The weekly post of extra stuff, full of extras that haven’t advanced beyond the lovely level of stuff. Here’s the stuff, then.
Scary thought I had the other night in the parking lot, “Is it possible that I’m getting tired of Whataburger? Is that the reason I stood beneath that sign, watching it like it was flying away?”
A few not-quite-wild brown-eyed Susans:
I believe this may be a thin-leaved sunflower that had just popped up in a walking path and was hanging on to the end of the season. Life finds a way:
Oh, just the most perfect pine cone in the world. At least this side of it was:
I put new handlebar wrap on my bike. Looks great, was very frustrating to get on and will be dirty instantly. But, finally, my handlebars match the saddle. I pulled some of it out of place on my first ride with it this afternoon, but it rewrapped easily enough:
I call this one, The Colors of My Day:
I wonder what is down that path. Through the woods there is a saw mill. You could smell them chopping up old lumber this afternoon. Old lumber, I decided, has a more dull smell on a calm afternoon. The new, green, good stuff has that crisp bite in the nose. What was floating around today just made you want to sneeze. But what is down there?
My first thought was that the light at 6:30 is lovely. My second thought was that there shouldn’t be a 6:30 on a Saturday morning.
And if there must be a 6:30 on a Saturday morning, I should remain blissfully unaware of it.
Nevertheless, there we were. And by we I mean me and my running shoes:
We did the Marie Wooten Memorial Run today, a scholarship fundraiser. There were bananas:
And other snacks:
We saw our friend, the theater director, and another guy The Yankee knows from the pool, who is a librarian. The woman who was running with Dean Wooten the day she was killed was there to run, as were a lot of dogs. They need fuel too:
While we didn’t win place on the podium — we weren’t racing, though — The Yankee did win a hat as a door prize:
And we posed with our friend, Emily, who ran with us.
I ran home, another two miles and change, because why not? Yesterday I had a rambling ride through campus and town and the suburbs to put a simple 22 miles into my bike. Tomorrow I’ll have a longer ride. Now I’m going to watch football. This will involve a great deal of sitting. I’m OK with it.
photo / weekend — Comments Off on Catching up 14 Sep 14
The Sunday post with pictures from throughout the week. These didn’t land anywhere else around here
Some of the azaleas just outside of my office, it is a lovely campus:
The student body went to the polls this week. Some 40 percent of them apparently voted on class presidents:
The venerable old live oak. I’ve always thought these branches look like a parenthesis. I always expect there to be some important text in between there each time I pass by:
I thought an early morning bike ride would have some romance: sleepy, empty roads, mystic lighting. So I set an alarm and almost got up right away. The Yankee was asleep. The town was asleep. I was asleep. I, like the roads, was also empty.
It was just a bit over an hour in the saddle, and I worked through five timed segments, doing neither particularly well or particularly poorly on any of it. I worked my way through downtown and into the western outskirts. The sun turned from yellow to bright — and there is a difference if you’re awake early enough.
Early enough being a relative term, granted.
Later in the morning, at home, The Yankee read me this story:
After working with a fraternity brother to design her engagement ring, Clayton turned to another friend, an Alabama grad, to brainstorm the perfect proposal.
In the end, only one place in the world made sense for Clayton to ask the most important question of his life.
Nick Saban’s office.
He hid in the bathroom. His fiancee, a hostess, was sent in to polish up bling for some visitors. He comes out with a ring of his own, from the bathroom, where there are apparently snacks and he had some and … people do curious things, don’t they?
She read me the story and showed me the video — of course there is video — and I am chagrined I didn’t think to use Gene Chizik’s office. Of course, he’d only been on the job for just a few days when we got engaged, though, so Chizik’s bathroom snack basket might not have been stocked up yet.
“So I sprang out of the john and said ‘Would you — ‘ and she interrupted and said ‘Does Coach use Lysol or Clorox toilet bowl cleaner?'”
People do curious things.
Football! Auburn was off, and the slate looked uninspiring, but there was a day in front of televisions and, like all of the days that include college football, it turned into something thrilling.
And punting!
And still more punting!
Those two plays happened within moments of one another in the same game. How could you not love college football?
There was a weather day of the Georgia at South Carolina game. So CBS re-played part of the Iron Bowl. Some of the more casual fans found themselves wondering why Alabama and Auburn were playing so early in the year and why it was night in the middle of the day. Everyone else had a nice laugh.
The last item in that list is from someone familiar …
Things to read … because if you read enough anything can become familiar.
In demand for almost three years, this is the weekly post with extra pictures! Let’s get to it.
Walked into the restroom — no potty humor, please — and saw this. I wonder, how do you break a seat? What weird things are going on in that stall? And then I realized it was probably better not to ask. I filed it away as another of life’s enduring mysteries, but couldn’t be sure if it should go under the subheading “And I’m OK with that” or “And frustrating, because I really want to know.”
Because, I thought, we’ll never know.
And the next day it was gone. Those custodial and facilities folks work fast.
The best slip ‘n’ slide in town, not seen is a yard full of cards and at least three huge inflatables. This kid’s party was cooler than all of yours:
You might have noticed how parking lots have directed lanes of traffic. If all of the parked vehicles are angled in this way, you should drive accordingly. If the cars are angled differently, you’ve erred.
Well, this guy went the wrong way, upstream as it were. He parked. He missed his mark. He knew it. (I know this because I was parked in front of him and watched all of this unfold.) He put his truck in reverse and backed out. He tried again. Satisfied, he left his truck like this:
