There is an old story about a Chinese curse that says “May you live in interesting times.” I have no idea if this is an actual Chinese curse, but I can tell you that it might as well be. We live in interesting times these days. And it definitely feels like a curse.
The only president this nation has at the moment has lost his goddamned mind and nobody among his vast flock of cronies, lackeys, minions, enablers and slaves has the backbone to do anything about it. They’re just standing around, trying to figure out how to make money off the situation and remain in power once the demographically inevitable happens and for that they all need to be hauled off in chains, dipped in honey, and airdropped onto a field of anthills.
He’s declared a trade war against what was once our firmest ally and still remains our closest neighbor – a country that shares a coast-to-coast border with the US, remains the largest trading partner with a majority of states, and which is at least in part responsible for the Geneva Conventions on the grounds that rules are made when they’re necessary. Remember, folks, the US has invaded Canada twice and gotten its ass handed to it both times. Last week he decided that he’s going to rename Lake Ontario into something that fits into his tiny little ideological bubble, much to the disgusted contempt of the rest of the world. Perhaps he hopes this will distract from his catastrophic failure as a president or from his vast and expanding criminal record. Who knows what inanities flit through the waterlogged ruins of his mind. The US/Canada relationship will not recover in my lifetime, because, as the Canadian leader said, the American government’s signature is made in pencil and about as changeable. Anything that a competent and intelligent future president tries to do to fix this can easily be destroyed by the next cult leader Trump’s slaves decide to elect, after all. Trust is hard to build but easy to destroy and once destroyed it may or may not ever come back.
He continues to flail around trying to find a way out of the illegal war of aggression he stupidly launched against Iran – a country that his own administration said back in February constituted no threat to the United States. No other US president was dumb enough to declare war on Iran – not Reagan, not even Bush Jr. – and we know why. Even if the US were not being led by a senile child-raping grifter who installed a drunken cosplayer as the Secretary of Waaawrrrrr it would have been a difficult operation, but having purged the US military of every senior leader who was a) not a white man and b) not an ass-kissing toady, that task became impossible. Leaders of the Navy and multiple Commands across the globe have bluntly warned Pete Kegstand that the continuation of the war is dangerously degrading the military’s ability to do its job across the globe, which of course prompted our Secretary of Waaawrrrr to call anyone sharing that story deranged and mentally ill because that’s what leadership looks like in an age of bootlicking slaves. At some point our Convicted Felon will suck the strategic oil reserve dry (and no, stealing Venezuala’s oil won’t stop or even significantly delay this) and then it will all come crashing down in a hurry.
Folks, we’ve already lost the Iran War. Our so-called leadership is just too stupid to admit it. We’ve lost access to pretty much all of our bases in the middle east – whether we should have had them at all, at this point in history, is a different question – and our only ally in the region is currently committing genocide because apparently Never Again doesn’t count when the descendants of victims do it to others. As if. The economy is teetering and the fact that the lickspittle in charge of the US Treasury announced recently that it is buying back US debt should scare the hell out of Americans because that means nobody else wants to buy it and that means the whole economic house of cards that we’ve been living in under the GOP’s Don’t Tax But Spend Like A Drunken Sailor economic policies for the last half century is about to come crashing down on your mortgage and your credit card balance. Hope you enjoyed having a dollar that was worth something. Remember it fondly.
It’s been over 200 days since the Epstein Files were required by federal law to be released but the toady in charge of the Justice Department continues to defy federal law and instead devote resources to persecuting whomever the Pedo-in-Chief demands he persecute next. We know that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s name comes up in those files over 35,000 times. We’ve seen the allegations leveled by children against him for what he did to them – crimes those children were willing to speak under oath to the FBI in order to describe. Any just society would have fed the Pedo-in-Chief to the dogs by now, but that’s not us apparently. Watching Trump’s slaves continue to excuse his behavior has been morally degrading even at a distance.
Trump’s private Gestapo continues to kidnap and traffic both citizens and legal residents of the US – the vast majority of whom have no criminal record whatsoever and aren’t even being accused of a crime now – and the current plan is that they’re going to buy electric shock gloves to torture people into submission. Bear in mind, my fellow Americans, that the Founding Fathers literally staged a revolution over the idea of a tyrant’s private army hauling people off the streets and out of their homes for pretend crimes and shipping them out of the country to disappear them into prisons without due process. That’s a lesson for American patriots.
He and his minions, cronies, lackeys, and slaves are actively working to sabotage the midterm elections because they knows very well they’re going to lose by historic margins – every Republican with more than six functional brain cells to clap together knows this, which granted doesn’t seem to be a majority if you go by the news but there it is – and when that happens there had damned well better be swift and severe justice for the crimes this administration has committed. They know it’s coming, and their solution to the fact that they’re going to lose any free and fair election that happens is not to change their ways but instead not to have free and fair elections. Texas, for example, just purged over a million voters from their rolls mere days before early voting was scheduled to start, and they did so without warning or due process. They know their Senate candidate – a man so morally corrupt that he was impeached by his own party – is flaming out against a far better man and they can’t handle it. And just today a damning whistleblower report revealed the plans that Trump’s Post Office have for directly violating a federal court order in order to prevent mail-in votes from being processed. Watch your back, my fellow Americans. This fall is going to involve some very interesting times indeed.
The sad thing is that this list can be extended indefinitely. Every day is a cornucopia of corruption, vice, criminal activity, authoritarianism, moral degradation, and willful stupidity, and yet the cult eats it up and begs for more. A friend of mine on Facebook asked any supporter of the current president to list why they supported this guy – not why they hated everyone else, but why this guy deserved their support – and the barrage of delusion, viciousness, and historical fallacy that fell on his comment section was one of the most disturbing and depressing things I have ever read, and I read post-apocalyptic novels for fun.
It’s going to be a bumpy ride, folks.
Buckle up, strap in, and hang on, because these times are definitely more interesting than they need to be.
Tuesday, September 1, 2026
Sunday, August 30, 2026
A Weekend Visit
Sometimes you just go.
It’s been a while since we’d seen Oliver in person. Yes, there are a myriad of ways to communicate with people these days, ways that would have had our immigrant ancestors agog at how easily they could have kept in touch with all of the people they fled across oceans to get away from, but they’re not the same as actually spending time with someone in person. We’d visited Oliver back in May and he’d had plans to come home over the summer but 10 credits of intensive German classes plus adopting a cat made that impractical.
So rather than wait until Thanksgiving, we packed up the minivan on Friday and headed off into the sunrise.
Not the actual sunrise, mind you. Just in the general direction of where the sunrise would be, had we gotten up at that hour. Which of course we don’t do if we can help it, because that’s what beds are for.
It was a lovely visit.
Oliver told us up front that he had a lot of work to do this weekend – graduate school being like that, as both Kim and I well remember – so he’d see us when he’d see us, and it worked out pretty well. It was a very low-key sort of visit, and this suited everyone.
We got there Friday evening somewhat later than we’d planned thanks to the fact that rush hour in Chicago starts at 5:45am, runs for 24 hours and 35 minutes, creating temporal anomalies that make scheduling events a nightmare anywhere in the 312 area code, and extends out from the Loop as far as Rockford Illinois and Gary Indiana. Nevertheless we persisted, and we checked into our hotel and headed over to hang out at his apartment for a while.
This gave us a chance to drop off all of the various things that we’d collected to drop off. Some of it was for him and some of it was for the cat and that’s just how we roll.
The next morning bright and early (still not sunrise) we headed over to the Farmer’s Market, which was an experience. It’s a permanent installation in that city, with a long roofed-over area for booths and steel tables bolted into the concrete for the vendors to use. There is even a dedicated building for restrooms that is surrounded by a children’s play area. It’s quite a setup.
We love farmer’s markets in general, and we did our best to support the local economy.
I found someone selling homemade hot sauce, which is always a yes from me. We didn’t buy anything from the booth selling fresh chicken because by the time we got to the market, an hour or so after it opened, the line was about forty people deep and it didn’t clear out until they had no chicken left. But there were other booths selling breads, meats, cheeses, pasta, and of course produce of many kinds. I was particularly happy to discover the booth selling Nardello peppers, as they are very hard to find in the US. They were developed in Ruoti, the little hilltop town in Basilicata where my great-grandparents were born, and they are long, bright red, and without any heat whatsoever – a really nice variety of sweet pepper, for those who like such things. If you see them, give them a try!
We liked the market so much that after we dropped Oliver off to get his work done we went back for some homemade hot dogs (seriously – made from scratch, starting with the raw meat) and buckets of fresh-made lemonade that the yellowjacks kept trying to steal from us. Breakfast of champions!
Oliver called us around lunchtime and we hit one of the local brewpubs, where we dined like royalty. We’re kind of food-oriented, for which I make no apologies.
He spent the afternoon working while Kim and I spent the afternoon hanging out at the hotel doing pretty much nothing, which is a fine way to spend an afternoon really. Sometimes it is good to relax and not do much of anything at all.
Afterward we hit one of the parks where they had local bands playing, which was also a lovely thing to do. The band we saw was clearly having a very good time despite the fact that they’re not going to be a band anyone outside of that town has ever heard of, and that kind of enthusiasm is contagious.
We had dinner at an Italian place where the food was good and the conversations were better, and the evening flowed on by at a leisurely pace. All in all a good day.
This morning Kim and I found a little coffee shop for breakfast where we hung out and watched the rain fall until it was time to meet up with Oliver again. There followed two separate grocery runs to stock him up for a while – a small one at an Asian market and a larger one at the usual supermarket – before we lived up to our tradition of finding the ramen place for lunch. We’ve never not been to that place when we’ve visited.
As a side note, a cheer to the manufacturer of the little tire pump that we keep in the back of the minivan! The tire light came on this morning and once Oliver and I figured out the connections it pumped up the tire quickly and easily. I like when things do what they say they’ll do on the tin. The instructions were also correct in warning us that the pump would get Very Hot and we should let it cool before putting it away.
We said our goodbyes and drove home by a circuitous route known only to the programmers at Waze, but eventually arrived safe and sound. The preliminary meetings down at Home Campus are over and this week the semester begins in earnest so we’ll be back to the grind starting tomorrow.
But it was nice to get away for a quick visit.
It’s been a while since we’d seen Oliver in person. Yes, there are a myriad of ways to communicate with people these days, ways that would have had our immigrant ancestors agog at how easily they could have kept in touch with all of the people they fled across oceans to get away from, but they’re not the same as actually spending time with someone in person. We’d visited Oliver back in May and he’d had plans to come home over the summer but 10 credits of intensive German classes plus adopting a cat made that impractical.
So rather than wait until Thanksgiving, we packed up the minivan on Friday and headed off into the sunrise.
Not the actual sunrise, mind you. Just in the general direction of where the sunrise would be, had we gotten up at that hour. Which of course we don’t do if we can help it, because that’s what beds are for.
It was a lovely visit.
Oliver told us up front that he had a lot of work to do this weekend – graduate school being like that, as both Kim and I well remember – so he’d see us when he’d see us, and it worked out pretty well. It was a very low-key sort of visit, and this suited everyone.
We got there Friday evening somewhat later than we’d planned thanks to the fact that rush hour in Chicago starts at 5:45am, runs for 24 hours and 35 minutes, creating temporal anomalies that make scheduling events a nightmare anywhere in the 312 area code, and extends out from the Loop as far as Rockford Illinois and Gary Indiana. Nevertheless we persisted, and we checked into our hotel and headed over to hang out at his apartment for a while.
This gave us a chance to drop off all of the various things that we’d collected to drop off. Some of it was for him and some of it was for the cat and that’s just how we roll.
The next morning bright and early (still not sunrise) we headed over to the Farmer’s Market, which was an experience. It’s a permanent installation in that city, with a long roofed-over area for booths and steel tables bolted into the concrete for the vendors to use. There is even a dedicated building for restrooms that is surrounded by a children’s play area. It’s quite a setup.
We love farmer’s markets in general, and we did our best to support the local economy.
I found someone selling homemade hot sauce, which is always a yes from me. We didn’t buy anything from the booth selling fresh chicken because by the time we got to the market, an hour or so after it opened, the line was about forty people deep and it didn’t clear out until they had no chicken left. But there were other booths selling breads, meats, cheeses, pasta, and of course produce of many kinds. I was particularly happy to discover the booth selling Nardello peppers, as they are very hard to find in the US. They were developed in Ruoti, the little hilltop town in Basilicata where my great-grandparents were born, and they are long, bright red, and without any heat whatsoever – a really nice variety of sweet pepper, for those who like such things. If you see them, give them a try!
We liked the market so much that after we dropped Oliver off to get his work done we went back for some homemade hot dogs (seriously – made from scratch, starting with the raw meat) and buckets of fresh-made lemonade that the yellowjacks kept trying to steal from us. Breakfast of champions!
Oliver called us around lunchtime and we hit one of the local brewpubs, where we dined like royalty. We’re kind of food-oriented, for which I make no apologies.
He spent the afternoon working while Kim and I spent the afternoon hanging out at the hotel doing pretty much nothing, which is a fine way to spend an afternoon really. Sometimes it is good to relax and not do much of anything at all.
Afterward we hit one of the parks where they had local bands playing, which was also a lovely thing to do. The band we saw was clearly having a very good time despite the fact that they’re not going to be a band anyone outside of that town has ever heard of, and that kind of enthusiasm is contagious.
We had dinner at an Italian place where the food was good and the conversations were better, and the evening flowed on by at a leisurely pace. All in all a good day.
This morning Kim and I found a little coffee shop for breakfast where we hung out and watched the rain fall until it was time to meet up with Oliver again. There followed two separate grocery runs to stock him up for a while – a small one at an Asian market and a larger one at the usual supermarket – before we lived up to our tradition of finding the ramen place for lunch. We’ve never not been to that place when we’ve visited.
As a side note, a cheer to the manufacturer of the little tire pump that we keep in the back of the minivan! The tire light came on this morning and once Oliver and I figured out the connections it pumped up the tire quickly and easily. I like when things do what they say they’ll do on the tin. The instructions were also correct in warning us that the pump would get Very Hot and we should let it cool before putting it away.
We said our goodbyes and drove home by a circuitous route known only to the programmers at Waze, but eventually arrived safe and sound. The preliminary meetings down at Home Campus are over and this week the semester begins in earnest so we’ll be back to the grind starting tomorrow.
But it was nice to get away for a quick visit.
Sunday, August 23, 2026
News and Updates
1. We’re coming to the end of the summer and starting tomorrow I’m back on contract down at Home Campus. There are events planned for pretty much every day this week, and we don’t even start classes until September. It was a quick summer.
2. On the plus side, the weather for the last week or so has been nice – not too hot, and no storms that have required warnings (at least not here in Our Little Town). In a world on fire, every day closer to November where it doesn’t hit 90F (33C) is a good day.
3. Why do all the states in the upper midwest have new black and white alternative license plates? Is this supposed to be cool? Hip? Vaguely menacing? If so, do people know that you can put one of those on a Prius, which sort of misses the point? And yes, the sort of Edgelord Dork who owns a Cybertruck is the perfect market for one of these but there is no saving that situation so they can do what they want. There is a certain amount of freedom in owning a Wankpanzer, I suppose – you can’t fall off the floor. But for the rest of us, what is the attraction of these silent-movie plates? I see them all over these days.
4. We’ve been going to Ethnic Festivals of late. Yesterday was the Ukrainian Festival up in Madison. A couple of Fridays ago was the Irish Festival in Milwaukee. They were both fun in different ways, and if you ever get a chance to see SuperCéilí in concert you absolutely should go. I suspect they are a live band rather than one you should listen to on recordings, but they’re quite an experience. The thing that is perhaps most striking about these festivals is how utterly American they are. Americans identify as their heritage in a way that people who actually live in those heritage countries find bizarre and frankly rather irritating, but that’s what you get from a country founded and built by immigrants. Now if we can only get the white supremacists currently running our government to understand this we’d all be a lot better off.
5. The garden keeps producing produce and something, he said, must be done with it. Kim is enjoying her tomatoes and zucchini. I made a batch of raspberry-jalapeño jam today that I’m looking forward to trying. The jalapeño jelly I made last week is finally starting to set – I think I guessed wrong on whether 1.5lb of jalapeños meant before or after stemming/seeding weight, but it looks like it will sort itself out. And yet there are at least 2kg of jalapeños still out there in the garden, waiting to be turned into something. Fortunately our jalapeños will not cause disease or death!
6. It occurred to me on Thursday that I had volunteered to give a couple of presentations for the Mother Ship’s public speaker series in October – a series that I have enjoyed participating in over the years. No problem, thought I, I already have most of the talk prepared and all I need to do is update and edit it. And when exactly did I agree to this? Oh. Oh my. I’ve been pressed into service for a class down at Home Campus at that time, so I’m hoping this can be resolved.
7. Sometimes you get an email from a student or even several emails from multiple different students and – as the late and much lamented Molly Ivins used to say – it’s kind of like finding Fidel Castro in your refrigerator. Hard to know what to think. I suspect, however, that in some ways it is going to be a very long year.
8. The Premier League season is underway, without my Wolves but so be it. Only six more weeks until hockey starts up again. We will hold onto and celebrate these bits of cyclical normalcy for as long as we can.
9. I have been working on a very long and well documented rant for about a month now, and eventually it will come out. The problem is that I find myself very tired of a lot of things right now. It is very tempting to fold in and let the world do its thing without me, but the problem with that is that the things the world chooses to do when you stop paying attention to it are very seldom the things that you or anyone with more than six working brain cells would want it to do. We press on.
10. When it happens, the world will celebrate in ways that will be utterly inappropriate, borderline obscene, and without any shred of remorse or shame whatsoever and I fully intend to take part. And I don’t even have to specify what it is, do I?
2. On the plus side, the weather for the last week or so has been nice – not too hot, and no storms that have required warnings (at least not here in Our Little Town). In a world on fire, every day closer to November where it doesn’t hit 90F (33C) is a good day.
3. Why do all the states in the upper midwest have new black and white alternative license plates? Is this supposed to be cool? Hip? Vaguely menacing? If so, do people know that you can put one of those on a Prius, which sort of misses the point? And yes, the sort of Edgelord Dork who owns a Cybertruck is the perfect market for one of these but there is no saving that situation so they can do what they want. There is a certain amount of freedom in owning a Wankpanzer, I suppose – you can’t fall off the floor. But for the rest of us, what is the attraction of these silent-movie plates? I see them all over these days.
4. We’ve been going to Ethnic Festivals of late. Yesterday was the Ukrainian Festival up in Madison. A couple of Fridays ago was the Irish Festival in Milwaukee. They were both fun in different ways, and if you ever get a chance to see SuperCéilí in concert you absolutely should go. I suspect they are a live band rather than one you should listen to on recordings, but they’re quite an experience. The thing that is perhaps most striking about these festivals is how utterly American they are. Americans identify as their heritage in a way that people who actually live in those heritage countries find bizarre and frankly rather irritating, but that’s what you get from a country founded and built by immigrants. Now if we can only get the white supremacists currently running our government to understand this we’d all be a lot better off.
5. The garden keeps producing produce and something, he said, must be done with it. Kim is enjoying her tomatoes and zucchini. I made a batch of raspberry-jalapeño jam today that I’m looking forward to trying. The jalapeño jelly I made last week is finally starting to set – I think I guessed wrong on whether 1.5lb of jalapeños meant before or after stemming/seeding weight, but it looks like it will sort itself out. And yet there are at least 2kg of jalapeños still out there in the garden, waiting to be turned into something. Fortunately our jalapeños will not cause disease or death!
6. It occurred to me on Thursday that I had volunteered to give a couple of presentations for the Mother Ship’s public speaker series in October – a series that I have enjoyed participating in over the years. No problem, thought I, I already have most of the talk prepared and all I need to do is update and edit it. And when exactly did I agree to this? Oh. Oh my. I’ve been pressed into service for a class down at Home Campus at that time, so I’m hoping this can be resolved.
7. Sometimes you get an email from a student or even several emails from multiple different students and – as the late and much lamented Molly Ivins used to say – it’s kind of like finding Fidel Castro in your refrigerator. Hard to know what to think. I suspect, however, that in some ways it is going to be a very long year.
8. The Premier League season is underway, without my Wolves but so be it. Only six more weeks until hockey starts up again. We will hold onto and celebrate these bits of cyclical normalcy for as long as we can.
9. I have been working on a very long and well documented rant for about a month now, and eventually it will come out. The problem is that I find myself very tired of a lot of things right now. It is very tempting to fold in and let the world do its thing without me, but the problem with that is that the things the world chooses to do when you stop paying attention to it are very seldom the things that you or anyone with more than six working brain cells would want it to do. We press on.
10. When it happens, the world will celebrate in ways that will be utterly inappropriate, borderline obscene, and without any shred of remorse or shame whatsoever and I fully intend to take part. And I don’t even have to specify what it is, do I?
Monday, August 17, 2026
Canning the Day Away
I spent much of today not really doing any of the things I was supposed to be doing.
It’s the last week of my summer, after all.
And while there is the inconvenient fact that I still have a laundry-list of tasks that I was supposed to accomplish before the academic contract year started up again, the joy of inconvenient facts is that human beings are naturally wired to erect SEP fields over them and go on about their days. So I did not get anything done on my new class that has to be ready by January. I did not do anything for any of the various work projects that my job would like me to complete, since I am only getting paid to work two days per week and today wasn’t one of them. I did not even consider any household tasks, since none of them have risen to the level of a crisis yet.
Those tasks will still be there tomorrow, of course. They don’t go away. But not today.
Instead, I spent a fair chunk of the day making jalapeño jelly.
If you’ve never had jalapeño jelly, you should. It’s not that hot, usually – the sugar in it does a good job of knocking back the heat so mostly you get the flavor of the pepper – and if you spread it on crackers with some cream cheese it is just the most wonderful stuff in the world. Kim always plants jalapeño peppers in the garden to get me to pay attention to it, so we have them in quantity. We do not need to rely on the various Corporate Jalepeños that are being recalled for contamination with typhus, diphtheria, dancing sickness, malaria, ague, or CRS these days because we have our very own growing right here at the house!
I went out this morning and picked about two pounds (about 900g) of peppers, which to be honest barely made a dent in the supply so I will likely have to repeat this process in a week or two. The recipe calls for 3/4 of a pound and I wanted a double recipe, but I figured once I cut off the tops and removed the seeds it would come to about 1.5lbs and, surprisingly, it did almost exactly.
Cutting them was its own challenge, of course.
It’s the last week of my summer, after all.
And while there is the inconvenient fact that I still have a laundry-list of tasks that I was supposed to accomplish before the academic contract year started up again, the joy of inconvenient facts is that human beings are naturally wired to erect SEP fields over them and go on about their days. So I did not get anything done on my new class that has to be ready by January. I did not do anything for any of the various work projects that my job would like me to complete, since I am only getting paid to work two days per week and today wasn’t one of them. I did not even consider any household tasks, since none of them have risen to the level of a crisis yet.
Those tasks will still be there tomorrow, of course. They don’t go away. But not today.
Instead, I spent a fair chunk of the day making jalapeño jelly.
If you’ve never had jalapeño jelly, you should. It’s not that hot, usually – the sugar in it does a good job of knocking back the heat so mostly you get the flavor of the pepper – and if you spread it on crackers with some cream cheese it is just the most wonderful stuff in the world. Kim always plants jalapeño peppers in the garden to get me to pay attention to it, so we have them in quantity. We do not need to rely on the various Corporate Jalepeños that are being recalled for contamination with typhus, diphtheria, dancing sickness, malaria, ague, or CRS these days because we have our very own growing right here at the house!
I went out this morning and picked about two pounds (about 900g) of peppers, which to be honest barely made a dent in the supply so I will likely have to repeat this process in a week or two. The recipe calls for 3/4 of a pound and I wanted a double recipe, but I figured once I cut off the tops and removed the seeds it would come to about 1.5lbs and, surprisingly, it did almost exactly.
Cutting them was its own challenge, of course.
Finding all of the supplies was another challenge, since most of them were in the basement. Lots of things are in the basement. Many of them are actually supposed to be there. Sorting through it all to find specific things can be a trick, in part because one is constantly making exciting discoveries and getting sidetracked.
I was smart enough to do most of the processing outside so as not to blister the paint and render the air inside the house hazardous. You never know with jalapeños. They’re not the hottest pepper in the world, but they have quite a range of heat depending on soil, climate, or even just what’s planted next to them. Sometimes they can be rather aggressive.
There’s a lot of hurry up and wait with canning. You have to sterilize your jars (though I discovered that if you process them long enough you don’t, actually). You have to get all the ingredients together into a pot and then boil them for a while. You have to get a giant pot full of water and bring that to a boil. You have to take the boiled ingredients and ladle them into little jars, which takes a surprising amount of time. You have to boil those jars for an extended while, as noted. You have to get the jars out of the boiling water and onto something where they can cool and then get the next batch of jars in, whereupon the process repeats.
They’re all done now – 14 half-pint (roughly 240ml) jars, sitting on my dining room table cooling into jelly.
I have crackers. I have cream cheese.
And I have tomorrow to worry about all the things I didn’t get done today.
Tuesday, August 11, 2026
The Ghost in the Machine
When you do enough genealogy, you end up with ghosts in the machine.
My brother has joined me in genealogy this summer and it’s been a lot of fun to have a co-conspirator to share these things with. We’ve been pushing back the frontiers of the Italian side of the family – both the Basilicata side and the Sicilian side. We’ve been digging into Italian and Philadelphia records, haunting FamilySearch and Ancestry, and – in his case – calling older relatives to get their stories. We’re having a good time.
Right now, though, the big mystery is Serafina, my grandmother’s grandmother.
We know she married our great-great-grandfather Giuseppe in 1872, five or six years before my great-grandfather Antonio was born, depending on which document listing his birth date you look at. We have the Sicilian marriage record. 19th-century Italians kept surprisingly good records, if you know where to look and how to read them. The marriage record also lists their ages at marriage and the names of all of their parents, so there are a lot of clues for how to proceed if we want to keep moving back in time.
But here is the thing.
One of the family stories that my grandmother told both of us, repeatedly, in slightly different but mostly compatible versions, was that her grandmother died in an earthquake in Sicily. The story goes that she was trapped in a building, calling for rescue, but by the time they could get to her it was too late. In the version my grandmother generally told me, her last words were “Too late, I’m dead,” and then she died. In the version she told my mother and Keith, there were a few things said in addition to that, but not many.
The story continues that my great-great-grandmother’s sister then married Giuseppe, who was apparently not a very nice person. She secretly saved up money from the household budget and used it to send Antonio to the US in 1900. His future wife (Antonina) followed in 1907.
Legend has it that Antonina was the family cook back in Sicily, which would imply that Giuseppe had some money to be able to have a cook. My grandmother said he was a lemon grower, which makes sense – that sort of thing was not unusual in Sicily and you had to own land to do it, which meant having some money. Antonina and Antonio married in Philadelphia pretty much the moment she got off the boat – I found the marriage certificate from the Orphan’s Court, which did not have the wait time for marriages that the Catholic Church would have had at the time. They were married for two decades before Antonio died.
The great irony of this is that my mother grew up with Antonina in one of those tight-knit Little Italy neighborhoods that abounded in eastern US cities in the early and mid-20th century. She and my uncle would go over to her house for meals during the school year when they were kids, and by my mother’s account Antonina was a lousy cook. “Well,” my grandmother told my mother once, “she was better when she was younger.”
So far this is a pretty straightforward story. Serafina would probably be the one who died in the earthquake, and her sister would become Antonio’s step-mother. Except that Antonio’s death certificate lists as the witness providing all of the information: Serafina.
So who died in the earthquake? And who was the step-mother?
The witness on Antonio’s death certificate could be a different, perhaps related Serafina. Italian families tended to use the same four or five names unless forced to improvise by circumstances, and in the small hilltop villages of southern Italy and Sicily the supply of surnames was similarly limited. They tended to intermarry. If this is the case, then the earthquake and step-mother story stays as we know it, and we add another Serafina into the mix.
But there is a chance it’s the same Serafina, who would have been 82 at the time – not out of the question even in the 1920s. In which case either the earthquake and step-mother story doesn’t hold water or Serafina was the second marriage for Giuseppe. They were both 27 when they got married, after all, which is fairly old for a first marriage in 19th-century Sicily.
And that’s where the story stops. We’ve found a fair number of references to Serafina in other people’s research but no actual documents for any Serafina, whether different or the same, and at this point I’m fairly convinced it’s just the same unsupported conjectures being passed from tree to tree. The address she listed on Antonio’s death certificate was not one where she was living in 1920, according to the census – I went to the original documents in that enumeration district and found an Irish family living there. Indeed the whole neighborhood was Irish, which does call into question whether that was an actual address or just something she wrote down to write something down on this bit of paperwork. I come from a long line of people with little to no respect for official bureaucracy so I honestly can’t rule that out.
We haven’t found her in the Italian records after Antonio’s birth. There’s nobody by that name in Philadelphia between 1900 and 1940 that I’ve been able to find (and here is a really good time to note that Ancestry’s search engine does a very poor job of looking for what you ask it to look for, so bear that in mind).
She is a mystery, our very own ghost in the machine. At least for now.
We’re still looking, and at some point perhaps we’ll find her. Or both of them, if they are different people.
And won’t that be a time.
My brother has joined me in genealogy this summer and it’s been a lot of fun to have a co-conspirator to share these things with. We’ve been pushing back the frontiers of the Italian side of the family – both the Basilicata side and the Sicilian side. We’ve been digging into Italian and Philadelphia records, haunting FamilySearch and Ancestry, and – in his case – calling older relatives to get their stories. We’re having a good time.
Right now, though, the big mystery is Serafina, my grandmother’s grandmother.
We know she married our great-great-grandfather Giuseppe in 1872, five or six years before my great-grandfather Antonio was born, depending on which document listing his birth date you look at. We have the Sicilian marriage record. 19th-century Italians kept surprisingly good records, if you know where to look and how to read them. The marriage record also lists their ages at marriage and the names of all of their parents, so there are a lot of clues for how to proceed if we want to keep moving back in time.
But here is the thing.
One of the family stories that my grandmother told both of us, repeatedly, in slightly different but mostly compatible versions, was that her grandmother died in an earthquake in Sicily. The story goes that she was trapped in a building, calling for rescue, but by the time they could get to her it was too late. In the version my grandmother generally told me, her last words were “Too late, I’m dead,” and then she died. In the version she told my mother and Keith, there were a few things said in addition to that, but not many.
The story continues that my great-great-grandmother’s sister then married Giuseppe, who was apparently not a very nice person. She secretly saved up money from the household budget and used it to send Antonio to the US in 1900. His future wife (Antonina) followed in 1907.
Legend has it that Antonina was the family cook back in Sicily, which would imply that Giuseppe had some money to be able to have a cook. My grandmother said he was a lemon grower, which makes sense – that sort of thing was not unusual in Sicily and you had to own land to do it, which meant having some money. Antonina and Antonio married in Philadelphia pretty much the moment she got off the boat – I found the marriage certificate from the Orphan’s Court, which did not have the wait time for marriages that the Catholic Church would have had at the time. They were married for two decades before Antonio died.
The great irony of this is that my mother grew up with Antonina in one of those tight-knit Little Italy neighborhoods that abounded in eastern US cities in the early and mid-20th century. She and my uncle would go over to her house for meals during the school year when they were kids, and by my mother’s account Antonina was a lousy cook. “Well,” my grandmother told my mother once, “she was better when she was younger.”
So far this is a pretty straightforward story. Serafina would probably be the one who died in the earthquake, and her sister would become Antonio’s step-mother. Except that Antonio’s death certificate lists as the witness providing all of the information: Serafina.
So who died in the earthquake? And who was the step-mother?
The witness on Antonio’s death certificate could be a different, perhaps related Serafina. Italian families tended to use the same four or five names unless forced to improvise by circumstances, and in the small hilltop villages of southern Italy and Sicily the supply of surnames was similarly limited. They tended to intermarry. If this is the case, then the earthquake and step-mother story stays as we know it, and we add another Serafina into the mix.
But there is a chance it’s the same Serafina, who would have been 82 at the time – not out of the question even in the 1920s. In which case either the earthquake and step-mother story doesn’t hold water or Serafina was the second marriage for Giuseppe. They were both 27 when they got married, after all, which is fairly old for a first marriage in 19th-century Sicily.
And that’s where the story stops. We’ve found a fair number of references to Serafina in other people’s research but no actual documents for any Serafina, whether different or the same, and at this point I’m fairly convinced it’s just the same unsupported conjectures being passed from tree to tree. The address she listed on Antonio’s death certificate was not one where she was living in 1920, according to the census – I went to the original documents in that enumeration district and found an Irish family living there. Indeed the whole neighborhood was Irish, which does call into question whether that was an actual address or just something she wrote down to write something down on this bit of paperwork. I come from a long line of people with little to no respect for official bureaucracy so I honestly can’t rule that out.
We haven’t found her in the Italian records after Antonio’s birth. There’s nobody by that name in Philadelphia between 1900 and 1940 that I’ve been able to find (and here is a really good time to note that Ancestry’s search engine does a very poor job of looking for what you ask it to look for, so bear that in mind).
She is a mystery, our very own ghost in the machine. At least for now.
We’re still looking, and at some point perhaps we’ll find her. Or both of them, if they are different people.
And won’t that be a time.
Saturday, August 8, 2026
News and Updates
1. Kim and I went over to City Hall yesterday here in Our Little Town and voted in next week’s primary elections. They let you do early in-person voting in Wisconsin and it’s a good way to make sure that no right-wing voter suppression tactics are thrown in your general direction on election day. Remember, folks! If casting your ballot didn’t matter the GOP wouldn’t be trying so hard to stop you from doing it, so get out there and vote.
2. It has come as a great surprise to my family that I have never actually ridden a horse. It’s as if I told them that I have never put on shoes. How can you not have done that? Everyone has done that! Except me, apparently. In my defense, horses were not that common in the suburbs of Philadelphia when I was growing up and getting access to the ones that did exist required far more ancestral wealth than my family possessed. I do not feel particularly deprived by this lack of experience, however, and I have no current plans to change my horse-riding status.
3. My brother has been bitten hard by the genealogy bug and now I have a co-conspirator. We are having a grand time pushing the Italian side of our heritage back into the 19th century together. It turns out that Italy has digitized a surprising number of records that you can have access to for free if you are willing to go to the Italian archives online and translate them on your own. You can also find a lot of them on FamilySearch, which for this purpose is actually more effective than the paid subscription version over at Ancestry. We have made some interesting discoveries, not least of which being that 19th-century Italian families tended to have a lot of children and then gave them all the same five names, sometimes multiple times in a generation. Couple that with the prevalence of small hilltop villages with a maximum of eleven surnames that got traded back and forth as people married, and it gets interesting.
4. We went up to Lauren’s old apartment today to do some spackling and whatever else needed to be done before the lease officially expires next week, but it looks like Aleksia and Anita have most of the move-out checklist well under control so we didn’t have too much to do. We had a lovely time with Aleksia, though, including a Thai lunch afterward. We’ll have to catch up with Anita another time.
5. We also heard from Lauren this morning and so far her latest Adventure seems to be going well. The pictures are lovely.
6. At some point it will no longer be construction season here in Baja Canada and we will be able to get from Point A (defined as our house) to Point B (defined as any example of most of the places we go) without having to go through Points C through L (defined as any of a number of increasingly desperate attempts to find a way to Point B that actually permit travel to occur). Today was not that day. Tomorrow does not look good either. On the plus side, the detour home was scenic.
7. Kim and I also spent an hour on a Zoom call with the Financial People last week. We have a new Financial Person as the old one has gone to wherever Financial People go when new opportunities arise (Houston?) and the new one wanted to go over things with us. There was also another Financial Person beaming in from an office in a whole other time zone because they do Different Financial Things than the more local Financial Person. All of this was so that we could discuss how Kim and I are set up for retirement, which is looming ever closer on the horizon. I gather that we are doing okay in that regard and will likely not have to live on peanut butter and raw oats once we leave our jobs, though to be honest after about fifteen minutes of Finance my eyes started to glaze over. This is why Kim was there, to understand all the things that just sound to me like the human equivalent of an old dial-up modem waiting to connect.
8. I also had a separate meeting with a different Financial Person earlier in the week because apparently I put $100 into a Roth IRA sometime around 2003 and promptly forgot about it and they wanted to know if I was still alive. Yes! More or less! Here I am, in all my glory. The account has been chugging along just fine without my intervention, it turns out, and while I was grateful to this Financial Person for letting me know about it we are going to consolidate it with the other Financial People because clearly I need someone who can keep track of all of these things at once and that someone is not me.
9. I am trying to read an actual work of history – all 789 pages of it – and it is going slowly. It is hard to read about the formation of the American republic while it is being actively torn down by its current government and all the termites who support this regime. But it’s well written and I’m enjoying it whenever I can sit down and focus on it.
10. The cat has been in Cling Mode the last couple of days and we thought she was just being affectionate but it turns out that the automatic feeder was empty and she was just sizing us up as sustenance. And being affectionate, because that’s who she is, but definitely sustenance as well. All is now restored and we may live to see another day.
2. It has come as a great surprise to my family that I have never actually ridden a horse. It’s as if I told them that I have never put on shoes. How can you not have done that? Everyone has done that! Except me, apparently. In my defense, horses were not that common in the suburbs of Philadelphia when I was growing up and getting access to the ones that did exist required far more ancestral wealth than my family possessed. I do not feel particularly deprived by this lack of experience, however, and I have no current plans to change my horse-riding status.
3. My brother has been bitten hard by the genealogy bug and now I have a co-conspirator. We are having a grand time pushing the Italian side of our heritage back into the 19th century together. It turns out that Italy has digitized a surprising number of records that you can have access to for free if you are willing to go to the Italian archives online and translate them on your own. You can also find a lot of them on FamilySearch, which for this purpose is actually more effective than the paid subscription version over at Ancestry. We have made some interesting discoveries, not least of which being that 19th-century Italian families tended to have a lot of children and then gave them all the same five names, sometimes multiple times in a generation. Couple that with the prevalence of small hilltop villages with a maximum of eleven surnames that got traded back and forth as people married, and it gets interesting.
4. We went up to Lauren’s old apartment today to do some spackling and whatever else needed to be done before the lease officially expires next week, but it looks like Aleksia and Anita have most of the move-out checklist well under control so we didn’t have too much to do. We had a lovely time with Aleksia, though, including a Thai lunch afterward. We’ll have to catch up with Anita another time.
5. We also heard from Lauren this morning and so far her latest Adventure seems to be going well. The pictures are lovely.
6. At some point it will no longer be construction season here in Baja Canada and we will be able to get from Point A (defined as our house) to Point B (defined as any example of most of the places we go) without having to go through Points C through L (defined as any of a number of increasingly desperate attempts to find a way to Point B that actually permit travel to occur). Today was not that day. Tomorrow does not look good either. On the plus side, the detour home was scenic.
7. Kim and I also spent an hour on a Zoom call with the Financial People last week. We have a new Financial Person as the old one has gone to wherever Financial People go when new opportunities arise (Houston?) and the new one wanted to go over things with us. There was also another Financial Person beaming in from an office in a whole other time zone because they do Different Financial Things than the more local Financial Person. All of this was so that we could discuss how Kim and I are set up for retirement, which is looming ever closer on the horizon. I gather that we are doing okay in that regard and will likely not have to live on peanut butter and raw oats once we leave our jobs, though to be honest after about fifteen minutes of Finance my eyes started to glaze over. This is why Kim was there, to understand all the things that just sound to me like the human equivalent of an old dial-up modem waiting to connect.
8. I also had a separate meeting with a different Financial Person earlier in the week because apparently I put $100 into a Roth IRA sometime around 2003 and promptly forgot about it and they wanted to know if I was still alive. Yes! More or less! Here I am, in all my glory. The account has been chugging along just fine without my intervention, it turns out, and while I was grateful to this Financial Person for letting me know about it we are going to consolidate it with the other Financial People because clearly I need someone who can keep track of all of these things at once and that someone is not me.
9. I am trying to read an actual work of history – all 789 pages of it – and it is going slowly. It is hard to read about the formation of the American republic while it is being actively torn down by its current government and all the termites who support this regime. But it’s well written and I’m enjoying it whenever I can sit down and focus on it.
10. The cat has been in Cling Mode the last couple of days and we thought she was just being affectionate but it turns out that the automatic feeder was empty and she was just sizing us up as sustenance. And being affectionate, because that’s who she is, but definitely sustenance as well. All is now restored and we may live to see another day.
Tuesday, August 4, 2026
Comfort and Adventure
There are worse things to be than uncomfortable.
I am a firm believer in comfort, it has to be said. Comfort is a rare and fleeting quality in this world, and people who insist that the only way to live is to get out of your comfort zone don’t seem to take into account how much effort goes into creating that comfort and how quickly it can vanish even in the best of times. It should be cherished, not scorned.
And yet there are times when it is worth it to be uncomfortable.
I am not an adventurous person. I have adventures, because I have learned to say yes and I’m willing to be uncomfortable, and it has been worth it. Some of those adventures are among my most treasured memories.
I have traveled, for example. For someone who once had to have the concept of “cabin fever” explained to him (“you mean I stay in my home with my stuff and nobody bothers me and this is a problem … why?”) I have been to a surprising number of places. Surprising to me, anyway. I’ve seen beautiful and amazing things, been to fascinating places, and met welcoming and lovely people along the way. I’ve had the good fortune to do all that with my family and to visit friends on the other end of those travels. I look forward to doing all of that again in the near future, revisiting old places and exploring new ones. And if there is always some discomfort lurking in the background so far from home, well, so be it. It’s a small price to pay for such experiences.
The experiences stick with me long after the discomfort fades away.
I make a good part of my living speaking in public, after all. That’s what teaching is, at least in part – standing in front of an audience and trying to get them to listen even when they don’t want to do so. It took me a long time to learn how to be comfortable doing that. It didn’t come naturally. And yet now I enjoy it. What discomfort I started with has long faded.
There is a certain amount of privilege in this position, I suppose.
Everybody has operating costs – how much energy it takes to live your life. Sometimes those costs exceed what people have available to get from one end of the day to the other and all you can do in that situation is hold on as best you can, borrow energy from your future, and hope things get better. Sometimes the costs and the expenses line up and that’s a comfortable place to be. And sometimes you have more than you need, and you can spend some of the surplus on things like being a little uncomfortable in a new place or a new situation, in the service of something larger. It is a good thing to have that surplus, and I’m grateful for it.
One of my favorite lines in cinema comes from Lawrence of Arabia. It’s early in the film, still at a point where the director is establishing just what sort of character T.E. Lawrence actually was. There are a couple of men in a tent (the almost total absence of women in this three-hour epic film is one of the most singular things in movie history) and one of them is trying (and failing) to extinguish a match with his fingers. Lawrence then puts it out by squeezing the flame between his fingers. The first guy tries to imitate that and then yelps.
“Oh! It damn well hurts!” he says.
“Of course it hurts,” Lawrence replies.
“What’s the trick, then.”
“The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.”
If you’re willing to be uncomfortable for a bit and able to pay that cost, the world is a more adventurous and interesting place. And that is a lesson worth learning.
I am a firm believer in comfort, it has to be said. Comfort is a rare and fleeting quality in this world, and people who insist that the only way to live is to get out of your comfort zone don’t seem to take into account how much effort goes into creating that comfort and how quickly it can vanish even in the best of times. It should be cherished, not scorned.
And yet there are times when it is worth it to be uncomfortable.
I am not an adventurous person. I have adventures, because I have learned to say yes and I’m willing to be uncomfortable, and it has been worth it. Some of those adventures are among my most treasured memories.
I have traveled, for example. For someone who once had to have the concept of “cabin fever” explained to him (“you mean I stay in my home with my stuff and nobody bothers me and this is a problem … why?”) I have been to a surprising number of places. Surprising to me, anyway. I’ve seen beautiful and amazing things, been to fascinating places, and met welcoming and lovely people along the way. I’ve had the good fortune to do all that with my family and to visit friends on the other end of those travels. I look forward to doing all of that again in the near future, revisiting old places and exploring new ones. And if there is always some discomfort lurking in the background so far from home, well, so be it. It’s a small price to pay for such experiences.
The experiences stick with me long after the discomfort fades away.
I make a good part of my living speaking in public, after all. That’s what teaching is, at least in part – standing in front of an audience and trying to get them to listen even when they don’t want to do so. It took me a long time to learn how to be comfortable doing that. It didn’t come naturally. And yet now I enjoy it. What discomfort I started with has long faded.
There is a certain amount of privilege in this position, I suppose.
Everybody has operating costs – how much energy it takes to live your life. Sometimes those costs exceed what people have available to get from one end of the day to the other and all you can do in that situation is hold on as best you can, borrow energy from your future, and hope things get better. Sometimes the costs and the expenses line up and that’s a comfortable place to be. And sometimes you have more than you need, and you can spend some of the surplus on things like being a little uncomfortable in a new place or a new situation, in the service of something larger. It is a good thing to have that surplus, and I’m grateful for it.
One of my favorite lines in cinema comes from Lawrence of Arabia. It’s early in the film, still at a point where the director is establishing just what sort of character T.E. Lawrence actually was. There are a couple of men in a tent (the almost total absence of women in this three-hour epic film is one of the most singular things in movie history) and one of them is trying (and failing) to extinguish a match with his fingers. Lawrence then puts it out by squeezing the flame between his fingers. The first guy tries to imitate that and then yelps.
“Oh! It damn well hurts!” he says.
“Of course it hurts,” Lawrence replies.
“What’s the trick, then.”
“The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.”
If you’re willing to be uncomfortable for a bit and able to pay that cost, the world is a more adventurous and interesting place. And that is a lesson worth learning.
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