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.
Well, this is most definitely that week. So let’s do that this week, let’s document autumn. These are all on campus, in the Dunn’s Woods, which was a 20-acre tract of land the university purchased in 1883 from Moses Fell Dunn, a local lawyer and landowner:
As the university shifted from its seminary roots to a liberal arts college, it was important to keep the original atmosphere. So campus officials were intent on keeping much of the woods. They used the phrase “preserving the sylvan nature” a lot in their campus plans. Because of that, a walk on campus shows a great abundance of native flora.
That was a good choice.
history / IU / Monday / photo — Comments Off on The beautiful trouble of autumn, Part II06 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.
Well, this is most definitely that week. So let’s do that this week, let’s document autumn. These are all on campus, and in the Old Crescent:
Franklin Hall, where I work:
The Rose Well House:
Used to be the big thing, you’d take your date to the Well House and get a kiss at midnight. The fronts and ornamental stone fixtures from the Old College Building were built into this structure in 1907 and 1908. It’s named after Theodore F. Rose, class of 1875, who chaired the project and paid for it in honor of his graduating class. He was a lawyer, but made his money in natural gas, after which he became one of those people who sits on the board of this and is the president of that, including the university’s board of trustees, over which he presided. He died in 1919, while working toward the university’s centennial. I’ve been reading about him in an alumni magazine of that year, an almost-100-year-old magazine. We’re going to celebrate the bicentennial soon, and I have the good fortune to work with some of the people in that office in a very small way. From the other side of the Well House:
In the background, you can see Maxwell Hall, which is an administration building.
The Richardsonian Romanesque-style building was built in 1890 and later named after Dr. David Maxwell, who is considered the father of the university. He was a physician and a lawmaker, and another president of the university board. We’re surrounded by history in the Old Crescent. And beautiful trees, too.
After a few years of trying, in 2005 he figured out that tiny, little no A/C church. His recording sounds like an amphitheater with a 450-member national choral arrangement in four part harmony. (Mind you, this is my phone recording a CD playback from my car stereo.) Then the guy included just about all of my favorite hymns from the book on his CD. It was worth every, I dunno, $5 he wanted for it. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
Track six is I'm Winging My Way Back Home, which has six syllables I sing better than anything else in the 750-plus song catalog.
I can't correctly sing any other part of the song right in this arrangement, but those few notes …
A quick tale about an experience that was funny right away and funnier over time because of friends, starring @SDWesq and his lovely wife. pic.twitter.com/YanGwNkEK1
Well, this is just about the oddest thing you can expect on a one-block walk between the parking deck and the office:
This evening we were shooting sports shows. It is that time of year when we’re still talking about college football, the start of the wrestling season, the beginning of basketball, the men’s soccer team’s postseason run and more. Lydia and Austin are holding it all down:
After the night in the studio, I walked back by that hydrant. It seemed weird, but not really weird, the wig was gone when I walked back by.
Who picks up that wig? Was it the original owner? Why did they leave it to start with? Who needed a new wig, and happened upon this one? What if they didn’t have the right complexion?
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.
