1. So I’ve been away for a few days. Did I miss anything?
REALLY?
Sigh.
It’s going to be a long two years in Congress with the nation held hostage by the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party – a party whose mainstream is already by any rational post-WWII American standard firmly situated on the radical right-wing extreme and which has demonstrated conclusively that they don’t have the spine to protect democracy and law from attacks by their own fringe even if they were inclined to do so, which seems doubtful after the evidence of the last decade or so. If they wanted to prove themselves incapable of governing and unfit to hold power they couldn’t have picked a more effective way to do it.
2. Also, I’m not sure how the new Speaker of the House can claim a mandate from the American people when he doesn’t even have a mandate from his own Congressional delegation.
3. There is a backlog of posts to be made here and I’ll get to them all by and by. There are Vacation Posts, because nothing says “personal blog” than having to slog through someone else’s travels – it’s the 21st-century version of the old carousel of slides! But this is where I tell the stories I want to remember, and perhaps they’ll be entertaining enough for others too. There are also the Books I Read Last Year posts, and later today we’re heading to my in-laws for Final Christmas: The Reckoning, which will be much fun. So watch this space!
4. And the Christmas cards are almost ready to go out! Perhaps even Monday! Hey – it’s never too late for a card as far as we’re concerned.
5. Do not under any circumstances fly with the company which I will, for legal purposes, refer to as Ghost Air, unless you really, really feel a need to have the free time to get to know the airports along the way in excruciating detail. More on that when we get to the Vacation Posts.
6. Ancestry has been scoring at a higher rate than usual with the hints that they send me, so I’ve been downloading a satisfyingly large cache of documents to review at my leisure. The problem is that I already have a satisfyingly large – indeed, worryingly large – cache of similar documents downloaded from earlier binges through their holdings, and at some point I really do need to get to the “review at my leisure” part of this process. This is hard to do one is included in other plans, though admittedly this is a nice problem to have.
7. I also need to devote some time to my US2 history class, which I have been threatening to revise from the ground up since 2019. Likely not this time around, alas, but at least I can see about squeezing a few topics along the way so I can then extend the class closer to the present. Last year I got up to about 2010. If I can get to 2021 I’ll be happy as it provides a rather dramatic end point (“A republic, if you can keep it.” – Ben Franklin). This will require condensing some topics that were once rather popular but which now aren’t all that interesting to students born in the 21st century, but that’s how it goes.
8. I need a new computer, as the one I have now I bought used in 2017. Unfortunately I would like to replace it with an up to date version of the one I have – Apple’s most popular desktop model, after all – and Apple, in its infinite edginess, has decided to discontinue it because “it’s cooler this way.” I have no interest in a laptop, tablet, or whatever miniaturized thing is hip and trendy these days because I am old, and I have had enough of Windows to last me several lifetimes and most of whatever afterlife I may someday experience. Linux is not even on the table as an option because, well, just consider who this is for. So it is a quandary. Meanwhile bits and pieces of my computer seem to stop working randomly and at some point the whole thing will just freeze and die and I just hope I can get this resolved before it all collapses. This is the modern version of the Great Race.
9. Kim may have resolved my iPhone photo issue, however. It may well have just been a setting after all.
10. The house smells like pizzelles. Life is good.
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2 comments:
I haven't used a desktop since - jeez, really? 1999, on which I wrote my PhD thesis.
Everything since then has been a succession of MacBook Pros. This stopped in 2017 because I prefer that model to the ones that have followed it, but will probably need to resume as this one seems to be imploding.
Still: have never wanted nor missed a desktop in that time. What's driving your desire for the tethered machine?
Well, for one thing I'm pretty much tethered - I have almost no reason ever to move my computer from place to place and haven't since 1997 when I stopped having to go into archives to do my dissertation research. I have an office at home with a nice chair in it, and that's all I need. Digital mobility is overrated as far as I am concerned.
For another thing, I like having a 27" monitor and they just don't make laptops that big (and even if they did it would sort of defeat the purpose). I like being able to put multiple documents and windows side by side to work on. Laptops in my experience also have less power and worse screen resolution.
Also, Kim has eleventy-billion laptops, tablets, and assorted gizmos, so on the rare occasions where I absolutely must use one I can just borrow one of hers.
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