News and Updates

1. In the past seven days it has been 27F (-3C) and 84F (29C) here. We’ve had sunny days and severe thunderstorms. We had three separate tornado warnings in a two-hour span one night (none of which came close to our house, but the sky was notably yellow). It’s been a time.

2. The rusting silver pickup that has been parked across the street from our driveway for most the past two months (with the brief exception of the blizzard a couple of weeks ago, when everything had to be moved off the street) has finally gone away. On the one hand, it’s a legal parking spot on a public street so there really wasn’t anything we could do about it. On the other hand, it’s nice to be able to back out of the driveway without trying to thread that particular needle anymore.

3. I spent most of today driving, mainly to pick up Lauren at O’Hare from her trip to visit Shai in South Africa and deposit her back in her apartment up by Main Campus University. In this era of uncertainty it was nice that all of her flights went well – the main holdup in Chicago was actually baggage claim rather than security so that was good. She had a lovely time in South Africa and got to see some of the country with Shai while she was visiting. They bopped around Cape Town, where Shai’s family lives. They saw Bafana Bafana in action. They went out to South Africa’s wine country for a few days. They went to one of the townships, which is not something most visitors do – on the plus side Lauren got to help one of the market vendors butcher a chicken, something she has now done on three different continents, but on the down side our bank looked at some of the purchases she made in that market and thought, “that can’t be right” and put a hold on her card until she could explain things, which was complicated by the fact that they don’t use WhatsApp but eventually it got resolved. So it was a good trip and now she is back in Wisconsin to tell us stories.

4. Also, a quick shoutout to the Ethiopian Airlines ground crew in Addis Ababa, who not only got Lauren from her arriving flight from Chicago to her connecting flight to Cape Town in the 15 minutes they had between the first one landing to the second one taking off (a process that involved a bus across the tarmac directly from one plane to the other and a quick climb up the stairs into the back of the plane while they were loading the food) but also managed to get her luggage on board as well.

5. I spent a good chunk of the past week trying to clear my advisees who are graduating this semester, which is a much more complicated process than it used to be because back in the day I would just look at their transcript, compare it with the degree requirements, and write a note on a spreadsheet to say that everything checked out, but these days there is a Computer Program that in theory is supposed to automate much of this task but which in practice required me to spend several days trying to figure out how to explain to the Computer Program that the neat little boxes it divides everything into do not correspond in any meaningful way to the actual lived experiences of flesh-and-blood students. I am not sure this constitutes progress.

6. This is a general problem with This Modern Age, in my experience. We spend so much time, energy, and money trying to automate human judgment which could make those calls quicker, easier, and more cheaply. I do not think This Modern Age was built with me in mind.

7. I visited the Tax Prep Person at the end of last month and let them get on with all of that, a discovery that I made the year after my mom died and let me tell you it was just lovely to have someone else handle that. And they found me a refund I wasn’t expecting so it worked out. This year I’m still waiting for a couple of documents and I’m not likely to get anything back but it should get done. I have to admit, I don’t think the regime of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, cronies, lackeys, enablers, and slaves has done anything in the last fifteen months to merit me paying them any taxes, but so it goes.

8. I read recently that the reason Americans hate paying taxes while Europeans don’t seem to mind it nearly as much is that Europeans generally get services in return for their taxes while Americans mostly get bombs and oligarchs. I can’t say I disagree.

9. Here we are only seven games from the end of the season and the Philadelphia Flyers are tied for the last playoff spot, which is worlds better than I thought they’d be. They only have about a 25% chance of making it in, according to the sports knobs, but they’re still in the hunt and one takes one’s victories where you find them.

10. Wisconsin has a set of elections this week, and I’ve been working on which candidates I wish to vote for (and, in this day and age, which ones I wish to vote against). Go out and vote, people! If your vote didn’t matter there wouldn’t be so many Republican legislators trying to stop you from casting it.