Tag: family

The most exciting thing that happened today

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

I have made this observation in three different places so far, which is almost certainly more than it deserves: the most impressive thing about the Big Arch I had for lunch today is that it looks exactly like every picture of the Big Arch that McDonald’s has been using to advertise it. If you eat at restaurants at all you know how ridiculously uncommon that is. The review: pretty damn tasty, almost too big, although I could still taste it three hours later and I suspect my breath may still slightly smell of onions.

This week was utter madness.

Two different two-hour fog delays, which led to me talking for five hours straight on Thursday, as everything I had planned for that day had to be compressed into two hours less class time, meaning I did nothing but lecture the entire day. This is not a thing I do. I was so tired when I got home I forgot to take my Mounjaro shot, which has been a regular Thursday thing for at least a year now. Today they took the test I was doing the guided notes for yesterday; I still have two classes to grade, but early indications are that the bed appears to not have been shit in. Monday and Tuesday were it’s getting warm and there’s a full moon behaviors and Wednesday was an e-learning day and tons of meetings.

Y’all, I am exhausted. And all of this is before we get to the bit where the fucking world set itself on fire more than once in the last couple of weeks– have I even used the word “Iran” on this blog yet? How long ago was the first attack? It could have been anything from yesterday to a month ago at this point; I’m so fried I can’t even tell. The second-dumbest guy in the Senate is apparently getting promoted? Gas prices have shot up by a dollar a gallon since I filled the tank on Monday.

Oh, and while I’ve generally tried not to talk too much about some of the medical issues my son has been having, for probably-obvious reasons, I cannot pass up mentioning that he was prescribed a nasal spray this week for migraines that are somehow in his abdomen, and no part of me is capable of dealing with the fact that that sentence represents something real and is not word salad.

So naturally tomorrow we’re going to tear down a wall in the bedroom. Wish me luck.

I’m sure it’ll be fine.

Eighteen years

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

It’s official: my marriage is a legal adult. I continue to be amazed and surprised that she’s put up with me all this time.

I need a higher class of opponent

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, life1 Comment

I have spent far too much of today arguing with deeply stupid people on social media, and my God, y’all, the literacy crisis is real. The literacy crisis is real and I am not very bright, but I am stupid in a different way from, for example, someone willing to argue that there are only white people in the town I live in, or someone who wants to argue about what a legal disclaimer means but clearly hasn’t actually read the Goddamned thing. I am stupid because I am unable to simply block these fools and move on with my life, or better yet, avoid activities that cause me to be exposed to them in the first place.

In my defense, at least one of them started it.

Like, there weren’t even any opinions involved today. Text can be interpreted, sure, but phrases like “in perpetuity,” “throughout the world,” and “for any reason” have a fairly plain meaning, and demographic data exists. I sometimes like to pretend I still live in a world where at least semi-objective reality exists, and I’m too old to adapt to a post-truth existence.

The internet was a colossal mistake, is what I’m saying here, along with virtually every single other thing that has happened to society since, oh, Ronald Reagan. I use the words “everything is going to get worse all the time forever” fairly frequently, but I don’t really believe it, because the depth of dumb out there keeps managing to surprise me.

I am not watching the Super Bowl, in accordance with my standard practice, and I am not watching the halftime show either. I watched Kendrick’s show live last year, after spending far too long fucking with streaming platforms, and I just don’t care about Bad Bunny enough to fuck around with it this year. I admit that I’m curious whether anyone at NBC or whoever the hell is broadcasting the thing is smart enough to know to bleep “chinga la migra,” but I assume anything interesting that happens is going to be all over TikTok tomorrow so I’m not going to worry about it.

My wife is going to be out of town all week, so I’m on solo Dad duty, which isn’t much of a problem except for the number of tasks it adds to my mornings. My son’s schedule and mine differ enough that he’s generally not even out of bed when I leave for work, and while we have someone picking him up to take him to school my wife generally handles the three hours of reminders and gradually-sterner pokes in the ribs it takes to drag his eighth-grade ass out of bed, not to mention things like lunch-packing and such. He’s going to have to get up earlier so that I can make sure he’s conscious and vertical before his ride shows up, and I’m going to have to get up earlier to make sure everything is ready on time.

I also have to remember to pick him up on the way home from school, also not normally my job. Luckily we live close enough that the one day I slip into autopilot and drive home, I can turn around and go to pick him up and just pretend that I got tied up at work and couldn’t leave right away. Nobody has to know, right?

Anyway, my wife’s train— yes, train— leaves at midnight, so I’ve got some time to kill before I drop her off at the station. What’s that, Nioh 3? Yes, Daddy will be there soon.

Family time!

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, ParentingLeave a comment

So what does family time look like when everyone in the house is an introvert?

The boy and I working on Lego sets while my wife works on a puzzle, all of us in the same room, but with minimal conversation happening, because we’re all concentrating.

I’ve been working on the Notre Dame set a few bags at a time for the last several days, but I picked up this AT-AT today and decided to take a break and get this done in one sitting. The Notre Dame set is beautiful, but it’s also crazily repetitive and I didn’t have the strength tonight to make 32 more windows or 10 more flying buttresses. I noticed the instruction manual had a link to the new Lego Builder app, and holy hell, I’m never touching one of the manuals again other than to look through them for the little flavor details they like to sprinkle through them. The app surrounds any new pieces for any particular step with a little glowing aura, making it way harder to miss them than in the manuals, and you can rotate and enlarge the model on the screen.

That’s a Goddamn game-changer right there. Lego manuals are impressively well put together 95% of the time, but sometimes there’s just no way to display a step with one single perfect angle, and letting me zoom and rotate at will was just amazing. Plus they gave me stats at the end, and y’all know how much I like stats. Turns out if you were to stack all of the pieces in that AT-AT on top of one another (I assume the long way, and not actually attaching them to each other?) it would be 6 meters high! I also managed to put together 7 pieces per minute in the hour and fifteen minutes it took me to put the set together. I don’t know what the hell I could possibly do with that information, but I love that I have it.

Keep on trying me

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

I am bored and kvetchy and it’s making my anxiety act up something fierce. I actually got quite a lot done today– no big projects, but a ton of little jobs around the house and I got the oil changed on the car– but since the sun went down I’ve turned into a mess, and I can’t concentrate well enough to read.

That part’s the alarming part, honestly. It’s rare that I can’t focus enough to read. I’m watching someone else play a video game while I’m writing this, and I’m starting to think I need to dive back into Skyrim or something like that; I simultaneously need something new to do and am kind of aching for something familiar and comfortable I can just fall into.

I’m also, for the first time in several years, pretty excited (or at least not actively dreading) Christmas, mostly because I feel like I definitely won Christmas this year. I don’t know if other families do this thing, where they’re competitive about who gets each other the best gifts– hell, I don’t know if my family does this thing or if it’s just me– but one way or another it’s me, hi, I won Christmas, it’s me.

Anyway, I’m going to go take down the wallpaper in the library or something.

That can’t be right

On By Luther M. SilerIn life, Parenting1 Comment

Not that my immediate family is that large, but I’m done with all Christmas shopping for my immediate family, and everyone else is pretty much gift card people. My brother will send me a list for my niece and nephew, who are too young to get mad at me for buying the wrong thing anyway, and the basement goblin will likely get cash. The tree went up after Thanksgiving and I’ve been changing the lights every time I walk into the living room just because I can.

(Seriously, Govee lights are amazing. Ignore the price; order these. They’re absolutely worth every dime.)

Anyway, what this means is that everything’s going to show up broken, or not show up at all, or I’m suddenly going to realize four days before Christmas that my wife and son don’t actually like any of the things I got them for Christmas and I’ve somehow accidentally ordered a ton of stuff for me instead. This is actually a bit of a risk with the boy; he and I have enough tastes in common that I actually rejected a gift I was thinking about for him this year because I decided I wanted it and not him. He’d have liked it, I think, but it was a little too expensive for “he’d have liked it, I think.”

I have one thing left to do for my wife, which is going to involve Doing Art, and which will be a funny joke even if I completely fuck up Doing the Art. She looks at the blog kind of irregularly, so I could probably get away with telling y’all the plan, but … nah.

How’s your shopping going?

Some Sunday odds and ends

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews2 Comments

Had an enormous traffic spike the last couple of days– yesterday was the highest traffic day in years, possibly since the Syrian refugees post hit a couple hundred thousand views ten years ago. And other than the fact that most of them were from America (with a much smaller but still weird four-day pop from Chile, of all places) I don’t know anything about any of the visitors.

It was probably a bot– I’ve also been getting a lot of traffic from China lately– but I thought bot visits didn’t count? I wish I could get more detail on my views.

Today? Dead quiet.

We are finally, after fourteen years of living in this house, replacing the hideous curtains in our bedroom and the gross miniblinds in our living room. I found this behind the hardware for the curtains and I would like a word with whoever built this place. I just wanna talk.

I’m not doing a full review of it, but this is a really good book. My only problem is that Hastings has a weird habit of drawing attention to the race of any American who isn’t white when it isn’t necessary– there was an actual chapter about race relations among American troops, and I’ll cut some slack on that one, but just for example, referring to the youngest soldier to die in Vietnam as “a black kid” in a weirdly flippant way really stuck out. My only problem is that now I want to read twelve other books on Vietnam that he mentioned (sidenote: are there any histories of the war written in English by Vietnamese scholars?) and my backlog is bad enough already.

This image from my email is not exactly inaccurate, but I feel like maybe Amazon is still having some tech problems.

After over a year of threatening to watch it, my wife and I finally sat down to watch John Wick 4 last night, and I will forever refer to it as The Dumb John Wick. I’ve seen all of them now, and I never really loved the series, but this one takes everything that was sorta ridiculous about the first three movies and turns those up to 12, while also not adding anything of real value to the series, ignoring the cliffhanger ending of 3, and being way, way, way too long. Is there a lore reason why there are literally no cops at all in the John Wick universe, for example? Blech.

You might not be able to tell, but this picture was taken outside the window as I was removing the curtains earlier today. At 6:30. I fucking hate daylight savings time. Hate. Can we please be a society just for a little while and get rid of this bullshit? Please?

And finally, as of tonight I’ve read just over 2600 pages on my new Kindle, which means that I’ve managed to adopt the thing into my lifestyle successfully … and the battery is still at 16%, which is bloody impressive.

U-pick, U-shoot and then U-sleep

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

Today’s Fun Family Time included a two-hour drive to an apple orchard up in Michigan; my wife’s side of the family has apparently been doing it as a yearly thing for forever and just decided to invite the out-of-towners this year.

I don’t know if you’ve ever used an apple cannon. I can tell you that after firing $10 worth of apples out of one, I’m going to find a way to build one in our back yard. The apple cannons were absolutely the highlight of the trip; I discovered to my consternation that despite apples generally being among my favorite fruits, when rotting apples is the only thing I can smell in a given location, it’s going to leave me feeling a bit ill, so I was fighting off a shitty mood for most of the afternoon and just mostly trying to keep a smile plastered on my face. The apple cannons totally fixed that problem.

(Also, Christ, there’s nothing that can reduce people to ‘splosion- and cannon-loving Americans faster than seeing someone hit a target with an apple at 50 yards. Wow.)

There was also a large corn maze. Despite having grown up in and spending most of my life living in Indiana, I have never been in a corn maze, and I still haven’t, because the three of us figured we were going to get lost and decided not to make the time investment. I figure you want to do a corn maze when you have time to get hopelessly lost and not when you want to be home before it’s dark.

Then once we got home, in accordance with our most ancient traditions, all three of us retired to separate rooms to recharge and not speak to each other any more, and I fell asleep under a pile of cats, which is why this post is just going up at 9:00 PM.

Tomorrow is not a day off officially, but I took one anyway. I’ve been pretty good about attendance this year and upon realizing that the wife and child would both be home, had a “fuck it” moment and called in a personal day. Hail Columbia, or whatever.