Today was a paperwork day. A small amount of important paperwork was … Worked? Papered? No matter which incorrect verb we use, it means three more things off the to-do list.
I’m also catching up on reading things. There are so many things to read. I am just under three months behind on one read, and eight years behind on another. There’s a lot of reading ahead. There’s always a lot of reading ahead. You welcome a challenge like that. And it’s all great stuff, too. No AI, no second-tier writers. Nothing I don’t want to absorb in some way. It’s a wonderful thing. There’s just … a lot of it.
The volume isn’t a problem. The problem, as ever, is what to consume next … and how in the world can you make a real dent in the stacks?
More and faster. That’s always the answer.
We had a lovely bike ride this afternoon. I titled it “One day my legs’ll surely come back.” I had four splits of 20+ mph, though. And I set three Strava segment PRs, the last one in the final moments of the ride, long after my legs had called it a day.
That was also a fair amount of time after this moment, which was the moment when my lovely bride dropped me for good.
At one point, one of the stronger parts of the ride, I thought I would need to sit up and wait for her. I’d had three big bursts in a row, over a stretch of road that favors my ride over hers. Then I looked over my shoulder and she was right behind me.
Later, on a stretch that should have favored neither of us, it was all I could do to stay on her wheel. I knew early on I was going to be way off the back. It happens from time-to-time. Just settle in and enjoy the view.
One thing I saw was on a new-to-us road. (Most of them are new to us.) On a bit of straight road that went over the freeway, there was a beautiful little side road, veering off at a 45-degree angle. It was quiet, and tree lined and tree-covered. I don’t know where it goes, but
I love all the different styles of field irrigation farmers use. I wish it was the sort of thing that I knew more about. Some of these rigs have signs, though, and I’m eventually going to look them up. Maybe I can become a Wikipedia-level expert.
There was a rainbow there, but I missed it.
Didn’t miss all of this hay, though. How could you? That’s a lot of winter food for the livestock.
Later, after my heart rate returned to normal, I picked the day’s tomatoes. We now have to bowls worth to eat. Plus all of our peaches!
I had four smaller peaches today. I lost count on the number of tomatoes.
Not every day, he said to himself in the sort of conciliatory fashion that usually comes with hair being tossled, or a sweet jab on the shoulder or the word “Slugger,” is meant to be the most productive day of the week. And in a week of slow productivity, that day was today.
I returned to Lowe’s to pick up the garbage can lid I forgot yesterday. It’s a fair drive over there, so I had time to work up some material. And I had a tight four minutes of poor comedy ready for the person at the customer service desk. But here’s the thing about the person at the customer service desk: they don’t care.
That’s not fair. This woman seemed perfectly fine and approachable. She’s just been trained, either by corporate decision or reasonable experience, to not be bothered by anyone that walks through that door and the story they share.
She did explain the corporate red vest policy. Apparently, they aren’t allowed to take them home. So they’re never clean. That’s a long way to go to avoid Halloween photos on the ‘gram. I said, because it was obvious she caught herself saying something that was too much. She agreed. And she let me get that garbage can lid. And she also rung up a few extra purchases. I got some specialty bulbs for some recessed lighting. I picked up some new air filters, because we have a lot of air to filter, and I also got some packing tape, because I need some crispy, sticky, prrrrrrrrbt! PTSD in my life.
I made two other fruitless stops, which built to a nice little mood. Then I hit an upscale UPS store. I say upscale because this place was built for a certain clientele in a certain part of town. You could tell by the “light fawn” shading of the stucco out front. Our last UPS store was in a tired little strip mall. Twice, within the last year or so, someone drove through the store. Going there for more than a few seconds at a time felt like a gamble for that very reason. Today, I was given two things to drop off at the UPS store. One was going back to Amazon. No problem. The other, the young man straight out of Disinterested Young Clerk Central Casting, vaguely assured me he didn’t want the package.
“Uhhh, these instructions usually mean they’ll pick it up?”
Who is they?
“The UPS driver.”
Well see what brown can do for us this week then.
“Huh?”
I got back to the house just in time for the heavy rain to start. Some of our flowering flowers haven’t recovered from Sunday’s rains. This, then, made for a demoralizing scene. Maybe in a week they’ll pick themselves back up, the flowering flowers. Maybe they won’t. This is the headspace I’m reaching for.
After all, I have to simultaneously deal with things like this. This is American fireweed. It’s fire.
As in burning. It’ll burn the flesh right from your bones.
(No, it won’t. — ed.)
It’s actually named that because this is one of the things that first pops up in great abundance after forest fires. It’s a broadly indigenous plant. It has some medicinal uses. Mostly, you forget about this stuff and then wake up in August and this thing is interfering with air travel lanes.
It can grow up to eight to 10 feet, almost over night. I pulled up a lot of it today. All of it in a hard-to-reach spot. I am wondering if it was nature or a person that thought this was a great practical joke.
I looked in some storage for a few items I can’t put my hands on. Still can’t find them. But I did pull out some good thread, high quality envelopes and some thank you cards. I am sitting on some weird, arbitrary fine line of “Will this be useful? Or should this be stored and forgotten until after it would have been useful?”
Which is to say, how many times have I purchased a batch of thank you cards while six other blank cards sit in a drawer and I’ve forgotten about them?
The next thing to do — that’s probably not true, but this is on a long list — is to make sure that all of the things are placed in rooms and drawers and shelves that make sense for when and where they’ll be used. All of that tape I picked up today was placed in a cabinet in the mudroom. Because it doesn’t need to go in a kitchen cabinet, and we might forget it if we put it in the basement somewhere. There are dozens of these little decisions.
And why is that large nail protruding from the wall at almost eye level? I spent a few minutes solving that problem, because the nail is in use, but it is inelegantly applied. Martha Stewart would just cringe.
Also I disguised a bit of floor under the stairs in the basement. This is the area where things with no daily demand will go. But you can build a little box fort around that area, so that, one day, when you are cleaning up down there, and you find the old seashells that would have been useful for that one project, and the extra wood flooring and such, you’ll smack yourself in the head remembering that you did have some walnut-shaded maple, and a bunch of broken bits of ocean life. And you’ll wonder why you built up this box fort. Because it made sense on a rainy day in 2023.
Oh, I changed the air filter, and added an innovation. I wrote the date on the air filter, so I’ll know when to replace it. (Don’t worry, there’s a notation in my calendar, as well.)
The best part of the day is that my in-laws arrived safely this evening. They’re going to spend the weekend with us. They sampled our peaches.
Like that new basket, don’t ya? I surely do.
Anyway, they said the peaches are delicious. And they are! I had a few after dinner tonight.
If fresh fruit is involved in the best part of your day, no matter how productive the day was, it was a pretty good day, Slugger.
We inherited this giant L-shaped wardrobe. A functional IKEA piece. It doesn’t match our furniture, or fit amongst it, but it is perfectly serviceable. When we moved, as I have mentioned, the movers moved it downstairs for us. I’d disassembled it into its four base parts and they sweated and streamed and muttered and heroically got it down. And then those poor guys moved our stuff in.
Eventually, I put some of the pieces together. I may never rebuild it into one piece, because I rushed through dismantling it, because see above, and took no notes. And I have no instructions. But there’s this full-length, full-length-and-then-some mirror on one part of that wardrobe. And today I re-installed it.
Sorta. That’s a two-person job. There are four hinges, eight screws, and the ones in the middle are done. The rest will require some muscle, and perhaps some more muttering.
It was demoralizing to find that the best approach was to take apart what I’d recently put together so I could get the mirror in place. And even that only partially.
I found a stopping point. How does one find a stopping point in an endless, intractable project? You say, “OK, enough of that.” And then you go outside.
It was a lovely afternoon, much better spent in the backyard than the basement. So I deadheaded daisies and hibiscus and pulled up a few weeds. I was rewarded with a new bowl of tomatoes.
This, in my estimation, was an excellent tradeoff.
I wanted to do this as a daily status update, as a joke, but I was afraid the joke would come off as boorish.
Early this evening I floated for 75 minutes, until the wind was chilly, and told myself I should do more of that, and for longer.
I only got out because it started raining. Wouldn’t want to get wet.
Also, it was dinner time. The day has moved swiftly, even when I have not, and that’s not an altogether bad thing. Though I would vote for consistency in days, and I would vote for them to feel longer than today did.
Let’s dive back into the Re-Listening project, because I need to catch up before I get … really behind. (Right now I’m 13 discs in arears.) I’m playing all of my old CDs in the order in which I acquired them, which sounds easy enough. But there’s a ridiculously overwrought process involved. First of all, the CDs are all in their big CD books. This part is neatly and ordered — though we’ll come to a moment, later in the Re-Listening project — when I don’t recall which book comes next.
From these books, I pull out the CDs and put them in a miniature CD book for travel. (Since the point, for some reason, is listening to these in the car.) Right now that book isn’t in the car, but here on my desk. I am patting it confidently now. Also, I am at the end of what that book will hold, so those CDs will need to come out of the mini-book and go back to their proper homes. So I need to reload the book. Oh, but four of the CDs that have been temporarily in the miniature book are still in the car’s CD player. They need to come out and go back to their proper place. Which means the reverse has to happen to refresh the playlist. Also, the last CD in the player is the first CD in a double-set. Everything is in the in-between. So let’s dive in.
In April of 2000 a friend of mine burned me a CD (remember doing that?) that was, at that time, seemingly a small release. (That was a thing that happened, and we didn’t even blame the supply chain. Things were just limited sometimes.)
It was Guster. We’re talking about Guster’s debut album, “Parachute.” They were just a local Boston act at the time. People were just barely downloading questionable tracks online. You can, of course, get the thing in all sorts of formats now. CD, vinyl, digital. Back then, the first few thousand prints were sold as being by Gus. It’s a different time, because that was a different time. But they put it out themselves, because Guster was a trendsetter, even in the mid-90s.
Adam Gardner and Ryan Miller split the lead vocal duties, which was what they were doing back then, but that felt odd pretty quickly. Owing to some of that, and it being their earliest recorded work, it isn’t as good as “Goldfly,” or anything else that comes after, but it’s worth having.
Probably, people bought this at their early shows. Or they heard it because their roommate or their sibling had it on. That song is the first one you heard. The blueprint for the next decade of what Guster was going to become follows up right after that.
I never got especially attached to this record because, by the time it was given to me I was already two more albums into their catalog. It seemed like going back in time to a more raw, nascent thing, and who wanted to go back to that?
This is the title track, with Gardner doing the lead. This song got mixed up for a lot of people with a Coldplay song of a similar name. And early 21st century digital media humor ensued.
Apparently some people thought this was, in fact, a Coldplay song. I find that difficult to believe. But I own no Coldplay records, so I could be altogether wrong in this.
Someone also burned me a copy of the first disc of a Dave Matthews Band concert album, “Live at Red Rocks 8.15.95.” I wonder why I don’t seem to have the second disc. Now there’s a 23-year-old mystery that’ll bother me for four or five minutes. Anyway, recorded in 1995, when the band was touring to support “Under the Table and Dreaming,” this was released in 1997 and given to me in the spring of 2000. It went double platinum and, from here, just reads like a live version of a greatest hits CD. Nothing wrong with that.
“Seek Up”
“Proudest Monkey”
“Satellite”
“Two Step”
“The Best of What’s Around”
“Recently”
“Lie in Our Graves”
“Dancing Nancies”
“Warehouse”
I wonder why I didn’t get that second — oh! Look! This is a version of “Warehouse” before the Wooo became a thing.
If you’re wondering about the Woo becoming a thing, it’s a bit of a call and response. Just a few years later, it was the thing to do with this song.
Somehow, I never really listened to this CD a lot. So there are no impressions or anecdotes to go along with this one. In fact, I’d all but forgotten I had it. I just never played the thing. Selected tracks always seemed to be on the radio, so maybe that’s a part of it.
I played this one more, a not-for-release Black Crowes EP from 1998. This was sent to radio stations, complete with two callout hooks at the end of the thing. Those hooks were for promotional bits. I picked this up because the station I was at didn’t want it and I did. There are seven tracks here, and six of them are all of the Black Crowes catalog I need. This EP was meant to support “Kicking My Heart Around.”
“Jealous Again” is on here, and that song was eight years old by the time this came out. “She Talks To Angels” was seven years old. “Remedy,” “Thorn In My Pride” and “Sting Me” were all six years old. The one I really wanted, because I was never buying a Black Crowes album for just one song, was “Hard To Handle,” which was also eight years old.
Remember, this EP is from 1998. (I got it in 2000.) The Crowes’ version of “Hard To Handle” was from 1990, which explains a lot about that video.
But that song was, then 30 years old, of course.
For years now, my goal has been to find the right mixture of musically savvy, but musically inexperienced young people and hook them on that Black Crowes cover. When they appreciate the awesomeness and intensity of that, I will play the Otis Redding original and watch their minds evaporate.
That’ll be a tricky group to find, of course, because they need to be able to appreciate a certain level of glam rock/jam band, they need to know about Otis Redding, but they don’t need to know all about Otis Redding.
The only problem with this goal is that you can’t just go around and say “Do you know about Southern rock bands with disproportionate amounts of attitude relative to their talents, and do you have an appreciation that the King of Soul is better than most everything that came after him, but not know about his posthumous releases?” Believe me, I’ve tried. It kills a conversation dead.
And it can bring a long blog post to a quick halt, too.
cycling / photo / Thursday — Comments Off on Grab some pruners, let’s prune 27 Jul 23
I spent the morning with a pair of pruning shears in my hands. There were daisies to deadhead. There’s shade on that side of the house that time of day, and there was a great breeze this morning. All the daisies were cut back. It was actually a pleasant outdoor activity, given the heat wave. And now, hopefully, in another two or three weeks the daisies will show us new flowers for the effort.
The big decorative show shrubs also got a little trim. Some other weeds were pulled from the earth. A few more pokeweed plants, some vines, an oddly emerging tree sapling all came out. On the corner, there’s a trellis, it is in the sun at that time of day, which the sprawling roses enjoy. I noticed that amidst the thriving roses there was one, big, dead branch. That needed to be cut away, and I had some pruners right there in my right hand. So I did the thing where you follow it around the other growing things, through the trellis, and down to the earth. That’s when I found out why that one was dead. Someone had cut it, and left it in place.
In took me about two minutes to make four strategic cuts and carefully pull the thorny thing out of the trellis, and away from the happily growing roses. Why no one else had done that will just remain a mystery, right there alongside what that oddly placed light switch in the hall is supposed to do.
There’s an oak tree on the other corner of the house. It has a wonderful little fork right about eye height. Soil got in the crook of that tree somehow or another. And from that soil had emerged a strand of poison ivy. I had one bad run-in with poison ivy in the oughts, and so I carefully cut that back. Then I put away my bucket of weeds, my pruning shears and washed my hands. And then I took a shower, just to be sure. And then I washed my clothes for good measure. (And being careful, and more observant than I was in 2007-or-whatever, I did not get Urushiol on me.)
After some mid-day store errands, I took a little bike ride. It was the absolute hottest part of the day, which wasn’t the problem. The problem was that I stopped for a few minutes in the early going, and that allowed the sweat to pour, rather than evaporate in the wind.
This means sweat is getting in my eyes. And I am, of course, riding on brand new roads. I mean, brand new. I mean, pulling up more than one map to make sure I am following my plan. Because of the sweat stinging away, and alternating eyes, and because they are new roads, I did not follow my plan perfectly. But close enough. Trying new roads on your bicycle is such great fun.
I just could not keep the perspiration from my eyes, and after a half hour or so of that, a strange, full-body sensation came over me. I think that all of the eye rubbing and eye irritation felt a lot like how you feel just after a real big, long cry. And, suddenly, the rest of me figured that out. Now my chest and my lungs and my stomach and everything else is paying attention. What’s wrong? Is something wrong? Something is wrong. Should we be concerned? Emotional protocols activated. We’re tightening everything up! The mind wanders, even when you aren’t aware of it.
Before all of that, I saw what has to be the largest excavator east of the Mississippi. I know there’s not much here to use as scale (other than those two big tractors) just remember, this was mid-bike ride, and I was using one eye at a time.
When I found that closing both eyes was the most comfortable condition, it was time for this little recovery ride to end. Fortunately, I was in the neighborhood. Down one hill, around the corner and up the driveway. Do you know how hard it is time your stop, so you don’t foolishly ram your garage door while riding with your eyes closed? Neither do I, but I thought about trying it.
This was the temperature when I got back inside.
Here’s the thing. I could do that four or five more times and be just fine. A lifetime in sticky subtropical climes means you can easily adjust to the condition. Only, I don’t want to be in a heatwave for that long anymore.
Hours and hours later, I still feel red-eyed.
In the early evening I deadheaded the daisies in the backyard. I pruned a bit on the big beautiful hibiscus bush. I watered a few other plants. And then I set out to fix this door.
This building is a little decorative garden shed. It isn’t wide enough, or deep enough, to walk into. But there are some handy shelves in there. Great for fertilizer and other gardening accessories, and we intend to do that. But, if you’ll notice those two planks right in the middle of the door. They were missing from the door. Today was the day I got around to studying the problem because, really, I want to store gardening accessories in there, but you need to be able to protect them from the elements. So I looked at the door, figuring I could just cut some thin lumber, bluff my way through the tongue-and-groove and have an actual, functioning door, even if it was badly mismatched.
But then I found the two original pieces of lumber.
There are two morals to this little story. The first one is this. The tool you have is not *always* the best tool. Pruners are not staple removers. It seems that the previous owners tried to reattach this wood with staples. They protrude from the outside in, but they did not make it into the cross brace. They were, in fact, just in the way of things. So I pulled out one staple with the pruners and thought, This will work just fine and then, buoyed with the overconfidence that comes with luck, I managed to stab myself in the left thumb.
So, if we’re keeping score, I have now invested blood and sweat into the new house. Tears, TBD.
Here’s the second moral to the story. The easy, quick, good-enough, halfway solutions to small problems you make will one day be noticed, and questioned, by others. (By now, I could write a dense pamphlet on some of the previous owners’ decisions. Nothing huge, or uncorrectable, but a lot of it curious.) Better to do it right. Or better. Aim higher than good-enough, is the point.
The door on that little gardening building has been repaired. One more thing off the list. (And it’s a fun list! This is going to be fun to accomplish and remove things on this list!) And my thumb, which is perfectly fine, is sporting a cool bandage.
And now there’s a cat laying on my left forearm. That’s either cuddle therapy for the scratch on my thumb or a sign that I should shut down the computer for the night.
Started the day with some good ol’ fashioned house cleaning. My lovely bride’s mother is coming for a visit and we have to hide more boxes and clean the floors and give another big push toward making this look more like a home than an abandoned warehouse. More a place that looks like people could live in it rather than a low-budget dystopian landscape.
I kid, of course. We’re basically there. Because we’ll have company the guest bedroom is coming online. After that we’ll only have the dining room to go.
The last time we moved my mother-in-law came to visit at precisely the right time, injecting some much needed momentum into our efforts and helped us unpack the dining room. I reminded her of that recently, not to suggest she should do it again, I said, but to point out how important that was to pulling us across the finish line … and are you sure you aren’t interested in doing that again?
She doesn’t have to do that again.
We had a technician come in and pick up some testing equipment they’d left earlier this week. We passed the test. All systems go. The good news there is that all of the things I’ve put on the back burner because of this can now be placed back on the front burner. Ehh, Monday, maybe.
I made a trip to the Rowan campus today. Had to take care of a little paperwork. Stopped in to meet the dean. We talked for more than two hours. I don’t know how many one-on-one chats I’d had to add together with my previous deans to total two hours, but that math problem would span several deans, for sure.
We talked about the area. We talked dialects. We talked about the move, and the mysterious light switch in our hallway. He told me about the 100-year-old house his family moved into when they first came here in the 1990s.
We discussed the Edelman College classes I might like to teach in the future. I’d sent him a list of classes in the catalog that I can credibly lead, and he detailed where each of those is going in the future. And, it seems, there will be plenty of options to set up a fun little corner of coursework. It is a ball-is-in-your-court kind of conversation, a conversation that will run into next spring and beyond; it is a conversation I’ve never been offered before. Hopefully good things will come from it, and so now I’m coming up with ideas for classes and curricula.
Then the dean pulled out a piece of paper that showed a map of one of the college’s buildings. These are the offices for this unit. This is a classroom for this. That’s the newspaper. Over here is the TV studio. And this room here is going to be a new kind of lab. He described it to me, and in the process of explaining the vision they have for that lab he mentioned the idea of creating a working community newsroom. A hyperlocal project that is both classroom and practical. Now we’re talking about journalism, news deserts, coverage areas, the possibilities and concerns, the successes and liabilities of a newsroom of this sort. And this is part of why the conversation went on for more than two hours. Then the dean mentioned some other specific needs he sees for underserved communities. If anything comes from that, it would be an important contribution. That he sees, at least conceptually, the need, is a big, positive signal.
Then I chatted with the dean and the associate dean about the 3+1 model the Edelman College has helped pioneer for the university. If you want to enroll, but aren’t near the main campus, or your circumstances don’t allow you to come in as a traditional student, they’ve created a partnership with community colleges. It creates convenient, and affordable opportunities, to further a person’s education. It was nice to see their enthusiasm for the program, and great to hear. Innovation with rigor is the sort of thing a university can do well.
By the time I got back to the house it was after 5 p.m., and my mother-in-law had already taken the big house tour. Now we’ll do a little visiting, so, to play us out …
We saw Barenaked Ladies just last night in Philadelphia, remember. Here’s some more of the show.
“Hello City,” is from the “Gordon” album, and it is one of those songs with some bitter-tasting lyrics disguised by tempo and instrumentation.
It’s happy hour again.
And “Brian Wilson,” of course, is about the Beach Boy, Al Jardine Brian Wilson.
Oddly enough, Brian Wilson actually covered the song. It’s as surreal as it should be.
Maybe Jardine has as well? I dunno. Let’s look tomorrow.
That’s enough for now. We’ll get a couple more days out of the BNL show, so if you’re waiting for a favorite, come back tomorrow. You may see it here. See you tomorrow.
