I cannot calendar. I don’t know if you can calendar, and I feel like I used to be able to calendar to some degree of accuracy or another, but I have lost the ability. I don’t know how long things take, I don’t know how long ago things happened, and it is generally impossible for me to keep track of such minor details as holidays, birthdays and dates that my son might have off of school that I don’t, where we need to provide some sort of child care for him, since it turns out that you really can’t just drop them off at school on days off.
And! For once! This deficiency has finally worked out for me, as I discovered today that April 1, which is not this Friday but is instead next Friday, and was previously thought of as the last day of school before Spring Break, is an asynchronous e-learning day. Did I know this? I did not. It’s even the day after Parent-Teacher conferences, so our district did something sensible and I didn’t even notice!
What that means is that this morning I thought I had to survive ten school days until Spring Break, and now, magically, I have survived one day and I only need to survive for eight more! Because days with no students do not count.
Today and tomorrow, along with New Year’s Day, are historically completely dead days for the blog. This will not prove surprising to anyone. Usually I try to come up with something spicy for those posts since no one will notice anyway, but I find myself not in the mood for Christmas in a wide variety of ways right now. There was more work on the bathroom again today, but it was more mudding and drywalling. Monday will be sanding and primer, and Tuesday they’ll paint, and that does put us on track to be done before school starts back up again.
Assuming, that is, that school starts back up again, which — don’t tell anyone– but I’m starting to seriously doubt. The trend line on Covid is currently vertical for the country, and I think Indiana’s probably will be as well as soon as everyone starts reporting again, because I doubt that we’ve actually managed to show a decline in cases with Omicron on the loose. But we’ll see what happens.
Merry Christmas, to all who celebrate; those who don’t, enjoy the weekend anyway. I will almost certainly post tomorrow in some capacity or another, but there’s no reason to not be nice to people early, I suppose.
The context: my father has been told that he needs to replace his phone by January 1, because it is not 5G capable and T-Mobile is phasing out all of their 3G towers.
“Yeah, I can’t imagine they’re that busy at 2:30 the day before Thanksgiving. Let’s just go get it taken care of.”
Pfah.
(I’m not griping, especially since I’m fully aware my dad will read this. But it was completely stupid of me to not realize these places are crazy-busy all the time, and “the day before Thanksgiving” is not a salient concept to people who need phones, because that is a thing that is not always something you can put off.)
And I came home and stuffed my face with Chicago deep-dish pizza, so all in all I am full of cheese and it was a good day.
In lieu of a View From My Hotel Window post, since it’s ludicrously dark: my family has never been a Traditions Family, and neither has my wife’s. My brother, on the other hand, very much married into a Traditions Family, and one of those traditions is fresh pasta on Thanksgiving.
Went outside and did a thing today— the Leeper Park Art Fair, held in scenic downtown South Bend, in a park that until a year or two ago was home to an inbred, angry, violent group of ducks– so angry, inbred and violent that the city had to step in to figure out how to deal with them. There was a massive kerfuffle, of the type that can only be found in small- and mid-sized towns, and some of the ducks were eventually euthanized, some taken elsewhere, and their pond was filled in, producing a much nicer public park that people can actually bike and walk through without fear of being attacked.
The fair was really nice, honestly– the temperature suddenly shot up by a good ten degrees on the (short) walk back to the car, but for the whole time we were walking around it was pleasant and breezy outside, and it’s always fun to look at art, even if in general everything was far outside of my price range. I’m not disputing the prices these folks were charging, mind you; this isn’t you shouldn’t be charging $250 for this hand-turned wooden vase, it’s I don’t have $250 I can spend on this hand-turned wooden vase, and honestly for most of the things I looked at, $250 was inexpensive. There was some amazing stuff there, but even if I had the money, I don’t know what the hell I’d do with a $250 wooden vase if I bought one, because we really don’t have that kind of house. At any rate, if you’re local, it’s open for a couple more hours today and all day tomorrow, although tomorrow there’s a risk of rain.
Instructions from the fair organizers were to mask up and socially distance, especially when you were actually in an artist’s booth, and you can probably get a good idea from the picture there how well that went over. The vaccination rate in St. Joseph County is less than 50%, so it’s an awfully interesting coincidence that no one who was unvaccinated showed up at this thing.
(That said, my self-righteousness only goes so far; I brought a mask with me but didn’t put it on. The crowds weren’t so tight that staying away from people was much of a challenge, and the event was outdoors. I did get into a conversation with one of the woodworkers that had me thinking about putting my mask on, since we were standing fairly close to each other and talking, but I didn’t end up doing it. That said, I’ve had my fucking shots.)
At any rate, this is the first time we’ve done something like this since February of 2020, so it was really nice to be outdoors and around people for a while. That said, I stepped in a hole as we were going back to the car and it went straight up my back and through my ribcage, so I expect to be unable to walk by the end of the day. This is probably my punishment for getting judgy about masks.
I can actually pinpoint fairly precisely when I learned Juneteenth was a thing– it was my senior year of college, in a class about Black American religion. So probably 1997, 1998 or so. I just reread Ralph Ellison’s novel of the same name, since I needed an author from Oklahoma and figured it was appropriate. And I’ll be honest: while my opinion matters not at all, I don’t love the idea of it being a national holiday– or, at least, I don’t love the idea of it being a national holiday in America.
Why? Because capitalism, and because this country can’t take a Goddamned thing seriously. Because this is exactly what’s going to happen:
If you’re on TikTok, btw, you should be following both of these creators. They’re great.
Like, capitalism has destroyed Christmas. It’s fucking Thanksgiving all up. It’s eaten Memorial Day and Veterans Day. I don’t need it chewing up Juneteenth too. Especially galling, beyond the capitalism angle, is the fact that low-paying jobs are not going to be getting a holiday for Juneteenth precisely because capitalism is going to eat Juneteenth, and that means a whole lot of Black people working service jobs are going to have to work on that day.
Yell at me if you want, although I don’t think I’m going to have any takers among my current readership: I think only black people should get Juneteenth off. As a teacher I’m off every June 19 anyway, since school never goes that late, but it’s ridiculous that my lily-white ass might get a day off to celebrate the ending of slavery when the actual descendants of those slaves have to go to work so that I can buy a mattress or whatever fucked-up knickknacks Target vomits up for the day.
This is not, objectively speaking, that great of a picture. Bek has pretty clearly just emerged from the shower, I don’t even look like I have showered– my beard is an utter Goddamned abomination– and none of us are looking at the camera for some reason, which is odd because I seem to be holding it, so you’d think I’d know where to look. I like it anyway.
Roughly thirteen years ago, I got married to that lady on the right there. Why roughly? Our anniversary is February 29, meaning that for three out of every four years I correctly celebrate our anniversary on the 28th of February and my wife incorrectly insists that our anniversary is March 1st. I finally won this argument free and clear this year, when she fucked up and accidentally advocated my position for a few minutes, forgetting that she has always been the March person. I will never, ever allow her to forget it, either.
At any rate, asking her to marry me remains the best decision I’ve ever made, as I Married Up in every conceivable fashion. The jury may still be out on her decision to marry me, but I’d like to think it’s worked out okay.
We aren’t doing anything for our anniversary this year. Last year we went to C2E2 on our anniversary. Covid-19 was a concern already, but at the time there were less than 60 cases nationwide and we figured it was as safe as it ever was. I tried my damnedest to keep my hands in my pockets as much as I possibly could and we washed our hands whenever we had a chance to. We had dinner with a friend at a Potbellies in Hyde Park and then came home.
And then I was sick for a month anyway, not quite “as sick as I’ve ever been” levels but I literally was trashed for the entire month of March, and by the time that was done we were in lockdown. That Potbellies dinner was the last time I had dinner in a restaurant. That dinner was the last time we made plans with anybody to do anything fun. And 500,000 people are dead in the United States alone, with another two million gone worldwide.
So, yeah, this year we’re staying home. We’re having Hamburger Helper for dinner. Why? Because Bek used to make it all the time and has stopped in the last couple of years for some reason, and I’m so Goddamn starved for novelty that having Hamburger Helper for the first time in probably seven or eight months seemed like something worth getting excited about. None of us have had shots yet; we’re too young to qualify yet, and Indiana is explicitly hoping at least a few more teachers die of this thing before they vaccinate any of us.
Maybe next year, if we’re able to, we’ll celebrate on the 28th and the 1st.
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