Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Monday / photo — Comments Off
24
Jul 17

Catching up

The folks were in town this weekend. I’d given them the appealing offer of coming up for a few days and doing nothing. They took us up on the deal. Saturday everyone slept in and then The Yankee and I gave them a tour of our building. We had Thai food for dinner. I had the fried rice. Rick ordered something much more fancy:

Allie enjoyed a weekend of doing close to nothing:

A cat would enjoy that, though.

Yesterday, between morning and evening rain, we saw resplendent sunflowers:

Who knows what I’ll see tomorrow.

You can see more on Twitter and Instagram too.

family / food / Friday / photo — Comments Off
21
Jul 17

Try the salmon … and definitely the croquettes

It was a quiet day on campus. The Friday of the next-to-last week of summer classes moves pretty slowly. I spent a few minutes in an audio booth:

At home, the folks are here for the weekend. After work we took them out to a local restaurant, a farm-to-fork joint. It was even called The Farm. I had the ribs:

Other things they have are better.

In the restroom they have a newspaper collage. There was a date, in the collage, Thursday, July 31, 1919. Let’s assume all of the clippings were from that same issue, making this story is 98 years old:

It seems an odd thing to read, all these years later, but people ought to have an opportunity to educate themselves on civics and the issues of the day. So let’s refresh ourselves on the issue of their day. By the end of 1919 a significant chunck of American women could vote in presidential elections. As the world started recovering from the Great War more women throughout the world became able to cast a ballot. That created more pressure here at home and several votes that would give the power to women were lost by close counts in D.C.

In May of 1919 it finally happened. Woodrow Wilson brought the Congress back to vote on a potential constitutional amendment. Missouri ratified the amendment, just a few weeks before the story above was published. Arkansas became the 12th state to ratify earlier in that same week. Readers of this little story knew the amendment was a third of the way toward becoming the law of the land. The summer of 1919 must have been full of promise for suffragists.

Tennessee voted to make the 19th Amendment the law of the land in August of 1920. It took a long while, but over the next two generations of voters, ballots cast by gender started to even out.

No one voted on those ribs, though.

photo / Thursday — Comments Off
20
Jul 17

This post needs a cat farming joke

I had to visit the hardware store — the local place, because they are closer and their prices are so far comparable on everything except for light bulbs. I needed heavier nails. And in walking around the little store checking out the paint samples, listening to the chicks cheep and wondering where the nails were stocked, I found this:

You’d figure ERTL, who have been making farm toys since the end or World War II, would know that kids are going to supply their own dirt.

Plus, what about all the carpet farming that kids do? Does Mom really want to introduce this sort of thing? Kids plowing in the shag, the fake mud and the real dirt mix and the next thing you know the low pile is a big problem in the living room.

And then there’s the back 40, the good, new carpet in the seldom-used dining room, where kids can run their tractors with less disturbance and more mud.

Allie does not like tractors, but she does enjoy a good tunnel:

She’s more into birds and fish than row crops.

Maybe I’ll introduce her to fisheries.

history / markers / photo / site / Wednesday — Comments Off
19
Jul 17

I’ll soon tackle the office closet, requiring signal flares

I installed two more shelves on an office wall today. If you enjoyed yesterday’s explanation of the process you can just imagine this twice this evening. Though, this time there were four nails and only four nail holes. Also, I developed something better than the traditional tape system to mark my spots. Then I did math four times, measured twice and drove a nail.

But the first nail is never the problem, is it? When you’re hanging something that has more than one holder it is always the math related to that second nail which is a bit more tricky. The first nail will live wherever you put it and, at worst, you just have a quirky sense of style. That second one though bears a direct relationship to the first. And at that point all of your hardware better come from Mars. Or Venus. Either one, so long as they are from the same one.

The nails have to be relative, is what I’m saying. Maybe they have to be related. No, that’d be weird. Why would the second nail stick around for that? Morbid curiosity? “What just happened to my brother? Oh well, I guess I’ll just sit around and seeeeeee — ” and then suddenly that nail is driven into the wall, too.

At any rate, a slow rate really, my home office is coming along. There are only two walls that aren’t spoken for. One is dominated by a rather large bookshelf. The other features a closet door and some curiously placed electrical plate covers. It is a small room, but it has two cable outlets, and they are about four feet apart and that is in vertical distance. This was done, I can only assume, at the beginning of the wall-mounted television craze. My solution has been to cover this space with wall art.

Now, would you like to hear about the procedure I used to chop vegetables for dinner tonight?

Back to the historical markers. We just returned to this section of the site last week and I’m now showing off some of the historic sites in this new county. The original premise is still the rule. I’m riding my bike to all of the historical markers in the county. To find out all about this building right here:

You can see the complete list, here. There will be more as the weeks progressed.

Elsewhere, check me out on Twitter and over on Instagram, too.

site / Tuesday — Comments Off
18
Jul 17

This is about speed, and also the lack of that

Who is this man, and why does he look carefully calibrated to be satisfied, but not so much that you’d think him smug?

The answer will be found in a 75 year old book. And also in the book section of the site, where we formally meet the man, the myth, the legend. You can see more of that particular book here. Then, please do look at some of the other books I’ve highlighted.

Speed typing champion. Who knew there was such a thing? He’s doing that on a manual typewriter, of course, and that’s very fast. On my computer, just now, I took a typing test and hit 96 words per minute. That’s faster than the average typist, the site assured me, but still rather pedestrian compared to Mr. Hossfield. And I imagine any given modern computer can have its keyboard operated faster than a classic typewriter.

Sometimes his name is spelled Hossfeld. Whichever way he spelled his family name, I like to think the typo really annoyed him.

This evening I hung a shelf. This involved a hammer, a few nails and a few more holes. Also, there was one exasperated sigh. But I put a shelf up. Now, this part isn’t the amazing part. I am no expert, but I can claim a fair mastery of the common hammer and both of its two main uses. What’s most interesting about this is that I just eyeballed it. There are empty walls and stacks of things to hang because this is a process that takes time.

Too much time, truth be told. There must be ideas, considered, forgotten, reapplied and philosophized about. Sometimes, if the first 14 stages of the process are successful, the frame sits at the base of the wall for a time, for further in-depth consideration.

Then, and only then, if you find the right item for the right patch of wall, you have to measure everything. There’s the distance from the left corner — this one most come first for some reason I don’t understand — and then from the right side. Equidistance must be preserved, or if further displays are warranted, steps must be taken to allow for an appropriate spatial relationship of multiple framed works. Then you have to figure out the height. Of course we’re not going to solve the timeless dilemma of what is truly eye level, but that’s running through your mind when you hang things. Also, does this thing need to be mounted in a stud? And is this nail the right weight?

Hanging thigs is a process, is what I’m saying.

Tonight, I just said Looks about right, and started driving nails. It was a powerful and carefree feeling. Not so much a smugness, but a satisfaction.

And then I looked beyond the window, to the other side of the room. The same wall. The asymmetrical, blank wall.

This is going to take a while.