20
Mar 24

The most wide-ranging Wednesday post in a while

This evening I watched a man in a custom suit and sneakers talk about his life’s work, listened as he painted a picture that he thinks everyone is out to get him, that money is everything and that having a life is secondary to having work. It would have been disconcerting if it didn’t come off as sadly insecure.

It’s one thing to be driven. To have gotten, undeniably, indisputably, to where you want to be and still come off that way, it seemed difficult, in the day-to-day. I could be wrong. The guy had on a great suit. It fit him, and the rest of the vibe.

Where as I was wearing shoes that look good, but don’t exactly treat my feet well. I like them, but there better not be a lot of walking around in them. And I’m secure enough about my feet to be able to say that.

It is not a phrase I use. It’s not one I think of often. If I were trying to sum up a person, or a presentation, or an attitude, it’s just not a descriptor I reach for. But at one point during the talk it slipped out of my mouth, under my breath, to no one in particular. At the end of the talk, as everyone stood to leave, the strangers in front of me stood and looked back and we all made eye contact, as you do. One gentleman said, “He seems very insecure.”

Also, I’ve become a huge proponent of having a life and an identity away from the office. One day I’ll even make one!

Right now I’m too busy watching things bloom, and waiting for it to get just a little bit warmer. But instead of a steady, constant, climb of mercury, we are stuck in this middle ground of 48 degrees. We are stuck in that time of relative temperatures. Six, seven weeks ago, you’d take 48 degrees, and you’d be pleased with it. But now, somehow, the body knows better. It isn’t supposed to be 48 degrees anymore. The rational mind has known this for some time, but now the body has gotten wise.

That’s when the impatience really kicks in.

But the budding and flowering things don’t seem to mind. The magnolia liliiflora is getting ready to put on a show.

It’s a small tree, basically, because the Overambitious Shrub Lobby got to the policy makers. It’s from China, though it’s often called Japanese. And, as you can tell, it will offer many, many blooms before the leaf buds open.

It is a slow growing thing, about six inches a year or so.

Makes you wonder if we cut it back too far last fall.

I guess we’ll find out in two or four years.

Here’s another video from last week’s visit to California. Here, the waves are rolling in on William Randolph Hearst Memorial Beach. Just across the highway and well up the hill is the Hearst Castle. They’re rather fond of the old media magnate. Gave him a nice, quite, beach too.

The Hearst family owned it all, until they gave it to the state in the 1950s.

We were only there for a short while, of course, but it looks like there’s a lot to enjoy there.

Once again it’s time for We Learn Wednesdays. Today’s is our 29th installment, and I don’t know why I’m still counting that. Anyway, I ride my bike around the county to find the historical markers via bike. Good way to see things, and it’s amusing to take pictures of sometimes important old places in funny clothes. This is the 50th marker in that effort, and I shot this one last December in a stockpiling effort.

The stockpile should last until it gets warm, and I can put some road miles in my legs. But I digress.

I digress because I have nothing.

Here’s the building.

And here’s the marker.

It’s gone on sale again just this week. It’s seemed to have been off and on the market a lot in the last several years. It’s been a mixed use rental for the last decade or so. And the building, according to property records, was built in 1888.

The web will not tell me what makes this place deserving of being on the historic register. You’d think the historic register people would put that on a site themselves. The historic register people do not.

Next week, we’ll learn a tiny bit of a long-gone social club. If you’ve missed any markers so far, you can find them all right here.

Sometimes you run across a good obituary. Obituaries are a celebration of the living, we were taught in J-school, and sometimes the obit writers remember that. It takes a great skill to write a quality obituary, though some of them do come easier than other, prepackaged with magic or memoirs or flacks as they are. A remarkable person, a life well-lived. All of it is found in this one:

As a teenager, Mr. Greenfield was Maximilian Grünfeld, a skinny Jewish prisoner whose job was to wash the clothes of Nazi guards at the concentration camp. In the laundry room one day, he accidentally ripped the collar of a guard’s shirt. The man whipped Max in response, then hurled the garment back at the boy.

After a fellow prisoner taught Max how to sew, he mended the collar, but then decided to keep the shirt, sliding it under the striped shirt of his prison uniform.

The garment transformed his life. Other prisoners thought it signified that Max enjoyed special privileges. Guards allowed him to roam around the grounds of Auschwitz, and when he worked at a hospital kitchen, they assumed that he was authorized to take extra food.

Max ripped another guard’s uniform. This time, it was deliberate. He was creating a clandestine wardrobe that would help him survive the Holocaust.

“The day I first wore that shirt,” Mr. Greenfield wrote seven decades later, “was the day I learned clothes possess power.”

At every turn the obituary gets better and better, and you don’t say that about a lot of newspaper copy. It’s one of the best obits I’ve ever read. And is, without a doubt, the most memorable piece I’ve ever read in a fashion section. Give it a try.


19
Mar 24

I made a beach video, just for you

What day is it? What time is it? We didn’t take a red eye, but it seemed like it. I’m an amazing lightweight when it comes to being thrown off by travel, so it is not a great surprise that, a mere 36 hours removed from being on the other side of the country, and five-and-a-half degrees of a lower latitude, I’m still trying to determine my identity, and which shoe is for which foot.

Lewis and Clark would be very, very disappointed in me.

Of course, they knew nothing of time zones. They might have known about coordinate cartography. Sailors of their day certainly did. But did that really figure into the slower pace in which those hardy souls crossed the nation?

And how was their cell service when they did that, anyway? Because some places on this trip, it was surprisingly spotty, even now.

There’s a joke to be made here. Something about how one of the members of the expedition had a great data plan. I’m not convinced people really know Toussaint Charbonneau well enough for the joke to really land.

Spring is finally showing up here on the inner coastal plain — where the heavy land and the green sands meet. You can see it on the ground and in the mulch and on the ends of the little sticks that have been protruding from the bushes and trees all winter long. We took two nice little walks, in a sunny chill, around the yard yesterday to see what had popped up while we were out of town.

The peach tree, for one, is making a lovely show.

We had so many peaches last year. Gave bags and bags of them away. Ate a lot. Froze a bunch more. I look at this beautiful little flower and think, We better start eating those we froze.

Peach smoothies for days. Maybe some peach shakes and peach ice cream, too.

But first we’re going to need about 15 more degrees, day and night, please.

I had class last night, of course. There’s nothing like the first evening class after spring break to give you a sense of who is invested in the class. Everyone, I hope. They have an exam next week. And so that is what we spent the evening discussing, how the exam would work, a few tips on what to look for, a review of key terms. A few exercises.

You know what’s embarrassing? When you forget a thing right when you’re trying to make the point, and someone asks about it. It doesn’t make for the most graceful deflect ever to say, “What do you think it means?” But there I was last night, doing exactly that.

It was one of those tip-of-my-tongue moments, sure, but it was going to take a while to pull it all together. And I’d done the exact same thing in this class in our last meeting. I can’t let on that this is happening all of the time, of course.

Anyway, the students have good material with which to prepare. I hope they all do well on their test.

I’m guessing, if I spread them out evenly, there are two, maybe three weeks of videos from our west coast trip to share. If there are that many, I decided I should hastily make a California banner. So I made a banner. May as well use it.

Most of these, I think, will exist without context. I shot a lot of them thinking, this will be a nice moment that readers can use as a quick, calm, break. I was fortunate and made it to the beach. Just in case you didn’t …

That’s late afternoon on Moonstone Beach, in Cambria. The seaside village has a population of 5,678, but that’s a number for the larger, sprawling area, surely. It came up as a lumber, ranching and mercury mining town. The ranching is, one supposes, not a coincidence. The Obispeño name transalted as “Place of the horses.” Today, it feels like it has been an artist village for a good long while. It’s a lovely place. And, as you can see, the beach is quite nice as well.

Not bad for a 60 second vacation, no?

And now, to catch up on things. Or was it, to get ahead of things?

Difficult to tell after such a trip, and the accompanying jet lag. Toussaint Charbonneau would be unimpressed.


18
Mar 24

We’re back! Somehow …

We made it back from California. We were only a little late, but that worked in our favor. But that’s getting ahead of things.

I had two days worth of taco lunch, on Thursday and Friday. Also, on Friday, I did a little two-mile run. That’s two runs this week, and my first two runs of the year. I’ve been spending my time, of course, putting in base miles on the bike. All of which allows me to find ways to get to this old saw: When I see a person riding their bike, I always think, ‘Man, I wish I could ride my bike right now!’ I have never, ever seen anyone run and think, ‘Man, I wish I could go for a run right now!

My run was to the drug store. I should have bought some painkillers for my little run, but the purpose was to get some contact solution. I could have gone to a CVS four-tenths of a mile away, but that’s not a run. Not really.

Anyway, the first run this week was 1.5 miles on a beach boardwalk. This run was downtown, which is a run that, despite the red light, green light, wait for a clear intersection nature of it all, felt like it could go on for forever. Maybe those occasional breaks were why it felt that way.

I saw a bunch of friends, which was delightful. I bumped into a former coworker, who is about to leave the place where we met. She told me how difficult things have become there, which is unfortunate. But she’s excited for what’s next for her, starting next fall, which is exciting. She’s been stretched thin, it appears. Added duties, administrative issues and so on. It all sounds not good. I said, When you get there, and you’re doing just the work you’ve been hired for, the work you want to do, it’ll be a big improvement. And you will have earned that. You’ll just have to be let yourself come to realize that fact. When you do, you’re going to remember how to enjoy all of this again.

Sometimes, I sound like a sage.

The Yankee’s two presentations at the conference were great. Interesting research abounded throughout the conference, none more so than hers. We had a great dinner on Saturday night. On Sunday morning, we were up and out early. To the airport, Jeeves!

This is what happened next. The Los Angeles city government conspired to ruin everything. We’d received an email on Saturday from the car rental people warning us that construction between their lots and the airport was slowing everything down. Arrive early, they suggested. We did. Returning the car was easy. The shuttles to the airport were non-existent, stuck in traffic somewhere around wherever. This, despite an early morning flight, backed up customers at the rental car lot. On the third bus, we were able to board the bus. The driver was awesome, but she was flabbergasted. The construction project had reduced the lanes to the international airport to a minimal level. After a long, long, long time on the bus, we just got off and ran the last mile and change, backpack and suitcase in tow. (So look! Three runs in one week!)

After which, the federal government conspired to make it worse. At Terminal 5 at LAX, there are two TSA agents tasked with the important job of checking driver’s licenses. Yesterday morning, there was a man and a woman on the job. Around two corners — not counting the serpentine crown lanes — I managed to get in the woman’s line. This was good! The man’s scanner was barely working, which meant that every third passenger or so he had to walk over and borrow the woman’s gear. The woman, for her part, left her duty station three times. The time was ticking. And I missed the boarding window.

Fortunately, my flight crew was stuck in the nightmare outside, as well. And that was the only way I made that plane. When the first part of security theater had been satisfied and my ID was finally checked, an older woman came to the front of the line, asking if she could go ahead. Her flight was leaving in eight minutes and so on and so forth. Everyone was in this boat, I was sure of it. The TSA agent said she’d have to ask permission of everyone in front of her to cut the line. I knew my flight crew was still trying to fight their way in, so I invited her to break in line in front of me. With one authoritatively dismissive tone, I convinced the dismissive ID experts that she was with me.

At the take walk-around-in-your-socks portion of the security, the old woman said she’d lived here for 40 years and she’d never seen it like this. She said she, too, ran from the road. She said she was 75 years old.

She had time to tell me all of these things because the scanner image specialist left his duty station twice.

“Safety,” one of them tiredly said over and over, “is my priority.”

Somehow that explains why people kept leaving their posts.

Anyway, we made the plane, but I only made it because the flight crew had trouble getting in.

The flight was fine. Long, but short. Seemed to take an entire day, especially with jumping three time zones. On the other hand, we flew across the entire nation. Lunch was airport food on the plane, chewing quickly, hoping to avoid cooties. Dinner was from a rest stop Shake Shack at 11:30 p.m. But, hey, it’s milkshake season.

It was a great trip. Our only problem over the whole trip, as it turned out, had to do with getting home.

I have a lot of video from the trip, and that’ll be something I dole out over the next however long that takes. But I’ll give you a hint.

  

Come back, or better yet, subscribe to the RSS feed for many, many more videos from the Pacific Coast.

I shot, I dunno, maybe 15 or 20 videos that will just be Peacefully Enjoy The Moment videos. I suppose that speaks most of all to how pleasant the trip was. But I haven’t counted how many videos I have, so I’ve no idea how many and how long we’ll enjoy from that trip.

For example, I’m still adding video from our New Year’s diving trip. This one just has a lot of fish, and then a barracuda with great camera sense.

  

I’ve probably got a few more videos from that trip, and then maybe I’ll just pull out some single shots for posterity’s sake. Video runs never really end here, but this post must. I must finish my prep for this evening’s class.


15
Mar 24

Your weekend meditation

This is probably the sort of deep philosophy you can get from a weather-beaten, or even an artificially weathered, plank at Hobby Lobby, but I saw this at a restaurant in Cambria this week and I don’t think I’ve ever seen this before, and look …

Sometimes, you get a thunderclap. Something short of an epiphany, but no less important. Sometimes they happen in dreams, or staring in the mirror, or in random moments at red lights. But this one was a carefully stenciled platitude on a weight-bearing column in a seaside restaurant and it was perfectly timed …

There’s a few ways you can use that expression, perfectly timed. It could mean, in this context, that you receive a quick stab of clarity. Or it could mean the introduction of new information or a new concept when you’re ready to be receptive, and willing to give real thought to what you’re told. I suppose it could also mean both. That’s how I’m choosing to take this. I was ready for the sudden 2×4 across my brow, and willing to learn what it meant. And at that moment, as I passed this on the right, and looked up, there it was.

Maybe it was having just come off the sand, or having that persistent feeling of salt on my skin. Maybe it was the jet lag. But, most likely, I’m just ready to accept real wisdom when I see it, even if it is from a fortune cookie or, as in this case, a restaurant motto.

It seemed fundamental. It seemed obvious. It was like any straightforward invention where you smack your head and wonder, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

Why didn’t I think of that?

It doesn’t hurt that it was a restaurant with really good fish tacos, either. So, thanks John and Kernn. (And thanks for the tacos, too.) There are a lot of ways one could take to heart. I’ve already started pondering them. And will continue to do so.

That word, the one at the end, that’s powerful.


14
Mar 24

Down to Burbank, and our conference

We loaded up the rental and headed south from Cambria this morning. The mini-vacation has come to an end. The three-day convention is beginning this evening.

Cambria is about three hours down the road. The first two hours or so was views like this.

It looked like this for a long while, until we reached the high high winds in the San Emigdio Mountains and, then, back to the towns and cities that orbit Los Angeles.

The winds were something. I found a weather report that says 25 miles per hour, but that must mean there are no weather stations in the mountain passes. You could get buffeted, hard, from any direction. At one point, the wind was even coming through the mountains.

Including Burbank!

That’s where the conference we’re attending is being held. The conference is the International Association for Communication and Sport summit. This year it is hosted by the University of Texas.

They have a facility, right there in Burbank. This is no fly-by-night thing. No strip-mall-with-folding-fairs-in-the-shadow-of-Hollywood program. It is a proper school facility with a small satellite office set up. Two classrooms and all the amenities. Some real thought went into that space. Many will be hooked, most will be Texans. I am referring to it as the Texas embassy for the weekend.

Anyway, the conference began at Dodger Stadium this evening. Light dinner in a luxury box area. Great views down the right field line. And our friend, Ann. (She’s from Canada, you don’t know her.)

They aren’t plotting to take over the world in Dodger Stadium. I’m told that conversation will take place tomorrow.

The Yankee is presenting two papers at this conference. I’m watching those and visiting with friends and, tomorrow, trying to get ahead of next week. The weekend itself, though, will be a great deal of fun. Lots of nice people, and people you know from other places. Nods, waves, and some actually delightful conversations.