News and Updates

1. I finally managed to get the half-inch-long splinter out from under my thumbnail, where it has been lodged for a week or so. After a while you stop noticing it, but eventually it started to work its way out and I could grab it with tweezers without gouging holes in my thumb, so out it came. I feel a full half a gram lighter now.

2. We had our Easter over at my in-laws’ house on Saturday, since that was when we could mostly all gather. Things are busy these days. But Kim, Oliver and I gathered Lauren and Max from college and spent a fine evening eating good food and having lovely conversations with good people. Oliver brought out his Fantastically Awful Pink Deck of Cards – the deck we got in Washington DC when we were there over a decade ago and it was the only one for sale at the only store open in the entire city as far as we could tell – and we played Go Fish and Max taught us a new game that I never did quite wrap my head around but which looked entertaining. And on the way home we discovered that one of Lauren’s Squad from high school works with one of my good friends at a wholly different university, so three cheers for small worlds.

3. I keep thinking I’m going to write an entire post about the current descent into madness led by the American right wing that we seem to be experiencing, as opposed to all of the previous ones, but every time I try to think about it my brain leaps from my head and into the path of oncoming traffic in a desperate attempt to save my sanity by preventing me from thinking too hard about it. I’ll get to it eventually, I suppose.

4. We saw the Dungeons and Dragons movie over the weekend as well, and it had no business being as good as it was. Even Oliver – who is an avid D&D player and thus most likely among us to notice its flaws – enjoyed it. There was one sight gag that still makes me laugh.  Although, as someone else has said, if they really wanted this to be a D&D movie they would have brought the house lights up about halfway through and then had the audience spend the next hour trying to decide when they could get together again to finish it.

5. There have been a lot of movies of late that are far better than they had any real right to be. The most recent Puss In Boots movie, for example, was a surprisingly sharp exploration of what it means to face mortality and had some great lines in it. I love how computers have made the actual process of animation inexpensive enough that studios can afford to hire good writers again.

6. We are inundated with cheese here at the house. Not just Cooper Sharp, but all sorts of cheese. I am not complaining about this, though I do think we need to make a more concerted effort to whittle it down than we are currently making.

7. It is definitely spring here in Baja Canada. The rabbits have gone back outside to their hutches and we have fired up the grill for dinner twice now, these events not being related in any way except for the weather.

8. Lauren continues to go viral with a social media post that has eclipsed my personal hit record by more than two orders of magnitude now. I am impressed.

9. Oliver, Kim and I watched the final Flyers home game tonight – an oddly tentative overtime win over the Columbus Blue Jackets, one of the vanishingly few teams in the NHL below the Flyers in the standings. It was good to see them go out on a high note, though, and it’s been a nice thing to share with family through the season. And with others, I suppose. A couple of months ago I was standing in a retail establishment here in Our Little Town when a guy accosted me about my Flyers hat, in the cheerful sort of way that sports fans give each other grief while understanding that it’s a game and it’s supposed to be fun. “Who should I be cheering for, then?” I asked. “The Chicago Blackhawks!” he replied, as they are the nearest NHL team geographically to Our Little Town. “Dude,” I said, “they’re just about the only team in the league worse than the Flyers!” He just laughed. On to the playoffs, which I and my hometown Flyers will be watching together from our respective living rooms.

10. I think it’s about time that the semester ended, don’t you? Of course you do. We all do.