1. It’s registration season down at Home Campus which means the days are busier than usual and that’s an achievement in a place with as few employees as we have. But it’s nice to see my students and usually they end up getting what they need, which is what they would have wanted had they known.
2. I keep trying to put together another one of those Dispatches From the Coup posts because I feel things need to be documented and protests made, but every day there is just so much more of it to keep track of that I fall behind. I’ll probably end up putting together themed posts rather than a catchall. Today: the slide into Fascist dictatorship! Next: destroying the economy for fun and profit! And on and on. I saw someone online point out that the US has had presidents who wanted to be dictators, presidents who were bigots and assholes, presidents who were corrupt, and presidents who were blisteringly incompetent, but never before have we had all of that in one gaseous package. It’s a lot to follow.
3. The rabbits are outside now, enjoying their hutches and the nice spring breezes. We’re optimistic that this will be permanent, at least until the winter sets back in. The poor bunnies have been yanked in and out repeatedly over the last few weeks as the weather becomes springlike and then winter comes storming back like it wanted one last word in an argument. But the other day they got to play in the grass and that is their definition of bunny paradise.
2. I keep trying to put together another one of those Dispatches From the Coup posts because I feel things need to be documented and protests made, but every day there is just so much more of it to keep track of that I fall behind. I’ll probably end up putting together themed posts rather than a catchall. Today: the slide into Fascist dictatorship! Next: destroying the economy for fun and profit! And on and on. I saw someone online point out that the US has had presidents who wanted to be dictators, presidents who were bigots and assholes, presidents who were corrupt, and presidents who were blisteringly incompetent, but never before have we had all of that in one gaseous package. It’s a lot to follow.
3. The rabbits are outside now, enjoying their hutches and the nice spring breezes. We’re optimistic that this will be permanent, at least until the winter sets back in. The poor bunnies have been yanked in and out repeatedly over the last few weeks as the weather becomes springlike and then winter comes storming back like it wanted one last word in an argument. But the other day they got to play in the grass and that is their definition of bunny paradise.
4. Speaking of bunnies, the Rabbit of Easter brought of the chocolate last weekend (apologies to David Sedaris for stealing that joke) and it was a good time. Easter was never a big holiday in my family growing up so I always forget about it but Kim got the baskets prepped for all of us, and we picked up Lauren on the way to visit my in-laws for the holiday. There was an intense amount of good food and good company, and we made a lovely day of it.
5. It is a strange thing when a moderately known local figure passes away and my social media feed is full of loving paeans to their character and all I can think of is the two-week period I spent interacting with this person over a decade ago and how my big takeaway from that time was “Sweet dancing monkeys on a stick, what a two-bit grifter.” Maybe it was just a bad time for this person. Who knows.
6. Every year I think “this is the summer where I will take it easy and do as little as humanly possible, and perhaps even catch up on some projects I have been putting off” and every summer that does not happen. We make plans. We make plans on top of plans. Plans get made for us. And those plans are always wonderful. I have a great time. I make fantastic memories and acquire lovely stories. And the next summer the cycle repeats. I’m not complaining about this. But someday there will be a summer of not much, too. This is not that summer. I suspect next summer won’t be either. At this point I think we’re pretty much booked solid until early August. I will enjoy it all, but I will be tired. Oh well. I’ll sleep later.
7. I finally decided to spring for a subscription to the Newspapers.com side-hustle that Ancestry runs, and I’ve been having a good time entering random names from my family to see what I can find. Mostly what I have found is that we are not a very newsworthy bunch, though every now and then something does come up. My grandfather played on a handful of sandlot baseball teams in Philadelphia in the early 1930s and I see his name in a lot of box scores, for example. He was apparently a very good contact hitter.
8. I got to give my “Witchcraft in America” talk to my friend’s religious studies class again, today, and I had a very nice time doing so. Every year I tweak it about 5%, adding new details, taking out bits that didn’t work as well as I wanted. It has some fun stories that I enjoy telling, and it’s always interesting to see how people react to them.
9. Now if we could only get the technology in the room to do what it says it can do, we’ll be ahead of the game.
10. It’s been interesting watching the preparations for the next Pope now that I have actually been to the Vatican. I see these news stories and mostly I think, “I remember that place!” I’m not sure this is what I am supposed to think under these circumstances, but the mind is a lonely hunter and it goes after the thoughts it wants.
6 comments:
2. “one gaseous package.” Truth.
5. I have reason to believe that there are those whose only memory of me will be my despicable period …
It is a fear that I have.
6. Doing “as little as humanly possible” and “catch[ing] up on some projects I have been putting off” are mutually exclusive goals.
8. Once again, you are not allowed to tease. Share … ! 🧐
Lucy
5. You can't control what someone remembers, especially if you don't see them anymore. All you can do is give someone else something better to remember.
6. I suppose so. But it made sense at the time. It's not like my projects are all that taxing. ;)
8. Perhaps! I will likely give this talk again, though, and I generally don't put presentations here unless I am fairly confident I won't have to give them again. I might anyway, though. It would be very long - it's about 7750 words or so, plus a 69-slide PPT presentation. That would be about half again longer than my previous long post, even without the images. It would be a challenge.
8. This is the space you have chosen to preserve.
You could break it into about 10 parts over, oh, say, about a year.
Alternatively, Selected Tales would also work.
We are easily entertained.
Yes. We are.
Lucy
I'll think about it. Perhaps I'll check with my friend whose class I give that talk in, and see what he thinks of it.
Hi Lucy -
I finally caught up with my colleague and he said he'd be okay with me posting that here so I'll try to work it into a post soon. Likely not this weekend, for reasons that will become clear soon enough. But perhaps next week.
Seriously - No Rush.
Take your time, attend to that which requires your attentions.
Lucy
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