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.