1. It’s Spring Break Month here in Baja Canada, which is what happens when you have four people in an academic family who have absolutely zero overlap in their Spring Break weeks so there is about that much chance of us doing anything together. I don’t get much of a spring break, to be honest, since the two campuses I work for do that at different times so I get two half-breaks which isn’t all that helpful. Kim’s on her break right now, except that she’s in a far-off city at a conference, from which she will have to do work for Home Campus anyway because that’s just how that goes and that’s not much of a break either. Oliver’s break was a couple of weeks ago but he had so much to do, being a first-year graduate student, that the only thing that was different for him was that he didn’t actually have to go to classes. Lauren is visiting Shai right now and that genuinely is a break so I’m glad that one of us got to have one. There will be stories later, no doubt.
2. Kim and I were hoping to continue our streak of Traveling Abroad this year but we looked at the current state of both international politics and prices (both of which are now … what’s the jargon term that economists use in these situations? … oh, right … “thoroughly fucked”) and decided that perhaps staying closer to home this year would be a good idea. So we’ve got a smaller thing planned and perhaps some others will be added at some point. As problems go this is a fairly high-class one to have, but still. It is one more black mark to be added to the account of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, cronies, lackeys, enablers, and slaves.
3. Watching the slow-motion suicide of a Great Power from the inside has been a grotesque way to spend time, really. The illegal and blisteringly incompetent war of aggression against Iran, the unfathomably cruel strangulation of Cuba that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is waging that nobody in this country seems to be aware of, the slow-drip of Epstein Files revelations confirming ever more conclusively that the Only President This Country Has is a child rapist surrounded by people who don’t consider that a deal-breaker and are happily willing to violate the law to protect him and cover up his crimes, the open and ongoing financial corruption that makes the Gilded Age look pristine, the continuing rampage of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s unaccountable army of thugs through American streets, the tanking of both the American and the global economies, the destruction of NATO – seriously, it never ends with this crew of cannibals. I very much look forward to clear, unambiguous, and brutally blunt justice being served, and while I have already had to wait far longer than I had hoped for it I will not be deterred from believing that this nation will at some point see that justice served cold and hard.
2. Kim and I were hoping to continue our streak of Traveling Abroad this year but we looked at the current state of both international politics and prices (both of which are now … what’s the jargon term that economists use in these situations? … oh, right … “thoroughly fucked”) and decided that perhaps staying closer to home this year would be a good idea. So we’ve got a smaller thing planned and perhaps some others will be added at some point. As problems go this is a fairly high-class one to have, but still. It is one more black mark to be added to the account of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, cronies, lackeys, enablers, and slaves.
3. Watching the slow-motion suicide of a Great Power from the inside has been a grotesque way to spend time, really. The illegal and blisteringly incompetent war of aggression against Iran, the unfathomably cruel strangulation of Cuba that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is waging that nobody in this country seems to be aware of, the slow-drip of Epstein Files revelations confirming ever more conclusively that the Only President This Country Has is a child rapist surrounded by people who don’t consider that a deal-breaker and are happily willing to violate the law to protect him and cover up his crimes, the open and ongoing financial corruption that makes the Gilded Age look pristine, the continuing rampage of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s unaccountable army of thugs through American streets, the tanking of both the American and the global economies, the destruction of NATO – seriously, it never ends with this crew of cannibals. I very much look forward to clear, unambiguous, and brutally blunt justice being served, and while I have already had to wait far longer than I had hoped for it I will not be deterred from believing that this nation will at some point see that justice served cold and hard.
4. On Monday we had a blizzard. Today it was 75F (24C). Living in Wisconsin can be strange.
5. One of the ways I have been trying to distract myself from current events has been to get back into genealogy, a deep rabbit hole into which news and events rarely penetrate. After not being able to find my paternal grandmother and her family in the indexed versions of the recently released 1950 Census, I decided to put my research skills to some use and go to the actual documents to see for myself. And it seems that she managed to duck the entire census. I found the sheet where their house should be, and it is not there. On the one hand, this is entirely in character for my grandmother and I have to admire the commitment to the bit. That whole family was like that. I located her parents – my great-grandparents – who were still living at the ancestral family home in West Philly at the time, and both of them reported their ages as being at least a decade younger than they actually were (if the ages they gave were accurate neither one of them would have hit their teens when my grandmother was born and I know for a fact that was not the case). So I’m not surprised that she’s not there. On the other hand, it is disappointing as I had hoped that document could help clear up the ongoing mystery of my grandmother’s marital status in 1950. We press on.
6. I spent a good portion of the last couple of months doing Committee Work down at Home Campus, and on Thursday night this particular committee’s task ended successfully so now I can put down my keyboard and retire from those duties with the sense of a job well done. Three cheers to my fellow committee members and all those who made it happen. One takes one’s victories where they arise.
7. Sometime in November Kim and I got replacement credit cards. I don’t know why this happened, since we’d just gotten replacement cards in June because my previous card was probably sitting in a landfill in Florence somewhere. The first replacement cards were working fine so it was a bit of a mystery, particularly as the relevant numbers remained unchanged. I actually called the credit card company to ask about it and they said, “Yes, those are legit, go ahead and validate them.” And that would have been the end of it except that every time I pull out this latest card I am reminded once again that this card is made of depleted uranium and grief. It is the heaviest card I have ever owned – easily twice the weight of any other card in my wallet – and I have no idea why this is so. Sometimes I just randomly hand it to people to see what their reaction is and it never ceases to amaze them. It is a mystery.
8. It is March Madness season, the only time of the year when basketball of any description makes any noticeable impact on my life, and I have dutifully filled out my bracket. My designated champion lost their first game and pretty much every team I actually thought would be interesting is gone as well, though I did somehow manage to call one entire region correctly in the first round based purely on vibes, so I’ve got that going for me. I am the only person in the family who filled out a bracket and yet I suspect I have still managed to lose this year’s contest anyway.
9. I really hate the fact that the internet killed the phone book and then got so enshittified that you can’t actually find a business anymore. We need a Large Household Project to be done by someone else, and half the results I get by searching online are either a) not in that actual line of business, b) not anywhere in the time zone despite my specifying the actual town I was trying to search, and/or c) so long gone and forgotten that their phone number has been reassigned. This does not strike me as progress.
10. I finally got new headlights on my car. After 20 years the plastic housings had gotten so opaque that they really didn’t illuminate anything anymore, and it is nice to be able to see where I’m going when driving in the dark again. It’s the little things.
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