Happy Birthday!

Today is Oliver’s birthday, a celebration in the midst of a pile of celebrations but one to be noted and enjoyed even so.

It’s been quite a year. He started the year living at home, working as an academic advisor down at Home Campus, and he finishes as a graduate student in history living in another state entirely. He’s had to navigate more than a few life changes and bureaucratic tasks, and he’s done well at them.

Birthdays are for celebrating, and tonight we’ll have red beans and rice, chocolate cake, and a quiet time as the new year rings in all around us, and that sounds like a good way to spend the day.

Happy birthday, Oliver! May the new year treat you kindly. I’m proud of you.

Christmas, Part 1: Getting Ready

Christmas is always a somewhat drawn-out event with us.

This is not because we’re the sorts of people who live, sleep, eat, and worship Christmas. To be honest, most years it kind of sneaks up on us a bit and the only one among us who has any real ability to think about the holiday before Thanksgiving is put away is Kim. Rather it’s because the way we do the holiday involves several stages of celebration.

There’s the preparatory stage. This means trying to get the house at least somewhat decorated, wrapping up our various semesters (some of which didn’t end until the 19th this year), and dealing with other holidays and celebrations that we manage to insert into this already busy time because that’s just how we roll.

Then there’s the Gregorian Christmas, which we celebrate with my side of the family in December. This changes location from one year to the next. Some years there are full-sized gatherings where pretty much everyone I see more than once a decade ends up in Tennessee to eat, talk, and enjoy each other’s company for a few days. And some years my cousins head out to their various in-laws and it’s just us and my brother’s family, which is a bit quieter and just as lovely.

We wrap up with the Julian Christmas in January, gathering together with Kim’s side of the family here in Wisconsin for another festive day of food, conversation, and good company.

2025 has been a long and exhausting year, sometimes for reasons that were joyful and memorable such as our various travels and visits from friends, and sometimes for reasons that were much more stressful, such as the unusually numerous crises of our semesters and the entire news cycle for the calendar year. Add all that together and for me at least the holiday snuck up more than usual. One day I’m getting ready to give my midterm exams for my classes and looking forward to Halloween and the next day – BAM! – it’s finals week and I’ve reached the point where I either buy Christmas gifts locally or give out IOUs.

I didn’t get much decorating done this year, is what I’m saying. The outside lights remain in their boxes, and so be it. We did get the trees up, though.

We were properly supervised the whole time, of course.

We’ve graduated to having two Christmas trees these days. One is for all the normal ornaments that we’ve collected over the years, or at least as many as we can fit on the tree since we inherited a bunch from my mom that we still need to sort through, really. That one goes in the corner of the living room where we’ve put Christmas trees pretty much since 1996 when we moved in.

The other is for the travel ornaments that we’ve been collecting as mementos of going places and visiting people. Most of these are keychains, since they’re cheap, indestructible, and clearly labeled to let you know where you got them so they make wonderful story prompts. We added a pile of new ones this year – Oliver and Lauren know to bring back keychains for me when they travel places, so the tree represents all of our wanderings now – and there are enough of these to justify their own tree. This one goes in the dining room because, well, that’s where there’s space for it. Minimalist we are not.

I usually put the angel that my parents had on their tree on top, but this year I just looked at it and thought “that’s an incandescent bulb powered by sixty-year-old wiring and the rest of the tree is lit by LEDs that we leave on a lot and I don’t want to burn the place down,” so I put a hat on the tree instead. I thought it looked jaunty. It had been given to us by a friend who passed away this year, so there was that as well.

We have other events as well that get tossed in with the holiday, and this year we celebrated two of them before we left for Tennessee – both on the same day.

One was my birthday, which happens every year around this time.

The other was Shai’s successful defense of his dissertation. He’s been here in the US since Thanksgiving week, but he still needed to do his defense and he took care of that on the 19th via Zoom to New Zealand, where his committee was located. It went well and they accepted it without revisions which, if you understand the PhD process, is quite an achievement. Naturally a celebration was in order!

We took the time to take some group photos as well, since we don’t ordinarily get a chance to do that. It was a festive evening all around. Even the rabbit joined in.

And yes, the hat looks pretty jaunty on Miley too.

The next day, bright and early, we left for Tennessee.

Back and Between

Well, we’re back.

We’ve been there and back again and it was a lovely holiday all around, and at some point in the next day or two I will get some actual blogging done about it because this is where I put my stories so I don’t forget them but for now I’m still just sort of lazing around in a holiday-filled cheese-induced haze.

We got the house at least somewhat decorated for Christmas before we left, collected all of the people who were coming with us, and then went to Chattanooga for the holiday to spend some time with my side of the family. It was a far less ad-hoc experience than the last time we did this a couple of years ago, but what it lacked in buccaneering spirit it more than made up for in just being a good time with good people.

We got back late Saturday and have been enjoying doing not much of much at all since then, though today Kim and I were both working from home and Oliver is working on a project from last semester that he has to finish by the 9th. The cat has been very glad to see us and at some point soon she may actually detach herself from us physically. She was well cared for while we were away, but she definitely wants her people around. 

As a welcome home gift yesterday Wisconsin presented us with an inch or two of powdery snow being blown about by 30mph (48kph) winds such that when I went to shovel out this morning about half the driveway was bare and the other half was a handsbreadth deep but the joy of powder is that you can just sort of shove it along with only one hand on the shovel.

I had to get some errands done this afternoon but tomorrow my goal is not to leave the house at all. We’ll see how that goes.

This is the lawless part of the calendar year – the timeless part in between that nobody really tracks. You can sit around in sweatpants eating pie and watching irrelevant sporting events or reading whatever comes to hand, listening to whatever you want on Spotify since it won’t show up for next year’s Wrap until January, and generally not paying attention to the world for a bit. I feel I should be doing more bacchanalian things but then I have always felt that way, even when I was much younger, and I am old enough now that my definition of bacchanalian is mostly about books and tea anyway, so perhaps I already am.

It's not a bad way to spend a few days.

A Long Time Ago

I was born at a little before six in the morning on a fairly warm solstice in Philadelphia, the only thing of any real significance that I did at that hour until I was in my thirties. It was just me and my mom in the delivery room, along with an assortment of whatever medical personnel were on hand. They didn’t let dads into those rooms back then, so my dad was home waiting for the phone call. After it came he violated nearly every traffic law the city had on his way down to the hospital.

I was glad that those rules no longer applied when I had my own kids. The delivery room rules, I mean. I got to be there when Oliver and Lauren were born, and while my role was mostly ceremonial it is an experience I treasure.

Traffic laws still have their place, though they do get more generously interpreted in the area around a hospital. People are in a hurry, after all.

My dad told me that I was born on a fairly warm day and it stayed warm for a while after that, until early January when I was christened in the middle of a blizzard. “You opened the front door and the wind blew you out the back,” he said. But that was later. They kept new mothers in the hospital for a long time back then, something that annoyed my mother to no end. Eventually she decided that she felt fine and she wanted to bring her newborn home for Christmas so she checked herself out and off we went. As the first grandchild on either side, I got passed around like a prize. My uncle gave me a stuffed Huckleberry Hound as my first Christmas gift, and I kept it until it fell apart about a decade ago. They said I handled the holiday pretty well for a first-timer. I probably slept through most of it, if I know me.

That was a long time ago now.

But every year on this day I officially get another year older. I can’t say I feel all that different from one day to the next, but it all accumulates and eventually I notice.

It’s going to be a pretty quiet day. Oliver’s already home. Lauren and Shai will come down later. We’ll have a nice dinner and maybe play some cards and hang out, just the five of us. That sounds like a great birthday to me.

The older you get the more you look back, because there’s more there to see back there with each passing day. It’s been a busy year, and there hasn’t been much time or energy for reflection but it’s good to do that now and then.

I’m not sure what the future will hold but we press on regardless, shaping what comes next as best we can.

Happy birthday to me.

News and Updates

1. The semester is rapidly coming to an end now, which you might think would mean that I’ll soon have time to relax if you weren’t already familiar with how my life works. There will be very little relaxing in the next few weeks, even if all of the various activities that are currently on my schedule will be enjoyable. I suppose I’ll relax at some point down the line, and then I’ll have some good memories to relive. We’ll call that even.

2. All of this semester’s classes for Home Campus are now put to bed and cleaned off my computer’s desktop (where I keep the currently active tasks). Grades are submitted, the first student complaint has already been received, and when I get back into the office tomorrow I will start the process of recycling last semester’s printouts and stacking this semester’s until the next round appears. It’s the circle of academic life. I still have my Far Away Campus class, but the lectures are done and all that remains is Friday’s final exam. The never-ending online class will actually come to an end on New Year’s Day, at least for me, and it will be nice to have my Saturdays back and not find myself grading essays on my phone in some agriturismo in rural Italy again. Not that I have any problem with being in rural Italy! I just had more satisfying things to do while I was there than remind students to cite their sources.

3. It’s definitely winter here in Baja Canada. We’ve gotten more snow since Thanksgiving than we got all winter last year, and today when I woke up it was -9F (-23C) with a windchill of -26F (-32C). That’s January weather around here, not December. But I like it, if I’m being honest. I love when the snow covers things, making them beautiful in their austere way, and the temperatures still beat the heat of August. You can always add clothing but there is a limit to how much you can take off, especially in the US. And even if you exceed that limit, you are still too hot. Give me my sweatshirts and my hot tea and a good book, and this is my weather.

4. I’m trying to gear up for the holiday season, as much as one can in these parlous times. I refuse to acknowledge Christmas until after Thanksgiving, and since the winter started good and hard exactly when that happened I have put up no decorations. The plan is to at least get the trees up and decorated this week – we now have two, one for the regular ornaments and one for the travel ornaments that have proliferated with such abandon in recent years, which is a sign of a good life.

5. Last month we all went up to see the photographs that Lauren’s bestie Aleksia had in an exhibit in town. They were lovely photos, and she is a talented artist. Plus we got to go to dinner with Lauren afterwards at a Laotian restaurant that we’d never tried before, and that was good too.

6. Speaking of things that I probably should have written about sooner, last week I checked in with the Internet Road Trip that I started following back in early June and, well. You can understand why democracy is as hard as it is. For those who don’t remember, a website set up a first-person-driver game where anyone logged in could vote on what to do next as it careened down Google Street View. In theory the plan was to get from Boston to Los Angeles, but most of the first month was spent in Nova Scotia which, you will note, is east of Boston. Sometime in October they found their way back into the US, but last week they were somewhere in Quebec and still east of Chicago. So it’s been six months and they’re nowhere near either completion or the correct path, but there are still a lot of people chiming in and that has to count for something.

7. We picked up Lauren and Shai at the bus station last week since they wanted to borrow my car for a few days, and from there we visited the place that had the best fried cheese curds here in Our Little Town because that is a very Wisconsin thing to do and we need to get Shai used to such things. There is nothing remotely healthy on the menu of this place, and that is just part of its charm. We spent the rest of the evening playing cards and hanging out and it was a lovely time. Lauren and Shai took off the next day to see The House on the Rock, which is a monument to what happens when too much money meets not nearly enough medication that you simply must see if you are in southern Wisconsin, and we got the full report Friday night when we met them at a Thai restaurant to collect the car again. It’s been a good week that way.

8. Just because I’m not writing about the horrors of living in Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s America doesn’t mean I’m not paying attention to them or that I am not incandescently angry about them. And if you are not similarly enraged, you need to re-evaluate your life.

9. I keep thinking that I should get a new calendar for my office, since the year is rapidly drawing to a close, but I know in the depths of my being that I won’t actually get around to doing that until sometime in February because that’s just how that goes. I have accepted this as a cost of doing business as me.

10. Every time I think I have managed to blot out all of the various ways that companies are trying to shove AI down my throat, they figure out ways to get around me and try again. Right now at work every time I open a Word document (which is the program that the university has paid for us to use) there is a floating icon advertising Microsoft’s version of this foul and invasive process and no amount of research has yet to provide an answer for how I can get rid of it. Or, rather, it has provided several ways – some of them from Microsoft itself – but none of the things they tell me to click on actually exist in the program on my computer. Go HERE and click on THIS it says, but there is no THIS (and sometimes there’s no HERE) and I suspect that somewhere a coder with a seventh-grade sense of humor is enjoying this immensely.

The End of Western Civilization

I gave my last ever exam in Western Civ II this morning.

It’s a class I’ve taught many times, and it’s one of my favorites. It moves right along – I start in 1300 or so with a broad and vaguely Scholastic overview of how medieval Europeans thought the world ought to be organized (feudalism, orders, and so on) and we usually run out of time right around the end of the 20th century with the EU and the disintegration of Yugoslavia serving as contrasting post-Cold-War trends. Along the way we go through several of my favorite set-pieces – Malthus and the Counter-Enlightenment; why Freud was a terrible psychologist but a fantastic symbol of his era; the tripwires that led to WWI; the Dawes Plan. It’s a fun class to teach.

This year I really had a particularly wonderful bunch of students. They were comfortable asking questions – and not just one or two talkative students, but probably about half of them. They got along well with each other. It’s one of the few classes I’ve ever taught – and certainly the first one since the pandemic – where I routinely had to call the class to order because they were so engrossed with conversations spanning the entire room. And their work was interesting. Most of my assignments require students to take a position and defend it with evidence and I always appreciate it when they don’t all end up on one side. It’s more interesting, and it’s nice when they take positions opposed to the ones they hear from me. That’s why I give them that evidence to use, after all.

Plus, for the last few years I’ve been putting together PowerPoint slides to show them as I run through my stories. It’s interesting to see what people and things looked like, after all. As we get into the 20th century I start to slip old photos of my family into the presentations. I used to do this just for me but recently I’ve been pointing out to classes which photos these are because the students seem to like knowing that these events have a connection to the class. The first family photo that makes it into the slideshow is one of someone on my dad’s side of the family who served in WWI. This year that inspired two students to search through their own family photos and then show me the results. That was really impressive, I thought.

But all good things must come to an end, however prematurely.

The state legislature in its infinite hostility to higher education declared that we needed to revamp all of our gen-eds on an insanely compressed schedule, and then the Mother Ship Campus decided not to follow the lead of every other such campus implementing all of this and instead impose their unique curriculum on us, with the net result being that we’re going to be devoting a wholly disproportionate amount of our time on those classes and not much else.

And somewhere in that cloud of dust, my little Western Civ II class disappeared.

The other historian on campus and I are going to be teaching a new required class – Twentieth-Century World History – that hasn’t been taught on our campus for so long that nobody can find a syllabus for it, so we’ll be working on figuring that out. I can reuse about a third of my Western Civ II material for it, including at least two of the set-pieces that I enjoy, and I’ve got some ideas on how to set up the rest of the class as well so it should be fine.

But I will miss Western Civ II.

A Thanksgiving Holiday That Couldn't Be Beat

Everything’s put away now. The dishes are all washed. The extra chairs are back in the garage. The dining room table is round again instead of oval. But for a while all was noise and chaos and motion and it was a lovely way to spend a holiday.

We’ve been empty nesters now for real ever since we dropped Oliver off at his graduate school apartment in early August, but both he and Lauren were coming home for Thanksgiving. We spent some time getting the house ready – mostly making sure their beds had clean sheets and blankets – and figuring out what everyone’s plans were.

Lauren arrived Tuesday evening without any difficulties, but Oliver had a bit of an adventure getting back. The plan was for him to take a train from where he goes to school and then switch to a bus in Chicago that would take him to Our Little Town, and that would have been simple except that the train was late enough that there was a real chance he’d miss his bus – the last one until the morning – and then I’d have to drive down to Chicago to pick him up, and while that’s just what you do in those circumstances it was something I’d hoped to avoid as driving in Chicago is never a good idea even in the best of times. Fortunately Kim thought to call the bus company and they agreed to hold the bus for five or ten minutes. Oliver made it with moments to spare, and all I had to do was pick him up at our local bus station at 2am in a howling windstorm, which was much nicer than driving to Chicago.

Wednesday morning Lauren took my car and went down to O’Hare to pick up Shai, whom she met in Vietnam this past summer. Shai flew in from South Africa, where his family is, and once Lauren had picked him up she started his American education by driving to the nearest Culvers for some MURCAN food (seriously – if you want to know what the platonic ideal of a fast-food burger is you can skip the rest and go straight to your nearest Culvers and be enlightened) and then to various and sundry other places before returning back to Our Little Town. We enjoyed meeting him and getting to know him over the holiday weekend. 

One of the newer traditions – newer to me, anyway – surrounding Thanksgiving break is that when people come back to their home towns from wherever it is they’ve been they gather with their old high school friends for Blackout Wednesday, which is essentially a pub crawl. I volunteered to be one of the designated drivers for the evening and ended up having dinner with Lauren and her friends at one of the local Mexican restaurants, one chosen specifically because they also serve yard-high towers of margaritas (and, for the DD, horchata).

Someone told the waiter that it was Shai’s birthday and he was game to play along, though at some point in the process I suspect he may have had second thoughts about that.

We then went to another place that was more of a bar, where I rediscovered just how old I am, and then I dropped them off at another place downtown and let them have at it while I went home to recover my hearing. Apparently a good time was had, and the call to take people home came around 1am. After a short visit to the local Kwik Trip (a midwest staple) for snacks I took everyone back to their respective spots and we called it a night.

I slept in the next morning because it was Thanksgiving Day and holidays are meant for that sort of thing. Lauren and Shai met up with a good chunk of the squad for the annual Turkey Trot here in Our Little Town and three cheers to Shai for having the wherewithal to do that after a long travel day and a short night. It was a cold morning, but spirits were high and Turkeys were Trotted like nobody’s business.

After which there was much napping, because that’s how that goes.

We’ve been driving up to Rory and Amy’s for Thanksgiving for the last few years for a celebration of food and family, so after a morning spent making pies, biscuits and pizzelles to share we piled into the minivan and headed on over.

It’s always a good time seeing everyone, and there was plenty of good food and good company to be had. There’s a constant swirl of people to talk with and things to eat and eventually you get to everyone and roll away full.

Friday was kind of a relaxing day after all that activity. Lauren took Shai out to explore Our Little Town while Oliver got caught up on some work he had to do and then joined me in our daily assault on WhenTaken.  For those of you who haven’t found this, it’s a once-a-day game where you get five historical photographs from anywhere in the world – some as old as the 1870s, others as recent as 2024 – and you have to guess where and when the photos were taken. For history nerds such as me and Oliver, it is just the most wonderful thing ever and it’s probably not an accident that our highest scores ever came when we were working together. We’ve been doing this for about a month now, and so far there have been two photos of places that I recognized instantly because I’d been there and that is an odd kind of thrill.

I made lasagna for dinner, and after that Lauren and Shai headed up to her apartment to beat the snow that was scheduled for Saturday.

Kim and I were supposed to go to Madison Saturday for her birthday, as there was a concert that she wanted to see as her designated gift, but as the day drew nearer the weather forecast got grimmer and in the end they postponed the concert to February and we just stayed home. I cleared off the first 8 inches (20cm) of snow at some point – those who laugh at someone clearing 8 inches of snow in the middle of a storm have never cleared 14 inches (35cm) of snow at the end of a storm – and we had a quiet evening of Bake Off, hockey, and popcorn while the world slowly disappeared under a blanket of white.

I tried to clear the last 6 inches (15cm) of snow the next day but the snowblower was not really up to the task and at any rate it died about 5% of the way into that job so Oliver and I had to resort to shovels. Somewhere I have almost this exact picture of my brother and my dad. What goes around comes around.

The last big event of the holiday weekend was later that day when we hosted Friendsgiving. This is not an event that happened when I was younger, as far as I remember, and I have to say that I really like the idea of making Thanksgiving something that is shared with friends and not just family. We had the family Thanksgiving on the day, and then on Sunday a pile of Lauren’s and Oliver’s friends came over. We all squeezed into the dining room and shared a loud and joyful meal together and it was a lovely time all around. Sometimes, if you are very lucky in this world, you will realize that the good times are happening while they are happening and then you can just let them wash over you and enjoy them.

Even Midgie relaxed and got into the spirit of things.

Sunday was also Kim’s actual birthday, so there were two different cakes and a couple of pies and we all sang happy birthday.

Afterward there were games and activities.

This was Shai’s first real experience with snow and to celebrate he decided to dive face-first into it. When you live in Wisconsin you get kind of jaded to the snow after a while, and it is always good to be reminded of just how exciting it can be when it is new.

Eventually it was time to wind down. I ended up taking Lauren, Shai, and Anita back to their apartment by Main Campus University, while Oliver turned in early so he could sleep a bit before taking the 3:30am bus back to Chicago and his train back to school – a process that went much more smoothly than his trip out.

And now we’re back to normal, or as close to that as we get, with a nice pile of memories and stories to hold onto, and that is how holidays should go.

A Shipshape Thanksgiving

My dad spent a couple of unremarkable years in the US Navy in the late 1950s. The Eisenhower Recession was in full swing when he graduated high school in 1958 and he didn’t have any plans or money to go to college so his choices were to find some kind of menial job or enlist and he figured the Navy would be more interesting.

It probably was, though it wasn’t something he particularly talked about much afterward. It wasn’t traumatic, but it wasn’t all that big of a deal to him. He was a radioman on the USS Tutuila, a small-engine repair ship, and he served his time and then left when his enlistment was up. He had shore leave in Cuba before Castro took over, saw the Northern Lights out in the Atlantic, and never learned to swim because he figured if the ship went down in the middle of the ocean where would he go?

He spent Thanksgiving 1958 aboard ship, which probably didn’t sit quite right with him but so it goes. For a man who stood 6’2” and never weighed more than 190lbs in his life he had a healthy respect for Thanksgiving meals and before my parents were married he would routinely go to my mother’s family for a full dinner before returning home to another one with his mother. Having only one Thanksgiving meal – and US Navy chow at that – probably wasn’t his idea of the best way to spend the holiday.

But you have to be glad for what you have. That’s the point of the holiday, after all. And he saved the little program that the ship printed out for the day, so it must have been at least that good.

It’s been a long time since then. Both of my parents and all of my grandparents are gone now, and the USS Tutuila – sold to Taiwan in 1974 – was scrapped decades ago.

But it’s still Thanksgiving, and that has to count for something.

Thanksgiving has slowly become one of my favorite holidays as I have gotten older, mostly because it is one of the very few holidays on the American calendar that doesn’t want us to ask for more. It just asks that we be glad for what we have.

This can be a difficult task in these parlous times, as the future darkens and the past recedes into memory, but it is no less important even so.

I am glad for the life I have. I like my job, Kim likes hers, and between us those jobs provide for all that we need and a good chunk of what we want – the key, of course, being not to have wants that are too excessive. We have a snug house that is big enough for everything we want to do in it. We’re basically healthy, within the parameters for our age. And, most importantly, we have family and friends who make our world better.

Oliver and Lauren are home for the holiday, and the house is back to its full capacity. We’ll have Thanksgiving dinner at Rory and Amy’s house along with most of Kim’s side of the family. Lauren’s new boyfriend will be with us. Friday I’m going to make lasagna because I can. Saturday will depend on the weather, but Sunday will be Friendsgiving, when we’ll have another big Thanksgiving dinner and this one we’ll share with those of Lauren and Oliver’s friends who can join us.

I am thankful for the life I lead.

I am thankful for the people in it – for my family and my friends, both near and far.

And that is enough.

Thirty

I’ve been married for half my life now.

Thirty years ago today – what was then the Saturday after Thanksgiving, which has long been our default day to celebrate – Kim and I got married here in Our Little Town. We wrote most of the service ourselves, blending our different traditions together into something that said the things we thought it should say. There were family and friends there to witness, and afterward we had a very nice party to celebrate.

Since then we’ve lived our lives well.

We bought a house. We made careers and friends. We celebrated. We traveled. We watched a parade of animals pass through our lives. And most importantly we raised two strong, independent children who became good, interesting adults.

It’s been quite a run.

Through it all, at the center of it, there we were, two people making a life together.

We celebrate these things when we have time for them. Last night we went out to dinner. At some point we’ll plan some traveling. Not sure where, but we’ll go. And this week Oliver and Lauren will come home for the holiday. There will be good food and good company and if there is any better way to celebrate an anniversary I couldn’t tell you what it would be.

Here’s to the first thirty years, and may the next thirty be just as lovely.

Happy anniversary to us!

Let There Be Lights

We’ve lived much of the past few months as if our entire physical lives were covered by one big warranty that expired on Memorial Day.

I had to replace my Water-Pik, the tires on my car, and the blinds on multiple windows. We have a new water softener – a necessity in a place that gets its water filtered through a thousand feet of limestone bedrock – and all of the plumbing in the upstairs bathroom has been flushed out. I’ve put in four showerheads since the spring semester ended, though the latest one seems to be working just fine. I managed to fix the dehumidifier in the basement, much to my surprise, and Kim fixed both of the toilets we own. In October our microwave died a noisy but mercifully abrupt and self-contained death and now we have a new one that is deeper but about half as tall so we can cook things that are wide but not high. Last week the control panel on the oven decided not to let us turn the oven off for a while but we’ve known that it was possessed since we bought it – it would periodically emit loud beeping noises and briefly show 666 on the clock face before returning to the usual display and I’m genuinely not making that up – so it really didn’t surprise us much. The appliance guy is coming to fix that next week, though whether he brings screwdrivers or a crucifix will be interesting. Could be both! Why not both. A book I purchased turned out to have printing errors that repeated some paragraphs and deleted others and while Amazon (politely) told me to pound sand the publisher was more reasonable about it and I may have a replacement next week if all goes well.

The cat is still in good shape, as far as we know, and that has to count for something.

My goal when it comes to home repair projects is always to pay other people to fix things, as I have a difficult and unfriendly relationship with the physical world and I dislike those projects with a consuming and deeply immature passion. I know other people enjoy such things but to me they’re just dentistry – probably good for me in the long run, but unpleasant experiences nonetheless. Plus, if I pay someone with actual expertise there is always the possibility that they will be done correctly.

This is often more of an aspiration than a practical reality, though, so all too often I have to put on my Homeowner Hat and try to figure out what exactly the instructions for this project mean in real terms and how I can actually carry them out without injuring either myself, the people around me, or the thing I’m trying to fix. More and more these days I wish I were more of a drinking man, but so it goes.

Last weekend I ended up doing not one but actually two of these home repair projects, both of which involved putting in new light fixtures. Getting this done was, as always in these cases, problematic, but so far nothing has burned down and I’m going to call that a win on points.

On Saturday I replaced the light fixture on the outside of the garage.

We’d had a friend install one when he put in the garage door openers a quarter century ago, and it served us well for a long time. But the plastic housings had gotten so old and brittle that when I went to put up the usual string of overhead lights that we do every summer – tying one end to the side of the garage, running it over to the awning over the back door and then back to that light fixture – one of the two swiveling light housings just snapped off. The other one still worked, so I figured I’d get to it after I took the overhead lights down, and that finally happened a few weeks ago.

The new fixture is actually pretty nice. It’s got two LED paddles that never need to be replaced and which you can rotate to point pretty much any direction you want, which is all I was looking for, and it installed with only the standard minimum amount of confusion and profanity. It works pretty well and it’s really bright.

What I didn’t realize was there is also an LED ring around the base – a strip about half an inch wide running around a circular base that has a diameter of about eight inches – that lights up at dusk and then stays on the entire night until the sun is well and truly risen. It’s a low, warm light so it’s not like we’re landing planes here, but I’m still not convinced it’s something I want.

Unfortunately, this is the default setting and the only way to change that is to download an app onto my phone, set up an account, and then use that to control the light. I need to log into my garage light, in other words. This is not the future I wanted.

I haven’t decided whether I want to go through that or just live with the nightlight feature. We’ll see.

On Sunday I replaced the ceiling fan fixture in our bedroom.

The old one had been there for long enough that it was starting to thump and whinge whenever we turned it on, and we could never quite be bothered to find matching light bulbs for it so it had four differently-shaped bulbs in it as well as one empty socket that pointed directly at our heads in bed and gave us too much glare so we took the bulb out. Plus the paddles were very long, and every time I forgot they were there and tried to put on a shirt I’d end up punching one. The new fixture looks like a roomba. It’s got an LED ring around it that's maybe three fingers wide, and in the center it has some short but high-velocity fan blades that put out a fair amount of wind.

This project took slightly more than the standard amount of confusion and profanity to install, as well as an emergency trip to the hardware store to deal with the fact that the ceiling box was half an inch too small for the fixture so I needed to get an adapter.

The light has a lot of different settings. You can vary the brightness, from Expensive Restaurant Dim to Airport Runway Bright. You can also shade it from cool to warm. And, it turns out, it has a Disco Night setting where the light will cycle through colors ranging from blood red to deep blue to vibrantly green, with occasional stops at white light just long enough to keep your eyes from adjusting to the darker colors.

We found out about the Disco Night setting by accident – there’s a button on the little remote that came with the light and Kim was playing around with it to see what would happen – and now we’re stuck with it. We cannot turn it off. The remote will no longer talk to the light for some reason, and there are no controls whatsoever on the light itself. The only way you can control it, other than turning it off completely with the wall switch, is through the remote.

I suppose I should be grateful that it’s not an app.

So right now that is unusable and we’re waiting to find a time where their service center is open and we are not actually at work.

At some point we will just get oil lanterns and be done with it.

The Further Adventures of Lauren - Coming Home

All good things must come to an end, and as the summer started to turn toward autumn and graduate classes loomed on the horizon, so too did Lauren’s grand tour wind down.

This took a bit, since the temptation to stay in Southeast Asia was strong and the intransigence of the travel company that she’d been working with made rebooking her flight home inordinately more complicated than it needed to be. They eventually refunded about half of her money for a flight that didn’t work out – a long and hard-fought battle that ended sometime in October – and Lauren found another flight to Chicago that would arrive from the west on August 26, more than ten weeks after she’d left O’Hare headed east.

She and Shai traveled from Siem Reap back to Phnom Penh and said their goodbyes, and then Lauren flew off to Taiwan where she had a fairly lengthy layover before her connecting flight. This, it turned out, was not the problem it might have been in most airports around the world as the good people of Taipei understood the assignment when it came to airports.

“Taipei airport has lapped Stockholm Arlanda” Lauren reported from the scene. “Each gate is themed, bathrooms are immaculate (heated seats, multiple kinds of bidets); food is amazing and cheap; food court is themed like a Chinese village.” On top of that the wifi was free and faster than at home and – perhaps the greatest thing of all – there were outlets pretty much everywhere. You can’t ask for much more than that out of an airport.

Also, for some reason, sarsaparilla is very popular in Taiwan and sold pretty much everywhere in the Taipei airport. I don’t remember the last time I saw it here in the US, but if you’ve got a hankerin’ for some, partner, the place to go for a cold, refreshing sarsaparilla is not some sepia-toned Old West saloon but a vending machine in the Departures area of Taiwan’s biggest airport. It’s a strange old world, it is.

So hats off to the Taiwanese for sticking the landing (and takeoff) here.

One of the wonders of the modern age is the fact that with a simple app on your phone you can track pretty much any flight in the world. This never fails to amaze me, particularly as a historian who spends a fair amount of time in my classes emphasizing how slowly everything moved prior to about the early 1800s. For most of human history we lived in a three mile per hour world, where nothing – not people, not goods, and not information – moved faster than that over any appreciable distance. That’s the walking speed of the average adult. That’s how fast a horse moves over long distances. That’s the speed of a sailing ship. 3mph. 5kph. That’s how it was from the first time our species evolved out of whatever preceded it right up to the invention of the steam locomotive in the early 1800s.

Now? I can pull out the tiny little computer in my pocket that masquerades as a phone even though nobody uses it as one, tap on an even tinier icon on the screen, squint a bit, and follow a traveler flying high above the Pacific Ocean at hundreds of miles per hour, and I can do it in real time.

Amazing.

If you have never picked someone up at O’Hare, it’s an experience. They do the best they can to make it work, but a) it’s one of the busiest airports in the world and there is no arrival time you can choose that will not have you grinding your way through traffic to get where you want to go, and b) everything within an hour of the airport is under construction and has been since they rebuilt the city after the Great Fire.

Nevertheless, I successfully found my way to the cell phone lot and settled in. Lauren’s flight landed. Customs were cleared and bags picked up and eventually I found her waiting outside of the Arrivals area and we headed back to Wisconsin, stopping only to get some direly unhealthy American roadside food along the way because welcome home, weary traveler! 

There are a few postscripts to this story.

For one, when we asked Lauren what she wanted for her first dinner after arriving back home she immediately replied “Mexican!” and this is absolutely correct. The rest of the world beyond Mexico and its neighbors, for all of its culinary marvels, is sorely lacking in quality Mexican food whereas we here in Our Little Town have not only all of the finest chain restaurants in America but also some surprisingly good real Mexican food.

For another, now that she was back in the Land of In-Network Insurance Coverage – a uniquely and disturbingly American concept – Lauren went to the local Urgent Care to have her fingers looked at. Apparently she became the star of the Urgent Care as people there were fascinated by the story of how she ended up in this condition. It’s probably not a story they’ve heard much here in Our Little Town in Wisconsin. Her fingers continue to heal.

She also got reacquainted with the cat, who was glad to see her. Midgie is always glad to see her people.

Lauren’s flight landed almost exactly a week before her classes were scheduled to start and I sort of expected her to sleep for most of that week before heading up to campus, but it is easy to forget the recuperative powers of the young when you are no longer part of that demographic and she went back to campus after only a couple of days. Not long after that Arden came to visit and they had a good time together rattling around Main Campus University. They also came down to see us and share a meal and we got to hear more of the stories that way. It was a lovely evening.

And finally, not long after Lauren went back to her apartment near campus, I went up as well and we did a major Costco resupply run since groceries were probably not something that she’d had much time to acquire in those intervening days. On the way back to her apartment we decided to stop for lunch at a Thai restaurant, and it turns out that the owners are from Chang Mai so they had a good time talking with Lauren and hearing her experiences in their hometown. It was really good food, too.

The world is a big and exciting place but it can be very small and welcoming as well.

It is good to travel, to see and experience new things. It is good to come home. It will be good to travel again.

Welcome home, Lauren.