It got cold, as promised. It is going to get colder, as promised. You’ll see. It is easy to notice the difference if you spend an entire day inside. It is one thing in the morning and the hammer part of a two-part cold front moved in during those 10-or-so hours. Overnight the anvil part of the cold front will be here. No one will be singing when the two collide.
One of the shows our students produced tonight invited a comedienne on. This was my favorite part:
There were about eight of us in the studio and she was doing this for television cameras and without the rest of the troupe she’s accustomed to. And she’s relatively new to comedy and none of this is easy. But she was game for it and that means a lot.
On the way out to the car I shot some footage and then I filed a report to the social media video networks:
The temperature fell another 10 degrees before I could actually upload that video. Think warm thoughts.
Under the very real possibility of -40 degree temperatures in the next 36 hours, the IU campus decided to cancel classes tomorrow. So no school. But campus isn’t closed. So some people, including some students, will still be working. And it will still be way down in the negatives. Think warm thoughts.
And it wasn’t that bad, really. I’m running in tights and a t-shirt and over that there is a special lightweight running jacket. You wouldn’t think it would do much by appearances, but on the inside that jacket has some special material that basically turns you into a baked potato.
Once you get your heart rate up you’re basically running 20 degrees warmer than the ambient temperature anyway, so that’s about 38. And that jacket is good for another 15-25 degrees I figure. Look! I’m sweating there at the end of that brief little run.
Also, after a time, you don’t even notice the frozen fog anymore which is a concept as alien as an alien coming down to the planet’s surface, running a quick evening 5K with me and saying “This frozen fog isn’t noticeable like it is on Kerplax 7.”
Which is precisely the sort of thing the alien would say. Between deep gasps, because the oxygen content isn’t exactly perfect for him, and there’s some gravity issues relative to other planets this alien athlete is accustomed to. But he’d say that, maybe, and none of this would be nearly as weird as me thinking Huh. I didn’t even notice the frozen fog..
So the weather wasn’t that bad for an evening run, really. But it is going to get worse.
So since everything, included the roads, are frozen here, still*, let’s talk about some place warmer. Here are a few pictures I took yesterday just before we left Savannah. (Truly, we toted our luggage inside.)
The diocese was installed by Pope Pius IX in 1850. At the time, it covered all of Georgia and part of Florida, totaling about 5,500 Catholics. Another Pope Pius, the XII, split the territory in 1956. So now this covers south Georgia. Much of what was the original church at this location was destroyed in an 1898 fire. The outside walls and two spires were saved.
There was a big renovation project in the middle of the 20th century and a massive repair project in the 1980s put the high altar in the background. Then there was another round of renovation in the late Nineties. So the pews aren’t that old.
Indeed, much of everything here is new compared to some of the beautiful church buildings we have seen over the years, but this one is still lovely, and as impressive to me as the first time I saw it 14 years ago.
The stained glass windows went in around 1904:
Many, if not all of them, were removed, cleaned and re-leaded during the last restoration project.
I didn’t realize you had to do that to windows.
Now, about that organ …
The first recorded organ at the cathedral was installed in 1837. (They held a fundraiser in 1836.) That original organ is now on display, but not in use, at the First African Baptist Church a few blocks away. Organs came and went, one was rebuilt after a hurricane, but lost in the fire. At the turn of the century an organ builder in Delaware installed a new one. That one was removed after 1938, and some of the pipes wound up in local classrooms. During the reconstruction in the 1980s a Massachusetts firm, Noack Company, was selected to build the new organ. A protestant, a Lutheran even, helped bring the organ project to life. The cathedral’s website says that was a first. And that man’s church choir, from the local St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, was the first Protestant concert in the cathedral in 1991.
*The snow was Saturday. You could barely drive around downtown today for the ice in the roads. They have some kind of plan, I’m sure. You’d like to see it activated. You’d like to see warmer temperatures, too. They’ve got about 13 degrees on us today.
We’re traveling back into the barren and cold northlands today, after a fine weekend that was capped off by a fourth visit to Clary’s, a little time in the park, a massage and watching Savannah’s Martin Luther King Day parade. (It was two hours long and still going when we had to leave.)
It was a great visit to a lovely city that we enjoy a great deal. We discovered a fine little Mexican restaurant out of necessity today for our late lunch-on-the-go. Today’s Uber driver had just moved to the low country from the Smokies. She’s still getting used to the entirely different weather patterns, which is funny considering she’s only about 300 miles from home, but that’s an important 300 miles. That was a retirement 300 miles for her and her husband, she said. Our Uber driver on Thursday night had a similar story, but for a lifetime in the Navy and then retiring to coastal Georgia. Neither of them looked old enough to be even semi-retired. Maybe that’s the autobiographical aging process, or maybe its just the latitude.
That’s The Yankee reading under Our Tree on Saturday. The weather was so perfect that day we spent most of the day in that spot. Coincidentally, that is about the same view I had in December of 2008 just before I proposed. We’d been sitting under that tree and I was waiting for The Sign. You know, the one you sometimes find yourself asking for. Eventually a leaf fell on me and I took that as the requested sign. My plan involved me leaving, so that I could come back. I excused myself to visit the restroom and, right about where I’m standing to take that photograph above, a man intercepted me and we started talking about families and marriage and biblical passages and I said, “OK, fine, that is my sign.”
So I went back to the tree, hung her engagement ring on some of the bark and called her over to scratch our initials into it. And there was her ring. She was there, I was there, it was Savannah, there was a ring and I didn’t even think up a speech. Which is odd, because this is me. I asked her if she would like to keep having adventures with me, and then another guy came up and “What’d she say? What’d she say?” as he offered to make us one of the little bamboo flowers they sell to tourists here.
I knew he’d want to be paid for that, and he should. It was ornate and involved and quite nice. We had eight dollars between us. He was disappointed, but gave us the flower and she finally said yes. Now here we are. I have at least nine dollars in my pocket today.
Anyway, we enjoyed our Saturday beneath Our Tree. It was bracketed by breakfast and a nice run, but that was pretty much the day, and it was perfect. That night we also went out for crabs on Tybee Island:
We also saw some birds:
And from the It’s Been Too Long Department, we saw Wendy!
Something like 17 years I’ve known her now. She’s even more wonderful today than she ever was.
Sunday the weather was a bit dank and I was tired and sore and still trying to overcome a few days of fun with my sinuses, so it was a low key thing. Today the parade, a spa trip and then the car ride to the airport. We made one other stop, but I’m saving those pictures for tomorrow. Be sure to stop by for those. It’ll be lovely.
