Entry 813: Father's Day 2026

I have the house to myself on this Father's Day 2026. S is riding with another mom to take Lil' S2 and a few of his pals to sleepaway camp, and Lil' S1 is spending the day at a cabin or a farm or something like that. The parents of one of his friends from school rented a house in a rural area and welcomed some other folks to join them. They actually invited our entire family, and I suspect we would have all gone if today wasn't also check-in day for Lil' S2's camp. But I didn't really want to go without S, so we arranged for another family to take Lil' S1 with them.

It was a tough call on my part. I certainly didn't love the idea of spending an entire day out in the boonies with people I barely know (especially with an entire day to myself as the alternative), but I also don't want to be the dude who grows old and withers away in his mancave with no friends around, because he didn't cultivate any new relationships when he had the chance. And I know I'm not good at taking the initiative to plan social events, so, as a general principle, I try to not turn down invitations. But there are exceptions, and those exceptions apparently including making small talk for hours on end while Lil' S1 leads a D&D campaign in the other room. So, I decided I would leave it up to Lil' S1. I laid out three scenarios and presented each of them neutrally, so as to not influence his choice: 1) neither of us go; 2) we both go; 3) just he goes. He immediately picked 3. It was so quick, in fact, that I would have been offended if that wasn't the answer I was hoping for.

Setting aside my own preferences for a minute, he's at a tricky age where it's not at all obvious, as a parent, what events you should and should not attend with him. Young teenagers pretty much always act as if they don't want their folks around--and they often say as much--but sometimes they really do want you there, or at least they appreciate that you are there. And then even if they genuinely don't want you there, is it something that you still need to go to for supervision? That's a consideration also. Lil' S1 and his friends are pretty independent, which is wonderful, and they also have access to an extensive public transportation system, which is also wonderful, but they aren't quite old enough to do everything they want and go everywhere they want without a chaperone at least in the vicinity. This becomes especially apparent when Lil' S1 tells us he is going to go somewhere, and we have a conversation much like the following.

Lil' S1: Hey, I'm going to [event] with [friends].
Us: Okay, well, how are you getting there.
Lil' S1: Metro.
Us: What stop is the event on?
Lil' S1: I'm not sure exactly yet.
Us: Okay, well, what time are you going?
Lil' S1: [Friend] is coming over here at 1:00, and then we are going to go and meet [other friend].
Us: 1:00? You know it's 12:30  now, right?
Lil' S1: Yes.
Us: And [friend] is coming over here, right now, even though the place you are going is the exact opposite direction for him as our house?
Lil' S1: Yes.
Us: Okay, where and when are you meeting [other friend].
Lil' S1: Not sure exactly. We'll text each other.
Us: You know phones don't always get service on the Metro, right? Do you have a backup plan if you can't get a hold of each other?
Lil' S1: No
Us: And don't forget, you have [some other obligation] at 3:00. Are you going to be able to do all this and get home in two hours?
Lil' S1: Yes.
Us: And your friends' parents, they're all okay with this?
Lil' S1: Yes, they all already said it's okay.
[*Buzz, buzz* Text from other parents]: Hey do you guys have any idea what's going with [event]? Apparently they are supposed to meet in a half hour, and this is the first I'm hearing of it lol.

And scene...

In other news, we are on the final episode of Modern Family, which means we are going to need a new sitcom to watch pretty soon as a family. Overall, it was a good series, but like almost every TV show I've ever seen that was more than like five seasons, it drastically dropped in quality in its latter half. In fact, I can pinpoint the moment I realized that it had completely jumped the shark, or should I say, moved the piano.

Season 9, Episode 15: Cam and Mitchell are throwing a party at their house to celebrate Mitchell's new job as a high-pay, high-power attorney for a well-known billionaire. To rub their newfound success in their friends' faces a little bit, they buy a piano for their living room. Midway through the party, however, they learn that Mitchell's new boss was involved in fraud or something like that, and so Mitchell doesn't have the job anymore. They don't want their friends to know this, so Cam takes all their phones under the pretense of being more present in the moment. They also can no longer afford the piano, so they want to return it, but they can only get their money back if they return it that very day. So, Cam lures all their friends into the bathroom and takes the handle off the door, which somehow "accidentally" locks them in. Then, the next scene, as they "fix" the lock and all their friends come out, the piano is gone, and in its place is a stack of boxes under a giant blanket in the shape of a piano.

What...?

How did that happen? How long were their friends locked in the bathroom? The piano movers weren't even there yet, and it would take several people at least like an hour to move this thing once they arrived. Then it would probably take another hour or so to find and move all the boxes to set up the fake piano after they left. How long are we supposed to believe this group of people were trapped in a small bathroom (and what kind of psychos would lock people up like this)? At some point, the detainees are climbing out the window or forcing the door open. And also how could they possibly move a piano and a bunch of boxes without somebody in the bathroom hearing what is going on? The bathroom is adjacent to the living room. A normal bathroom door could not come close to stifling such sounds. 

Then, to make things even more inane, after the are let friends out, they all ask Cam to play something on the piano, so he pretends that his electronic keyboard is the piano keys and plays with the blanket still on. Amazingly, nobody peeked under the blanket or wondered why his playing sounded like an electronic keyboard and not an actual piano. The whole thing is a set up for Mitchell's sister Claire to lie on the fake piano, jazz singer style, and fall through the boxes thus revealing the whole charade, and that is kinda funny, I guess, but you can set that up so much better. The whole thing is so stupid, and not in a funny stupid comedy type of way, but in an I actually feel like watching this has made me stupider type of way.

The thing is, obviously you have to suspend your disbelief with any work of fiction, but you also have to be able to relate to what's going on. "It's funny because it's true" is a comedy cliché for a reason, and it's especially resonant for a show in which sympathizing with the characters is the main source of the comedy. Phil and Claire talking to their hot divorcee neighbor--funny! Phil and his father flipping their car--not very funny!

Although, that latter scene did send me down a Fred Willard rabbit hole. His character dies at the end of the episode, and it seemed the writers shoehorned it in, which made me wonder if it's because he died in real life, and I think that's what happened, as the dates seem to line up. Then I started reading Willard's list of TV appearances, and it is insane how many small-to-medium-ish parts this guy played throughout his career. He might be up there for greatest TV character actor of all time. Here's a list of shows he was on that is about a fifth of the size of the one on his Wikipedia page, as I'm omitting shows I've never heard of. It also doesn't include any of his movie roles (e.g., This is Spinal Tap, Best in Show)

• The Bob Newhart Show
• Laverne & Shirley
• SNL
• The Love Boat
• SCTV
• Trapper John, M.D.
• The Golden Girls
• Married... with Children
• The Ben Stiller Show
• Family Matters
• Murphy Brown
• Roseanne
• Friends
• Clueless
• Sister, Sister
• Lois & Clark
• Saved by the Bell
• Muppets Tonight
• The Weird Al Show
• Sabrina the Teenage Witch
• Two Guys and a Girl
• Mad About You
• The Simpsons
• Just Shoot Me!
• Ladies Man
• The Hughleys
• Ally McBeal
• Undeclared
• King of the Hull
• Hey Arnold!
• Family Guy 
• That '70s Show
• Everybody Loves Raymond
• The Drew Carey Show
• The Batman
• The Boondocks
• Everybody Hates Chris
• Wizards of Waverly Place
• Modern Family
• Castle
• Important Things with Demetri Martin 
• Chuck
• Funny or Die Presents
• The Closer
• Raising Hope
• Hot in Cleveland
• The Cleveland Show
• Community
• New Girl
• I Think You Should Leave
• Space Force 

That is a ridiculous résumé. I'm more than six years late on this, but RIP Fred Willard, you were a national treasure.*

Well, that's all for now. Happy Father's Day to those who celebrate fake holidays.

Until next time...

*He was also in something called Easy to Assemble, a web series featuring Illeana Douglas sponsored by Ikea... WTF?! Jeff Goldblum and Keanu Reaves were also in it... double WTF?!  

Entry 812: Winters, They Will Come And They Will Go

I've been having cotton candy dreams lately. That's my term for dreams that are super intense and slightly unsettling, the type that require you to recenter yourself for a few minutes after you wake up. They aren't nightmares necessarily, but they aren't sunshine and lollipops either (despite being called cotton candy dreams). They're not like watching a horror movie, but rather a really well-made thriller. Scratch that, they're like being in a really well-made thriller. But one that doesn't make sense. They're like being in a David Lynch movie.

I call them cotton candy dreams because once on a podcast a guy was talking about his friend who was on medication, and this friend found that if he ate a certain brand of cotton candy, he could only ever find at CVS, right before he went to sleep, it interacted with his medication in a such a way that it would give him the wildest, most intense dreams. For some reason, this little anecdote has always stuck with me (it could have been the part that CVS sells cotton candy and that a grown man buys it--that sounds utterly disgusting to me), and since then I've referred to such dreams as cotton candy dreams.

I don't have cotton candy dreams often, but the past week, I've had them nearly every night for some reason. One through line is that there is almost always a celebrity involved, and in my dream I'm friends with this celebrity, and then when I wake up, it's always a bit of a letdown that I'm not actually friends with them. (Most recently it was Larry David, surely because they showed him so much during the broadcast of the last Knicks-Spurs game.) Another through line is that I live in a shitty place. That's my version of the "naked in public" anxiety dream. I live in some overcrowded group house or dingy studio apartment, and then when I wake up it's a relief to be in my king-size bed next to my lovely wife, in my beautiful house, in my nice neighborhood.

Anyway... speaking of dreams, I've mentioned before that I think "Dreams" by Fleetwood Mac is basically a perfect song. So, I was pleased that the choir at Lil' S1's school sang it during his "moving up" ceremony. I did wonder, however, when they started it, if the subject matter was appropriate for a middle school graduation, you know, being about a man who wants to exit his current relationship so that he can philander more. However, the choir director anticipated such misgivings and changed the lyrics to something more apt for the occasion, so "women, they will come and they will go" became "winters, they will come and they will go." To which I say, well done, choir director.

It was a fine ceremony overall, even though I got to it late. I had to go into the office that day, and it's a bear to get from my office back to DC anytime from like 3pm to 7pm (which is why I usually go to the gym for a few hours after work). Also, the thing I most had/wanted to do in the office didn't start until 4pm and the doors for commencement at Lil' S1's school closed at 6:30pm. I gave myself what I thought was ample leeway, leaving so that my expected arrival time was 6:10 (accounting for traffic), but it wasn't good enough. At some point along the way, my ETA jumped from 6:10 to 6:23 to 6:32 in the span of about 30 seconds.

By the time I final got to the theater, it was 6:35, and the first speech was under way. I waited for it end, and then I slipped in and sat in the first open seat I saw. I quickly realized I was in a special section reserved for faculty, which is why a seat was available so close to the stage. Nobody seemed to mind, but I felt awkward, so between each speaker/performance I tried to find where S was sitting with her sister and Lil' S2. Surely, they had saved me a seat, right? But where were they? I could not spot them, even though it's a relatively small theater. So, I just sat in the faculty section the entire time, trying not to feel weird about it. I was cursing S in my head for not saving me a seat and sending me a text saying where they were sitting, but she actually did do that, but the text didn't go through until much later in the night for some reason. The highlight of the ceremony for me was Lil' S1 reading a funny poem he wrote. It was a pleasant surprise, as he didn't mention it to either S or me beforehand.

Alright, I'm just about out of time, but let's do a quick lightning round before I go.

• I seem to have successfully gotten rid of the houseflies on our deck... for now. They will probably come back at some point, but I haven't seen one in weeks. I've seen other gnats and midges (which I spray down immediately lest they grow into something bigger), but no houseflies. Knock on wood.
  
  
• But not all is good with our deck. There is a leak in the ceiling now. I got up on the roof today to see if I could find the source, and immediately it was like, There's no way I'm finding this damn thing. The entire outer layer of the roof is full of cracks and splits, and it's impossible to know which one exactly is leading to the leak. I did however notice that the leak is by the skylight, so I bought some waterproof sealing tape, and covered up the edges of the skylight. Will it work? Maybe, maybe not, but for $17 plus an hour or my time, it's worth a shot.
  
  
• We got rid of our trampoline today. It's the end of an era, but, now that I think of it, it was a bad era (we bought it at the beginning of the Covid shutdowns), so maybe it's good ju-ju to get rid of it. It was time. The thing was falling apart, and it made me super nervous, safety-wise. The protective netting tore to shreds over the years, and I couldn't figure out the right replacement, so the new one didn't fit right and was constantly falling off. Then we kept losing springs. When I saw some six-year-old neighborhood girl I didn't know bouncing on it, I was like, Yeah, we're gonna get sued if I don't get rid of that thing. So, I broke it all down by hand, wrapped up the piping and springs in the jumping mat, tied it off and dragged it out to the front curb for bulk trash pickup. It was a bitch. It took me like four hours, and I was drench in sweat and my hands were sore and blistered when I was done (for some reason I didn't think to put on gloves until I was like 75% of the way through). But it's gone now, so mission accomplished.

Until next time... 

Entry 811: Repeat Champions... Not!

It's the 5th-grade flag football league title game. The Seahawks are trying to repeat as champions. They have the ball, down three, at the 40-yard line (which is actually about 20 yards from the end zone). There are a mere 15 seconds on the clock. The Seahawks coach (aka me) calls the play. Seahawks QB Lil' S2 takes the snap and scans the field. He fires the ball to his buddy and main receiver Z running a crosser. Z makes the catch! He snakes his way past some defenders, across the goal line! Touchdown! Seahawks take the lead with mere seconds remaining! They will be back-to-back champions!

But wait... the referee throws his penalty marker. It's a flag-guarding infraction on Z.* No touchdown and a ten-second run-off of the clock. The game is over. The Seahawks lose. Many players on the team break down in tears. The coaches shake their heads and mutter curse words under their breaths, wondering what on Earth would possess a referee to call that ticky-tack bullshit on the final frickin' play of the championship.

*Flag-guarding, if you're unfamiliar with the rules of flag football, is when the ball-carrier uses their arms to block the defenders from pulling the flag. Usually, it's not called, especially at this level, unless the player intentionally and obviously uses a chopping motion to deflect the defender's hand, which, I will point out, Z did not do. I think he was holding the ball kinda low, but he always does that and almost never gets called for flag-guarding. This was the type of thing, where if the ref doesn't call a penalty, nobody thinks anything of it. I don't think flag-guarding was even on the mind of anybody on either side of the field until the ref threw the flag.

So went my Sunday evening. It was such a gut punch, and I'm legitimately bummed about it. I know it's just elementary school rec football, but that doesn't mean you can't care. It's good to care. Caring is where all the satisfaction and fun and personal growth comes from. I'm glad I still care about things. One of the biggest downsides of growing up as a Gen Xer was getting pummeled with the notion that it's uncool to care. Nothing could be further from the truth. Caring is the best. So, yeah, you can care about winning and losing in kids sports. 

You just can't be a psycho about it. But I'm not. I never am, and I wasn't in this instance. I didn't say a word to the referee; I didn't gesticulate in an aggrieved manner; I didn't even do that thing coaches sometimes do, where they complain to other parents on their sideline, but in such a loud manner that, in effect, they are complaining to everybody at the game, including the referees. I did none of that. I took my place in the high-five line, congratulated the players on the other team and their coaches, and then sat down my team and gave them a short talk. I told them that they just didn't get the call. That's it. They did enough win, and probably should have won, but the call went against them. It doesn't take away from how well they played in the game--all season, really--and they should all be proud.

I don't know how much solace they took in that. But one of the dad's from the other team came up to me, and said he thought I said the right things to the kids. He also said it was a bad call and that he wished there was a way we could have had one more play to decide things in a noncontroversial manner. I appreciated that especially since there was no reason for him to say anything to me at all. It's not like we were sitting next to each other at a dinner party. I had no idea who he was. He just started talking to me. But it was really cool of him to do that. 

Lil' S2 took it hard.* He was sobbing after the game, and he rode home with S (we had to drive separately), presumably because she's the more comforting of us two. He already got his "life lesson" spiel from me and probably just wanted some unconditional sympathy from his mom. He played really well though. They hold the semifinal and final on the same day in this league, so we had two games, and he was almost perfect on the day. We had two QBs, but one recently broke his finger, so Lil' S2 had to take every snap for us, and he was throwing dots. In the first game, we ended every possession we had with a touchdown pass. In the second game, he threw a bad pick-six at the end of the first half (his one big mistake) and put us behind the 8-ball, but we battled back, and he threw the go-ahead touchdown with 1:10 left on the clock, and then after they quickly scored to retake the lead, he immediately drove us downfield and threw the aforementioned nullified game-winner. It was cool and very reminiscent of Kurt Warner in Super Bowl XLIII.

*He seems fine now, though. One of his buddies who's also on the team came over, and they seemed to be happily playing video games when I peeked through the ajar door to check on them. That's one nice thing about kids: They heal quickly and not just physically.

So, I'm sad we lost, but it certainly went better than our baseball playoffs. We got thumped 15-4, and it was somehow less competitive than the score indicates. Lil' S2 had a terrible game, with two strikeouts in two plate appearances (is it worth mentioning he fouled off a few pitches? probably not, but I did it anyway) and a quasi-drop in right field (it wasn't an easy play, but a decent little leaguer makes the catch). After the drubbing, Lil' S2 said he wished he had "skipped the game," and proclaimed that he didn't want to play baseball next season. Fine with me, but he also said that last year. So, we shall see.

Alright, that's all for today. Just an update on flag football that literally nobody wanted. But I needed to get that all out there. Thanks for being my sounding board.

Until next time... 

Entry 810: Running Out The School Year Clock

The end of the school year is nigh, and it feels like a year's worth of events have been saved up for the next two weeks. With Lil' S2 it's the worst because his school is so noncommunicative. Like, he'll tell me on a Thursday evening that he needs $80 in cash by tomorrow morning for a field trip, and I'm like, What? I haven't heard of this? And then I start panicking a little bit, thinking I dropped the ball on something. That is, until my phone starts pinging with a hundred messages from the parents' WhatsApp group, and everybody is asking what the deal with the field trip is and why hasn't anybody heard of it. Inevitably, somebody will post a screenshot from a Class Dojo message from a random teacher's aide, but almost nobody saw it, because Class Dojo sends you roughly 50 alerts a day and 45 of them are trying to get you to upgrade to the paid version.

I'm sure that just about every parent complains about their kid's school to some degree, but Lil' S2's has been plagued by some serious dysfunction, like to the point that the principal resigned earlier this week, perhaps to avoid being fired. I won't get into the details, in part because I don't feel completely informed on them--I mean, nobody is, that's a huge part of the problem--but I've been especially tuned out to it all. We've got a month left, and then that's it--we're done with elementary school for good. I'm just trying to coast to the finish line, and once we get there: not my monkeys, not my circus.

Although, I will say one thing on the matter because it's kinda funny. There was a parents-only Zoom meeting a few weeks ago to discuss the state of the school and the current leadership. I didn't attend, but apparently a "parent" named "Patrick" did, and in the chat, "he" was stridently defending the administration and arguing with parents who were expressing misgivings. Given my quote marks, you can probably see where this is going. Patrick was not, in fact, a school parent, but rather its assistant principal. Her name isn't Patrick*, and apparently she isn't very good at covering her tracks on the internet (also, all the parents know each other, and they were like, Who is this Patrick person we've never heard of?). She was immediately put on leave after this came to light, and I will be shocked if she's back at the school next year.

*This was not actually her fake name. I'm using a pseudonym for a pseudonym. 

So, like I said, we're just trying to ride out the next few weeks, and also like I said, there's a lot to ride out. Over the past three days we had a talent show, two sleepovers, a birthday party, two baseball practices, a baseball game, and today we have volunteering, an exhibition project, and a flag football game, and that's just Lil' S2. With his brother, you can toss in two D&D sessions*, a sleepover, cookie baking for some reason, a programming internship, and a friend's dance recital. It's too much. I mean, it's literally too much, so we had to make cuts. We said no to Saturday night sleepovers (actually Lil' S1 preemptively said no to his friend because he knew he had a lot to do, while Lil' S2 was very grumpy about it), and we skipped all the baseball stuff. 

*In which no D&D is actually played. They used to play, but they stopped for some reason, and now they just hang out, but everybody still calls it D&D.  

Speaking of baseball, there's a good chance Lil' S2's career in the sport is over. It's the playoffs right now, and the team isn't very good (1-10 record), so if they lose, which is likely, they're out, and that's the season. He says he doesn't want to play again in the fall, and if he doesn't play in the fall, he's not going to be good enough to play in the Spring when he would age into a higher league. He's actually been improving a bit, and if he practiced, like at all, he could be half-decent, but he shows little interest in practice. So, I don't feel bad about him not going to the game today. He's not one of the better players on the team, so we're not letting anybody down by missing it. In flag football, he's currently our only quarterback (our other one broke his finger and is out for the season), and we're trying to repeat as league champion, so it would be a big deal if he had to miss a playoff game. In baseball, it might even be better for the team if he doesn't go, as then his spot in the batting order will get skipped, and, even though he's been improving, he still usually makes an out. I don't think his coach was too broken up about it when he saw we RSVP'd "no".

To completely shift topics, I randomly watched Fargo the other night, and it's so damn good. I hadn't seen it since it came out 30 years ago, so I'd forgotten a lot of it. I wish they still made movies like this*--no CGI, no superheros, no talking animated animals, just a great script, great performances, and a runtime under 100 minutes. That last one is key. Everything is just too damn long now. I thought about watching Marty Supreme instead but it's two and a half hours--for a ping-pong movie? Why? I mean, I haven't seen it yet, but still I ask, why? 

*One thing to consider is that I think a lot of would-be movies are now turned into prestige TV shows, and a lot of them are really good, so that's cool. But still, I wish these great shows were being created in addition to great films, instead of in place of them.  

Alright, times up. Until next time... 

Entry 809: Rainy Day Weekend

The weather has been brutal here in DC this holiday weekend. It would have been the perfect time to stay in and watch movies--and maybe we will do that later today--but we had a lot to do these past few days and couldn't let some gray skies stand in our way. Plus, I'm used to this type of weather, growing up west of the Cascades. In all my memories of playing outside as a child, it is raining. I'm shooting a wet basketball at a wet hoop that sprays mist every time the ball hits the rim, or throwing a waterlogged football that's twice as heavy as it should be, or riding my bike through puddles as mud spatters from the tires onto the back of my sweatshirt. This is very much that type of weather. Usually out here we get thunderstorms, where it comes down in buckets for a half-hour at a time, and then the clouds break, and the sun comes back, and you wouldn't believe that it was just storming if not for the drops on the trees. But this weekend it's just been a Tacoma-esque steady dreary drizzle, and it's not forecast to clear up until Thursday.

Our first order of business this weekend was to get a new car, and we succeeded in that regard. We got a Hyundai Ioniq 5. It's pretty nice. After the first 24 hours, we don't have any buyer's remorse, at least. We wanted an EV, and this seemed to be the best one that wasn't a Tesla and wasn't like $60K. We actually started to waiver a little bit and considered getting another Tesla, just because it's so easy, and the prices have come down a lot over the past few years (which actually hurt us with our reimbursement from the insurance company), and we already have all the infrastructure--accounts, apps, chargers, etc.--for a Tesla. But I really like the idea of being out of Elon's World, and I was very unhappy with the Tesla service center the last time I had to take the car in, and some of the technological "enhancements" on the Tesla are kinda silly and actually more inconvenient than their more primitive counterparts, like, I'd rather just open the glove box with a handle than use a tablet. So, we were at the very least going to check out other brands of EV.

The first place we went was the Hyundai dealership, and I was sold very quickly on the Ioniq 5. It's cool looking and drives smoothly and takes the Telsa charger without an adapter, which is a big plus. Also, the sale's rep was really good, very nice and knowledge (even though he looks like he is 14), and not very pushy, which I appreciated. The car we wanted came with a pretty good corporate rebate,* and I would have just said yes and driven it off the lot, because that's how I roll, but S wanted to shop around a bit more, so we also went to the Kia dealership, but we didn't love what they had to offer. They felt more like gas cars that had been refitted to be electric, rather than originally-designed EVs. The salesman also wasn't as good. He wasn't bad, but he didn't seem to be going above and beyond like the other guy--or maybe is just as good and correctly assessed us as being very unlikely customers, so he was polite, but didn't invest too much time and energy in us. Whatever the case, he didn't get our business. The next day we went back to Hyundai and drove home in our new car. (Well, I drove it home, anyway. S drove our old car, which we came in.)

*In order to get the rebate, we had to finance a loan--we couldn't just pay cash--but the minimum length of the loan is only 90 days, so we can just pay it off in full after that if we like. Being that the rebate is $10K off the sticker price, it's a no-brainer. I was wondering how this makes business sense for the company, and I think just getting people into loans works out in the long run because of the interest. Although, you can pay it off in full after 90 days, a lot of people probably won't, the same way a lot of people won't pay off their credit card in full each month or won't cancel their subscriptions once the free trials expire.

Along with the car buying, we had a very social past few days. Saturday evening we went to some friends' house, who have two kids the same ages as ours, for a dinner party, in which the older kids made all the food. They've done once this before and it's really cute. They made homemade hummus, bean and tomato soup, these beef pocket bread sandwiches that you dip in yogurt sauce, and then a cookie cake for dessert. It was really good. The only downside is that I drank too much, because the hosts are big social drinkers, and the husband just kept filling up my wine glass, and I kept drinking it because I almost subconsciously just eat or drink whatever people put in front of me. I did catch it, however, before it got completely out of hand, so I wasn't super hung over the next morning or anything like that. I just felt a little extra logy. Nevertheless, I managed to bang out The Murph the next day, a traditional Memorial Day workout: 1 mile run, 100 pull-ups (I did chair dips), 200 push ups, 300 squats, another 1 mile run. It felt good and tiring, and I tweaked my back later in the day, which is super annoying. It's not terrible, but it probably means a week of no weights.

Actually, there was one other downside to the dinner mentioned above: Our other friend-couple thought we were coming over to their house for dinner instead. S was texting with the wife about us coming over on Sunday, and the wife thought she meant Saturday, and nobody every clarified which day they were referring to, so then I got a text from the husband asking what time we were arriving, and I'm like, "Uh... tomorrow." They had already bought all the food, and our kids were going to sleep over at their place, so everybody on their end was disappointed and annoyed, and even though it wasn't really S's fault--it was more of a two-way miscommunication--she felt bad and invited them over to our house on Sunday. So, instead of a kid-free night, which is what I thought I was getting, I got a four-kid night, and of course it was on me to put them all to bed, because S goes to bed at 9pm when she isn't jet-lagged. I finally got them all down around midnight, which actually isn't terrible, and I when I got into our room to sleep, and S is out cold with white noise pumping through her phone. 

Anyway... one last unfortunate thing to relay: The flies are back. You probably didn't even know they were ever gone, but I actually got rid of them temporarily. There were four straight days where I didn't see a single fly in our deck. But then I saw a few, not many, but not zero either. What's worse is that S saw them, and she convinced me to open the screen for a night to "let them all out." So, we did that, and today it's like we are back to where we were before our few glorious fly-free days. There are so many of them, and a lot of baby ones too, which means they definitely are breeding somewhere within the confines of our deck again. I wish I had never agreed to open the screen up. But I kinda had to, to prove my point that it wouldn't work, mainly to S, but also a little bit to myself. And now we seem to be back to square one. So, disheartening.

On that note... Until next time... 

Entry 808: Flies Frequently

I made a crossword puzzle once where the theme is that some clues have missing commas. So, for instance, one clue is "All for one" and the answer is LAUNDRY DETERGENT. Get it? The clue is supposed to be interpreted as "All, for one", and then the answer fits since All is an example of a laundry detergent. (There is a revealer later in the puzzle explaining this to help the solver along.) Another clue is "Flies frequently" and the answer is ANNOYANCES, since putting a comma in the clue would indicate that flies frequently are annoyances. I've been thinking about this puzzle lately since flies have become annoyances in my life of late--more than annoyances, actually. They've become the bane of my existence. Okay, that's an exaggeration. They are somewhere between annoyances and the bane of my existence.

The story starts with a different flying pest: mosquitoes. They are in abundant supply here in DC because the city was built on a swamp.* In certain pockets of the district, including our yard, unfortunately, mosquitoes make going outside for a prolonged period of time completely unbearable, unless you bathe in deet before hand, which is a step up from being eaten alive, to be sure, but still isn't very pleasant. So, to have a backyard we can actually enjoy, we bit the bullet during the Covid lockdown and spent a hefty chunk of change to screen-in our previously open-air deck. We then used it frequently, and it was great.

*This is a fact you will hear again and again if you live in this area, but I've never actually fact-checked it. It's probably not even true. I'm going to Google it right now... and what do you know?

But that was six years ago, and over time the screen has frayed and gotten some holes in it. This means a few more bugs get in now, particularly houseflies. They land on the screen and walk along it and maybe chance upon a hole and slip in. It used to not be a big deal because it was just the odd fly, every now and then. But a few weeks ago, S texted me while I was at work that there was a whole swarm of flies in the corner of our deck.* So, I bought some Raid and a bunch of different housefly traps on my way home, and I sprayed the swarm down and set up the traps and patted my hands together as if to say, Well, that's the end of that.

*Of course, she didn't try to do anything about it, because as a man this is my job. I also had to clean up the dead squirrel in our yard, even though I wasn't home at the time it was discovered.

And... the next morning they were back, even more of them before. I mowed them all down again, and then I checked the traps and came to realize that those things are mostly snake oil. There were dozens of flies around, and presumably they had been there for hours, and yet some of the traps didn't have a single fly in them. I started monitoring them, and I would watch a fly approach a trap, sometimes even land on it, and then not go in it. It was infuriating. The only thing that kinda worked is this multicolored adhesive stick. It had four or five flies stuck to it, which was better than the baited water trap, which had one, and then the light bulb trap and the other adhesive trap had zero. Their only stated purpose is to catch flies, and they couldn't catch a single one of a massive swarm.

Since it was clear the over-the-counter traps weren't up to the task, I called our pest control company to have them come out for a special visit. It wasn't quite a complete waste of time. He sprayed some industrial strength poison, which did almost nothing, the flies were back almost immediately, but he did explain that they were probably not getting in through holes, but rather breeding within the screens of the deck. For some reason, I never even considered this possibility, but it makes perfect sense. There is no way they could all be coming through the tiny, sparse holes in the screen. There is way too many of them for that. What must have happened is an inseminated female got in, laid her disgusting fly eggs under the floorboards, and started a colony. Our screen wasn't keeping the flies out; it was trapping them in. This was a they-weren't-flashbacks-they-were-flash-forwards Lost moment for me.

But what to do about it? I considered just opening the screen and letting the flies leave, but then what? How would I know if they were gone for good? When would I close the screen again? If they were still breeding under our deck, then that wouldn't solve anything. And it would let all the mosquitoes in, which is worse, because they suck your blood. Instead, I decided I would just have to wipe out their colony. Kill them all and let God sort it out. So, I bought out the entire stock of the multicolored adhesive sticks from the local hardware store (which was only three) and hung them up around the deck, both inside and out, and I made a plan to check the deck every half-hour or so and spray every fly I saw, no exceptions.* I had to get them before they could reproduce.  

*Thankfully we still have a few boxes of N95 masks in our old "Covid drawer," so I don't have to directly inhale the toxic spray. It does dissipate quickly, though, and I've gotten good at using just a tiny amount. You just need to hit those annoyances with a little shot, and then they can't fly temporarily, so you can knock them off the screen with a blunt object (I use a flat, light shoe) and bop them, hard enough to kill them, but not so hard it makes it mess. It's takes a deft hand to do it perfectly.  

Since S has been gone this past week, I've been working from home, which gave me a good opportunity to carry out my plan. I think it's working, but not quite as well as I would prefer. I have yet to go a day without killing a fly, but the number has definitely gone down. At first, I would see a half dozen or so every time I checked. Then it was two or three. Then it was two or three every other time I checked. Now it's one or two a few times a day. Progress, but it's still not good enough, and it's not linear. Sometimes I won't see any for hours, and I'll see one and go out to get it and realize while I'm out there that there are four more buzzing around. That's very disheartening. 

Hopefully, this seemingly unending struggle will in fact end soon. I can't continue to live my life this way. It's not just the time investment, it's also the psychology and physical strain. I'm like Walter White in his "contaminated" meth lab. My blood pressure goes up every time I see a speck of gunk on our screen. The other day I ran out to spray a fly and realized it wasn't a fly, but a spider, and I sprayed it anyway, which is completely counterproductive, given that more spiders mean less flies. I also don't love killing a massive number of living things. I mean, we all do it every time we wash our hands with antibacterial soap, but we can't see that. I can see the flies on the ground writhing around, hopelessly flapping their little wings and kicking their little legs. I know that this is the only way to get rid of them--it's not like I can shoo them away or transport their nest to the woods--but still, it doesn't make me feel awesome.

Alright, that's all for now. I've been talking about flies so much, I'm starting to feel like Jeff Goldblum (in Independence Day, weirdly, not The Fly). Until next time...

Entry 807: Airbags Deployed

Scary moment Friday evening. I was at home and had just gotten out of the shower and noticed there was an alert from the Tesla app on my phone. I didn't have my glasses on so I couldn't make out what it said, but I didn't think much of it. We frequently get Tesla updates on our phones for unimportant things, like "Update available" and "Your car cabin is now at the desired temperature" and whatnot. Plus S had the car, so I figured whatever it was, it probably didn't apply to me anyway.

Not thinking anything was out of the ordinary, I got dressed at a normal pace and put my glasses on and noticed that the alert was written in a much more attention-grabbing manner than usual. I don't remember if it was all caps or a font change or the use of scarier icons, but something about it made me think: You need to read this now. So, I did, and my heart sank a bit when I processed what it said: ACCIDENT DETECT, AIRBAGS DEPLOYED, 911 CALLED. That's scary, obviously, but it was slightly less scary than it might seem because I had another alert on my phone telling me I had missed a call from S, and that one came in after the one from Tesla. So, I figured, S had to be alright, at least somewhat, or else she couldn't have called me.

That's something, but it's not a lot, so I called S, but it went through to voicemail. I then sent a text but didn't have the patience to wait a reasonable time for a reply. I could see where the car was on the app, and it was only a few miles away, so I told Lil' S1 I was leaving, without saying why--no need to get everybody scared for no reason--and set off in S's direction. Thankfully, S called me before I got too far and explained what happened. She felt completely fine, which was the first point of order--the airbag had done its job--but she was audibly shaken, understandably so. She was going through a very busy intersection, with a green light giving her the right-of-way, and somebody turned left into her path, and she smashed into him. It was completely the other person's fault (as indicated on the police report). He was making a left and didn't yield to oncoming traffic. He is also 78-years-old and was in a different accident just a month ago, so I hope he's done driving now. First, I hope he's okay--it's unclear to S exactly what condition he was in after the crash--and then I hope he's done driving.

S told me to go back home and wait for her to call for a ride home. She said she still had to talk with the police (very helpful and kind, by her account) and wait for the tow truck. I said I would come out there to help with that, but she said that there wasn't much more to do, and she didn't want the kids to be alone. (Lil' S2 was about to return from baseball practice.) They're fine to be by themselves for a bit--we leave them home alone frequently--but I think in the state she was in the thought of her children being home alone really stressed her out, so I turned around and came back home. I thought about calling her sister to stay with the kids, but I didn't want to needlessly freak her out, and I also didn't want to introduce more logistics into the situation.

I got home about the same time as Lil' S2, so I told the kids what happened, and then S called about a half hour later and said she was ready to be picked up. Lil' S2 wanted to go with me because he wanted to see the smashed up car, but I told him it was already towed away, and then he wasn't as interested. When I went to pick up S, I had to make the same left turn as the other driver, and it's not a great turn. There's no left arrow, and they really need a left arrow. It did cross through my head, how ironic it would be if I replicated the accident picking up S from her accident, but of course I didn't do that.

Even though S wasn't feeling any physical effects from the crash, I took her to urgent care, per the recommendation of the paramedic who came to the scene. He said your adrenaline can mask your injuries in the immediate aftermath of an intense situation. Thankfully, however, all the tests came back clean, and the clinic is very close to where S's sister lives, so S called her, and she was able to come and keep S company.

Our car did not get the same clean bill of health. There's a good chance it's gone for good. I'm of two minds about this. On one hand, it's a really good car. It's an EV, and I've grown accustom to how easy it is. Everything just works. Also, it kept S safe and automatically called 911--that's pretty cool. On the other hand, we bought it right before Elon's full-on heel turn, and I've never felt good about it. So, I'll be fine either way, which is good, because I don't have any control over it. 

Alright, that's all for now. Oh wait, one other observation, I've noticed that if you tell people that you (or in this case your spouse) got into a car accident, they will listen very sweetly and very genuinely, and then they will tell you all about the worst car accident they've ever been in. I'm about 10/10 with this so far.

Alright, now that's really all. Until next time... 

 

Entry 806: Baseball Parenting And The Kentucky Derby

I have a few minutes alone on a weekend in the middle of the day, which is a total rarity. Lil' S1 is walking to a friend's house to play some D&D (he's not the dungeon master in this campaign, which is nice, as if he was, he would have to bring a bunch of heavy manuals and would probably hit me up for a ride), and S took Lil' S2 to his baseball game. Typically sports are my milieu, but S volunteered to do it, and I let her because Lil' S2's baseball games can be kinda brutal. His team is terrible--they haven't won a game all season--and he's not very good himself. He can't hit, because he never practices (and hitting a baseball is something you need to practice to be able to do at all competently), and he shows little interest in pitching, even though he could probably be decent at it with a little focus. He just doesn't seem to actually like playing baseball, and he's only on the team to goof off with friends, which is fine, I suppose, at his age, but baseball is a rough sport for parents if your child isn't really into it. You sit around for hours, usually on uncomfortable bleachers, watching your kid stand in the field, hoping the ball doesn't get hit to them (although Lil' S2 isn't a terrible fielder; I wouldn't say he's good, but he's not terrible), and then when they come up to bat, you steel yourself for what is almost guaranteed to be a strikeout. It's not at all enjoyable, so I took S up on her offer to handle baseball duties this morning.

S is leaving next week on a work trip, a longer one than usual, which is why she volunteered (if you were wondering). She feels guilty about leaving and tries to take on more of the parenting responsibility before she goes. I appreciate it, but in theory much more so than in practice. For one thing, it's completely unnecessary, as far as I'm concerned. She already does more than enough, while she's in town, and she's leaving for work, for money, which everybody in the family benefits from, including me. For another thing, it doesn't really work. I don't actually get much of break. I mean, I do, around the edges, like maybe I get out of the things I dislike the most, but they just get replaced with other responsibilities. For example, this morning I had to take Lil' S1 to get his haircut during his brother's game (a more laborious task than it might sound), and that's something that S would normally do, because I would be at baseball. 

Also, there is an element of want-to or feel-obligated-to with your kids that you can't turn off just because your spouse is willing to do more. Sometimes I want to take the kids places, or I would rather help out than sit there and do nothing, even if S says it's okay if I sit there and do nothing, because it makes me feel like a deadbeat dad if I sit there and do nothing, and I don't want to feel like a deadbeat dad. The only way you can really get away from parenting is to literally get away from it, to go somewhere away from home. And even then you're likely to get bombarded with text messages saying somebody wants permission for more Netflix time.

In other news, time just jumped, and it is now late evening as I write this. Lil' S2's baseball game is long over. His team lost 18-4, but he told me he got a "hit," which means he made an out, but not a strikeout. He made contact and put the ball in the play. It was a ground out to first, apparently, but still, that's progress. I think that's the first time he hit a fair ball all season. 

We went to a Kentucky Derby party at a friend's house today. It was fun, but I got a bit of a stomachache from it. I guess eating fried chicken and drinking mint juleps can do that to you. I had two mint juleps, and I probably should've quit after one, not because of the alcohol, but because of the syrup. Well, it was both, really. Somebody else made me the first one, and it was very good and proportional. But then I made the second one, and I suck at making drinks, so I put in too much syrup, and then I tried to even it out by putting in more bourbon, which meant I now just had a giant sugary (but still strong) drink, and I felt compelled to finish it because I always feel compelled to finish my drinks.  

In general, derby parties are pretty fun. You can get there before the race, hang out and eat and drink for a bit, and then watch the race, which is only two minutes, and everybody gets super into it, and has this intense experience together, and then you go home. Our friend does a big betting pool every year also, which makes it even better. I very much loathe the pervasiveness of gambling into all facets of sport, but some betting is fun. Like, if everybody is throwing $5 into a pot once a year on a big race at the center of a social event, then that's good. If you're compulsively tapping away on an app, alone in your apartment, betting your rent money, unmotivated to do anything else, then that's bad. Context matters.

I didn't win big tonight, sadly. Horses were drawn randomly and mine was a 75-1 shot going into the race. That means the oddsmakers thought it had about a 1.3% chance of winning, and it showed, as early on it was in the back of the pack. But then it made a furious push and was in the lead down the final stretch, before getting passed by two horses that were even further back and coming in third. Pretty good for a horse with such low odds, but not good enough to claim a winner-take-all pot. My horse's name was Ocelli, which is the plural of ocellus, the eyespot of a peacock. I told this to the woman sitting next to me at the party, and her reply was, "How do you know that?" which was exactly the response I was going for.

Until next time... 

Entry 805: School Daze

I thought the title for this entry was an homage to a 2001 stoner movie starring Method Man and Redman, but it turns out that movie is called How High. School Daze is a Spike Lee joint from the late '80s starring Laurence Fishburne. I've never seen either film. The latter apparently is a musical comedy-drama based in part on Lee's own college experiences at Morehouse. As for the former, well, I'll just quote Wikipedia directly:

The film follows two cannabis users who gain admission to Harvard University with the supernatural help of a deceased friend whose ashes were used to fertilize a marijuana plant. 

I now want to see this film. It has strong funny-in-a-campy-sort-of-way vibe to it. I don't know why, but for some reason, the first thing that popped into my head for comparison is Weird Science, and as I recall I thought that movie was entertaining even when I rewatched it as an adult.

Anyway...

The end of the school year isn't quite nigh, but it's in sight. It's a bigger deal this year than usual, as each of my kids will be graduating to a new phase of life. Lil' S1 will be done with middle school and moving on to high school in the fall. Lil' S2 will be starting middle school and leaving elementary school. For S and I, this means we are just about done, officially, with the little-kid stage of parenting. The annual elementary school gala is tonight--it would be the final one for us--but we aren't even going. S's friend came into town from Boston to visit, so she doesn't want to go, and I would maybe go stag, but I got invited to dinner with some puzzle people, so I'm going to go to that instead. I'm not really that bummed about missing our last gala. It's a fun event, but we typically just talk to the same people we see all the time anyway.

The big topic of discussion in our household at the moment is where Lil' S1 is going to go to high school: his current private school or the in-zone public school. I want the public school, but I think I'm going to lose this one. Although Lil' S1 showed a willingness, a desire even, to switch to the public school earlier this year, he has become pretty resolute recently in his wish to stay at his current school. S is mostly with me, in that she wants him to go to the public school, but if he really doesn't want to go--and it seems he doesn't--then it changes things. As she put it to me, "I want him to want to go there."

So, I think the fear of the unknown will be too great, and she will ultimately push to keep him where he is, and then I'll have to fold or face two people mad at me in my family. I'll probably fold. Also, it's honestly not a huge capitulation on my part. I think he will be fine at either school. I hate paying tuition to an institution that I don't think it is that great, but if I don't look at our bank statements, it's not that bad. The thing is, I just don't know what we get from this private school that is worth the money. I guess from my perspective I have to tell myself that's it's for family harmony, marital bliss, peace of mind, and those things are worth whatever you can afford to pay for them.

Speaking of Lil' S1's school, there was an "incident" this past week that caused quite the hullabaloo among this little community. What happened is some teachers were trying to come up with groups for a grade-wide project, and they wanted to match kids with other kids with whom they would work well. To do this, they created a spreadsheet with the kids' names and some information about them--their race, their interests, their friend groups, etc.--and in so doing, they used informal, somewhat disparaging language about the students. Then they accidentally saved this document to a drive to which students have access (doh!). A few kids saw it, took screenshots, and showed it to their parents, and then all hell broke loose.

There were really only two demeaning descriptions in the doc--the teachers characterized somebody as a "mean girl" and said another kid was "small and very ADHD" (and even that is more infelicitous than pejorative)--but that was enough to set off an email chain of seemingly infinite length, prompt an open letter to the school, and lead to not one, but two Zoom meetings--one with the school administration and a parents-only prep before that.

What exactly got resolved? I'm not sure. I don't think anybody got fired or disciplined, but maybe that's coming. Hopefully nobody loses their job over this. It doesn't rise anywhere close to that level, in my opinion. This is more like an-apologize-and-move-on type of thing. My big takeaway is that everybody should be under the assumption that anything they write to anybody online could be made public at some point, and so they should act accordingly. I don't really care that the teachers sometimes categorize their students in less than flattering ways (they're humans and that's how humans communicate), but it shows terrible judgement to put this down in writing. That should be the lesson for the kids: Every time you send a text or an email or share a document or otherwise communicate in a way that leaves a record, you have to think, "What would happen if this gets out?" If the answer is, "It would lead to public humiliation for me and possibly be cause for discipline from my employers," then maybe don't send it. 

On that note, until next time... 

 

Entry 804: What Does The Fox Say?

No entry last weekend, you might have noticed, because I went to a crossword puzzle tournament and had no time for blogging. It went well, and I had a great time. I don't compete but rather help administer the competition. I also hang out with a bunch of people I quite like but only see once a year: my ami-puzzlers. I'm trying this new thing where I use the prefix "ami" to indicate a friendliness--actually beyond a friendliness, an adoration or bond, perhaps, there's no good word for it, which is the problem--for people I like a lot, but I'm not quite friends with. I've come to realize that the English language is completely bereft of words or succinct phrases to indicate a relationship between an acquaintance and a friend.

It's weird too, because we probably have way more people in our lives that fall into the "ami-" category than we have actual friends. I have a decent number of actual friends, people to whom I am not related (neither through blood nor marriage), whom I hang out with semi-regularly, whose phone numbers I have and could text anytime for trivial reasons without it seeming weird, whose children and spouses I know, whose careers and interests I'm familiar with, etc. But I have at least twice as many ami-folks in my life, people who don't fit the friend criteria I just laid out, but whom I still very much like and enjoying spending time with and wish nothing but the best for, people with whom I might very well be friends in the future or would have been friend with under slightly different circumstances. A lot of coworkers fall into this category, also a lot of neighbors and parents of my sons' friends. I've been going to the same gym for over seven years now, and I've gotten to know a lot of the instructors and other patrons, and it would be nice to have a way to convey this more elegantly than "this guy I'm friendly with who goes to the same gym as me."*

*Sometimes you can convey this by putting how you know the person before the word "friend," my "gym friend," my "work friend," etc. Weirdly, doing this indicates that you aren't actually friends. 

That's where "ami-" comes in. You can just attach it to the beginning of any relationship, and it instantly conveys a friendliness that goes beyond mere acquaintance. Oh, hey, there's my ami-barber... I was getting lunch with my ami-colleague... An ami-dad and I were talking at our kids' baseball game... It's beautiful, and I recommend you all start using it too, especially since there is a decent chance I will never mention this topic again. I'm very good at ideas; I'm not so great with the follow-through.

In other news, before I left, I had to retrieve a baby fox that had trapped itself in our window well. In our backyard deck, we have this little pit, about five feet deep, that leads to a basement window. It's usually covered with a iron grate and deck furniture, and we don't even think about it. But late one night, about a week and a half ago, I heard this weird noise--a sort of high pitched sound, somewhere between a screech and a yelp--and I couldn't figure out where it was coming from. I finally decided it was a weird bird call and went to sleep.

Then the next night I heard it again, but more intensely, and it was super clear right when I walked by that basement window. Thinking maybe it was an animal merely occupying the well, not stuck in it, I banged on the window to chase it away. It was silent for a bit, and then started making the noise again. So, I shined a flashlight through the window (which took a tiny bit of courage--shining a light into a dark area not knowing what you're going to see is a bit nerve-wracking) and saw a frightened little fox. It clearly was wandering around under our deck, had fallen into the pit, and now couldn't get back out. My first thought was Shit, now I'm gonna have to go get this thing, followed by so, that's what the fox says, it's not actually "hakki-hakki-hakki-ho".

Weirdly, S was still awake even though it was about 11:00pm, so I told her what was going on, and she got out of bed, and we went out to the deck together. It's an effort just to lift off the grate, but we (mostly I) managed to do so, and then I tried unsuccessfully to scoop up the kit (that's what you call a baby fox) with a snow shovel. It had the instincts to call for help, but also the instincts to evade that help at all costs. I was going to have to go in. It was visibly terrified and trying to run away from me, but it had nowhere to run. I was worried that it would try to bite me, so I kinda trapped it against the wall with a bucket and slid it up until it could reach the ledge, at which point it vanished under our house. We put the grate back and that was that.

Well, almost... The whole time I was doing all this, I was trying to remember who actually sings "The Fox (What Does the Fox Say?)," and I kept thinking it was The Elvi's, but I knew that wasn't right, because that was a local band I used to see flyers for in college. So, I had to look it up before I could sleep in peace. (Ylvis, that's right, so close.) I told this to S, but she couldn't have cared less and just wanted to be back in bed as quickly as possible. That's the difference between her and me.

Until next time...

Update: I came home tonight after meeting up with some friends and saw this guy hanging out in my neighbor's yard. Too big to be the one I saved, but maybe a relative?

 

Entry 803: Death and Taxes

There's a cliché that the only constants in life are death and taxes. I had my fill of both this week. Well, the death part might not have happened yet, but it seems imminent. My elderly neighbor collapsed twice in the past three days and is now in the hospital for some sort of emergency procedure. I'm no medical expert, but I feel confident stating that the recovery rate for a man in his mid-90s from whatever it is that ails him is not super high. And he was almost bedridden before this. He seemed to be chair-ridden. He would get up in the morning, make his way to a chair, and basically sit there the entire day. S and I are just waiting for the grim, inescapable word from his wife. He might be able to make it back home, but if he survives to see autumn, I'd be surprised.

And when he goes, there's a good chance his wife will join him shortly thereafter. She has already had a stroke, about a year ago, and I saw this with my own grandparents, where my grandma, who was hanging on decently, deteriorated extremely quickly after the death of my grandpa and died just a few months later. It's like she just didn't want her husband to be alone, and once that was no longer a possibility, she surrendered to the inevitable.   

I would say that all this is sad, but I think that's the wrong word. It's more hard. I don't feel melancholy; I feel a sort of helplessness. As the Flaming Lips put it, "Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die?" (Great song, by the way.) Since moving into this neighborhood, inhabited by a lot of elderly people, I've definitely realized this. Two people in the house to one side of me have already died in the past five years (and a third one is close), and now, it seems, two more on the other side are well on their way. I lived the first 45 years of my life without ever once being asked to lift an old person who had fallen and couldn't get up, and now it seems to be a semi-regular occurrence.

It also doesn't help my general mindset on this matter that my parents just came out to visit last week, and my mom spent most the trip in her PJs lying in bed or on the sofa. She got hit with a bug, and although she recovered, it really laid her up, and it had me slightly concerned. My parents aren't yet at the same stage as my neighbors, but they probably aren't that far behind. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, I'm not that far behind, as I don't think we are going to crack immortality in the next 40 years, despite what you might find from "life maxxers" on YouTube.

Maybe that's a silver-lining of being focused on the nonexistence of others. It distracts me from thinking about from my own departure from this mortal coil. It is so much worse to think about your own death, not just because it's your death (though of course that's part of it), but because you lose your frame of reference. There's still something when somebody else dies. When you die there's a good chance there's just nothing, and contemplating nothing will mess your head, even if it's not in the context of your own demise. An existential freakout is a double-whammy: You are going to die, and you will never understand why you (or anything else) ever even existed in the first place. It's no wonder religion is still pretty popular these days.

Well, at least I'm gainfully employed while I still exist, as I was reminded when I did our taxes a few days ago. As I've said before, I get so resentful every tax season, not because of the amount we pay, but because of how ridiculously confusing and time-consuming it is to figure out how much you owe. I used TurboTax, and the estimated time was one hour and 45 minutes. It's been over twice that, and I'm not even completely finished yet. Maybe we need to go back to having somebody do our taxes for us, like we did last year. But the thing there is that you still have to spend the time gathering all the necessary documents, which is a large part of the overall workload. I imagine the CPA is basically just entering all the stuff into a computer program the same way we are. That's not nothing, but it's also probably not worth the relatively hefty fee, especially considering we paid almost the exact amount last year as we did the year prior when we did our taxes ourselves. Also, if I do our taxes it gains me some emotional capital with S. That's also not nothing.

Well, that about does it for this morbid entry. Until next time... 

Entry 802: King Of Pain

I learned something about myself recently, something that has been true for a long time, but I just never realized it: I'm a Sting fan. Like a legit, sing-along-with-all-his-songs admirer.* I've long had what I thought was a casual fondness for Sting. Somewhere in my basement I have a CD box set of The Police and his solo album Ten Summoner's Tales, but both of those were given to me as gifts. I never would have thought myself a full-fledged fan of Sting's music, and I found his affect--the falsetto, the tantric woo, the constant feuding with his ex-bandmates--more than a little pretentious. But recently I've had my mind opened--opened like that book by Nabokov--and I've come to the conclusion that when it comes to the toe-headed Brit né Gordon Sumner, just about everything he does is magic.

*Well, not all his songs, but most of them. Well, most them before, like, 1995. I must admit, I'm not at all familiar with his later catalog. I mean, he did an album with Shaggy?

It was an episode of the podcast Hit Parade that really elicited my Sting love. I've been catching up on past episodes, and I also listened to one about David Bowie recently, and if you asked me beforehand whose music I like more, I would have said Bowie's without question. But after listening to these episodes, I realized that it's actually Sting I like more and by a nontrivial margin. Bowie has some amazing songs, but actually not all that many, in my opinion. By contrast, listening to Sting's episode, I was like, Oh, yeah, that song is a banger, and that one, and that one... I mean check out this list:

The Police 

• "Next to You"
• "So Lonely"
• "Can't Stand Losing You"
• "The Bed's Too Big Without You"
• "Message in a Bottle"
• "Walking on the Moon"
• "On Any Other Day" (Great deep cut)
• "Don't Stand So Close to Me"
• "Driven to Tears"
• "De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da"
• "Spirits in the Material World"
• "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic"
• "Invisible Sun"
• "Re-Humanise Yourself"
• "Secret Journey" 
• "Synchronicity I"
• "Walking in Your Footsteps" 
• "Synchronicity II"
• "King of Pain" (bonus points for inspiring "Weird Al"'s "King of Suede")
• "Wrapped Around Your Finger" 

Solo 

• "If You Love Somebody Set Them Free"
• "Englishman In New York" (sneaky good) 
• "It's Probably Me"
• "Desert Rose"

That's like 25 bops right there, most of them with The Police, but a few solo tracks as well. He also provides back up vocals on "Money For Nothing" (total guilty pleasure song for me), and his song "Shape of My Heart," which I don't love (it's fine), is the backbone for Juice WRLD's "Lucid Dreams," which Lil' S2 and his friend used to ask me to play in the car all the time.

You might have noticed that I did not include either "Roxanne" or "Every Breath You Take" in the list above. I've never really liked the former, and the latter is a tremendous song, an absolute tour de force, that has been almost completely ruined for me because it's been so overplayed. It is, perhaps literally, the most played song in radio history. Like, if I had never heard "Every Breath You Take," and I listened to it for the first time, I would probably be thinking, Wow, this is absolutely amazing! (The Puffy remix is awesome too, if you can separate the artist from the art.) But I've now heard it so many times, it's hard for me to enjoy it. A few other songs that reached this level for me: "Stairway to Heaven," "Losing My Religion," "Longview," "Gangnam Style," "Old Town Road."

In the Hit Parade episode about Sting, one thing that host Chris Molanphy mentions is that Sting was a musical chameleon, who always seemed to find the right style to chart a hit--punk when punk was the thing in the early '70s, reggae when that was hot in the late '70s, synth-heavy in the '80s, ballad-y in the early '90s, and he even dipped his toe into hip-hop and country in the late '90s. This was often used as a knock against him, like he's phony or something, but really what's wrong with it? What's wrong with wanting to make the type of music that's popular at the time?

Maybe I'm just sensitive to this charge because I always felt like I was a chameleon coming of age at a time when authenticity was of the utmost importance and being a poseur was an insult of the highest degree.

Anyway, gotta run. Until next time... Zenyatta Mondatta.       

Entry 801: Fine Con

Almost no time to blog this weekend. The past three days have been action packed. Friday immediately after work I had to take Lil' S2 to baseball practice, and then I kinda crashed out from a long work week. Then Lil' S2 had a baseball game Saturday afternoon and then we had drinks with friends after that and then we had a St. Patrick's Day party after that. Today, Sunday, we spent almost the entire day at Awesome Con, which I would characterize more as Fine Con. Truth be told, I didn't find it awesome, but it's not really for people like me. It's a lot of anime/comic book/fantasy stuff, and that's not the type of nerd I am. If it was about, say, sports or crossword puzzles, then its status would have been elevated to awesome for sure. Actually, the vibe reminded me a lot of going to Cooperstown for Ken Griffey Jr.'s Hall of Fame Induction, even though the focuses of the two events were very different.

The main thing for the day was getting Lil' S2 a selfie with Nathan Fillion. I stood in line mostly by myself for two hours to do this, even though I didn't know who this guy was until like a week ago. Actually, I did, but I just didn't know that I knew him. Upon looking him up, I recognized him as the guy who played Green Lantern in the new Superman movie. He apparently was on a show called Firefly, which I've never seen, but I know is very popular in nerd culture, and so he and many of his costars from the show were signing autographs and taking selfies at this event. Lil' S2 knows him from this show The Rookie that he randomly watched the entire series of, so once he found out he was going to be at Awesome Con, he wanted a selfie.

Of course, Mr. Fillion so happened to be the most popular celebrity there (at least today), so his line was super long, and I, being the one who cared the least about actually seeing the exhibits, volunteered to wait in it. I got there at 12:45p, and we finally got the selfie at 2:45p. It was a legit two hours. I did most of it alone, and another dad took Lil' S2 and a few friends around to spend whatever money they had on swords and figurines and Monkey D. Luffy hats. (S had the big kids, Lil' S1 and his buddies, who just insisted they didn't need a chaperone, until she final relented and got a coffee and sat in the food court.) The wait would have been much longer too, at least another hour, probably even longer still, but this guy randomly came up to the other dad I was with and gave him a VIP pass that let us all skip the line. He said somebody did it for him once and he vowed to pay it forward one day, and we just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

The selfie, or selfies rather, we got a few, came out pretty good too. I'm not in any of them, by choice. There's something weird to me about paying somebody to be in a picture with them. It's fine for children, but it just doesn't seem like something becoming of a grown man. Like, if you know a celebrity personally, or you do something with them and get a picture with them, then that's cool. But it's much less cool to pay somebody to pose with you like they're your friend--to me, anyway. If that's your thing, like it is for the very chatty woman standing in line behind me, who was showing everybody around her all the photos she had with various celebrities, then more power to you. It's just not for me is all. Although, I say that, but the chick from Homeland was there also, and I did briefly think that it would be very cool to get a selfie with her, so maybe I have a double-standard about the whole thing. Well, I'm not alone. I overheard a conversation in which a woman somebody said to the effect of "The only selfie I've ever gotten was with Thomas Jane, because he's just really good looking."

Alright, that's all for tonight. Until next time... 

Entry 800: I Don't Want To Talk About It

We are still bombing Iran, and it still doesn't make sense to me. I don't understand how destabilizing an entire region of the world makes us safer in the long run. Violence begets violence begets violence. At some point somebody has to break the loop. I know two Iranian-Americans pretty well. One of them I haven't talked to in a few months. I asked the other one the other day how she was doing, and she said, "It's horrifying. I don't want to talk about it." Maybe that's the best approach for now. I don't want to talk about it.

I spent a large portion of this weekend doing dishes and cleaning the kitchen and there is more awaiting me right now. Lil' S1 loves to bake and cook, but it's like a cyclone comes through our kitchen every time he does. He uses seemingly every utensil in the drawer, every bowl in the cabinet, and every ingredient in the pantry. And I'm somehow always on the hook for cleanup. Actually, I kinda volunteer for it. I would rather do it than have somebody else do it. For one thing, I'm the only one in this house who can do an adequate job. S loads the dishwasher so inefficiently it drives me mad (and it often takes multiple runs or a post-scrub to actually get the dishes clean), and when the kids "clean up," I find dough all over the cabinet handles, a trail of flour on the floor, oil spatterings everywhere, etc. For another thing, this is one of the few things Lil' S1 likes to do that doesn't involve a screen, so I want to encourage it, and forcing him to clean up--really clean up--would be doing the exact opposite.

It's so funny how different my sons are with their friends. Lil' S1 had his D&D buddies come over yesterday, and it turned into an impromptu sleepover, and Lil' S1 made a pecan pie for the occasion (which was delicious, by the way; it wasn't cloyingly sweet, like most pecan pies I've had) with homemade whipped cream. Then this morning, he made everybody eggs and chocolate chip waffles with fresh cut strawberries and blueberries, and he fixed them all sandwiches for a hike they are on right now. Lil' S2 would never do anything like any of this. It wouldn't even occur to him. When he has sleepovers, fixing breakfast for him and his friends consists asking S or I to make them something, or getting bowls of Honey Nut Cheerios from a bag that has been mutilated open, so when you pour from it Cheerios scatter every which way. So, I guess the mess is one thing they have in common.

I doubt Lil' S2 and his friends would ever go on a hike together either, unless their parents were going and dragged them along. They are all actually skiing right now. It's one of his pal's birthday, so this kid's parents took a little crew to the mountain. They all went a few weeks ago for a class trip. It was Lil' S2's first time, and he said he really liked it. So, it's good that he gets to go again, as it's unlikely that S or I will take him much (at all) in the future. Neither of us know how to ski, and I'm not particularly inclined to learn pushing 50, and I don't think S is either. She did say, however, that she would go up and sit in the lodge if he wants to go sometime.

It's kinda strange that I never learned to ski being that I grew up near the Cascade Mountains and some pretty good recreational ski resorts (from what I hear). I just was never really into the outdoorsy sports--skiing, kayaking, rock climbing, etc. My parents weren't into this stuff,* so I didn't do it when I was little, and then when I got old enough to go on my own or with just my friends, I was too preoccupied with other activities. Wrestling was the big one. It was the same season as ski season, and my weekends were frequently spent at tournaments. You couldn't really do both. In fact, I remember one of my teammates lamenting the fact that his parents sold his skis, because he wasn't using them frequently enough to justify keeping them because of wrestling.

*My dad did cross-country skiing a bit later in life, and he took me once when I was in my early twenties. I liked it, but I didn't like it any more than trail running or hiking, both of which require so much less time and gear. 

Another, very petty reason I didn't get into outdoorsy sports as an older teenager is because I didn't like the culture. There was this group of kids who always wore Gor-tex and caps with bands around them and used carabiners on their school backpacks, and even though I was friends with a lot of them, I found the whole thing over the top and pretentious in a way. In retrospect, it was just young people finding their niche and expressing themselves, the same thing I, and everybody else my age, was doing, but at the time I found it to be something mockable.

There was also surely some sour grapes mixed into the batter, as the type of girl I went to college with was much more likely to be into the outdoorsy guy than she was to me. I remember once hanging out with some folks, and we were talking about our best New Year's Eves, and one of my North Face-clad buddies said, "When I was rock climbing [some surely awesome rock face somewhere in Colorado or Utah]. I rang in the New Year all by myself, hundreds of feet in the air, hanging in a tent, looking at the stars light up the desert landscape." I couldn't have rolled my eyes any harder, and yet this dude consistently dated the hottest girls on our campus. 

Alright, the pile of dishes in the sink beckons. I can't put it off any longer.

Until next time...  

 

Entry 799: Forever Instability

So, I guess we are at war with Iran now... or not? Maybe this will sprawl into yet another forever war in the Middle East, or maybe the bombings are going to stop in a few days, and we will look back on this in two months and be like, "Remember when we killed the Ayatollah? That was wild, huh?" the way we are now with the capture of Nicolás Maduro. I could see it going either way, with the latter being the more preferable of the two, by far.

Whatever the case, it certainly adds to the already unsustainably high instability in not just that region, but the world at large, and that is not a good thing. I don't see how this advances American interests. Iran, under its current (former?) regime, poses a threat in spirit to the US (they definitely hate us and often wish death upon us), but they're on the other side of the globe, and by all reports they don't have the weaponry to reach us. Of course, they could develop such weaponry, which would be very bad for us, so I understand bombing their military infrastructure, but killing their top leaders and telling the Iranian people to overthrow the government is a whole other animal. How is this going to be different from the other three times we've tried and failed at this in the past 40 years?

To be clear, I'm not exactly an expert on the geopolitics of the Middle East, but neither, I think it's safe to say, is our president. And that's another reason I don't like this. I don't trust the manchild in the White House to put the interests of the American people first and foremost. He does things almost completely based on his own self-interest and his own warped perception of how he's perceived by the rest of the world. And I suspect/fear that that's what is going on here also. In his first term, he tore up Obama's nuclear deal with Iran, I suspect, not because he thought the terms were unfavorable to the US (I honestly don't think he could describe the terms), but because it was Obama's deal. If it was the exact same thing, but he got credit for it, he surely would have been touting how great it was.

So, then he tried to broker a different deal with Iran, and he got nowhere, because Iran's government is largely fueled by obstinacy and hostility toward the US. They would rather die than accept anything that makes them look subservient to the infidels (and for some of them that is exactly what happened). I imagine the president took this all very personally, because that's the only way he ever takes anything, and he lost his patience, and when a guy with the temperament and insecurities of a middle school bully has the backing of a very powerful army (and a Netanyahu in his ear), this is the result we're all gonna get. One of the few things I liked about our president is that he seemed to not be a warmonger. Now, even that minutely redeeming quality is gone. It's not great.

To end on a positive note, it is genuinely heartwarming to see all these Iranian citizens and expats, who have been oppressed and terrorized by the government for years, to celebrate their freedom, fleeting though it may be. It makes me look at everything I've written above, and think to myself, But who am I to say to these people, "No, actually this is a bad thing"? But then I think about what lies ahead and wonder will it actually be any better for them. I don't have great responses to any of this. It's almost as if life is full of unanswerable questions, impossible tradeoffs, and moral ambiguities. The only thing I know for sure is that I don't really know anything and neither does anybody else. I'm very Socratic that way.

Until next time...    

 

Entry 798: What Can't DG Complain About?

I used to listen daily to The Adam Carolla Show. I haven't listened in, jeez, probably over a decade now, because it got way too repetitive. This happens to pretty much all podcasts, by they way, in which the hosts' pontifications about their personal lives are central aspects of the show. An individual person only has so many stories and so many jokes and so many stories to set up those so many jokes, and if you listen for long enough, you get to the point where it's like, Do I really need to listen to Adam do his bit on canned cranberry sauce for the one millionth time? And then you hit unsubscribed. This also happened to me with Sarah Silverman's podcast, and it preemptively happened with Dax Shepard's. My sister-in-law told me how good it was, so I was thinking of adding it to my rotation, but then a few months later she said she stopped listening, because he just told the same stories and jokes over and over, so I decided against it.

But one of the bits I used to really like on ACS was "What Can't Adam Complain About?" where Adam's producer would throw out a topic, and he would find something about it he didn't like and then just riff on it for a few minutes. I always thought I would be good at this segment because I'm a world class complainer. It's one of my finer qualities. Although, I get the feeling S doesn't feel that way about it. In fact, she seems to be more annoyed by my constant carping than amused. Fine art always goes over some people's heads.

Here's a sample from my latest list of complaints.

Microsoft Office Licenses
One of my least favorite technology trends is the nearly universal adoption of the software subscription model. You can't just buy software now and have it forever. You have to, in effect, buy it over and over again every year. My personal Microsoft Office subscription lapsed recently, but that's okay, because I found out that at my company, we can use our work license on up to five machines, including personal computers. So, I registered Microsoft Office through work on my laptop, and all was well. 

Until I tried to save something. Turns out Microsoft is so fucking petty, they won't let me save any Office documents to my laptop or personal One Drive account, and the documents that are already saved there are read-only. I have to use my work drive, even when I'm using my laptop. It's not the end of the world, but it is irritating, and it's like why? I'm not renewing, so they're going to punish me by making their product more annoying? If anything, that makes me want to get a Mac. It doesn't seem like the greatest business strategy to me.

The worst part about it is that I like to keep work and personal things separate. But I think that's already a losing battle. I started using my personal phone (the only phone I have) to authenticate certain work credentials a long time ago, and I just discovered it's easier to schedule work meetings through my phone than on my work laptop. The work/personal firewall as already been breached. Also, we get most our revenue at my company by selling software as a service, including subscriptions, so, yeah...

AI
I'm not going to complain about AI, so much as I am AI mania. AI itself is fine, but it's just that, fine. It's not the godlike omnipotence it's being hyped as. Maybe it will get there someday, maybe someday relatively soon, but can we pump the brakes a little until it does? We're now at a point were every company has to put the term AI in their mission statements just to seem relevant; everybody looking for a job has to tout their AI credentials (even if they don't really have any); and seemingly every podcast has to be about what AI holds for the future of whatever field the podcast deals in. I'm now kinda rooting for AI to render human thought completely obsolete within the next few decades, as if it doesn't, we are presently wasting a whole lot of time discussing how it is going to do so. 

Personally, I like using AI as a check on me. We use it at work for code review to identify potential issues and like ten percent of the time it finds something that requires a fix. It's rarely something major, but still it's legitimately helpful. What I don't find AI useful for is how it's being marketed, as a creator whose product I'm supposed to check. For work, I had to take these AI training modules, and they were very pro AI, but also very insistent that AI was only going to augment human labor, not replace it, so they would say things like: You can use AI to draft emails, because that's something AI is very good at doing very quickly! But then it's your job to make sure your message conveys all the information you want and that the tone is appropriate for the intended audience. That's something that requires a human touch! And I was thinking to myself, that "human touch" is what I spend 95% of my time on when writing an email, particularly getting the tone right. The longer I watched, the more I thought to myself that AI sounds a lot like a bad employee whose work you constantly have to monitor.

Of course, it will get better. That's the obvious retort to all this. But how much better and how quickly? And is better actually better? Right now AI tells you things that are obviously incorrect*, and so you know not to believe it. But if it told you things that looked correct, but still weren't, it could be more harmful. Like, if using AI becomes finding the needles that are its errors in a haystack of content, is that better? For me, it's more efficient to build the haystack myself and keep the needles out along a way. (And then an AI can check if I succeeded or not.) But maybe I'm just getting old--this century's version of the guy who looks up things in the encyclopedia because he insists it's faster than googling them. That's definitely a possibility, and I'm mostly okay with it. 

*Case in point, I googled "colleges with presidents and a super bowl winning quarterbacks," and this is the result that the AI gave me. It did get 1-3 correct, which is impressive, but neither Franklin Pierce nor Matt Ryan went to Harvard, and the notion of Mitchell Trubisky winning a Super Bowl is patently absurd to anybody who follows the NFL at all.

 

 

Back to the Future:
As I mentioned in a previous entry, we recently cranked out the Back to the Future trilogy. I like it quite a bit, but something about it rubbed me the wrong way this time around. It's not any of the evident time-travel paradoxes, or the fact that the successful McFlys at the end of the movie live in the same house as the dysfunctional McFlys at the beginning (including Marty's brother, even though he's portrayed as somebody who could afford his own place), or the weirdness of Doc's best friend being a teenage boy. It's none of that. It's the contrived plot point that Marty's Achilles' heel is being called chicken.

I remembered this from the first time I saw the movies, way back when, but I didn't remember the back story, and then when we watched them this time around, I realize there is no back story. They just invented it out of thin air. In Part II, Griff Tannen calls Marty chicken, and he reacts to it as if it's an established part of the canon that he has a pathological aversion to this, but it's not. It's not even alluded to in the first movie. Then, future Marty gets fired from his job after getting goaded into a shady scheme by getting called chicken, and future Jennifer tells their kids, something to the effect of, "You know your father's one weakness is being called chicken." And it's like, Oh, okay, I guess this is a thing that the audience is supposed to know now.

It's pretty weak character development, to be honest, and I don't see why it's necessary to the story. Surely, the movie makers could have come up with a different way to make Marty's future go south. Also, in the scene in which he doesn't get baited into racing Flea ("Needles"), and thus avoids his life-altering accident, why does he gun it backwards and do a half-donut, instead of not moving at all, or just going forward at the speed limit in a safe manner? What Marty does actually seems more dangerous to me than racing forward.

Anyway, this has been "What Can't DG Complain About?"

Until next time... 

Entry 797: You Complete Me

Some good things happening here in my world right now and some bad things. The Seahawks won the Super Bowl in dominating fashion, and I've very much enjoyed basking in the success of my favorite professional sports team (tied with the Mariners). Every night since Sunday, before I've gone to sleep, I've watched some sort of highlight or game video on YouTube from the Seahawks' championship season. Last night, I watched the final quarter of the NFC Championship Game against the Rams. There are no points scored in it, but it's a great watch nevertheless. It's basically only two series. The Rams go on a long time-consuming drive that ends inside the Seattle ten-yard line, when the "Dark Side" D gets a beautiful, fortuitous fourth-down stop. And then the Seahawks take over and effectively run out the clock, getting clutch first down after clutch first down. It's a joy to watch, even though I know what's going to happen. In fact, it's a joy largely because I know what is going to happening. That I know that this is what propels them to the Lombardi Trophy is what makes it fun. Had they lost the game or been defeated in the Super Bowl, I wouldn't be watching at all.

In other good news, the snow is finally starting to melt here. There is still a ton of it, and it's still annoying, but the streets are a little bit wider, and I can see large pockets of green on my lawn.

But there is bad news also: Our president is still a megalomaniac, who is making life worse for pretty much everybody, including many who voted for him, and his abhorrent policies concerning immigration enforcement have put us on the verge of another prolonged government shutdown. As with the first one, just a few months ago, I think the Democrats are correct on the issue but wrong on the tactics. Dems don't want to fund ICE without reforms, which I totally understand and completely cosign, so they are refusing to allow the funding for DHS to go through, since ICE is a part of DHS. The problem is that DHS has like 20 agencies under its milieu, including essential services like FEMA and TSA, and these are currently not being funded. What's more is that, as I understand it, ICE got a special carve out of funding in that Big Beautiful Bill, so it has the money to operate without restraint for the foreseeable future. So, basically, a shutdown will disrupt the good parts of DHS, while the worst part of it carries on unfettered. Maybe I'm missing something, but that doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

Anyway...

It's a four day weekend for both our children. This is a bit annoying, given how much school they missed due to the snow, but at least DCPS did something for which I've been advocating for years. They scrapped some administration days and turned them into a school days. We don't have parent-teacher conferences now, but I'd rather that be the case than have to tack on a days of school the week after "graduation" (this is Lil' S2's last year in elementary school) when a lot of kids will already be at camp or on vacation. It does beg the question: Why doesn't the district build these flex days into the schedule from the get-go, instead of adding them on the fly, being that we get at least one heavy snowfall pretty much every year? I still don't know the answer to that. But I at least give DCPS a half star for making a smart adjustment.

Actually, there is some drama at Lil' S2's school right now. A contingent of teachers are unhappy with the administration--they don't feel supported and empowered--and they have rallied some parents to advocate on their behalf. There is a letter to the chancellor going around on the message boards that a bunch of parents are signing. I think S might have signed it (or is going to sign it), mainly because her friend asked her to. Personally, I'm staying out of it. In four months, we will be done with this school, and so I don't feel super invested in the matter. I also don't want to just support the teachers reflexively (I'm admittedly still bitter about their reluctance to return during Covid lockdowns, even after getting moved to the front of the line for vaccines, even after it became clear that children weren't great vectors for the disease), and I'm not sure if it really is "the teachers" or just "a few teachers." One of the parents in a group chat I'm in is also a teacher at the school, and she posted something in defense of the administration, which definitely gave me pause about the whole thing. Basically, I would want to do some research and get all the facts and opinions before signing onto anything, and that seems like entirely too much work to me considering I won't have any kids at the school by the time I'm done. As long as teachers at the school don't start striking, I'm just gonna ride this one out.

Abruptly changing topics, it was Valentine's Day yesterday, and last night was one of those increasingly rare weekend evenings in which both of our kids are home and don't have any friends over, so we decided to have family movie night and settled on the 1996 romantic comedy Jerry Maguire. And by "settled on," I mean S and I decided that that's what we wanted to watch and cajoled the boys into watching it with us. Lil' S1 lasted about 15 minutes ("I didn't even want to watch it in the first place."); Lil' S2 made it about an hour ("This is boring. There's hardly any football in it."). So, we turned it off and watched a couple episodes of Modern Family instead.

S and I are intent on finishing it, though. We both forgot how good it is. It's nearly a ten of ten on the rewatchability scale. Every character in it is almost perfectly crafted and acted. Jerry and Dorothy couldn't be more charming as the leads; the little kid Ray is just as adorable as you remember ("The human head weighs eight pounds."); Rod and his wife are super likeable and funny; Jay Mohr is great as the movie's only real villain; and Bonnie Hunt is brilliant as Dorothy's sister (real appreciated her performance this time around). We still have about 40 minutes left in the movie, and hopefully we get a quiet time to finish it tonight--preferably before 8p. If it's any later, there is a real risk of S falling asleep during it, and then it will be like that one Valentine's day, many years ago, when S was pregnant and went to bed at like 7:30, so I celebrated alone by eating a heart-sharped piece of cake, drinking sparkling cider, and binge watching Friday Night Lights. Oh well, Valentine's Day proper is already over, and it's fake holiday, anyway.

Until next time...