photo

IU / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off on That’s novel; that’s normal
23
Feb 21

That’s novel; that’s normal

A night in the studio means dressing like it. Or trying, a little bit. Here’s today’s look. It’s novel.

That’s a Christmas shirt and a Santa pocket square. I think they paired nicely together. Also, this is the first time I’ve put on sports coat since November.

Haven’t worn a suit in almost a year. Feels like it, too. So that’s normal now, I guess.

Anyway, one nice thing happening is that the days are getting longer, so at the point of the evening when our crew can get in the studio there’s still a bit of light left. We have windows along one wall and they face east. It can make for some challenging shoots in the morning on some of our sets, but you also get a few minutes of that lovely golden light in the morning and evening.

Now if only there were leaves on those trees. In a couple of long months … we’ll have a great many green things out there. And then, in a shockingly few number of days, we’ll be used to them, once again.

If there’s one thing you can say about our society, we get used to the most amazing things incredibly quickly. We’re so good at it we don’t even realize we do it anymore.

Oh, that’s novel! Oh … that’s normal …

I watched students produce two new news shows tonight. It’s both normal and novel. That’s the fun part of doing the news, sometimes. There’s usually something new in there. Sure, the weather is the weather and the sports are wins and losses and you get quotes for this or that, but then you seize on an important story. They’ve got one of those tonight. Or you get a great guest. And the talk show had a TikTok star on this evening, for what that’s worth.

I wonder what that’s worth. The guy apparently has a few million followers. Apparently he does his dances in classes and that was a big part of his audience growth — which says a lot about the app and the audience. It wasn’t obvious from the interview that he’s monetized that. How novel.

All that will be online tomorrow, and you can see it here, then. Very normal.

Monday / photo — Comments Off on Another week it is, then
22
Feb 21

Another week it is, then

This was one of the larger snow mounds at the big box store last weekend. It was before the big snow. Let’s chart it’s progress.

This is that same mound of snow on Saturday.

It was joined by one that was even larger.

We’ll see how long they last. It is warming up a bit this week, but that’s a lot of snow. A colleague, online, is predicting they’ll be with us until mid-March. I hope not, but he may be correct.

If you go out there with a blow dryer to speed up the process that’s cheating. But we’ll allow it.

Yesterday we went to the grocery store. We needed shallots and batteries and figured, it’s a pleasant-ish enough day. Let’s make a walk of it. So we walked up to the grocery store. Two miles, one way. The store did not have shallots. (Dinner was delicious anyway, and I most assuredly drove the shallots joke into the ground.)

On the new pedestrian bridge, on the walk back:

My feet only got a little wet tromping through the snow. Some sidewalks haven’t been cleaned since the last snow, last Tuesday. And that, I suppose, why the city is trying to annex more land, so it can tax it and not clean it.

The meadows look nice though!

The cats are doing fine. They’ve lately noticed that we’re getting a little more sunlight once again. Everyone is grateful for that.

Phoebe is pondering warmer temperatures.

I think she thinks she needs a bath.

She can take care of that herself. I fear the claws. I have some deep scratches from her from weeks ago that haven’t healed yet.

Poseidon knows what’s up. I don’t know what’s up, but he does.

And he’s still trying to convince you he’s cute and adorable and innocent.

Don’t believe it for a second.

cycling / photo / television / Thursday / Twitter — Comments Off on Someone’s alarm went off at 5:30 — and then I was awake
18
Feb 21

Someone’s alarm went off at 5:30 — and then I was awake

I think this morning marked the fourth time we’ve shoveled the driveway in the last week or so. It’s a small driveway, thankfully, and this was a light snow. Probably it didn’t even need to be done, but it’s become rote. Get up, examine the pavement, and then eat something, maybe. While our little stretch of paved paradise took an hour and change on Tuesday after the biggest snow, it went quickly today.

Mostly I wanted to do a better job of digging out the nearby fire hydrant. One of my former students did a story on this at his station in Ohio this week and I was somewhat guilted into it. So slush slush and heave ho and, oh, look, the city guy that plows the walking path behind us but not the street in front of us came through and poured his best effort into the road.

Because what you want … nah, what I want … is for you to drive down an untreated road and then hit a snow bank you can’t see right in front of my yard and the electrical boxes and the gas line.

I don’t know anything about plowing roads, and I wonder who around here actually does.

So I got that off the road, just being neighborly and all. And then, since I had fully warmed up my core, I decided to go on a little bike ride.

This is the volcano route on Zwift’s fictional world. Some of the environments they offer are trying to be realistic. Some have a bit of a futuristic feel and this one is pure fantasy. My avatar is riding through a volcano there. You go in the volcano twice on the way up and twice again after you ride to the top of the active volcano.

I’m breathing a bit on the bike in the house, which does not smell of sulfur, could you imagine that in real life?

Anyway, I left my bike in one of the harder gears and just dragged myself all the way to the top of this little climb. It’s a good weekday sort of thing. It doesn’t take even a slow person like me forever, and you can still move around a bit when you’re done. I had an hour this morning, and this is what I did.

Zwift charts the King of the Mountain, which is the fastest person up the route. And the current leader is a name I recognize. Dylan Teuns is much faster than I am. He’s younger, stronger, a climber, more fit and also, and this part is incredibly important, an insanely talented professional cyclist. But today I got to the top of the climb in just under twice the amount of time it took him to do it. So I’m putting him on notice.

I can tell by the number of replies he’s not sent that I’m absolutely in his head.

Anyway, that was my second time up the volcano route, and I shaved a little over a minute off my previous time. So I guess there’s something to that snow shovel warm up.

This evening it was back to the studio. We shot the talk show first, new semester, new soccer season, new host.

And Jevan was on the desk to kick off the semester. Were there gifs? There were gifs.

Thursday nights run into Friday quickly into Fridays. Dinner, dishes, and, now, bedtime. We’ll be back in the studio again tomorrow morning. I’m tired already. Can’t imagine why.

Bloomington / IU / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off on That second wave of snow was something else
16
Feb 21

That second wave of snow was something else

Today was a work-from-home day for our campus, so I worked from home for most of the day. We, like most of you, had weather. This is how much we received:

We have a short driveway, and it took an hour to dig it out. Biggest snow we’ve had in our time here. It’d be a great parenthetical close to winter, too, but more will be coming before we’re done. We’re never done, it seems.

Our road does not get plowed.

But a city truck came down the road, with his plow disengaged, to turn onto the walking path between houses. The road is in the county, but it seems as though the city maintains the paths, even the one behind our property, in the county. And this is how he went about getting back there.

The path, when he was done, was generally in much better shape than some of the roads. They really understand winter around here.

Except for this part of the path, where walkers can encounter a hurdle at a T-intersection. It was fun to watch people step over this on a slick ground.

The entire day was not a work-from-home experience. I went in late in the evening for a television production. The roads were, once again, a mixed bag of quality. Some were downright dry. Others looked like a sheet of tundra dotted with buildings. The sidewalks were a hilarious joke. It seemed about every other one had received some half-hearted attention. Winter, they really get it.

In the studio this evening was this young woman, who is the first editor of a new section of the campus paper.

It has been a great read this year. She, and all of her contributors have done a great job with it. And I’ll let her tell you about it when that interview goes online tomorrow.

So make sure you check back for that. And stay warm and dry until then.

hobby / Monday / photo — Comments Off on Winter showed up
15
Feb 21

Winter showed up

That was some weekend, wasn’t it? Cold, ominous, and with inexorable weather rolling in for everyone. We had our usual Chick-fil-A on Saturday, a video chat that evening, and took a walk on Sunday just before that weather started making it’s presence known locally.

It came in two waves here. One, last night, with a couple of inches of new snow. This on top of the three or four inches we got last week that never had a chance to melt. And the second wave is coming upon us now, and late into the evening. Forecasters suggest we’ll be getting an inch of snow per hour for a while.

I went into the office today, because that’s what you do. And 15 minutes later the email came down: Work from home, people.

So I left at 2 p.m., because it was really starting to come down. I park in a parking deck at work, and my car was dry, but it was snowing enough to accumulate on the windshield and roof while sitting at a single red light. That, to me, seems like a lot of snow.

So you drive slow, and stay well back. Fortunately not a lot of people were on the roads. I suspect the stay-at-home, the day’s work-from-home and just the wisdom of staying out of this foolish weather kept people safely indoors. Just before I made it to our neighborhood I could see the car ahead of me fishtailing in a roundabout. An ominous sign. After that, three-quarters of a mile, and the treacherous and unkempt roads of the neighborhood, lay between me and my safe, dry garage. So I slowed down even more, because that seems like a thing to do, and Icrept in. You could run it faster. But I made it, just in time to see the birds.

If that cardinal doesn’t impress you, perhaps you’d like to see the eastern bluebird.

We had three at one time, which was a lot for this time of year. These little thrushes should be in the southwest right about now, but they are back, so I’ll take that as a sign.

They come and go through the shrubs and trees and bird feeders. Eventually the bluebirds gave way to warblers.

I would have thought the birds would be all in their nests right now, and building roofs.

The snow makes for a neat backdrop, no?

The cats are doing just fine. They are warm and dry. They probably want to go outside, but I think they’d decide against the idea when their paws got cold. They are lightweights, like me.

They can’t be perfectly untroubled by what’s going on outside. Phoebe is hunkering down, for some reason.

She’s lately developed a new pose that involves swimming over the shoulder.

Poseidon doesn’t know what that’s about, either.

When he’s not traumatizing his sister, or trying to figure out what she’s up to, he’s taking a great interest in laundry. It’s hard to fold sheets when he’s climbing inside of them.

I eventually turned a fitted sheet into a hammock for him and gently swung him back and forth until my arms got tired. I thought it might drive him away, but he liked it. Eventually I set the cat-carrying-sheet back on the floor and wrapped him up inside. You could hear him purring from six feet away. Eventually he climbed out a bit, so I folded the sheets around him. He was perfectly happy to stay like that for quite a while.

Pretty smart cat, sometimes, wouldn’t you say?

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →