News and Updates

1. It snowed all day today. It’s still snowing. Everything was canceled and I stayed home with my tea and Kim and Oliver and it was in fact a good day. There was too much grading, and if Webex ever functions correctly on the first try it will surprise me no end, but even so – a good day.

2. People who don’t understand clearing 6 inches (15cm) of snow before the storm is finished have never cleared 12 inches (30cm) of snow after the storm is finished.

3. This was a most welcome break in a week that felt like I was swimming through syrup for most of it. I’m not sure how value-added I was at work, but I did give it my best and that has to count for something.

4. If you want trivia, go to the source. On Saturday I joined my usual team for the Local Businessman High School trivia fundraiser event – the first one I’ve attended since 2020, just weeks before the world caught fire – and we won handily over 27 other teams. This is what happens when you have a crew that includes at least three teachers and two librarians on it, plus three others who do this sort of thing regularly.

5. We also went up to join Lauren and Maxim for their regular Monday night trivia game. They named the team “The Eagles Were Robbed,” which I appreciated. We had Kim, Oliver, Chase, Daniel, Isaac, Isaac’s dad, and Isaac’s coworker who told me her name and was a perfectly lovely person to talk with but that information is now lost along with so, so much else, and again we won handily, this time over 14 other teams. We are the greatest of the least! Rah, us!

6. I’m not sure why fans of teams who watched the Super Bowl from their living rooms are still getting after the Eagles for coming within two minutes and a questionable call of possibly winning the game, but you know. Folks. Whatever gets you through the long cold off season, I guess.

7. We have a pile of snack food left over from that game. I suppose we’re all just getting older and less interested in junk, which is good. But that doesn’t change the fact that we have a pile of snack food left over from that game. We’ll work on it, and eventually whatever we don’t get to will go to the chickens and get converted into eggs, and thus the circle of life is unbroken.

8. I keep thinking I’ll make some comment on the current headlines – any of them, all of them – but every time I do it just devolves into vitriol and snark and frankly I don’t need that right now. Just take it as read.

9. There is a lull in my Committee’s work right now so I’m trying to make appearances at events for the other similar Committees down at Home Campus, on the theory that a) they might do so for ours, and b) sometimes you just need people to paper the house. I have a warm body still drawing breath. I can do that.

10. We covered the 19th-century industrial working class yesterday in my remote course, and it always seems to come as a surprise to students what the actual conditions of life were for them. We take so much for granted these days, despite the feverish activity of those who would return us to that state.