Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

When you rebrand the weather, I am over the weather

Monday. February. Groundhog’s Day and all of that. Still snow and ice on the ground. Hasn’t budged a micro, hasn’t melted a gram. In a group chat the other day I pointed out that none of my friends back home could say anything to me about their weather until we’d been above freezing for two days in a row. As it happens, tomorrow might be the second day. It did hit 32 today. We are promised 35 for tomorrow. And so, now, another post about how the weather has impacted everything. (This snow fell 10 days ago. I’ve not had too many snows in my life where the stuff just … stayed around. I can think of two. And, quite frankly, it has lost its appeal.

Saturday around midday I was out trying to widen the driveway a bit. We’d carved out a path last week just wide enough for a vehicle and, somehow, it was only just wide enough. Well, finally I got tired of that and so I gripped the shovel firmly and determinedly, and went to work. In that time I dug out the spot behind where my car is parked in the garage, and what I estimate the space necessary behind it to do the back and turn maneuver. I also tried to chip away at a few other places that were troubling. Working up a sweat in a long-sleeved t-shirt, I used our biggest shovel to bend the ice to my will for an hour. Until, that is, my back was bent against my will.

About that time my lovely bride returned home from her morning activities and midday grocery run. We did the grocery system. She carries in an arm full of groceries and I try to carry everything else in, so she can pretend to fuss at me. In the kitchen, with all of the bags on the island, I hand her things for the refrigerator. And then I hand her the things going into the freezer. And then I hand her the things going in the pantry. Finally, I stack up the bags and put them back out in the garage for her car. There’s nothing to it, but we do this every week and it’s also important.

Speaking of the kitchen island, I happened to be in just the right place to catch this bit of anarchistic artistry.

It was how Poseidon brought the spatula to the floor, looked around and walked off. Usually, when he does cat stuff like this, he owns it. He will sit by the thing he has knocked over or broken and wait until you see it, and him with it. It’s admirable, even as it is frustrating. But, here, he just walked off. Maybe it was because a rubber spatula can’t shatter, and there’s nothing to leak.

Somehow, we both managed to stifle our laughter until he’d left the scene of the his vandalism. We wouldn’t want him to feel he was being praised for all of this, after all.

To get away from the snow and the ice — snowcrete they are calling it — I went to Tokyo for an hour or so. Saturday night, I renamed the basement “Tokyo.”

The thing about Rouvy I haven’t figured out yet is everything. This was a flat route, according to the ride profile I saw before I started pedaling. There were was a tiny bit of climbing, but nothing to write home about. The profile I saw after the ride was … lumpy.

It was 26 miles through the various parts of Tokyo. Whoever recorded this most have done so in the very early morning. There was almost no one on the roads, as you can see from that image. Also, there were a lot of red lights, and the video seemed to catch them all. It is not at all demoralizing to be pedaling your little heart out, to see your avatar pedaling his little digital heart out, but you’re not going anywhere.

Anyway, it was a good sweat. I just have to do it more. Someone motivate me.

The weather is absolutely not motivating me. It is not motivating me precisely when it should be. One day this weather will not be our weather. One day we’ll emerge from the ice age. It will not be this day, for we are still solidly, firmly, in the Pleistocene Epoch.

Right in the middle, I would assume.

Here’s the view of yesterday’s sunset from my office window.

I think I spent all day at my desk. I’m not sure what I did with all of that time. Some work was done. But there was more work to be done today. We’ll get into that tomorrow, though.

adventures / basketball / Friday / Philadelphia / photo — No comments
30
Jan 26

Starts with birds, ends with birds, has other birds in between

We — the cats and I — were watching BirbTV this morning. I might have, for a time, been more interested than the kitties. It was when this beautiful cardinal showed up. She waited patiently, and then waited some more. She approached the bird feeder, then hopped away to a distant branch, and then came back again. You’ll have to forgive the quality of the photo, I was stretching my phone’s digital zoom and shooting through a double-pane window. It was, however, a beautiful bird.

That’s looking to the east. I also stood and looked to the west, taking three photographs before the chill chased me back indoors. The windchill was three degrees. I walked out there in jeans and a long sleeve shirt and house shoes.

Pretty soon we get to the Stockholm Syndrome portion of the winter which, in this case, is when I look up the weather in Stockholm and see that it is essentially the same.

Sigh.

I had only one meeting today, which allowed me the time to catch up on the week’s reading, grading, and make sure my prep for next week is at least underway. (Sunday I’ll start next week’s reading, and Monday I’ll prepare a lecture. And this is the course of most weeks for a while. Unless I get a bolt of energy and get ahead of lecture prep. But that’s never happened, so I am not counting on it.) The meeting today was a virtual meeting.

Have you ever been in a presentation where the presenter reads from their slides? The only thing better than being in a presentation where the presenter is reading from their slides is being in a virtual presentation where the presenter is reading from their slides.

The slides, to be fair, were helpful. I downloaded them for later, and mostly kept making sure I was on mute so the giggles and chuckles didn’t break through the reading. Of the slides. Which were on the screen.

We went over the river tonight and made a little history. Unrivaled, the 3-on-3 women’s basketball league. There was a doubleheader, and also history. The crowd set a new record for attendance of a regular season women’s basketball game. There were 21,490 people announced. They watched the Breeze and the Phantom, both teams filled with stars the crowd knew.

The Phantom won, 71-68. I like the timing rules. They play on a slightly smaller court — which changes the style of play — and then play three 7-minute quarters. In the fourth quarter it’s a race, first to plus-11. At the end of the 3rd, the score was 53-60, so the first team to 71 would be the winner. That format takes out a lot of the timeout and fouling gamesmanship that characterizes the traditional version of the sport. And it adds tension, too. I assume that at that stage of the game the fatigue is setting in for one team and desperation for the other, because that race to the final score was frantic, and fun.

It’s also meant to speed up the game, which it seemed to do. But there’s a flaw in the doubleheader setup. The time between the two games was interminable, even with the assistance of the hype squad, the mic woman (who had to be paid in Red Bull, for she was, herself very hype), and also a local rapper who has a big viral hit. The second game was set to begin at 9:30, and it started at about 9:40. It was between the Rose and the Lunar Owls, which is a great team name, obviously.

Maybe there’s a media component to this, there can’t be any other reason to drag out a 9:30 start. You are certainly not waiting for anyone to get into the venue at that point. But you are getting in the way of my dinner.

The Lunar Owls won 75-85, on the strength of Marina Mabrey’s 47 points, including the game winner. She had 27 of those in the first quarter, which is a league record, and the hoop must have looked 12-feet wide for her. She’s played all over the world, but grew up about an hour away. Must have been a nice homecoming.

Anyway, back to my dinner. We ordered Chick-fil-A from a nearby store. Went through the drive-thru. They’ve updated their app and now there’s no upsell point. This is why that’s a problem. You plug in your order, put in your car, and now, instead of seeing a person, you scan a QR code when you get there. Used to be, that person would confirm the order. They’d ask “Would you like to add anything?” But now there’s not an option for that. What if you’d changed your mind? What if you needed to add something? We got our sandwiches and then went through again, just to prove the point, and also to get a milkshake.

The new app and mobile ordering process violates Smith’s First Rule of Economics (1997): Don’t make it hard for me to spend my money with you.

It’s an ironclad rule.

Rowan / Thursday / video — No comments
29
Jan 26

There’s no pattern like migratory patterns

I recorded this video, then forgot about this video. Then the platform wouldn’t let me upload the video. Then it did let me upload this video. So this Monday video is now a Thursday video. But it could just as well be from today.

These geese hang out in some fields a mile or two to the south. And they’re heading back there in this shot. They’re flying back from the sloughs a few miles to the north of here. I’m not sure their schedule, but lately they’ve been flying the other direction in the early evening.

I love the geese, and the honking. I love them because I hear them passing by, and because I don’t hear them constantly.

Let’s talk about work. That’s what that image just above is about. That’s on campus … somewhere. I do not work in that building. I haven’t seen that building.

One day, when it isn’t 5 degrees out, I’ll have to take a shot of our building to use as another banner.

I was dreading class today because I felt the need to try to cram in two days worth of material in one. Going slower is better, but owing to the weather, I feel behind, hence the urge to overfill one day. Also, these were designed as two important days.

Fortunately, I’d asked the students in my Rituals and Traditions class to write a brief paper about this topic in advance, and that told me exactly where we all are, so I can tailor the presentation and cut the superfluous. I also had a colleague stop by and talk to the class for a few minutes, just to help set the table. And so, somehow, the class moved along nicely.

Later in the afternoon I had to complete the stage setting for the Criticism class, and there’s a lot to establish at this point for the rest of the term. I prepared one slide deck out of two, and had to work through varying pages of notes all out of order, hoping to make it flow, determined to make sure it made sense.

We made it through. A lot of what we discussed, in both classes, will come up a lot throughout the term, of course. And in Criticism, at least, there aren’t a lot of lectures. As I joke, they don’t want me to lecture, and today they found out why. That class becomes more conversational and Socratic, and I’m glad for it. I just need to figure out a way to make Rits and Trads something like that, too.

Happily, it was still daylight when we left campus at 5 p.m., and a bracing 6 degrees, having warmed a full 20 percent from several hours earlier. It was dark by the time we got home, however, but the days are growing longer. In just two more weeks nautical twilight will be at 6:30, and that’s the second sign that there’s seasonal hope.

There’s eight inches of packed ice outside my window right now, so it feels like a bit of false hope, but nevertheless. The sun is telling us that winter is on its way out. We’re gonna win.

cycling / maps / photo / Wednesday — No comments
28
Jan 26

I am so far ahead I can see tomorrow

Lovely day, if you like living at a pole, and the color white, and ice everywhere. I’ve been trying to count how many times I’ve experienced a snow that persisted — this snow came down Sunday and will be with us for at least another week. It is a small number of experiences. And now there’s talk of another snow system this weekend.

I’d like to just … not. I still have shovel shoulders from Sunday and Monday.

Productive day, today. Emails were fired off with abandon. I prepared two lectures. This was made all the trickier because we did not have classes on Tuesday, and because we are right at the beginning of the term, where I am trying to set up the definitions and paradigms we’ll be using throughout the semester.

For my Criticism class, where I told them I would lecture this week and they would see why the rest of the semester is conversation-based, I’ll have 75 minutes to try to make the points that should take up about two hours worth of material. Also, I am Frankensteining two lectures to do that. Duct tape and PowerPoint presentations will see me through. What could go wrong? In my Rituals and Traditions class I will combine a brief guest appearance with some further elaboration on the slides I sent them online on Tuesday. Again, two days in one, just to set the tone for the entire class. What could go wrong?

Students in my online class received the second of three notes they’ll get from me this week. This one was a 791-word, tightly written, well-edited walkthrough of a sequence of the course that amounts to 20 percent of their grade. I put a lot of time into that letter because I know how much students are inclined to read these days. And I’ve been working on it over the course of three semesters now. (Given my process for these messages, that means it’s gone through at least nine editing passes at this point.) It is a good letter. Helpful, expressive, detailed, precisely to the point at hand. I send it to their inbox and post it on our class CMS. Now I just have to hope they’ll give it a look.

Perhaps the most productive thing I did today, though, was lay out the rest of my week. The least productive thing I’ll do the rest of the week is ignore most of that plan.

The best thing I’ll do is highlight the kitties, because they’re famous and popular, just ask them. So let’s do that.

If you like belly rubs, raise your paw.

Phoebe really likes belly rubs. She held her paw up for a good long while … just so long as the belly rubs continued.

The birds are feasting at the feeder, because, I think, several of their food sources are under a lot of snow and ice.
And so BirbTV has been a big hit around here. So much so that Poseidon doesn’t even care what he’s standing on, so long as he gets a closer look.

The cats are doing just fine. Though they would also like it to be just a bit warmer.

I wonder how it registers when they look out of the windows and see how different things are with so much white stuff on the ground. Lately, though, I’ve noticed they’re not as keen on trying to get outside as normal. It feels like four below out as I write this.

This evening I got away from the cold and went to Torano, Italy, where it is somehow 30 degrees warmer than here. I’m not saying we’re packing up and moving, but this was a delightful little valley ride. You can see it here.

Rouvy puts you in a video that someone recorded, and layers your avatar over the footage. As you can see from this screengrab, I was riding in the Italian summer.

And look at that mountain up ahead, there’s still snow up there. Here’s a few of that same feature, a few miles farther along in my ride.

Those cyclists are not a part of my ride. They are real people that were captured on the video. If I rode this route again, I suspect I’d seem them at pretty much the same spot, no matter how slow or fast I’d gone. (I averaged about 24 miles per hour on this ride (it had some nice downhills), which is the best ride I’ve had in a while. I churned out almost 600 watts for a bit, and regretted it the rest of the way.) Same for the other two people I caught up to, who I caught at a left-hand turn. They put out their hands to signal the turn and it looked like they were waving at me as I went by. I’ll see them in that valley again, should I visit. Or so I suppose. And my avatar would catch the same red light in Grosotto, or Lovero, whichever little village I was breezing through. My avatar just disappeared for a moment, while the video (and the car or whatever was shooting the footage) worked through the stop. A blip that felt like a Twilight Zone moment, which would be fun, if everyday didn’t already have a hefty dose of them.

Tomorrow, we’ll go to campus. I wonder what the roads will be like.

Tuesday — No comments
27
Jan 26

Not Hoth, but not unlike Hoth

Campus was open today, after closing Sunday and Monday for the storm. We did not go in, however, as the roads remain dreadful. We have a wide latitude for this decision, fortunately. It’s a large campus. There are several locations, and also hospital facilities and so on. People come in from three states, and the university is aware that the weather here may not be the weather there. Also, road conditions. And, this time, also, ice.

Everything is hilariously frozen solid. It’ll remain so for more than a week. Even I will go stir-crazy at the amount of indoors activities. (Update: That happened about Saturday.)

And who knows about those country road conditions between here and there, anyway. (Update: On Thursday, still not great!)

The policy is that students won’t have it marked against them. I, a professor who uses attendance policies, appreciate and honor the discretion this allows students. Also, being from the South, I’m going to want to make safe choices, too. Fortunately, I have that ability. What an employer, huh?

So we decided last night that, since the roads we could walk to looked terrible, we weren’t going to try drive 20-25 minutes on poorly-if-at-all-cleared roads. I put some material online that I’d planned to discuss today, sent a message to my students, and that was that. I hope they all read it. I hope they’re all warm and safe. Or sledding down a hill somewhere.

This allowed me to catch up a bit, which is great, because now I can get ahead of things for Thursday.

Just pretend there are several paragraphs here that have to do with reading and typing.

Also, pretend there’s a video here. I meant for a video to be right here, but it won’t upload just now. Perhaps tomorrow.

Tomorrow, which will be similarly frozen! (Single digit nights, barely double digit days!) And even more productive!