News and Updates

1. I’m enjoying the last few days of the American republic. I suspect I’ll come back to these memories a lot in the coming years.

2. Why is it that every trip to Costco requires an entire shopping cart and costs $400 even if all you initially wanted to buy were cheese puffs? They didn’t even have the cheese puffs this time. We made up for this by purchasing a lifetime supply of shredded cheddar and citrus fruit, and a package of the world’s longest beef sticks. Please note that I am not complaining about any of this, just observing.

3. We now have a new sofa, which Kim has been wanting for years. Our old sofa was a maroon leather Sam’s Club model that we got because we figured it would be easier to clean when the kids were little and in fairness a) we were right about that and b) it held up pretty well for over two decades. But now we are old and wanted something we could sit on for more than an hour at a time without back pain, so last month Kim asked me to go look at sofas at a local furniture store – “just to look!” – and we ended up buying one, as I knew very well we would. It’s grey and comfortable and three much younger people delivered it last week and set it up and so far it’s really nice. Oliver and I took the old one down to the Gamer Nook in the basement where it will likely be passed on to whomever buys this house from us because that thing is heavier than it looks and we’re not bringing it back up. He says it’s nice to have it there.

4. Midgie has decided that the new sofa is acceptable, which is good of her.

5. It is a strange in-between time down at Home Campus, where I am mostly working from home because there is precious little for me to do on campus until the big campus retreats start up next week and the students return the following week. I can do pretty much everything I need to do here while not having to leave the house – three cheers for remote meetings, I suppose – and the few students who need to see me I can handle by going in one or two days a week.  That counts as a win in my book.

6. Anniversaries come and anniversaries go and what are you going to do about them, that’s what I want to know.

7. Our tollway transponders are being phased out in favor of stickers, and I am sure someone can explain how that works even if I don’t particularly want them to do so. I’m not convinced about this at all and I expect that I will get nastygrams from the toll agency about that, but so it goes. We’ll have that conversation as needed.

8. Having now picked up three different people from two separate airports in the last three weeks, I think I am done with that for a while. It’s nice to see people and hear their stories, though. Lauren had a good time visiting Arden and that is a lovely thing.

9. I need to get my next class up and running for the spring, which means putting it all into Canvas and deciding how much of it I want to change. There are at least two discussion assignments I want to replace and if I can get about four years further in lectures then I will arrive at a good stopping point. So, work to be done. At least it’s fun work.

10. I also have several long-term personal projects that I need to work on, some of which involve other people and outlays of money and some of which just require me to sit in front of a computer and move things around into files. Also, tea.