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Early night at the office tonight, so we jogged around campus. This was just a little more than three miles into the run.
We ran eight miles in all. I ran negative splits over the last three. The Yankee tells me this is good.
Must have been because the sun was down and it was 37 degrees by then.
So I’ve learned two things. First, training for a long run in the winter makes you faster. Second, if you have to train for a long run in the winter, don’t.
I watched two shows get produced this evening. First was What’s Up Weekly:
Sierra and Sheila are going to take you through all the important and cool events going on around town. And there might be some fashion and celebrity gossip thrown in there, as well. They have a lot of fun on that show.
And here is the group getting ready for Hoosier News Source:
Tonight Sophia and Mackenzie are on the desk, and you see Lauren and Meredith who are doing a bit of floor directing and last-minute wrangling before the cameras started to roll. It was a decent-sized show:
This is the best story of the day. What the tweet doesn’t tell you: this was from 1,800 meters away. Her Majesty’s best man did this from more than a mile away:
SAS sniper kills THREE ISIS fighters with a single shot in Iraqi https://t.co/Nn1OX5pPeg via @MailOnline
— The_Q (@The_Q_is) January 23, 2017
The story says the bad guys were about to start shooting at a group of women and children.
Best headline of the day: The Girl Behind The Sparkle-Shooting Prosthetic Arm Is Just Getting Started:
The last 10 months have been a whirlwind for Jordan, who was born with a left arm that stops just above the elbow. After Fast Company first wrote about Jordan’s sparkle-shooting arm last March, she’s presented it at events all around the country, including a trip to Disney World, where she won the Dream Big, Princess award. Autodesk and Dremel gave her a 3D printer to use at home, and Awesome Without Borders chipped in $1,000 for filament.
“It’s just crazy,” Jordan says of everything that’s happened over the last year. “Good crazy. There’s no such thing as a bad crazy.”
And, finally, The Story Behind Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” and the Poet’s Own Stirring Reading of His Masterpiece.
It was sunny and 67 and gorgeous on Saturday. We were supposed to run 12 miles, but you get days like this in January here only so often. Or a day. You only get a day like this in January only so often. (As in, Saturday. That was the one day.)
So instead of running we decided to go for a little bike ride. So we set out for the bike and pedestrian trails around town:
It was an easy spin. Just as well, because it was the first time I’d been on my bike since the end of last season. She was in fine form:
A lot of people were out, because they understand the weather to be an exception to what is ahead of us, so the trails were often full. Lots of walkers and joggers and families and you can hear the briefest of a snippet of conversations on the trails and I’m always hoping they fall together to make some nonsensical story. You’re around people for about a second, and it’ll take forever, but I’m hoping.
And there are a lot of kids on bikes. Whenever I see a kid on a bike I always try to compliment their ride. “Oh I need one that color!” Give a little boost and all that. Not this girl, though:
She went by me too fast.
On Sunday afternoon it was overcast and 60. We were supposed to run 12 miles, but I only got in five miles. It just didn’t feel good (so I added four more miles today). But it looked like this, which is what most winter days look like here:
And this:
We passed that barn going the other direction the day before on my bike. I’d tried to take a picture of it from my bike, but my phone’s iOS decided to confuse my opening the phone app for “Yes, let’s update right now!” I just wanted a photo of the silo and I got an all new operating system, instead. It was good that I found the barn and silo again on foot. I had no idea where we were when we rode past it, which is the best way to start your year on the bike.
You go through your young life in Illinois and enlist the Army right out of high school at 17. By the time you are 20 you have fought in Guadalcanal, been wounded and learned both your parents died while you were away. You go AWOL three times before, finally, your bouts of drinking and fighting become too much to overcome, you get discharged. And then you write classics like “From Here to Eternity” and “The Thin Red Line.” That was Jim Jones. Later still, he was also a journalist covering Vietnam. And I bring him up to you because he was a friend of Willie Morris, that Mississippi scoundrel who was editing Harper’s Magazine by the time he was 33. They become such good friends that Jones asked Morris to finish his last book for him after he died. And he did, “Whistle” became the last of Jones’ war trilogy, and Morris wrote the last three chapters in 1977-78.
Two decades later Willie died. He’d been teaching at Ole Miss after he moved back from New York and had compiled and released a book of his essays that I’d find in a bookstore. I wish I could remember which one. It doesn’t matter, but it probably does. Either way, Terrains of the Heart he wrote at Oxford and I bought it in Alabama, quite literally because of the cover.
And this was a great choice. Willie, like all gregarious storytellers, was pleased to hold court in the warm embrace of a room of people that loved his stories. Willie, like the best storytellers, could make a place come alive and — no, that’s not quite accurate. Willie Morris, who was concerned about entropy and stillness and mortality and life could make the South hum. He could bring the sweet smell of the South to your mind, through your nose, and the dew in the fields to your heart through your toes. And Willie taught me the second thing I learned about writing. The first was that if you can figure out how to bring a smell into the story you’ve done some serious writing. And the second was I wanted to teach myself how to write like Willie Morris.
I tell you this because on this day, every four years, I think of a conversation Willie Morris recounts of his friendship with James Jones:
Who knows what all we’ll think four years from now, or at any time in between, but that’s an important observation to keep in mind.
Sometimes you park in the lot across the street from the building. Sometimes you park in the lot one block over from that. Depending on the time of day, you might have to park one block away from the building, in a narrow little, older looking parking deck.
That’s where I parked today. And in that deck they have painted numbers on the doors so you know where you parked. And that stencil artist decided to be extra helpful …
But then someone came along and said “No, no, no. We can’t have that.”
And you wonder why.
Thursdays are long days. I stayed on campus until almost 9 p.m. tonight. I was watching a few shows being recorded. Here’s a sports show the IUS crew taped tonight:
First show back this semester. So now all of the rust should be knocked off and it’ll be onward and upward from here. There was also a talk show tonight, but it won’t be released until the weekend.
I should have shared these yesterday, but I forgot. So here is the news show, Hoosier News Source:
And What’s Up Weekly:
And that’s plenty for now. Except for whatever I don’t remember.
