Wednesday

Indiana / IU / maps / Wednesday — Comments Off on nasses Nickerchen
11
Dec 19

nasses Nickerchen

I saw this word used a few years back and immediately fell in love with it: administrivia. It is an American thing, of course, and apparently came out of the 1930s. Can’t imagine why. And it became popular in education circles in the 1960s. Can’t imagine why.

Which is not to say that we’re the only ones burdened with the thing. Administrivia is everywhere. But the way it’s used is delightful. Even summoning up the word is a judgement: This isn’t cool, I know, but I also know it is necessary, and know you know, by my using this word, that I know it isn’t cool. And maybe it isn’t even necessary, but that’s bureaucratic inertia, kid.

Even saying the word is a bit of a challenge the first few hundred times you do it. It makes you sympathetic to the German speaker’s use of komposita.

The first time I saw this word, administrivia, it was on a syllabus. Which was perfect. It was in a bold font. Which seemed useless.

Anyway, that was my day, dealing with the details that must be dealt with in order to do more interesting work.

There was the approval of travel funds, the approval of payroll and the sending out a contract which had most assuredly been sent before. Arrangements had to be made for an office key to be turned in, and the first question about the next term rolled in about that same time. Somehow, another approval was required for the same upcoming travel funds. This prompted a great many notes. There are always programming notes to consider, both looking back and looking forward. And then there were the emails, always there are the emails, and the brief doorway meetings and so on.

The Germans don’t seem to have a word for administrivia, which seems like it would be an embarrassing oversight on their part.

I did learn a fine German proverb looking for it though. Wer den Acker nicht will graben, der wird nicht als Unkraut haben.

Speaking of komposita …

Hey, it was either that or going long on this little news note today: Wet-Nap maker planning to build area production facility, add 90 jobs

Nice-Pak Products, a manufacturer of wet wipes for consumers, health care, food service and other commercial markets, announced plans Wednesday to build a 760,000-square-foot production and warehousing facility in Mooresville, creating 90 jobs.

The Orangeburg, New York-based company already employs 413 people at its existing administrative and production facility at 1 Nice Park Road in Mooresville. The company, which has 2,500 employees worldwide, has operated in Mooresville for 45 years.

A man named Julius had an idea and started it all. He and his son got in bed with Colonel Sanders, and then things really took off. It’s an industry that is projected to have compound annual growth of about seven percent over much of the next decade. Everyone needs clean skin, after all, and some of that growth is going to come from just up the road. And that’s 90 new jobs rolled into what is already that county’s biggest employer.

The company makes products as varied as Wet-Nap, Nice n Clean Wipes and Grime Boss. What, you didn’t think you’d diversify in the wet napkin game? There are all sorts of pre-loaded moisture needs out there, friend, and businesses have to meet those needs.

It isn’t clear from that brief story if this means an additional facility, or a full upgrade and replacement project. Here’s what they have now. The exterior looks as clean as you would expect of such an enterprise.

The new place will be about five miles down the road from the old place, which is opposite a concrete mix supplier. Adjacent to the new locale are a small car dealership and a gutter cleaning service. It just seems a logical place, said a guy who was counting on those civic tax breaks to build the new facility.

They’ll start moving dirt late next year. It’ll be a project where no one goes home with grime under their nails.

Instagram / running / Wednesday — Comments Off on To shine a light on my thinking
4
Dec 19

To shine a light on my thinking

This is where I am on running, on having to sit it out for most of the year: I can now move around a bit. I am not always winded. I have to re-remember how to run uphill. I’m still slow, but then I haven’t been fast since high school, but I can manufacture a little burst every now and then. My foot feels much better, which is the best part of it all. I haven’t taped it up in a few days in a row, and I’m running without binding the thing, too.

And while I’m probably still months removed from wanting to run — it’s funny, I see people riding their bikes and I think “I’m jealous,” I’ve never seen a person running and thought “I wish I could be doing that right now — there is a certain meditative quality of a good run, when you can move the body without too much suffering.

Maybe it was the evening or the circumstance, but I remembered that this evening.

The light is great, mind you. The photo is blurry because I took that, mid-stride, running downhill. Even with all of those limitations, you can still easily see your way. The view is even cleaner with the eye.

The light is this one. You wear it on your head. It’s lightweight, has an adjustable strap and all that. You don’t forget it is there, but it isn’t an encumbrance. I don’t think I could ride a bike with it, which I’d like to do, because you’d probably outrun the light. But it’s perfect for night runs. They cast a brilliant light to see where your feet are going, and it makes you visible to people coming your way — as if they couldn’t hear me huffing and shuffling from a great distance.

Where I also am on running: I’m not yet back to doing great distances. Oh tonight I was going to run four miles. Four whole miles! But then precisely at the 5K mark, or 3.1 miles, my knee felt a twinge. And as I am trying to get my various joints to work happily and, perchance to dream, in harmony, I called it a run. It didn’t hurt — my rationale, that is — that I came to this conclusion just in front of the neighborhood. So I finished my run at the 5K mark, turned off the head lamp and walked home by porch light. It was in the low 40s, which felt like a slight chill after a little run. The crickets are gone, the bullfrogs are quiet, the kids are all inside. That’s also meditative.

I focus on spring, when I won’t have to miss the sound of insects and the aural landscape that comes with a happier season, when the sun sticks around longer, when I can a bike or run, or both!

photo / Wednesday / woodworking, sorta — Comments Off on I made this
28
Nov 19

I made this

I’ve been talking about this too much and showing very brief, inconsistent photographs of my latest project, but here it is:

It’s nothing more than seven pieces of wood, from three larger pieces I bought late this summer. This wood was supposed to be the test pieces as I tried to answer the question: What should a stove cover look like?

The real question is: How do you keep cats off countertops? but philosophers, scientists and theologians have all failed to answer that one. So we’re left with the stove cover thing.

I did a plywood top version for a few weeks. It was really a study of heat. What was safely tall enough to not cause problems as the stove eyes cooled after use? We did some product testing and decided we would like to lower it a bit, to make it flush with the bar in the background. Happily, we decided we could safely do so. I considered different methods for the top portion, ultimately deciding to keep it simple and use wood I already had in the garage. Most of it was straight and true. One piece had a nice twist in it, and I had to use it. So I did. And that’s what makes it artisanal folk art made by a total amateur. Or whatever.

A few weekends ago I got all the cutting and sizing done. And then I trudged through the sanding. It turns out these things take time when you have competing interests. Last weekend we did stain tests and The Yankee applied the chosen blend. Now that has finally dried. Yesterday, and today, I have applied four coats of the top coat, which is a General Finishes product I’m almost ready to swear by. It is a little pricey, but it goes on easy. It cleans up easy. It dries fast and it doesn’t bubble. It seems durable and, the Internet tells me, it doesn’t yellow with time. I applied it to my desk last year and that still looks nice.

Here, I think, is the key: I got four coats of that stuff on last night and today, and finished the project. (Just in time for Thanksgiving, but hey.) Amazing what you can do when you have some free time on your hands.

Wednesday / woodworking, sorta — Comments Off on This was right, until it was wrong
20
Nov 19

This was right, until it was wrong

I was going to start with this …

… but that’s not exactly accurate. I did get to play with power tools today. I mentioned on Monday that I was close to wrapping up this one project with a whole series of jokes about how I’m not good at working with wood. Measure twice, cut once, sand away your shortcomings. That sort of thing.

Only the belt sander probably caused as many problems as it created.

Fortunately, I realized, a quick bit of sawing would solve all of my troubles — and boy don’t we always say that. I did that.

So there was fun to be seen.

Tonight, you see, I had the choice of breaking out the miter saw or running a quick shopping errand. It was my job to pick up two frames for some fancy certificates my television gang has received. Only there wasn’t enough time tonight.

We had just the one car between us today, because The Yankee’s car is in the shop. It isn’t a terrible inconvenience. We work at the same place, of course, and our schedules matched up nicely today. It’s really an issue of what you’re accustomed to. You’re used to being independent, but now you must depend on someone in the simple matter of getting from A to B. And, in this case, you must depend on me. And you must depend on people leaving my office at quitting time, so that we may all, you know, quit for the day.

We left late, which changed up the evening. If I stopped off at C, that would throw off dinner plans, and that would keep me from making sawdust, which I wanted to do. And I did! Now I just have to glue it all up, later this week, and then stain and finish the thing this weekend.

So I’ll try to take care of that shopping errand in the morning. Of course, first-thing shopping is a wholly different experience than late-in-the-day shopping.

There will be more fun tomorrow, then.

history / IU / journalism / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off on Historic parchment
13
Nov 19

Historic parchment

Seventy-five years ago today Indiana awarded alumnus Ernie Pyle an honorary doctorate. He grew up not far away, attended school here, worked at the campus paper, left a bit early for a professional newspaper job.

He’d said “(M)y idea of a good newspaper job would be just to travel around wherever you’d want to without any assignment except to write a story every day about what you’d seen.”

A decade after that he got to go on the road and write all of those columns that made him mildly famous before the war. It was there that blogging began.

Anyway, when the war came, one of the most well known domestic reporters would become the best known war correspondent, first in Africa, then Europe and everywhere he went, really. He was beloved, because he wrote about the GIs and the Marines, and not about all the generals. He lived it with the soldiers and sailors. It was tough for him, just as it was for all of those in the fight. They loved him because they thought of him as theirs.

And in November of 1944 his alma mater gave him a lovely little sheepskin. He belonged to Indiana first.

He would become something more than an accomplished and famous alumnus. The journalism people at IU, over the years, essentially canonized him. For decades they worked in Ernie Pyle Hall. Outside the new building is the famous statue. And his desk today sits one floor above my office. (I used to be one floor above that desk, but they moved me for reasons that still surpass understanding.)

On this floor there’s a display with some of Pyle’s personal effects, on loan from owners or university collections.

Here are his medals, and a not-often circulated photo of Pyle and Generals Omar Bradley and Dwight Eisenhower.

Of Bradley, Pyle wrote in September of 1944:

He is so modest and sincere that he probably will not get his proper credit, except in military textbooks.

But he has proved himself a great general in every sense of the word. And as a human being, he is just as great. Having him in command has been a blessed good fortune for America.

Here’s Pyle’s entrenching tool. They said that the writer was the foot soldier’s best friend. But they also say that a soldier’s best friend is the earth. And this is what Pyle would have used to dig holes for cover, for sleep and so on. It’s not difficult to see that spade, in hand, digging frantically into all different types of soil and sand. It’s easy to see the wear on that handle and wonder about the fear and worry that any man would have felt when they had to dig and dig and dig.

He wrote about being a part of the tragedy of Operation Cobra, which brings home the importance of all of that digging.

In 1943 Pyle wrote a column calling for combat pay for members of the infantry, airmen, after all, were granted “flight pay.” Soon Congress voted for an increase in pay of $10 a month for combat infantrymen. The law was entitled “The Ernie Pyle Bill.”

Pyle was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Correspondence that year, for “distinguished war correspondence during the year 1943.” He typed some of his work on this very typewriter:

Of course he also wrote in his letters, and perhaps in his columns — it gets hard to recall directly from memory, because his style was the same in a letter to his friend or to readers or to his colleagues — about his typewriters. A true devotee of his craft, he thought of his tools.

This is what he wore in Europe. The standard issue field jacket. He didn’t have a rank, but on the left shoulder was a simple patch: war correspondent.

And his passport is there as well.

He received that honorary doctorate 75 years ago today. The next April he was killed in the Pacific, and we all lost a talented scribe.

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