News and Updates

1. It rained most of the weekend here – a couple of grey, rainy autumn days with blustery winds and falling temperatures that are about as good as weather gets, I think. I’m going to retire to Scotland someday.

2. The rain did keep me from unloading the minivan for a few days after we’d gotten back, though once it cleared up the unloading proceeded apace. I can’t say the delay bothered me overmuch. Sometimes you just have to let things sit for a bit, and sometimes you’re one of the things that just has to sit.

3. One of the bummers of this past week is that we were on the road heading home when Voces8 were performing at a venue that was, at least in theory, close enough to my house that I could have gone to see them. They’re a British group and there’s been a pandemic (really – pay no attention to the plague rats who insist otherwise) so it’s been a long time since they’ve been anywhere near me. Oh well. If you’re out there listening, #Voces8, I hope you are going to be near Wisconsin again sometime soon. I’ll be there.

4. I suppose it is fitting that this is the week that my pizzelle iron chose to give up the ghost. You can’t really fix these things since they have basically no moving parts and no access to anything on the interior without scrapping it entirely, so now I am without a pizzelle iron for the first time since 1990 when my grandparents gave it to me for my birthday. I’m not sure that they ever really understood why I wanted one, as they both regarded cooking as women’s work, but I have always loved it and I will miss it. The company that made it no longer exists thanks to predatory capitalism, so I will need to find a different one.

5. Although having spent the last few days researching pizzelle irons, I am now sorely tempted to try once again to fix my old one. Maybe I can get it to work again. Or maybe I can find someone else who knows how to repair simple electrical appliances (seriously – it’s a heating element with a handle; the main problem is getting access to things). In either event, I do need to fill this hole in my possessions so I can go back to making the house smell like anise.

6. A lot of twenty-first century parenting is just being unreasonably pleased when one of your children likes a social media post that you made.

7. One of the nice things about going back to face to face classes and advising is that I am finally meeting in person students I’ve been talking with for a year now on Zoom. Some of them are surprisingly tall.

8. I’m doing my best to avoid politics these days as all it does is make me angry, but sometimes you just have to wonder what the hell people are thinking. The more we find out the worse the treasonous insurrection of January 6 becomes, and still there are people who see nothing wrong with it. Watching supporters of the disgraced twice-impeached former president deny the undeniable and defend the indefensible would be comical if it weren’t so utterly grotesque.

9. Twice this month I have spent the wee hours of the night chasing down a bat that was doing laps around my bedroom and then, having caught up to it, depositing it outside. At least I think I deposited it outside the first time. Given how quickly the problem repeated itself, I may just have lost it somewhere in the house where it hid and then reappeared a few nights later. But the second time I definitely saw it fly off into the night, chittering angrily the whole way. I’m hoping it goes somewhere with its little bat buddies and leaves me alone from now on. Seriously – after the last year and a half I’m pretty sure I don’t want to be dealing with bats.

10. How tired do you have to be to be sitting at work, eating your lunch, and suddenly realize, “Oh yeah, a few hours ago I was chasing a bat around my bedroom,” having completely forgotten about it in the interim? This tired. You have to be this tired to do that.