Going through my phone; finding things I’ve never used here before. I’m taking a break from writing messages to students to clean a few things off my phone, that’s how my Wednesday is going. How’s yours?
Anyway, this was on a flight from here to there, I forget which. I could look, but that’s not the point. We were in the emergency exit row, which is great for legroom, plus you get this teeny tiny little porthole to look out of, and wonder.
Expect more of this sort of place holding filler the rest of the week, and perhaps next.
I am reading students’ reactions The Social Dilemma, a docu-drama on Netflix. They have to watch the full program and then describe one phenomenon that jumps out at them, and then apply one of the concepts or theories we have discussed in the class this semester to try to better understand it.
Why any of us, including myself, continue to use social media after going through one of my classes I’ll never know.
Well, for me I know. News.
In my other classes, I am looking over slide decks and quizzes and other papers. I’m not sure if the goal is to stay in the curve or get ahead of it. Maybe I’m just preemptively trying to get in the curve.
At any rate, this was my view today.
It’s important, every so often, to look up, and to look out.
history / Monday / photo / video — Comments Off on We sit and stand and play and dream beneath them 25 Nov 24
I received a memo from the desk of the Office of Kitteh Complaints, and such memos are always to be urgently read and promptly acted upon. Previous memos have explained and, again, reiterated the process. Cat photos are expected on Mondays as part of the site’s most popular weekly feature. Their Insta drives a lot of traffic, it turns out.
And, as the weekend memo pointed out, they did not feature into the site last week. It was a serious memo. The subject line was was terse.
So here are the cats.
Not too long ago we ordered pizzas. It was a coolish night, and so they availed themselves of the boxes.
We have, you can see, created two monsters.
Here’s Phoebe taking her afternoon sun in the dining room.
And here’s Poseidon and you can almost see his little mind thinking “PILLOW FORT! PILLOW FORT!”
So the cats, as you can see, are doing well. And now I have to fulfill the rest of their tasks on the memo. They are very particular.
Some time back we had a limb fall from a tree. I cut away a lot of the small stuff by hand soon after it fell, then waited a while and bought myself a chainsaw. This weekend, finally, I got around to cutting it up. I don’t know why I waited so long. This was fast and easy and awesome.
I cut it into firewood-sized sections. The limb was still partially attached to the tree, so eventually I had to break all of the chainsaw rules, fetched the ladder, climbed up, firmly established my balance, reeeeeeeached up, closed my eyes and did what needed to be done for that last bit of the wood.
Felt quite macho.
First time using a chainsaw, as you can probably tell.
We inherited that wheelbarrow in the move, and I’ve come to value it. I had to put some air in the tire, but it works just fine. And the crickets were loving it when I evicted them for these chores.
Things still look properly festive on the front porch. Pay no attention to the dirty floor in need of a fresh coat of paint.
That’s coming in the spring. I am making a list of things to do and that’s well up the list.
My lovely bride has broken out all of the Christmas paraphernalia this weekend and we have deployed it strategically throughout the house and yard. When it was done, we wandered outside and down to the street to see the effect.
Festive, but not overstated. She did a nice job.
The candles in the window are always my favorite.
The tree I was working on earlier? This is it, in the early evening.
The people that we inherited the wheelbarrow from had three kids. Maybe they climbed that tree. I hope so. I hope they had a lot of fun in that part of the yard. It’s easy to be romantic about a place when it gives you shots like that.
I had to document this, because no one would believe it. It rained last night. This is the first rain since September 27th. I have read that we are in the worst drought in 130 years of record local meteorological observations.
It didn’t rain long enough to break the drought. Probably it couldn’t rain that much at one time. In fact, you don’t want it to do that, because it invites other problems. We need several good soakings, but none are in the forecast at the moment. Standing out in the rain last night, though, was a delight.
The farmers have been out in their fields just moving dust around. We saw some examples of that on our Friday afternoon ride.
This guy’s just playing around, just getting outside. I’m sure of it. What could he possibly be accomplishing over there?
My lovely bride and I did one part of one of our regular routes on Friday, only we did it backward. And then we took a different road which was not the best idea. But we had a nice day out, it was bright and warm and lovely and that was the beginning of the second week of November.
We went right by this guy on Friday, and I couldn’t have timed that much better if I’d asked that guy to coordinate his laps around the field.
It was colder on Sunday, and then nice and mild for today’s ride, when I saw a combine out of it’s natural environment. Look at the treads on this guy.
And here’s my shadow, riding off to the side as the sun started to dip in the west.
I made a Christmas present today. Can’t be talked about. You never know who reads this stuff. And another present arrived. Ssssh, don’t tell anyone.
Christmas? I am in no way prepared for the Christmas season. I never really am. But it doesn’t seem like that time of the year should be sneaking up on us. It never really should. But all of this happens every year.
If I wrote about that today, what would I do in the next six weeks? I should get back to grading, anyway.
I started the week with 148 items to grade, and I’ll finish those up tonight. It’ll be a fury. Or a flurry. It’ll probably be fuzzy.
Let’s return to the Re-Listening project. In the car, I am playing all of my old CDs in the order of their acquisition. And I’m writing about them here, occasionally, to pad out days like today. These aren’t music reviews, because who needs that. But they are sometimes a good excuse to dredge up a memory or two. They’re always an excuse to put some good music here.
And this good music is from Will Hoge. He’s from Nashville, and he fits the overlapping areas of Americana and country these days, but his debut was pure blue bar rock ‘n’ roll. He had a band that almost made it, then toured the South as a solo act with a supporting band. Dan Baird stood there and played guitar next to him, so it was basically a coronation. Carousel came out in 2001, and this song broke speakers all over alt rock stations.
I loved it immediately, it was the frenetic pace, the driving rhythm section, the desperate way he was screaming out the lyrics. Hey, it was 2001, but it was five or six years before I picked up this record.
It’s a debut album, which is great, but also limited. He was still growing into his craft. And I’ve yet to see him live, but it looks like a good time.
Here’s the title track.
Somehow, this was one of those CD mixes, one with a provenance I’ve forgotten. But whoever made this did me a real solid, or maybe I knew what I was doing, because there are five live Will Hoge tracks tacked onto the back, including this phenomenal Bill Withers cover.
He’s got a peppy little version of “Mess Around” that apparently no one has ever uploaded to the web. I’m not saying this version of the song being online would solve the web’s problems, but we can’t disprove it, either.
And there’s a sweaty bar version of one of the other key songs from this record, one I didn’t share earlier because I wanted to put it right here, in a live version worth hearing, in all of its clangy, brassy, Telecaster glory.
Since then Will Hoge has put out 13 more records, and I’m going to introduce his music to a relative soon, because some things just need to be passed down.
One day I’ll even get to see him play. He is doing some touring right now, just not close by. (Update: Turns out he was here about three weeks ago, and I had no idea. Come back, Will!)
The next time we return to the Re-Listening Project, we’ll go all the way back to 1992. This was a CD I picked up to finally replace an old cassette and I guarantee you that every time I’ve listened to it, I’ve wondered why I waited so long to do that. It’s going to be a great listen.
