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22
Mar 15

Catching up

And now the 168th installment of the weekly post of extra photographs that haven’t already appeared on the site.

New rule: If you are using three or more fonts, it better have something to do with Vanilla Ice.

You pull up next to a bus, inspiration strikes and you drive all of your designer friends absolutely nuts with your irreverence.

That’s not bad for a Wednesday afternoon.

The Yankee and the Black Cat do yoga. Allie is very interested in this lately.

Walking in the sunset.

Mowed the lawn Wednesday. Had this in the lawn on Thursday. So I picked it, and gave it to my best girl. Take that, dandelion.

A frog in the aquarium at Mellow Mushroom. For ages we thought they might be fake. They almost never move. When we saw them this week they were all over the place.

One of the frogs’ tank mates.

The driveway (I wish we had) …

Seven-foot tall furry mascots help us get over our kid fears.

They also take good mock-selfies, which is now my raison d’Aubie. I asked him to throw his hands up and he figured it out, took my phone away from me and started take pictures everywhere around us. I have 16 shots on my phone now of the people sitting nearby, with Aubie sort of photobombing the foreground. Genius.

Raison d’Aubie.


20
Mar 15

Your typical perfect Friday

This morning we went to the Barbecue House for breakfast. I had the BLT with egg and cheese and a side of hash browns. It was delicious.

I found another bookstore and, finally, the AP Stylebook. It only took four stores, but I have a new book with the latest entries and misuse of the more than/over construction. There will be a new book any day now, of course.

We hit the pool. It was not my best day between the lane lines. My shoulder hurt. But The Yankee gave me some good tips on how to improve my wonderfully terrible form. Only one of the tips she gave me threatened to drown me. I did not swim far, but it was quality. Or so I’m telling myself.

We stopped by a friend’s house. Twice, actually. We were there to check on cats. We were about 15 feet short of pulling into the driveway when we realized we did not have the house key. So we went back home to get the keys, and then back to the friend’s house. These are some of her flowers, because it had rained, and drops make the flowers pop:

flower

flower

flower

We went to the baseball game and watched Auburn beat the top-five ranked Vanderbilt 6-4. It was an exciting game and something of a surprising win. Then we had pizza at Mellow Mushroom, which was delicious. Tomorrow there’s a doubleheader.


19
Mar 15

Got any AP Style?

I was looking for a book, a new Associated Press Stylebook, but one place didn’t have it. A second store was closed.

Going to a third place I had your standard “Don’t see that every day” moment. A bicycle-mounted police officer pulled over a car. The officer turned on a little blue light and the car pulled over.

Hargis

You can almost imagine the mental calculus going on in the car. But that was a good move, stopping. Oh you’ll get away from the guy on the mountain bike with the fat tires. But he has friends just down the street. And those people aren’t riding bikes.

I believe that’s the first traffic stop I’ve seen by a cycling officer. Now I want to see the officers on the ruggedized Segway-trike get someone making an improper turn.

I rode 22 miles on my bike this afternoon and I didn’t see anyone that would stop for me. But I don’t have a badge or a blue light. I just have the lycra.

Anyway, the third bookstore didn’t have the book. I can try another place tomorrow. I hit Walmart. I was looking for two things, but I only found one. I got a watch battery for an old watch. (Still works! Now I have three watches that might, from time-to-time, help me out. I’ll be late somewhere tomorrow.) So I only found the one thing at the retailer, that let me make a withdrawal at the cash register. These are the details of my day.

I needed the cash because as I was going from one place to the next I got a message from an e-bay seller. We’ve been negotiating the sale of two Gloms. A deal had been reached. He’s in town and so we set up a meet.

So I find myself watching the sun go down from the Kroger parking lot, waiting on this guy to show up. He brought two books. I paid cash. He felt like he got a good deal. I felt like I got a good deal. We were both happy.

Turns out the guy’s a picker. He’s telling me stories about how he used to go dumpster diving, how it is different now. Once, he said, people would come up to him and strike up a conversation. Now he’s afraid they’ll just call the police.

But is it the times or his age? You can probably get away with more in your 20s than 40s, I’d guess.

He feels like he covered the entire area, going through old abandoned buildings, salvaging and scavenging. I wonder how many of those roads I know because of my bike and how many I have no idea about.

The newest condos being built are going up on a large tract that previously had several old, decrepit houses. He says he got the call to go into those houses, that he was the only guy, and that he got to pick them clean for leftover property, repurposed fixtures and, of course, the copper.

The stories of all of the local stuff he finds sounds like a lot of fun.

We probably talked for an hour, mostly with me just trying to get him to show me his collection. Never know what else he might be willing to sell.

Probably should have asked him if he had a Stylebook.


18
Mar 15

Cleaning the leaves that never go away

The weather is beautiful. Tomorrow it will change. And so I was sent outside to do yard work.

And by sent, I mean it was overdue and it was a wonderful day to be outside for a few hours. The sky was high and sharply blue. The few clouds were thin scraps of paste in the sky. The temperature was intent on redefining room temperature. And overhead, things are showing the full promise of the season.

buds

Blink fast and everything turns green.

And so it was that I had to mow the lawn. Some parts are greener than others. And some are just dusty. Other parts have still more leaves. I’m pretty sure we’ve raked “for the last time” twice during the winter, but here I am doing it again today. No matter. There is stuff to see.

blooms

Managed to fill about four big lawn bags, mostly of willow oak leaves. Once again I say unto you: No person that has ever raked willow oak leaves has ever later planted willow oak trees. That’s one of the two things I know about raking. The other is that I’m going to make my money by developing an efficient way to get leaves off the ground and into bags.

How do you do it? I’ve tried about every possible way to get leaves from here to there. I’m using a giant rake and shoveling the leaves from the pile into a bag held somewhat open by a giant garbage bag. We cut the bottom out of that can, probably because we read it online or someone told us too, but I think would work just as well using this technique in the conventional

Maybe I could invent a vacuum system for next fall.

But that’s for later. I’ve done enough of this today, two hours of yard work and two minutes of brushing by one bush that seems to have a unique nest alliance of wasps and bees inside. Glad that one doesn’t belong to me. I hope the owner notices it soon.

There’s this beautiful tree nearby:

pear tree

In putting away the lawn mower and the lawn bags and the giant garbage/leaf can and the gas can and all of that I learned we had a new neighbor. I wonder how he feels about leaves. He was a shy one. Good thing I got this safety shot. He offered me no other photos:

lizard

About that time The Yankee came home and we went for a run.

So there we are on the trail. She takes off, I catch her. At precisely a mile I realized I’d had exactly one bowl of Cheerios all day. And so far the next three miles I suffered. I’m not sure if it was the sudden lack of energy or the knowledge of the sudden lack of energy. It was not a good run. But there will be other, less not-good running efforts. (The flatter the better.)

At home I ate two pieces of leftover frozen pizza. And they were the best two pieces of mushy thin crust and stretchy cheese you can imagine. And then we went out for Chinese, and it was the best Chinese you can imagine. Pretty much the best day you can imagine.

Except for the leaves.


17
Mar 15

Cat ketchup

We are catching up on some very important cuddling:

Allie

After a few more days of this it may be that she has gotten her fill and moves to lounge not all over me, but perhaps merely beside me, or nearby.

Until then, however, she’s read as much of these links as I have.

Things to read … because there is no kitty literature here.

Ex-NSA director: China has hacked ‘every major corporation’ in U.S.:

McConnell’s assertion is different. It would mean that no large company can escape the massive theft of American entrepreneurial ideas.

In his speech, McConnell also said that during the final years of the Bush administration, the Chinese government employed a jaw-dropping 100,000 hackers dedicated solely to breaking into computers.

By comparison, he said the United States had that many spies — total.

McConnell listed what the Chinese are stealing: “planning information for advanced concepts, windmills, automobiles, airplanes, space ships, manufacturing design, software.”

“If they can take that, before we can take it to market – for free – and it’s unchecked for 15, 20 years, I would say that has strategic consequences for the United States,” he said.

Makes you wonder what he’s not been cleared to say out loud, doesn’t it?

Don’t worry, if the Chinese aren’t snooping enough for you, the local police may have you covered. A Police Gadget Tracks Phones? Shhh! It’s Secret:

A powerful new surveillance tool being adopted by police departments across the country comes with an unusual requirement: To buy it, law enforcement officials must sign a nondisclosure agreement preventing them from saying almost anything about the technology.

Any disclosure about the technology, which tracks cellphones and is often called StingRay, could allow criminals and terrorists to circumvent it, the F.B.I. has said in an affidavit. But the tool is adopted in such secrecy that communities are not always sure what they are buying or whether the technology could raise serious privacy concerns.

[…]

“So, just to be clear,” Joe Simitian, a county supervisor, said, “we are being asked to spend $500,000 of taxpayers’ money and $42,000 a year thereafter for a product for the name brand which we are not sure of, a product we have not seen, a demonstration we don’t have, and we have a nondisclosure requirement as a precondition. You want us to vote and spend money,” he continued, but “you can’t tell us more about it.”

Please, tell us again the one about how if you aren’t doing anything wrong you don’t have anything to worry about.

Meerkat became very popular as a live streaming platform very quickly. And so we knew this day would come as Twitter readies their new acquisition, Periscope, but did it come fast enough? Twitter Chokes Off Meerkat’s Access To Its Social Network:

Friday evening, BuzzFeed News learned from a source familiar with the matter that Twitter was taking steps to break Meerkat’s ability to access its social graph. When we tried adding other accounts, such as the BuzzFeed SF and BuzzFeed FWD Twitter accounts, we noticed lots of inconsistencies with the follower graph numbers.

A Twitter spokesperson confirmed that Meerkat had been cut off.

“We are limiting their access to Twitter’s social graph, consistent with our internal policy,” the spoeksperson said. “Their users will still be able to distribute videos on Twitter and log in with their Twitter credentials.”

This won’t totally kill Meerkat — people will still be able to use it to announce on Twitter that they are streaming — but it will seriously kneecap it.

Time will tell.

I link to this story because it is a good one. It speaks to the power of the Internet, personal networking and just good old fashioned human kindness. I also link to it for one quote, which parallels something I used to say when speaking at leadership workshops.

First off, this is a story about a reunion of a young patient given a kindness by a young nurse. His tale, discussed in the story above, is a hard one to imagine any kid going through. Her story is not that uncommon. Nurses are generally remarkable people. You can see it in that one comment, too, “I wish I would have known. I wish that I would have known more. I wish I could have done more.”

We seldom do know the impact we have on others, I’d tell young high school and college leaders. And even if we do find out, it is usually well after the fact. But what you do, what you say, how we all act, means something to someone. That’s just one of those stories that reminds us of the truism.

Sometimes the headline in no way captures the story. This is one of those times: Chris Koch to speak in Auburn in April.

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