Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Ireland / memories / photo / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
13
May 26

Domestic hazards

There are two great fears in my home-life. One, that a cat will jump out from somewhere and startle me, or do some real damage. I wonder where the kitty could be …

The other day she hid under the covers that were bunched up and hanging over the foot of the bed. Where, oh where, is Phoebe? That little tail just swishing out in the air. I can’t see Phoebe anywhere!

The other fear is that a cat will walk across a keyboard at a critical time. There’s grading to be done. Fortunately, I convinced Poseidon to curl up and take a nap behind the laptop. It’s a heat source, and he likes to find the warmest spot possible.

The grading is coming along. It filled the day. I’ll be at it for a few more days. Things will probably be light here as I work my way through it all. The most important thing is that the cats are doing well, we are doing well, and you’ve got a video of an absolutely stunning place below. Enjoy.

I’m still living in the happy memories of our wonderful Irish vacation. So, I’m sharing extra videos that we didn’t get to at the time. It was a great vacation. I have a lot of footage. This will go on for some time. Enjoy it with me, won’t you?

This incredible view is of the Tra Na Rossan Beach on the Ros Goill peninsula.

cycling / Ireland / memories / photo / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
12
May 26

I can see the miles ahead

My last finals and projects are rolling in now. They’re all due by 11:59 tonight. The original deadline was that same time last night, but after the Canvas outage last week I pushed it a day. It seemed the polite thing to do, and doesn’t crimp my schedule. All of my final grades must be submitted by the 18th. I started the day with 96 more things to assess and the final grades to tally and submit. The last part goes quickly. And I began chipping away at the final projects today.

And they go fairly quickly. This is work my online class does. They’ve been studying social media platforms all semester and in last six weeks or so we’ve been on a four-part journey of examining a particular platform of their choice. (Most these days are choosing TikTok and Instagram. It’s all about personal trends.) The first stage is simple, pick your platform, write an introduction and rationale, which get modified as the project moves along. The second stage is that they have to start coding the platform’s tools according to one of the key readings of the semester. They begin analyzing their data and putting that into the outline form of this project. By the third stage, having finished their coding, they are essentially the rough draft of a platform audit. All of these get a lot of feedback from me, which I am happy to provide and hope they find useful. It does take time. But for this, the fourth assignment in the project, they are submitting their final, finished audit. No feedback necessary. I just get to read the thing (some of which I’ve now read two or three times) and make sure everything is present and where it needs to be.

And also their final, which is an essay. So 48 of both of those, 96 things. But I spent much of today working through the audits that came in before the deadline. I’ll spend tomorrow and Thursday and maybe Friday, finishing this off.

To celebrate, as I often do, I went for a bike ride. This was the ride where I got a couple of three-minute miles, which I don’t do that often anymore. This was the ride where I decided to start adding on a few extra miles. I was going to do 25, but I was riding well. The weather was lovely …

… and I told myself that this was the ride where I would start building up some real mileage. This is what I tell myself every year. For 16 years now I’ve told myself this. And almost every time something — a trip, responsibilities, illness, motivation, extreme heat, life — gets in the way of that. I just want to be fit enough to go out and ride to some place for five or six hours, see the sun like this on the way back in …

… and have enough energy to want to do it again the next day.

The other thing I want to do is to find a nice shade-filled park a couple, ride there, carry a book, sit under a tree and read a while, and then come back home. There are a few parks around town here, but that’s more like a thing you’d do to break up an afternoon — if you were the break-up-an-afternoon sort (I am not) — not take on as a challenge.

One of these would be easier than the others. I just need to figure out how to not sweat through a book while I ride.

A third thing I’d like to do — and I don’t want to become a bikepacker, because I’m too old to ride long distances, sleep on the ground, and ride long distances the next day — is to get a hammock and ride long distances, string up my hammock …

Actually, no, that seems like a lot of work.

Just long distances, and then other rides to faraway parks. And daily 30-milers like today’s ride, which was a lot of fun.

This beautiful little spot is Ros Guill.

adventures / cycling / Ireland / memories / Monday / photo / video — Comments Off
11
May 26

Line and pole rod

How was your weekend? Here it was … variable. Coolish on Saturday morning. It felt almost damp. (That’s a meteorological observation where I’m from, and it differs from humidity.) The mercury struggled to get to 67 degrees. The temperature peaked before noon and started falling away soon after. Sunday it was 81 degrees and it finally rained.

Recently a read a paper from a colleague who is an atmospheric scientist. She and her co-authors were discussing how highly variable springs are just the new normal around here now. Climate change in daily life. It’s hurting the crops. Because the agricultural sector needs more challenges right now.

Today we topped out at 69 degrees. Tomorrow we’ll have variable skies and be in the mid-70s. One of these things is late spring. They can’t all be late spring.

Saturday morning we went out for a ride with the neighbors. The guy up front lives just behind us. The woman closest to me in the photo lives about a mile away. There’s at least two other cyclists in between these houses. We could start a little roadie gang.

We should start a little roadie gang. Only, I, being neither fast enough or talented enough, am not the biggest fan of group rides. Three or four people is probably my comfort limit, and I like them to be spread a bit, rather like that photo. Some people are crowders, should bumping, handlebar rubbing riders, and I’m too frail for all of that.

Today, I woke up, sent a reminder note to my online class about their adjusted deadlines, and then went out to the creek. The purpose was to pretend to do a little fly fishing. But, really, I could just sit next to that, walk along the bank, or put on those waders and just go out there and stand in it for the better part of a day and be happy. And hey, that’s what i did.

I caught one good fish, a beautiful 16-inch rainbow trout. Slipped him right back in the water, and he went and told all of his friends to take a good look before trying to eat anything else. His messaging worked. I got a lot of nibbles, a few on the line, but couldn’t bring anything else in the rest of the day.

Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter at all. I’d probably rather not hook them if I’m not going to keep them, and these are catch-and-release. Some people like the gear — and there sure is a lot of it in fly fishing. Some people like the puzzle and the challenge. I could stand right here and listen to the woods and unwind until my toes grow cold from the water and I’ll get everything I need out of the experience.

It’s funny. I’ve been on this little body of water twice and our host is keen to coach me up. I think he thinks I’ve never been fishing before or something. I have now been fly fishing three times. Twice with him. But I grew up with a Zebco and spent a lot of time with bobbers and worms and liver bait and bass lures. Even then, I enjoyed the peacefulness and the company, most of all. But my guy here on this river — they call it a river, I’m not sure it rises to that level — was taking it personal that I wasn’t getting more fish. He’s a big technique guy. He feels the real thrill of bringing them in. I think he’s trying to appreciate every little part of his sport. And he’s a pretty good teacher, even if he has a lousy student. He’s got my casting and line management techniques down to an almost manageable level. There’s a real satisfaction in placing it where you want it to go, as opposed to in a tree. It’s satisfying when the cast feels just right. Just being under those trees is more so.

This is part of the view at Island Roy.

Friday / Ireland / memories / photo / sports — Comments Off
08
May 26

A few steps closer to summer

Canvas, the platform the university uses for its online coursework, has returned to form. Came back late last night. This was only a problem because we’re in the middle of finals. Canvas died right in the middle of one of my final windows, in fact. The real problem was that the platform was hacked. There are secondary concerns. Did Instructure pay off the hackers? What got inserted into the code? Why did it just come back? Why didn’t the university’s IT people caution caution with returning to the thing? Why do we submit ourselves to annual training, and daily dual authentication processes, if as soon as this primary platform comes back the email just says, “It’s back!”

It said a little more, that email, but not much.

Anyway, I received the last few exams — they’re exams, but I’ve been calling them papers, my apologies — from the class that had their final window interrupted. I gave my online class an extra day to get their final projects and their exams in. Canvas was down for about eight hours, they got a 24-hour extension. Seemed fair.

It’ll all be fine, the finals I mean. Those are important IT questions that, hopefully, someone is answering.

It’s been a full day of it, but I’m hoping that, before tonight is done, I’ll have finished assessing 48 of those finals. Just 96 to go. (Guess what I’ll be doing this weekend!)

The cats are, helpfully, not helping with the grading. Sometimes they very much want to be involved. But, lately, Phoebe has been working on a new skill.

Poseidon climbs down to hit, or he muscles and claws his way up it. I’m not sure if he’s jumped to it. Phoebe has learned to climb onto now too. And where Poe looks so proud, Phoebe shifts into “So what? Now what?” pretty quickly.

Poe, for his part, has been taking seriously his new role as weatherproofing.

That’s the door to the garage, which we use a fair amount. When he doesn’t want you to go, you get a whole routine out of this now. It’s adorable. You just have to build in an additional 30 seconds of prep time to deal with him.

I wrote a little something, highlighting 10 Sports stories worth watching:

If your team isn’t in the thick of a postseason run you might be up for a little change of pace. Or, if the playoffs are too much, this could be just what you need to break the tension. Watch these 10 sports documentaries celebrating their 10th anniversary this year. See them for the first time. See them again for the first time. In chronological order, they are …

Keepers of the Game is about the members of an all-Native American girls lacrosse team fighting for acceptance on every level: within the tribe, at their school, and in the larger community. They want to play a game that was historically a boys’ and men’s game, they do this with no financial support from their school system, and against a heated rival who looms large on the schedule. It starts slow, but it becomes downright cinematic. Keepers of the Game was an official selection at the Tribeca Film Festival. It was nominated for an Emmy, won an award at Cannes and, in just 88 minutes allows us to see sometimes hesitant kids become confident athletes. Isn’t that what we want out of youth sports?

The Cleveland sports curse persisted for 52 years, a dry spell running from 1964 to 2016. (So if your teams aren’t in playoff contention right now, it could be worse.) Believeland aired in May of 2016. ESPN was hoping to cash in before King James inevitably rendered all the footage obsolete. The Cavs won the 2016 NBA Finals just 32 days later after it aired. A few weeks later, ESPN aired a version with a new ending, the exciting 3-1 come-from-behind series win. Between Believeland and the Cavs triumph, though, local man Stipe Miocic won the UFC Heavyweight Championship and the American Hockey League’s Lake Erie Monsters won the Calder Cup. We leave it to you to decide which was the greater inspiration for the Cavaliers.

There are eight more documentaries in that piece, all of them are good, several of them are truly great.

That’s Fanad Head. It’s a real treat.

adventures / cycling / Ireland / memories / photo / Rowan / Thursday / video — Comments Off
07
May 26

Score one for edtech

Today was finals day. Two classes had their finals due this afternoon. These were done remotely and submitted online. To celebrate we, of course, went for a bike ride. It was a fast 20-miler, and then I got right back to it. I started the day knowing I had 144 papers to read, and knowing that 48 of those were going to come in today.

And for that hour, just a bit more than an hour, my empty mind drifted over to the questions I’d asked on the two finals. One class had four simple questions. Two hypotheticals I was asking the students to work through, and then two questions that were a tiny bit subjective. In the other class I had the students watch a program and answer a bunch of questions about it. You can run through all of those questions quite a few times while you’re not thinking about anything else.

I hope I caught all of my typos. I hope the students did well. I hope it was all clever enough to let them show what they’ve learned, how they’re thinking, what they’ve possibly gained from their time in my class.

Not too long after we got in, Canvas, the platform the university uses for online classwork, crashed and died.

One class had finished their allotted final window. The other was mid-final. About four people hadn’t submitted their final yet. Well.

Also, my online students have their submissions due on Monday. Who knows how long Canvas will be down? And some of those students manage very regimented schedules. Well.

There was nothing more from the university than that. During finals. Well.

(Update: It came back overnight, in fact, not too long after I shared my contingency plans with all of those students with work still outstanding. Problem solved. Can kicked down the road. Everything is now due next Tuesday.)

But I can start grading that one final right now. (Mini-update: They’re doing well.)

That is the view at Ballymastocker Strand.