It's a Hockey Night in Madison

You don’t realize how small a hockey rink is until you’re there. It looks bigger on television.

Last night Kim and I went up to Madison to see the UW Madison men’s hockey team play Michigan. It was supposed to be a somewhat larger group of us going but events intervened and we’ll just have to do it again sometime later with the full complement of people, but we figured we paid for the tickets and we should go anyway.

It is strange, two years into this pandemic, to be going out anywhere, let alone to a restaurant and then to a stadium. But Madison is the kind of place that takes science seriously and where people wear masks and get vaccinated as a matter of course, so we figured we’d be okay there. And while the restaurant was kind of a mixed bag (you can’t eat through a mask, after all), compliance at the Kohl Center for the game was nearly complete.

Nearly.

Not quite universal, but nearly.

Sigh.

But we wore our masks throughout and that has to count for something.

We got to the Kohl Center rather earlier than we’d planned. Dinner took much less time than we’d budgeted for and walking around on State Street when it is 9F (-13C) with a stiff wind coming off the lake turned out to be less entertaining than we’d hoped. And when the used bookstore we took refuge within closed an hour before the game started, well, we figured at least we’d be warm in our seats.

We were way, way up in the nosebleed section, which turned out to give a pretty good view of the action once it started. We could see the student section and the band clearly and hear them indistinctly – sound tends to get muddled in places like that – but it was obvious they were having a very good time.

This was good because the game didn’t turn out well.

The Badgers outshot Michigan. They had more face off wins. They had more power plays. The goalie actually played pretty well given the caliber of shots he faced.

And they lost 6-2.

But it was an interesting and entertaining game requiring only minor repairs to one of the plexiglass panels rather than the wholesale replacement of one and containing only two game misconduct penalties – both of which were less than when these teams played the previous night. It was a chippy affair.

Getting out of the parking garage was a bit of a trick, but it worked out fine. We made it home and poured ourselves into bed like day old coffee, but it was nice to spend an evening out.

Someday we’ll get to do that more often. Could happen.

Letters

I’m taking today off, as it is my last chance to do that before the semester heats up in earnest.

My advising job is 80%, so in theory I can get it all taken care of in four days rather than five. My first year seminar class (“How to College”) is part of my advising load so that gets folded into it. But I have my US2 class as well which isn’t part of that, and the time I spend on that needs to be made up for my advising job which means that I’m on campus five days a week during most of the semester.

Except that the campus where my US2 class is hosted doesn’t start classes until next week, and my boss basically told me to take the opportunity while it was in front of me.

I’ve got a few things to take care of today – most pressingly to try to find a place to get a haircut. The marvelous little barbershop I found here in Our Little Town didn’t survive the pandemic, and since then I’ve been using the clippers I bought. The joy of not having much hair left is that it’s pretty easy to take care of. Set the clippers to a given height, set up a few mirrors so you can see everything, buzz away, and clean up when you’re done. I like to do this outside, though, as it simplifies the cleanup, but it’s winter in Wisconsin now and that makes things a bit impractical that way. Wednesday morning it was -13F (-25C) when I left to go to work, and that’s without counting the wind chill. It’s slightly warmer today (real square roots!) but still.

Otherwise my main project for today is to continue scanning family documents. I inherited a pile of them when my mom died, and my goal is to get them all digitized. This way they can be shared with those who are interested, and it will help with preservation.

I’m working my way through the letters that my parents wrote to each other when my dad was in the navy in the late 1950s. They were voted Cutest Couple of their high school class and then graduated into the depths of the Eisenhower Recession – my dad once told me that he and his friends basically had three choices at that point: college, unemployment, or the military. So he joined the navy and spent three years as a radioman on a small engine repair ship that was based out of Norfolk VA. He saw the northern lights on one deployment and spent a couple of shore leaves in pre-Castro Cuba on others, but otherwise it was mostly watches and cleaning. Norfolk was close enough to Philadelphia that he could usually get back there on weekend leaves, which he did every time it was practical to do so. Long after he was discharged the ship was sold to Taiwan, and I think they scrapped it sometime in the 1970s.

My parents wrote to each other every couple of days or so, in an era where long distance phone calls were prohibitively expensive and the internet was decades away from appearing, and it’s interesting to follow along the conversation as it develops over time. I know how it ends, of course – he’d get out after his three-year hitch was up, they’d get married two years later, and they’d stay together for more than half a century after that. That’s the thing about history. You know how it turns out.

But they didn’t know.

It’s kind of strange to realize that they were eighteen or nineteen years old when they were writing these letters. I’m used them being my parents – responsible adults in their 30s and 40s or older, paying bills and having careers and all that. My children knew them as grandparents in their 60s and 70s. Yet they were once younger than Lauren is now, unsure of how things would turn out, and deeply in love.

That, more than anything else, is why these projects mean so much. They remind you that the people you know had lives before you knew them, lives that got them to where they were when they showed up in your own, lives that had nothing really to do with yours. 

There is a certain melancholy in these projects that way, especially when you start them after the people involved are gone. But there is also a sense of discovery, of warmth, and of knowing the people you love more clearly than before, and that’s a worthwhile thing, I think.

Crystal Ball in the Corner Pocket

I suspect I’m doomed.

Well, that's probably a bit melodramatic. But there is a definite sense of “this isn’t going to end well and there is nothing you can do about it” in my life at the moment.

Here is the situation.

I work on a college campus. My various jobs all require me to work in close physical proximity to students. I see a lot of students, many of them for extended periods of time in small enclosed spaces.

The current omicron variant of the coronavirus is both remarkably contagious and fairly sneaky in that – at least in vaccinated people, for whom it is less severe – it presents with the same basic symptoms as everything else you normally get in the winter: sore throat, cough, congestion, and so on. Your basic common cold symptoms, in other words. Sometimes it even has no symptoms at all, but usually it looks like every January you’ve ever spent in school from the time you were still getting snack breaks and naptimes.

Students get colds. They come to class anyway, because there aren’t that many classes in a semester and it’s just a cold after all – that’s how things work.

Some of them actually do have colds. And some don’t.

So far this week I’ve had one student (with no visible symptoms) who spent half an hour with me in my tiny office email me later to tell me he had tested positive for covid. Another similar student had sniffles and a cough, and we discussed getting tested as well – a possibility that seems to have taken this student by surprise. These are bright, responsible students. And yet here we are.

I am vaccinated, boosted, and recovered from a diagnosed case of covid within the last 90 days, so under the current guidelines I only need to wear a mask when I’m around people and don’t need to go into isolation with every exposure. We have a mask mandate anyway, so everyone – including the students – is masked up all the time on campus. Compliance is pretty universal, for the most part – I haven’t had any troubles with anti-maskers trying to Freedom other people to death, anyway. We also have a requirement that students and staff must either be vaccinated or get tested weekly – which in practice mostly means vaccinated, since weekly testing is such a colossal nuisance that few are willing to stick to their ignorance and submit to the testing that often. Those who don’t vaccinate or test don’t get to sign up for classes next term.

So I’m about as protected as anyone can get in my situation.

And yet I know, with every fiber of my being, that I’m going to get covid again – probably sometime in late March or early April, when my 90-day “you’ve already had covid” warranty runs out. Evidence says that my vaccines will likely keep it from being anything too serious, for which I am thankful. But it’s going to happen.

There’s no real way to avoid it short of switching back to all virtual classes, and even if every scientist and medical person in the world stood on the hilltop and screamed at the top of their lungs that such a switch was all that stood between survival and the utter extinction of the human race, that wouldn’t happen. There are too many people in this country with a toddler’s grasp of liberty (DON’T WANNA! CAN’T MAKE ME!) for any sort of coherent or effective public health policy, let alone one that would require that level of sacrifice. And Americans as a group have effectively said that we’re tired of the pandemic and ready to move on to something else, such as either getting back to trying to overthrow the US government in order to install their favorite incompetent dictator, or trying to prevent same. We've pretty much decided that the pandemic is very much like the Vietnam War was back in the early 1970s – it’s no longer interesting, we’ve declared victory regardless of the situation on the ground, and we’re just going to get on with our own lives now thank you very much so you should stop reminding us about the bodies and go bother someone else.

So we’re pretty much doomed.

There is a part of me that finds this grimly humorous. I’m going to try to focus on that part for the foreseeable future and see how it goes.

News and Updates

1. One of the many joys of wrapping up my mother’s estate is that the rules for doing so are written for much broader cases than my own specific situation, which is how I found myself at the post office on Friday, sending a letter to an officer of the court to let them know that I had – just that day – formally notified myself that I might in fact be involved in this. I notified my brother too, just in case he wasn’t aware of something that HAS OCCUPIED US BOTH FOR MUCH OF LAST SEVERAL MONTHS, not that I am complaining about the ridiculousness of the whole thing in any actionable way whatsoever. But now we’re up to date with the bureaucracy for the time being and that has to count for something.

2. My dad always hated the Los Angeles Rams. “Biggest waste of talent in the world,” he’d say of them as they lost yet another football game on a sunny 1970s fall afternoon. I was never sure why he felt so strongly about a team that played three thousand miles away in a different division from our hometown Eagles, but I couldn’t say he was wrong and so I inherited this particular prejudice full blown. This is why I was slightly amazed to find myself rooting for them in today’s playoff game. Because Tom Brady has won enough and should take his vague scent of corruption and go home now.

3. On the one hand, Brady and his team lost today and the Cowboys lost last week, so they’re gone. On the other hand, the Eagles got blown out of the water last week and the Packers choked up a terrible loss yesterday, so they are also gone. I have nobody left to root against or for in this year’s NFL playoffs and I can now ignore the whole thing entirely, and I will call that a win.

4. It's amazing what you can find in the darker corners of American television. This morning I found myself watching a soccer game between RUSG Brussels and Gent, two teams in the Belgian league. It was a well-played and entertaining game, one that was not decided until the very last instant, but mostly what I found myself looking at was RUSG's stadium, which was apparently built inside of a sinkhole. The entire thing was ringed by forest where the crowd - which was apparently banned from the stadium, whether for covid or disciplinary reasons was not made clear - gathered to look down on the pitch and light their flares, much to the concern of the announcers who were clearly worried that the whole thing would burn down. The announcers also kept referring to a "stump" somewhere that could support precisely one person who wanted to peer over the walls to watch the game below. The seating at one end of the stadium was nearly vertical, which is not an exaggeration - I genuinely couldn't tell if there were stairs or ladders to get you from one row to the next. It was the most amazing stadium I have ever seen.

5. Are we absolutely sure that “Tucker Carlson” is not a Max-Headroom-style AI programmed to spew out nonsense at regular intervals to see who is stupid enough to listen to it? Has anyone actually seen him in person? Anyone? I spent a wholly inordinate amount of time this weekend marveling at his M&M fetish, which he was generous enough to share with an unsuspecting world who, frankly, didn’t ask to be informed of that at all. There is not enough whiskey in the barrel to think about that as long as I did, but so it went. Everyone should call him “Candyman” from now on, even in formal legal documents.

6. Semester break is now well and truly over and I got nothing at all done on most of the projects I had hoped to do this January. I am not sure why this surprised me as much as it did, but there you have it.

7. Although I did get a few things done, for all that. One of the joys of accepting that you will never get a tenure-track job is that it simplifies your record-keeping requirements considerably. A great deal of paper that was being saved because it might be useful someday suddenly became not useful at all and therefore could be removed from both office and house without concern. The recycling truck crew earned their money at my house this week, let’s just say that.

8. Kim and I spent a chunk of today at the nearest Costco because reasons. We don’t really need anything. We don’t really have room for anything. But sometimes you just have to get out of the house and experience some retail therapy, especially the kind that leaves you with tasty food.

9. Yes, I too have discovered Wordle. It’s fun, it’s quick, it’s free, and it has no data-mining (yet), so I’m all for it. Plus “Mastermind” was one of my favorite games back when, and this is just an updated version of it. So far my record is getting it in two tries (today’s word), though I have sometimes needed all six. I’ve always gotten the word, though. I don’t post it to social media every day, though, as that seems excessive to me. I am clearly in the minority on that, but as things flooding my feeds go it’s pretty benign.

10. My “drink more Italian wines” project has also stalled, which anyone who knows me could have predicted from the get go. Perhaps I will get back to that soon.

11. We’re down to just the two of us now. Oliver went back to Small Liberal Arts College a couple of weeks ago. Lauren (and Maxim, who was staying with us for a few days) went back to Main Campus University yesterday. You get used to having your kids around surprisingly quickly and then they’re gone again, back to where they need to be even if that isn’t here.

A Birthday in January

I remember this moment.

 

It’s probably around 1974 in this photo, give or take a year. We’re in the dining room of the house I grew up in – a concrete twin house on a one-block-long street in the suburbs of Philadelphia – and it’s my dad’s birthday, which explains both the fact that there is a cake and the fact that it has very little if any frosting on it. You’re looking toward the living room, away from the kitchen, and from there out onto the street behind the window, though it’s evening in January so it’s dark outside and you can’t really see much out there.

We got that Velcro dartboard for Christmas a few weeks earlier and it stayed up on the wall for a long time.  We got good use out of it. Whap! Whap! Whap! It kept me and my brother busy.

My plate is something out of the 1960s, with fruit of some kind painted on it in earth tones of olive greens and rusty browns. It’s only really glazed on one side. The bottom is brown. My dad’s plate is from their wedding china, with a silver rim and little daisies picked out on the edge. The amber glassware tells you it’s the early 1970s. The table eventually came with us to the new house when we moved five years later. My mom left it there for the new people when she moved out nearly four decades after that. As far as I know it’s still there. The plates and the glasses are long gone, though the china we still have.

I never liked having my picture taken, but I always understood that as soon as the camera was pointed at me I had lost that particular battle so I might as well be gracious and try to smile. Sometimes I succeeded. And sometimes it came out like this picture, which was good enough. Thanks for trying, kid. Nice work.

I remember how my dad looked at me like that. And I hope that my own children will remember me looking at them like that.

He would have been 83 today.

I’m two decades older now than he was in this photo, but there are some things that never change. You’re always your parents’ child, no matter how old you get or how time has moved on.

Happy birthday, Dad.

Breadly

One of the benefits of reading science fiction and fantasy novels is that they teach you to accept as reality whatever is presented to you as such.

This is a valuable skill in a world as determined to outweird itself with every passing moment. 

A few days ago one of Lauren’s friends left on our porch a giant plastic bag full of overbaked sandwich rolls that her workplace was getting rid of. Yep, a big old bag of rolls is definitely what it was. Big bag. Biiiiig bag. Of rolls. You would think this was Peak Weird for that situation, but you would be wrong. As for me, I figured they’d be heading toward the chickens at some point this week. It turned out that Lauren and the Squad had other plans, though.

Last night they disappeared into the basement with the bag of bread, several long pieces of quarter-round that could be converted into dowels, and a general sense that the world was simply not weird enough for their liking.

The end result was Breadly.

 

 Yes, Breadly is a guy.

They ended up stuffing him into the van and heading off into the cold Wisconsin night to various Points of Interest, all the while taking pictures – basically “Flat Stanley-ing” him around the county. It was an adventure. He didn’t make it home – perhaps he was left as a warning to others, though about what and to whom I cannot fathom – and by now I suspect that Breadly has been picked clean by crows and all that remains is the quarter round.

But he made the world a more entertaining place while he lasted, and that has to count for something.

Fare thee well, Breadly. We hardly knew ye.

The Frontiers of Cousindom

Every so often Ancestry.com will send me hints about possible relatives.

In general I find that these hints fall into one of two categories.

The first one is “Hey! You have an ancestor with an Incredibly Common Name! We found another person with that same Incredibly Common Name! Go look at this!” The odds of this person actually being the same as your own ancestor are small – sometimes the hint is off by over a century, which is surprising considering that all of the dates are entered into Ancestry as well – but there have been times when they’ve scored so it’s usually worth a glance at least.

The second one is “Hey! We found Your Exact Ancestor! Everything you need to know is in this document, which your account does not actually allow you to view even though we said that it would when you signed up!” I’m not sure why they offer access to Newspapers.com as part of their pitch, for example, since in the fifteen months I’ve had an account I have never once actually been able to see a Newspapers.com document. I’ve seen plenty of offers to “upgrade” my account in order to do so, but since they lied to me the first time I strongly suspect that they’re lying to me this time as well and all I would be doing would be spending more money to not see the same documents.

But every now and then they do hit the nail on the head and the hint takes me to someone who is a) genuinely related to me and b) accessible through my current account.

This is how I found a cousin of some kind last week.

This man’s grandmother would have been my dad’s great-aunt, which as near as I can tell makes us … cousins, in that grand extended sense of being related in a way that is far too cumbersome to worry about actually defining and which likely wouldn’t be worth the effort even if I got it right. We have common great-great-grandparents and we're a generation apart. That makes us, what, second cousins, twice removed? Something like that, perhaps. 

I’ve ransacked this guy’s public family tree for information and documents and found out few interesting things about someone I didn’t know much about.

This particular great-great-aunt of mine always felt a bit glamorous in some ways, simply because she ended up getting married in Los Angeles in 1919 – a long way from home for a woman born in Philadelphia in the late 1800s – and died in Vermont about the same time I was born. That’s a lot of travel in an age that didn’t make that sort of thing easy, especially for women. There were some new documents and information about that, as well as a few others about where she lived in the interim with information that I didn’t know. I also never knew she had any children but apparently there were two, one of whom was this guy’s mother.

So, cool stuff. Three cheers for Ancestry on this one.

I am tempted to contact the guy and introduce myself – it worked at least once with another long-lost cousin on my mom’s side, a woman about my mom’s age with whom I am still in touch – but I’m not sure what I would say to the guy to be honest. On the one hand, the last time anyone on that side of the family contacted anyone on my side of the family might well have been 1950. They weren’t a dysfunctional family, as my dad used to say, but they weren’t close. On the other hand, perhaps there are stories to be learned.

We’ll see.