News and Updates

1. I have a lot to write about regarding the events of this weekend – all of it good, since it revolved around Lauren’s second college graduation in a year (woot!) – but that is going to take a few days to organize so I’m going to put this list out there just to hold a spot and remind myself that I do actually know how to make blog posts even if there hasn’t been much time to do that of late. It’s a pattern – early May has always been a scarce time around here and that’s just what you get for reading a blog written by an academic. The end of the semester hits hard.

2. It’s Mothers’ Day here in the US, an annual festival devoted to mothers of all varieties. Kim and I decided that we would invoke the Moveable Feast Tradition and celebrate in June – a joint holiday with Fathers’ Day that we’re going to call Parent Day for lack of any better ideas at the moment – so today has been pretty low key. Low-key also fit well into the larger picture of our lives because Friday and Saturday were very busy, very active days and this morning I was reminded of the simple fact that I am no longer young. There were muscles I hadn’t heard from in years who wanted to have some serious conversations regarding my future plans for them, and that generally requires some down time for negotiations.

3. The cat also wanted a few moments of our time this morning to register her disenchantment regarding our absence over the last two days, a sentiment that she announced at 6:25am by howling outside of our bedroom door until I got up and fed her. If you want to know why I have bags under my eyes larger than the carry-onI took on my last flight, this is a good place to start looking.

4. Also, I discovered this evening that there is actually a difference between the Bake setting on our oven and the Air Fryer setting and, well, some alternative side-dish plans had to be made. Fortunately the house mostly doesn’t smell like smoke anymore.

5. I took a lot of photographs this weekend, as befit the proud parent that I am. And if you do that you should share – that’s what photography is for. In this digital age that’s a fairly easy thing to do – you download the photos onto your computer from whatever various sources they come from, upload them into a GoogleDrive folder, and then invite all interested parties to access them. This is in fact generally simple, though Google now insists that it will not share such folders with people outside of the Greater Google Co-Prosperity Sphere so good luck trying to get these to people without Gmail addresses, but that is the walled-garden internet we have these days, alas. It’s easy to do all this with the photos from my phone, since that just means downloading from iCloud and uploading to Google, a sentence that contains no words from the Bible. But I actually have a DSLR that takes nice photos when I can get out of my own way and let it do so, and transferring those requires an SD card reader. I own two of those, both of which however seem to have evaporated into the ether along with the Constitution and my general sense of well-being. I spent a good portion of the weekend ransacking my office looking for them, and this is why I now own three SD card readers.

6. On the plus side, I found a stack of old blue coin books – the kind where you collect a given type of coin, usually by year, and save them by pressing them into the little coin-sized spaces in the books. I picked them up from a garage sale at some point in my life that I no longer recall, and they’ve been sitting in a nice neat pile on my office floor for years now. Part of my SD card reader search process was the thought that I really need to get rid of a lot of “someday” projects and other useless items, and to be honest these little cardboard books aren’t really all that great for coins anyway. So I tossed them. Then I had the thought that perhaps I should check them just in case they weren't just cardboard. And indeed, they were not. I found an old Mercury dime, a handful of Buffalo nickels, and a small collection of wheat pennies hidden away, so now they are safely preserved. They’re probably worth about $35 total, so I’m not going to get rich on them. But they’re cool, and that has to count for something.

7. Speaking of coins, I still have my Reddit account, though I reserve the right to get rid of it at any moment. At this point I honestly feel like the Dread Pirate Roberts every time I log out. “Good night, Reddit! I’ll probably delete you in the morning.” But so far, so good. Once in a while there is interesting stuff. I seem to have stumbled into a couple of old coin subreddits, however, and they are the most depressing part of the entire internet not connected to current events. Every other post more or less says the same thing: “Hey! I found this historic and visually stunning old coin! It probably was a family heirloom! How much would it be worth if I melted it down and sold it for metal value?” Sigh.

8. I got one of the new quarters this weekend as well, which was fun. They’ve got a whole new design for the 250th anniversary of American independence, and while I’m all for new and interesting designs on our coins whoever did this one really needs to stop drinking on the job. I literally cannot make heads or tails out of this design – which side is the obverse and which side is the reverse? One side has a ship. The other side has what appear to be homesteaders – the common clay of the new west, as Gene Wilder once said. I suppose it could go either way. I know there’s a new half dollar coin as well, though the last time anyone used a half-dollar for a commercial transaction was probably 1954 so if I want one of those I’ll have to go to my bank to get it, and there’s a new dime. I’ve seen pictures of the new dime – the eagle kept the arrows in the one claw but apparently dropped the olive branch he was holding in the other, and if that doesn’t sum up our current leadership nothing will.

9. Yes, we got caught up in the Great Canvas Hack of 2026. Like a lot of universities worldwide, Home Campus and everything connected with it runs on Canvas – a private company that exists to siphon money from universities and render our lives less meaningful. I generally use it as a document drop and an online discussion space, but you can have students turn in assignments, take quizzes, do homework, and so on. And like any such program, it can and will be hacked. We got the notifications last week and were told to stay away from it for a while, but eventually they said we were good to go. So we’ll see. It all begs the question, though, of what criminal brain trust decided to try to extort money from universities? We don’t have money.  The GOP has made very sure of that. The first rule of financial crimes is to go where the money is, after all. They should have gone after a hedge fund or an oil company or whatever shadowy cabal is pulling Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s strings this week. Universities? Sure, bud. We can give you a nice mug with our logo, will that do?

10. Be that as it may, I do need to grade my last discussion assignment in case the World’s Least Observant Hackers decide to come back and steal my Cold War assignment.