stuff
19
Apr 22

Just the regular stuff

It was a sunny day. I know that because I drove in the sunshine. Because I have a late night on campus, I enjoyed a late start. So I lazed around a bit and read and did some laundry and generally wasn’t productive enough for most of the morning. A shame, really, because productivity is the mark of your downtime! Otherwise you’re just staring at the clock, waiting for your chance to spring into action.

And after I’d sprung, I spent the day in a room with no windows, which always helps productivity. So the sun could have done any number of things over the next six or so hours, and I’d be none the wiser. But I did see this streaming from a colleague’s office as I went up to the studio.

This will bake your bean: what if the universe is telling you something, but you just don’t understand the symbols?

That’d be too much to think about in the control room, where there was a lot going on this evening.

And, next door, in the studio, they were talking table tennis.

Because we had the recently crowned national champions in for an interview. These guys are twins, born 40 minutes apart. They’ve been playing internationally for about a decade, already. And one of them was an Olympic alternate during the most recent Games.

They said they practice about three hours a day. Later, the studio gang had a talk about all the things we could all be good at if we practiced it three hours a day.

Aside from autonomous things, like blinking and breathing and so on, what do you do for three or more hours a day? I probably read that much, presumably making me an expert reader. It gets pretty thin after that, though.

Also, Mia told us it is going to warm up just in time for Little 500 weekend. Every year since we’ve been here, that weekend has marked the precise retirement of winter, and beginning of spring.

Why they can’t have these races, then, in February, or March, remains a mystery to me.

Just as mysterious, where they’re going next with this show. It’s a mix of scripted and improv comedy, and we’re all just going along for the ride. Anyway, this week’s premise is that we’re on the search for a new co-host, and all of the awkwardness that you can possibly imagine from that is probably under consideration here.

Here’s the new longform interview show. All of the guests are IU or Indiana type folks, and that’s not a bad hook. So far they’re three-for-three on big names, including Michael Uslan, who’s the guy responsible for all of the Batman movies you’ve seen since Michael Keaton put on the cowl. So the caped crusader is probably going to come up in this conversation.

And this is a rock ‘n’ roll show. Three bands came into the studio, including one brand new band. This was the first song the three-piece band ever played together. Fooled me.

It was after 8 p.m. when I left the building, and still vaguely daylight when I made it outside. I walked to the parking deck and drove up to the top floor to look to the west. The gloaming hadn’t even begun.

That’s a great feature here. The best one, if you ask me.

Monday / photo / site — Comments Off on So close to spring you can hallucinate it on the shrubs and trees
18
Apr 22

So close to spring you can hallucinate it on the shrubs and trees

Green things! I saw this on our Saturday walk. All of this started budding three weeks ago, but it’s been gray and damp and chilly for most of that time, and so the growth, and the various blooming of the trees, has gone largely unnoticed. Which is a shame, because the springtime explosion here is usually worth seeing. But so is this, up to and beyond the point where it feels rote. And, after this year, that seems a long way off, meaning we can marvel for some time. Green things!

It got cold again on Sunday. Who knows when spring will finally show up for good. Probably by next fall, at this rate.

Of course, my hypothesis is that spring always shows up here just in time for the Little 500 bike races, which are next weekend. So there’s hope, I guess.

Because it was cold on Sunday I spent most of the afternoon being sat upon by one cat or the other. And they are over the chilly temperatures, too.

And so let’s check on the kitties, who are the most popular feature on this site. Also, we haven’t shared them here in about three weeks. So we’re overdue.

Here’s Phoebe, cuddling for warmth.

And, a few days ago, she was trying to soak up some sunshine.

Poseidon, god of water, sub-deity of fuzzy blankets.

He’s angling for a promotion.

Oh, one more thing I did this weekend. I started building a photo gallery of photos from our most recent dive trip. I’m hoping to tweak the style a bit, going forward, but in case you somehow missed a few, you can see all 130 photos I’ve published, right here.

Click on any of the thumbnails there to see the larger photo. Click it again to see all the thumbnails.

And, for no greater reason than that I like it, here’s the bottom of the dive boat.

Gotta get back to that view soon.

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