Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Another day closer to being ready for the semester

Another one of my classes was locked down today. I’m sure I’ve said that recently. Probably about that class, but it is official official now. The syllabus has been uploaded. I’m not touching anything else with it, build-wise. Of course I have to work on lectures, but there’s time for that. For now, it is organized and mostly coherent.

The last thing to do was to fix the syllabus. Change the dates. Change the time and date details. Add some standard university boilerplate. Wonder why this was a nine-page document. My afternoon goal was to cut that down. Eventually, I made it five pages. Here’s how you do that.

You press the delete button a lot.

When you add things you have to delete things. Paragraphs and sentences can be made redundant. Then you can move sections around to take advantage of page breaks. Then you can reduce sentences to their Hemingwayesque destiny. Finally, you can just delete a whole two-page section with information that exists elsewhere, anyway. Voilà! Five pages!

If you’re not leaving the bulk of your work on the cutting room floor, you’re not doing your best work.

I also locked up my online presentations class with a new thumbnail image: owls staring at a computer. Tomorrow, I’ll go through my org comm class once more to make sure that it’s ready. Monday, I’ll put the finishing touches on the first week’s slide decks. Tuesday, I’ll hit the ground stumbling.

If you wanted to see the new sunglasses shelf in its natural location, and I’m sure no one did, here it is. One piece of scrap plywood for the back, two bits of leftover pine for the sides, one of the rip cut to match the other. Two other pieces of extra wood crosscut into shelves. Glue on the sides, brad nails on the shelves. Wood screws for the cleat, which was was also leftover. Six shelves, lots of sunglasses.

It does what I wanted it to do.

I hate it already.

I do not know why my lovely bride has two helmets in the garage. She can only wear one at a time. (She has at least three active helmets right now.)

The sunset looked promising from the backyard.

Over at the north corner there was a nice mixture of colors amidst the tangle of plants. The roses and the hydrangea are having a fine time of it. I think we might have developed a second hydrangea in there, somehow. Just there on the right the famous honeysuckle is sneaking into the shot.

Looking to the west, the sunset got serious quickly.

That’s a good argument to knock off work at key times. You can only catch that by chance unless you make the actual effort. Make the actual effort. You don’t want to miss views like that.

cycling / memories / photo / Rowan / Tuesday / woodworking, sorta — No comments
25
Aug 26

Back to it

Today was a day of waking up at a reasonable time. I had forgotten there was a 7:30 a.m. I am not the morning person. I’m fine when I wake up, but just let me sleep in. It’s my natural condition. So imagine, if you will, the 10 or so years I did morning news. I had one job where I was in the studio at 4:30 a.m. That might the next job’s 6 a.m. arrival seem positively easy. The upside was that you had an afternoon to get errands done. The downside was you can’t, in your 20s, convince people you need to be in bed by 8 p.m.

Reader, I never was.

I was not last night, either. I only had to wake up at 7:30. This was rude enough.

Fortunately, my classes are all in the afternoon and evening.

Anyway, we had a meeting at 9:30 a.m., our first faculty meeting of the semester. This involved sitting in a classroom, reading an agenda, talking about the various items. Trying to stay on track and on schedule, and so on. (This group has a terrific sense of staying on time, and that’s a nice thing to be a part of.) It ran for six hours, this meeting. Six hours is not easing back into things. I suppose all of the work I’ve done these last four weeks have been the easing back into things. And, also, the sudden increase of email that has coincided with the work. Perhaps that has been the easing back in. (Just four more days of easing back in until the full stride begins. But I don’t want to wow you with all of that just now.)

The good news is that we’ll be on the clock for the work next week. Once we get started, then we can get started. The feeling before classes begin is an odd one. It is a stew of excitement and anxiety and you-still-have-time and you-have-no-time and there-are-days-to enjoy-yourself-so-relax and who-can-relax and, also, I-need-more-days-with-which-to-relax. This paragraph breaks no new ground — as opposed to every other ‘graph on this site. It has always felt like that. I suspect the days before a new semester begin feel like that for a lot of people. I imagine it always will, at least so long as we have semesters and people teaching in them.

And now, notes from real life.

We went out for a morning bike ride yesterday. A simple 20-miler, one of the traditional routes. I decided, wisely, that instead of trying to stay out front for as long as possible, I would ride sensible, hanging onto my lovely bride’s wheel, and then maybe I’ll still be there at the end. Going out front would have probably been a better option. She’s riding so well lately and I am not and that’s how you find yourself going 20-plus miles an hour and squinting into the distance, trying to determine if you can still see someone in the distance.

Nothing on that ride was terribly bad. She’s just super great at the moment.

Some farmers, in some places, talk about a second season. We have that here, and here’s evidence of that. I rode this same route a few weeks back and the corner was taller than me. Now, it is not.

This, if I remember my corn growing rates, is pushing the boundaries of the science, which is pretty cool. Double-cropping is a growing thing, and I need to read more about it. I can’t recall if it is efficient or inefficient. (Most likely that depends on the crop.)

For today’s bike ride I recreated a route I did three years ago, this week. It was a ride-every-road-within-shouting-distance-until-you-get-to-20-miles route. I did it at just below a tempo pace. I finished it two minutes and two seconds faster than I did in 2023. I wish it had been faster.

After my ride I finished this project. It’s the same picture I shared yesterday, because the face of it looks the same. This evening I had to attach the cleat to the back. From there, hang the cleat on the wall.

This took four screws, but they had to be precise because the cleat isn’t quite large enough. The cleat isn’t quite large enough because it is a leftover cleat that I made last summer. I got a corner cabinet and mounted it in a dead space in the garage and there sit the bike shoes and the helmet. All of this was an effort to get the bike stuff all the tool stuff. Only, lately, the sunglasses and have migrated back to the tool stuff. So, I had some extra lumber and wanted to try my new brad nailer and everything worked out well. Until I had to get those screws in. There were about three millimeters for error because, again, I cut twice and measured once on this project. It is garage furniture.

And now it is sitting on a wall cleat and holding sunglasses and it doesn’t even wobble when the garage door goes up and down.

There are no cats in this tunnel. Phoebe ran into the room for attention and settled down in her favorite spot for speculative belly rubs. I gave her a nice pet and then shot this, just because I like the way the light was playing off the tunnel.

That’s a new tunnel that my mother sent the cats. We now have two tunnels, so our jealous sibling cats can get along with one another. I’d randomly move them around the house, but these little guys are such creatures of habit I’m not sure how they’d react to upsetting their routine with such an offensive gesture.

Outside, I looked up just in time. This plane is going to London. By the time you read this, of course, the people are already there. Probably over the jet lag. I wonder what they’re doing today.

Sometimes you should look up even when there’s no rumble or roar of an aircraft overhead. Sometimes you just get lucky. Just about every time, really, if you think about it.

Think about it.

cycling / memories / Monday / movies / photo — No comments
24
Aug 26

And so begins the last week of summer

The penultimate weekend. There should be something grand here, but there’s not. At least the last weekend of summer has plans. I think I’d rather have the plans this weekend and nothing next weekend, but the people that schedule big citywide events don’t ask me these things.

It’s nice not being asked a lot of things. But if you never get asked things you can’t have input. It’s a tradeoff. And of all of the tradeoffs we make in life, many of them are worse than that. Still, if someone asked your thoughts, you might think your thoughts had value. You might think you could maybe contribute in some way. You might think it was appreciated, what you had to offer. Cities should ask your thoughts on when they schedule big events is all I’m saying. If I am, in fact, talking about cities.

And of course I am. Why wouldn’t I be? There’s a huge cycling event next weekend and we’ll be there to see it. Guess what photos I’ll be showing you this time next week.

Today, though, it’s just the usual from around here. For instance. Like many of you, I am a newly minted Internet Ancient Greek scholar. And, finally, we went to watch The Odyssey. Knowing I’d have some important thoughts in line with my public scholarship I dressed for the occasion.

These were my thoughts: the movie was very loud. I’d like to see it again, a version without the score. Also, it was a good movie. On the other hand, I’m not sure it met the hype. On the third hand, how you can you live up to an epic. On the fourth hand, it was still sweeping and grandiose. It was also a good set of cast members, but on the fifth hand — five hands, what am I, one of Zeus’ misbegotten offspring? — not everyone seemed well cast. On the sixth hand, I don’t think this movie will age much better than the Romans-with-English-accents era of 1950s and 1960s cinema.

Also, I really would have liked to have heard the siren’s song. You’re going to eventually tell me that the Trojan horse was some iconic visual element, you’re going to go long (and rightly so!) on the great pains to be authentic with clothing and brag about the visual effects, you could give me the siren’s song.

It’s been a long time since I read The Odyssey. I think we read portions of it in high school. In an undergrad literature class I read The Iliad and the Odyssey. I’m not sure — because time makes me forget things — if the professor was truly an expert in the Greek classics or she was just covering bases, but if I had that to do over again I’d insist. Epics of the western culture demand expertise, I’d say, so that I will be better prepared to comment on this after I see a movie in a few decades. But with that in mind, this. The movie changes Homer’s story. That’s fine. It’s art. And also it was an oral tradition. Things change. If you want Homer, read Homer. If you can’t read Greek, get in your time machine and … well, yeah, that’s still a problem. Fine, there are several dozen English versions in part or in toto. I think one was written by someone who doesn’t write English. E.V. Reiu’s translation in the 1940s was the first. Richard Lattimore’s translation is well regarded for accuracy. The relatively recent work of Emily Wilson’s is an excellent version for people new to Homer — she is also the one catching a lot of social media broadsides. Go figure. Anyway, the changes itself aren’t bad. People will quibble with how some of the changes come about. And as I am realistic about the Homeric question — probably there’s more than one author, certainly the story changes over time, also, and this is important … it’s fantasy I’m OK with the descent into madness version here. It has been a long while since our last film that was universally regarded as a descent into madness theme.

Or was that just the woofers in my theater?

I set out Sunday afternoon for a moderately different route. The river run is a simple out-and-back to the river and it gives you a steady 15 miles — yep, 15 miles, every time — and you’re back in the neighborhood in 45 or 50 minutes. But the weather was nice and I figured I’d try a different road. It starts like this. When you get to the river you can turn left or right. Usually, we turn left. But I’ve gone the other way a few times, just for variety. And when I go to the right I take the first right, effectively doubling back with two-plus extra miles for the effort.

But, I thought, what happens if I turn right … and don’t take that first right. So, yesterday I took the second right. I chose this one because I looked at it on a map beforehand and the street name has something to do with tall climbs. There are none of those around here. In fact, at one point on the river road you are three feet below sea level. Well, let’s see what’s on that road. It is the usual array of warehouses, which are the state flower. Also, these guys.

Hey, there’s the hill the road sign was talking about. Actually, it’s a five-mile road (and I was only punish passed twice) and there are four of these hills. You might call them rollers. By the end of the road which was so boastful of its hills I’d climbed about 120 feet.

I’m not judging. I’m merely pointing out that the terrain here is flat. I’m faster on flat roads than I used to be, but I probably couldn’t get over a proper climb without a tow rope anymore. (I did two big hills in Switzerland last summer, first climb in a few years, and it felt exactly as I remembered. My chain and derailleur fell apart before I could complete the whole hilly route, however.)

Anyway, back home, and I finished up the work on this rough little piece. I used my new brad nailer to mount these little bits as shelves. It’s garage furniture, I cut once and then measured twice, and this will get the job done.

I’ll make another version that’s smaller and neater, one day. I have already mapped out the plans in my mind. For now, I just have to attach the cleat to the back of this one and put it on the wall. But fun like that you have to spread out over several days. We’re not totally uninhibited.

Here’s the view, last night, as I took out the garbage. It’s about midnight.

Believe it or not, there are three planes in that shot. One of them flew directly overhead, and had no ADS-B transponder signal. It came from Washington D.C. Those tracker apps are such great fun, and the flights without all of the information might be the most fun of all. Sure, that one plane is going to Boston and the other to Florida, but the mystery of this plane, that’s loads of fun.

Speaking of fun, the first meeting of the semester is tomorrow. We’re easing into things with a six-hour effort.

errands / Friday / photo / woodworking, sorta — Comments Off
21
Aug 26

A day in rebellion

Because I did not do it yesterday, because I was working, I spent the morning running the weed eater. The backyard needed it. Also, I plucked some giant mutant dandelions. The web will tell you that dandelions can grow two feet tall, and if I knew that before just now I would have taken photos of the three and four-feet tall stalks that were threatening the rose bushes. My plan had been to hit just the edges of the lawn, the high spots at the fence, and the parts that were growing beyond their design intention. But, you know how it is with weeds. One thing leads to another and before long I had built up a decent sweat and a giant lawn bag full of mint and whatnot.

Want some mint? Come get some mint. Be sure you want it first. It’s an opportunistic plant, willing to grow in any free space, and it is all but impossible to eradicated.

Give the mint three pieces of credit, though. It pulls up easy. And it will choke out just about any other weed. It smells pleasant. And now the car smells like mint. I took the recycling and the green things to the county drop off site after my lovely bride did a bit of weed-pulling too. So there I was, two big containers of glass, aluminum, and a bit of plastic to drop. Two bags of weeds. Great armfuls of boxes. I even put them in the car well this time, such that I was a whirl of efficiency at the county site. The one other guy doing his part to save the earth was amazed at my industry. Two trips to the cardboard bin, two long walks to the mixed recycling. The only wasted motion was when when I accidentally closed the trunk too early.

Back home I left the garage open, and broke out some of the tools with which one works wood. I had, by then, just decided I wasn’t going to get in front of a computer today. (Except I am now, but that’s different, somehow.) The weather was just right, in the shade, anyway. And I decided to make a little thing for the garage. One of the few shortcomings in our house is that the garage is awfully crowded. And the wall upon which I store the tools with which one works wood is also where the bikes and various cycling accessories live. There are two problems with this. Last year I got tired of all the helmets and shoes and whatnot sitting on top of my table saw, so I got myself a corner cabinet, made myself some French cleats and now we have two shelves for helmets and shoes. But, still, the sunglasses have worked their way back down to the saw area. I’m the biggest perpetrator. So lately I envisioned a little sunglasses holder that will also go onto the elongated French cleat.

Today, because the weather was nice, in the shade, and I was in a computer rebellion, I decided to take the afternoon and make that happen.

The problems are these. One, I’m not an especially good woodworker. You improve with practice, though. But this brings me to my second problem. Space is limited, and so I don’t practice all that much. I had to go downstairs to fetch the ladder so that I could climb up it to see what scraps of old lumber I’d use. I had to move the miter saw to get to the table saw. I had to pull the table saw into the drive way. I had to run an extension cord. I had to peer through the garage shelves (which desperately need attention, which is my fault, and something I’m looking forward to addressing on a not steamy day) for things like a framing square, pencils, the table saw fence, the orbital sander, and so on.

Once I had all of the right things I proceed to doing the work, breaking down a random bit of plywood I picked up from somewhere, and then ripping a lovely bit of pine for the sides of my shelves. And then gluing one of those sides to the plywood. Then I dug out my brand new brad nailer. I picked this up sometime back and now was the time. The battery was charged, some long brads came in the box (I picked up some others, too, and they’re on that shelf … somewhere.) I drove in my first-ever brad nails today. I felt macho doing it.

With my ear protection on and everything. The brad nailer works well. It is also louder than you’d expect.

Then I ripped some more pine, so that I could crosscut it for the shelves themselves. Here I managed to not hurt myself, but relearned a lot of things about what not to do with your table saw.

(I’ll never hurt myself on the table saw. I fear it enough to respect it. I will hurt myself on pretty much any other thing. Though, today, happily, I didn’t hurt anything.)

I decided to make the shelves larger than I’d envisioned. I figured maybe it will evolve into a storage space for something else one day. Besides, it just didn’t seem like a small project day. I don’t know how to explain that, otherwise, but you should always listen to your gut around power tools.

Plus, I figured, you can never have enough space for the little things you carry.

Anyway, all of the pieces got cut. And I made a little dry fit test. It’s going to look something like this.

I glued up the second side. I’ll drive some brad nails into it this weekend, just for fun. And I’ll develop a process to space out those shelves, too. They’ll be attached all in one go at some point soon. Then we’ll just have to install the cleat on the back.

I sanded all of this down, but decided I’m not going to finish it. It’s garage furniture, after all. The Yankee might want to. She likes staining things. So I’ll leave that up to her.

Anyway, by this point, on a project where I decided to do more thinking than measuring, I realized I was approaching being done for the day. This is an important thing to consider because there’s still the cleaning up and the putting away. I timed this. It took 32 minutes to throw away the little bits, to put the sander and the sand paper and the square and the ladder away, to find a place the shelves can safely sit while the glue fixes, to put the table saw back in its corner, and the miter saw back on the table saw, to roll up the extension cords and, finally, to clean up my sawdust.

Truly, it is the most first world problem that ever existed, but set up and tear down is an investment all its own in my scenario. I need a shop so that I might do more of this, and get better at it. Which is to say, really, I shouldn’t buy any more second hand tools. There’s no room in my non-space. A new space can’t be the basement — too much sawdust and noise. It can’t be the garage — that’s where the cars live. I don’t have an outbuilding for this, nor is ours the sort of neighborhood where that would fit in. And I can’t afford an off-site location. So I’ll dabble, me and my average to poor carpentry skills, when the weather and scheduling and big chunks of available time permit.

The good news is that I have plenty of projects in mind.

This evening I’ve spent chatting with The Yankee, making weekend plans, having dinner, catching up on the day’s news, doing the dishes, doing this … pleased I spent a day doing something that was just for fun. Aside from the weeds, anyway. Backyard looks good, though!

Someday, soon, the sunglasses will, too.

memories / photo / Rowan / Thursday — Comments Off
20
Aug 26

I strained my toe trying to think of a headline

I spent the day staring at my third class, a presentations class. It’s a great idea, this class. Students have to give presentations. It’s like public speaking, but all online, and you have to prepare and present accompanying slides. It’s not my class, in the sense that I didn’t build it. The person in charge of it is making great strides with dialing it in. I also didn’t have this class initially this term, but things change and merrily we will go through the semester, offering feedback and hoping it is helpful.

It’s useful for students who think they know everything there is to know about computers and using them in these most basic ways. (I should keep count of the technical problem complaints I receive. Some of them are hilarious.) Also, it is a terrifying class for people who have a fear of public speaking. This class substitutes for the public speaking course in everyone’s curriculum, which is nice. It is up to each person to make a choice of which they’d rather do.

I think the public speaking class would be easier for a couple of different reasons, but that’s just me.

When I took public speaking, we were pretty new into the idea that everyone should have the course. They were still explaining it thusly to students: The one thing all of the employers say when we survey them is that their new hires need to be better at giving presentations as in a work meeting or board room, and that’s why everyone must take this class. So, when I did it, we met a few times in this very large lecture hall and you spent most of the semester in a smaller room, a lab, with a grad student running the lab and 12 or 15 nervous people besides. There was, I remember, one guy that was unusual in our lab. He’d spent a career in the Army. He was a paratrooper. He’d just retired. His son was in school and he figured it’d be nice to go back to school with his kid, so here was this dad, this man who talked about how one time his chute failed and the only thing that saved his life was that, at the last second, he remembered his training. He talked about how his body was broken, and the depression he left in the earth when he hit the ground. I don’t recall how high up he said he was on this jump, but it sounded both plausible and unbelievable at the same time. But, you could take one look at that guy and know two things simultaneously: he’d been through some stuff, and he could beat you up if he needed to. Nice fella.

I can’t remember anything about the grad student that ran the class, which is unfortunate. I do remember after the first time we met that person I went downstairs to a payphone and called home. I did not wait to get back to my place. I said: send me that file filing system of all of my speeches. I’m going to use them in this class. And I did.

I think I finished with something like a 114 in that class.

So I’m not usual in that sense. Just hammy enough, just desperate enough to be perceived as credible, and I stumnbled and walked and bumbled through four years of public speaking with Douglas Caddell. I hung out with some of the best young speech-makers in the state, dated a state champion, and competed in just about every contest I could get into.

Anyway, that unusual lane in high school left me well prepared for a basic public speaking class, and was probably helpful, eventually, in broadcasting career.

The best thing about public speaking back in the dark ages was that we didn’t have to make presentations. There was no PowerPoint back then. Some rooms didn’t have power. My slides today are nothing great. I built and use a university-branded template, and try not to put too many words on the slides. What you put on your slides isn’t where the game is won, but it can be where the game is lost.

I can’t give all of the good advice away for free here. If you want to know more, enroll in my class.

This is what should be on all of my slides, I’m told. The cats say if they have a weekly check-in here they should be in every slide deck I make, too. Phoebe would make great points about any topic from her hammock.

She lately went through a kitteh noir period.

You can almost hear her thinking in hard-boiled cat detective narration.

“You tell some tall tales, kid. But my tail is taller. A cat’s greatest weapon, though, is a keen eye, and her greatest ally is the dark. That’s how I came to find your man, lingering in the shadows. He’s been singing to me for weeks. If he was any more of a rat he’d sprout whiskers and a tail, but his info’s always good and it brought me here, to you. And I know you’ve been thinking that while the cat’s away, the mice will play, but the cat’s back. Playtime’s over. Hands up. I can say it with a smile, sure, the smile is free of charge. You need a smile in my line of work. The smile says ‘hello’ while your trigger finger waves goodbye … ”

Poseidon is more of a chaos comedy fan. He’s been working on his Will Ferrell impression.

“Hey mom! The meatloaf! We want it now. The meatloaf! Ma, the meatloaf!”

A few days ago he changed up our mid-day routine. I have a little bite to eat and he waits patiently. Then, I grab a protein bar and a glass and sit in a corner in the living room. He waits patiently for this. As soon as I sit down he’s in motion, and then on my lap, or curled up beside me, or climbing up my chest for a snooze. But on this particular afternoon, he insisted I would not spend those few minutes reading.

And so I did not.

Storms blew through this evening. The forecast was for rush hour. They arrived at about 7 p.m. Weather forecasting, it ain’t what it used to be. That was a choice. Apparently there was a tornado to our west and a waterspout or tornado to our southeast. Here, it just rained. We had some lightening, but the wind never really picked up. It was an oddly timed thing, as the clouds on the back end of the system lingered, the sun started it’s regular dive to the horizon. This is the view from my office just now, looking off to the north-northwest.

And now I’ll get back to work. Because there is always work.