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adventures / food / friends / Monday / photo / running — Comments Off
6
Dec 21

A weekend in Savannah

Yes, this is Monday, but I’m writing about Monday. The next few days will be in arrears. It’s a vacation thing and I’ll somehow cope with the difficulty of the problem.

Spirits were high before the 10K. Here are most of us. Anne was on the course doing a 5K because she’s an awesome overachiever. The Yankee, Brooke, Andre and Stephen and I all did the slightly less ambitious 6.2 mile run over one of the tallest bridges in the southeastern U.S. We had to run the bridge twice.

Anne ran the bridge three times. (She also finished in second in her age group.)

This is at the starting line. Limited field by design. Everyone had to show proof of vaccination and all of that. Here, I thought, is a sign of maturation as a human and my bowing to inevitability. The joke I used to make right here was “Look at all of these people I have to pass.”

(Knowing I would never pass all of those people. I have landed on the podium in exactly two foot races as an adult. Both, you might say, were of a limited field.)

But, today, my joke was “Look at all of those people that don’t have to pass me!”

And here we all are, after weaving through many of the beautiful squares in the historic district we finally have our first good view of the bridge we’re about to go over.

And one of the views from atop the Savannah Bridge.

This is the largest single ocean container terminal on the U.S. eastern seaboard, and the nation’s fourth-busiest seaport. It is a cable-stayed design, and it’s 185 feet from here to the river below.

Off the bridge, around a cloverleaf, up one little kicker and around a little right hand turn you’ll find the finish line, and your medal, and some fruit and other healthy snacks.

Speaking of food … We tried a new place for dinner Saturday night, on account of the mileage we’d already enjoyed. Plus it got good reviews, and we’re going to give Cha Bella another good review. It’s a farm-to-table concept, a term that’s lost all meaning, I think, but Saturday night it meant tasty. We had a gnocchi appetizer.

I had a tasty grouper entree, which did not photograph very well, but it was tasty. We tried the cheesecake, which had a goat cheese blend. It was a super creamy dish, and every now and again, you got that hint of goat cheese.

It was a delicious outdoor dining experience. And we made everyone go back with us again on Sunday night. Because there were other things to try.

And, look, if you have different servers on different nights and they both react the same way when someone orders a specific dish, you get that specific dish. This is the hog chop.

And I’m pretty sure I don’t need to ever have another pork chop in my life. But I also wonder why everyone doesn’t make their chops like this one. Because they should.

And this weekend I also had the opportunity to enjoy a few ghost signs. This was one of the better ones. Everybody knows, Uneeda Biscuit.

That’s a 19th century brand, made it all the way to 2008, when Kraft (which took hold of all of the old Nabsico properties in 2000) discontinued it. The old original Nabisco, NBC (itself a product of three different mergers) rolled out the Uneeda campaign in the 1890s, when no one said things like “rolled out the campaign.” Within a year or so, NBC was selling ten million Uneeda biscuits a month.

I don’t think I ever had a Uneeda, which you’d, of course, today call a cracker. But I did have some good biscuits this weekend.

Tomorrow, we have to leave Savannah and travel back to Indiana. But I probably have two more days of content to work through here. Anything to extend the trip.

adventures / Friday / memories / photo — Comments Off
3
Dec 21

A Friday in Savannah

First things first, we had to have breakfast at Clary’s. Longtime readers know we always go to Clary’s. Usually we go multiple times per visit for the delicious breakfast and friendly staff. We are doing all of our dining outdoors this visit, and they don’t have many tables on their sidewalks, but after the briefest wait …

Clary’s is something like 118 years old now. Luther Clary founded it as a drug store. Later it became a soda shop and, eventually, the diner we have today. And it figures heavily into the Savannah lore.

We got a little table overlooking Jones Street. This allowed for the traditional Clary’s photograph.

Here’s the first one, which was from our second visit. This was 16 years ago.

Here’s another visit, and from the same table, this time in 2007.

And here’s a photo from the same table on a 2012 visit.

We go to Clary’s a lot.

We’re not just here for the food this time, of course. There’s a 10K that six of our group of nine are running tomorrow. Anne will be the winner.

She’s a natural born runner. And the rest of the group have been putting up some really nice times in their recent runs. Whereas I … well, to say my recent training has gone poorly would be an insult to poor training. The run is tomorrow and I’m just going to have a nice time and try to not be the last person on the course.

I walked seven miles or so today, though, and that counts as training, right?

adventures / friends / memories / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
2
Dec 21

Travel day, friends day

I’m going to warn you, there will probably be crying, The Yankee said to me at the airport.

We got up this morning, drove to Indianapolis, put the car at a park-and-fly facility and caught the shuttle to the airport. This was our view.

Checked a bag, breezed through security and boarded the plane. It quickly got above these oddly bright-and-dark clouds. The plane turned south. We were flying south.

When we arrived in Atlanta, The Yankee said that to me. Because after we’d disembarked from the plane and changed terminals we met up with some friends coming off a flight from Nashville. Maybe pushing people out of the way in the jetway was Sally Ann, who we’ve known for seven years. They’re besties and made a beeline to one another. A great many hugs were had and tears were shed. Someone standing off to the side watching this got a bit weepy as well. I gave the bro hug to her husband, who we have also known for several years, but this is the first time we saw them as husband and wife. They got married during the pandemic, but did it on their own, because of the pandemic.

We all got on a plane together, their seats serendipitously right behind ours, and headed further south, to Savannah.

We got off that plane, gathered our luggage and caught an Uber.

This is our town, as you know. The Yankee and I took our first trip here. We kept going back. We got engaged here. We got married here. And now we’re having friend reunions here.

Down in the heart of the historic district our Uber dropped us off at the house we’ve rented for the weekend. I climbed out of the car first. Emerging from the house was The Yankee’s other bestie, who practically floated into my arms. There were more tears. We’ve known Anne and her husband Bill, who flew down from Maryland, for five or six years, but we haven’t seen them since just before the pandemic began. Also inside the house was an old friend of mine, Andre, who drove over from Birmingham. We’ve known him for 15 years or so, but haven’t seen him in ages. During dinner, takeout, Stephen and Brooke stopped by. They’re spending the weekend in a nearby hotel. I went to college with the two of them, meaning I’ve known them for almost a quarter of a century. We haven’t seen each other in far too long.

All of these people have been a part of our weekly Covid video chats. I’m not even sure how they started, but they did begin very early in the pandemic. There were about 17 people, far too many to be heard and understood. It was the first loud thing we’d heard after two or three weeks of silence, and it was joyous just to see the chaos after days of stillness. Over time a side chat evolved, show notes, we called it. And as these things tend to happen, the group worked down to these people, who we are here with now, the usuals. We said, at the beginning of this year, that we should all get together when this was over. We set this weekend, around a 10K run and lots of pleasant, smart, thoughtful people. We were naive, of course, about the timing, but they’ve all been careful with their health, and those around them. They’ve all been vaccinated and received boosters and they’ve been cautious with their activities, just as we have.

It was a delight to sit around a large table and watch these seven other people. They are loud. They are funny. They are boisterous. They are incredibly smart and talented and successful people. They are all our friends.

It was a great coming together. A meeting. An introduction.

They’d never met, not in person, before tonight.

And now we’ll have a long weekend to enjoy, together.

photo / site / Wednesday — Comments Off
1
Dec 21

A gray day

Welcome to December, and the encroaching color of the season! It is … dunh da dunh dunh da daaaaaaa!

It was just everywhere today. Couldn’t be helped. Whoever was painting today only had one color in their palette. Whoever was lighting the day only had reflecting screens. Whoever wrote this day spent four or five solid hours debating between “gray” and “grey.”

Today, it was gray. As we move on, we’ll go to the more conventional spelling.

It doesn’t look grey yet. But it will.

But don’t let that weather fool you. It was a lovely day, otherwise. Spirits were high! Good times were in the air! We had a lovely night in the studio and a full day around the building before that. And when I went home, sometime after 8 p.m., I got to head into a long, long weekend. The skies were low, morale is actually very high!

You just couldn’t see it because of my mask.

The daily duds: Pictures of clothes I put here to, hopefully, help avoid embarrassing scheme repeats. And isn’t this an interesting coincidence …

Gray!

IU / photo / television / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
30
Nov 21

This post brought to you by … me … and the cats

Another pretty day outside. It was sunny. The mercury got just above 50 degrees. It was, I’m told, a great thing. (I was bathing in the florescent glow of the office for much of the day, and the brilliance of LED lights in the studio well into the evening.) Nevertheless, we must honor it with photographic proof.

For the end of November, that’s nothing short of spectacular.

Phoebe, as we get our weekly check-in with the kitties, is enjoying this weather. She’s here posing in the living room to enjoy the late-morning sun.

Poseidon has this weekly game. After we make weekend breakfast we put the cover on the stove, and he jumps on it to soak up the last of the heat. When breakfast is done and the dishes are clean I pull out a napkin and give his face a big rub down. Sometimes he lets me rub his back or his paws — never his tail, with a napkin anyway. Sometimes he attacks the napkin, or me, or both. In a recent version of the dirty face game he tore a big hole into the napkin. And then he stood there while I tied it around him. And he posed for pictures.

One day all of the tumblers will click and I’ll understand what he likes and wants from the napkin game. It’ll be obvious and he’ll be relieved that I finally got it. This will take too long. I will blame is communication skills.

It was a news night in the studio. They did some rehearsals and auditions and it was all very productive. Because that’s what it was — and it was that because of the weeklong break the students enjoyed for Thanksgiving — they didn’t record anything. (Still took the same amount of time!)

But there is something new to show you here. This is the late night show, and this one came out just yesterday. Check it out.

And if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go sit down for a haircut. My lovely bride will give me a trim. This one means the clippers I bought last year have paid for themselves. And when you add in the silly pictures, buying a haircut kit was obviously a terrific investment.

One more work day for me this week, then it’s time for a long weekend vacation. But who’s counting?