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IU / photo / Thursday / video — Comments Off
19
Jan 17

Remember, or forget, either way its fine

Sometimes you park in the lot across the street from the building. Sometimes you park in the lot one block over from that. Depending on the time of day, you might have to park one block away from the building, in a narrow little, older looking parking deck.

That’s where I parked today. And in that deck they have painted numbers on the doors so you know where you parked. And that stencil artist decided to be extra helpful …

But then someone came along and said “No, no, no. We can’t have that.”

And you wonder why.

Thursdays are long days. I stayed on campus until almost 9 p.m. tonight. I was watching a few shows being recorded. Here’s a sports show the IUS crew taped tonight:

First show back this semester. So now all of the rust should be knocked off and it’ll be onward and upward from here. There was also a talk show tonight, but it won’t be released until the weekend.

I should have shared these yesterday, but I forgot. So here is the news show, Hoosier News Source:

And What’s Up Weekly:

And that’s plenty for now. Except for whatever I don’t remember.

books / friends / history / photo / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
18
Jan 17

Stuff in the air, and in my office

I found this book last weekend:

It was published in 1958 and seems to be aimed at giving a reasonable historical re-telling and description to teens. The chapters have great line art:

That’s a paratrooper, which was pretty much the moment I decided to take pictures to send to our friend Adam, who is a modern paratrooper, because I thought he’d appreciate the biplane:

But it was this one he really liked, and how could you not? Look at his left hand:

Just another day at the office, oh, and do remember your briefcase. Here’s an almost contemporaneous accounting of Captain Sergei Mienov:

He spent almost a year in the United States. On his way back to Russia he passed a few days in Paris. He was full of enthusiasm for what he had seen in the development of air technique. Although Russia was not yet officially recognized, Mienov had been courteously received. He had visited airplane factories, airdromes and training schools. He praised highly the quality of American parachutes and the instruction American pilots received in their use. He had made his first parachute jump here.

[…]

When Mienov submitted the report of his US observations to Air Chief Alksnis, he mentioned the wide interest which parachute jumping could arouse. He suggested that the interest of the Soviet population, and particularly the young, could be turned toward the development of air power by this type of propaganda. Alksnis passed the comment on to the Politburo. Stalin agreed that it was a good idea.

And so parachuting became wildly popular in the Soviet Union.

Until the purges. And then the Germans did it better and then the Americans did it more. And that’s the story of how one of the more crazy ideas a person could do as a spectator sport became one of the craziest things people would do in military service. How the book wound up where I found it remains a mystery.

Here’s Adam now, this is his jump into Ste. Mere-Eglise, Normandy, France, commemorating the 70th anniversary of D-Day:

He took a miniature American flag on the jump with him and sent it to me as a keepsake, which super cool. That’s in my office now.

So is this stuff:

We are about to surplus a bunch of old equipment. The university has a surplus process for its eight campuses and some things of a certain value must be processed in a certain way and that’s where I am. More specifically, that picture is opposite of where I am, in my office, which is now filled.

Because it made more sense to bring this stuff out of storage, start (and hopefully complete) the paperwork process and then wait on the nice fellows from the Surplus store to come over and pick it up. So I have huge bundles of television cabling, a half dozen old cameras, a switcher, various accesorries and a chest-high stack of old engineering components in my office. If anyone wants to come push buttons, now is the time.

As a bonus, many of the buttons sound different.

history / IU / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
17
Jan 17

The ranch we visited last weekend

So we stopped by to see some family. Which, to some of us, meant family and, to others, like me, meant new people. And very kind and interesting and happy people, too. This was after the funeral, and this was some of the local family who invited the whole large group over for a visit. This was the first sign you see:

Now think of that. Inside the house there was a framed certificate that says they ranch started in 1856. Texas was annexed in 1845, so the ranch itself is almost as old as the state. We learned that the man who originally owned the land had it longer than that before he built on it. In all that time it has stayed in that one family. Think of that.

So it turns out Texas’ Historic Farm project has been going on for some time. They recognize farms that have stayed active within one family at 100, 150 and 200 years. One press release I found said there were about 4,800 in the state that can make the century claim. In an entire state, in all of Texas, there are just a handful of farms older than this place:

Let’s think of this another way. While at the place, which still raises cattle and has at least a few horses and one very loud donkey, I met this delightful lady, a retired art teacher. I won’t guess her age, but she had one. These, she said, were her grandparents:

And they weren’t even the first people on the ranch. And the way she said it, they were’t the first ones by a good ways.

Back at work today. The semester started last week and we started shooting today. Here’s a view of the control room during the shoot:

And here I am in the studio with the What’s Up Weekly crew:

They proclaimed me the king of candid shots with that one. I’ve had worse titles.

Monday / photo / running / video — Comments Off
16
Jan 17

Oh the things I could tell you

I could tell you about the shuttle drivers we had this weekend. (They were each great in their own ways. The first because she was enthusiastic and opinionated and talkative and honey this and darlin’ that. And the second because he was waiting just for us and took us directly to the car and then told us which way to go to avoid the new toll on the bridge.) I could tell you about the six-and-a-half miles I ran today in the fog. (It was slow and I’m still not a very good runner.) I could tell you about one book I just finished and another I started. (One was fiction, the rare piece of the genre I read and, thus, a real guilty pleasure. The other is a historical collection, and we’ll get into it at a later date.) I could talk about a lot of things, I suppose.

But I have a picture of The Yankee with a horse:

And we also met a donkey this weekend:

That was at the ranch, which I’ll tell you a bit about tomorrow. But, first, there is a video of the sky:

And, tomorrow, we’ll talk about a historic farm.

family / Friday / photo — Comments Off
13
Jan 17

We come to sing true praises

We buried my step-grandmother today. This is my step-father’s mom and she was just a gem of a human being. A lovely Southern lady, through and through. She lived a full life and was independent, and fiercely so, right up to the end. She still traveled, alone, at 92. And to know her was to be charmed by her and to be charmed by her was to be a person who said something like “I hope I’m like her at that age.”

The pastor gave a nice little service and then Rick, my step-father, stood up and talked about his mother. And in front of a room full of people that had known him his whole life and her their whole lives, he really painted the picture well. Her niece talked and then a nephew. A former college professor colleague of hers (she taught English and reading) and a friend of hers spoke about her as well. It was a celebration, which is what they had wanted. There was a reception afterward. And then we all took a long drive so that she could return to the place from where she came, surrounded by her family again. And in that there was a little history lesson for the family, too.

Another preacher offered a graveside service and it was lovely and somewhere in all of this someone had this great notion that essentially said our elders give us love and we repay them with joy and happiness. And that seems like something you really would hope is true.

It was cold, but the rain had stopped. We placed our pall bearer flowers on the coffin. Right after the service concluded this large flock of birds that had been just a bit away in the cemetery, the size of which you don’t often see anymore, decided to start singing and flew off to the west. We heard them all, and I managed to catch the last few on my phone.

I saw this on her porch yesterday, and if there’s ever been a more apt thing said about a person or her philosophy on garden decor, I don’t know what it would be.

“O, Tiger-Lily, I wish you could talk!” says Alice in Lewis Carroll’s ‘Through the Looking Glass.’

“We can talk,” the flower says, “when there’s anybody worth talking to.”

And she was one of those, because she wanted to listen to everything, because she was interested in everything. The thing about people that invite you into their circles — and I’ve had some experience with this — is that when they welcome you in you don’t often want to leave. And she was good about that, bringing you in, making you feel welcomed and the center of things. So it is with the rest of her clan. Near the cemetery is a family ranch, and we went there for a visit. It was more of the family, and more neat history that we got to learn about. I’ll write a few things about that next week.