photo

photo / Tuesday / video — Comments Off on Nice day out; try it while you can
21
Apr 20

Nice day out; try it while you can

It was a lovely spring day. We’ll have more gross and cold weather soon, because these damp, gray, Canadian conditions can’t pick their spots. Hey, we’ll worry about that on another day. Like tomorrow! And portions of next week! And possibly a substantial portion of May!

Anyway, here are a few pictures of blooming trees from just down the street.

It was a walk, you see, taking in the lovely aspects of a fine Tuesday.

This was not the turnaround point, but it could have been.

And this is a dandelion in the front yard. It’s coming along rather nicely in the bed with three differing layers of anti-weed material placed with the intention of preventing such a thing:

The dandelion is growing in the shadow of these shrubs, which provide us with today’s Video That Has Nothing To Do With The Day:

Listening to birds singing is just lovely. And, for a moment, the wind was a nice addition and there were no kids or the far off beep beep beeping of trucks backing up or any of the other things that happen in a hopping neighborhood. It was a fine day to sit in the shade and listen.

cycling / journalism / Monday / photo / podcast — Comments Off on Some walks, a bike ride, a podcast, some cats
20
Apr 20

Some walks, a bike ride, a podcast, some cats

And your weekend? Was it functionally much different than your week? Unless, of course, you’re going into work still, in which case I apologize for the joke. But that’s all we can do with it, is joke and laugh, and then work from home or wish we could, or, in far too many sad cases, wish we could work from somewhere.

I get to work from home. I’m very fortunate indeed. And not a day goes by that I don’t spend a lot of time thinking of that. I do it a lot more than during the walk from bedroom to kitchen to home office, too.

One of the things I got to do today for work was this little program …

Elizabeth Malatestinic teaches human resource management in the Kelley School of Business at IUPUI. So she’s the one that onboards. I don’t know if she’s the person who came up with that term. It seems unlikely, but I didn’t think to ask. Anyway, she does HR, and we discussed what we should be able to expect from our bosses, what they can get out of us right now, managing the work-at-home dynamic and some other things. It actually is an interesting and useful conversation. But you’re only going to know that if you take my word for it and press the play button.

Press the play button.

Did you press the play button yet?

The cats are grand. Phoebe is studying yoga:

She has since decided to give it a try. She does it with a sense of panache that can inspire us all:

Poseidon has been studying yoga as well. Less interested, but nevertheless:

He’s a nice cat, when he’s being cuddly, and not a jerk to someone.

That cat is going through toddlerhood and adolescence simultaneously, and he’s going to be doing it for the rest of time, which is definitely something to look forward to.

On a walk yesterday we passed some carefully planted roadside trees and it reminded me of how I always make the same disappointed joke every year about maples being nature’s first quitters. It’s true. They are. It is disappointing, and then brilliant, and then just sad like all of the rest. But give the maples their due: They are some of the first ones back on the job, too.

Which is part of the twisted logic of acceptance: Oh, look at the beautiful early leaves! … As we approach the last week of April …

I am showing off the mask a friend made for me. She is crafty and has skills and a desire to help others and even me and I am very fortunate, plus it matches my eyes:

And a shadow selfie from today’s ride, which was notable only for the hill repeats.

You’re supposed to go up a hill for several minutes, descend and then start over again. Only I manage to do it based on the distance, because looking for that quirky tree or, like today, the discarded mattress on the side of the road is easier than staring at my bike computer. So looking at the data now, I went longer the first time, a bit shorter the second time, and then faster the next four times before slowing down for the next several climbs. Hey, it’s all slow and uphill to me. Also, I had negative splits on the back of the ride, which better be the case after 45 minutes or so of going uphill.

At one point this car was coming from the other direction right at the place where I was turning around. The hill continues on, so I have to keep riding, waiting for the car to pass so I can try to do a 180 at a suboptimal speed. Except this guy slows, rolls down his window and says “Steep ain’t it!?”

Hadn’t noticed, neighbor. Hadn’t noticed.

photo / podcast / Thursday — Comments Off on Listen to an actual pandemic expert, and also me
16
Apr 20

Listen to an actual pandemic expert, and also me

Another damp and gray day, so yesterday’s sunshine was all a ruse, a dastardly plot to lull one into a false sense of spring. Because why should you have a proper spring a month after actual spring began?

As burdens in life go, this is a small one. But if you’re going to tell me its spring, it should be spring. That’s not too much to ask. And it should be almost an article of faith. In fact in some cultures, it has been. But, as we are people of our times, let us put it in the modern context: if we can’t trust the planet who can we trust?

Probably the planet is getting us back for something we’ve done. No doubt we deserve it.

But think of these trees, these poor, tricked, trees!

Like we need things that can do this to deserve a sense of revenge …

Those are all photos from a week or so ago, pictures I took on my Canon and promptly forgot to upload. Now we’re giving them their fair shot at notoriety.

I talked to a real-life person today …

Epidemiologist Shandy Dearth is from the Fairbanks School of Public Health at IUPUI in Indianapolis. We talked about monitoring the pandemic’s progress and staying safe and a whole lot more.

 

I don’t know all of the ends and outs of an epidemiologist’s day, but I have enjoyed learning how they all talk about their work and the way they relate it to the rest of us.

After the interview we talked about types of epidemiologists. I figure, once I finally learn how to spell the word I should figure out what kind I want to be. Would I take on the casual, c’est la vie, attitude? Would I become a worry wart? Would I just figure the chips are going to fall wherever chips fall, and that’s into my mouth, after they’ve been on the floor? Would I be the founder of Extra Hands, LLC, a firm designed to do my work, so my hands never have to touch anything and get dirty? Would I drop a spoon and play devil-may-care since a dirty spoon shouldn’t separate me from dessert?

Epidemiologists must spend a lot of time in public resisting the urge to tell people to get their germy germs off my lawn and away from the water fountain.

But they do get to call themselves disease detectives, though, which is really cool.

photo / Wednesday — Comments Off on In the backyard
15
Apr 20

In the backyard

It is the middle of April and I read on some meteorological site — this is the problem, if you see something interesting two or three days prior and didn’t hang on to the link for citation purposes, you’re basically making stuff up — that this is the traditional last day of frost here. Oh, look, it was a government site. Probably accurate enough. The same table says the latest frost was on May 27, 1961 and that sounds like fake news.

We did have a frost this morning. We’ve been covering plants and ours are fine, Every small garbage can and beach bucket and what not have all been deployed and with good success so far. It would be touch-and-go for the ornamentals. We don’t have crops to worry about. Most of the things that get planted here are just now going in anyway, so it’s probably fine.

I mean, the grass is thick and crunchy.

I’d like to show you some of the flowering trees in the yard, because the buds and blooms never last long enough, but at least we can memorialize them here.

These are all from this morning, a few minutes well spent watching the sun poke its head up above the tree line, all sheepish.

As if that burning ball of fury is afraid I’ll be disappointed by it. As if that big burning ball of fury let me down.

But what am I? A savage? I know this isn’t the sun’s fault.

The blame here clearly belongs to the rotation of the earth. It’s not like it’s had 4.6 billion years of practice or anything.

But you know what they say. If you point your finger at the earth, you’re just pointing at the ground.

No, that’s not it. If you point your finger to the earth, four fingers are pointing back at Aristarchus and Anaxagoras.

Greek digit humor could be so ruthless sometimes.

That may seem like an awful lot for a backyard walk, but I was able to take my time with it before the day’s first meeting.

You can do that when you wake up obscenely early and can’t go back to sleep.

That’s not ever a problem I have, and brother, it isn’t one I’m intent on picking up now.

IU / journalism / memories / photo / podcast / Tuesday — Comments Off on A podcast, a random memory and three photos
14
Apr 20

A podcast, a random memory and three photos

From time to time I am put in mind of my first real camera. I was in undergrad. I was about to start the photojournalism work at the campus newspaper. Soon after would come the photography classes and so on. It was Christmas time and there must have been a really nice deal on Canons that year. I remember being at family haunts and taking those first pictures, really just trying to figure the thing out. It was a step up from the old 110s, to be sure, and what even is an aperture, anyway?

It was that phase of learning how to take pictures. There’s a certain tree, a certain outbuilding. This and that. And you think, That’s going to be a great photograph. Then you send the film off to be developed, or go to the darkroom to do your work, because wow I’m old. And then the prints come back and they are very average. Because you’re just trying to figure the camera out still, really, and it’s a nice and important element of family life and important to you, but that’s where it begins and ends and that’s really enough.

Then you go out and you take pictures of a random dead tree that grew out and above the rest of the tree line before just giving up entirely. And you think, That’s going to be a great photograph. But it isn’t. Because not all of them are great. Some days most aren’t even good.

You just need a few of those, really. If you ask for more you just look greedy.

Which is clearly what I was not on this walk, from a few more of the found photographs from last month.

I’m sure I thought to myself This trail is going to look amazing in this photograph, and I’ll remember this thought verbatim as a construct for a future photo essay on recall and subpar photography!

You can see why I was excited about that:

And! Look! A stream!

It is cold. It was cold then and it is cold now. Only two weeks have passed and while two kids were playing in it that a little further down, there wasn’t a line to get in there and give it a try. Maybe next month.

I talked with Tom Duzynski. He’s the Epidemiology Education Director at the Fairbanks School of Public Health at IUPUI in Indianapolis, Indiana, and basically a rock star. He talked about how it looks like stay at home practices and quarantine practices are working, how long it might be until we can start returning to more normal activities and what experts are continually learning about Covid-19.

I was promised audiograms, but those haven’t appeared yet. So I made my own, sorta, from the above conversation just to see what that’d be like. It’s getting some nice play, too:

I think the next person I’ll talk to will also be an epidemiologist. Let’s see if we can get them to disagree!

Actually, we won’t. It isn’t that kind of show.

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →