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photo / running / Tuesday / Twitter — Comments Off on To get us through a Tuesday
18
Feb 20

To get us through a Tuesday

Since we’re trying to mentally stretch out weekends around here, and since we were just talking about the sky and the weather and all of that. This is what it looked like during Saturday’s late afternoon run:

Not too bad. Sunday was an even more picturesque day. The Yankee had a rest day planned, but she said “You should go for a run and enjoy it.”

Meaning the weather, I think, which is more likely than enjoying the run. It looked like this:

And so I got in five quick miles. Quick for me. At one point I was running a 6-minute-and-change pace. During several phases I had a comfortable seven-minute mile pace. And then my legs or my lungs would remember I’m not a teenager anymore.

After a run like that, though, you get to use the compression boots. And so I did enjoy that this evening, and it inspired my last Valentine of the season:

Something about all of this meant I was a trending topic on Twitter:

It wasn’t me, but The Jet. This happens from time to time. I’m going to claim it anyway, of course.

Tonight, we had to move around one of the cats’ play things. They protested, as cats do, by sitting on it:

Sit-ins have a long tradition of respect. You wonder if the animals have been checking things out on Wikipedia when you aren’t looking. Maybe there’s more to it than you realize when your pet does the “I know you don’t want me in here, but I’m going to flop down, roll over, go cute and limp” routine. It could be a powerful social statement, when the cat tries to get into your closet.

Go check me out on Twitter, I might be trending! And there’s more on Instagram as well.

Monday / photo / running — Comments Off on There’ve been worse weekend ideas on Mondays
17
Feb 20

There’ve been worse weekend ideas on Mondays

There’s a difference between personality and style. Personality, at its most basic, demonstrates characteristics that help the rest of us distinguishes one character from another. You can see this in siblings. You can see it in twins. Style, meanwhile, is a way of doing a thing. I am talking about the connotation of style that is to do that thing in an appreciable way. Appreciable in the sense of I see the nature of how you handled that, and I admire, sir or ma’am, your elan. Style.

This cat has personality, at the very least:

That personality is usually: Let me aggravate you as much as possible with my understanding of where you don’t want me and my immediate, continual and pressing need to always be in or on those places.

His sister, who I managed to take just one picture of this weekend, has a style. She’s aloof and insistent on very much having her way in controlling whatever is going on. Not in a bad sense, it’s just about her terms. And if you can’t oblige that, well, she needed to be somewhere else right now, anyway.

Here was my original Valentine e-card on Saturday:

And here’s a picture from Saturday’s run:

It was a nice-enough day. Generally cloudy, occasionally a bit of sun, and finally warmed up to 43 degrees. Still that snow, though. So we had a nice easy neighborhood run, and then ran through the next neighborhood, too. Got about four miles out of it, and in no particular hurry.

More from the weekend to pad out our tomorrow. Hey, if your weekend goes to fast, just look back on it with a fond nostalgia for the next two days. Then, before you know it, you’re already at Hump Day. You’re going to spend your Thursday and Friday thinking about the next weekend anyway …

food / Friday / photo / video — Comments Off on Happy Valentine’s Day
14
Feb 20

Happy Valentine’s Day

And a cold one it is. But the sunny is out, and it became one of those days when the sun made all the difference. If you were dressed in the appropriate amount of layers.

This was the view this morning. Just look at that fog rolling of the creek.

Here is my official work Valentine:

That’s a giant sloth skeleton. Well, it is a 3D-printed recreation of a giant sloth. Story goes that he was discovered on the banks of the Ohio River in the 19th century. Sometime later he was donated to the university and the fossilized remains were on display in a science building. Then, in the 1940s, the bones “got thrown out.”

There’s a bigger story there. That story may be lost to history, but anything told, misremembered, perhaps obfuscated and then glossed over 80 years later becomes an easy recitation of “facts.”

Eventually, it was decided by the Office of They that the sloth should be put back on display as a part of the university’s ongoing bicentennial celebration. Only, no one has the bones. But better than fossils, we can reprint them. Technology is grand! Some of the bones were apparently not lost to history, carelessness, conspiracy or whatever it was. And they were used as a model, along with careful consultation of other ancient sloth specimens. Ultimately, it became a collaborative effort among several aspects of the university, which was probably the most important thing. Our part is … hosting the sloth. The original didn’t sit in this building, but this one is, for a time. The orientation is unfortunate. It is pointing at the newspaper’s offices and it really shouldn’t. Apparently he’s going on tour after Spring Break. A very slow tour, I’m sure.

Had a cookie:

I walked down to the local little cookie bakery where they make custom-ordered treats. Made a video of it for a friend, shared the cookies with some people in her honor. I made sure to enjoy one for myself.

And I saw this on the way to the car after the day’s work was done. Tulips! Sun!

I want to be heartened by this, but I won’t be tricked. Not this year. I remember the video from this morning, after all. And I’ve come to realize: after you see the first tulips here, you still spend two months in sweaters and coats. Three winters, lesson learned.

OK, here’s an important part of the cookie video:

Happy weekend! Find yourself a cookie. Probably you deserve it.

IU / photo / Thursday — Comments Off on Of course you could borrow my coat
13
Feb 20

Of course you could borrow my coat

Don’t mind me. I’m just over here getting ready for tomorrow.

I don’t understand why we don’t do Valentines notes like this all year long. I have thought up six or seven in the time it took me to make that one, which really took no time at all. I would be insufferable, is what I’m saying, and maybe that’s why this isn’t a year-round exercise.

Oh, the puns.

No one in television knows anything about puns. You can ask them. Very serious, all the time. See?

memories / photo / SCUBA / Twitter / Wednesday — Comments Off on The great thing in the grate
12
Feb 20

The great thing in the grate

I made a little animated photo as my new pinned tweet. I mention it because I know you are deeply invested in this sort of thing. You are. All of you. Deeply invested. Profoundly so.

My last pinned tweet had been around for quite some time. Summer of 2015 I took that picture. London. Everything was different then, everything was the same.

We took the above picture in Roatan, Honduras last summer. Everything is the same.

It is about time for another dive. We’ll do some later this year. The problem with being so land locked is that you can’t do it readily. This is an obvious issue. The other side of that coin is that when you do get the chance, you maximize your dives, to the extent that your body can handle it. (There are some fatigue issues arising from oxygen and nitrogen at depth, eventually, and the eventually of that chemistry does catch up to you. Unless you dive nitrox, which I do not, as yet, do.) We did 20 dives over six days in Roatan, for example, knowing that was it for the year. If you could just get into the water (of the sort that you wanted to be in) more readily then we’d do so. I’d sit on the bottom of a pool for hours, if you’d let me.

Oh, look, here I am doing just that last May.

It was a peaceful experience, no currents to fight, no corral to avoid, no depth considerations to consider. Just sit and breathe. It was, then, a contemplative non-dive. Many things were considered in that high school pool, the first high school pool I’ve ever been in. (It was a Saturday.) The first one I’ve ever seen, I think.

A lot of profound thinking is going on in that photo, as you can tell. Mostly about all of the things that find their way to the bottom of a public pool.

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