Remember how, a few days back I said I had to catch up on photos that I’d taken on my DSLR? We’re back to doing that today. These next few photos are from a walk we took … I dunno, three lifetimes or two weeks ago. Forgive me. I seem, today, to be having the day that a lot of people have been struggling with for the last four or five weeks. It’s something you bounce back from sooner or later, I’m sure.
Anyway, some version of a few of these are going to get used elsewhere on the site. (There are big plans! OK, average-sized plans. Alright, alright, very small plans with no real import at all.) Let’s see how they look!
Neighborhood trees in full bloom:
And I think we found our winner from that batch.
And some dandelions in the yard. This is a tough head-to-head competition here:
I know which one I think, but what about you?
Today on the show we talked computer and network and data security with Andrew Korty, who has the title chief information security officer. It’s easy to imagine a person with a title like that standing behind the captain on the bridge and scowling, but that’s just television. Andrew probably just has three or five computer monitors and a lot of blinking lights and some operating software that doesn’t exist beyond a television set.
I learned some things in there, and you might too. Primarily that I am supposed to pay attention to my IT experts. Who knew?
Won’t you give it a listen?
photo / Tuesday / video — Comments Off on A walk through the woods 28 Apr 20
It was definitely a get-outside sort of day today. So I traipsed through the woods for lunch, and saw these young red-tailed hawks who were on the prowl:
Flowers I found down by the creek bed:
The trees are finally getting ready to speak their piece around here:
I’m still trying to figure this out …
… it’s a managed field surrounded by woods that’s out of immediate use and there’s that old tree just waiting. I am pretty sure I am on someone’s prop —
I am from the South, as I feel compelled to remind people all the time. So that sort of thing isn’t odd to me at all. Someone was burning things and they sat out there to monitor the fire.
But I have also read a lot of the Southern Gothics, and this little setting just off to the side was a bit more unnerving:
When authors write about the trees and hills, this is the sort of thing many of them have in mind, I am sure of it:
And just a small batch of pretty wildflowers I saw on my walk:
On the way back inside, the geese:
cycling / Monday / photo / podcast / video — Comments Off on There’s a podcast and a botched bike ride and some pics 27 Apr 20
And how was your weekend? Did you know you just had one of those? We’re all making that joke, now. It’s starting to work its way into television commercials, which is how you know the zeitgeist approves of the usage. But we should also remember that not everyone is in the same at-home condition. And there’s a lot of variance in the stay-at-home concept, of course. And some people don’t have a traditional weekend on Saturdays and Sundays. But you can’t address all of those in one joke, for punchline purposes. You really can’t do it in a small talk shorthand. And you definitely shouldn’t start a long post with it either.
That’s what I learned this weekend.
The cats had a fine time of it. Phoebe at dinner time:
And here’s Poseidon enjoying an afternoon lounging in the sunshine.
And speaking of Poseidon, here’s a cat video:
He never does catch the light. If you sit with that for a few minutes you can make a terrific story. And then you begin to wonder: do cats have revenge stories because of the things we write in our heads, or do we write those tales because cats just fundamentally have revenge on their minds?
Today the cat – light story is about a creature watching a flattened version of a Big Bang. It could be that he has no idea of understanding what he’s seeing. Or maybe he knows precisely what he’s seeing. Maybe that’s where the wonder is.
We could all use a little more wonder these days.
It was a chamber of commerce kind of yesterday, and so we went for a walk in the afternoon.
The flowers I fell for.
No, really, I fell. That was going to be how I started this post, but that sounds scary, and I’m fine. Jammed my shoulder up a little bit. It aches today and it’ll be sore for another day or two and it’ll be fine, I promise.
It was quick trip. The mud slipped out from underfoot and I stuck my arm out, thinking at the last moment I should tuck instead. So I did that, but not completely enough. Mostly it just hurt my pride and got my clothes dirty. So, yeah, I shot a video because if you suffer you should make some art out of it, or something.
That was all the weekend.
Today, I published this conversation with IU’s vice president for research, Fred Cate.
It was fascinating, I asked him to touch on all these different kinds of research, covering a big handful of disciplines from multiple schools on two or three campuses and he got them all. He’s really good at giving overviews. And there’s some great quotes in there. I like the one near the end, about how you’d be hard pressed to find some slice of life in the state (and beyond) not being touched by IU’s coronavirus research. It’s impactful.
I want to talk about all of them.
The view of the sky from just before our bike ride:
It was a weirdly frustrating ride all the way around. But the important thing is that today was hill repeats. Which means finding a hill and going up it over and over again. It makes you a stronger climber and, brother, I need that.
The really important thing is that today hill repeats meant going up the hill just four times before I had another flat. Allow me to visualize this for you:
That’s four flats in the last two weeks, and under Gatorskins, too. Gatorskins being an ultra tough tire meant to protect the fragile little inner tubes. So me and the Gators and the Mavic rims are going to have a long talk tomorrow, because this is getting expensive.
Have a great start to your week, which may or may not be well underway, or even great. But if it ain’t, do try to make it so.
For reasons I’m beginning to understand only a bit, and am not quite yet equipped (or perhaps inspired, or both) to remedy, the videos I shoot on my phone look like compressed garbage when I upload them. What is this, 2012?
Anyway, here’s a little bit of today’s cross-county-line ride. Before the turnaround, and well before today’s flat. So sick of flats.
This, too, was before the flat. Good thing, as this was well away from the house. But you aren’t thinking about any of that when you see turkeys:
Anyway, just before getting back to the house I had another flat. It was on the last big downhill which, in my experience, is the wrong place to have your rear wheel to go down. At the bottom of the hill is a hard turn that leads up into our neighborhood. But I stopped short and figured, ehhh, I’m walking this in.
Because I could try to re-inflate the tube, or swap out to an extra one, right there on the side of the road — like I did just four rides ago! — or I could just walk the last mile in and do all of that in the comfort of my bike room or home-library.
So I walked it in. Problem: bike shoes. So you take those off and walk it in feeling a little ridiculous: spandex, helmet, walking a bike and barefoot. At some point you have to figure the people in your neighborhood, to the extent that they notice you, are just used to it.
Bobet, I hope so.
Anyway, you could be mad at flats, or pleased with the opportunity. If my tire hadn’t gone down I would have whizzed right through here at 20-some miles per hour and not even noticed this redbud tree (Cercis canadensis) demonstrating its cauliflory.
It’s a trait some species exhibit, where blooms can grow directly out of the trunk. Cauliflory, by the way, is ‘stem flower’ in Latin.
And, yes, I looked up the scientific name. There’s only so much stuff I can keep in my head, after all.
Also on the walk back … and this is just after The Yankee got to the house, put her things away and walked back out toward me with my sneakers. Which was great, because half-a-mile barefoot is quite enough, thanks. Anyway, we walked it in together, which was also nice, and we saw this:
And that’s how the weekend begins. I hope yours begins with pretty things and nice gestures, and fewer mechanical issues.
photo / Thursday — Comments Off on More blooming things 23 Apr 20
Out for a little walk this fine, gray, damp, chilly, late April, oh look, now it’s raining Thursday afternoon. I saw an older couple out for a shuffling jog and I saw them again later as they walked back to their home. It seemed as apt as anything else out there.
There are a lot of sidewalks and some nice paths in our immediate vicinity. One of those paths is succumbing to a nearby storm pond, and so work must be done. I wonder how many people have been up to this sign and turned around. Not many. Most of us are just walking around it.
But I do it thinking of an old joke. Enough is enough!
These won’t be around much longer, so let’s document them now. On a turn in between condos there’s a tree on the corner and whoever lives there probably thinks of it as their tree. And that’s just fine.
So long as they don’t mind if I stop by taking photos of the blooms every now and then. “Oh, Charles, someone is out there again, taking pictures of our tree.”
It’s important, I decided, to be very deliberate about which direction you face when you do that, lest someone think you’re trying to peer into and photograph their living room.
These are a bit safer. They’re in our yard.
And thus, they are ours.
Ours. All ours.
But, still, you want to mind your background.
Heaven forfend you get the exterior of a neighbor’s house in the shot.
