books / cycling / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off on ‘And the chain tension in harmony with the correct gear’
15
Jul 20

‘And the chain tension in harmony with the correct gear’

Today, on the bicycle, I had an interesting ride. It was one of those days where I really understood gearing, anticipating shifts in all of the right places. It wasn’t la volupté, the voluptuousness, by any means. I seldom get that spare moment Jean Bobet described:

Its magic lies in its unexpectedness, its value in its rarity … It is more than a sensation because one’s emotions are involved as well as one’s actions.

The voluptuous pleasure that cycling can give you is delicate, intimate and ephemeral. It arrives, it takes hold of you, sweeps you up and then leaves you again. It is for you alone. It is a combination of speed and ease, force and grace. It is pure happiness.

I didn’t have that, but I was really in tune, understanding, anticipating, the shifting today. I really had it down in a fine and intimate way. One click here, push over the roller and two pops there. It was one of those days where I really understood it, until I completely and immediately forgot it all. One of those days.

(I really need a haircut.)

Probably it means I have been riding those particular roads too much recently. Indeed, as we see by today’s installment of the irregular feature of Barns by Bike:

As I am sure I’ve written here before, this road was also on the first bike route we rode here. We see it a lot. Do you ever wonder what’s inside people’s barns? You have time on a bike to think about such things.

Anyway, some roads are like that. Everyone has their regular routines. You have to work to escape them sometimes. You see la volupté a lot less frequently. Far too little, in fact. But it’s one of the reasons you keep going out there. Just one of them.

adventures / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off on Three backyard pictures
14
Jul 20

Three backyard pictures

That wasn’t the theme when I started this. I had a weekend photo to use, and a day’s post to pad out. What to do, what to do? There’s always a photo post waiting to happen.

And with three new photos and a slow Tuesday with few accomplishments to point to, I put a little branding tag on the pics. Time to try something new, I figured, and then I uploaded the photos.

And that works! Three photos! I can write around that! Look at the text layer! How over-done and gimmicky! I wonder how long that will last! Or how long it will be before I change the font? Or the size? Or I have to work around a picture with poor negative space.

Which was when I realized: I took all of these pictures in the backyard. And, if the backyard wasn’t somehow the height of adventure recently, that’d probably mean something. But, alas.

We have a little tree with a lot of character:

And we have other trees that are just casual foreground. This photo is really about how you can still see at almost 10 p.m. this time of year.

It’s my favorite part of the place, easy.

That was earlier this evening. And this was soon after. Darkness had fallen, we stood out in the yard to look up. The International Space Station was soaring overhead.

There are five people up there. I get to see it occasionally, and that never gets old. We are up there.

Space still excites people. Excites me, anyway, even if it is just from the backyard.

cycling / Instagram / IU / Monday / photo — Comments Off on Back on campus today again
13
Jul 20

Back on campus today again

I had a tough bike ride on Saturday. This was my only photo, and I was basically back at the house and worn down and had pretty much given up on the whole thing for quite a while, anyway.

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Thirty miles in the wind.

A post shared by Kenny Smith (@kennydsmith) on

Sometimes it is like that. Some days you feel great. Great! And somedays are off. Or some days you just feel lousy about the whole thing. It is always better to have done it. That’s the constant. Even on the lousy rides, like this one on Saturday. I had a headache in the middle of the it, which might be a first for the thousands of miles and the few thousand hours I have spent staring down at handlebars.

But the speed was about … average for what I’ve come to expect lately. So call it an uneven evening ride of pushing through. I stayed with The Yankee for half of it, anyway. She took a different route and I just turned around at one point. She came in about 10 minutes and with an extra two miles or so. Hers was better than mine, which is always nice.

Which leads us nicely to the weekly cat pictures. This is perhaps the cutest one I took of Phoebe this week.

But it is not the best one I took of her. I’m saving that series for a rainy day.

Poseidon was very sleepy this weekend. When he wasn’t being demanding, challenging, loud, too aggressive or otherwise overbearing.

So normal cat stuff, I guess.

Cats.

Back on campus today. We spent six hours in Studio 5 tearing down a set. Last year they built a set for an apartment for one of the production classes. Somewhere along the way it was decided that the set wasn’t sufficient. So, after many meetings, it was decided that this set was coming down.

So today we took ratchet to bolts and pry bars to nails and it all came down and the soundstage is a soundstage again.

People also balanced lights in suspension system hanging in the rafters and we tore down an ancient wall fixture which required brute force, which is why they keep me around.

Someone also put in an order for a dumpster for all the stuff that was due to be disposed of from the studio. We filled the loading dock with debris and it will go a long way toward filling the dumpster.

When it got down to the point of removing tape from the floor I knew it was time to leave … just as soon as the tape was cleaned up.

It was a productive Monday, I suppose. I stopped by the grocery store on the way to the house. I was intent to count the masks to no-masks, but gave up when it was 11-2, masks and I needed to find the most direct route to the areas of the store I needed with the fewest people between points A, B, C and D.

All of the products I wanted were there. I picked up all of the products I wanted. I breezed through the self-checkout and hustled outside, so I could go directly to the domicile in the most indirect route possible. There’s road work, you see. So I had to go through a neighborhood that we usually ride bikes through and I had to remind myself the car and the bike approach things differently. Also, the hills are much smaller with an internal-combustion engine at your disposal. The music is better, too.

Back inside, groceries put away, showered, snacked and then catching up on the day’s email and then dinner and, now, this. It wasn’t exactly a full day, but it was full enough. There were people and achievements and a place to sit down at the end of it, so full enough indeed.

Friday / Twitter — Comments Off on Some social media stuff
10
Jul 20

Some social media stuff

I spent most of the morning in Zoom meetings.

The rest of the day was a blur for reasons I already don’t understand.

Anyway, a tweet:

A story that, I dunno, is probably going to require followups:

Local health officials were optimistic; two months and more than $40 million later they’re losing patience.

According to multiple public health officials, it is unacceptable that as many as half of the files in the state’s contact tracing database are missing vital information.

On May 11, Indiana began to supplement the efforts of local health departments by creating a centralized contact tracing call center. The state is paying Virginia-based outsourcing firm Maximus $43 million to oversee centralized tracing. Although public health experts recommended more, 500 workers were hired in May.

Just before the deal was inked, the company sent a donation to Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb’s reelection campaign. That wasn’t its first foray into Indiana politics.

Maximus did not respond to a request for comment—either on its political contributions or the quality of contact tracing.

But the issues Indiana is facing run deeper. Health officials worry contact tracing issues could be costing Hoosier lives.

And since we talked about the sports here yesterday, how about a video? I know all these guys. Nice guys. Smart guys. Future-of-sports-broadcasting guys.

And one more tweet to begin your weekend.

More on Twitter, check me out on Instagram and more On Topic with IU podcasts as well. And have a great weekend!

podcast / Thursday — Comments Off on Where will children learn this year?
09
Jul 20

Where will children learn this year?

There’s a now sort-of famous poll, I guess, from May (remember May?) that said 30 percent of parents are “very likely” to try homeschooling in the fall. Even more said they were considering it. And a lot of teachers are considering not returning to the classroom this year. Educators are trying to figure all of this out, and there are, as you might imagine a lot of moving parts involved in turned the routine into the crisis-driven responsive.

So we are talking homeschooling here with professor Robert Kunzman, a man who knows all about the research involved.

The rules vary from state-to-state and, in most, they are shockingly light.

That’s the third education podcast I’ve done on this program. I never worked an education beat. Politics and courts and hard news, sure, but never education. I’m not sure if this qualifies me for the job.

Anyway, education is going to be tricky this year. In Indiana the state department of education said “The local school corporations will figure it out.” While it probably seems like passing the buck, that does allow for different circumstances over vast geographical areas. And left local superintendents and county health officers to make the call.

It seems like most, here in this immediate area, will be doing some sort of hybrid program. Some days in school, some days out of school. I haven’t seen the particulars so I shouldn’t question the efficacy or the thought process behind it. It is, we can all agree, less than ideal, everywhere.

As I write this I just saw that in Dallas, Texas, some 153,000 students are now looking at a September start date. Kicking the can, says the superintendent there, was the backup plan. But as you get closer to launch dates, backups become realities.

And, in something that really matters to casual audiences, college football is facing similar problems. Today you saw the beginning of the end of the 2020 football season. The Big Ten dumped their non-conference schedule. It’s a nod to more flexibility for the games that matter, a teaser of even-more-cash-strapped-smaller-programs or court, or both. And it feels like frustra sperans that we’ll even get that far.

The smaller Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, representing 14 schools across six states, is cutting out the middleman, hope, and has canceled their fall athletic seasons. Sometimes the right decisions are the most difficult ones.

And in New Mexico the governing high school body has today canceled football and soccer for this fall.

More will follow, near and far.

The second half of this week already reminds me of the second half of that March week when they shut down the basketball tournaments. That was on a Thursday, too.

Solution: Eliminate Thursdays. Let us go directly to Fridays!

But not yet. First I get to Zoom with some of my students. You don’t pass up those rare summer visits.

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