Sunday, December 14, 2008

Sunday

Funny day here. Warm enough for runners to be out in shorts. Windy. Rain. And we're talking single digits temps tonight.

The Augie game last night was just so-so. The opponent was a winless team that played with a lot of emotion, and the game was close most of the first half. The Augie boys were sluggish and played down to the competition. My guess is that the locker room needs a new coat of paint after the coach's halftime comments, as they came out and did a little 13-0 number in the first couple of minutes of the second half. And coasted home. We left with a little less than 10 minutes to go.

I took Margret out for a spin this afternoon, and left her in the third stall over at Mom's. This gives me garage space for my regular cars. I walked back on the new sidewalks that the city paved this Fall, which I think will get a lot of use in the years ahead. The demographics of Bettendorf residents suggest a fitness orientation, kids, and dogs/bikes.

It occurred to me on my walk back that I missed the "thinking time" that I have during the Summer on my bike. When you're out on even a relatively short evening ride of 15-20 miles, you have a lot of time to consider the news of the day, or dream dreams, or calculate the square root of the distance you traveled in the last four minutes.


This in contrast to my mental experience when running, which is a simple exercise to determine how much longer the pain will last.

Here is a pic that I just got from 2 of her first Christmas tree in her first year in her first house. I am not responsible for the slightly blurry image. Me thinks that her phone was moving when she clicked the shot. Pretty amazing technology. She texts me the message. I email it to my Yahoo account, copy it into my laptop, and then upload it into Blogger. Very cool.

And to the right is my very iffy picture of my two-bush Christmas light display. I had to take the pic from inside my car because of the downpour. (I'm a little worried about ice by morning.) It took all of five minutes to hang the lights, but it was almost an hour beforehand to untangle them and search for burned-out bulbs. I think when they were last up a couple years ago, there were several sections that never lit because I didn't test them in advance.

No Aunt Martha, I do not regularly read the NYT. I will pick up a section occasionally when someone has left it at SB's. I read the local paper and The Wall Street Journal most days, and USA Today a couple of days a week. And several business web pages.

The fact that the NYT Public Editor has to write an analytical column this weekend to consider the question as to whether the murderers in Mumbai (Bombay) should be called terrorists in NYT stories on the event is evidence of political correctness run amok. See www.nytimes.com and click on the Opinion box in the mid-page menu.

I thought that Susan's Estrich's column in today's papers was a bit of self-serving tripe, suggesting that the work of Old Media reporters was the core substance for analysis of politics, government, the arts and culture. Her work is located at www.creators.com
(Don't confuse my dismissal of Old Media as any endorsement of New Media. They all drink from the same cool-aid.)

Lastly, have my readers noticed the daily email from e-tailers? I signed up for a Gap card and a Kohl's card a couple years back, and gave them my yahoo address on the application. Then I ordered a couple things on line from other places, and all of a sudden, I'm getting sometimes two emails a day from each store's auto-email servers. I'm thinking that that methodology has got to be cheap advertising, and probably has good $$$ returns. It really doesn't help me when I'm doing most of my shopping on Christmas Eve morning though.

Stay warm. Have a great week.

BCOT

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

i also got my lights and tree up this weekend. i get my tree at a men's church club lot near the school i work at. they are really nice and remember me every year. it probably helps that i take lucy and one of the guys has a shih tzu at home. i don't get a big tree because we don't have much room. last year we had a little bit of an episode that resulted from not enough branches being sawed off the bottom. the tree didn't hit the bottom of the tree stand but we didn't realize that until i had it decorated and had just sat down to admire my work. the tree came crashing down, ornaments, water-filled tree stand, and all! we don't have a yard, and thus did not have a saw handy in order to saw the troublesome branch off. matt swore off trees forever after that, so i get one solo this year and made sure all branches were clear! i even had the needles cleaned up by the time he got home:)
gearing up for the last week before break. if i'm this antsy for two weeks off, i can only guess how my students are going to be this week! i showed a movie last week that kind of went with a book i taught. the book was 'montana 1948' and i showed 'a river runs through it'. i'd never read the book or seen the movie before, but both were good. even my students like them!
parent teacher conferences on tuesday...the word is not many people show....

camperkev said...

Hey, you can't go wrong with a movie about fly fishing....you do live in proximity to the boundry waters you know....fish on...pyramid lake in 5 days and counting.

camperkev said...

oh, tell 1.1 the same thing happened to me about 10 years ago...i've had a fake tree ever since.

Anonymous said...

i forgot your love of fly fishing...have to admit some of the scenes looked pretty peaceful! i don't think i could muster the guts to touch icky insects though.