Hey!

So tonight I went to a basketball game.

I’d never been to one of those before.  Ever.  Not in high school.  Not in college.  Not for any professional team at any level.  While this came as a shock to Kim, it had never struck me as anything I needed to correct, really.  As I’ve said before, any sport where teams routinely score a hundred points in increments of two is clearly irresponsible and can be dismissed out of hand.

But for this game, I had Powerful Incentive.

For tonight’s matchup between Local Businessman High School and their league rivals in the next town south of us, they invited the fifth-grade band members from most of the elementary schools that feed into LBHS – a category that includes Not Bad President Elementary – to join with the LBHS pep band.

Lauren has been practicing for weeks on her clarinet, honking away at Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll Part 2,” which everyone refers to as “The Hey! Song” because that makes a whole lot more sense than “Rock and Roll Part 2.”  Frankly it makes more sense than Gary Glitter in general, but there you go.  She’s also been rehearsing the “Let’s Go [TEAM]” song that everyone plays at these things, so it has been quite the peppy time around here.  She got to be pretty good at them, too.

I dropped her off at the appointed time so she could join the rehearsal before the game, and then I went back home to pick up Kim and Tabitha.  We returned to LBHS, paid our admission (only the performers get in free and “I’m with the band!” doesn’t cut it, even if you produced one of the band members out of your own flesh and blood, not that I am complaining or anything), and settled down in the bleachers to wait.

It was a long wait.

The JV squads were having their game when we got there.  It was midway through the third quarter and the two teams were apparently having a rather spirited back-and-forth contest, with a number of lead changes and some quite athletic plays, none of which made any sense at all to me.  “Why did they blow the whistle this time?” I’d ask, and Kim – who actually does understand this game – would answer that question with an explanation that might as well have been in Attic Greek for all the good it did me.  This went on for a while until it became clear that further questions weren’t helping anyone.  For example, “How is that a foul?  There’s no blood!” is apparently not an acceptable thing to say at a basketball game.

Who knew?

I think I’ll stick with hockey.

But eventually the game wound down, with the visitors pulling out what was no doubt a thrilling victory for those whose knowledge of the game extended to more than seeing which score was bigger.  As they did so the band filtered in and took their seats in the bleachers across the way.

And then they began to play.

HEY!

We had a grand time cheering along.  They played their songs quite a few times, each time getting the appropriate shout-out in response, and it was an energetic and happy evening.  And then suddenly it was time for the varsity teams to come out and commit further acts of basketball, so we left and got ice cream.  Because it’s January in Wisconsin and 11 degrees outside and we’re under a winter storm warning and that’s just what people here do under those conditions when there is celebrating to be done.

Well done, Lauren.

Service and Safety

Lauren’s term as a safety down at Not Bad President Elementary ended this week.

They only serve for a semester, down at NBPE, and then they have to step aside so the new group can come in.  There’s a period of training so they can pass on their bits of wisdom to the incoming safeties – the official things that make up the manual, and the little things that the teachers may or may not choose to acknowledge that they know – and then it’s over and they melt, Cincinnatus-like, back into the regular population.

She has really enjoyed being a safety.  For one thing it forced us to get out of the house a little earlier on school days and anything that gets people off the dime is a good thing, really.  But more than that, I think, was the fact that it gave her a job to do, one that she could see was clearly helping others.  There’s a satisfaction in that.

We live in service to others. 

This is a lesson that you would think is largely forgotten today if all you did was listen to the political ranting of the Galt cultists, those whose ideal human is the diagnosably sociopathic atomized individual fanatically pursuing his (and it’s almost always “his”) own self interest without regard for his neighbors.  Such cultists hold a lot of sway here in the 21st-century US, far more than any civilized culture ought to give them.

But they forget the simple human fact that we are a social species.  We derive meaning from our relations with others, and the heights we reach depend on the depths of our commitment to our communities and the people in them.  All of the people in them, and not just the ones that look and think like us.

Service starts at the beginning.

I’m glad Lauren has been a safety these past few months, shepherding the younger kids across the street in front of NBPE.  She is learning at a very young age a lesson that so many adults seem to have forgotten, and if she is lucky it is a lesson that will stick with her for the rest of her life.

Good work, Lauren.  I’m proud of you.

Unreal Times

There is an element of unreality that invades your world when you’ve had several snow days in a row.

Of course they’re not snow days this time.  They’re wind chill days.  For the second time this month the air temperatures have gotten down around -20F here in Our Little Town, which is unusually cold but not unheard of in this part of the world.  But the winds have been high as well, and we had several inches if light fluffy snow over the weekend – snow just begging to be blown into a whiteout haze – and when you add those things together it’s just better for everyone to stay home, drink warm beverages, and hunker down. 

The semester was supposed to have started this week down at Home Campus.  It started last week for my online course. 

For the online class I’m just administering someone else’s design – that’s how those classes work.  There’s a Lead Professor, who designs the class – most of the work in an online class happens before the students ever show up – and then the online folks open up a bunch of sections to handle the enrollment.  The Lead Professor gets one, and they farm out the rest to other professors.  We go in, customize things a bit to our liking, and then handle the day-to-day work for the class.  I’ve taught this class in two different versions, and I have to say I really like the one that’s up now.  It’s well designed and thought out, and if it requires a fair amount of grading and feedback for my students from me, well, that’s what good classes do.

For my own class, I’m rewriting the last third of it this semester.  Any class whose title ends with “…to the present” needs to be tinkered with every year, and after a few years of tinkering it gets to be unwieldy and you have to rewrite the thing from the ground up, especially if – as is the case with my US2 class – my thinking about how the last fifty years or so of American politics works has changed since the last rewrite.  Squeezing the old material into the new framework has gotten harder and harder to do, so it’s time to pull it apart and build it anew.

So I’ve got a lot to do.

But everything’s on hold.

The online class is in its opening bit, before I have any real grading to do.  I just have to monitor it for now.  And the weather has been so bad across the state that my own class has yet to meet.  Meanwhile the local schools are rightly closed, which means my children are home (or at least are not in school – Lauren has been shuttling from friend’s house to friend’s house the last few days for sleepovers), and not many people really want to hold meetings or if they do they’re okay with phone meetings, so Kim has mostly been home as well.

It feels like semester break still.


Except it isn’t.

There’s all sorts of work to be done.  The clock is ticking on the semester. 

And here I sit.

It’s been a strange winter.

Low Down on Set Up

There was a time when new televisions were a simple process.

You bought the television – perhaps after doing some comparison research on the various brands and models, or perhaps after simply walking into the store, pointing to the nearest one to hand and saying, “That one!” – and you lugged the thing home.  You set it up in whatever space was allotted for it.  You plugged it in.  You turned it on.  And from there it was just the sweet, sweet sensation of your every neuron liquefying into uselessness as you sat on the couch and ate things which could only be classified as food by virtue of the fact that you were putting them into your mouth and not dying then and there.

That was then; this is now.

This month Kim and I came to the conclusion that our current television was becoming a bit too idiosyncratic for our tastes, so we looked at our various change bins and decided that this was the time to get a new television.  This is how we do it around here – we dump our spare change into jars and at least one bright orange ceramic pig, and when it all hits critical mass we buy a television.  And then we start over.  Our last three televisions have been purchased this way, though we usually take the coins over to our bank for processing beforehand.  Someday we’ll just hand over a bucket of nickels and see what the salesman says, but that day is not today.

If you’re going to buy a new television, the week before the Super Bowl is the time to do it.  Everything is on sale.  The one we got was about half price, and came highly recommended by a number of reputable review sites, none of which seemed to be making any money off of such recommendations.  It is the same size as our old one, which made it easy to site, and we’re hoping that it won’t be subject to the random fading to black that the old one featured as part of its “intensify the drama” feature.  We’re not that into drama.

The buying and the bringing home parts are actually easier than they used to be, since the new televisions are both lighter and more easily handled than the old CRT models.  I rediscovered this when I traded out the very old tv upstairs for the slightly old tv that had previously been downstairs and then had to haul the very old tv into the basement, where it will replace the supremely old tv we had when we lived in our apartment in the mid90s.  Those things are heavy, those old CRTs.

So we got it home.

I took it out of the box and spent a half hour or so reading through the startup guides and getting the base screwed on so that it would stand up nice and pretty. 

This was followed by an event I like to refer to as The Swapping Out Of The Cables.

Because your modern televisions are not simply televisions, nosirreebob.  They’re entertainment centers.  They’re integral parts of component systems, the way stereo units used to be.  Everything plugs into them by way of a bewildering maze of cables and power cords, all of which look just enough alike to be confusing but not quite alike enough to get you where you need to be.  There are HDMI cables.  There are component cables.  There are audio cables.  There is probably a trans-Atlantic cable in there somewhere that I may have inadvertently disconnected in my mad flurry of activity, so Kaiser Wilhelm?  If you’re listening?  Stay out of Belgium and stick to the original plan.  Trust me, the war will be shorter that way.

The Swapping Out Of The Cables took well over an hour.  It involved a fair amount of labeling in order to overcome the looking-like-all-the-others problem as well as the what-on-earth-does-the-other-end-of-this-connect-to issue that one gets when connecting multiple devices into a single hub.  And since no two televisions have precisely the same number or arrangement of ports for these cables, there was a certain amount of rearranging followed by a trip to the local purveyor of electronic goods, wherein I discovered that every other piece of hardware we own is antiquated and only compatible with the new television through either an intermediary device or wholesale replacement, the latter option not really having been budgeted for in the coin-saving process.  So intermediary device it was, which entailed further instruction reading and plugging in and any number of other adventures that would probably sound much better of the storyteller had access to a fine glass of whiskey and a hearty fire made from burning the various packing materials that all this came in.

Gather ‘round, kiddies!  Grandpa gonna tell yiz a story.

But eventually the previous television was sitting forlornly off to the side and the new one was proudly occupying the space it had vacated.  It was fully cabled.  The new intermediary device allowed us to have all of our devices plugged in rather than hot-patching them in as required, which is probably good.  It was time to watch some television!

And that’s when I moved onto an event I like to refer to as The Raising Of The Blood Pressure, though no doubt the engineers who devised this thing call it “set-up” or “programming” or something similarly benign to hide the sadistic and evil ways in which you have to contort your mind in order to get back to the viewing experience that you had before you started this whole process.

That’s the thing, really.  It’s a lot of work and contortion just to get back to square one.  But a more brightly and consistently lit square one, and perhaps one that will last a bit longer than the previous one did.

There has been all sorts of set-up happening here.  Gobs of it.  I have gone through more menus than a mall food court.  I have set levels for things that were bumpy and bumped up things that were level.  I have told it to scan for channels and signs of alien life and was vaguely relieved when both came back negative.  And after another hour or so, there was a picture.  And, mostly, sound (that’s still ongoing).  I did have to call the cable company to find out how to get the Universal Remote to recognize the new television (either that or rebrand the thing the Particular Remote), but with the notable exception of the Mute button that all seems to be working.

Then I took to old television upstairs and swapped it out with the very old television, as noted.  This process went through the Cable procedure and the Blood Pressure procedure, and in the end it gave us exactly what we had previously only rather bigger.  So there’s that.  If I want it to be fully realized in all its productive glory I need to go get another intermediary device – one that the good folks at the cable company plan on charging me a monthly fee to have.

And then I get to move on to Round 2 of this process.

News and Updates

It’s been one of those weeks, as the illusion of plentiful time was cruelly and definitively shattered by the approaching semester.  Suddenly, all the things I thought I had weeks – weeks – to do had to be done yesterday or sooner.  But ain’t that just life?

1. We had our semi-annual All Day Meeting down at Home Campus this week, in part to bring us up to speed on whatever is going on around campus that has changed since August and in part to discuss the new ways in which the state government is working hard to eliminate education in Wisconsin and what the odds are that we might possibly survive in the near term.  On the plus side, there was also lunch. 

2. I think I have my classes set up now, which is good since the online class started on Monday.  The new version of the course software has turned out to be pleasantly useful and convenient despite its occasional troubles, a fact that has caused me no end of surprise and delight, and my online students are a cheerful group so far.  That goes a long way in a class where you never see anyone face to face.

3. When you are an adjunct lecturer on multiple campuses at the same time, you might want to think twice about reading a novel about a day in the life of an adjunct lecturer on multiple campuses at the same time, no matter how funny it is or how accurately it calls up images of your home town, as such novels do tend to make you question your life choices.

4. We got a new electric teakettle to replace the one that we burned out through overuse, which is the proper evolution of such things.  The new one is a far more serious machine than the previous one.  It has a brushed steel exterior instead of the cheery white plastic of the old one, and when you press on the big lever at the bottom a bright blue light turns on and the kettle sounds like a jet engine taking off.  I feel like I should be making more of an effort than I am, just to keep up appearances.

5. This week I had a friendly and entertaining conversation about the issue of guns in the US with someone who is on the other side of that debate.  It can happen.

6. As a coin collector, it is always a good day when someone crosses your palm with silver.  I am now the proud owner of a 1963 Roosevelt dime, which is probably worth about a buck and a half but is still pretty cool.

7. It’s been really, really cold here in Baja Canada, with air temperatures well below zero Fahrenheit and wind chills even further down on the scale.  But, as the Swedes like to say, there is no bad weather, only bad clothes.  We’ve dug down into our sweatshirt and corduroy supply, fired up the new teakettle, and kept ourselves toasty.

8. I discovered this week that the little red indicator on Kim’s car does not, in fact, refer to the battery even if the battery did need changing.  Despite being square and having two little buttons on top that looked very much like the contacts on a battery, the icon actually alerts you that the coolant system is failing.  So now we have a new battery and a new radiator, and eventually the car will call to mind the old joke about George Washington’s axe.

9. It’s strange how old songs just come bubbling up out of the back of your mind to haunt you for days, and how it’s so rarely the song itself that makes you stop and think but the context – when you heard it, who you were with, what you were doing.  This happens more and more as I get older, and someday I suppose I will just get lost in a fog of those songs and never find my way out. 

10. This is the season when all the book gift cards come home to roost.  It’s a pretty good season that way, whatever the weather.

Bumper Sticker Angel

Some days are more surreal than others.

Every weekday I go over to Not Bad President Elementary School to pick up Lauren.  I park in my usual spot, just up the road, and I wait for the bell to ring. 

Usually I read my book while I wait – it’s one of the prime reading points in my day, where I quite literally have nothing else to do with my time, and I treasure it for that reason – but sometimes I poke my head up to see the cars going by.  A couple of times a week my Cowboys fan buddy will pause as he drives past, and we’ll talk football.  I’ve come to recognize quite a handful of other vehicles too, as the usual suspects parade by.

Recently I’ve noticed a car that has a fairly distinctive bumper sticker.  It’s one of those pink breast cancer ribbons that you see all over, only it’s just a pink outline.  And in further outlines there is a pair of wings, a head, and a halo, combining in all to form an angel.

It looks a lot like like this:

I’m guessing that the significance of this sticker is that someone has lost somebody they knew and loved to breast cancer and would like us to think about that, either as a call to action to keep similar losses from happening to others, or simply as a memorial.  I’m okay with that.  It’s kind of touching, really.  Part of me wants to take off my baseball cap as it drives by, the way you would to show respect at a funeral.

Part of me, however, looks at that bumper sticker and thinks, “Man, that angel really needs to pee.”

It makes me feel like a heel, but what can I say?  The person who came up with this particular bit of graphic design really didn’t think this one all the way through, I think, and that kind of mixed signal sort of detracts from the message of the thing, at least for me.  Surely there is a better graphic for this purpose than that.

But you can’t really go up and say anything to the people in the car – “Did you know that your angel looks like she’s three large coffees into an all-day road trip?” – because they’ll think you’re not taking their cause seriously enough or, worse, actively being a jerk about someone they loved. 

So I sit there as it drives past, wondering idly about the flaws in the design process that allowed that particular image to go unchecked, and the flaws in my thinking process that allow that design to impinge on my consciousness in precisely that manner, and the days pass slowly by.

Deflooberating the Jujingas

So apparently the new update to the online course software that we use down at Home Campus has a few glitches.

Who knew?

At the moment the glitches appear small from my angle – mostly the fact that things that appear in one order in one place on your course site appear in a very different order in another place on the site despite the fact that the latter place is supposed to dictate the order of things at the former place.  This can be problematic when you are trying to direct students to a specific item.  Or at least it could be if you assume that students actually pay attention to such things.  Most of them do, though not all.  And for that latter group, well, the transition is probably just as seamless as they could have hoped.

All this is for the section I’m teaching on someone else’s course design.  I haven’t even begun to set up the website for my own class, which I will have to do from scratch.

Every year this happens. 

I finally get the hang of whatever changes and improvements were made the previous year – a process that generally involves several weeks, a fair quantity of whiskey, and the full tapestry of profanity that I learned from my grandmother, an artist in the field.  I suppose in that way I am simply passing down the family craft, and for such opportunities the historian in me ought to be grateful.  And with sufficient whiskey, perhaps I could be.

Having gotten the hang of it all, cleaned up my language and put away my whiskey, I spend the next semester or two bludgeoning my way through the system.  I may not be able to do things in the most efficient or effective way, but I can create a course page that satisfies my demands and makes at least some sense to my students – enough that they generally can figure it out after a few classes.  Things are going well.

And then the engineers decide to optimize things.

“Just think!” they crow.  “If we deflooberate the jujingas and kahoomerize the flotwhilers, we can add all these cool new features that nobody has ever asked for but might one day!”

So they do.

Meanwhile all the features that were already being used get scrambled, because once you’ve deflooberated the jujingas you cannot possibly expect the flotwhilers to run as they used to run, especially after they’ve gone through the kahoomerization process.  And don’t even get me started on the zulwoo modules.  Your zulwoo modules, you know, they’re pretty sensitive things, and tweaking the jujingas in any way is enough to make them just give up and collapse into quivering little balls of semi-random code.  If you do it just right, you can turn them into a pizza-ordering app, which is a feature I would definitely use.

So now I have this new system all full of TEH SHINY that doesn’t quite work, and classes start in mere days.

Pass me my whiskey, cover your ears, and step back.