More meetings today. Meetings about meetings. Meetings which begat other meetings. A fair amount of time canceling meetings. Meetings about canceled meetings. And oh so many emails and rapidly evolving and newly created policies. Our employer, Indiana University, is taking it seriously, which is nice.
My dean, in fact, told everyone at a meeting this morning to not be in the office after today unless it was essential that we be there. I have to go in for a brief while, tomorrow, but today is the last full day of on-campus work until April as we duck Covid-19. These are not off days. We’ll just be working from somewhere else. I’ll be in the home office.
It’ll sink in eventually.
We went for a run this evening. It was a quick three-and-a-half-miles of progressions, where you continue to build up speed as you go. This was just as we got int the third mile, which means she was going pretty fast, which meant the photo was blurry:
Earlier in the run I saw this, the second green things of the season. The tulips of February are false advertising. The longer days are a signal, next week’s spring break is a clue. March is a mirage, but there are now, suddenly, a few green things:
The next warm-ish day we have I’m going to take a walk through the woods behind the house. I have to find more green things.
Sometimes I can pop my upper back from a seated position by raising my hands above my head and rotating my torso with a particular style of torque. Did that on Monday, and as I did, my back popped, as did my shoulder, in a most unfortunate way.
That set off a sequence of painful sensations — sore shoulder, muscle spasms beneath and beside the scapula, pain across the collarbone and into the neck. Right in this area, which was on fire for a day and change:
More scapular stabilization dysfunction, then, and how did I walk around feeling like this for the second half of 2012 and almost all of 2013? (I’ve had one or two other re-occurrences and each time I’ve said the same thing. How did I suffer through this for that long? It only took three hospitals, three different surgeons and two different sets of physical therapy to make a collarbone tolerable.)
Anyway, at the office today I concentrated on some of those therapy exercises and I found an empty wall and did the tennis ball tricks. And then, walking down a ramp (it’s a quirky building) my neck popped and started feeling better.
I could feel it immediately, everything was starting to loosen up. My neck started popping at the slightest provocation. All of the muscles in my back, having flared for two days, felt better, but exhausted. I could move freely! But it also felt as if the slightest provocation could start the whole thing over again.
So naturally a three-and-a-half mile run was in order. Best I’ve felt in two days, somehow.
The moral to the story, I guess, is this: Never raise your hand.
I wasn’t even volunteering for anything at the time. And if volunteering requires any big arm movements right now, I probably would think twice about it.
Back to being the idea guy, then. I’m pretty good at that.
photo / Wednesday — Comments Off on Just writing about very casual photos 26 Feb 20
Bought gas this morning. Watched the rain turn to snow and marveled at how gross the parking lot looked, which is to say, a lot like a wet parking lot in semi-dark conditions. It’s the most central European experience I can offer you today. Brown turns gray and it’s too cold to qualify as dank. And it was almost the first thing in the morning. But at least the price at the pump was good:
So thank you, Kroger fuel points for the discount.
Forgot my lunch today. I guess I was just too excited about fueling up. So I had to get a sandwich at the nearby sandwich place, which meant chips. Which meant choices and new packaging and …
Cool design, I guess, so they’ve increased the cool, but perhaps not the ranch. The look suggests a chip went subatomic and left only the excess seasoning. There is a little extra seasoning. I’m not sure it required new packaging. You could give me the new chips in the old bag and I would have thought there was a new man on the special spice machine last week. The new guy is always more interested in the customer experience than the corporate bottom line, after all. But that soon passes when the veteran first shift crew talks him into toeing the line.
At which point the new guy becomes just one of the guys, on his way to being the old guy. It happens overnight. Literally. Before he knows it he’s working a double on the third shift because that guy is the manager’s brother-in-law. Everyone knows he’s the weak link, the third shift brother-in-law. No way he’d be working that schedule if the manager liked him. But you know how it goes. And so the formerly-new-guy bitterly starts thinning out the spices.
And that’s when the new design on the chip bag is outdated.
But will you even notice? There’s so much going on, if you’re not leaving big, smeary, fingerprints on everything, how could you notice it all?
There isn’t enough extra cool ranch for big, smeary, fingerprints.
I took a picture of some of the wood stain in the garage, because I needed to make a note of it for my current project. I’m going to start sanding soon. I think. I hope. So here are some stain cans.
And so now I’m spending the rest of my Wednesday evening enjoying getting to go home with some of the day still left in it. Working late on Tuesdays and then having a regular schedule on Wednesday is an unusual thing. Challenging on the at the beginning, but the back end, this is a nice feeling: free time.
Makes getting gas first thing this morning worth it, I guess.
The handlers, for lack of a more appropriate term, were wonderful with both the animals and the students who were working the show. And some of their creatures work school and other promotional events all the time, so they apparently take it in stride.
The ladies said the animals would do better out of their carriers than in them, so after a moment of “Awwww,” and a second moment of photographs, the crew got down to work and did a nice job pulling the program together. And the hosts created a tight little segment with their furry guests.
Off-camera the lemur jumped on me. And I learned that a bengal cat will grow to be a bit larger than a domestic feline. This one was still growing. We were told that you can tell them apart mostly by their softer coat and their personality. They generally behave more like dogs, she said. But this guy was too chill to be bothered by anything going on around him. That lemur wanted to be the star, however. You can see it in here:
The news show was done after that. I missed a lot of it, trying to be useful, downstairs working on other things.
Driving home this evening, I had a nice view of the sun:
Something about the angle of it in the sky, even as it was descending toward the horizon, is starting to feel different. Like the sun is bigger, brighter, and should-be-warmer. It isn’t yet. But either some ancient neuron in my brain has begun to detect the seasonal shift or my keen powers of critical observation are seeping into my subconscious.
It still isn’t warm — nor would you expect it to be warm here just now, but on general principle I demand it nevertheless — so either instinct or perception is wrong. But there was a feeling that an optimist might ascribe to optimism.
I’m a resigned realist.
Probably I owe Phoebe a photograph. It was a rare evening, indeed, when she chose to sit on me. If she’s going to choose to cuddle with someone it will be The Yankee. (And almost always on one of the blankets.)
This is a thing she does near the end of her time cuddling. Having rolled over, she stretches her full body out. I’m not sure if she’s surveying the ground below her, or just enjoying the moment or trying to wake up or fall back asleep.
Eventually, she pushes off with her back legs and gracefully rolls toward the floor. Here’s the side view before that happens:
I think we’d now, finally, have to use three hands to count the number of times she’s voluntarily sat with me. It’s progress. Maybe she was jealous of the bengal cat. Maybe she’s noticed something about the sun, too.
I made a little animated photo as my new pinned tweet. I mention it because I know you are deeply invested in this sort of thing. You are. All of you. Deeply invested. Profoundly so.
My last pinned tweet had been around for quite some time. Summer of 2015 I took that picture. London. Everything was different then, everything was the same.
We took the above picture in Roatan, Honduras last summer. Everything is the same.
It is about time for another dive. We’ll do some later this year. The problem with being so land locked is that you can’t do it readily. This is an obvious issue. The other side of that coin is that when you do get the chance, you maximize your dives, to the extent that your body can handle it. (There are some fatigue issues arising from oxygen and nitrogen at depth, eventually, and the eventually of that chemistry does catch up to you. Unless you dive nitrox, which I do not, as yet, do.) We did 20 dives over six days in Roatan, for example, knowing that was it for the year. If you could just get into the water (of the sort that you wanted to be in) more readily then we’d do so. I’d sit on the bottom of a pool for hours, if you’d let me.
Oh, look, here I am doing just that last May.
It was a peaceful experience, no currents to fight, no corral to avoid, no depth considerations to consider. Just sit and breathe. It was, then, a contemplative non-dive. Many things were considered in that high school pool, the first high school pool I’ve ever been in. (It was a Saturday.) The first one I’ve ever seen, I think.
A lot of profound thinking is going on in that photo, as you can tell. Mostly about all of the things that find their way to the bottom of a public pool.
