“Writers have a rare power not given to anyone else: we can bore people long after we’re dead.” – Sinclair Lewis
If you’re an American literature student at one of the area high schools or colleges who is stuck reading William Faulkner, I empathize with you and your private hell.
He’s dead, but he’s still in the curriculum.
Thus begins another Saturday spent with me. Time spent, furthermore, you’ll never recover.
Be of good cheer Times-Union readership because I can’t write weekly columns when I’m dead, and I don’t think there will be a collection of Chip Shots columns bound by any publishing company.
Let’s get this thing finished.
Sometimes I’ve sat or stood at the keyboard feeling key-bored when I prepare a column until something energizes me.
By the way, the “stood” part… if you have a chance to use an adjustable desk, and you can stand often, please purchase one.
I worked from home from March 18 until I returned to the office April 2. I have two manufacturing site offices: one with an adjustable desk and the other with one of those surface desks you adjust on top of your desk.
The latter is garbage, especially if your work requires you to have some documents and reports to your left or right. There is no room. I don’t use that adjustable service left behind by my predecessor.
At home and at another site where I work, the full-size adjustable desk I have is sufficient in document surface, and I can roll through big chunks of the day standing up while I work. I’m up 6-7 hours per day when I have a full-service standup desk.
I’m not really excited about watching spring sports as a fan aside from track and field, and rugby. I like working spring sports events from behind the mic, though, especially if I’m working in something where I can block the elements.
There is a different kind of cold in spring sports than in fall sports.
It’s warming up from mostly cool, and very wet weather in the spring, and I feel like I’m fighting the cold.
In the fall sports season, conversely, the days are mostly warmer, and sunset cools the air with much less bone-chilling humidity you feel in the spring. I only close my window in the press box during football season if rain is shooting inward on my papers and the electrically charged equipment.
Spring is so muddy and filthy, too. Fall is drier, and even if there is some rain it feels far less messy than whatever was left by a small, soot-filled snow pile, or rain on ground still squishy after the precipitation is gone.
The only annoying thing about fall event work is the first time you enter the press box to see – and to clear – the dead stinging and biting insect carcasses who checked in, but unwittingly never checked out.
September yellowjacket/bee season is a real gas, too. I deliberately don’t have anything sweet nor syrupy if I’m in the press box during a late September morning or afternoon. Rick Timmons and I, during a JV football game five years ago, put over 50 sputtering, disoriented yellowjackets out of their collective misery while not missing a beat on the game’s action.
I let the honeybees die on their own, though.
I’m already counting the Fridays to football season. First scrimmage is at home, Friday August 16, and the Warsaw Tigers will host Columbia City at 7 p.m. Warsaw coaches will adorn themselves with some great-looking, fun tropical shirts.
I don’t mind schvitzing in the soccer press box either. The Tiger Soccer Complex sits in a mini valley with a breeze on the pitch from the northwest, and as soon as the sun sets, the air in August and September is perfect. I love leaving the window open.
There is something about seeing lawn chairs and blankets the fans have set up north and south of the soccer stands that calms me. It resembles a picnic or an in-stadium tailgate.
Fall is cleaner than the miserable Northern Indiana spring. The only two reasons I liked spring growing up in Northeastern Ohio were the school’s musical and track and field. I stayed remarkably busy balancing these commitments. It was easier to run in the lousy spring weather a little over 35 miles inland from the shores of Lake Erie than it was to stand there in street clothes.
The small lake shore in the village where I lived was visually disgusting with its dead fish, eyes hollowed out, or half-eaten by bald eagles and seagulls. The southeast corner of the village had three blocks at low levels whose narrow-feeding waterway flooded up to a preadolescent’s waist at worse, and almost always to the knees.
When I walked to the beach in childhood summers on the hot gravel-tar surface I reminded myself I was glad I lived on the top of the hill. Those perennially flooded houses are all razed now.
Spring… my least favorite season, Thanks for letting me harvest some energy while I was in the middle of this thing.