OK, OK, these are slightly older now than the usual motif for this weekly post, but they’re worth sharing, I think. And, I promise, no more cruise shots for a while.
Read this last one. When do you think it was manufactured?
photo
6
Feb 15
Don’t forget your sea boots
You know, when you look back on it, that’s an enviously pretty view.
Miami from sea.
The phones had just died and we stood there on the deck talking in a small group and wondered how far away we were, how the distance and your perspective is skewed because your mind and your eyes are so limited. That’s just right over there. Look, you can see the buildings!
Trouble is, you can see so many buildings. So many small buildings.
But, you know, if you dropped into the water, here, this is a traffic lane. And at least seeing the shore and all of those distant buildings would give a boost to your morale. Better than being surrounded by empty horizon.
You think of that story of the football player who swam nine miles to shore, because he had an indomitable will.
I tried to tell, and told it so poorly that I just stopped, the tale of John Aldridge, the 45 year old crabber who fell off his boat off Long Island. He could really only remember the boots and the buoy, but the details woven into this january 2014 story remains impressive.
The news about Aldridge was also spreading through Montauk’s fishing community. Much of the town’s commercial fleet was out on the water that morning. Some fishermen heard Sosinski’s anguished first call for help. Others heard Sean Davis’s pan-pan broadcast. And then word traveled from boat to boat, back to the dock and then all over Montauk. The mood in town was grim. Everyone knew the odds: a man overboard, that far off the coast, would very likely never be found alive.
He was in the Atlantic for 12 hours before they found him. Said he’d spent his career conditioning himself for that moment. Surely, though, it wouldn’t take you 12 hours from that shot above to the coast. No way. And this picture is from Miami, not the north Atlantic.
I got the boots part of the story wrong in my telling of Aldridge’s story. (It has been a year since I read it.) But they were important, and I did remember that part.
Hey, it’s Friday.
5
Feb 15
Look back, waaaay back
I don’t know if it every came up in the show, but if the Flintstones had trading cards, they probably looked like this:
Sadly, it is not in mint condition.
I found this in Miami. If you have any idea what it means …
4
Feb 15
Don’t trust the map
Here is a map my phone recorded:
That’s off of a fitness app. A company has a run app and a walk app and a walk-your-dog app (no kidding) and a cycling app. Naturally, that’s the one I got first. Why they don’t simply integrate these into one utility escapes me, but we do know that dog lobby is a powerful one. Anyway, I share that map with you because, on Monday, I tried out one of the gyms on campus I’d never been in before. It was built in the 1960s and has a track running around the outer ring.
Something about the building, though, interferes with the signal getting to the phone and the app. That’s two laps around a circular track floating above a standard gymnasium. The website tells you the distance, but the app was very much in disagreement. So I just turned it off and thought about downloading the walk-your-dog app.
Which probably would have been better than the run, or the way I’ve felt for the past two days. I still have grapefruits in my calves from the exertion, an easy five-mile run. (I knew the lap count and my general time.) Apparently I didn’t stretch enough and I’m reminded of this every time I walk down stairs right now.
Also, we have interesting little maintenance vehicles on campus. They are probably nicer than the older golf carts with plastic screens. And they have racing stripes:
I just thought you’d like to know that.
1
Feb 15
Catching up
The post with the most — leftover photographs, that is.
First, a series of talented people flipping, and the always enjoyable people watching in the background:
It was “Are you shorter than Jeff Graba?” night. The promotion was, if you were smaller — Graba is five-foot-five — then you got in free. This is the only shot of him I got tonight, apparently:
Often, these are mixed vegetables. Occasionally, this is a vegetable medley. This week, they were Italian vegetables.
When they are Italian, I learned, that means they are the opposite of fresh.
Look who I’m hanging out with. They’re doing yoga. They call it black cat pose:
