A Legacy

Coach Kay Yow 1942-2009

First head coach of the NC State Wolfpack Women's basketball program.
Pioneer for women's basketball.
Competitor. Cancer survivor. Inspiration. Always a teacher.

And respected by many a rival.

Many teams across the country and probably all of the conference teams wore pink uniforms or at least pink shoelaces this week. The ones they have for Feb and Hoops for Hope. My Tar Heels wore pink with blue numbers at Maryland.

Articles that say more than I ever knew:
The announcement from NSCU: Yow passes peacefully Saturday morning
Another story from NCSU: Yow's last gift to her team
From an ESPN analyst: Yow's considerable efforts will live on
and a Year by year career from ESPN

ESPN did a nice job with the video tributes over the weekend.

All three of the major tv network local affiliates carried the on campus tribute live tonight.

-SML

flashback

I had a flashback today - to my undergrad years and the brief time I spent with the campus radio station WMFO.

Here's how it happened:
UNC Women's Basketball team is away at Georgia Tech.
The local radio coverage is an AM station that I cannot get at home after dark because I live too far away.
The local internet broadcast requires SilverLight 2.0 which is not available for my Linux boxes.
The Georgia Tech radio station - WREK - is broadcasting the game and has free online streaming.

So I am listening to the GT announcers. But it is the ads that remind me that it is a campus radio station which in turn takes me down memory lane. There are several ads for regular WREK programming. It was the ad for the program "Coffee and Sushi" that made think if college and also think that I should post.

[note: we were ahead by 15, now it is tied. I better "Go where I go, do what I do" as Woody would say.]

-SML

A Historic Day

Today was a snow day. Even if it wasn't, I planned to watch the Inauguration of the 44th President of the United States. So I spent much of the day caught up watching all the coverage. Even through the TV, I could feel the energy, the excitement, and the pure emotion of the people who traveled to our capitol.

The sea of people was amazing. I was remembering times that I have been to Washington D.C. and particularly when I sang with my church youth choir on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

The stories told by people who participated in the civil rights movement were moving. It reminded me of when I was in junior high and we had a visitor come and tell of surviving the Holocaust. I listened to the stories that are hard to remember and the pride in the changes that have occurred and the hope that the past will not be repeated in the future, knowing that the stories must be told for change to occur.

I enjoyed listening to the history of past Presidents and past Inaugurations. I particularly enjoyed listening to Luci Johnson talk about being a teenager in the White House and of her father's contributions to the history made today.

There were cameras everywhere and I look forward to seeing many photos. It will be interesting to see which ones are famous 4 and 40 years from now. One of my favorite sites is BBC News In Pictures. Of course they did not disappoint for this historic day.

-SML

Fridays before holidays

I like working the weeks between the Thanksgiving and New Year breaks. I do not like going to the mall, especially locally. The family that I spend holidays with is all local and we see each other all the time so I am not doing an special entertaining or extra travel. I do not have kids concerts, recitals, or exam study sessions to attend. Other instructors like to take time off so work is usually available and it is a good time to pad the bank account for the slower months at the beginning of each year. If I am traveling, I can go check out the decorations of some other city - one year I was even lucky enough to be sent to NYC where I made sure to go see the show at Radio City Music Hall and the windows at Macy's.

That said, for the past few years I have been on the road not just near the holidays, but specifically the week before Christmas and trying to get home on one of the busiest Friday's of the year. I have even flown home on Christmas Eve morning to avoid the worst of a Friday night. This year I was working locally which involves a bit of a commute. It was damp, drizzly, and foggy all week making for horrible traffic and lots of accidents. It was just plain ugly. I was driving home - no sitting in traffic on the Interstate - one evening thinking that I would rather be traveling. If I was traveling I would be staying at a hotel much closer to the office. I also wouldn't know if the traffic was normal or a holiday special. And I probably wouldn't be as interested in getting back to the hotel or to dinner alone at any specific time. I was just thinking I should try harder to be traveling the week before the holiday next year...

Then I saw the weather report - snow in the mid west and north east. Flights canceled in the New York City area and Chicago. I am very glad to be at home.

Merry Christmas.

-sml

This doesn't look like November in North Carolina.

I choose to live in a place with 4 seasons. I like winter in small batches and for short periods of time. But not before Thanksgiving! Yet during possibly "the coldest November on record" and "8 years since the airport had measurable snow before Thanksgiving" and possibly the first time ever that the airport had measurable snow TWICE before Thanksgiving, I woke to snow on my car. We even made the national news both Saturday morning (for Friday's snow) and Sunday morning (for record breaking lows on Saturday).

Most of my friends from the northern tundras teased about my complaining about the cold. Sure it is (and was) colder up there but they should expect cold and possibly even snow in November. Sure, some would not even call it snow. A dusting at best since it was not on the roads and most of melted shortly after the sun came up.

I have had offers to move North again but I prefer to let the snow melt if I am at home or let the hotel staff clear the drive if I am traveling. With all the traveling I do, I was beginning to wonder what state I was in that day. I prefer my snow to have little impact on the roads and to be pretty, short lived, on a weekend, and in January - like this picture from last winter:
-SML

Thoughts

Thoughts from this morning.

* It is just wrong to go from 73 degrees to 37 degrees in such a short time.
* Especially when it is damp and windy.

* If the time change had occurred last weekend then I would not have been scraping frost from the car in the dark then driving east into the sunrise to get to work this week. It would already be light out by the time I started my commute.

-sml

re: travel stories and travel blogs

Yes. I am still training.
No. I am not traveling as much. But who knows what next week will bring...

But there have been a number of small stories running around in my head that I have been meaning to post.

When I was in Las Vegas I spent a few hours in a bookstore just browsing and I found a book title The Traveling Curmudgeon by Jon Winokur.

It is mostly quotes about traveling from around the world and from many time periods. There is an introduction that describes - much better than I can - how most interesting travel stories are rarely happy stories and most were no where near funny at the time they were happening. They are mostly about lost luggage, canceled flights, sick children, and other such adventures.

It struck me as very true and as a reason I wouldn't expect anyone but a few close friends to ever find anything interesting in my travel stories. I was also thinking about this book and what could be boring travel stories as I was following the Olympics in August. I have always found the stories about the local culture or what it took to get there the most interesting. Since I had the privilege of traveling to Beijing in 2000, it was also fun to see if I could tell from photos and video what had changed. What I most enjoyed though were the blogs of the athletes that shared the behind the scenes view of traveling to the Olympics.

My favorites were of the months running up to the Equestrian portions in Hong Kong.
Here is a list of some of the ones I was reading - some were just for the Olympics, others have continued since and you have to look at the July and Aug posts to get the Olympic travel stories:

2008 EquiSearch.com Olympic Blogs (a list of blogs including some below)
Inside the O'Connor Cavalry
Beezie Madden
Notes from Debbie McDonald
Rachel Dawson (Tar Heel Field Hockey)

Happy reading!

-SML