I have been working, today, on 23 pages of syllabi. That will cover two classes. Most of it makes sense, but I’ll revisit it on Friday and look for any errors or obvious landmines. That was the biggest part of the day, trying to make sense of schedules that will drive things through mid-December.
No big deal.
Also, I brought in some peaches. Just one basket worth today. We have about three baskets to do something with, plus an abundance of fruit still on the tree. It’s an incredibly bountiful crop.
Speaking of, I had to upgrade the bowl I’ve been using to harvest tomatoes, because the smaller bowl was obviously not up to the task today.
The only thing better than a peach still-warm from the sun might be a tomato you just twisted from the vine. Just sitting here, writing about it, I am counting the steps from my desk to the kitchen counter. Should I go back for more, at this late hour?
These are the questions of my day, and also “Is this too many reading assignments?”
This is the third installment in my tracking down the local historical markers. New county, new goals and all of that. I found a database with 115 markers in the county, so we’ll be at this for a good while.
You can find them all under the blog category, We Learn Wednesdays. What will we learn about today?
Here’s the local high school, which has a fine infographic-style marker out front. Their graduating class of 2012, who are all ancient now, sponsored the display, which was presented by the local historic commission. And there’s a lot of information because of it.
In May of 1922, President Warren Harding was passing through the area, on his way to Atlantic City. He stopped off briefly at the school and spoke briefly. The road that passes in front of the school had been named the Harding Highway, and part of the road was even paved. Big doings in 1922.
The school was still new at the time, having just opened in 1916. (The earliest local school house was nearby, and built in 1750.) A few years ago they opened a 1915 time capsule.
Inside the capsule included names of teachers and pupils in the school district; lead pencils; names of mayor and members of borough council; and a 1915 and 1905 Woodstown National Bank Almanac, to name a few.
No one told Harding about that in ’22. Seven years later it wasn’t forgotten, but it wasn’t top-of-mind.
Harding had a big May that year. There was a fire in the Treasury Building, he got the Soldier’s Bonus Bill — and vetoed it. He took that trip to Atlantic City, where he vacationed and spoke to the Women’s Club. He waded in on coal field prices, sat down with Big Steel over the matter of 12-hour workdays and haggled with the rail bosses. He also signed an important narcotics bill into law. At the end of the month he dedicated the Lincoln Memorial. May 1922.
His August 1923 wasn’t as good. He died, in office, 100 years ago this month.
I wonder how many schools there are in America that had that one visit by a president, and the story got passed down until it didn’t matter anymore. Harding probably barely shows up in the modern curriculum, right? Teapot Dome Scandal, his early death and, lately, his illegitimate daughter. Two of those might not even figure in to a high school class. It was a century ago and he was only in office for two-and-a-half years, after all. But, still.
Anyway, the school expanded in the 1930s, more floor space and a gymnasium. By the late-1950s the elementary school kids and the middle schoolers were in new, separate buildings. Another gym was built in the 1980s, the old one was turned into a library and additional classrooms. The last major renovations took place just a few years ago.
All of this modernity replaced eight one-room schoolhouses around the area. One of them still stands, as a period schoolhouse museum.
Here’s the next marker, which is also in front of the modern high school.
This bell, then, would have been in a school building that came to life in 1852, the second public school in the community. The first high school class graduated from there in 1885.
You wonder what other happy and sad news that belt might have rang about in its day. Maybe a few of the current students are interested in that bell. If their families have been here a long time, and they did the math, some student this year might realize that perhaps one of their a great-great-great-grandparents heard that bell.
Last night I swam a mile. I didn’t know how much I would do, but it started raining on me at about 800 yards and I didn’t want to get wet, so I just stayed in the pool. Before you know it, that’s 1,650 yards and my shoulders felt like it.
The getting wet joke is a lame family joke. We’d gone on a vacation, a dive trip, and my step-father and his kids had just been certified for open water diving. Now, some of us had been diving for a long time, and some of us took to water naturally, and a lot of us had learned from different companies and through evolving teaching methodologies. So I got to be the stick in the mud who demanded the safety meeting the night before our first dives.
Good thing, too, because we learned that my step-sister thought that giving the Heimlich maneuver was delivering CPR. (To be fair, she was young.) Anyway, she wanted to go to the pool, but I wanted to go over hand signals and hypothetical situations. It seemed a good idea. She hated every moment of it. Finally, after a refresher on rescue breathing, and a run through of the basic Caribbean fish signals, we decided we were all at least in the same chapter of the book. So it was time to hit the pool. But it was raining, you see, and so she wasn’t enthused by that. (She was young.) So the rest of us went to the pool. I stayed underwater so I would not get wet.
But last night, I swam that mile and then I floated in the water listening to the raindrops until I got cold. It was delightful in every way.
I swam a mile and I … liked … it?
I do not know what is happening.
Maybe I’ll go for another swim on Thursday.
My laps have been pretty decent, by my standards. My riding has been OK, but light. My running, lousy as ever. Now I just need to put them all in a consistent routine. That’s the part that always gets me.
Today, just more peaches. We tried the new blender. (It blends!) We had peach smoothies. And then we blanched peaches to freeze. Our freezer has a lot of peaches in it now. A new colleague came over and took some off our hands. I brought in three more baskets from the tree. I made myself another smoothie.
We goofed off in the pool until dinner time. It was a fine day. Just peachy.
So let us turn our attention to the Tuesday Tabs feature. This is for all of those extra browser windows I have open. Some of these are worth keeping, somewhere, but perhaps not worth a bookmark at this time. So I’m simply memorializing them here, so I can finally close a few more tabs. (There are so many tabs.)
The most common alternatives to bi-fold closet doors include barn doors, sliding doors, pocket doors, French doors, and curtains. If you want a more unique option, consider swinging doors, a room divider, mirrors, bookcase doors, and industrial doors …
If you’re tired of the same old bi-fold doors, choosing an alternative comes down to the overall look you want. Ready to try something new? Give these different looks a chance when you’re ready to close the door to your closet.
My home office has a bifolding door set. Not a fan.
“The First State” is an amazing state along the Atlantic Ocean, Delaware Bay and Delaware River. This peninsula location means it is full of beautiful sandy beaches, riverfront views and gorgeous parks. The state also has a rich history dating back to it being the first of the original 13 states to ratify the constitution in 1787 (hence its ‘first’ nickname). Among the big cities and prominent attractions are a number of adorable small towns full of charm, history, and opportunity. From the Dutch colony of Lewes to maritime villages or the scenic beaches of Bethany Beach, Delaware is a beautiful and friendly state worth exploring.
This March, when U.S.-based AI researcher Anand Ahuja launched CTRHero, “an AI to replace Thumbnail Artists,” he called it “his life’s work.” Trained on millions of successful thumbnails from various social media platforms, CTRHero could create thumbnails within minutes, reproducing faces with 99% accuracy, according to Ahuja. The tool outraged designers who felt their livelihoods were suddenly at stake: some threatened Ahuja with physical violence. Soon after its launch, Ahuja sold off the core technology for CTRHero.
…
For YouTubers, thumbnails are serious business, as they can make or break a videos’ reach. Top creators such as MrBeast test up to 20 different thumbnail variations on a single video, paying designers a reported $10,000 for a single video. This has spawned a microeconomy of freelance YouTube thumbnails artists around the world, who hone their design skills to attract clicks.
By some estimates, AI-generated content could soon account for 99% or more of all information on the internet, further straining already overwhelmed content moderation systems.
Dozens of “news sites” filled with machine generated content of dubious quality have already cropped up, with far more likely to follow — and some media sites are helping blur the lines.
Without sufficient care, generative AI systems can also recycle conspiracy theories and other misinformation found on the open web.
University of Washington professor Kate Starbird, an expert in the field, told Axios that generative AI will deepen the misinformation problem in three key ways.
Starbird is a brilliant scholar and one of the leading researchers in this field. Check out her work.
As you read this, I am eight CDs behind in the Re-Listening project. That’s the one where I’m listening to all of my CDs in the car, in the order in which I acquired them. I am writing about them here because, it’s a good excuse to post videos of good music. Also, sometimes there are memories attached to these things, but mostly it’s padded content. And all of it’s fun. Except when you run across that bad CD, sorta like the bad grape you weren’t expecting. There’s one in every bunch, and it all comes down to taste.
Someone else bought Sister Hazel’s third studio album so I didn’t have to. I’m not sure who gave it to me, because I did not write it on the CD and it has been at least 23 years and two months since it happened. My memory is good, but there’s a lot of stuff in my memory, ya dig?
“Fortress” featured three singles, “Change Your Mind” peaked at number five on the US Adult 40. “Champagne High,” one of the album’s better songs, reached number 22. “Beautiful Thing” did not chart, which, in retrospect, was probably a signal that the moment of success brought on by Sister Hazel formula had somehow passed them by. It’s a mystery to me, really, because it’s the same as what we were all used to from the boys from Florida.
They are rhyming the word “thing” with the word “thing,” though. Maybe people noticed.
But, look, the formula works. If you want a fun sweaty party band, Sister Hazel can take the stage and keep you happy.
As an album, “Fortress” was a minor hit, settling at 63 on the Billboard 200. The record you remember, “Somewhere More Familiar” made it to 47 in 1997. Nine years and four albums later they cracked the top 50 again. Maybe tastes change around them, but the syrupy, twangy Southern rock guitar and the upbeat harmonies stayed with the band. And you can hear it still, Sister Hazel is touring all over the eastern US for the rest of the year.
Next up is one of those albums you regret. It was released in 1997 and I got it in 2000 and I can only blame myself. The world wide web was out there, and I had three solid years to find out “Deconstructed,” a remix album, is just a bad project. Even if you like electronic music, you didn’t want this. There are no new tracks, and no real reason to listen to this. I have probably played it four or five times, total, and two of those were for the Re-Listening project. Anyway, Bush worked with DJs from the electronic genre of music to remix some of the band’s previously released songs. The first one is probably the best track … but … still … electronic, British or of any other nationality, just wasn’t for me.
Hey, it was a fusion idea that went gold, and settled at number 36 on the Billboard 200 in 1997. I didn’t like it in 2000. I don’t like it today. I never understood it on my few tries in between. Maybe it’s just me. (It can’t be just me.)
Let’s wrap up this post with a better one. Up next in the Re-Listening project was a 2002 purchase, something I no doubt got at a discount bin. Something Sony licensed for a few suckers just like me. But that’s not a problem, because “The Sound Of Country was a 2 CD sampler set full of important tracks. It grabs you right away, with some classic Roy Acuff.
That’s the more famous Acuff version, of course, but his 1946 original is something to behold. It’s not o this CD, but I have included it for you here.
One of the greatest songs ever recorded in the English language is also included here.
It’s a fundamentally perfect song. Chet Atkins is in there. The background vocals are none other than the Jordanaires. That song topped the country chart for eight weeks in 1958 and climbed to number seven on the predecessor of the Billboard Hot 100. At least three covers of that song have charted over the years.
I am pretty sure I bought this double CD, which was, no doubt, very cheap, for this one song. It was the correct choice.
I was going through a Roger Miller phase. I’d find reasons to play that song. I wasn’t the only one who fell in love with that. It won five Grammys in 1966. It should have become a Broadway show and a network miniseries. If it had come out a few decades later it would have been embossed on mudflaps. The legendary Buddy Killen played guitar on that song. His people knew my people. Maybe that’s it.
You get into some important later hits, too. This topped the charts in 1984, presaging what would become of country music a generation later.
Also atop the charts in 1984, was The Kendalls last number one.
The father-daughter act released 16 albums, seeing 22 singles making the top 40, and 11 climbing into the top 10, including three at the top of the chart. Royce died in 1998 (this CD was published in 2002), but Jeannie Kendall, who started performing at 15, is still strong more than a half-century radio.
The whole double CD:
Blue Eyes Crying in The Rain – Roy Acuff
Walking After Midnight – Patsy Cline
Oh, Lonesome Me – Don Gibson
Mama Tried – Merle Haggard
King Of The Road – Roger Miller
Big Midnight Special – Wilma Lee & Stoney Cooper
When I Stop Dreaming – Leona Williams
No Help Wanted – Bill Carlisle
Sweet Memories – Frank Ifield
It’s Only Make Believe – Conway Twitty
I Love You Because – Bob Luman
All My Ex’s Live In Texas – Whitey Shafer
Louisiana Man – Rusty & Doug Kershaw
Does Fort Worth Ever Cross Your Mind – Whitey Shafer
Okie From Muskogee – Merle Haggard
I Got Mexico – Eddy Raven
The First Few Days Of Love – Lorrie Morgan
Sweet Dreams – Don Gibson
Tennessee Waltz – Redd Stewart
Honky Tonk Merry Go Round – Patsy Cline
Night Train To Memphis – Roy Acuff
Tortrue – Kris Jensen
Thank God For The Radio – The Kendalls
God Bless The U.S.A. – Lee Greenwood
And with that, we’re only four CDs behind. The next installment of the Re-Listening project will feature an act that shows us what turn-of-the-century country and bluegrass music should have done.
family / Monday / photo — Comments Off on You can eat peaches with everything — and we probably will14 Aug 23
Another succesful weekend in the books, but first, let’s get to the site’s most popular weekly feature, checking in with the kitties.
Phoebe has rediscovered a high quality hidey hole.
She clearly doesn’t want me to tell anyone where it is.
Poseidon also wants me to stop typing, but, I’m sure, for different reasons.
He wants the attention, and typing gets in the way of that, you see.
As we tell him frequently, he’d get more pets if he spent more time being charming and less time causing trouble.
They are both, however, spending as much time as possible enjoying the sunshine.
It’s kinda weird when they’re both doing the same thing, but, as you can see, the kitties had a great week.
We had a nice little bike ride on Saturday morning. It was headwinds for the first 10 miles. And it rained on us for a while, as well. And that’s when the humidity rolled in.
When we turned out of the headwind to head for home, there was no tailwind, somehow. We were on a parallel road, but somehow that breeze had disappeared.
I set four new Strava segment PRs, though, so it was a nice ride overall.
I need to ride more.
Afterward, I had to do a little yard work. For reasons I forget now, after deadheading a few flowering plants I took a quick photo of some of our very own pollinators.
Annnnnnnd then there were … the peaches. I spent a fair amount of time, I don’t know how long, working under our peach tree on Saturday. This was a start. Seven baskets of peaches.
I added five more baskets worth to the total.
Here’s the thing, I didn’t pick the first peach from the tree. These are the ones that had fallen to the ground. This does not include the discards, or the two small batches of we’ve frozen already, or the few dozen we’ve eaten.
We have a lot of peaches.
The god-nieces-and-nephews-in-law (just go with it) came over for a cookout Saturday night. And we sent them home with plenty of peaches. They even helped me get a few of the hard-to-reach fruits from the ground, and they were, of course, fascinated by picking their own peach right from the tree. That was really cute, and I hope they’ll come do that again a few times so it burns in as a memory.
One of them took home a peach pit, and I sent some info on growing a peach tree. Maybe that will launch a new interest for her.
Sunday was a quiet, lazy day. We spent the afternoon outside with the in-laws under a sky that looked like this.
And before dinner I worked on my new hobby, peach smoothies.
I am so passionate about this hobby that we broke the blender, and had to get a new one today. Peach smoothie making will continue apace.
My in-laws headed home this morning, and they took some peaches themselves. And then I picked up another basket-and-a-half of peaches.
My in-laws arrived last night, as planned. They got in late in the evening and we had a nice casual day of it today. They are lovely guests who thoughtfully don’t over-pack, which helps me out when I carry their luggage to the guest room.
Since it was dark when they arrived, they received the full tour today. The cats, who spent a few weeks with them earlier this summer, were also happy to see them, because more pets, more play, more treats.
My father-in-law tossed around a football for a while. The big guy still has some zip. It was great fun, that little game of catch.
We took in our first Phillies game this evening. The hometown good guys started a guy who was 0-3, and the visiting Minnesota Twins, who no one really likes anyway, started a struggling former Cy Young Award winner in Dallas Keuchel. Philadelphia gave up two runs early on solo home runs, but the Phillies put six runs up in the bottom of the second, knocking Keuchel out of the game. Everything after that was perfunctory. The home team put runs up in the bottom of the fourth, sixth and eighth. The Twins finished with an outfielder on the mound, and the weekend series started with a 13-2 win for the home team. Cristopher Sanchez went six innings and got his first win of the season.
Here, I think, is what is important. It was easy to get into the sports complex area. We parked right across the street from the venue, so getting in was no problem. It was a very short walk to our lower deck seats. It was easy to get out, even if it took two tries because of a weird merge.
These days, all of the major venues are pretty good. Citizens Bank Park opened in 2004. If you have a good venue and a good product, the thing that will get you to come back, or the thing that keeps you away, is convenience.
And, tonight, it was easy to cross the bridge, get to Greenwich Island, and get out again. A good time, as the cliche goes, was had by all. Except the Twins, and nobody really likes them, anyway.
Not every day, he said to himself in the sort of conciliatory fashion that usually comes with hair being tossled, or a sweet jab on the shoulder or the word “Slugger,” is meant to be the most productive day of the week. And in a week of slow productivity, that day was today.
I returned to Lowe’s to pick up the garbage can lid I forgot yesterday. It’s a fair drive over there, so I had time to work up some material. And I had a tight four minutes of poor comedy ready for the person at the customer service desk. But here’s the thing about the person at the customer service desk: they don’t care.
That’s not fair. This woman seemed perfectly fine and approachable. She’s just been trained, either by corporate decision or reasonable experience, to not be bothered by anyone that walks through that door and the story they share.
She did explain the corporate red vest policy. Apparently, they aren’t allowed to take them home. So they’re never clean. That’s a long way to go to avoid Halloween photos on the ‘gram. I said, because it was obvious she caught herself saying something that was too much. She agreed. And she let me get that garbage can lid. And she also rung up a few extra purchases. I got some specialty bulbs for some recessed lighting. I picked up some new air filters, because we have a lot of air to filter, and I also got some packing tape, because I need some crispy, sticky, prrrrrrrrbt! PTSD in my life.
I made two other fruitless stops, which built to a nice little mood. Then I hit an upscale UPS store. I say upscale because this place was built for a certain clientele in a certain part of town. You could tell by the “light fawn” shading of the stucco out front. Our last UPS store was in a tired little strip mall. Twice, within the last year or so, someone drove through the store. Going there for more than a few seconds at a time felt like a gamble for that very reason. Today, I was given two things to drop off at the UPS store. One was going back to Amazon. No problem. The other, the young man straight out of Disinterested Young Clerk Central Casting, vaguely assured me he didn’t want the package.
“Uhhh, these instructions usually mean they’ll pick it up?”
Who is they?
“The UPS driver.”
Well see what brown can do for us this week then.
“Huh?”
I got back to the house just in time for the heavy rain to start. Some of our flowering flowers haven’t recovered from Sunday’s rains. This, then, made for a demoralizing scene. Maybe in a week they’ll pick themselves back up, the flowering flowers. Maybe they won’t. This is the headspace I’m reaching for.
After all, I have to simultaneously deal with things like this. This is American fireweed. It’s fire.
As in burning. It’ll burn the flesh right from your bones.
(No, it won’t. — ed.)
It’s actually named that because this is one of the things that first pops up in great abundance after forest fires. It’s a broadly indigenous plant. It has some medicinal uses. Mostly, you forget about this stuff and then wake up in August and this thing is interfering with air travel lanes.
It can grow up to eight to 10 feet, almost over night. I pulled up a lot of it today. All of it in a hard-to-reach spot. I am wondering if it was nature or a person that thought this was a great practical joke.
I looked in some storage for a few items I can’t put my hands on. Still can’t find them. But I did pull out some good thread, high quality envelopes and some thank you cards. I am sitting on some weird, arbitrary fine line of “Will this be useful? Or should this be stored and forgotten until after it would have been useful?”
Which is to say, how many times have I purchased a batch of thank you cards while six other blank cards sit in a drawer and I’ve forgotten about them?
The next thing to do — that’s probably not true, but this is on a long list — is to make sure that all of the things are placed in rooms and drawers and shelves that make sense for when and where they’ll be used. All of that tape I picked up today was placed in a cabinet in the mudroom. Because it doesn’t need to go in a kitchen cabinet, and we might forget it if we put it in the basement somewhere. There are dozens of these little decisions.
And why is that large nail protruding from the wall at almost eye level? I spent a few minutes solving that problem, because the nail is in use, but it is inelegantly applied. Martha Stewart would just cringe.
Also I disguised a bit of floor under the stairs in the basement. This is the area where things with no daily demand will go. But you can build a little box fort around that area, so that, one day, when you are cleaning up down there, and you find the old seashells that would have been useful for that one project, and the extra wood flooring and such, you’ll smack yourself in the head remembering that you did have some walnut-shaded maple, and a bunch of broken bits of ocean life. And you’ll wonder why you built up this box fort. Because it made sense on a rainy day in 2023.
Oh, I changed the air filter, and added an innovation. I wrote the date on the air filter, so I’ll know when to replace it. (Don’t worry, there’s a notation in my calendar, as well.)
The best part of the day is that my in-laws arrived safely this evening. They’re going to spend the weekend with us. They sampled our peaches.
Like that new basket, don’t ya? I surely do.
Anyway, they said the peaches are delicious. And they are! I had a few after dinner tonight.
If fresh fruit is involved in the best part of your day, no matter how productive the day was, it was a pretty good day, Slugger.
