Heading home today. On the one hand it is amazing that you can travel across something like 1,000 miles and nine states in an evening. On the other hand it is amazing that it takes the better part of a day to get home.
Also, I got my first freedom rub today. I passed the time humming Lee Greenwood. Not sure the security guard federal agent got the joke.
We had lunch at Overton’s, where you can get four fried shrimp on a bun for $4.75.
The sunny, stormy view:
And now he’s playing coy:
But, really, they are after your french fries:
Flying out of White Plains:
I have the best travel companion:
She just reads and reads:
Sunset over … let’s call it Tennessee:
On the descent into Atlanta:
We got home around 11 p.m.
photo / weekend — Comments Off on Catching up 3 Jun 12
Never got around to mentioning this at the end of a full week, but that’s what the catch up day is for.
My mother-in-law runs a program at local church called special church. It isn’t even her church, but she’s a giver like that. So this class provides an outlet for some of the members of the local special needs community. There are always projects, like last week’s flower planting:
There are parties, social opportunities, a little bit of scripture, snacks and so on. Everyone there is always smiling. Here are some more of the flowers they planted Thursday:
We wrote names on the bottom of the terracotta and spooned in potting soil and pretty blooming colors. After a while, it was time for the music therapist, who stops by and plays for a half-hour or so every week.
The weather was so nice they did everything outdoors last week. We sat in the side lawn at the church, surrounded by peaceful trees and a memorial sculpture and under picturesque clouds and howled through made up songs and people danced through classic rock and sang What Wonderful World.
Some of us even remembered the end, but no one was really looking forward to it. Sometimes things should just go on.
The Yankee’s parents are celebrating their 40th anniversary this weekend.
The Yankee and family friends conspired to throw them a little surprise party. Here they are walking in the door of a little Italian restaurant they frequent:
Did you hear her say “We say your car?” That was one of their local friends. We parked right next to them and they said “That looks like their car … ” We also parked right next to an out-of-state family member’s car. No one noticed it.
We crammed 28 people into Tutti’s, the delicious little Italian place. Everyone had a great time. My mother-in-law said “These are all of the people we’d want to have dinner with.”
The Yankee and all of the people involved in putting the party together did a great job. The guests of honor had no idea.
One of the brides’ maids produced the dress she wore 40 years ago. Some of their lifelong friends brought out the old photographs.
Here are two snapshots someone showed off, taken just after the young couple had returned from their honeymoon:
Here’s another picture from some time shortly after that:
And these next two pictures were taken on the night they met. This was at a one year reunion for her nursing program. I was sitting tonight next to the lady who set them up, she told me the whole, cute, story.
My mother-in-law is on the far right, decked out in crepe paper. It seemed to be the style of the time. The guy in the awesome jacket was a doctor in that nursing program. (Three of her nursing classmates were at the party tonight.)
Facing the camera in the photograph on the left is the groom-to-be. He’s a bit fuzzy in the original too, but there’s an entire series of pictures where he’s floating in the background, in that posture, in the same place.
She says he tried to pick her up by suggesting they go out to his car and listen to his stereo.
“No way,” she said. But he’d finally win her over. He’d soon tell his friends she was the one. They’d be married a year or so later.
And here they are today, surprised and surrounded by their friends.
We had dinner with our friend Paige tonight. Drove up to her house.
She let me take a picture of the famous Rory:
This is only slightly intimidating. I was shooting her cat with my phone. Paige is a photographer on the side. In fact, she shot our engagement:
It was 17 degrees with about nine inches of snow on the ground. Maybe more. We shot those at a park up the street from The Yankee’s parents’ home, a park where she’d played as a child. There’s a pavilion there. Under that roof, there was six inches of snow covering everything.
It seems we can’t all get together without severe weather, so naturally it rained tonight.
By the time we got back home there was lots of rain.
We ate dinner at a Thai place called Somewhere in Bangkok. Good food, lousy website. The server was … well, she was as American as could be.
Today I fixed a printer problem, which is a piece of equipment normally beyond me. Samford won a huge baseball game in NCAA regional play. I uploaded three pictures to the Tumblr blog.
I love this road. Good quality asphalt, a bike lane basically the entire way from beginning to end. It is quiet because the business of this road is down near the other end. Up here, for the time being at least, it is still undeveloped. It is the victory lap of some of my routes. A fair amount of it is downhill.
I did an easy 20-miler this evening. I’m looking forward to longer rides, which will start back next week.
And if you need a bit of inspiration for, well, just about anything, here’s a video destined to go big. Only 250,000 views so far, but that will change. Tune out the music, and wade through the first two-and-a-half minutes. The reward comes soon after that:
Things to read: Local boy is a good speller. Samford and UAB baseball both make the NCAA regionals. Auburn and Alabama did not.
New York City plans to enact a far-reaching ban on the sale of large sodas and other sugary drinks at restaurants, movie theaters and street carts, in the most ambitious effort yet by the Bloomberg administration to combat rising obesity.
The proposed ban would affect virtually the entire menu of popular sugary drinks found in delis, fast-food franchises and even sports arenas, from energy drinks to pre-sweetened iced teas. The sale of any cup or bottle of sweetened drink larger than 16 fluid ounces — about the size of a medium coffee, and smaller than a common soda bottle — would be prohibited under the first-in-the-nation plan, which could take effect as soon as next March.
That’s a sticky slope, friends.
Two years after the oil spill, the fishing is bad down on the Gulf:
The long-term prognosis for the Gulf’s health remains uncertain.
Recent studies have found higher numbers of sick fish close to where BP’s well blew out and genome studies of bait fish in Barataria have identified abnormalities. Meanwhile, vast areas of the cold and dark Gulf seafloor are oiled, scientists say.
And many fishermen are convinced something’s amiss.
[…]
“We was there to work, but couldn’t,” said Lawrence Salvato, 49, as he stopped for lunch on a dock where he moors a shrimp skiff he runs his wife, Lisa. “Usually people are excited and they can’t wait to get out there. This year, there’s no real incentive.”
He said he made about $10,000 in seafood sales last year compared to $75,000 in 2009. He said his family made do with a $40,000 interim payment they got from BP. Fishermen who haven’t settled legally yet with BP over damages continue to survive on periodic payments from a $20 billion trust fund set up by BP.
“We’re afraid,” Salvato said. “A lot of people are getting out of fishing. They’re afraid.”
“We are no longer a newspaper company,” Sun-Times Media Holdings LLC Editor-in-chief Jim Kirk said in a memo to staff. “We are a technology company that happens to publish a newspaper. We deliver content. And we will deliver content on many platforms and in ways that we haven’t yet fully considered.”
