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Thursday

Alabama / iPhone / Samford / Thursday / video — Comments Off
26
Aug 10

A loooongish Thursday

Occasionally, when you wake up before the sun, you want to spend all day in sunglasses.

When you spend the early morning hours trying to figure out a particularly tricky issue that involves mathematics and then still wake up before the sun … well, it is best to reach for the welder’s eye guard.

Spent the morning discussing experimental designs to research media effects in class. The guy next to me brought strawberries. And because I had forsaken breakfast they smelled even 16 percent better than normal. He then returned to his coffee mug. And then he produced a bottle of water. Who knows what else was in his bag.

The class is a good one though. Our professor is internationally renowned, a very kind and engaging man. He has a deep stash of jokes and a very personable way about his seminar class. I suspect it will become an incredibly useful class by the time it is finished.

He’s also on my dissertation committee, so I’m doubly lucky.

After class I found my dissertation chair, another prolific and well respected researcher. We have nice conversations and he always has a handful of good ideas. We’re getting close to answering all the biggest questions and solving the largest fundamental problems with my dissertation idea. Ultimately it is making the whole thing a little bit easier, I think.

Had a meeting with my boss at Samford. We’re co-teaching a class together this semester. Should be a good class, now that the prep has been formalized. I will teach a bit about Strunk & White. Just doing my part to pass along the idea of omitting needless words.

I also met with the editor of the paper, who will hopefully omit many needless words, and the ad manager, who will hopefully add many paid words. It is the circle of news.

That’s about it for the day. Oh, and one other video. Did you know that Calera is, apparently, the fastest growing city in the state? The Oracle at Wikipedia says their population has tripled since the 2000 census. Here is a little snippet of town:

This time next week we’ll be visiting a new section on the site. I’m very excited for it. This time tomorrow we’ll be celebrating Pie Day. I’m always very excited about that as well.

adventures / Alabama / Samford / Thursday / video — Comments Off
19
Aug 10

Now that’s a day

My day started at 5 a.m. for the second time this week. When did yours start? There are people who are already awake by then. I saw them on the road, biking, or at the gym, working out. These are disturbed individuals. I’d say something about waking up that early twice this week, but all of those people did too.

Of course it hit the mid-90s today, and at the early hour it was only 77 degrees with 94 percent humidity, so they are most likely just brilliant self-preservationists.

Another sporadic new feature, Today’s Mystery:

What do they make in there?

Had a class this morning, titled Researching Media Effects. It is taught by an internationally renowned scholar who is the new dean of our graduate program. He’s bringing about swift changes, the kind of things that make you wish he’d had the job a few years back.

Over the summer they’ve been renovating all of our labs, and there is a great deal of promise for future research and hopefully a little of it will help when I get to my dissertation, which is only just around the corner. This is my last class and I’ll be start preparing for comprehensive exams soon.

Time flies when you’re insanely busy, I guess.

Anyway, the class is about researching media effects and given the professor and the reading list it is already one of the best classes of the curriculum. I’m looking forward to the class, but I’d rather still be in the summer.

Visited Samford. Had lunch. We had a church media workshop underway today and I sat in a few of those sessions. I had a meeting with the boss to receive more marching orders for the semester. Had a nice long meeting with the new editor, who is a very collected young woman. I suspect that her staff will put out some quality stories and great papers before too long.

I sold a few cardboard boxes. We bought a few extras for the move and they went unused. The people that sold them will buy them back, making me think I might be in the wrong business. Glenn Beck wants you to invest in cardboard, but there is a humble income to be found in corrugated materials.

And then I headed home. The best thing about a nice afternoon drive:

The clouds. Or the cloud. That’s actually one cloud I chased for a good long while. The road turned just before I got under the thing and the curve never bent the car back underneath. But at least I caught some meaningless video.

We headed out to an owl release this evening. Turned into the parking lot with the crowd, and asked a police officer working the parking traffic what the event was.

“Band-o-Rama.”

So we left, having dodged a musical bullet.

The owl release was just up the road, because nothing motivates previously captive birds like percussion and low brass. Only the owl release had been postponed because of bad weather. But the weather was beautiful. It took three people to explain the delay and hand out fliers to the guests. “Fledglings No More” will take place in September.

At dinner I physically hit the wall. I stood up to get my drink, blinked and felt it. The 5 a.m. part of the day had officially won.

So I edited two videos, wrote this, had dinner and planned tomorrow. It’ll be another great adventure! Hope yours is even better!

adventures / errands / hobby / memories / photo / Samford / Thursday — Comments Off
12
Aug 10

Part of a day in pictures

Pretty bird

The cardinals in our neighborhood are very shy. I’ve been patiently chasing them, and finally got a picture or two of the male. We played this circling, chase game around the trees in the backyard. After a bit I changed the rules and went under the tree. He didn’t expect that.

Pretty bird

Tried to get some work done on the car today, but the shop I visited had a slight problem with a key machine this morning. The guy said the repair man was coming at noon. I left my number and asked him to call me when the machine was fixed so that he may hoist my car onto it.

Because, if there’s one thing we’ve learned from amusement parks and forgotten to extrapolate to the rest of our lives, you’d rather not be the first person up on the freshly repaired equipment.

So I went to a giant antique store. I’m saving that story for the weekend. I walked the whole place, no phone call. After an amount of time that is surely beyond what it should take to fix one machine, the mechanics of which I know nothing about, I returned to the shop. The repair guy hadn’t yet showed up. So I called it an afternoon.

Time and temp

That was the temperature when we went out for dinner. In other news, this is August, but still. We had dinner at Cheeburger Cheeburger, which is a place that The Yankee and I have never enjoyed together. There were two in Birmingham, for a time, but we have no memory of a mutual visit. So this is a new experience. This is also new:

Cheeburger

Cheeburger has always displayed the Polaroids of the hungry people who’ve eaten their one-pound burger (I’ve never tried). Previously the pictures covered the walls like a wallpaper, which was an interesting expression of growth, much like a celluloid bacteria. Haven’t visited in a while? Oh the pictures have expanded around the corner and down the baseboard. That sort of thing.

The last time I was here they were moving up to the ceiling. The surrounded-by-people-promoting-their-new-metabolic-problem atmosphere was a terrific exhibition. You couldn’t help but staring at the faces and the little notes people left behind. I understand why they went to the stacks, for space concerns, but this new display method ruins the point. You don’t want to look through pictures in stacks like that. It would feel like too much work, or feel too intrusive. So you just see the stacks on the wall and go about your meal.

I wonder when they finally make the decision to throw away some of the old pictures. Maybe they have a little ceremony.

We drove around until we found a field on a quiet country road where we could see the night’s festivities. I always oversell the Perseids in my mind. One of the astronomers on the Samford faculty sent us a note where he mentioned that some experts were expecting up to 100 visible meteorites per hour if you got in a good spot. I’ve learned to temper my expectations — I want 100 a minute, like some sort of movie theater intro film — but still haven’t learned to forget taking pictures of the event. This is the one I got.

Perseids

The background are actually stars I shot tonight. I caught no Perseid meteorites on my camera (The Yankee got TWO!) but we saw several and had a great time, sitting in the dark and quiet and heat of the evening. My best picture of the night:

A plane

The plane! The plane!@

Thursday — 3 Comments
5
Aug 10

The story of our air conditioner

The Yankee decided she’d like to have a digital thermostat for the house. So we picked one up the other day and that was going to be one of our little chores for today.

So I open the open-proof packaging, find the instructions in the proper language, pull out the parts and settle in. Step One: Discontinue power to the air conditioner. OK, no problem for most.

The one difficulty in the new house being that the circuit breakers were vaguely labeled. I’ve been exploring the electricity and have figured out the circuit breaker layout, but there’s no air conditioner. Outside, below the main, there is a faded A/C inscription. Success! So I flip it, go inside and we removed the old thermostat for the new.

Only the new thermostat isn’t the right model.

So off comes the new, and back on goes the old:

The old thermostat

Only it now doesn’t work. So I take it off again, reinstall it once again. Still nothing.

On the air conditioning unit itself there is a phone number. I call to see if they’d offer a little telephone troubleshooting. It seems I shouldn’t have turned off that circuit, but rather a different one. I’ve probably blown a fuse in the attic. The guy sends me back up into the attic and tells me it should be in here:

Where's the fuse?

Fuses can take on many appearances. The attic light doesn’t penetrate this portion of the room. It is dark, hot and this is all stored in a section that isn’t exactly comfortable. The roof slants down at a significant angle here. There are exposed nails to duck, rafters to dodge, plywood to step on. It has to be 115 degrees up there, so I’m sweating a great deal again.

My abilities as an electrician reach just far enough for me to know when I’m about to become a danger to myself. So I start calling people that might know a little bit more about this stuff than I do. I sent photographs. We discuss possibilities. (No, the round thing with the yellow and white sticker isn’t it. Yes, the thing just beneath it is hot.)

I take my pictures to Lowe’s, because I’m going to have to buy a new fuse anyway, I figure. So we head out, my mind imagining the heat rising inside the house. The trip to the fix-it store is always slower when you have something to fix. The Yankee returns the thermostat that is the wrong model for our situation. I find a guy who knows electricity. I tell him the story. He says, “Sure. You look here, flip this, do that, and the fuses are there. It’ll look like this.”

So he shows me the example. He sells me fuses. I pick up a voltmeter, because I have to be a grown up eventually. We head home. I’m eager to solve the problem, turn the air back on and get back to the day. I go back to the attic. I find this:

Is there a fuse in there?

I pull the black handle, flip down the gray panel and … no fuse. So I’m back to calling people for advice. I decide to close this little box up, so I flip up the gray panel, try to click the black handle back in place and dislocate my thumb.

I have weak thumbs. I haven’t done this in a long while and, to make up for lost time, I did it but good. (You can tell by the blinding white hot light and the mutterings I uttered and the exclamations I exclaimed.) My thumb goes right back, but it’s going to hurt for a good while.

And that’s when I gave up. We called for an air conditioning guy. Our home inspector suggested someone. We called that gentleman and he showed up within the hour. I explained the story, we climbed into the attic. He told me where I should have turned off the air — that switch above — and said there was a reset button in that jumble of wires. Turns out I was very close to finding the button. And pressing that button would have solved the problem. He reached in, pushed the magic button, sealed the giant box of wires up tight and was on his way.

This took all day, lots of aggravation and a now aching hand. We have fuses we don’t need. We feel less than intelligent, missed the farmers market and gave an HVAC guy an easy laugh and a few bucks.

Stupid thermostat.

We walked through the new neighborhood this evening. We are within walking distance of the Publix. We have this stream nearby:

The neighborhood creek

We met five people — also walking, running or biking — they all said hello.

friends / memories / photo / Pie Day / Thursday — Comments Off
29
Jul 10

The pre-move

The heat index only made it up to 99 degrees today. And I did my part, I tried, to get that last extra degree so I could say “Hey, I moved furniture in triple-digit temperatures today.”

Because 99, somehow, doesn’t sound impressive.

And that’s when you know sunstroke has set in.

So the recliner went downstairs to the garage. One of the rocking chairs joined its mate. The living room chair found its way safely into the garage. Numerous boxes, all of our books all made it downstairs. The plan, since the move is tomorrow, is to sling everything from the garage onto the truck and call it a day.

This evening we packed up the kitchen. All of our clothes have been dutifully stored in wardrobe boxes. Later I’ll tear down the network and pack up the televisions.

Even still, I managed to do three voiceovers this morning. But the place looks entirely different from that, even 12 hours later. Now it looks like a cardboard factory explosion.

Pie Day

We had our last regular Pie Day with Ward tonight. (Incidentally, that’s the banana cream pie, which is new to Jim ‘N’ Nicks, and quite tasty.)

Ward

I’m a fairly sappy and sentimental person, and waxing on about it is possible, and would be silly. Ward, there, has looked after us for a long time. We’ve been coming here for five-and-a-half years. This is as much a part of our history and social culture as anything else we do. And we’ll still make it here when we are in town visiting, but this was our last regular visit.

Yes, barbecue means that much. Pie means that much. That it was the first excuse I had to get my eventual wife to have a bite to eat with me means even more. (As I’ve mentioned before, it was a competitor’s waitress’ line about how “Friday is Pie Day” that cinched the deal. When The Yankee and I were standing in a parking lot one afternoon I impulsively invited her for a barbecue sandwich. She hedged. And then I invited her for pie. Friday, I said, is Pie Day. You just can’t argue with logic like that, friends.)

We’ve had untold celebrations here. Birthdays, graduations, quiet nights of dinner for two, loud nights of dinner for a dozen. This has always been our date night and we’ve always incorporated everyone that wanted to come. I used to keep count of the people, stopping somewhere around four dozen, that joined us for Pie Day.

And now when I mention it — or even when I don’t mention it — on Twitter people respond to it even people I haven’t yet met in person.

Sure, The Yankee and I will still have Pie Day. Yes, I’m looking forward to finding the new home for the event. But, still, I hold onto things, tightly and closely. And this has been a wonderful event worth holding onto for a long time now.

We managed to sit in the same table where we ate there the first time.

And now, so I don’t waste any more of your time on it, cute cat pictures:

She's helping.

She’s helping.

She stopped helping ...

She stopped helping.

And now for a late night and early morning of last minute panic packing…