Happy Birthday to Me

I was born on the solstice, when the daylight has ebbed to its lowest and the longest night of the year awaits at sundown. Perhaps this is why I have always loved the quiet darkness of the night more than the frenetic light of day.

I had a lovely birthday yesterday, and if it was perhaps a bit more frenetic than it might have been it was still a good day.

We had travel plans to visit my relatives in Tennessee over Christmas, but the increasingly grim storm forecasts and the correspondingly dire warnings from various agencies charged with monitoring travel conditions finally convinced us that this would not work. There was an interlude of activity involving more permutations of schedules than I could possibly deal with – fortunately Kim enjoys and is good at this sort of thing – and alternate plans have now been made, though the upshot is that we will be home for Christmas this year.

It will be nice, though. We have all we need here.

Once that plan got made, I went out and fortified the chickens against the coming storm and then we went to collect Lauren from school and run a few errands while we were there.

For example, both Oliver and I needed to visit the Apple Store. It turned out that he needs a new battery for his laptop, which will take some time. I wanted them to look at my iPhone to see if I had any settings wrong, or failing that to explain to me why I can’t take decent pictures with it. The tech looked at some of my photos and said, “I see what you mean,” and then made a couple of small changes to my settings but in the end he told me in the politest way possible that this was basically an ID-10-T problem* and I should log into their YouTube channel for some helpful instructional videos or come by and take a class. I suppose it’s nice to know that the problem is not the phone itself and is therefore within my control to fix, but I was really hoping for him to say, “Oh – you have THIS setting wrong. Here – you’re ready to be the next Ansel Adams now.”

Alas, it was not to be.

We also looted the Costco for supplies. Costco is a dangerous place that way. For one thing, they have a lot of great stuff. For another, you are constantly getting Warehoused when you’re there. You stand there in this vast open warehouse of a store staring at the Thing you’re going to purchase and you think, “That is a reasonable amount of Thing to have,” and then you get it back to your nice cozy home and that’s when you realize you have a burlap sack of Thing that will last you until the next millennium. And this lesson never sinks in! You will do this again the next time you’re there, or at least you will if you’re like me.

We picked up Lauren and her friend Chase, who also needed a ride back to Our Little Town, and went out for my birthday dinner at a place that had tasty food but a heating system that was only partially operational on an evening where the outside temperatures were about 9F or -13C, so we sat there in our coats and talked about old movies and the recent World Cup and had a generally grand time, all of us together. And that is what I will remember – sharing a meal in a slightly absurd place and time with family and friends.

Isn’t that what birthdays are supposed to be?

We came home and unpacked, and mostly just hung out in the living room for a while, all four of us together.

It was indeed a lovely birthday.

--

* Or PEBKAC, if you prefer that label.

News and Updates

1. Yeah, it’s that time of year when these short little lists are the best I can do. Sometimes a job worth doing is a job worth doing at the bare minimum level, because otherwise it doesn’t get done at all. And I like doing this job, so having it fall by the wayside would just remove one more small scrap of joy in this darkening world for me.

2. Not that others aren’t eager and ready to provide that service for me, though. Remember, kids! Unless someone is being canonized, they don't need to hear from a “Devil’s advocate.”

3. We’ve got the tree up now, and will likely be decorating it later today. It’s a skinny apartment-sized tree so we have to be selective with our ornaments. We looked at getting a real tree this year but for various reasons decided against it. And we looked at getting a bigger artificial one, but for financial reasons (those things are running around $400 these days!) decided against that as well. So choices will be made. The ones I tend to prioritize are the sentimental ones – mostly from when the kids were younger – and the keychains that we pick up on our travels to remind us of places and people we’ve seen.

4. The semester down at Home Campus is now mostly over, with my grades turned in and most of my advisees moving on to other things until classes start up again in January. The class I teach for Remote Campus ends Tuesday and there will be frantic grading at that point no doubt before the holidays can kick into high gear. Online Campus seems to be in a bit of a lull as well, so that’s nice. I’m looking forward to a break in the action.

5. My effort to get into the Christmas Spirit has been flagging but I still have hope. It’s not over yet.

6. Oliver and I continue to watch as many hockey games as we can fit in. The Flyers have reverted to the form that most of the Sports Knobs were predicting back in September and are currently ranked 27th out of the 32 NHL teams (hey – not the bottom!), but they work hard and are fun to watch even if they don’t usually come out on top. And every once in a while they win.

7. I’ve been following up on the Ancestry hint that I got last time and have stumbled into a good sized trove of documents relating to my grandmother’s family, posted by a guy who’s probably a second or third cousin if I read his family tree right. Of course he doesn’t know this, probably, because my branch of the family is not listed on his tree. My great-grandmother was one of nine sisters and the only one of them who was not buried in the same cemetery as the rest of the family, which means that most of the people whose research takes them through that group of sisters don’t include her. But I know she was there, so I just vacuum up the documents for my own purposes. I’m never sure if I want to reach out to the people making the trees without her – what would I say, really? – but someday I might.

8. So der Sturmtrumper has decided to make trading cards of himself in heroic poses, has he? That was his big announcement? I suppose it’s less harmful than the last one he tried, back in November. Has anyone done a dementia test on him recently? I’m absolutely serious about that, by the way.

9. My iPhone no longer backs up to iCloud because I have run out of free space and I have been so far unwilling to pay for more. I’m not sure if this is a problem or not. I will have to think about that.

10. The snowblower still works, which is a) a good thing to know and b) a dreary thing to have to find out on a Saturday morning when all you really want to do is stay inside and drink tea and watch large men chase a small ball on television for a while. Life is complicated that way.

News and Updates

1. We’re coming down to the end of the semester at all of the various campuses that I work for these days, and so far so good. My class at Home Campus ended last week. My class at Remote Campus ends this week. My class at Online Campus never really ends, but there has been something of a drop in enrollment lately – I suspect the advisors there are waiting to see how the new course revision pans out in practice before sending too many students into it, but that’s just surmise on my part – which means that it’s not that big of a concern. My advisees are mostly set for spring now. Things are calming down.

2. It is grey and misty and foggy out there here in Our Little Town, which is lovely weather as far as I am concerned though it was a bit of a challenge to go out and get the chickens fed.

3. Last week Oliver finished the painting of Mithra he was working on to give to Lauren for her birthday, and it is indeed a work of art worth the wait:

This is the model he was working from, by the way:

We were suitably impressed and proud. Kim and I delivered it to Lauren last Friday, along with a bunch of other stuff, and then went to dinner with her and, eventually, Maxim as well. My family rules.

4. I do believe that a long-term project has finally left my hands, after several false starts, and all that is left now is for me to wait for results. This is a good feeling.

5. I’m trying to get more into the Christmas spirit than I have these last few years, and it’s kind of working I suppose. This does not actually mean I have gotten a start on my Christmas shopping, nor have I done anything concrete to prepare for the holiday other than put up my usual single strand of blue lights across the front of the house, but I hope to get the tree up this weekend and just to approach the holiday with more positive vibes than I’ve been able to muster recently. It’s a goal.

6. Every once in a while Ancestry sends me “hints” that they’ve discovered about people who might be in my family tree somewhere, and every once in a while they’re right. Somebody posted the death notice that was published in the newspaper for my great-great-grandfather, and that was nice to find – he was a Civil War veteran, one of those 90-day wonders at the beginning of the war when they all thought it would be over by the fall harvest. He did his 90 days and noped right out of that whole situation as soon as the opportunity presented itself and then lived to a ripe old age, which speaks to a certain intelligence I suppose. It might very well be why I am here at all, given casualty rates of the Civil War.

7. I’ve been mostly following along with the World Cup this week and right now there is a decent chance that the final will be between Morocco and Croatia and I have to say I’m kind of hoping for it. France won it all last time and doesn’t need to repeat. Argentina and the Netherlands put on a singularly juvenile display of middle school dick waggling in their quarter final game and neither of them should have been allowed to advance to the next round regardless of who won, honestly. So I’m cheering for the weird matchup to prevail.

8. I’m trying not to pay too much attention to the news, because mostly it doesn’t change. If you’re not worried about the survival of the American republic in an age of increasingly overt and violent right-wing extremism, you’re either complacent or complicit.

9. Speaking as a guy who just spent a fruitless quarter hour trying to reach a customer service person, I strongly suspect that at some point soon every corporation in the US will have replaced all of their workers with algorithms and machines and at that point they have absolutely no idea why nobody can afford to buy their products anymore. Say what you will about the solutions he proposed but nobody has ever proven Marx wrong on his diagnoses of the problems of capitalism.

10. I now have my new drivers license, and it does seem to be a step backward to me. The old one was in color, but we are no longer in Oz, Toto, and now we’re back to black and white. But I don’t have to do this again until 2030 which is roughly a hundred years from now in subjective time so I can live with that.

The World Cup

I haven’t been watching a lot of the World Cup this year.

Some of that is just that I don’t have much time these days. The World Cup is usually something that happens in the summer rather than the last two weeks of the semester, after all, and while I understand why they moved it to this time of year – the weather in Qatar in August is hellish – that doesn’t change the fact that I’m barely able to keep up with things I have to do at this time of year, let alone things I’d like to do.

But some of it is the simple fact that this year’s World Cup is being held in Qatar.

A couple of weeks ago Oliver asked me how the decision gets made as to where the next World Cup will be located, and I explained that it is a complicated process involving bribery, influence peddling, threats both overt and implied, and corruption on a scale that makes the Olympic Committee’s selection process look transparent. Apparently the decision to give this year’s event to Qatar was so far beyond the acceptable limits of even FIFA’s legendary malfeasance and criminal conduct that most of the people who were involved in that decision are now in jail or “out of the game,” which is a polite way of saying that they got shoveled out the door and sacrificed to the authorities before they killed the entire cash cow.

And yet the decision stood.

Also, let’s be honest, Qatar is a wasteland of human evil. It’s a place where people can be jailed or even executed for their sexual orientation (a role model for the modern American right wing that way), and it openly practices human slavery. Much like the 18th-century sugar colonies in the Caribbean, there is a large population of bound labor (euphemistically called “guest workers” or some such nonsense in this case) ruled absolutely by a thin layer of phenomenally wealthy and privileged elites. Several hundred of those “guest workers” died in the process of building the infrastructure for the World Cup. I realize that no country is perfect – and the US is not an exception to that – but the human rights abuses in Qatar are genuinely revolting by any standard of comparison.

But then I always think of the athletes themselves. They’re not the ones responsible for this situation. They go where they’re told. And it’s the absolute pinnacle of their sport – an event that has no real analogue in American sports. How much can I hold them responsible for the larger situation?

I always watch the Olympics, after all, for much the same reason.

So I’ve watched a few games. Not many – again, even if I had no issues with anything the fact is that time and energy are both in short supply this time of year. And I take a small amount of comfort knowing that I have donated no money to this cause – the games I can see were included in the various streaming services that we already pay for now that we don’t subscribe to cable anymore.

This does have its odd moments.

Most of the games are being broadcast on Fox here in the US, and you can insert your own political joke there if you want. We don’t get Fox in any of the streaming services we have, and other than the occasional sporting event I don’t miss it.

But it is being broadcast on Peacock, which I do subscribe to in order to watch the Premier League on weekend mornings. So I can watch games there.

In Spanish.

Now, I do not speak Spanish, not really. I studied it back in middle school and high school, but that was forty years ago. At least half of my students down at Home Campus speak it as a first or second language, however, and between that and my long-ago studies there are certain words that I can pick up out of the stream of commentary. “Pelota,” for example, which means “ball,” and “otra vez,” which means “again,” and a few other words here and there. I’d like to learn the language – it would help me at my job if nothing else, and it is spoken by millions of Americans so it’s probably the most useful language after English to know in this country in general – but so far I have not actually done anything toward that goal.

So I come at this from what is essentially a position of ignorance.

This makes the commentary kind of fascinating, if not particularly useful for me actually following the game. All I really get out of it is tone and rhythm, interspersed with the few words I recognize and the occasional player name, and if you’ve ever sat down and tried to listen to a language you don’t understand the first thing that you learn is that it is very hard to figure out where the words begin and end. It all sort of sounds like one long word (interspersed with rolled r’s, in this case) until you get to something you recognize. As things get more exciting on the pitch the tone will rise and the phonemes will come faster and faster and then somebody will score and the classic 60-to-120-second-long announcement thereof will immediately follow and I know where I am at that point, sort of like stumbling onto a landmark in an unfamiliar city where you’re a tourist.

It all ends up sounding kind of like this:

SedimodabatiloeschalocodecazufrandojaARRRRRRRRRRdelasopenoseerenlabafrequitoPELOTA siconoceseangelesfritodecasaOTRA-VEZ-LA-PELOTAdenadalamesaquelohacerenelespaneradequinovadecasaZIMMERMANestasinochesdelostecosNOLASEPONEQUEARRRRRRRESLAEGUALESDEQUESOYTAMBIENELCINQUENCENTODELUNA

GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLL!

GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL!

As should be obvious from that, very little of what I can process is actual Spanish – it’s just the vaguely-Spanish-sounding flow of phonemes that this monolingual English speaker hears – but it is all very entertaining and I’m enjoying that part of the broadcasts immensely.

It’s been a strange World Cup overall, from what I’ve been able to tell. The Germans, Danes, and Belgians didn’t make the knockout round, but the US and Australia did. Italy didn’t even qualify. Iran beat Wales, Saudi Arabia beat Argentina, Cameroon beat Brazil, Tunisia beat France, and Japan beat Spain.

So we’ll see how it goes now that we’re in the knockout round.

I'll be glad to get back to the Premier League, though.

News and Updates

1. Day eight with the new furnace. Still warm. Further bulletins as events warrant.

2. I still haven’t been paid for work I did this past summer for one of the three campuses I work for. Mostly this is because nobody can figure out who is in my chain of command at Home Campus or the Mother Ship to sign off on it, and on those rare occasions when somebody is identified they either move to another position or get artfully fired (“reassigned to special projects”). The band is officially stumped. I suppose I should be grateful I’m being paid at all, come to think of it, but it does give me pause regarding whether I should accept further projects.

3. Speaking of work-related confusion, is there any conceivable universe where this would be considered a useful notification?

Just checking.

4. My friend Nick says that he wants to see one of those high-stakes political thriller movies where the nuclear access codes can’t be accessed except through DUO and nobody can get it to work because their browsers are the wrong version or their wifi is too slow for the timed-response approval. I’d pay money to watch one of those, yes I would. I’d probably be rooting for Armageddon, but I would watch.

5. We have not cooked an actual meal this week and may not do so until Saturday. It’s definitely leftover season. We’ve been alternating between Thanksgiving leftovers and gravy (spaghetti sauce to the non-Italians in the audience) and meatballs leftovers, and while it has been very tasty I think we’ll all be grateful for a change of pace.

6. I’m trying to block off some evenings without work, which is a rather foreign concept. Teachers in general have very poor life/work balance skills and mine are pretty much nil. There’s always something to grade or something to prep or something else to write. But there is also hockey to be watched and family to be hung out with and books to read, and that has to count for something.

7. I need to renew my driver’s license. Apparently it’s a “Real ID” – as opposed to the fake ones that you see so often with college students, I guess – so there are extra hurdles. Also, I need to give them my physical description, which is somewhat complicated by the fact that a) I no longer care to know how much I actually weigh and b) specifying a hair color is an act of nostalgia rather than observation. But they don’t really check when you fill things out, so I suppose I could just put down whatever I want.

8. I have acquired a nice winter hat in the approved Home Campus colors, and it is now cold enough to justify wearing it on occasion.

9. I should also get a Home Campus sweatshirt or two, mostly because this will allow me to wear sweatshirts to work. Honestly, the pandemic did quite a number on my eagerness to wear the standard Business Casual academic work uniform anymore. I don’t mind button downs and khakis, but sweatshirts are more comfortable.

10. It is December 1 and I am now willing to acknowledge the existence of Christmas.

New Heat

We replaced the furnace last week. Well, other people replaced the furnace. We just told them to do that, and paid them for doing so. It counts.

We’ve been talking about this for the better part of a decade now. The old furnace came with the house in 1996, and from what the various service people have told us it was moved there when the house got moved to its current site in 1992 or so. The furnace itself was originally installed in 1986. It was a reliable and efficient furnace – a pulse furnace, which is a design with essentially no moving pieces to wear out – but they stopped making parts for it sometime during the Obama Administration and the last time the repair guy came out he told us that even the parts that they could jury-rig into place were getting scarce.

So it was time.

Kind of a shame, really, since it was working just fine. But it would do that until it stopped and when it stopped we’d need the new one in a hurry and it’s just best to do this on your schedule rather than the furnace’s schedule.

This is why we ended up replacing the AC unit at the same time. The guy who last serviced it, back in September, looked at it and said, carefully, “Yeah, that will probably start up in the spring.” It was also here when we moved in back in 1996, so it too owed us nothing.

Of course, getting a new furnace means clearing a path to the old one through the stuff in the basement, which is a problem. There’s a lot of stuff down there. My parents’ stuff. Kim’s dad’s stuff. Our various grandparents’ stuff. Stuff we had before we got married. Stuff we acquired afterward. Kid stuff. Project stuff. A wide assortment of tools that we have been threatening to organize since at least 2017. Stuff.

Fortunately the stuff is arranged in a fairly modular way and the furnace is not far from the stairs, so clearing a path was not all that intensive. But still. There was archeology.

Two guys showed up on Wednesday morning with a truck full of parts and equipment and set to work. I watched for a little while because it was interesting, but after a bit you could tell they just wanted to get on with things without the Homeowner staring at them so I retreated to my office to stare forlornly at my grading without actually doing any of it before switching gears and plinking around the web for a while. It was technically a holiday, after all, since none of the various campuses I work for held classes that day.

It was also a fairly warm day, so keeping the heat off for a morning caused no issues. I can’t imagine trying to do this in -20F weather. Yeah, our schedule, not the furnace’s.

Eventually they finished, cleared off all the old equipment, and headed off with a fairly large check in my handwriting because for some reason my winning smile was not payment enough. I have no idea why other than the fact that it has taken me three tries to type this without falling over sideways laughing.

The new furnace works pretty well – it’s quieter and more efficient than the old one, and it provides better heat to the far reaches of the house as well. I have no idea how the new thermostat works, but they did leave a manual that I swear I will read someday. Given that it is November we haven’t tried the AC yet, but with climate change barreling down it’s entirely possible that someday we will have to do that.

Here’s to warmth in the winter.

Thanksgiving Too

It’s odd how things become embedded in family lore.

Way back in the 1970s there was a commercial for Alka-Seltzer. I don’t even know if they make Alka-Seltzer anymore – they must, surely – but it’s been decades since I’ve seen a commercial for the stuff. If you’re not familiar with this product, it’s a tablet that dissolves into bubbles when placed in water and it is meant to soothe upset stomachs. This particular commercial was mostly a tableau of the remains of a vast holiday feast, the table groaning with food and the people strewn around it groaning from the consumption thereof. This goes on for about 25 seconds, and then from offstage you hear a cheerful woman’s voice shout “Bring out the second turkey!” right before they cut to the product pitch.

That became a tag line in my family. We were a group that loved our meals together. We still do.

We spent Thanksgiving Day up at my brother-in-law’s house, along with a hearty representation of Kim’s side of the family. We spent the morning preparing the things we were asked to bring – pizzelles, rolls, a cranberry-apple-current pie, a pumpkin roll – and then loaded up for the journey. Lauren was home for the break and she brought Maxim with her, so we had a pleasantly full minivan on the way up with the five of us.

There was a vast amount of food and family, and we had a grand time. There are a lot of younger kids on that side of the family so there was a proper swirl of activity. I spent most of my time in the dining room with Oliver, Lauren, Maxim, my niece Marin, and Bob (Amy’s dad), sharing stories and food, but others dropped in to visit and occasionally I did venture out into the rest of the house where everyone else was. I had a long conversation about animation with a guy named Dave whose exact relationship to me was never made clear but who was enjoyable to talk with, and I made my rounds to Grandma and Grandpa, Rory and Amy, and various other folks.

I tried to take some pictures but my utter inability to get an iPhone to take usable photographs is becoming something of a running joke (or mild running tragedy, take your pick) these days. Oh well. They always come out flat and grainy, and I suppose I just need to remember to bring my actual camera to these things.

So a good time was had, photographic failures notwithstanding.

But the problem with having Thanksgiving at someone else’s house is that someone else gets to keep the leftovers. Fortunately there is a solution to that.

Bring out the second turkey!

We decided to have Thanksgiving again on Saturday. Oliver invited some of his friends, and when much of Lauren’s old Squad came over on Wednesday night to hang out here after their Friendsgiving dinner at one of the local Mexican restaurants we invited them as well. Not everyone could make it, but in the end we had eleven for dinner – me and Kim, Oliver, Lauren, Maxim, John, Camrin, Jacob, Nolan, Chase, and Kyler – and that was a nice crowd.

We spent the day making all sorts of good food, and for the meal itself we dragged out the wedding china because when else are you going to use the stuff? Might as well put some mileage on it, we say. There was too much food to put on the table (a lovely problem to have) so we just set it out in the kitchen and people dished up there and went to sit down. It was a couple of hours of conversation and laughter and even though a few had to leave early most ended up migrating to the living room for an impromptu sing-along to Mamma Mia, which is about a fine a way to end a Thanksgiving holiday as you could ask for.

I’ve always liked Thanksgiving. It’s one of the few holidays devoted to being glad for what you have rather than asking for more. I am thankful for my family and friends and loved ones. I am thankful for the good people I shared meals with, who brightened my home and who allowed us into theirs. I am thankful for the food and the songs and the laughter. In a world that seems intent on darkening, there is light.

And that is enough.