News and Updates

1. I may never be caught up on my grading. Fortunately the semester will end at some point and then it won’t matter, but until then I expect to be even less fun to be around than usual. Oh well. The upside to all of this is that I can procrastinate and be fully productive, as there is never any shortage of projects to work on.

2. It’s March Madness, or so I hear. Every year Kim and I would try to put together a bracket or two, which was always an exercise in creative writing since neither of us follows basketball at any level. Kim at least understands the game – to me it just looks like an indoor track meet that gets interrupted every eighteen seconds for a game of HORSE. But now they’re playing, and I suppose I should see who is winning. Go Team! Beat that Other Team! Rah!

3. Oliver came back from Small Liberal Arts College for spring break last week, which was fun. He brought Dustin with him and we had a pretty good time hanging out for a week in between grading and other assorted tasks. We had raclette one night and put on a pretty good St. Patrick’s Day spread of corned beef with all the trimmings. He got his cat fix, after half a semester at school. We even managed to catch a hockey game or two. They’re back at SLAC now, but it was good to have him home.

4. Lauren is now technically on spring break from Local Businessman High, though that loses a lot of punch after most of a year on an every-other-day cohort schedule. The school district has decided that there will in fact be a graduation ceremony – outdoors, with a restricted number of attendees, but still. And there will be some kind of prom, also outdoors. It’s good that they’re doing some of the normal things as best they can.

5. She and her friend Aleksia were voted Best Duo by their peers at LBHS, which was a nice honor to have. Besties! Maybe they’ll get into the yearbook for it, though it is late in the game to be adding things to that.

6. After a few books away, I am once again reading Claire North – one of her older books, but hypnotic in a way. You should be reading her stuff. Of course, mostly I get to read in three-page increments these days so it takes a lot longer than usual, but such is my semester. I knew the job was dangerous when I took it.

7. Can we all just admit that the real problem in this country is native-born straight white Christian men with guns? Seriously, people – go look at the last two or three dozen mass murders that have taken place in the US (and is there another country in the world not actively at war where such a statement even makes sense?) and who was responsible for them and tell me I’m wrong. I dare you. Go ahead. This country has a white supremacy problem, a Nativist problem, a “women are property” problem, a “too damned many guns” problem, and a “rules don’t apply to right-wingers” problem, all of which intersect in precisely those people, and until those get solved we will continue to see innocent blood shed by losers who can’t handle people who don’t look exactly like themselves and feel entitled to subjugate those they hate. This is what brought us the Trump Insurrection in January, it’s what brought us the mass murder in Atlanta this week, and it is what will destroy this nation if it is not stamped out.

8. On the other hand, it does feel good to see all the Trump Insurrectionists being arrested and charged for at least some of the crimes against the United States that they committed. If there were any real justice in the US der Sturmtrumper would be rotting in a jail cell alongside them by now, but the GOP is far too corrupt to allow anything of the sort. Hell, they’re doing their best right now to make sure that only native-born straight white Christian men with guns can vote in the next election and doesn’t that just bring the discussion around full circle.

9. It may actually be spring here in Baja Canada.  It got up to 65F/18C last weekend, and then we got two inches (5cm) of heavy wet snow that I didn’t bother shoveling because it immediately went back up above freezing and now it’s all gone and we’re back up to where we were last weekend. So, yeah, spring in Wisconsin. The soft-serve ice cream place has been open for over a week. I’m sure there were people lined up in the snow.

10. Some days you just need to eat and drink whatever you want and deal with the consequences later.