News and Updates

1. Kim and I went over to City Hall yesterday here in Our Little Town and voted in next week’s primary elections. They let you do early in-person voting in Wisconsin and it’s a good way to make sure that no right-wing voter suppression tactics are thrown in your general direction on election day. Remember, folks! If casting your ballot didn’t matter the GOP wouldn’t be trying so hard to stop you from doing it, so get out there and vote.

2. It has come as a great surprise to my family that I have never actually ridden a horse. It’s as if I told them that I have never put on shoes. How can you not have done that? Everyone has done that! Except me, apparently. In my defense, horses were not that common in the suburbs of Philadelphia when I was growing up and getting access to the ones that did exist required far more ancestral wealth than my family possessed. I do not feel particularly deprived by this lack of experience, however, and I have no current plans to change my horse-riding status.

3. My brother has been bitten hard by the genealogy bug and now I have a co-conspirator. We are having a grand time pushing the Italian side of our heritage back into the 19th century together. It turns out that Italy has digitized a surprising number of records that you can have access to for free if you are willing to go to the Italian archives online and translate them on your own. You can also find a lot of them on FamilySearch, which for this purpose is actually more effective than the paid subscription version over at Ancestry. We have made some interesting discoveries, not least of which being that 19th-century Italian families tended to have a lot of children and then gave them all the same five names, sometimes multiple times in a generation. Couple that with the prevalence of small hilltop villages with a maximum of eleven surnames that got traded back and forth as people married, and it gets interesting.

4. We went up to Lauren’s old apartment today to do some spackling and whatever else needed to be done before the lease officially expires next week, but it looks like Aleksia and Anita have most of the move-out checklist well under control so we didn’t have too much to do. We had a lovely time with Aleksia, though, including a Thai lunch afterward. We’ll have to catch up with Anita another time.

5. We also heard from Lauren this morning and so far her latest Adventure seems to be going well. The pictures are lovely.

6. At some point it will no longer be construction season here in Baja Canada and we will be able to get from Point A (defined as our house) to Point B (defined as any example of most of the places we go) without having to go through Points C through L (defined as any of a number of increasingly desperate attempts to find a way to Point B that actually permit travel to occur). Today was not that day. Tomorrow does not look good either. On the plus side, the detour home was scenic.

7. Kim and I also spent an hour on a Zoom call with the Financial People last week. We have a new Financial Person as the old one has gone to wherever Financial People go when new opportunities arise (Houston?) and the new one wanted to go over things with us. There was also another Financial Person beaming in from an office in a whole other time zone because they do Different Financial Things than the more local Financial Person. All of this was so that we could discuss how Kim and I are set up for retirement, which is looming ever closer on the horizon. I gather that we are doing okay in that regard and will likely not have to live on peanut butter and raw oats once we leave our jobs, though to be honest after about fifteen minutes of Finance my eyes started to glaze over. This is why Kim was there, to understand all the things that just sound to me like the human equivalent of an old dial-up modem waiting to connect.

8. I also had a separate meeting with a different Financial Person earlier in the week because apparently I put $100 into a Roth IRA sometime around 2003 and promptly forgot about it and they wanted to know if I was still alive. Yes! More or less! Here I am, in all my glory. The account has been chugging along just fine without my intervention, it turns out, and while I was grateful to this Financial Person for letting me know about it we are going to consolidate it with the other Financial People because clearly I need someone who can keep track of all of these things at once and that someone is not me.

9. I am trying to read an actual work of history – all 789 pages of it – and it is going slowly. It is hard to read about the formation of the American republic while it is being actively torn down by its current government and all the termites who support this regime. But it’s well written and I’m enjoying it whenever I can sit down and focus on it.

10. The cat has been in Cling Mode the last couple of days and we thought she was just being affectionate but it turns out that the automatic feeder was empty and she was just sizing us up as sustenance. And being affectionate, because that’s who she is, but definitely sustenance as well. All is now restored and we may live to see another day.