Thursday « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Thursday

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29
Sep 22

This is a recovery week – Thursday

She did great, but today got out of control in a hurry.

Much like when the driver of the red pickup truck cut off my wife and caused her to crash her bike at about 25 miles per hour.

This morning, one doctor’s office visit and an X-ray turned into a surgical consult. We’d been hoping that the collarbone would settle itself down, but the past week, the relaxation of the muscles and all of that, have actually shown the true extent of the problem. The first doctor was — what was that reaction? Appalled, Stunned? Crestfallen? — a bit shaken by today’s X-ray. What the pictures said was that surgery is the right answer. Avoiding surgery, at this point, is a game of chance, but, really, delaying the inevitable.

The doctor says, “I’ll let you think about it.”

Not that there’s much to think about, really. Young and active and planning on staying that way, the best outcome is the one you want. That’s definitely surgery. The surgical outcome is far more controlled. But, for a week, she’d been hoping to avoid that.

It’s funny, you spend a week trying to will something to happen, gritting through terrible pain, and then one photo that makes the point, clear as day. The space between the bone fragments was large enough to write “surgery” in a substantial font.

I’m not sure how many sentences we’d gotten into the subsequent “think about it” conversation when he came back into the exam room.

“Have you eaten anything today?”

And that was when the day turned into a sprint. If there’s a surgery, someone should come into town to help out. Her mom will be on the next plane. We need to get her from the airport. Arrangements made. Arrangements changed.

There needs to be some straightening up around the house, then. New sheets on the guest bed. Floors vacuumed. Room made in the closet. Extra bathroom opened. Coffee purchased. And and and. I’m also still in a quixotic campaign to get her painkiller prescription refilled.

The surgical center called. There had been a cancellation, can we come even earlier? We could and we did. There was scarcely time to think or react. We just did, all day. Maybe it is better that way. Less thinking and worrying and fretting.

Because there hasn’t been enough of that in the last week.

And so I found myself sitting in the foyer between the waiting room and the carport of the surgical center, answering work email, because that’s what important right then, I guess. What else was I going to do?

She did great and she’s doing great. But that’s why there’s not more here.

But don’t forget: Catober begins this weekend.

photo / running / Thursday — Comments Off
15
Sep 22

Scenes from a run

Went for a short run after my bike ride from work-to-house. This is almost a brick workout, then. And my first run since last week. On the one hand, this makes two weeks in a row featuring a run. On the other hand, that’s hardly a note of distinction. On the third hand this is the time I’ve run twice in two weeks since July. On the fourth hand, why are we counting a third hand?

Anyway. My knees will hurt for a good two, three days after this. So you better enjoy these pictures.

If you must run, run either at night, or in the golden hour.

Around here, you’ll bump into deer during either of those times. And this doe is unbothered by my existence.

Her fawn doesn’t yet know any better. Still losing spots, gaining experience, and posing casually for photographs.

I ran past that deer, noticed the baby hadn’t flinched, turned and walked back to take that picture. I’m easily within five feet of the fawn.

Sometimes the light conspires with the tree cover and you get something quite nice.

Best part of an otherwise sloppy run.

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8
Sep 22

So much driving

The problem is that this trip involves a full day. The good part is that we stopped for good barbecue along the way. And, also, the weather was much better than our Saturday drive.

The other problem is that I already miss the pool, but what can you do?

This is the Rockport Generating Station is a coal-fired power plant. It features two of the largest coal units built, and is connected to the grid with the largest lines allowed in the U.S. (It is scheduled to be shut down in 2028.)

Also, this is apparently the tallest smokestack in Indiana, and, indeed, one of the tallest in the world at 1,038 feet. Wikipedia says it is the 33rd tallest, globally, the sixth tallest in the U.S. and seventh tallest in North America.

Shoutout to whomever compiles this data for the rest of us.

This, meanwhile, is a 17-foot tall fiberglass model of popcorn. It sits outside of a store that pops 90 different varieties.

It isn’t closed, but that’s one scary parking lot.

Some of the corn you can get in that store may have come out of these bins.

Or maybe these, which were just up the road.

And, look! That’s the field that fills that bin.

Just kidding. This corn goes way up to the other side of town, I bet.

Corn produces something like $3.28 billion a year in Indiana which, as a state, ranks eighth in the nation in ag exports, and is the 10th largest farming state.

It would be easy in these quiet little parts of southern Indiana to think that’s the economy, but not hardly. Indiana produces more steel than anyone. And the chief economic driver is manufacturing.

Someone has to make the popcorn, after all.

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2
Sep 22

‘Oh, snap! Guess what I saw?’

Welcome to September. Like you, I have no idea how this happened, or how it occurred so quickly.

Today I taught someone a foundational trick of a technology that’s now more than 30 years old. Happy to do it. It makes me rework the analogies I use. If you, for example, haven’t figured out how to do a basic thing that’s existed during the entirety of your professional career, I need to find a frame reference you might understand.

So remember when Chevy Chase …

Otherwise, this whole thing is hopeless.

An equally impressive highlight of my day was going up one floor to get a remote control, and then taking that remote and its DVD player to someone else a few floors away.

Just kidding. The real highlight of the day, maybe the week, was lunch. I walked down to Chipotle and ordered some takeout. This was the second lunch I’ve purchased during the work week since February or March of 2020. I figured a day or two of something other than a peanut butter sandwich will make the return to peanut butter and bread seem all the more exotic again.

If you are what you eat, I am destined to become a big smear of peanuts.

In other work miscellany, the next time I will show you progress on the removal of the nearby Poplars Building I expect will look a lot different than this. This has been the story since Monday.

They’ve been working on the rubble, and some of the lower part of the building obscured from our vantage point. But I bet they won’t be doing anything tomorrow. It’s a three-day weekend, of course, meaning everyone is making it a four-day weekend.

Let’s jump back in time to Monday night, when we caught the Barenaked Ladies show in Cincinnati. On Monday, in this space, I shared a bit of the opening act from Toad the Wet Sprocket. If you were here on Tuesday you saw a brief bit of the brief feature performance from the Gin Blossoms. Yesterday there was a bit of classic BNL. And here’s a bit more from the 2018 inductees of the Canadian Music Hall of Fame.

This is “Man Made Lake,” from last year’s Detour De Force. The drummer, Tyler Stewart, says:

it is an allusion for drowning in man’s creations, as opposed to losing yourself in nature, which is often very therapeutic.

I think that it’s a very raw vocal, very personal and up-close. It’s the first song that we recorded for the album, and I think it really set the tone for those acoustic sessions, and obviously, it’s a standout on the record.

And that’s all well and good, but there’s just something about that simple bass drum that haunts the whole song. It’s a curious, and telling, heartbeat, if you will.

Detour De Force, their 13th studio album, was produced just before the pandemic began, and later that same summer, is the album this tour was meant to support. So just imagine, right about here, three or four paragraphs of navel gazing about how the pandemic impacted the arts.

This is from the song “Looking Up,” off 2017’s Fake Nudes. It’s a live show song, I think, a bridge between one mood and another in a concert. And this is the only interesting part in a song of saccharine pablum.

The big finish is a cover medley. There’s some instrumentation changes, some Led Zeppelin, Devo, a web meme and a nod to the late, great Biz Markie. And we always celebrate Biz Markie.

Tomorrow, the encore!

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25
Aug 22

I didn’t know Derdriu and Noisiu either

I sat on the porch for too long this evening, enjoying the stillness of the air. That pushed the rest of the day a little further into the night. Get cleaned up, play with the cats, have a bite to eat, and so on until, finally, it was late and dark by the time I got around to watering the flowers.

I did that in the darkness, because we don’t have lights right over the flowers. Easy enough, though, especially in the dark. Give the spigot a half crank, make sure the sprayer is on mist and then move back and forth a lot. The sound lets you know if you’re on target. I was thinking about different types of leaves and the sound the water makes on them. I was thinking of how this wouldn’t happen to me:

Watering plants, with a gardening hose, being a terribly suspicious activity and all that.

Watering his neighbor’s plants.

The charges against the pastor were rightfully dropped. Seems fairly perverse that they were filed to begin with.

Let’s check in on the Poplars Building, the one too wild to tame, too tough to implode, too slow to be scrapped to death. The cleanup continues on the ground. No tearing down of what’s left of the building today. (Maybe they found the room Elvis stayed in?) Elvis stayed there.

And people know that. It is a remarkable thing for here. It is remarked upon. That’s something to hang your hat on, one supposes. Of course, there’s also a statue honoring the future birth of a fictional war criminal. (The war criminal joke is one of the best in Star Trek. It’s a reliable chuckle. That we have people who put a bust up for a character that’ll be born in 2336? That’s hysterical. There are layers to this, the tongue-in-cheek joke, the get-a-life joke and, finally, this-is-a-remarkable-thing?)

I read this in Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization this evening. It’s one part of a poem in the “Táin Bó Cúailnge,” an epic of Irish mythology. Noisiu was killed by a jealous king, and is lamented by Derdriu. “Though for you the times are sweet with pipers and with trumpeters …”

The whole of it is merely excerpted here by Cahill, and I’ve done it an even greater injustice, but if you pull it out and let it stand on it’s own, it’s just as heartrending as the rest of the lament.

A bit later, he gets to Patricius, the fifth-century missionary and bishop in Ireland, the “Apostle of Ireland,” St. Patrick. The first two paragraphs here, they are drive-by sociology, dangerous and liberating, and good enough for a book that I’ll read.

Fragments of a great papyrus.

The next time I need to name something portentous, that’s on the shortlist.