A quick video of the moment the eclipse happened at our house. You can hear some of the neighbors cheering.

Lots of people out walking and riding bikes. Beautiful day. Feels like a less hot July Fourth. We should have eclipses more often.

The head of Indiana’s DNR (who is also my neighbor) says all campgrounds and state park lodges are full. Guests from all fifty states and three other countries. So, plenty of people around–but the roads are quiet. People seem to have made the wise decision to get to their viewing site and stay put.

So there’s an eclipse coming, if you haven’t heard. We’re in the path of totality. In fact, we’re at the end of the zone where the darkness will last a full four minutes. It’s caused a bit of a hubbub.

• IU cancelled classes and is holding an event that features William Shatner performing spoken word poetry and a Janelle Monae concert. By Friday afternoon, they were giving away tickets to faculty and staff, so I wonder how well-attended the event will be.
• Authorities are warning about a massive influx of people, causing traffic jams and fuel shortages. Bloomington is expecting 30,000 people. Spring Mill State Park is expecting 11,000. It’s reportedly been a bit hectic at local grocery stores this week. Apparently there’s been some panic buying. I suspect this is due to the memory of shortages in the early days of the pandemic.
• This morning alone I saw four small aircraft flying into the (very small) local airport. I’ve noticed a lot of helicopters in the area today also.
• Local campgrounds are all booked. Hotels have been booked for a year or more. Local astronaut Charlie Walker will be addressing a crowd at the 4-H Fairgrounds.

We don’t plan to drive anywhere until Wednesday. I do plan to do some walking though, to see how bad the traffic gets on some of the main roads. It might get a little crazy around here for the next couple of days—and I’m not looking forward to that. But I am excited about the eclipse itself!

Nearly every time someone mentions Eclipse Day (which I always imagine with capital letters), I think of this from Neil Gaiman.

New staff member started yesterday. I think he’s going to be great.

You know what’s not great? The fact that I’m back in the office for a few weeks to train him. The commute. Merciful heavens, the commute. 90 minutes per day of the worst of humanity, which brings out the worst in me.

The clearest and most disturbing realization I had after quitting Big Tech/algorithmic social media was that my mind had been colonized by the timeline. I thought about what it told me to think about, to the exclusion of what I may have pursued on my own, synchronistically and independently.

I have a new staff member starting next Monday. I’m excited to have him join, not least because it’s a totally new position that will bring in some skills we’ve needed for a while. BUT, because of an HR rule that new staff must be trained in person, it means I will have to be in the office five days a week for several weeks. I’m trying my best not to get overly gloomy about this. It doesn’t help that I’m already in a very busy, high-pressure time as we enter the last two months of a two-year long re-write of our endowment management system. And we’ve just started budget construction for our next fiscal year–and it’s a new process. And we’ve reorganized the department. And we’re adding four new staff members. And we’ll go straight from deploying the new endowment management system straight into audit. And … and … whew, it’s a lot. I have no point to make here; just complaining.

My grandpa’s license plate. My dad’s tool box. He added the State Farm sticker; I added the Mortise and Tenon sticker.

I’ve lived in different areas of Lawrence County for my entire life–but everything started in one particular town, Springville. That’s where my maternal grandparents lived their adult lives. Bud (real name Clarence but universally known as Bud) and Alta (pronounced AL-tee) were both born in the Kentucky counties of Wayne and Pulaski, respectively, but their families moved to the area for the limestone jobs. I plan to write more about them but first I’m working on getting the chronology of their early lives straight. In the meantime, suffice it to say that Springville is where their children were born and it is the place of my earliest memories.

Two buildings come to mind today.

First is the Trinity Pentecost Mission. (The Holiness people, bless them, weren’t always clear that their churches were Pentecostal, not Pentecost.)

Grandpa helped build this church and served as Sunday School Superintendent for thirty years. I have the bell he used on those Sunday mornings.

It’s possible that my great-grandpa was a preacher at this church but that is unconfirmed. I’m waiting to hear back from my uncle to see if he knows anything about that.

My earliest memories at this church:

• Stacking hymnals up to make buildings for the action figures and cars I brought with me.
• Dozing under the pews while people sang and danced and waved their arms.
• Listening in rapt amazement as a preacher (not the pastor) described what would happen in the end times. I vaguely remember speaking up during the sermon and saying something like “really?” and the preacher responding in the affirmative.
• Hearing the strange—almost distressing—way Brother Chet, the barrel-chested pastor, would catch his breath as he preached. Holiness preachers don’t talk, they yell. A preacher who didn’t yell for 90% of his sermon was a rarity. So it wasn’t that Chet was unusual in volume, only in the way he sucked in oxygen at the end of a sentence like a man having a heart attack.
• The painting of damned souls dropping off a cliff into Hell, with a caption along the lines of “Eternity. How long?” I may visit the church again sometime just to get a picture of that painting.

Second is Springville Grocery. A picture as it is now:

My aunt started this store many years ago. Maybe in the 70s? I remember it especially from the time when my grandparents moved from their little house in which my mom and aunts and uncles grew up to a trailer on the lot next to the grocery store. My guess is that my aunt owned that lot and helped my grandparents move there so they would be close by.

I stayed with my grandparents a lot during childhood so I remember walking over to the store with a handful of pennies and nickels for candy. I don’t really have many specific memories about the store—just that it was a fixture and landmark during my childhood.

I’m very glad to see that it seems to have taken on new life. I hadn’t been there in many years until very recently and they’ve added booths and hot breakfast. It looks like the sort of place the local retirees might gather. And, more relevant to us, they have become Springville’s source for locally raised meat and dairy products. Seeing my aunt’s store turn into a market supporting local agriculture is gratifying.