News and Updates

1. Lauren has made it back from her travels safe and sound. I picked her up at the airport on Tuesday and it was nice having her around for a couple of days before she headed back up to her own apartment tonight. She has graciously given me permission to tell the story of her summer journey from my perspective, so at some point I will do that. She has become quite the traveler now, far more so than either me or Kim, and as much as I am glad to have her back I will admit that she’d probably have been happier continuing on. Perhaps next summer.

2. Everything returns, but what returns is not what went away. (Louise Glück)

3 Oliver’s classes have started and there is always a certain excitement to that – the orientations are done and now it’s time to get down to classroom business.

4. My own classes start next week and I’m both looking forward to them because I always love telling stories and I generally like my students and not looking forward to them because they are a lot of work and grading sucks.

5. Grading has in fact taken up a great deal of my time of late, mostly because there’s always someone who thinks they deserve a grade for work they didn’t do and it is a special joy to remind them that this is not the case, particularly in Wisconsin where the Academic Integrity Code has the force of state law. But it is a process, and that takes time and energy.

6. I’m not going to write about the political situation here except to say that every day brings more sickening evidence that the United States has already crossed the line into Fascist dictatorship and historically there has been only one way out of that situation. Don’t lie to yourself. Don’t look away. Don’t submit. It’s going to get ugly and the only question is how ugly. At some point I’ll write about it again, but right now I’m just watching it happen.

7. I think there should be a rule in all workplaces that they’re not allowed to replace more than one mission-critical software package at the same time. Right now I’m trying to navigate three of these changes down at Home Campus and I have to tell you that it’s been interesting, in the liberal arts sense of the term, the way three-headed frogs are … interesting.

8. I’m always impressed at how much time, labor, and money people will spend to create, introduce, and troubleshoot systems designed to replace simple human judgment. One of the processes I was recently trained on for one of the new software packages took over an hour to explain the various steps one has to take to do something that we used to just do by hand in three minutes and we didn’t actually complete the training, so there’s probably at least that much more to go. This to me is not progress, even if it is automated.

9. And get off my lawn.

10. Every week here in Our Little Town they embark on a new road construction project, which is a good thing in that the roads really need it and in the end it will be much nicer to get around the place, but it does make it difficult to get anywhere, particularly as the projects compound and slowly hem us in. At current rate sometime next month we will have to have our groceries airdropped to the back yard and simply wait it all out rather than try to Dukes Of Hazzard our way through the construction zones to the supermarket.