proud, but not necessarily in a good way

kris cut a hole into the bottom of a paper bag to give otto a little "window" to look out when she hides inside.

a friend at work told us to try this not long after we got the cat. normally, it's kinda cute and funny to watch her peer out.

unfortunately, it didn't work out that way today.

painting bull's-eyes

seriously, sites like these make me nervous.

"pat white plays here" is west virginia university's effort to promote the senior quarterback's heisman trophy bid.

i know it's supposed to create publicity and awareness of the engine that makes wvu's football team go.

it's just that, well, bull's-eyes are designed to attract attention, too.

i'd always believed that one of the best weapons our school teams always had was stealth -- the quality that allows you to sneak up on your quarry and take it unawares. (as my morgantown colleague mike says, we're great at "doing more with less.")

but now the mountaineer is tromping through the woods tooting his horn in advance of his pursuit.

i know, we're loaded for bear -- in both football and basketball -- and i suppose it's hard to keep all that hardware under wraps -- sort of the "stop us if you can" mentality. (which i still haven't totally bought into.)

but i'd rather sound the trumpets and point when the trophy is on the wall and not before.

kitty prone

i pray this abomination gets the last bit of youtube mania out of me for a while. it was educational learning a little bit about a new program and a fun bit to put together, but it's getting a bit self-indulgent. this isn't why i got a computer.

the new phone book's here!

it's here! it's finally here!

the sporting news released its college football preview today and it's got west virginia quarterback pat white on the cover!

(ok, so there's, like 15 different covers, but at least pitt's not there.)

and they've even got this meaningless teaser rating the best of everything in college football. (pat white gets "best dual threat quarterback," for all the import that holds.)

but seriously, until the games are played, aren't all these stupid preview issues pretty meaningless? and the only poll that matters anyway is the last one in january.

but still ... it's like that first, bright green tree bud in spring ... or the first snow flake in december ... it's a harbinger. it's the promise of a great, big bowl of cheetos and all the coke you can drink -- you know, the garbage you love to eat until it makes you sick.

it's like, do you or don't you drink the mountaineer kool-aid? do you dare hope that new coach bill stewart can make his stew full of choice ingredients work for 12 games after his fiesta bowl miracle in the desert?

i'm finally starting to come to terms with the summer heat and humidity thing after a spring that ended on a marvelously cool, three-week note. but i'm already looking forward to the end of august.

i think it's like everyone says before every sport's season begins, where hope springs eternal. you're sitting before a marvelous feast where you're starving and everything makes your mouth water. it looks good and it smells good and you're just waiting for someone to say grace.

with any luck, this will be the year we get the meal we dared not pray for.

warmed over chili

today was the 10th annual smoke on the water chili cookoff here in charleston.

kris and i were both judges in the salsa competition. she chose this event to preside over rather the red and green chili contests in order to not have to spend the better part of the day on kanawha boulevard as the temperatures rose.

it takes a few hours to go over the many entries, tabulate evaluations, award prizes, etc., when you judge chili. that can lead to a lot of beer consumption, and varying degrees of heat prostration and indigestion. great, non-troubling stuff when you're single and/or not 40-something, but weird things happen when you get married and middle-aged.

this is the festival's tenth year, which means it started the same time i started working here. i may have skipped that first year for some reason. i have no memory of it.

i do recall maybe the second or third one, hanging out on the boulevard with a bunch of work buddies, drinking beer to cool the chili heat and listening to live bands.

sitting in the shade, we listened to jazz fusion and some big band swing. (this was tail end of the swing band revival.)

earlier in the year, a handful of the young tykes at the paper had gotten it into their heads to partake of the swing dance craze, so the stuff we learned was still fresh in our heads. at some point, our education reporter rebecca and i did a little dance right there in the street, which was fun and kinda cool because it almost looked like we knew what we were doing with the turns and spins. she even curtsied at the end.

the jazz fusion, as often is the case, got to be a bit self-indulgent with the solos. one in particular was a seemingly endless saxophone turn that made me think, "man, this guy's just playing with himself." so i laughed out loud when they said the name of the piece was "autoerotica."

this was about the same time our buddy and daily mail sports editor jody and his friend jim thought it would be a good chance to see how their skills fared against some of the area's other chili chefs. they had a booth featuring something they called "big and tall chili."

it got its name from a young lad who asked if eating it would make him big and tall like them. a quick grab for markers and a piece of poster paper and a name was born.

jody was an acknowledged chili aficionado, distance running advocate and stat fanatic without peer. he passed away while undergoing treatment for colon cancer in the summer of 2002.

two years later, his fiancee marina inaugurated the "run for your life," a 5-mile run through downtown charleston and up and around the spring hill cemetery -- hands-down the hardest five miles i've ever run. it's almost straight uphill to get to the cemetery, then once there, an undulating, hilly course. hellish. proceeds benefit colorectal cancer awareness.

i skipped this year because there was no way i could fake it and jog my way through the race in my condition. even walking it is a challenge -- and not an option yet. i hope this is the last one i miss.

walking past the booths, and quaffing that first beer of the afternoon today reminded me of the first time i'd ever really spent any social time with kris since the party where i'd first met her.

it was 2003 and we still published on saturdays. after work, my friend tony and i hit the boulevard and ran into kris and some of the new young staffers. it wasn't noon yet, but i was well on my way to an alcohol soaked day.

it was hot as all get-out and i had the sense to drink a bottle of water after every two or three beers to stave off dehydration and any potential hangovers. seemed it worked ok, because ...

rebecca and her boyfriend steve were in town and we were all invited to the home of our friend brad and his wife, where i ran into kris again. we had a lovely buffet supper with drinks before heading out to what used to be a favorite daily mail east end hangout, the red carpet lounge, a very hole-in-the-wall kind of establishment just down the street from the state capitol complex.

by the time the night was over i looked at my watch and determined i'd been on more than a 14-hour run of consumption. it was a record i have yet to match. oddly, i was loopy but lucid. go figure.

anyway, kris claimed later to have been impressed by the whole stamina thing -- which she now denies -- but which i still call the day i knew "she wanted me ... bad." (seriously. she denies everything, but i know. oh, yes, i know.)

i'm not quite sure if that qualifies as symmetry, but it does provide a nice landmark along the path of our journey together. it will be interesting to see how the landscape changes around it.

(like the pic above, which was shot last year when they tried the cookoff at appalachian power park. the ballpark had great amenities, lots of places to sit and plentiful restrooms but it was blocks removed from the river. what they traded for convenience the ostensibly river-based chili festival lost in ambiance. it was a noble experiment, though.)

(btw, kris had no idea at this point that i was looking for the opening to ask her to marry me. she probably didn't even think i was entertaining the idea. i love that.)

he'll have your back

as college sports enters its summer hiatus, i scrounge for faux stories/commentary on my west virginia mountaineers. i was glad to see us mentioned in a good way in the sporting news in a column called "mascots you want on your side in a bar fight."

i like that among the attributes mr. spencer hall admires is "a thick enough beard to cushion most strikes to the face." that, and he rates the mountaineer above the pitt panther. (pictured is the upcoming academic year's mascot, michael squires of clarksburg.)

my sister, the genius

not much to this, really. i've been trying to figure out how to record video on the digital camera my sister joy gave kris and me and couldn't find the button or the menu item that said, well, you know, "video."

turns out you access it with a button that also doubles as the "trash" button on the back. then you pick the little icon that looks like a video camera. (well, there's like 12 of them on the screen. i couldn't get past pushing the button that might possibly trash all the pics on the memory card.)

anyway, she was pretty proud of herself, as you can see.

just testing

this is otto trying to get my attention this morning. like all good terrorists, she followed through on her threat after i ignored her and proceeded to break the daisy.

ask an expert

a friend who studied a year in germany told me that auto mechanics there are accorded the same kind of regard that physicians enjoy here.

it made sense to me. a culture built on engineering prowess should have respect for professionals who can make sense of cam shafts, fuel lines and other wondrous mysteries of the internal combustion engine.

i know many and many a health care provider who can stand absolutely flummoxed staring into the gaping maw of a vehicle's raised hood and not have idea one what he's looking for.

high blood pressure, they can handle; the "check engine" light on the dash, not so much.

if you think about it, we live in a world populated by experts.

plumbers. information technology specialists. landscapers.

yeah, i said landscapers.

you think that shoveling dirt around and planting shrubs is all it takes to be a landscaper?

next week, i have a fellow coming who is going to help get these vexing, poisonous vines in my yard under control.

i tried for years to trim, untangle and yank the things into submission and all i got were itchy pustules, scabs and a cortizone shot in my keister.

i gave up the fight of guessing my way into a more habitable homestead. 

it was time to call in people who do it for a living and know how to identify and handle nasty greenery and their skin-irritating secretions.

i guess intelligent people think they can figure out how to do almost anything. (i say that acknowledging the possibility that i might not be a truly intelligent person.)

but i can intuit my way to things with sad, makeshift home improvement solutions or computer program workarounds.

i think i sometimes work under the delusion that because i can use a wrench or pruning shears that i can intuit my way into stopping a leaky plumbing fixture or ridding my yard of poisonous plants. i mean, why pay someone for something you can do yourself?

it's embarrassing to admit that my ego is so large -- and the hold on my wallet so strong -- but sometimes i forget that there are folks out there who know a whole lot more than i do about a whole lot of things. 

and, you know what? time -- especially the wasted kind -- also has a cost.

it took a while, but i may have finally used my intelligence to realize there are all kinds of experts out there for all kinds of things and that the smart thing to do, rather than flood the house or get another shot in the butt, is to call them.

made it

at this writing, the most catastrophic thing that's happened is that the internet went down. 

i notice this happens every time it rains. 

at first, i thought it was because of a connection at my house. 

but nary a drop had fallen when the service became sluggish, then nonexistent. i heard thunder in the distance south.

as the storm drew closer, i figured it was time to hit the sack. since the modem is in the bedroom at the moment, i could see the internet and dsl indicator lights blink or wink out or just turn red.

i'm not sure what utility to compare internet service with that is so susceptible to the whims of weather. probably none. 

(if i were ma bell, i'd tell it "why can't you be like your brother, the telephone? he doesn't seem to mind if it's raining or storming. you're such a prima donna.")

at least 10 years into my internet experience, i still get reminders the service is more of a crapshoot, like broadcast tv or radio reception -- you know, stuff you get for free. 

but of course, i'm paying for this. welcome to the information age.

i suppose i should complain to the folks at verizon, but i doubt that communications giants really listen to inconvenienced individuals. 

i don't think they pay attention unless service blacks out for whole cities or regions or big businesses and it ends up in the news.

so thunderstorms mess with my internet? i guess that's just my bad luck.

use it or lose it

i called this pic "neglected friends" because that's what they are -- the latest in a line of buddies that took me through some tough physical, mental and emotional times -- but this pair has been sadly underused of late.

i'm sitting shirtless on a friday evening where the air outside is not as thick with humidity as it was about a week ago and i can feel a paunch lapping over my shorts.

combine that with a general lack of tone and the saddest of little endorphin kicks from mowing the lawn a couple of hours ago and i know i miss the exercise.

"just do it" was probably the greatest ad slogan ever because it punctured every excuse you could offer for not being active. (and thus buy nike sporting goods.)  

but i've been using lots of them lately -- excuses, not sneakers.

the benefits -- do i have to repeat them here? -- better sleep; better mood; a more even keel; hell, better perspective -- i miss all that.

it's amazing what a good, hard sweat will do.

i'm almost back to square one. (the real square one is at least 12 pounds away.)

so no more road races. and the next triathlon definitely goes on hold.

those were the goals, the things to do, with all the activity i was already practicing. 

running and swimming weren't training -- they were how i was keeping my blood pressure and cholesterol down.

as my fitness increased, the competitions became incentives to walk into that ancient locker room at the y and tie on a pair of shoes or swim that extra few laps.

i forget things like that sometimes. i'm not now or ever have been a jock. i'm probably what you'd call an advanced beginner or an intermediate.

the goals were usually modest -- just go a little faster than the last time you ran -- or at least not slower.

for want of a better phrase, vanity got the best of me lately, in convincing me i could just jump into a race, as if i were always in good shape.

it's not like it was four years ago when i had great wind and endurance. things have slid mightily since then. the caboose is more loose and not nearly as taut.

i'll have to eat some ego and simply focus on those daily 20 minutes of sweat. keep it simple. lift some non-impressive amount of weight. return to the back-fixing yoga just once a week. 

build from there.

maybe come august, i can run a little race.

eh, it's a start.

doodles and doo-dads

ok, so we're working on this project for the paper where i have to use the office videocam.

i figure it would be a good idea to practice using this thing before the actual shoot, so i take it home and start taping.

it also occurs to me that this might be a good reason to really play with the imovie app that came with the computer.

this can only mean i'll be adding another gee-widget to my duffle bag of geeky, time-sucking, computer/internet obsessions.

exhibit a:



it's pretty long as videos go, but i can't stop watching it. (kris got over it, i think, but she still can't believe that's how her voice sounds. mellifluous, is it not?)

hopefully, this new fancy will pass into just another cool, fun thing to do when we can use it.