News and Updates

1. We are neck-deep in registration season down at Home Campus and my next available appointment is sometime in 2031, which will likely be several years after I have retired so I’m not sure how that will work out for them. We have an entirely new degree to advise, none of my students fit into the nice neat little boxes that they’re supposed to fit into, we have a full tank of gas that cost more than my old mortgage payment, it’s getting dark earlier and earlier, and we’re wearing sunglasses. Hit it.

2. We managed to have lunch with Lauren on Saturday at a nice little Nepali restaurant not far from her apartment – one of a growing number of such places in her city. The food was tasty and it was good to hang out with Lauren for a bit. And then she left to go see friends while Kim and I went clubbing, which is what you call it when you are in your 60s and are headed toward Costco. We had three things on our list, one of which we couldn’t remember and didn’t actually buy, and we still came home with a carload of items. You don’t go into Costco for what you need. Costco will tell you what you need.

3. We also had a lovely phone call with Oliver on Friday, which means we got to speak with both of our far-flung children in a single weekend. Life is good.

4. It may or may not be autumn here in Baja Canada, nearly halfway into November. On the one hand we have had several mornings with frost on the ground, the garden is pretty much put to bed, and we pulled the rabbit inside for the winter on Friday. On the other hand, I’m still wearing t-shirts comfortably. It’s just that way.

5. I am doing my best not to worry about the state of the nation in this interregnum period, as there is nothing I can do about any of it and I have every faith that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, cronies, lackeys, enablers, and slaves will be doing their best to loot the country bare, burn it to the ground, and piss on the ashes while the Democrats write strongly worded op-ed columns to their local newspapers (circulation: 4). I can dream of better things, though, and for the moment I am content to do that.

6. I need to upgrade my password for Far Away Campus, since they require me to do that every eighteen to twenty days or so and that moment is rapidly approaching. I am not convinced that this is actually helping anyone keep anything more secure since I no longer have any passwords left in me or any capacity to remember the ones I do come up with which means that they’re all going to end up on a post-it note stuck to the side of the monitor, but apparently that’s what they want so that’s what we do. I have five days to get this done before they lock me out of all of their systems, and there is a strong temptation to let them do that except that I like teaching my class for them and I can’t do that if I’m locked out. So we press on.

7. I think I have lost my ability to cook things. I used to be a pretty decent cook. Not spectacular, but not anyone whose meals you’d fear. The things I make these days are not measuring up to previous standards, however, and I’m not sure why. Just getting old, I guess.

8. We had a weeklong event celebrating first-generation college students last week – a group of people who make up the bulk of my advisees – and I ended up in charge of a panel discussion where a couple of my former students came back to discuss things with the current students. It was nice to see them again. There was a third who was supposed to be there but got sick at the last minute, so we’re going to try to catch up later this week. It’s good to stay in touch that way.

9. I made my first batch of pizzelles for the season, and for a while the house smelled nicely of anise. They have all been distributed and consumed now, which is the ideal state of being for a pizzelle, and pretty soon it will be on to the next batch.

10. In the spring I will be teaching a brand new class, or at least one that is brand new to me. I need to be working on that now. I do not wish to be working on that now and, indeed, have not looked at it since June. It needs to be looked at. I will likely teach this class a maximum of twice. I will have to teach it a minimum of once. Such is the circle of academic life.

The Wave

It’s been a couple of days now, and I have to admit I’m still savoring the absolute ass kicking that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies, enablers and slaves took in the midterm elections.

They lost the House of Representatives by a landslide. Right now, as I type, the Democrats have 253 seats to 157 for the GOP, with a couple dozen elections yet to be called.

They lost the Senate by another landslide, and currently hold 44 seats to the Democrats’ 54. The two remaining elections yet to be called are both trending away from the GOP, and the fact that they are in Alaska and … wait for it … Mississippi is just a big ol' slice of Schadenfreude Pie with a cherry on top. Texas elected a Democratic Senator for the first time since the 1980s. Maine elected another. So did Michigan, despite all the anti-Muslim hysteria ginned up by the GOP. Hell, even Kansas elected a Democrat. There hadn’t been a Democratic Senator from Kansas since the Herbert Hoover was in office, and now there is one.

They lost governorships, state legislatures, and down-ballot positions across the country, in every region, even in places where they once felt secure.

The entire state of Texas has turned blue, from the governor and the lieutenant governor (a powerful position in Texas) to their entire legislature [EDIT: just their House, sadly] to the Texas Board of Education – the people who largely determine what textbooks your children will read no matter where you live and who have, for a generation, been poisoning the minds of the country with right-wing propaganda. Also, remember when Buc-ees decided that they couldn’t possibly sell something called Beaver Nuggets in a state that wasn’t ruled by Republicans so they stopped expanding into blue states? I wonder if they’re going to close all their Texas locations now. Perhaps they should.

For crying out loud even Wisconsin’s legislature – one of the most gerrymandered in the country for over a decade – has an incoming Democratic majority in both houses, something I never expected to see in my lifetime.  I hope that this incoming majority treats their Republican colleagues with exactly the same respect and collegiality that those colleagues treated the Democrats with since Governor Teabagger’s 2011 assault on the values of this state. I hope the GOP legislators figure out that they should just stay home and reflect on their arrogance and come to understand the depths of their sins. I will of course be doomed to disappointment, since the defining feature of the modern GOP is their absolute unthinking conviction that rules, morals, and Constitutions apply to other people and that they and only they have any right whatsoever to wield power. 

Watch them. The GOP is already gearing up to steal the results of this election as best they can, by throwing out votes, rewriting rules, and generally riling up the stupid and the violent before turning them loose on the good citizens of the US. It will be hard to do so in a landslide like this, and the courts have so far been unwilling to let them get far with their shenanigans.  Please remember that the results of this election did not happen because Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies, enablers and slaves refrained from trying to sabotage free and fair elections.  They happened because those efforts failed, mostly because of the courts.  Even the reliably partisan Supreme Court slapped them down, which says something.

So it’s been a time and I’m going to savor it as best I can.

It was nice waking up on Wednesday knowing that things did not get worse overnight. That there was, perhaps, a chance for them to get better. It has been a long time since I’ve woken up with that feeling here in The Land of the Free (tm).

But if they’re actually going to get better, there will have to be action taken.

Most importantly, there will be accountability. Not retribution, mind you, nor vengeance. Accountability. Every member of this criminal regime needs to be investigated – openly, publicly, transparently, aggressively, and conclusively – from the Pedo-In-Chief all the way down to every single neo-Fascist human trafficker on ICE’s payroll. There must be trials. There must be punishments for the guilty. There must be lessons taught good and hard so that future criminals will be deterred.

As part of this, the entire Epstein Files must be released, as has been required by federal law for nearly a year now. The ONLY part of it that will be redacted will be the names and identifying details of the victims. Nothing else, and certainly not the names of the perpetrators. There will be hearings – open, public, and transparent, on live television – and there will be trials. Every child-raping pedophile and every ghoul who made it happen, watched it happen, or knew and did nothing while it happened will face justice, swift, sure, and conclusive. There will be no mercy for those who prey on children. None.

There will be impeachments. We start with Secretary of WAAAAAARRRRRRRRR Pete Kegstand, for gross negligence and incompetence. Next comes Attorney General “Carte” Blanche, for obstruction of justice. And we move on from there. This administration will be systematically stripped of its bootlicking toadies until none are left in power. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump will be isolated and rendered irrelevant. And then it will be his turn, if he hasn’t exploded into a fine pink mist from sheer impotent rage by then. Cancel the ketchup orders to both the White House and Mar-a-Lago for the next two years.

There will be changes, though these will be harder to implement given the realities of the American political system. ICE will be abolished, its employees banned for life from federal employment, its crimes investigated and the perpetrators held accountable. Its budget will be used to restore funding to services sabotaged by Unelected Co-President Elon Musk and his feral band of teenagers, all of whom will be held severally and individually liable for every ounce of harm done by their actions. The illegal war of aggression against Iran will end, US forces will be withdrawn, and good faith negotiations will commence to determine a peacetime settlement. Those responsible for this catastrophic failure will be removed from their positions. All military officers removed by the regime for being insufficiently white, male, and/or obedient to tyrants will be given the opportunity to return to service. The tariffs imposed by Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump will be rescinded, our allies restored to positions of honor in our halls and our enemies removed from them. We will support Ukraine, not Putin. The US will have to accept the damage that has been done to our power, our alliances, our influence, and our reputation in these last two years, and work diligently to restore ourselves as a trustworthy partner on the world stage. This will take years and possibly decades, if it can be done at all. But it starts in January.

So many things on the agenda.

And if the top levels of the Democratic Party are too spineless to take the actions they need to take, if they insist on returning to business as usual, they will be replaced by actual leaders who understand why their party has been given this chance. That corruption, authoritarianism, and Fascism need to be rooted out and if this does not happen the electorate will turn on them too. This is a historic opportunity to right the floundering ship of state, and it must not be frittered away by the timid.

The first step has been taken, and decisively so, with the midterm elections. The voters have spoken.

And now the work commences.

Birthday Wishes

Some years have more in them than other years, and this is Lauren’s second one of those in a row.

She graduated with her Masters Degree in May, got a job in her field – no small achievement in this economy – and moved out of the apartment she’d shared with her friends for the last three years. She spent eight weeks with a backpack and half an itinerary traveling solo through seven different countries, most of them rather off the usual trail for Americans. Her employer seems to consider that professional training, which worked out well. She’s moved into her own apartment and has a car now, a milestone in any American’s life. It’s been a time.

It can be a beautiful and fascinating world, if we let it, and she is determined to explore as much of it as she can.

She has grown and changed and there is more yet to come.

Happy birthday, Lauren. I’m proud of you.

Brewed Different

I’m not really much of a baseball fan anymore. I used to be, back in the day, but on the list of sports where I would watch a random mid-week game between two mid-level teams that were not My Team, baseball isn’t in the top three.

My grandfather was a baseball fan. He lived for the Phillies and always had the game on during the season. My dad was an Eagles fan first, but he enjoyed baseball as well. He would take me and my brother down to Veterans Stadium to see the Phillies play once or twice a year. One year we got tickets in one of the skyboxes thanks to the company he worked for, I think, and that was fun, but mostly we ended up in the mid-level seats on the third base side, since that was where my dad preferred to sit and he knew better than to try to bring two children to the upper level of the Vet.

Veterans Stadium had its own, fully-functional courtroom in the basement, after all.

Baseball is best seen live, since so much of what is important is what isn’t happening and that’s hard to pick out on television since the cameras tend to gravitate toward what is. We have a minor league team in the next town south of us and we’d take the kids down there when they were younger. At the time they played in a ramshackle sort of place, the kind of stadium where no seat was more than about twenty yards from fair territory in a straight line and the players had to walk through the stands to get from the locker rooms to the dugouts. It had aluminum benches that could seat maybe 2500 people on a good night, infield games after every half-inning, and a playground for kids who were just there for the ride. You could bring a family of four to a game, including tickets, hot dogs, nachos, and drinks, for less than $50. They tore that place down a few years ago and built a shiny new stadium a few blocks away, and while it is, objectively, a snazzier place with much better food options, it is also soulless and far more expensive. Plus they renamed the team something stupid, so we don’t go as often as we used to.

For as much as I count myself a baseball fan these days – and consider the fact that none of the three Major League stadiums where I ever attended a game exist anymore and they haven’t since before any of my children were born – the Phillies are my team. But they were eliminated early in this year’s playoffs, so I figured I’d cheer for the Milwaukee Brewers since I have lived here in Wisconsin for three decades now and they’d never actually won anything in the entire time they’ve been a franchise. As a Philadelphia sports fan, I can respect that.

The Brewers – the best team in baseball this year according to the records – made short work of the Padres (a team that nobody outside of San Diego ever remembers exists) and the Dodgers (a stellar and gobsmackingly expensive collection of talent whom nobody outside of the wealthier parts of Los Angeles likes because that would be like cheering for Goliath) before getting to the World Series against the Rays.

The only other time the Brewers were in a World Series was 1982, my junior year of high school, and they played in the American League instead of the National League where they are today. A lot has happened since then.

Kim and I decided we’d like to see at least some of the games, but in this age of slice-and-dice television apps and streaming channels none of the ones that carried the Series were among the ones we actually receive. So for Game 1 we went out to a Local Establishment to have dinner and watch the game, which was on every single one of about four dozen televisions surrounding the dining area. You couldn’t not watch the game if you tried.

There was a good crowd, if not as much of one as I thought there would be – I suspect there were an infinite number of places showing it, so people were spread out – and when they sang the national anthem everyone stood up. Some of us sang along.

Pro-tip: if you ever want to make people a little uneasy without them quite knowing why, sing the harmony part to the national anthem at a sporting event.

We watched the first five innings or so before going home, missed games 2 and 3 entirely because we had other things to do and couldn’t see going out every night, and suddenly Milwaukee was up three games to none.

It was at this point that Kim decided she wanted to see the remaining games and since we are Old and Not Sports Bar People, she found a free trial for some television service that would allow us to do that. So we settled in for Game 4.

They played that in Tampa, right? I mean it was kind of hard to tell watching the game. I think the majority of fans there in the stadium were from Wisconsin. Apparently it was cheaper to fly from Milwaukee to Tampa, buy the cheapest available ticket for the game, stay overnight at a hotel, and then fly back to Milwaukee than it was to buy the cheapest available tickets for games in Milwaukee, so Wisconsinites showed up in droves.

They drank the stadium dry. Please, folks. These are professionals. Stand back, keep your arms by your side, and let them work.

Game 4 lasted roughly three days and confirmed my general feeling that the Brewers were not going to sweep the second-best team in baseball, so after a bleary day at work yesterday we watched Game 5.

Lauren came over because she and Kim are working on her Halloween costume, so the three of us watched the first couple of innings before she skipped out to a Local Establishment (not the same one) to watch with her friends. I got to see maybe another inning or two before it became clear that whenever I left the room good things would happen for the Brewers so I spent the rest of the game in my office, prepping classes.

Sports makes pagans of us all.

In the end they won fairly handily. The Brewers are your World Series Champions for 2026 and congratulations to them.

And now I go back to hockey and soccer.

Voting Early

I voted early, because for the first time in my six decades as an American I am no longer confident that my government is going to allow a free and fair election to take place on election day.

This is infuriating.

And, honestly, kind of obvious. It’s not like Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, cronies, lackeys, enablers, and slaves have been trying to hide it.

They’re going door to door trying to arrest anyone they decide is an ineligible voter now, and – given the shabby and threadbare excuses they’ve been giving for kidnapping people off the streets, trafficking them to prisons in foreign countries to be tortured, and executing people who get in their way, citizen or not, over the last eighteen months – this is not likely to end well.

They’ve been trying to gain access to unedited state voter rolls for months despite losing every single court case that has been brought in the matter by states who understand that elections in the United States are handled by the states, not the federal government. 

They’ve been purging legitimate voters who they think will vote for anyone other than themselves.

They’ve declared that they’re going to send Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s private Gestapo to the polling sites to intimidate voters from casting ballots.

They’ve openly stated that voting is a privilege rather than a right, one that only people they approve of will get to exercise.

Yesterday they filed an actual honest-to-whatever-God-you-happen-to-worship lawsuit against the state of Alaska to try to prevent it from certifying any Senate election result where the Republican incumbent would not be declared the winner. Apparently they think their voters are stupid and can’t tell who to vote for, and while it’s nice to hear them admit that in court under oath it doesn’t rise to the level of legally actionable. It’s just their way of threatening the rest of us if we don’t behave.

Every last grifter, seditionist, neo-Fascist, white supremacist, authoritarian and pedophile in the current administration – from the guy in the Oval Office to the jumped-up pretend soldier in his manly manly ICE gear infesting our streets – can go eat rocks and shit bricks.

It is long past time for Americans to reclaim the United States from the lickspittle toadies who kowtow before a senile child-raping wannabe dictator bent on destroying this nation and stripping it for parts.

This hasn’t been about liberal vs conservative in a very long time. It is about democracy vs dictatorship. It is about having a future vs burning the nation down and pissing on the ashes. It is about whether we as Americans place any value on the republic created by the Founding Fathers and preserved by Lincoln, a nation with flaws and glories like any other nation but one that can be made better for all of its citizens and all of those who live here under its laws if we want it to be better.

It’s my goddamned country, and those clowns can’t have it. 

News and Updates

1. It may actually be autumn here, nearly a month after the equinox, but that’s climate change for you. On Monday it was nearly 80F (27C) here in Our Little Town and it stayed warm enough through the night that we turned on the little room AC unit in our bedroom to sleep better. Last night we had a freeze warning and now the little room AC unit is packed away in the closet. I went out to the garden yesterday and picked what I would think is the last of the jalapeños out of the garden – a bit more than a kilo of them, which is impressive given that I picked about seven pounds of them not three weeks ago from those same plants. Yesterday’s haul is more than enough to make one last batch of raspberry jalapeño jam and a double batch of jalapeño jelly, but at some point you have to draw a line under things and move on.

2. One of my colleagues gave me a bag full of lemon drop peppers, though, which he said were “hotter than jalapeños but not as hot as habaneros,” a statement that covers a lot of ground. I did try one and it has a fair bit of kick to it – more than I’m going to put on a salad, anyway – so perhaps I’ll make jam out of those too. I’m enjoying this project.

3. We had dinner with my old boss and her husband earlier this week and that was lovely. It’s nice to catch up with good people. Oddly enough the other advisor who was in my office when I started this job – a guy who I’ve team-taught a class with a dozen times since 1999 and who ended up as the next boss in the office until he retired – stopped in to say hi since he was back in town for a bit. So it was old home week in the advising world and that was fun.

4. I have a talk I am scheduled to give this coming week. It is a 75-minute talk. I have – at most – 50 minutes to give this talk. I am in the process of squaring those two things but it is hard to give up some of the more colorful bits that don’t actually advance the story. So it goes. Maybe someday I’ll post the full version here.

5. Did you know there was another school shooting here in MURCA last week? Of course you don’t. Or, rather, you can’t really tell which one I’m referring to so it might as well have been a surprise. We’ve had more than fifty of them this year alone. We lost this battle when the nation’s collective response to Sandy Hook was to buy more guns, and my vitriolic contempt for ammosexuals isn’t going to change that. But don’t try to tell me we have to live like this or die like this. We are the only nation on earth that routinely slaughters its children and refuses to do anything about it, and at some point that bubble will burst. When it does no firearm on earth will save the people who allow this.

6. Also, hang onto your hats, folks – the midterm elections are coming in less than three weeks. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies, slaves, and enablers know very well how fucked they are if there is anything even vaguely approaching a free and fair vote, and they have no intention of allowing such a vote to happen. The next six to twelve weeks are going to be much more interesting than they need to be.

7. I may have recovered from helping Lauren move into her apartment. But at this point in my life all that means is that I can now move on to some other ailment. I suspect that my adventures with the AC unit did me no favors today, and I’m hoping the aches and pains in my right forearm are due to that and not the carpal tunnel syndrome that someone with my forty-year history of intensive typing is probably doomed to get. We’ll see.

8. Every day brings me closer to my goal of retiring without ever having learned how to use Microsoft Excel. We all have dreams.

9. Every week I put up a poll in my office for students and staff to wander in and cast their vote. Sometimes all you get are the tick marks. Other times you get mathematical arguments over brownies.

10. We are nearing that point of the semester where it all starts to break down for a lot of students, and as an advisor that’s when it gets busy. You do what you can. Sometimes it’s enough.

Moving Days

So we’re empty nesters once again. 

 

On the one hand, I’m getting used to this cycle and I’m always happy to have my kids home whenever they’re between things. I enjoy spending time with them. They have become capable, interesting, decent adults, and those are the people you want to hang out with.

On the other hand, it’s still a bummer when they leave, even if it is what should be happening.

Lauren moved out of her college apartment at the end of July, shortly before the lease expired. We gathered all of her stuff into several van- and car-loads and deposited it mostly into our basement and some in her old room, where she spent exactly one night before heading off on her travels this summer. She got back at the end of last month and has been juggling time here and up by her job ever since, a situation that could not last.

So last week she found an apartment in a leafy part of the city within walking distance of her job and – purely by coincidence – only about eighty meters from where some friends of ours live. She signed her lease and we started making plans.

We spent most of the weekend hauling things up there. Much of it hadn’t really been unpacked since it arrived at our house in July so it was a pretty easy job that way, and at any rate Lauren lives pretty light so most of it fit into two van- and car-loads. We took the first trip up on Saturday, unloaded in about half an hour – three cheers for off-street parking right next to the door – and then had a pleasant walk around the neighborhood before heading back home. And on Sunday we did it again.

This is where I discovered that yes, indeed, I am that old.

Sunday’s trip also featured two of Lauren’s friends – Carson and Ethan – who were willing to bring their truck and haul the old sofa up from the basement and take it to her apartment. Given that this sofa was built out of depleted uranium and grief and is therefore the one of the heaviest things in a five-county radius up to and including some apartment buildings, that was really very nice of them. I was also deeply impressed that they got it into the apartment without having to take off any doors. We left after unloading, but Lauren is well versed in the lore of having friends help you move so the three of them spent the evening enjoying pizza and beer together, as one does in these situations.

This evening Lauren met Carson and Ethan at our house and together they collected our old entertainment center, tetrised it into the truck, and headed back up to her apartment together. The basement has a much more open feel to it now.

And now it is official. She lives there now, not here.

It’s not like I won’t see her again soon, after all. But it’s another step on that road.

Congratulations, Lauren! May the new place be filled with good times and better memories!