Thanksgivings

My brother’s favorite way of dividing the world into two kinds of people is to point out that there are people who relax by doing something and there are people who relax by doing nothing. Me, personally, I’m a “doing nothing” sort of person – my idea of relaxation involves very little motion of any kind – but I am not the planning part of the family and Kim is very much a “doing something” person. I generally end up having fun at these somethings and being glad that I did them, it has to be said, though I often end up rather tired.

Such was our Thanksgiving break.

I don’t know if you noticed, but Thanksgiving was incredibly late this year. Most people down at Home Campus were ready for it to be about a week – maybe two – before it actually was, and that’s just the faculty and staff. Fortunately for me three of my five classes didn’t meet that week – I told my First Year Seminar students that they had to schedule an advising appointment to choose classes for next semester instead, and my Zoom class goes out not only to Far Northern Campus but also to anywhere up to half a dozen high schools in that area, all of whom are closed that entire week because it’s Deer Season (a capitalized event in Wisconsin) and it just wasn’t worth holding class for the two or three students who would show up. They’d probably just sit there and be unhappy because they hadn’t gotten their deer yet.

We had two Thanksgivings, because one was clearly not enough.

I’m okay with that, actually. Thanksgiving has become one of my favorite holidays over the years mostly because it is one of the very few holidays on the American calendar that does not ask for more. It simply asks us to be glad for what we already have. You don’t get gifts. You don’t get candy. There are no fireworks. You’re not expected to buy flowers. It’s just there to remind you that even with all of the problems in the world you probably still have things to be grateful for and you should acknowledge those things now and then.

This is why I have very little patience for the killjoys who insist that the holiday is somehow irrevocably tainted by its origins or the football games or whatever. I am well aware of such things. But you know. That’s not what I’m celebrating here.

Our first Thanksgiving this year was with Kim’s side of the family – our annual jaunt up to Rory and Amy’s house. We are responsible for many of the baked goods for this event – the year we had to stay home because we all had the flu was calamitous that way – so we spent that morning baking all sorts of things. Pumpkin pie. Apple cranberry pie. Buns. Biscuits. And, of course, pizzelles, which are my contribution to all of this. I’m not sure I’d be allowed in without them, and at this point I’m not going to test that theory. Plus they’re fun to make. I set up my pizzelle iron in front of the television and watch large men chase a small object for an hour or so while I make them, and then the whole house smells of anise. There are worse ways to spend an hour.

Kim, Oliver, and I piled into the car as soon as the last pie was out of the oven and headed on up to the festivities. Lauren and Max drove over separately, though there was some confusion as to when we should arrive so they got there well before we did. It is strange to know that your child can just get there on her own with her boyfriend – it feels like a whole new stage of people gathering from separate places, even if it isn’t all that different from us picking them up on the way. Not sure why.

The evening was the usual chaos of food and family, and we enjoyed ourselves immensely. I usually end up sitting in the front room or the dining room and talking with whoever happens by, which this year was mostly either Grandpa or Amy’s dad, along with our subgroup. Sometimes I’d wander into the kitchen and talk with people there, which had the advantage of also allowing me to graze on the appetizers set out on the big kitchen island. It’s all good. I don’t seem to take many pictures at Thanksgiving for some reason – perhaps I’m just happy to be part of a holiday instead of trying to record it as I usually do with events – but I got a couple.

We got back fairly late, moved the leftover bits of the pies from the van to my car since there was no room in the fridge and at this point in the year the garage is essentially one big cold storage unit, and left them there until Sunday when we had Thanksgiving II: The Turkening.

We wanted to do a smaller Thanksgiving on our own to go with the big family feast, perhaps just as a way to have more leftovers, and Sunday was pretty much the only day that we had open for that. And for reasons that will be explained in a future post, it worked out well as far as getting together, as Lauren and Max had come by on Saturday. So Sunday it was.

Kim did most of the cooking for this one – turkey, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, “dad rice,” cranberry sauce, and Aunt Linda’s Baked Pineapple Dish without which no holiday is complete, which is a lot for five people but then the leftovers were the point after all. We’ve already put Thanksgiving III: Bride of Turkey on the menu for later this week. My role was mostly hauling the turkey up from the basement to be prepped for cooking and then getting the table extended and the dishes set. We always bring out our wedding china and the silverware I inherited from my parents for this sort of thing, as well as the silver-rimmed glasses that were my dad’s pride and joy, since you might as well use the stuff.

Also, now that it is December and past the official date of Thanksgiving I will acknowledge the existence of Christmas, so Oliver, Max, and I put up the one stand of blue Christmas lights that we always have across the front of the house, a task that was both easier (more hands, plus no giant bushes in the front to work around this year) and harder (15F without the wind chill) than usual, but now the lights are up and glowing peacefully.

We had a lovely meal.

Afterward we all ended up in the living room collectively working on an online geography quiz because that’s just how we roll. You get a blank map of Africa and have to name all of the countries (we got about 95% of them) and then Europe (100%), Asia (95% or so), Oceana (100% but there aren’t that many), South America (100%) and North America (which has a lot of countries if you include all the Caribbean islands and we would have gotten 100% if the quiz had accepted the answer we kept trying to give it until it decided we were wrong and then gave us that same answer). You have fun your way, we’ll have fun our way.

Thus was our Thanksgiving break bookended. Of course, that left the two days in between, and naturally both of those were filled with events as well.

Something, not nothing, after all.

Twenty-Nine

After twenty-nine years you get to know someone.

You know most of what they like and don’t like. Not all, but most. You know the sorts of things that interest them. You know whether they want you to join them in this or that activity or just want to hare off and do it on their own.

You’ve heard the old stories. A lot of them, anyway. There are always a few surprises, and people find new things to like or become interested in after all. But if someone hasn't told you a story in nearly three decades chances are they're either not going to tell you or they've just completely forgotten about it themselves.

But all that means is that you get to make new stories together.

It’s been twenty-nine years since that crisp autumn day when Kim and I got married, here in Our Little Town. We’ve shared a lot since then, raised a family, traveled, seen, done, done again. We’ve told each other a lot of stories and gotten to know each other pretty well.

And here we are, making new stories.

Happy Anniversary to us!

Further Adventures in Technology

I spent most of my Saturday morning grading essays for an online class I teach, because that’s the kind of wild man I am these days. It’s one of those classes where the only real contact I have with students is grading their essays – everything else is front-loaded into the class site and they proceed at their own pace through the class, turning in essays as they go.

I’m not sure how I became a tech guy as far as classes go. It seems to have just happened gradually over time. I am the proverbial frog boiling in a digital soup.

I’m not much of a technological person. Computers are just black boxes where the internet is stored as far as I know, and don’t even get me started on the mysteries of what most of the “apps” on my phone are doing there. As far as I can tell their main purpose is to extract my email and sell it to spammers, which they do quite well. I am still getting spam advertisements in Hungarian from this summer, for example, because I had to put one of these apps on my phone in order to ride the trams in Budapest. Every so often I will copy the text of one of them and paste it into Google Translate to see whether it is congratulating me on my recent purchase of a bridge over the Danube or something similar, but so far it’s mostly been increasingly desperate attempts to get me to renew my tram pass. And you know, next time I am in Budapest I definitely will! But not now.

Most of my current confusion regarding technology these days seems to center around the various security measures that devices are implementing in order to make sure that only Russian intelligence officers have access to my accounts because they’re probably better at remembering my passwords than I am, after all.

Why the Kremlin would want to follow me on Instagram is kind of an open question, particularly since I have never actually posted anything there, but I have faith that answers will appear in due time.

Both my desktop computer at home (yes, kids, I still have one of those, now get off my lawn) and my phone have biometric security systems in place. My computer came with a keyboard that has a button on it where you put your fingertip (you do get to choose which finger) and it reads your fingerprint and logs you in. My phone relies on its camera for that, scanning my face to determine if it’s really me or not.

I wasn’t all that thrilled about either of these things, but they seem to work most of the time and that’s fine. It is a nuisance having to pick up my phone and stare directly into it in order to log into anything rather than just leaving it on my desk and tapping out a password, but as problems go these days it’s relatively minor after all.

The thing that I don’t get is that every so often both of these devices require me to enter my password in order for these biometric security systems to keep working.

Why?

I’m not sure how a random selection of characters (including at least one capital letter, one number, one “special” character, one Marvel character, three characters from the last movie I saw prior to setting this password, and the solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem) is more secure than my fingerprint or my face. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Shouldn’t I have to use the biometrics to keep the password working?

There are probably technical reasons why they make me do it this way and I am sure that if someone were to explain them to me I would stare blankly at them and eventually say “That’s nice” in a vague sort of way until they gave up, so I’ll probably just live with the mystery of it.

In the meantime, I kind of enjoy giving my computer the finger.

The Family Cookbook

Sometime around the turn of the millennium my mother decided that what this family really needed was a cookbook, a collection of recipes from all across the family, and that she was the person to make this happen.

It turned out she was right about that.

In that pre-social-media age she sent out emails and made phone calls and in the end she collected a fair number of recipes including more than a few from her own parents, who had recently passed away. That might have been part of it, now that I think of it – a desire to see those old favorites preserved and passed down. My mother was a storyteller and she put little introductions in front of most of the recipes sharing some of those stories and had a forward to talk about the project, and at some point we all got a small package with a 3-ring binder full of family favorites.

It proved to be very useful, in the end. Not only was it a nice way to honor the various family members who contributed, but we’ve been making things out of that cookbook for nearly a quarter century now.

Three cheers for Aunt Linda’s Baked Pineapple, without which no holiday meal is complete!

But that was a surprisingly long time ago, and some of the people who contributed to that cookbook are no longer here and some other people in the family who are routinely cooking meals for themselves and others these days weren’t even born yet, so last Christmas my cousin Chris and I decided that what this family really needed was a Revised & Expanded Second Edition of the family cookbook and that we were the people to make this happen.

We were right about that too. I tell you, this family has some pretty good fortune-telling skills. It’s a shame we don’t play the lottery more often.

Chris and I put out a call to all of the various branches of the family early this year – or at least as many as we could. There were some we inadvertently missed and not everyone was interested, but over the next few months recipes came pouring in from all over the US – we’re a pretty spread out bunch these days, especially when you expand out to include all of the various in-laws who have made our lives richer over the years.

We are legion.

Chris is a graphic designer by trade so he handled all of the layout and artwork for the book. I’m a word guy who actually enjoys copy-editing, so a fair amount of that ended up as mine, and I ended up in charge of soliciting and receiving recipes though in the end both of us did that anyway. Chris also understands how Google Docs work so all I had to do was send him everything I received and then log in and make edits.

I found a printer here in Our Little Town who would put it all together for a reasonable sum, and they did a very nice job of it. It’s nearly two hundred pages long, this revised edition, and nicely coil-bound. I gave them the pdf that Chris finalized and then picked up the completed cookbooks a couple of weeks ago.

The printers also advised me to get it copyrighted, to avoid some copyright troll with a bot scraping Google Docs and publishing it as their own. That process turned out to be fairly simple, so now all three of us – me, Chris, and my mom – are listed as the copyright holders for the book. Family can share it, of course. But no bots.

There are two post offices here in Our Little Town – a big one out in the mall sprawl land, and a much smaller one downtown that’s only open around lunchtime. Not many people even know it exists, which is why I went there to mail them all off. It’s much nicer when you’re not holding anyone up and you can stand there and have a conversation with the postal worker who’s cranking out the mailing labels, one at a time.

They started to land last week and so far people seem to like them. This makes me happy.

This is the picture Chris chose for the cover. That’s my grandmother – my mom’s mother – and my dad in the little yard behind my grandparents’ house. The white building in the background was an octagonal gazebo that my grandfather used as a tool shed. It’s Labor Day, 1967, and the family has gathered to celebrate and eat, there being precious little distance between those two activities as far as my family is concerned. I’m somewhere running around the yard, a toddler dressed in something adorable no doubt. Neither Chris nor any of our siblings have been born yet, but my second cousins are both there. I can tell that my dad made the hamburgers because he firmly believed that hamburgers should be roughly spherical objects and dismissed anything more disc-like as “hockey pucks.”

I’m older now than my grandmother was in that photo. So is Chris. Time flies.

I love that they look happy. I love that we can continue this tradition of sharing good food with good people.

News and Updates

1. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is wasting no time in assembling the Worst Cabinet Ever – a motley collection of suck-ups, Fascists, pedophiles, white supremacists, delusionals, and blistering incompetents chosen solely for their sycophantic loyalty and guaranteed to make any situation worse – and it’s going to be a very, very long four years for anyone with more than six working brain cells. But even in the midst of collapse, life goes on. And sometimes you just have to look away from the horror show and focus on other things.

2. We got to celebrate Lauren’s birthday last week – rather later than her actual birthday, but there is never a bad time for a birthday celebration, really. We had a lovely dinner and lively conversation and then stopped over at Max’s house to say hello to David S. Pumpkin, and there are good things in the world, yes there are.

3. I have spent most of this week grading exams and discussion posts because last week was kind of a lost cause for focusing on anything other than the current crisis and students really don’t need that kind of thing reflected in their exams. I’m almost done now – I just have to get my last batch of exams scanned and sent off to all of the various places that my US1 class beams out to. They did pretty well, and that’s always a nice thing to see.

4. Facebook has decided I’m boring and honestly kudos to them for figuring that out but I have to say that I don’t think I’m boring in precisely the way that Facebook seems to believe. For much of the last month it has been showing me vast amounts of content from a site called “Death Stairs,” which is pretty much exactly what it says on the tin – apparently there are people who go out and photograph unsafe staircases and post them online with descriptions ranging from prosaic (“You could fix this with a couple of two-by-fours and a good set of pliers, you know…”) to purple (“…and then the Angel of Death shown ‘round about me …”) and then other people comment underneath. These posts compete for space with various reels showing people doing household projects in new and presumably innovative ways, which is a genre that might as well be in Sanskrit for all I can make sense of it. I find it kind of compelling that I have so soundly defeated the algorithm’s attempts to understand anything at all about me. Some AI overlords these guys are.

5. Kim and I have been discussing getting a new TV for a while now, or rather Kim has been doing that and I’ve mostly been nodding approvingly since I don’t watch enough television to have it matter one way or the other and she might as well get one she likes. The one we have is getting antiquated – they do that faster than they used to do now that they’re essentially computers – and with the Grand Tariff And Trade War in the offing we figured it was a good time to take care of such a purchase. They’re even on sale at Costco now, right in time for the holidays, so we went down and picked the smallest one they had and it seemed like a good fit until I tried to get it into the van, which should have been my first warning. Fortunately, three-dimensional chess with objects being stuffed into vehicles is one of my hidden talents and we did get it home, where we discovered that we’d been Warehoused. Things don’t seem big in a warehouse. You think the thing you’re buying is a perfectly reasonable size. Then you get it home where the ceilings are a normal height and realize that no, whatever is the proper word for the size of this thing it isn’t “reasonable.” And then you feel really, really grateful that you didn’t succumb to temptation and get any of the larger sizes on offer. We haven’t had time to set it up so it’s just sitting in a box in our living room, slowly deforming the joists underneath and blocking the cat’s path up to the window. Perhaps we’ll get to it this weekend.

6. We’re also trying to get the new showerhead put in. The old one finally died of lime poisoning and old age so Kim found one she liked and put it mostly in before calling me up to finish the tall parts. This didn’t go well and a small plastic gasket – the sort of thing that probably cost them three cents to make – snapped in half. It turns out that this brand of shower heads doesn’t allow replacement parts to be sold by third parties such as your local hardware store. Also, their customer service center is only open during weekdays for forty-five minutes a day, and their website was designed by Neolithic goat herders who had heard of the idea of exchanging money for goods but wanted nothing to do with it. In the end I finally did speak with a customer representative who told me that the gasket was “not a replaceable part” so they were going to send me an entirely new showerhead. “You realize that this is not a sustainable business model,” I told her. “I know,” she said, “but it will be there in a few days.” It’s sitting in the dining room now, not all that far from the television, and someday we’ll get to that as well.

7. We are deep into this year’s rendition of Great British Bake Off and so far so good even if my personal favorite was just voted off. They’ve cut down the nonsense (so far no “tackos”) and focused more on actual baking, which is nice. And the contestants are the usual assortment of decent people who get along and try to help each other. It’s nice to know that such a place exists.

8. It may actually be autumn now, halfway through November. I finally started wearing long sleeve shirts anyway, though the rabbits are still outside since we have not really had any extended freezes that would force us to bring them in. Honestly if we’d covered the garden for those two nights in early October we’d probably still be harvesting tomatoes and peppers.

9. Over the last two weeks of my classes I have gotten to tell three of my all-time favorite history stories – all of which have, at one time or another, been featured here in this space – and they never get old.

A Note for the Future

In the end they didn’t even need to stage a coup. The voters of the United States simply handed power back to a twice-impeached convicted felon running on a platform of open fascism, a man who tried to overthrow the government and who hasn’t been able to form a coherent sentence since 2019. An adjudicated rapist, self-declared sexual predator, and serial adulterer who publicly lusted after his own daughter and buried his ex-wife on a golf course. On and on.

If this election proved anything it is that the American public would rather elect a fascist than a woman. That 71 million Americans do not regard committing rape as a disqualifier. That 71 million Americans would gladly trade the rights of their fellow citizens for the illusion of a future with cheaper eggs.

How cheaply my fellow Americans sell their rights and freedoms.

We had four years of conclusive evidence that the man was unfit for office, that he was a small, petty little grifter incapable of rising to any occasion larger than his own personal greed, and yet here we are.

You will notice that the American left (as much as the US has anything even remotely like a left) is not throwing a toddler-level tantrum over this – not claiming that it was somehow rigged, not threatening violence over the results, not filing dozens of frivolous lawsuits alleging hallucinatory conspiracy theories and fleecing donors to fund it all. Adults understand that sometimes things don’t go the way you want them to.

We just understand, in a way that the rest of the country hasn’t figured out quite yet, that this isn’t going to go well for anyone, not just us.

Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is everything the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution to prevent and everything the Greatest Generation went to Europe to fight, and yet in January he will be installed into power. He has no grasp of law, Constitutions, morals, or anything other than raw power and insatiable greed.

Look for reprisals against “the enemy within.” Look for pogroms against anyone not Just Like Him. Look for the darkness spreading out like a cancer from his supporters.

We’ve seen this movie. It didn’t end well in Germany in the 1930s and it won’t end well here.

So what do patriotic Americans do now?

We resist.

We stand for the things that make this country better, not worse.

We do whatever we have to do to keep fascism at bay.

And in the end we will see if the American republic still stands in January 2029 or not.

Here I stand. I can do no other.

An Election and a Warning

Sometime Tuesday night, probably around 9pm Eastern Time, Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump will declare victory in the presidential election.

He will do so in the same rambling, semi-coherent monotone he has used for the last few years as his mental condition has deteriorated into an angry and paranoid dementia, smug with the reassurance of a man who feels the world owes him whatever he wants whenever he wants and who has never once in his life faced any consequences for his actions.

He will do so regardless of the actual vote totals. He will likely do so more strenuously if the results show him losing, in fact. It’s not about reality. It’s about creating a pretext for action.

Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has not been trying to win a majority of the votes, after all. He has tried twice before and been overwhelmingly rejected both times, though once – thanks to the partisan gerrymandering of the Electoral College – he slithered into power anyway. He knows he cannot win the majority of the votes of Americans. He will lose the popular vote by somewhere between two and eight million votes, just as he has always done. It’s been eight years with this sad clown. Nobody has changed their minds about him in his favor. He has made no effort to broaden his base of supporters or reach out beyond the hardcore MAGA cult. His entire campaign has instead been a setup, laying the groundwork for the next stage of the ongoing right-wing coup against the United States.

When Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump makes his declaration, the extremist right-wing machinery that surrounds him and props him up like the hollow man he is will shift into high gear and launch its all-out war on the electoral process. There will be lawsuits. There will be threats. There will be hoarsely shouted assertions that the only acceptable alternative is to install Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump into power because any result that doesn’t do that must by definition be fraudulent.

There will be blood.

Make no mistake, folks. The neofascist right has been gearing up for this moment for years, ever since they were forced to back down in January 2021. They recognize no laws but their own privilege. They recognize no morals but their own desires. They think they can shoot their way to power. It has happened before, after all, in other places and other times, and the United States is not immune to history. The FBI and US intelligence agencies have reported that the chatter in right-wing circles online almost exactly mirrors what it was in early January 2021 when the neofascists nearly overthrew the government and installed their dictator into office against the will of the American people. The leaders and masters of that insurrection have walked free so far, and an insurrection that goes unpunished is called a dress rehearsal.

They have the support of millions of GOP voters who think they’re not neofascists but are deluding themselves - a PRRI survey conducted in the last couple of weeks noted that 24% of Republican voters think Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump should seize power regardless of the actual outcome of the election. That’s what dictators do. That’s what Fascists do. That’s what 24% of Republicans think is appropriate in the United States.

One out of four, more or less.

The neofascists do not control the levers of power at the moment, however. They do not control the military. They do not control the security forces. And most Americans want to see this country continue the centuries-old tradition of the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to the next, a tradition that was brutally shattered in January 2021. The flip side of that PRRI poll, after all, is that three out of four Republicans – along with near unanimous majorities of Democrats and Independents – reject the idea that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump should seize power regardless of the election results, as all Americans should do. Unless all of that changes the neofascists cannot win, but they can do damage.

Americans must be prepared to face this onslaught and see it defeated. Americans must be prepared to block those who would destroy the republic and replace it with dictatorship.

Americans must be ready.

We will say to the neofascists, we outnumber you. We will say to them, we will see you fail. We will say to them, we will see you forgotten, your plans turned to dust, your names turned to ashes, your memory erased.

Watch your back, my fellow Americans. Tomorrow is not the end of this contest, but simply the beginning of the next phase.