News and Updates

1. I aten’t dead. It just feels that way sometimes here in the depth of the semester. The exams and assignments are coming thick and fast, it’s registration season for next semester’s classes, and it’s all I can do to get from one end of the day to another sometimes. But I have been working on some things that I’ll get posted soon, and that will be a good thing. In the meantime, these little short-item posts are about what I got.

2. I finally got new glasses, more than six months after I got my prescription for them. I let Lauren pick them out because she has fashion sense and I do not. They seem pretty nice.

Yes, I’m that tired.

3. A couple of weeks ago my friend Trish came out to Chicago on a business trip and Kim and I figured “We’re in the midwest! What’s a couple hour drive to have dinner, after all!” and off we went. We drove down early and enjoyed an afternoon rattling around the Ukrainian Village section of Chicago, where Kim’s family lived before they moved to Wisconsin. Ann’s Bakery is still there and apparently much larger now, and we spent a happy hour or so picking out sausages, breads, and pastries in a place where I was probably the only person who didn’t speak Ukrainian. We went over to see the old church that Kim went to as a child, and we found a good Ukrainian restaurant for lunch. And then we made our way to Northbrook, just outside of the city, and met up with Trish. It was lovely catching up with her, and we ended up at a little Italian restaurant called Francesco’s Hole in the Wall, which was, as implied, very very small but had the best Italian sausage I have ever eaten.

4. I very much enjoyed watching the election results come in and seeing the Pedo-in-Chief panic and flail away because of it. It’s one of the few satisfactions one gets from politics these days. I keep telling myself I’m going to write more about politics, but it’s such a dismal thing watching your government implode in real time and take the country with it that it’s hard to focus.

5. It snowed here on Saturday night, our first measurable snowfall of the season. I always love it when it snows because it reminds me that the world can be a beautiful place if we let it. I will admit that I try not to drive in the first real snowfall because it takes Wisconsinites at least two storms to remember how to do that, but from the warmth of my home it was nice to watch the snow come down.

6. The roads were clear by Sunday, though, which was nice because that’s when Lauren and her friends Aleksia, Anita, Aly, and Kyler (just in case you thought they all had to have names beginning with A) came over for dinner. I made spaghetti and meatballs with the family gravy recipe (and yes, it's gravy), Kim made a poppyseed cake, and for an evening the house was noisy with conversation and laughter. I miss that, now that both Lauren and Oliver have moved out, and it was a lovely thing to have again.

7. I’ve been reading the same book now for over a month. It’s not even that long or dense of a book. It’s just hard to focus.

8. A couple of weeks ago I had to go to a meeting over at the Mother Ship Campus – like actually go there, not just parachute in on wings made of Zoom. It was an interesting meeting, in the liberal arts sense of the word “interesting,” about policies being imposed upon us from on high. More and more I am coming to understand the virtues of retirement, a state of being I never really expected to achieve. Perhaps that will change.

9. Kim and I watched the finale of The Great British Bake Off this year, as we always do, and I can’t say that either of us were surprised by the winner. I rather liked her so that was okay too, though my favorite baker was eliminated two weeks earlier. It’s one of those shows that has very low stakes and the people on it genuinely seem to like each other even though they’re competing against each other, and you need that now and then.

10. Apparently today was the day that the last US one-cent coin rolled out of the mint in Philadelphia. On the one hand, this is a smart move and I’ve been advocating for this for over a decade. On the other hand, like pretty much every other policy emitted by Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, cronies, lackeys, and slaves, it was so poorly thought out and executed that despite being a policy that actually made sense it ended up leaving everyone worse off. US coins need a complete overhaul, I think. We need to get rid of the nickel as well, convert the quarter into a 20-cent piece in order to get the change right, bring out a new and more useful fifty-cent piece, get rid of the dollar bill, and add a one-dollar and two-dollar coin. None of this will actually happen, because MURCA, but I can dream.