This is my favorite time in the new house. Sitting in a big chair, reading as the sun starts its slow slide outside. All day long should be just like this.
Thursday
28
Apr 11
For some: Here are your pieces, pick them up as you may
What can you say in the echoes of a day like we’ve just seen? The lucky are blessed beyond measure. Others are setting about the grim business of rebuilding their lives or mourning their losses. There’s no sense of solace. Only blistered hands and red-rimmed eyes. In one place things look just as they did a day before. A short distance away it can appear as if a bomb ripped the heart from a community. For many this is a normal Thursday. For some this is the first day of their new, unexpected life. What can you say to that? What do you feel beyond the mystery of chance and the knowledge of your puny, human vulnerability?
Once in a while you are afforded a glimpse at the absolute best humanity has to offer. The outpouring of support, money, material and manpower some of those communities hit by yesterday’s storms are already receiving is remarkable.
Officials are turning volunteers away in some communities until then can bring a little more order from chaos. Boxes can’t be emptied and replaced fast enough. People are aching to help, donate, ship, whatever. Blood drives in some places had to close today because they had too many donors.
The worst can bring out the best. Sometimes that’s what it takes. Today’s dire problems are going to be next week’s heavy burdens, next month’s inconvenience and next year’s worries. Hopefully that kindness and those giving spirits will endure while the storms’ survivors overcome.
21
Apr 11
Thursday, Thursday, two days after Tuesday
Twenty miles on the bike this morning. So the decadent lunch I had was OK, right?
I had my doubts about the menu in the cafeteria, but they had the best tender pork shoulder ever. And there was dressing. (It isn’t nearly as good as the dressing made by the ladies in my family, but for mass-produced starch-based food you’ve ever had.) The man that dipped my choices said “That’s the soul food, there!”
Yes it was.
Grading in the afternoon. And that got me down to just three things left to grade for the semester. This is progress.
Another day in class, another two hour session with Dreamweaver. The students are building webpages and they are coming along nicely. The lab, though, is very warm. Too many iMacs makes the room a sauna, I suppose. And if that’s as bad as your day gets, you have it made friends.
(I do.)
In the evening there was email, and plenty of it, returning phone calls and reading. Always with the reading.
And since it is Thursday evening, where the energy of the week begins to escape me, I’ll let Conan bring it home. I agree wholeheartedly with his Cap’n Crunch argument, but for the real fun stick around to the 2:15 mark.
Tomorrow: road trip!
14
Apr 11
The Timothy Sumner Robinson lecturer
Washington Post sports columnist — and former Redskins beat writer — Jason Reid was the Timothy Sumner Robinson lecturer at Samford University this spring. He spoke with many classes, the staff at the Samford Crimson, the radio station WVSU and more before delivering his Robinson lecture which focused on social media and sports reporting. Here’s a small sample of some of his advice to students early in the day.
The lecture series is named in honor of Timothy Sumner Robinson, a 1965 graduate of Samford University. He covered the Civil Rights demonstrations in Birmingham, the Johnson White House and, most famously, Watergate. Even amidst Woodward and Bernstein, Robinson wrote more front page stories for the Post than anyone.
Sumner would become a lecturer, an editor in Los Angeles (where he covered the Rodney King trial, the riots and the O.J. Simpson trial) and then Excite, Alta Vista, NBCi and AOL/Time Warner. He was a renaissance man before his time. His family, all charming people, put on this lecture each spring and it has become a highlight of the campus calendar.
(As an experiment: I took this audio via the open air microphone on my iPhone using the free Recorder & Editor app. I edited it in the app. I took the photograph with the iPhone’s camera and then put the two together in iMovie on my desktop machine. If I can move the file, as a wav, from the app to iTunes I could have produced the entire thing by phone. This process worked pretty well, otherwise, but the microphone picks up soft speakers best within two or four feet. A proper mic, or moving to the speaker, is desirable for good quality. Old radio guy that I am, I have a few other audio recording apps in line to try.)
