News and Updates

1. We may get our Christmas letter out by the end of this month.  This is earlier than some years past, actually. 

2. One of the many reasons I’m glad I attended the Women’s March last weekend is the simple fact that it has driven der Sturmtrumper to distraction, knowing that more people attended those marches than his inauguration.  Honestly – this is the leader of the free world these days?  This petulant little attention whore?  We are so screwed.

3. I actually came home sick from work today, for the first time over a decade.  I don’t get sick days from teaching at the college level – there are no substitutes, so you just have to go and do your thing regardless of how you feel.  I remember one evening several years ago, for example, teaching for three hours and then staggering back to my office and putting my head on my desk for nearly an hour before I could summon the reserves to drive the seven minute commute home.  So no sick days from teaching.  But my advising position, well, no point in bringing students into a confined space with you just so you can share your illnesses with them, or, if no students show up, in just sitting there in your office not really focusing on anything other than the fact that you really wish you could just breathe without conscious effort.  That’s a poor use of company time, really.  It’s your basic winter crud that I had been sort of but not quite coming down with for more than a week until this morning when it finally whacked me upside the head but good.  So I blog instead, because that requires no particular train of thought.

4. I am also working on having my hands removed.  My right hand hurts because a couple of weeks ago I caught my pinkie finger between a bin and a 50lb sack of chicken feed and bent it in a new and creative angle, from which it has yet to go back to straight.  And my left hand hurts because I was helping Lauren cook fried rice and picked up a bowl that I hadn’t realized she’d been cooking as well, which meant I spent the next 24 hours holding desperately onto a bag of ice.  Eventually I will be down to stumps and I’ll get a keyboard with keys the size of drink coasters and just bash away on them to make my statements here.

5. If Trump really thinks that millions of illegal votes were cast in the election that brought him victory, then there isn’t any other option but to declare the election null and void, and have a new one that is better monitored – preferably by outside agencies that don’t have a stake in the outcome.  So state governments would be out.  Perhaps we can convince the UN to do it.  Does he even think about what he says?  He’s just destroyed his own legitimacy.

6. Well, even further.

7. The cat has begun to sound like Edward G. Robinson.  Mithra doesn’t really meow much anymore – she just kind of growls at us.  “Mrow, see?  Mrow!”  All she needs is a cigar and a fedora.

8. Perhaps reading a book about the Nazi takeover of a once-proud democracy wasn’t the best choice for these parlous times.  It was a lovely story, though.

9. The chickens have gone berserk, and we are inundated with eggs.  On the whole, this is not a bad problem to have.  I need to bake more.

10. This has been a winter full of ice and drizzle, which is kind of dreary.  It really hasn’t snowed all that much so far, and for much of January it has actually been raining.  And then it freezes overnight.  I think winter should be winter, with cold and snow.  This halfway winter is just kind of disappointing.  Of course, at current pace we may not have winters anymore.  I will miss them.