The semester has started in earnest, and posting may be light from now through spring.
At least that's how it probably ought be. I have three online classes and another at Home Campus face to face, plus a part time job and, you know, a life (or at least a family), so in theory I'll be busy.
On the other hand, I'll probably need breaks, and since I'll most likely be sitting in front of the computer anyway, there might well be a deluge of posts instead.
Not sayin'. Just sayin'.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Christmas, One More Time!
Christmas has finally come to an end around here, which is only fair since it is nearly Groundhog Day.
In the grand family tradition of celebrating holidays when people can get together - since, really, what else is the point? - we went up to Kim's parents' house today for our Ukrainian Christmas celebration. In some sense it's a lot like the Italian version, only with different starches and soups. Both involve as large a family as you can gather together and as big a meal as you can feed them, and that's not a bad day.
So there was borscht and stuffed cabbage and pierogies and sausages and we all gathered 'round the dinner table and were glad in it.
Of course the fact that we were doing this in late January, almost a month to the day after the Christmas date on the calendar, did not mean that we were prepared for it. No, we stopped on the way up to get our last gifts and wrapped them up there, because it's just not Christmas unless you're doing things at the last minute. I've never understood people who get their shopping done by Labor Day. Fortunately I am not likely to become one of them anytime soon.
After dinner we had the traditional exchange of presents, mostly focused on the various grandchildren that were about - Tabitha and Lauren on our end, plus their cousins Kegan, Brody and Marin. The only adults who got presents during this were Grandma and Grandpa, mostly because Tabby and Lauren wanted to get Grandma a leopard-print Snuggie, although by the time we were packing up the car to come home we somehow ended up with it. Apparently we traded a pink one for it, because it is the Year of the Snuggie on this side of the family too and the things are just everywhere. Whoever invented it is doing quite well from a product that is essentially a bathrobe worn backwards. But it's warm and snug and now we have three of them so one of us will just have to rough it. It will probably be me, since I tend to stay warmer than the rest of my family, and that's fine. I'd probably just trip over it and break something - most likely me - if I wore one.
It was also the year of the Lava Lamp.
The grownups all play the same Cousins Gift Swap game that we played down in Tennessee, and somehow, without consultation or planning, two different people brought pink and purple lava lamps to throw into the mix. And somehow, not naming names of responsible parties (**coughLaurenTabithacough**) I ended up with both of them, just as I ended up with two blue Snuggies in Tennessee for the same reasons. We'll have to set them up somewhere, and then won't we be mod?
It was a foggy trip home but we made it back without changing the shape of anything on the road and that is always a victory.
Merry Christmas to all, and to all, finally, a good night.
In the grand family tradition of celebrating holidays when people can get together - since, really, what else is the point? - we went up to Kim's parents' house today for our Ukrainian Christmas celebration. In some sense it's a lot like the Italian version, only with different starches and soups. Both involve as large a family as you can gather together and as big a meal as you can feed them, and that's not a bad day.
So there was borscht and stuffed cabbage and pierogies and sausages and we all gathered 'round the dinner table and were glad in it.
Of course the fact that we were doing this in late January, almost a month to the day after the Christmas date on the calendar, did not mean that we were prepared for it. No, we stopped on the way up to get our last gifts and wrapped them up there, because it's just not Christmas unless you're doing things at the last minute. I've never understood people who get their shopping done by Labor Day. Fortunately I am not likely to become one of them anytime soon.
After dinner we had the traditional exchange of presents, mostly focused on the various grandchildren that were about - Tabitha and Lauren on our end, plus their cousins Kegan, Brody and Marin. The only adults who got presents during this were Grandma and Grandpa, mostly because Tabby and Lauren wanted to get Grandma a leopard-print Snuggie, although by the time we were packing up the car to come home we somehow ended up with it. Apparently we traded a pink one for it, because it is the Year of the Snuggie on this side of the family too and the things are just everywhere. Whoever invented it is doing quite well from a product that is essentially a bathrobe worn backwards. But it's warm and snug and now we have three of them so one of us will just have to rough it. It will probably be me, since I tend to stay warmer than the rest of my family, and that's fine. I'd probably just trip over it and break something - most likely me - if I wore one.
It was also the year of the Lava Lamp.
The grownups all play the same Cousins Gift Swap game that we played down in Tennessee, and somehow, without consultation or planning, two different people brought pink and purple lava lamps to throw into the mix. And somehow, not naming names of responsible parties (**coughLaurenTabithacough**) I ended up with both of them, just as I ended up with two blue Snuggies in Tennessee for the same reasons. We'll have to set them up somewhere, and then won't we be mod?
It was a foggy trip home but we made it back without changing the shape of anything on the road and that is always a victory.
Merry Christmas to all, and to all, finally, a good night.
Friday, January 22, 2010
They Can Have My Allen Wrench When They Pry It From My Cold Dead Fingers
It was IKEA day here in Baja Canada, so we piled everyone into the car and headed south to Chicagoland for some Swedish good times. I suppose it says something about the stage of life we're at that "Swedish good times" tends to mean furniture and not anything illegal in Alabama. Though I've never been to Alabama and for all I know Swedish furniture is indeed banned there, so I suppose I should hold my judgment until I know for sure.
IKEA is Kim's favorite store. What Barnes & Noble or Amazon.com is to me, IKEA is to her. She could spend days there, exploring all the various unpronounceable products and figuring out new ways to optimize our lives with each and every one of them.
Me, I'm a bit more ambivalent. It's not like Home Depot or Menard's or any of those other home improvement stores, which only exist to point out some of the more glaring of my many shortcomings. I have a defective home repair project gene and those stores are just giant reminders of what I will never be able to do. I suppose I could learn, but that would imply interest, and so far that hasn't materialized yet either.
IKEA isn't on that level, though, not really. For one thing, most of the items in there can be assembled by idiots using only an Allen wrench, so that's right up my alley. I can twist cams with the best of them. And for another thing, it is full of interesting little gizmos and gadgets, many of which can simply be purchased and used as-is, such as wine glasses.
Plus, they serve meatballs.
We're in the middle of a giant home repair project in our mudroom - the little antechamber of our house right as you come in the front door that nobody ever uses. Really, who uses their front doors anymore? The garage is in the back, so we enter through the back. But there was a closet in the mudroom that was offensive in its suboptimability and so it has been removed, leaving us with the question of what to do with the newly liberated space.
Kim lives for questions like that.
So down we went, and there we stayed for six hours - examining, plotting, discovering, and, occasionally, bashing each other over the head with feather dusters, because after a while you just go stir crazy and want something good and American in the midst of all that Swedishness and what's more American than random senseless violence? Especially when it's played for laughs.
We ended up filling the car up to the brim with things called "Gorm" and a less dignified way to die in the event of an accident is hard to imagine. But we made it home safely and all of the Gorm is outside, waiting to be unloaded in the daylight.
We are no longer gormless.
IKEA is Kim's favorite store. What Barnes & Noble or Amazon.com is to me, IKEA is to her. She could spend days there, exploring all the various unpronounceable products and figuring out new ways to optimize our lives with each and every one of them.
Me, I'm a bit more ambivalent. It's not like Home Depot or Menard's or any of those other home improvement stores, which only exist to point out some of the more glaring of my many shortcomings. I have a defective home repair project gene and those stores are just giant reminders of what I will never be able to do. I suppose I could learn, but that would imply interest, and so far that hasn't materialized yet either.
IKEA isn't on that level, though, not really. For one thing, most of the items in there can be assembled by idiots using only an Allen wrench, so that's right up my alley. I can twist cams with the best of them. And for another thing, it is full of interesting little gizmos and gadgets, many of which can simply be purchased and used as-is, such as wine glasses.
Plus, they serve meatballs.
We're in the middle of a giant home repair project in our mudroom - the little antechamber of our house right as you come in the front door that nobody ever uses. Really, who uses their front doors anymore? The garage is in the back, so we enter through the back. But there was a closet in the mudroom that was offensive in its suboptimability and so it has been removed, leaving us with the question of what to do with the newly liberated space.
Kim lives for questions like that.
So down we went, and there we stayed for six hours - examining, plotting, discovering, and, occasionally, bashing each other over the head with feather dusters, because after a while you just go stir crazy and want something good and American in the midst of all that Swedishness and what's more American than random senseless violence? Especially when it's played for laughs.
We ended up filling the car up to the brim with things called "Gorm" and a less dignified way to die in the event of an accident is hard to imagine. But we made it home safely and all of the Gorm is outside, waiting to be unloaded in the daylight.
We are no longer gormless.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
A Quandary
We had chicken pot pies for dinner the other night, and as I was taking them out of their packages (what, you think I could make one from scratch?) I happened to glance down at the directions written there.
Radical, I know.
And printed right there, in bold green letters on either end of the little wrapper, it said, "Open both ends first."
How exactly does one do that?
Radical, I know.
And printed right there, in bold green letters on either end of the little wrapper, it said, "Open both ends first."
How exactly does one do that?
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Cleaning Update
The problem with cleaning is that there are just so many categories of stuff.
Volume is not a problem. Volume can easily be handled by Storage. You have this much stuff, you find that much plus a bit of space, and then you insert Stuff A into Space B. Voila! And since the universe is, theoretically, infinite while the amount of stuff in it is, according to the scientists, insufficient to keep it all from flying off into heat death, so much so that they have to invent whole categories of stuff just to keep the equations from collapsing, then finding that bit of space for your stuff should be no problem.
Of course the people who worked that out didn't have kids, optimizers or packrats sharing their living quarters, so it's probably not that easy. But still - stuff; space; solution. Easy.
No, the problem is that it's not just stuff. It's many kinds of stuff. Or, rather, it's many different subtle variations of a few basic kinds of stuff and you have to figure out a) how to categorize it in such a way as to make keeping it useful (i.e. so you can find it again someday), and b) what to do with all those variations once you have satisfied the requirements of point a. Because categorization implies organization and organization is a bear.
I have in my office the paper trails from at least four different courses that I've taught in the last calendar year, all of which had to be organized internally and then put into some kind of macro-arrangement where I could access them again. So far I've gotten past the first hurdle but not the second.
The second hurdle involves more lifting, moving and refiling.
I have two short filing cabinets in my office that are currently filled with other stuff that should probably be moved out of the way to accommodate all the class stuff that I actually use. This is not going to be pretty, as it will no doubt involve moving boxes up from the basement in order to load them into the filing cabinets so I can keep all the course stuff together and then loading all of the other stuff into those now empty boxes and taking the once-again full boxes back downstairs. So there will be temporary local increases in entropy, is what I'm saying.
On the other hand, I have now reduced the stuff volume in my office to the point where I am reasonably confident that I could get from one end of the room to the other without serious injury in the event of a natural disaster.
And that's progress.
Volume is not a problem. Volume can easily be handled by Storage. You have this much stuff, you find that much plus a bit of space, and then you insert Stuff A into Space B. Voila! And since the universe is, theoretically, infinite while the amount of stuff in it is, according to the scientists, insufficient to keep it all from flying off into heat death, so much so that they have to invent whole categories of stuff just to keep the equations from collapsing, then finding that bit of space for your stuff should be no problem.
Of course the people who worked that out didn't have kids, optimizers or packrats sharing their living quarters, so it's probably not that easy. But still - stuff; space; solution. Easy.
No, the problem is that it's not just stuff. It's many kinds of stuff. Or, rather, it's many different subtle variations of a few basic kinds of stuff and you have to figure out a) how to categorize it in such a way as to make keeping it useful (i.e. so you can find it again someday), and b) what to do with all those variations once you have satisfied the requirements of point a. Because categorization implies organization and organization is a bear.
I have in my office the paper trails from at least four different courses that I've taught in the last calendar year, all of which had to be organized internally and then put into some kind of macro-arrangement where I could access them again. So far I've gotten past the first hurdle but not the second.
The second hurdle involves more lifting, moving and refiling.
I have two short filing cabinets in my office that are currently filled with other stuff that should probably be moved out of the way to accommodate all the class stuff that I actually use. This is not going to be pretty, as it will no doubt involve moving boxes up from the basement in order to load them into the filing cabinets so I can keep all the course stuff together and then loading all of the other stuff into those now empty boxes and taking the once-again full boxes back downstairs. So there will be temporary local increases in entropy, is what I'm saying.
On the other hand, I have now reduced the stuff volume in my office to the point where I am reasonably confident that I could get from one end of the room to the other without serious injury in the event of a natural disaster.
And that's progress.
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Ten Again
It took three tries, but Tabitha is now officially ten.
The joy or burden of having birthdays around the holidays is that there is never really any good time to celebrate them. There is always something else happening, or something else being prepared to happen, or something that just happened that you need to recover from, and really, who needs another happening on top of all that? This is why I long ago happily relinquished all pretences at having birthday parties - send me a card and we'll go get a good meal, and that's all I need to be content with it.
But Tabitha is still young, and birthdays mean more when you've had fewer of them. They stand out a bit.
We had one party down in Tennessee, with a cake and the extended East Coast branch of the family on hand. There was another, smaller, one actually on Tabitha's birthday - this one being just the immediate family. But if you're going to have a birthday party - a party, mind you, not just cards and a meal - you need friends around to celebrate with you.
Which is why we finally had Tabitha's birthday party today.
This year Tabby decided that she wanted an ice-skating party, which suited us just fine. For a small fee we could go down to the ice rink and have everything there and someone else would clean up and we wouldn't have to clean the house beforehand. Win.
Invitations went out early this week or late last - there being some discrepancy in the accounts given - and this year for the first time there were (wait for it) boys involved. Two of them, in fact, both of whom said they could come. I suppose this is a harbinger of things headed our way, and I will be investing in a shotgun and a fair amount of whiskey shortly.
When things came to it today we were actually doing pretty well. Kim and the girls had put together the gift bags that are now required for each guest - Kim had ordered a fair amount of useless but fun stuff to put in them, and in the event it turned out that they were quite well received. I had put down the deposit on the ice rink's party room earlier in the week - a rather eerie process that had me walking into an unlocked, dark and apparently unoccupied rink armed only with a checkbook and a firm conviction that untoward things only happen to other people. Eventually the janitor came out of the men's room and we got the whole deposit thing straightened out. And finally, Kim and the girls spent this morning making cupcakes, frosting them, and arranging them artfully in the shape of a 10.
We even had time to sit and watch the Evil Empire of Football get crushed by the Locally Hated Evil Empire of Football. For Wisconsinites, watching the Cowboys and the Vikings play is like watching a re-run of the Iran/Iraq War, where you have to try to figure out which side you dislike more or invent a way for both sides to lose, one or the other. As someone who grew up in the NFC East, of course my second-favorite team is whoever is playing the Cowboys, but it's a much finer line here.
And then it was time to go.
And that's where it all started to fall apart. Not from Tabitha's perspective, fortunately, but from a planning perspective, definitely.
The first sign that things were not going to go as planned was when the tray full of carefully baked and arranged cupcakes snagged on the rear-view mirror of the truck next to us in the parking lot, with predictable slapstick results. So once we got settled in the party room, I was sent off to buy a bakery cake for the rest of the guests while Tabitha could have the un-road-salted cupcakes. Fortunately, she's mature enough to handle that, and it went well. Also, fortunately, I was already out on the road when the call came that we had forgotten the ice cream and I should go home to get it. I did have to make a separate trip for camera batteries, but by then I was sort of expecting it and the third strike wasn't so bad.
But did this faze our party-goers? Not one bit!
Tabitha and her guests spent a happy hour zooming around the ice rink and/or decorating the party room, whichever their tastes led them toward (this is how you know that it was a party for girls, since a group of 10-year-old boys would never have even conceived of staying behind to decorate, whereas about half of the girls ended up chipping in one way or another).
After getting good and tired doing that, there was pizza, and after that there was cake and prize bag opening.
And presents.
We ended up staying quite some time after the party was officially supposed to break up - these things never end up on time, and fortunately the rink staff wasn't too inclined to shoo us out the door since they had other things going on to keep them busy and they generally seemed to like having birthday parties there - but eventually we packed up and went home.
As it turned out, there were a few extra goodies leftover. We're thinking of changing our last names to "Whiplash."
The joy or burden of having birthdays around the holidays is that there is never really any good time to celebrate them. There is always something else happening, or something else being prepared to happen, or something that just happened that you need to recover from, and really, who needs another happening on top of all that? This is why I long ago happily relinquished all pretences at having birthday parties - send me a card and we'll go get a good meal, and that's all I need to be content with it.
But Tabitha is still young, and birthdays mean more when you've had fewer of them. They stand out a bit.
We had one party down in Tennessee, with a cake and the extended East Coast branch of the family on hand. There was another, smaller, one actually on Tabitha's birthday - this one being just the immediate family. But if you're going to have a birthday party - a party, mind you, not just cards and a meal - you need friends around to celebrate with you.
Which is why we finally had Tabitha's birthday party today.
This year Tabby decided that she wanted an ice-skating party, which suited us just fine. For a small fee we could go down to the ice rink and have everything there and someone else would clean up and we wouldn't have to clean the house beforehand. Win.
Invitations went out early this week or late last - there being some discrepancy in the accounts given - and this year for the first time there were (wait for it) boys involved. Two of them, in fact, both of whom said they could come. I suppose this is a harbinger of things headed our way, and I will be investing in a shotgun and a fair amount of whiskey shortly.
When things came to it today we were actually doing pretty well. Kim and the girls had put together the gift bags that are now required for each guest - Kim had ordered a fair amount of useless but fun stuff to put in them, and in the event it turned out that they were quite well received. I had put down the deposit on the ice rink's party room earlier in the week - a rather eerie process that had me walking into an unlocked, dark and apparently unoccupied rink armed only with a checkbook and a firm conviction that untoward things only happen to other people. Eventually the janitor came out of the men's room and we got the whole deposit thing straightened out. And finally, Kim and the girls spent this morning making cupcakes, frosting them, and arranging them artfully in the shape of a 10.
We even had time to sit and watch the Evil Empire of Football get crushed by the Locally Hated Evil Empire of Football. For Wisconsinites, watching the Cowboys and the Vikings play is like watching a re-run of the Iran/Iraq War, where you have to try to figure out which side you dislike more or invent a way for both sides to lose, one or the other. As someone who grew up in the NFC East, of course my second-favorite team is whoever is playing the Cowboys, but it's a much finer line here.
And then it was time to go.
And that's where it all started to fall apart. Not from Tabitha's perspective, fortunately, but from a planning perspective, definitely.
The first sign that things were not going to go as planned was when the tray full of carefully baked and arranged cupcakes snagged on the rear-view mirror of the truck next to us in the parking lot, with predictable slapstick results. So once we got settled in the party room, I was sent off to buy a bakery cake for the rest of the guests while Tabitha could have the un-road-salted cupcakes. Fortunately, she's mature enough to handle that, and it went well. Also, fortunately, I was already out on the road when the call came that we had forgotten the ice cream and I should go home to get it. I did have to make a separate trip for camera batteries, but by then I was sort of expecting it and the third strike wasn't so bad.
But did this faze our party-goers? Not one bit!
Tabitha and her guests spent a happy hour zooming around the ice rink and/or decorating the party room, whichever their tastes led them toward (this is how you know that it was a party for girls, since a group of 10-year-old boys would never have even conceived of staying behind to decorate, whereas about half of the girls ended up chipping in one way or another).
After getting good and tired doing that, there was pizza, and after that there was cake and prize bag opening.
And presents.
We ended up staying quite some time after the party was officially supposed to break up - these things never end up on time, and fortunately the rink staff wasn't too inclined to shoo us out the door since they had other things going on to keep them busy and they generally seemed to like having birthday parties there - but eventually we packed up and went home.
As it turned out, there were a few extra goodies leftover. We're thinking of changing our last names to "Whiplash."
The Task Ahead
I need to clean my office.
When Kim and I were looking for houses, we looked at a lot of houses. Houses, it seems, come in a great many varieties, most of them not very useful. There are houses with too many rooms, houses with too few rooms, and houses with things that the owners insist are rooms but which are actually closets without doors, though sometimes they are entire floors with only an opening at one end. These rooms or quasi-rooms are often decorated in styles that require serious whiskey to erase from one's mind, and it's not just the ones that are ugly that fit this bill, nor is it just the houses that have entire rooms decorated in the colors of the local sports teams (a garish green and yellow, here in Wisconsin, or a relentless cherry red and white). Sometimes those houses were decorated in what was clearly once a tasteful and expensive style that somehow went out of fashion decades earlier and never got revised. Nobody should have to live the nightmare of heavy gold brocade in the 21st century - there must be laws about that on the books, and if there aren't then the State Legislature needs to get off its collective fanny and start protecting the people of Wisconsin from themselves. Isn't that what legislatures do these days?
Out of all the houses we looked at, this one was the only one that struck me as a place I could call home. It seemed comfortable. It was in "move-in" condition. It had only one room that needed to be undecorated - the kitchen, which had dirty yellow flooring and neon orange counters.
And it had my office. This was the only house we looked at that had a room with built-in bookshelves across one entire wall, and I knew instantly that this was mine.
That was fourteen years, two children and one dissertation ago.
I have since lined most of the other three walls with bookshelves that are lined two-deep with books. There is a desk along one wall that is covered to a depth of 14" by paper, CDs and miscellaneous electronics - it's a good thing that the monitor on this new computer is so big, otherwise I would never see it poking up from the rubble. And I had to add a table behind me to hold other papers that I needed to work on immediately rather than store, although it too has turned into a storage unit. There's also an exercise thingamabob that I got some serious use out of in the summer of 2008 but which has been the subject of good intentions ever since.
On top of the fact that I am an inveterate pack rat, especially where paper is concerned - books, photographs, documents: the place is a firetrap of the first order - my office is also the place where homeless objects end up. All of the "stuff currents" in the house swirl their way into my office, where they eddy forever. When the closet in the adjoining mudroom was optimized out of existence, much of what it contained ended up bunking with me. When company comes and things that are good enough for us to look at while eating but not good enough for others to look at while eating get moved out of the dining room, in they come. Sometimes they make it back, sometimes they don't. It's cozy.
But there reaches a point where it starts to interfere with what needs to happen. Documents I need get lost. Books I want to read or refer to are hidden. Things that need to go back to other rooms burrow in and are granted tenure like civil servant holdovers from a previous administration.
And then it is time to clean.
Wish me luck. If I am not heard from in three days, send out a search party. Or just leave a pot of tea and some snacks by the door for me. One or the other.
When Kim and I were looking for houses, we looked at a lot of houses. Houses, it seems, come in a great many varieties, most of them not very useful. There are houses with too many rooms, houses with too few rooms, and houses with things that the owners insist are rooms but which are actually closets without doors, though sometimes they are entire floors with only an opening at one end. These rooms or quasi-rooms are often decorated in styles that require serious whiskey to erase from one's mind, and it's not just the ones that are ugly that fit this bill, nor is it just the houses that have entire rooms decorated in the colors of the local sports teams (a garish green and yellow, here in Wisconsin, or a relentless cherry red and white). Sometimes those houses were decorated in what was clearly once a tasteful and expensive style that somehow went out of fashion decades earlier and never got revised. Nobody should have to live the nightmare of heavy gold brocade in the 21st century - there must be laws about that on the books, and if there aren't then the State Legislature needs to get off its collective fanny and start protecting the people of Wisconsin from themselves. Isn't that what legislatures do these days?
Out of all the houses we looked at, this one was the only one that struck me as a place I could call home. It seemed comfortable. It was in "move-in" condition. It had only one room that needed to be undecorated - the kitchen, which had dirty yellow flooring and neon orange counters.
And it had my office. This was the only house we looked at that had a room with built-in bookshelves across one entire wall, and I knew instantly that this was mine.
That was fourteen years, two children and one dissertation ago.
I have since lined most of the other three walls with bookshelves that are lined two-deep with books. There is a desk along one wall that is covered to a depth of 14" by paper, CDs and miscellaneous electronics - it's a good thing that the monitor on this new computer is so big, otherwise I would never see it poking up from the rubble. And I had to add a table behind me to hold other papers that I needed to work on immediately rather than store, although it too has turned into a storage unit. There's also an exercise thingamabob that I got some serious use out of in the summer of 2008 but which has been the subject of good intentions ever since.
On top of the fact that I am an inveterate pack rat, especially where paper is concerned - books, photographs, documents: the place is a firetrap of the first order - my office is also the place where homeless objects end up. All of the "stuff currents" in the house swirl their way into my office, where they eddy forever. When the closet in the adjoining mudroom was optimized out of existence, much of what it contained ended up bunking with me. When company comes and things that are good enough for us to look at while eating but not good enough for others to look at while eating get moved out of the dining room, in they come. Sometimes they make it back, sometimes they don't. It's cozy.
But there reaches a point where it starts to interfere with what needs to happen. Documents I need get lost. Books I want to read or refer to are hidden. Things that need to go back to other rooms burrow in and are granted tenure like civil servant holdovers from a previous administration.
And then it is time to clean.
Wish me luck. If I am not heard from in three days, send out a search party. Or just leave a pot of tea and some snacks by the door for me. One or the other.
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