News and Updates

1. It may actually be autumn here, nearly a month after the equinox, but that’s climate change for you. On Monday it was nearly 80F (27C) here in Our Little Town and it stayed warm enough through the night that we turned on the little room AC unit in our bedroom to sleep better. Last night we had a freeze warning and now the little room AC unit is packed away in the closet. I went out to the garden yesterday and picked what I would think is the last of the jalapeños out of the garden – a bit more than a kilo of them, which is impressive given that I picked about seven pounds of them not three weeks ago from those same plants. Yesterday’s haul is more than enough to make one last batch of raspberry jalapeño jam and a double batch of jalapeño jelly, but at some point you have to draw a line under things and move on.

2. One of my colleagues gave me a bag full of lemon drop peppers, though, which he said were “hotter than jalapeños but not as hot as habaneros,” a statement that covers a lot of ground. I did try one and it has a fair bit of kick to it – more than I’m going to put on a salad, anyway – so perhaps I’ll make jam out of those too. I’m enjoying this project.

3. We had dinner with my old boss and her husband earlier this week and that was lovely. It’s nice to catch up with good people. Oddly enough the other advisor who was in my office when I started this job – a guy who I’ve team-taught a class with a dozen times since 1999 and who ended up as the next boss in the office until he retired – stopped in to say hi since he was back in town for a bit. So it was old home week in the advising world and that was fun.

4. I have a talk I am scheduled to give this coming week. It is a 75-minute talk. I have – at most – 50 minutes to give this talk. I am in the process of squaring those two things but it is hard to give up some of the more colorful bits that don’t actually advance the story. So it goes. Maybe someday I’ll post the full version here.

5. Did you know there was another school shooting here in MURCA last week? Of course you don’t. Or, rather, you can’t really tell which one I’m referring to so it might as well have been a surprise. We’ve had more than fifty of them this year alone. We lost this battle when the nation’s collective response to Sandy Hill was to buy more guns, and my vitriolic contempt for ammosexuals isn’t going to change that. But don’t try to tell me we have to live like this or die like this. We are the only nation on earth that routinely slaughters its children and refuses to do anything about it, and at some point that bubble will burst. When it does no firearm on earth will save the people who allow this.

6. Also, hang onto your hats, folks – the midterm elections are coming in less than three weeks. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies, slaves, and enablers know very well how fucked they are if there is anything even vaguely approaching a free and fair vote, and they have no intention of allowing such a vote to happen. The next six to twelve weeks are going to be much more interesting than they need to be.

7. I may have recovered from helping Lauren move into her apartment. But at this point in my life all that means is that I can now move on to some other ailment. I suspect that my adventures with the AC unit did me no favors today, and I’m hoping the aches and pains in my right forearm are due to that and not the carpal tunnel syndrome that someone with my forty-year history of intensive typing is probably doomed to get. We’ll see.

8. Every day brings me closer to my goal of retiring without ever having learned how to use Microsoft Excel. We all have dreams.

9. Every week I put up a poll in my office for students and staff to wander in and cast their vote. Sometimes all you get are the tick marks. Other times you get mathematical arguments over brownies.

10. We are nearing that point of the semester where it all starts to break down for a lot of students, and as an advisor that’s when it gets busy. You do what you can. Sometimes it’s enough.