Monthly Archive for September, 2005

Gamm Sez …

Published on September 29, 2005 in Sports. 0 Comments

A coworker runs a Big Ten sports website called The Final Score. Andy Gamm’s also an MSU grad and wrote for the student-run State News while on campus. (The guy’s a marketer now, but you can tell as you read where his real love lies!)

All his predictions for the week’s games are here. From his writeup on the upcoming MSU/UOM matchup:

As if this rivalry tilt didn’t have enough hype surrounding it year by year, consider the following: this is the first time since Vegas has been issuing lines that State is the favorite. Nope, that isn’t a misprint. Neither is the fact that this is the first time since 1968 that MSU is ranked and Michigan is not heading into this game.The Spartans were higher ranked than Michigan back in 2003 when the teams met, but the Wolverines were a two point favorite and won the game by a touchdown. Back to the anomalies… Michigan is out of the Top 25 for the first time since 1998, a span of 114 straight weeks. The Wolverines are coming off their first Big Ten opener loss since 1981 – before every single player on the Michigan roster was born! Michigan State comes in having scored its most points since putting up 76 on Northwestern back in 1989. Hold on tight, this is an odd week but an exciting one around the state of Michigan.

His take on the score? MSU 38. Michigan 24. And like I said, in the "big game" anything’s possible. But I ‘ll put my money on State.

Update: Gamm himself sez: "I didn’t write for the State News, but rather after college I got my start writing about MSU and with the web as a stringer for Green and White (Lansing State Journal) and wrote for four years for BitterRivals." Sorry about that, Andy. I usually do a better job researching!

Published on September 26, 2005 in Sports. 0 Comments

What a great time to be a Spartan fan. They’re 4-0 and ranked #11 in the AP poll going into the annual shebang with Michigan. And oops I heard that the mighty UOM is out of the polls for the first time since 1998 …

And that’s all the gloating I’m going to do. Because as every diehard Spartan fan knows, MSU’s good fortune could turn at any moment. And Michigan can come back in the third overtime and somehow beat you after all.

So I’m totally not assuming anything as U Mich comes to Spartan Stadium this weekend. Anything can happen. And I’ve sat through enough MSU football to know that it will. Go Green.

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BTW, my sister’s husband is a huge Michigan fan with perennial season football tickets that he often shares with my husband. Thanks for that, Matt. And even though I think your heart’s in the wrong place, this logo’s for you. Umich

Where there's smoke

Published on September 23, 2005 in Friends and Travel. 1 Comment

Foxsports
In the Fox Sports Bar at Detroit Metro

People are drawn here from all corners of Detroit Metro Airport for one thing and one thing only: an increasingly hard-to-come-by permission to smoke. To my knowledge this bar is the only place within the airport’s sprawling confines where smoking is allowed.

As soon as you turn a certain corner off Concourse A, you can smell you’re going in the right direction. Several storefronts down on the left, a thick haze greets you as you walk into the bar “reserved for Fox Sports fans.” The place is packed with people, and all of them – all – are there for just one thing: to suck into their lungs as many puffs of their sweet sweet drug of choice before their plane takes off. Bics having been confiscated by security (or, as in Raleigh Durham, deposited “voluntarily” in labeled plastic bins just in front of the security scanners), matches flame at table after table as smokers light one, then the next in attempts to ingest enough nicotine to get them to the next airport’s smoking area.

Patrons nurse beers, pick at sorry plates of nachos and chicken fingers, and stare blankly if blissfully at nothing in particular. Bigger than life posters of Jimmy Johnson, Terry Bradshaw, Howie Mandel and James Brown from Fox NFL Sunday look down, jokingly, amused (Bradshaw is wearing the sharpest shiny navy suit with a navy windowpane pattern). Football jerseys encased in smoke-clouded Plexiglas line one wall. A bank of TVs atop the cases all are tuned to various sporting events. The smoke hangs blue.

Though it was mid afternoon and we hadn’t yet eaten, food just didn’t seem possible. In fact, we couldn’t bring ourselves to order more than a couple of diet Pepsis. “I’ve smoked two and it feels like five,” David said a few minutes later. Then he paid the tab and we left.

More from the shoot

Published on September 22, 2005 in Friends and Travel. 0 Comments

Horsebarn
Looking through the horse barn

David
David and friends

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Blossom

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David and Richard

Photoshoot

Published on September 21, 2005 in Friends and Travel. 2 Comments

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Watching Andy work

I’m in Raleigh this week on an interview/photoshoot. Actually, there are four of us here today; tomorrow three others will come in to do a short video shoot with us.

It’s great to be out of the office (and out of town) for a few days, even though air travel can be iffy and the days we’re on location are really long. I love the change of pace, the company is always good and our host/subjects generally go out of their way to make sure we get what we need. Not a bad work week, in all.

Can you see people …

Published on September 17, 2005 in Seasons. 4 Comments

Sailing so slowly, high up in the starry sky …

Through some quirk in the way my brain works I have this odd capacity to remember just about every song I ever learned as a child. I mean I can recall songs my grandfather tunelessly sang to me when I was 5 years old. (A red fox ran away; he ran so far away; his mother had no telephone...) I still can sing the “Hello” song that Miss Prine taught us in kindergarten. The gruesome stop-look-listen ditty Miss Loverin taught us in grade one? (Though you can buy many a ball, you never can buy a new leg.) Of course I remember it, along with every song I learned from the second grade music book. Camp songs. Sunday School songs. Oh, and all those fairy tales set to music that I had on 33 rpm vinyl. And don’t forget my favorite musical soundtracks: Mary Poppins, Music Man, The Sound of Music.

Sometimes the tunes in my early piano books had lyrics set to them, too. Whenever I see the full moon, I remember this one:

Big moon, bright moon
Sailing so slowly, high
Up in the starry sky
Big moon, bright moon
Can you see people
So little as I?

Yes, and I can sing it, too. What a total waste of brain space.

Moonover_1

"Sus, self"

Published on September 12, 2005 in Home & Family. 0 Comments

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Sus, in shades

This summer’s activity of choice: do-it-yourself portraits. Click on the Flickr badge below to see more.

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This is a Flickr badge showing photos in a set called Sus, self. Make your own badge here.

"Me, Meg"

Published on September 12, 2005 in Home & Family. 1 Comment

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Meg, up close

Here’s the other one’s brand of art. Click on the Flickr badge to see the rest.

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This is a Flickr badge showing photos in a set called Me, Meg. Make your own badge here.

Everyone needs a twin

Published on September 9, 2005 in Home & Family. 2 Comments

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Meg (operating) and Sus (patient)

It’s fall and they got the hair color bug again. Last week Sus colored Meg’s a lighter blonde and added super blonde highlights. This week Meg is doing Sus, who’s got the brown hair thing going again, only not so dark this time. She insists she hates blonde hair (we should all be so lucky as to be natural blondes, I’ve told her with no effect whatsoever.)

I know that sisters who aren’t twins can also color each other’s hair. But it seems to me that simple siblings wouldn’t feel as obligated to each other and one (the older one, probably) might pull out any excuse to get out of a hair color session. With twins you’ve got that bond going and even when they hate each other they know they’re inextricably tied up in each other’s lives. So doing things for and with each other is pretty much an unquestioned state of being.

They rarely do anything one without the other, and they do acknowledge the twinhood advantage of never having to face a new strange situation alone. Easy together as best girlfriends, their comfortable familiarity with each other is almost mystical. Likewise the extreme and unstoppable anger they sometimes direct at one another.

Yet the one who "hated" her twin enough to move out of their shared bedroom and into the uncertainty of the basement patiently squeezed blonde from a bottle onto strand by strand by strand of her sister’s hair. And the sib who complains continually that the other is mean to her (even though she herself incessantly critcizes her sis on matters only a mother should have jurisdiction over) artfully saturated her sister’s tresses with brown color.

We should all be so lucky as to have such sibling, I’ve told them, to no effect they’ll admit to their mom. Everyone should have a twin.

Down in the hole

Published on September 5, 2005 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: Uncategorized.

Hole
That’s Tom looking up; Amy’s paying no attention.

The building I work in developed some slight, uh, structural problems a couple of weeks ago and all the cubicles along one wall had to be evacuated and dismantled so the B&G guys could make repairs.

Most folks were accommodated within our cramped second-floor confines, but a couple of them did have to move downstairs for a week or so.

Not necessarily noteworthy by itself, I guess, especially if I don’t tell you that the "structural problem" involved cement falling from around beams near the ceiling. No, what’s interesting to me is how it happens that I can take a photo of these guys in the first place.

See, from the time it was first built, this place had been a warehouse operation for the receiving, storing, and shipping of our vendor-sourced products, as well as a product pickup point for all products sold by the company.

When it was decided about six years ago that the US operations would benefit from moving away from headquarters and being housed under one, separate, roof, the warehouse was deemed the spot for us. The place already accommodated a few cube dwellers but in order to take on the rest of us construction was added.

Now, I am spatially and directionally challenged, and so even today I cannot tell you exactly how the offices relate to the warehouse. (In fact, I spent my first few weeks inside here completely disoriented, relying on the good graces of friends to help me find the shortest way to the cafeteria or a conference room.) I do know that there are NO windows in the entire large expanse of building that my group occupies. Not on the second floor or on the first.

This was definitely not a selling point in convincing the US operations that it would be good to move our mailing address to the warehouse. Not that we had a choice. But one feature we were lured with was the promise of a skylight that would lend natural light to our part of the building.

Well, that may be good for the second floor cube dwellers, but what about those on the first floor? If you’re looking back at the photo now, you’ve got your answer: The hole. Spreading light — and sound — to the workers toiling in the depths downstairs.

Maybe in another post I’ll write more about the hole and how nobody works down there right now, but that there are plans to move people back in soon that maybe include plugging the hole…

But this post has gotten way too long as it is.

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If you’ve been looking for me this weekend, I have been blogging. Just not here.