News and Updates

1. Well the semester has well and truly started and the usual chaos and frantic motion has set in. The first couple of weeks are a madhouse for advisors as we try to get students settled into their classes, make sure their financial aid is set and their bill is paid, and generally try to solve small problems before they become larger problems. My next open appointment is next week, I’ve got four classes of my own to teach on top of all of this, and somewhere in there I have things I’d like to be doing that don’t involve work. It will start to settle down in about two weeks, after most of the important early deadlines pass, and then the teaching madhouse begins. It’s a living!

2. The folks over at Financial Aid are just overwhelmed this year, which makes my job harder but I can’t really get too mad about that because it’s making their job a lot harder than that. For those of you who aren’t in higher ed, back in April Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s administration imposed new and openly punitive rules on how financial aid is supposed to work, because educating the peasants just makes them uppity after all, and then didn’t bother publishing guidelines on how to implement these rules until sometime in July. So there is a godawful backlog, magnified by the fact that it all has to be calculated by hand since the old programs don’t work with the new rules. If you have a kid in college this year and you’re wondering why your child’s financial aid is so late and/or disorganized, you can thank the folks in Washington for screwing that up too.

3. And in the middle of this, I check my email on my phone and get this:

Does anyone ever say Yes to these? Not that you actually have an option to say No, really – your choices are Yes and Kind Of, which is exactly the kind of bootlicking that one expects out of tech bros these days. There needs to be an option that says, “This is not a conversation that actual human beings ever have,” and another one that says, “Motherfucker you do NOT want to hear my opinion on this matter.”

4. I am continually amazed at the names that parents give to their children. Granted, I’m on an 18-year delay, so the things I’m seeing are what parents were doing back in 2008 and I have to wonder what was in the water supply at that point, though in all honesty I am not really sure I really want to know after all.

5. We had a lovely Labor Day weekend despite the best efforts of the world at large to burn down. Kim and I drove up to her parents’ on Saturday and hung out there for the day. In my never-ending quest to gather genealogical information I sat down with her mom for an interview. She told me right up front that she had no interesting stories and then spent two hours telling me interesting stories and we only got up to 1976, so there will have to be a second round, and perhaps one with Grandpa as well. Sunday we went over to her brother Justin’s house for a Feast of Many Meats, which is what happens when you bring various side dishes to a guy who has three separate meat preparing devices in his back yard. It was all really good and we had a nice time hanging around together, and that’s all you need out of a holiday.

6. For Labor Day itself Kim and I found a nice lunch by one of the nearby little lakes, and then I spent the rest of the day making more raspberry-jalapeño jam. It’s starting to take over the dining room now. There will have to be some distribution soon.

7. Of course, the larger point of the holiday is always worth remembering. Folks, the rights and freedoms you enjoy were not given to you by those in power. They were taken by people who demanded what was their due, often in the face of state-sponsored violence and corporate thuggery. If you enjoy things like weekends, sick leave, child labor laws, and workplace safety rules, thank a labor union.

8. Tonight was Mow The Lawn day, much to my regret. I hadn’t done that for a couple of weeks and it’s been ideal grass-growing weather around here over that time, so yeah. Fortunately we still have the room air conditioner in the window of our bedroom so afterward I could go up, turn it on, stick my face directly into the vents, and breathe for half an hour. Cool air with that metallic tinge around the outside – still one of my favorite summer smells.

9. Somedays you wake up with a random John Prine song stuck in your head and that’s just how it goes. Come back to us, Barbara Lewis Hare Krishna Beauregard.

10. I spent the better part of an hour trying to figure out how to get rid of a random popup error message on my work computer – the kind that conveys no useful information and returns six to thirty second after you close it, on a random schedule because that’s scientifically proven to be more irritating than any other schedule. I explored a lot of bulletin boards with solutions far more technical than anything I would ever try and then I did what I should have just done in the first place and rebooted the computer and the problem went away. The people who programmed this are the same people who think we should turn over the economy, the military, healthcare, law enforcement, and society as a whole to a glorified word game program, and that’s a warning sign right there if you ask me.