You often see curious things when you’re traveling. A sign here, a weird fence there, and so on. I try to take pictures of things I see, because, sometimes, you find a theme emerging. But I only saw the one thing today.
You feel like they are maybe picking on Merle, the One-handed Man here. The rest of the employees, they get a pass, but Merle, he needs to think hygiene at all times.
The sink was one of the old fashioned ones. You had to do operate the faucet, soap dispenser and hand towel dispenser manually.
Anyway, Thanksgiving festivities begin tomorrow. I hope you’re safely and exactly where you need to be.
IU / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off on The beautiful trouble of autumn, Part IX 15 Nov 17
I’m in the final week of the local autumn observational complaint: You can’t make autumn stay, you can’t show off the season properly. I’m still trying to do it, even though it can’t be done. But I’m still trying.
It seems like there’s a shift in the tint of the golden light from the late sun. It’s still pleasant out, but there’s a feeling in the air. The optimism of crisp morning air is taking on a new meaning with a nearer, sharper crispness in the air. It isn’t a foreboding, but a coming to a sense of reality.
There was a mom and a child playing beneath that tree, while the dad was taking pictures of them. The boy was in his element and having a great time, but the parents were trying to document all that was passing before them. We must deliberately categorize certain things out of doors, in certain lights. The kids will get bigger, the trees will become exposed twigs, the blue sky turns grey. Before you know it, the next family photos feature a slightly older kid. And by the time they take those pictures, things will be green again. Or, covered in snow if their brave. And so they are out right now, setting a memory.
That’s a lot to take from watching a young family for a few seconds, but there’s a certain chill in the breeze.
IU / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off on The beautiful trouble of autumn, Part IV 8 Nov 17
It seems like that time of year where you try to catalog the changing of the leaves, because they’re pretty, but because you want them to stay.
So I’m doing that this week, which feels like the peak of the leaf turn. Here are two more examples from campus.
This is the newly renamed Francis Morgan Swain Student Building:
Before women could vote, Francis Morgan Swain was making waves on the IU campus. She lobbied the university for a space meant for female students. She was in school here for two years, from 1889 to 1891. During that time she raised $6,500 from alumni and members of the community — that’s about $200,000 today. Her husband, Joseph, a math professor, was the ninth president of the university. They stayed on to lead the university for nine years. She came back in 1904 for the groundbreaking, laid a cornerstone and she was here again when the building was formally opened in 1906. In September of last year the university rededicated the building in her honor.
And this is the side of our building, Franklin Hall, the brand new 110-year-old, $26 million dollar renovation, featuring all the bells and whistles journalism and broadcast and video game majors and comm scholars could ask for.
These photos are just a reminder to me to carry and use my real camera more.
Oh sure, my phone is a fantastic piece of technology. It does many interesting and useful and cool things. Plus it is a phone! And has games! But if I had been carrying my DSLR when I left the building for a chilly lunchtime hour I wouldn’t have had to fake the depth of field here:
And I could have taken a proper macro. And the picture, despite my having to pull out the media card and plug it into a reader and plug that into the computer, would look better.
…
…
Excuse me. I got distracted. You see, being the first of the month, that means I had to create a new subdirectory on the site for these photos. And that reminded me that I needed to do the monthly cleaning of the desktop of my laptop. And that takes some time. There’s the unstacking, the reminiscing, the categorizing, filing and trashing. It takes a while.
What? You don’t clean your desktop regularly? Or are you saying monthly is too long to go in-between?
Yes, I always clean mine at the beginning of the month. And then, a few days from now, I’ll do the routine, monthly backing up of my phone. Unless I forget again, for something like the fourth time in a row.
I recently discovered the Chris Gethard show. And I was so glad to see Tig Notaro, who is absolutely brilliant, appear on this episode:
Here’s a cool backgrounder on that show:
And from there you can go down the rabbit hole at your leisure. But before you do … I was sitting on the sofa this evening, having one of those moments where the feeling is just right. This was that moment that you want to hang on to because the memory is the kind you’d like to retrieve from time to time, when you need to remember that you can find contentment in nothing.
The Yankee was doing something in the kitchen and listening to Pandora and Jay Farrar was singing and it reminded me of May 1, 1998.
Twenty-ish years ago @AmyRay came on stage at Midtown, having just watched @sonvoltmusic. "God bless those guys," she said.
Tonight, @JayFarrarMusic is drifting in from the other room.
I had to look it up, that was May 1, 1998. Tonight’s moment was a moment populated by the memory of one sentence, said as an aside, into a microphone 19-and-a-half years ago, to the day.
I produced a podcast today. Actually I just ran the board for it, but some people use those words interchangeably. They shouldn’t — and I’m on a mission to civilize! — but they do. I simply sat behind an Axia console and made sure the levels were consistent and the computer was recording. I did this because the students who normally do it couldn’t join the production today, so I sat with the dean and his two guests from another part of the university:
And they talked about Orson Welles — Indiana University possesses what is believed to be the most extensive collection of Welles performances — and, specifically, the War of the Worlds. You can hear the show here:
After work there was just time enough for a cold evening run:
I’ve found it takes about three-quarters of a mile to run off the initial chill. I’ve found that there’s a particular dip in the path behind the house where the cold air coming off the creek pushes up out of the trees and drops the temperature by about five degrees. And I’ve found that I can run in shorts and a t-shirt, but I’m going to be using gloves a lot.
