Rainy today, all day, and getting colder by the hour.
A great day, then, to stay inside!
So I left the office and got on the bike and rode around some fictional place. I had read about this course on Makuri Islands earlier in the day and so naturally I decided to take the hilliest route.
You get out of a fictional city and into the countryside, which was much more fun, even if I was moving faster through the city segment.
Did I mention this was the hilliest route in Makuri? This bit was a seven percent incline, which was fine. There were harder areas. I think I need to reset my power trainer, basically. Somehow, the level parts near the end seemed more impossible than the ramps at the beginning.
See those blossoming cherry trees? I’m pretty sure they weren’t blooming when the ride started. I rode through the whole blooming cycle!
I’m still dialing in the positioning of the cleats of my new shoes. This is precision stuff and I am doing it by guesswork. I’m also the princess and the pea on the bicycle, so it takes a good long while.
Much like this ride! Which I may never ride again.
My morning was spent working on a few quixotic projects. Two of them involve depending on other people, and I can do little more than hope they come through. Some of them do, and you make do with the rest.
I’m also working on three Snapchat commercials. And there’s a sentence that would have made perfect sense to me 25 years ago when I decided to be an under-the-radar multimedia person. Except for the Snapchat part. No one would have had any appreciation of what that could be in 1997. Will anyone make any sense of it in 25 more?
Who knows! But we recruit people there, and so there is a cause to make 15 second commercials. Of course, in the shorter spots you’re asked to deliver the most. And do it in an age of widescreen everything, but on a medium that’s strictly a phone using a 9:16 aspect ratio.
Explain all of that to your 1997-self and your 1997-self would think they were dealing with someone who looked eerily like them, but older and with a blood sugar problem.
I took this picture just after noon.
And worked on this the rest of the day. There are six (SIX!) Pulitzer Prizes on this stage. I stopped counting the Peabody and Murrow and Emmy awards. It’s an embarrassment of riches.
There were two breaks between the three different segments of that symposium, and I cranked out social media, prepared for a Friday morning meeting and arranged an engineer for a future television production.
Left the office and did some followup work on it here at the house.
It was 10 hours, not counting the editing I did in my living room. Have you ever looked up the definition of “living room”? I haven’t, until just now. Here are two definitions.
So here we are, each typing on computers. Living room. Sounds about right.
Anyway, two simultaneous meetings and two studio sessions all taking place simultaneously, starting at 9 a.m. tomorrow. This silly week is going out in style.
We should all be so lucky.
Thursday / video — Comments Off on And then the weather arrived 3 Feb 22
Rained all day yesterday. Dipped below freezing at about 8 p.m. And overnight it turned to snow. It snowed all day today.
At the end of it all there’s probably 5 inches out there. It varies a bit from place to place, of course. For instance, under our covered porch we have 2 inches of snow.
The ice was the real concern. All that rain is now under the roads. And our road doesn’t get plowed. As in years past, the city sends a truck down our road so that it may play the walking path behind us. They do not plow the road. (We live in the county.) All of the roads are reportedly a mess, though. We’re under the “emergency travel only” advice. Not that I have anywhere to be.
I worked from home today. Interviewed a grad student about his research via Zoom. I had another long Zoom where we designed an ever-growing television show. It was supposed to be a one-off last year, but it never works like this. They always come back, and we always make them bigger.
And I finally logged off at 8:30 p.m., on a day when I worked from home.
I’m not really sure how that happened. I was doing work, looked up and it was almost 5 p.m. And I still had to prep for a morning meeting. Tomorrow, I’ll manage to get up to an easy 48 hours for the week. At least I didn’t have to risk life, limb, fenders and insurance rates for the last two days.
We purchased a new mattress, and it arrived yesterday. My lovely bride got the thing upstairs without me. She took the old mattress off the box spring, put the new one on last night. A mattress, you would think, is one of those things you want to go down to the showroom. Kick the tires, lay on it for 36 seconds, and all of that. Well, where has that ever gotten you? A mattress that works for a few years before you buy a foam topper, which works for a few years. Eventually your sleep patterns leave impressions in all of that, so the foam topper comes off, and the now old mattress isn’t much better. And how many times have you done all of that?
So she found an online service. Good reviews. Excellent return policy, and time will tell about their guarantee language — and whether the company has any longevity under this business model. She did this unilaterally, because the old one has been bothering her the most, she’s a bit more particular, and that’s how it works. Whatever makes you, quite literally, more comfortable, dear.
The new mattress, I learned last night, is a little taller. You need a running start. And as we discussed this afternoon, the biggest and most immediately noticeable thing is that you can just, sorta, roll over. Not every muscle group needs to be activated to make a common turn from back to side.
If the new mattress does that alone it’d be a win for internet merchants everywhere.
As for the first night’s sleep part, it seemed unremarkable. Pretty much the ideal, right?
All that sunshine from the last few days has regressed to the mean. And that’s just … mean.
The day, being a Thursday, slowed down a bit compared to the earlier part of the week, and I managed to put in just eight hours, so it the net perception was: null. Many people worked from home because of close contacts to Covid-positive people, and I have to figure out how to do that, without invoking karmic problems.
I spent part of the morning working on a podcast. Today we enjoyed our usual once-a-week Chick-fil-A takeout lunch. The afternoon’s highlight was probably cleaning up some Google Docs and preparing for a Friday morning meeting.
After a few days of doing everything rapidly it is nice to luxuriate in spending too much time on one thing at a time, is the point.
The television folks have uploaded two of their most recent sports shows for you. Here are all the latest highlights on all the coolest sports around here.
And here’s another sports show, featuring different perspectives and probably more fun than you should have outdoors in Indiana in January.
There will be another studio talk show online tomorrow. And another simulcast TV-radio project after that. There are also all of the online chats they do. The sports media students simply don’t stop anymore. It’s impressive when you consider the rest of the demands on their time.
The daily duds: This feature is going away because I realized that the goal was pointless. I was trying to document looks so I wouldn’t reproduce them too quickly, but that’s impossible without a proper indexing system. So today I’m just showing off this lovely pocket square my in-laws got me for Christmas.
Also, that’s one of my favorite sports coats. It has character and comfort, which is to say that, once you get past the print, it’s super soft.
And tonight’s dinner, because it looks healthy enough to brag about.
That’s three nights in a row of healthy things. We’ll have to blow this up tomorrow.
IU / photo / Thursday — Comments Off on Another long day 20 Jan 22
Without even intending to, I managed to stay in the office late for a third night in a row. But I got out by 7 p.m., so that’s an improvement?
“Improvement.”
Not that anyone acknowledges such things, or even notices. Makes you wonder, sometimes, why you spend so much time under the ol’ florescent lights.
Well, first of all, it’d be too cold to be outdoors just now.
Anyway, the extra bit of the day that shook up the routine today featured interviewing a bunch of students and a lot of Zoom meetings. And I learned how some new hardware and software will work together in one of our new studios. Not that I have high or demanding expectations for January, in general, but that’s almost enough to make for a banner day.
