Breakfast this morning at the Barbecue House, the new weekly tradition. It was quiet today. Few people, lots of tables. Sometimes you can time it like that, and you just want to linger as the place shifts from breakfast and the grilling meat smells drift in as they get ready for the lunch crowd.
Other times you can’t find a seat or walk. Barbecue House is a popular place.
Mowed the lawn for the first time this year. There was nothing remarkable about it, because there is little remarkable about the yard just now. There was a lot of winterdust kicked up, though. Thin grass, drought conditions, sandy soil and my sneezes. The lawn mower and my nasal explosions were the soundtrack of the neighborhood for a brief while.
Wrote big emails. Planned two classes.
Wrote two presentations for upcoming sessions, about 15 pages for 30 minutes or so of talking. I have one more of those to do.
Edited a paper.
Rode 50 miles.
I think I bonked. Probably when I looked down and saw that zero on the computer. And then I realized I was standing rather than pedaling. So I started riding again. My bonk said, aloud I think, “I don’t have the energy for this.” And so the last few miles were just inertia and mindless mindlessness.
Saw some pretty scenery, part of the national wildflower program:
Or is that the county’s “We don’t have money for a fuel budget” program? I always confuse the two:
The attempt to unload a lot of pictures that haven’t appeared on the site this week. Pretty things to look at for you, easy content for me.
And Happy Easter. Hope you enjoyed it in thought, with family, chocolate and peeps.
From the NCAA gymnastics regionals at Auburn last night. See the lady in the background? She’s the coach at Bowling Green. Also, she was one of The Yankee’s high school gymnastics teammates:
Sure you could do that. Right up until it came time to land:
This Michigan State gymnast had a lot of time to admire the ceiling:
At Georgia they call them Gymdogs:
That’s hardly flattering. When they perform as they did last night they should call them superwomen:
West Virginia had a great turn on the beam:
This is one of the Bowling Green gymnasts. The vault always looks a little painful to me …
She’s trying not to fall. She saved it, but this happened to her a few times. Shame, too, it was a nice routine:
The Auburn Arena is now just in its second year of use. They spent $92.5 million building the thing, and it is a handsome facility. For all of that, though, my favorite feature is that wraparound script:
The moon:
Clouds over the Samford University campus:
Told you I was replacing the seat on my bike. Can you tell which saddle is old and which is new?
I love the way the stickers are peeling away from this sign. How many summers do you think it has seen?
Saturday was just another beautiful day in the loveliest village:
Changing The Yankee’s tire:
Fond de Jante? There is a thin site with that name as a URL, but I doubt this website is official. Nevertheless:
They say dressing well is all about the details. The time spent obsessing is rarely repaid in public acknowledgment. Likewise, when repairing a bicycle, the attention paid to mechanical and aesthetic minutia will seldom be fully appreciated or understood by the rider. But, the worth of neither pursuit is diminished.
It means “inside the rim” or “rim base.” This rim tape is the best.
It was better than the Twilight Poorly Acted Emolodramas, though I could have done without the insertion of Team Jacob in the third act. It was not as good as its spiritual predecessors, Star Wars and Shakespeare. (And that’s the only time Lucas gets that I’d bet.) I eagerly await the second movie, The Hunger Strikes Back, even if we have to sit through Romeo and Katniss. I’m also looking forward to the inevitable anti-bullying campaign.
Yes, I’m sure the books are dreadful. (Or the best thing since Potter, which might best Steinbeck and Hemingway in that crowd.) I don’t care to read them. Seeing Donald Sutherland as the most normal-looking guy should be left to stand without any further narrative.
Did something incredible today. We lost an earring down a drain yesterday, but it isn’t the kind of drain you can take apart. So we Googled. And then we called everyone we knew to try to borrow a wet-dry vacuum. Finally we found a friend who’s father had a friend. That man let me, a total stranger, borrow his vacuum.
So there we are, hands and knees, trying to figure out a way to get a four-inch hose fit inside a two-inch drain. Ultimately we settled with putting a little drainage tube inside the wet-dry hose. We kept the vacuum by stuffing the excess hose with a washcloth. On the end of the drainage hose we tied off a stocking.
We delicately send the hose down the drain. On the third try, when I was ready to make intubation jokes, I found a second bend in the drain pipe and twisted accordingly. There was the trap. I slowly pulled everything back out. And at the end of the tube, held to the stocking by the power of the vacuum, was this important little earring.
The Yankee sterilized it and put it away for safekeeping. I walked around like a hero for a while. It was a lucky stab, but it saved the day, so this is a “file it away, it might come in handy one day” story. And we couldn’t have done it without the kindness of a friend and a stranger. So this is also an “I love my town” story.
Had a nice little 25-mile ride. I installed the potential new saddle for a test ride. Did a mile or so and realized it wasn’t set right. Off the bike, into the multi-tool. Move the seat approximately three centimeters, making a much better fit.
It is is stiff as possible. Love it.
As I got back in the neighborhood I got heckled by kids: “Get it! Get it! Make those thighs work!”
I tried to put on a good show, but I doubt they were impressed.
Gymnastics regionals were tonight, and they were very impressive.
I enjoy watching them cheer in the background:
Not sure why they are in disguise though …
And, sadly, this is the last time we’ll see Laura Lane tumble:
The co-scholar-athlete of the year is graduating and moving on to other things. Shame, too. She was a lot of fun to watch.
Six teams compete in the regionals. The top two teams in each region advance to the national championship. Auburn finished fourth, posting their second-highest regional score ever. They’ll be somewhere in the teens, probably, in the final gymnastics rankings of the season. And, we counted, about half their routines this year were performed by freshmen.
Meetings. Meetings about copyright laws. Meetings about stories. Meetings about meetings, at least two conversations worth. And then the emails. Emails about inventory. Emails about recruiting. And then there was a meeting about email. And, finally, emails about meetings.
That kind of day.
I took the long way home.
Somewhere in the middle of nowhere, between Calera and Jemison, Ala.:
They’ve moved! But their new location has the same chicken and the same chili. And you know they are good because they’ve deliberately misspelled both words. But don’t go in the old Dari-Delite. The recipes are not there. This is in Clanton, Ala.:
This is a fairly common misspelling if you search the Googles. But you don’t expect to see it quite so … large. Shame this Prattville, Ala. shop is closed, I’d loved to have walked inside and innocently asked them if they’d noticed anything odd about the sign. Or if Mr. Tripple was in today. Even for a muffler man this has to be galling.
The nine A’s though? That’s just brilliant:
Got my bike back from the shop. It now sports two shiny new shifter covers, a new chain and a tightened cassette.
So that will take care of the safety of my hands, a needed replacement — the old chain was starting to stretch and impacting performance — and fixed an obnoxious rattle on country roads.
The lady that runs the place offered to sell me a new seat because she’d noticed my saddle was giving way. When I bought the bike, used, there was one small tear. I recently rubbed two new spots on it in a stupid decision.
She said she’d just purchased a Felt herself, maybe that’s why she asked me about mine earlier this week, and couldn’t use this saddle.
“What am I going to do with an orange seat?” she said she’d asked herself.
And then through the door walks this sap, orange Felt with a frayed seat.
Saddles are a bit personal, though. She offered it to me for $20, and I talked her into a test ride. I’ll try it this weekend and buy it or return it. I gave her my business card, saying “If you don’t hear from me … ”
Turns out her husband works at Samford too. Small world, big bicycle.
The second-biggest problem with the camera in the iPhone is the depth of field. This looks like a lot more food than it really is.
But, then again, there’s the app that let’s you blur out everything but your focus. (And that biscuit was delicious.) There are also apps that turn your HDR photo into HDRerer, which makes rust look magestic. This is through my dirty windshield, in an oddly lit part of the day, so it doesn’t pop as it could, but:
Think that guy is a beach bum in training? His flip flops do.
To see the real work of an HDR app, consider this picture from a few years ago:
And here’s the treatment:
It really jumps, doesn’t it?
There’s no real particular point to that, other than to say that I had a biscuit for lunch. If you didn’t, you should have. And also, the amount rest of the food really wasn’t that impressive. I’m blaming the frame of the barbecue chicken. The biscuit was the best part, though.
We had a bestseller speak in our class today. Nancy Dorman-Hickson co-wrote the biography on Joanne King Herring, who is a icon of the Republican party in Texas. You might recall her from Charlie Wilson’s War, which demonstrated her role in drumming up support for the United States’ proxy role in the Russo-Afghanistan war:
She was upset, Hickson said, by how overtly sexual she was portrayed in the movie. She is a gentile, Southern lady and so on.
Hickson was great in the class where she talked about freelancing and becoming a book author. She said she got that book contract, in part, because Herring’s people Googled “Southern writer” and “Christian.” And when they did, a small magazine piece she wrote on a Lutheran church event got her foot in the door.
There was a small handful of writers they decided to try out. The prospective authors were to have a phone conversation with Herring, and from there write one of her stories, trying to capture her tone and rhythm.
Hickson says “She was to share one story. Joanne is Southern. Multiple stories ensued.”
