Back and Between

Well, we’re back.

We’ve been there and back again and it was a lovely holiday all around, and at some point in the next day or two I will get some actual blogging done about it because this is where I put my stories so I don’t forget them but for now I’m still just sort of lazing around in a holiday-filled cheese-induced haze.

We got the house at least somewhat decorated for Christmas before we left, collected all of the people who were coming with us, and then went to Chattanooga for the holiday to spend some time with my side of the family. It was a far less ad-hoc experience than the last time we did this a couple of years ago, but what it lacked in buccaneering spirit it more than made up for in just being a good time with good people.

We got back late Saturday and have been enjoying doing not much of much at all since then, though today Kim and I were both working from home and Oliver is working on a project from last semester that he has to finish by the 9th. The cat has been very glad to see us and at some point soon she may actually detach herself from us physically. She was well cared for while we were away, but she definitely wants her people around. 

As a welcome home gift yesterday Wisconsin presented us with an inch or two of powdery snow being blown about by 30mph (48kph) winds such that when I went to shovel out this morning about half the driveway was bare and the other half was a handsbreadth deep but the joy of powder is that you can just sort of shove it along with only one hand on the shovel.

I had to get some errands done this afternoon but tomorrow my goal is not to leave the house at all. We’ll see how that goes.

This is the lawless part of the calendar year – the timeless part in between that nobody really tracks. You can sit around in sweatpants eating pie and watching irrelevant sporting events or reading whatever comes to hand, listening to whatever you want on Spotify since it won’t show up for next year’s Wrap until January, and generally not paying attention to the world for a bit. I feel I should be doing more bacchanalian things but then I have always felt that way, even when I was much younger, and I am old enough now that my definition of bacchanalian is mostly about books and tea anyway, so perhaps I already am.

It's not a bad way to spend a few days.

A Long Time Ago

I was born at a little before six in the morning on a fairly warm solstice in Philadelphia, the only thing of any real significance that I did at that hour until I was in my thirties. It was just me and my mom in the delivery room, along with an assortment of whatever medical personnel were on hand. They didn’t let dads into those rooms back then, so my dad was home waiting for the phone call. After it came he violated nearly every traffic law the city had on his way down to the hospital.

I was glad that those rules no longer applied when I had my own kids. The delivery room rules, I mean. I got to be there when Oliver and Lauren were born, and while my role was mostly ceremonial it is an experience I treasure.

Traffic laws still have their place, though they do get more generously interpreted in the area around a hospital. People are in a hurry, after all.

My dad told me that I was born on a fairly warm day and it stayed warm for a while after that, until early January when I was christened in the middle of a blizzard. “You opened the front door and the wind blew you out the back,” he said. But that was later. They kept new mothers in the hospital for a long time back then, something that annoyed my mother to no end. Eventually she decided that she felt fine and she wanted to bring her newborn home for Christmas so she checked herself out and off we went. As the first grandchild on either side, I got passed around like a prize. My uncle gave me a stuffed Huckleberry Hound as my first Christmas gift, and I kept it until it fell apart about a decade ago. They said I handled the holiday pretty well for a first-timer. I probably slept through most of it, if I know me.

That was a long time ago now.

But every year on this day I officially get another year older. I can’t say I feel all that different from one day to the next, but it all accumulates and eventually I notice.

It’s going to be a pretty quiet day. Oliver’s already home. Lauren and Shai will come down later. We’ll have a nice dinner and maybe play some cards and hang out, just the five of us. That sounds like a great birthday to me.

The older you get the more you look back, because there’s more there to see back there with each passing day. It’s been a busy year, and there hasn’t been much time or energy for reflection but it’s good to do that now and then.

I’m not sure what the future will hold but we press on regardless, shaping what comes next as best we can.

Happy birthday to me.

News and Updates

1. The semester is rapidly coming to an end now, which you might think would mean that I’ll soon have time to relax if you weren’t already familiar with how my life works. There will be very little relaxing in the next few weeks, even if all of the various activities that are currently on my schedule will be enjoyable. I suppose I’ll relax at some point down the line, and then I’ll have some good memories to relive. We’ll call that even.

2. All of this semester’s classes for Home Campus are now put to bed and cleaned off my computer’s desktop (where I keep the currently active tasks). Grades are submitted, the first student complaint has already been received, and when I get back into the office tomorrow I will start the process of recycling last semester’s printouts and stacking this semester’s until the next round appears. It’s the circle of academic life. I still have my Far Away Campus class, but the lectures are done and all that remains is Friday’s final exam. The never-ending online class will actually come to an end on New Year’s Day, at least for me, and it will be nice to have my Saturdays back and not find myself grading essays on my phone in some agriturismo in rural Italy again. Not that I have any problem with being in rural Italy! I just had more satisfying things to do while I was there than remind students to cite their sources.

3. It’s definitely winter here in Baja Canada. We’ve gotten more snow since Thanksgiving than we got all winter last year, and today when I woke up it was -9F (-23C) with a windchill of -26F (-32C). That’s January weather around here, not December. But I like it, if I’m being honest. I love when the snow covers things, making them beautiful in their austere way, and the temperatures still beat the heat of August. You can always add clothing but there is a limit to how much you can take off, especially in the US. And even if you exceed that limit, you are still too hot. Give me my sweatshirts and my hot tea and a good book, and this is my weather.

4. I’m trying to gear up for the holiday season, as much as one can in these parlous times. I refuse to acknowledge Christmas until after Thanksgiving, and since the winter started good and hard exactly when that happened I have put up no decorations. The plan is to at least get the trees up and decorated this week – we now have two, one for the regular ornaments and one for the travel ornaments that have proliferated with such abandon in recent years, which is a sign of a good life.

5. Last month we all went up to see the photographs that Lauren’s bestie Aleksia had in an exhibit in town. They were lovely photos, and she is a talented artist. Plus we got to go to dinner with Lauren afterwards at a Laotian restaurant that we’d never tried before, and that was good too.

6. Speaking of things that I probably should have written about sooner, last week I checked in with the Internet Road Trip that I started following back in early June and, well. You can understand why democracy is as hard as it is. For those who don’t remember, a website set up a first-person-driver game where anyone logged in could vote on what to do next as it careened down Google Street View. In theory the plan was to get from Boston to Los Angeles, but most of the first month was spent in Nova Scotia which, you will note, is east of Boston. Sometime in October they found their way back into the US, but last week they were somewhere in Quebec and still east of Chicago. So it’s been six months and they’re nowhere near either completion or the correct path, but there are still a lot of people chiming in and that has to count for something.

7. We picked up Lauren and Shai at the bus station last week since they wanted to borrow my car for a few days, and from there we visited the place that had the best fried cheese curds here in Our Little Town because that is a very Wisconsin thing to do and we need to get Shai used to such things. There is nothing remotely healthy on the menu of this place, and that is just part of its charm. We spent the rest of the evening playing cards and hanging out and it was a lovely time. Lauren and Shai took off the next day to see The House on the Rock, which is a monument to what happens when too much money meets not nearly enough medication that you simply must see if you are in southern Wisconsin, and we got the full report Friday night when we met them at a Thai restaurant to collect the car again. It’s been a good week that way.

8. Just because I’m not writing about the horrors of living in Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s America doesn’t mean I’m not paying attention to them or that I am not incandescently angry about them. And if you are not similarly enraged, you need to re-evaluate your life.

9. I keep thinking that I should get a new calendar for my office, since the year is rapidly drawing to a close, but I know in the depths of my being that I won’t actually get around to doing that until sometime in February because that’s just how that goes. I have accepted this as a cost of doing business as me.

10. Every time I think I have managed to blot out all of the various ways that companies are trying to shove AI down my throat, they figure out ways to get around me and try again. Right now at work every time I open a Word document (which is the program that the university has paid for us to use) there is a floating icon advertising Microsoft’s version of this foul and invasive process and no amount of research has yet to provide an answer for how I can get rid of it. Or, rather, it has provided several ways – some of them from Microsoft itself – but none of the things they tell me to click on actually exist in the program on my computer. Go HERE and click on THIS it says, but there is no THIS (and sometimes there’s no HERE) and I suspect that somewhere a coder with a seventh-grade sense of humor is enjoying this immensely.

The End of Western Civilization

I gave my last ever exam in Western Civ II this morning.

It’s a class I’ve taught many times, and it’s one of my favorites. It moves right along – I start in 1300 or so with a broad and vaguely Scholastic overview of how medieval Europeans thought the world ought to be organized (feudalism, orders, and so on) and we usually run out of time right around the end of the 20th century with the EU and the disintegration of Yugoslavia serving as contrasting post-Cold-War trends. Along the way we go through several of my favorite set-pieces – Malthus and the Counter-Enlightenment; why Freud was a terrible psychologist but a fantastic symbol of his era; the tripwires that led to WWI; the Dawes Plan. It’s a fun class to teach.

This year I really had a particularly wonderful bunch of students. They were comfortable asking questions – and not just one or two talkative students, but probably about half of them. They got along well with each other. It’s one of the few classes I’ve ever taught – and certainly the first one since the pandemic – where I routinely had to call the class to order because they were so engrossed with conversations spanning the entire room. And their work was interesting. Most of my assignments require students to take a position and defend it with evidence and I always appreciate it when they don’t all end up on one side. It’s more interesting, and it’s nice when they take positions opposed to the ones they hear from me. That’s why I give them that evidence to use, after all.

Plus, for the last few years I’ve been putting together PowerPoint slides to show them as I run through my stories. It’s interesting to see what people and things looked like, after all. As we get into the 20th century I start to slip old photos of my family into the presentations. I used to do this just for me but recently I’ve been pointing out to classes which photos these are because the students seem to like knowing that these events have a connection to the class. The first family photo that makes it into the slideshow is one of someone on my dad’s side of the family who served in WWI. This year that inspired two students to search through their own family photos and then show me the results. That was really impressive, I thought.

But all good things must come to an end, however prematurely.

The state legislature in its infinite hostility to higher education declared that we needed to revamp all of our gen-eds on an insanely compressed schedule, and then the Mother Ship Campus decided not to follow the lead of every other such campus implementing all of this and instead impose their unique curriculum on us, with the net result being that we’re going to be devoting a wholly disproportionate amount of our time on those classes and not much else.

And somewhere in that cloud of dust, my little Western Civ II class disappeared.

The other historian on campus and I are going to be teaching a new required class – Twentieth-Century World History – that hasn’t been taught on our campus for so long that nobody can find a syllabus for it, so we’ll be working on figuring that out. I can reuse about a third of my Western Civ II material for it, including at least two of the set-pieces that I enjoy, and I’ve got some ideas on how to set up the rest of the class as well so it should be fine.

But I will miss Western Civ II.

A Thanksgiving Holiday That Couldn't Be Beat

Everything’s put away now. The dishes are all washed. The extra chairs are back in the garage. The dining room table is round again instead of oval. But for a while all was noise and chaos and motion and it was a lovely way to spend a holiday.

We’ve been empty nesters now for real ever since we dropped Oliver off at his graduate school apartment in early August, but both he and Lauren were coming home for Thanksgiving. We spent some time getting the house ready – mostly making sure their beds had clean sheets and blankets – and figuring out what everyone’s plans were.

Lauren arrived Tuesday evening without any difficulties, but Oliver had a bit of an adventure getting back. The plan was for him to take a train from where he goes to school and then switch to a bus in Chicago that would take him to Our Little Town, and that would have been simple except that the train was late enough that there was a real chance he’d miss his bus – the last one until the morning – and then I’d have to drive down to Chicago to pick him up, and while that’s just what you do in those circumstances it was something I’d hoped to avoid as driving in Chicago is never a good idea even in the best of times. Fortunately Kim thought to call the bus company and they agreed to hold the bus for five or ten minutes. Oliver made it with moments to spare, and all I had to do was pick him up at our local bus station at 2am in a howling windstorm, which was much nicer than driving to Chicago.

Wednesday morning Lauren took my car and went down to O’Hare to pick up Shai, whom she met in Vietnam this past summer. Shai flew in from South Africa, where his family is, and once Lauren had picked him up she started his American education by driving to the nearest Culvers for some MURCAN food (seriously – if you want to know what the platonic ideal of a fast-food burger is you can skip the rest and go straight to your nearest Culvers and be enlightened) and then to various and sundry other places before returning back to Our Little Town. We enjoyed meeting him and getting to know him over the holiday weekend. 

One of the newer traditions – newer to me, anyway – surrounding Thanksgiving break is that when people come back to their home towns from wherever it is they’ve been they gather with their old high school friends for Blackout Wednesday, which is essentially a pub crawl. I volunteered to be one of the designated drivers for the evening and ended up having dinner with Lauren and her friends at one of the local Mexican restaurants, one chosen specifically because they also serve yard-high towers of margaritas (and, for the DD, horchata).

Someone told the waiter that it was Shai’s birthday and he was game to play along, though at some point in the process I suspect he may have had second thoughts about that.

We then went to another place that was more of a bar, where I rediscovered just how old I am, and then I dropped them off at another place downtown and let them have at it while I went home to recover my hearing. Apparently a good time was had, and the call to take people home came around 1am. After a short visit to the local Kwik Trip (a midwest staple) for snacks I took everyone back to their respective spots and we called it a night.

I slept in the next morning because it was Thanksgiving Day and holidays are meant for that sort of thing. Lauren and Shai met up with a good chunk of the squad for the annual Turkey Trot here in Our Little Town and three cheers to Shai for having the wherewithal to do that after a long travel day and a short night. It was a cold morning, but spirits were high and Turkeys were Trotted like nobody’s business.

After which there was much napping, because that’s how that goes.

We’ve been driving up to Rory and Amy’s for Thanksgiving for the last few years for a celebration of food and family, so after a morning spent making pies, biscuits and pizzelles to share we piled into the minivan and headed on over.

It’s always a good time seeing everyone, and there was plenty of good food and good company to be had. There’s a constant swirl of people to talk with and things to eat and eventually you get to everyone and roll away full.

Friday was kind of a relaxing day after all that activity. Lauren took Shai out to explore Our Little Town while Oliver got caught up on some work he had to do and then joined me in our daily assault on WhenTaken.  For those of you who haven’t found this, it’s a once-a-day game where you get five historical photographs from anywhere in the world – some as old as the 1870s, others as recent as 2024 – and you have to guess where and when the photos were taken. For history nerds such as me and Oliver, it is just the most wonderful thing ever and it’s probably not an accident that our highest scores ever came when we were working together. We’ve been doing this for about a month now, and so far there have been two photos of places that I recognized instantly because I’d been there and that is an odd kind of thrill.

I made lasagna for dinner, and after that Lauren and Shai headed up to her apartment to beat the snow that was scheduled for Saturday.

Kim and I were supposed to go to Madison Saturday for her birthday, as there was a concert that she wanted to see as her designated gift, but as the day drew nearer the weather forecast got grimmer and in the end they postponed the concert to February and we just stayed home. I cleared off the first 8 inches (20cm) of snow at some point – those who laugh at someone clearing 8 inches of snow in the middle of a storm have never cleared 14 inches (35cm) of snow at the end of a storm – and we had a quiet evening of Bake Off, hockey, and popcorn while the world slowly disappeared under a blanket of white.

I tried to clear the last 6 inches (15cm) of snow the next day but the snowblower was not really up to the task and at any rate it died about 5% of the way into that job so Oliver and I had to resort to shovels. Somewhere I have almost this exact picture of my brother and my dad. What goes around comes around.

The last big event of the holiday weekend was later that day when we hosted Friendsgiving. This is not an event that happened when I was younger, as far as I remember, and I have to say that I really like the idea of making Thanksgiving something that is shared with friends and not just family. We had the family Thanksgiving on the day, and then on Sunday a pile of Lauren’s and Oliver’s friends came over. We all squeezed into the dining room and shared a loud and joyful meal together and it was a lovely time all around. Sometimes, if you are very lucky in this world, you will realize that the good times are happening while they are happening and then you can just let them wash over you and enjoy them.

Even Midgie relaxed and got into the spirit of things.

Sunday was also Kim’s actual birthday, so there were two different cakes and a couple of pies and we all sang happy birthday.

Afterward there were games and activities.

This was Shai’s first real experience with snow and to celebrate he decided to dive face-first into it. When you live in Wisconsin you get kind of jaded to the snow after a while, and it is always good to be reminded of just how exciting it can be when it is new.

Eventually it was time to wind down. I ended up taking Lauren, Shai, and Anita back to their apartment by Main Campus University, while Oliver turned in early so he could sleep a bit before taking the 3:30am bus back to Chicago and his train back to school – a process that went much more smoothly than his trip out.

And now we’re back to normal, or as close to that as we get, with a nice pile of memories and stories to hold onto, and that is how holidays should go.