1. The semester is now officially over and there is nothing left but the graduating, which is always a good place to be. I turned in the last of my grades this afternoon. I’ll miss those students – they’re all most of the way across the state and some of them I’ve had for the entire year, and I’ll not be seeing them again unless something very unusual happens. My advisees down at Home Campus who are graduating I will see at least once more, most of them, but then they’re off as well. It’s the circle of academic life, I suppose.
2. I won’t miss all of them, though, particularly in my other class. AI has made a qualitative leap forward in the last few months and I have had too many performances of the Academic Integrity Song & Dance routine because of that. AI is making people exponentially more stupid in a way that you can actually track in real time, and having a front-row seat to that debacle has been dispiriting at best.
3. We may need to call it a day for Oliver’s tree. When Oliver was a baby there was a huge straight-line windstorm that blew through Our Little Town and wiped out dozens of trees in our neighborhood, so one of the local tree-centered alliances offered to plant a tree in the terrace of everyone who asked and we ended up with a European hornbeam. It grew pretty well until a couple of years ago when the neighbor’s maple tree split and had to be removed and from then on our tree had no protection from the storms and high winds that seem to be more and more common these days. It lost its top third a few weeks after that, and today when I came home from work after two solid days of high winds and occasional storms both of the major branches on the north side were either on the ground or hanging by a thread. We’ll take the latter one off and see if the tree survives or not, but I’m not really optimistic. It was a nice little tree. Still is, at least for now.
4. I’m not much of a bicycle person. I haven’t ridden one for more than five minutes at a go in decades, and while I am a fan of a fair number of rather niche sports (curling, for example), long-distance cycling races have never been my thing. But after I got home from last summer’s visit to the Italian hill town where my great-grandparents were born I signed up for the town Facebook page and it’s been nice being able to keep up with the place and have that connection. A couple of weeks ago they announced that the Giro d’Italia – the Italian version of the Tour de France, as near as I can tell, or maybe the Tour is the French version of the Giro – would be passing right down the main street of Ruoti on May 15. Given the time differences there was no chance of me seeing it live, but when I got home from work yesterday I found the replay of that stage (complete with vibrantly Irish announcers for some reason) and watched until I saw things I recognized. It was really lovely to see the riders zip along the crowd-lined street and think, “I know that place! I have met some of those people!” It is the sense of connection that makes us human, I think, and you need that reminder now and then. Buon giorno, Ruoti!
2. I won’t miss all of them, though, particularly in my other class. AI has made a qualitative leap forward in the last few months and I have had too many performances of the Academic Integrity Song & Dance routine because of that. AI is making people exponentially more stupid in a way that you can actually track in real time, and having a front-row seat to that debacle has been dispiriting at best.
3. We may need to call it a day for Oliver’s tree. When Oliver was a baby there was a huge straight-line windstorm that blew through Our Little Town and wiped out dozens of trees in our neighborhood, so one of the local tree-centered alliances offered to plant a tree in the terrace of everyone who asked and we ended up with a European hornbeam. It grew pretty well until a couple of years ago when the neighbor’s maple tree split and had to be removed and from then on our tree had no protection from the storms and high winds that seem to be more and more common these days. It lost its top third a few weeks after that, and today when I came home from work after two solid days of high winds and occasional storms both of the major branches on the north side were either on the ground or hanging by a thread. We’ll take the latter one off and see if the tree survives or not, but I’m not really optimistic. It was a nice little tree. Still is, at least for now.
4. I’m not much of a bicycle person. I haven’t ridden one for more than five minutes at a go in decades, and while I am a fan of a fair number of rather niche sports (curling, for example), long-distance cycling races have never been my thing. But after I got home from last summer’s visit to the Italian hill town where my great-grandparents were born I signed up for the town Facebook page and it’s been nice being able to keep up with the place and have that connection. A couple of weeks ago they announced that the Giro d’Italia – the Italian version of the Tour de France, as near as I can tell, or maybe the Tour is the French version of the Giro – would be passing right down the main street of Ruoti on May 15. Given the time differences there was no chance of me seeing it live, but when I got home from work yesterday I found the replay of that stage (complete with vibrantly Irish announcers for some reason) and watched until I saw things I recognized. It was really lovely to see the riders zip along the crowd-lined street and think, “I know that place! I have met some of those people!” It is the sense of connection that makes us human, I think, and you need that reminder now and then. Buon giorno, Ruoti!
5. I’m not Catholic, but I suspect I’m going to like this new Pope.
This is on top of the fact that, as a Villanova University graduate, he may be the first pope in history to have ever eaten a genuine cheesesteak. Chicago has claimed him, but that’s just an accident of birth. He went to the Philadelphia metro area voluntarily.
6. Now that the semester is over I have time to look at the things we’re planning for the summer and I think I will rest when classes start up again in the fall. It’s going to be that kind of summer. All good things, mind you, and in the end I will be glad I did them. But very, very busy.
7. I am mystified by spreadsheets. If I play my cards right I will retire before ever being asked to learn Microsoft Excel in any systematic or in depth sort of way. There are a lot of computer programs that I feel that way about, to be honest, but Excel is the only one that I get asked to use at work. It took me a decade to figure out how to freeze the first column of a spreadsheet, and every time I want to sort anything I have to spend fifteen minutes relearning how. So I leave the spreadsheets to Kim, as she enjoys them. Much of our summer is sitting on at least four different spreadsheets now and it’s all rather overwhelming.
8. This is the year when I may not actually bother with my annual Books Read post. I’m just not reading much these days. If I hurry, I may finish my fifth book soon – one per month, in other words – which just three or four years ago was something I did by the end of January. It’s been a time. There’s a great little meme that floats by my social media feed a lot recently where the original post is lamenting how little they accomplish nowadays and then “the tiny me in OSHA-approved Hi-Vis Gear who lives in my brain and pulls all the levers” says, “Boss, it’s the fascism.” Yeah, I feel that.
9. On the other hand, I hope springs eternal and it turns out that Christopher Moore and Fredrik Backman have both published new books this year so perhaps things will rebound. No promises.
10. The hockey playoffs are continuing even though my Flyers didn’t get anywhere near them. The Premier League has a few more weeks to go and Wolves won’t actually be relegated as looked all but certain in January. Eurovision has returned with its usual assortment of camp, gender fluidity, power ballads, lasers, and inexplicable voting decisions and that will likely get a post of its own soon because sometimes you just have to spend some time talking about the harmlessly weird things that entertain you. Home Campus had its semi-annual potluck this week and you cannot go wrong with a potluck in the midwest. My Wordle streak and Spelling Bee “Genius” streak are still alive and I am learning by osmosis what a Pikman Bloom is even if I am not personally involved in that quest. There is good in this world, after all.
No comments:
Post a Comment