Month: August 2023

This morning was a bit brisk (11°), and I felt a little rusty after skipping yesterday’s run, but otherwise no real noteworthy aspects. Two miles.

Heavy rain this morning, so I haven’t run. It’s not unthinkable that I run later in the day, but it’s unlikely.

One of the dogs has a moderately dramatic digestive disruption, so Margaret got less sleep last night than would be ideal. We woke up together, I to run and she to clean up a puddle of puke and some gelatinous other dog by-product; she went back to sleep, and I run under light clouds, 14°, at an indulgent pace, and I tallied another two miles.

I came home, showered, breakfasted, corrected some typos in thos morning’s homily, and meandered down to Fairacres. We had Mass, the sisters prayed for Margaret and me in our housing… situation, home again, and I feel distinctly as though I’ve done enough for a day (though there is so much more to do as far as preparing to vacate the premises)….

Did I mention that Käthe came to stay with us a couple of weeks ago? Last night she blogged about the multi-staged holiday she took that included her stay in Oxford (Margaret and I make a cameo appearance — don’t blink or you’ll miss us!). But making links is one of the vital virtues of the internet and blogging, so I had to note and link to Käthe’s.

/waves vigorously

Two miles, uninteresting conditions, although just as my warm-up was transitioning into full-on running, I think I may have experienced a few moments of the breezing I observed in another runner earlier this week. I do not infer from that that I’m about to experience a breakthrough in limberness and energy, but it’s fun while it lasts.

I noted a while ago that Jenee Woodard sends traffic this direction to my New Edition post. It occurred to me that I hadn’t taken a look recently to see what has generated most traffic to this blog over the past decade or so. The old favourites are Plural of Impetus (for obvious reasons) and Genotext and Phenotext (reflecting the opacity of the distinction in the writings that originated the terms). Rough Injustice was my description and criticism of the first step toward dissolving what was once the General Theological Seminary, when the GTS8 (Deirdre Good, David Hurd, Amy Bentley Lamborn, Joshua Davis, Mitties McDonald DeChamplain, Andrew Irving, Andrew Kadel, and Patrick Malloy) were fired on the tissue thin pretext that they had implicitly resigned.

But the blog the is more than twenty years old, and in the past ten years I’ve had steady traffic coming in for posts that transcribe other texts: Guido Sarducci on UFOs from an early episode of Saturday Night Live, Weren’t No Kin on the lyrics of the popular R&B/Gospel/pre-proto-rap song ‘Tell Me Why You Like Roosevelt’, and more recently Some Things Are Important on the lyrics of the Toots Hibbert (and the Maytals) song ‘Pomp and Pride’ and the song ‘Draw Your Brakes’ by Scottie.

And scattered posts about my own vocational tale of woe and intrigue, my arguments about hermeneutics, miscellaneous sermons, the various digital editions of texts I’ve transcribed (now all to be found in my directory in the Internet Archive — I’m especially proud to have transcribed Louis Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews into four volumes with in-text footnotes), fountain pens, some of my memorial posts, and a couple of April Fools posts of which I’m inappropriately proud (Franciscans Sue Starbucks and Not That Happy).

It’s still tough to remind myself to blog every day (as we see), especially now that I have accounts on Mastodon and BlueSky as well as Facebook and Twitter accounts I haven’t yet given up on. But it’s worth keep the ol’ site going.

I got distracted yesterday, apparently, but I did run, and then trundled down to Fairacres, and then came back and eked out a bit of writing for the essay that I must, must, must complete this month. 14°, humid, cloudy, but a decent pace, two miles.

This morning’s run was a bit odd, in that it was about 18° when I set out, and the humidity must have been 100%; the air condensed around me as I ran into it. (It occurred to me that there should be a weather portmanteau such as ‘hu MISTity’ to designate this phenomenon. Anyway, I slogged along at a desultory pace through this near-but-not-quite drizzle, getting hotter and hotter in the high temp and humidity. Thus, another two miles.

I post most of my photos to Flickr, with a Creative Commons licence. Most of them are of only personal interest, but some have been selected for book covers, so that’s an agreeable outcome. A long-ish while ago, I got a comment on one of my photos on Flickr noting that another Flickrite had used one of my photos on her blog, and thanking me. She did everything right: all my photos are licensed through Creative Commons (attribution, non-commercial, no-derivs), so she (a) linked the photo to its place in my Flickr feed, (b) wrote an acknowledgement and (c) pointed to my overall Flickr account.

Sometimes people just go ahead and use my photos on the ‘Well, CC is public domain’ theory. Tsk, tsk. Or they ask me how to use a photo they like, as though it were rocket science. (Kara, is it rocket science? No, I didn’t think so.) Or people ask me if they may use them; but the whole point of a CC licence is that you don’t have to ask unless you’re selling. Now, it’s good manners if there’s even a slight risk of money changing hands, but at the heart of CC-licensed material lies the principle that if you do what the licence says (in my case, attribute the photo to me, don’t make money from it without making an arrangement with me, don’t remix it without my agreement), it’s all clear from the get-go.

Esther did it right. She posted the photo, with attribution, unedited, to her non-commercial blog. Then she directed my attention to it, a polite gesture but not strictly necessary. Bingo! All according to Hoyle.

Now, if you want to licence some of my photos for commercial purposes, (a) Great!! and (b) just get in touch. I’m a cheap date.

Sunny, brisk (10°), nothing special physically, but I just set pout at a decent pace and kept it up till I got home. Good run, good pace, two more miles.

The story this morning is not the conditions (11°, grey, humid, stiff limbs, relaxed pace) but the way that, on the home stretch, a much younger runner came up behind and passed me with no apparent effort at all. He just breezed by — smooth, steady, not pressing, not bounding or sprinting, just breezing. After he passed, I made a couple of futile efforts to match his pace, but it was as if we were different species; he had access to wells of strength and flexibility and energy that I ceded decades ago (if I ever had them). And since he wasn’t in a big hurry, he remained in my line of sight most of the rest of the way home, just coolly flowing along, taunting me with his vitality.

Bless him, he’s probably good-looking, too. And employed. Oh well, two miles more.

This morning I got up and put my trainers on and set out for my morning run, forgetting that I’d checked the morning weather and that it was 9°. I usually don a hoodie at 10° or below, so I was distinctly chilly for the run, and it took a good while for my back and legs to limber up. On the other hand, there was only infinitesimal precip (the BBC’s legendary MIST), and I was, emmm, motivated to take my run in a higher gear than usual. So everyting worked out, I ran at a pleasingly strong pace, and racked up another two miles.

Running, anyway. A chilly 10°, eyes and nose streaming copiously, nothing special in my limbs (apart from residual fasciitis and overall stiffness), and although I didn’t feel as though I was pushing against my limitations, I seem to have held to a good steady pace, so that the resulting two miles came in at a pleasingly short duration.