Missing Natalie

Graham and I walked to the library yesterday and thence to the grocery store, office supply store, and pharmacy to pick up stuff. Yall can probably guess which ones, no reason for me to plug them here.

I wanted to do the walk because Graham had told me how his friend Jake knew how to walk from the library to the grocery store to get a baked treat, and I was frankly a little shocked that Graham didn't have this geography straight in his head. So we got it straight.

As we walked, we talked a little about high school, looming next year. I asked if he was mostly looking forward to it, or mostly not. The latter, he said, but one of the biggest reasons was because Natalie was going to be reason. "Is it just because you'll miss her?" I asked. "Yeah," he said.

My kids do make me proud.

State/Gown relations

I met a guy from the University of Georgia over Christmas vacation, a humanities professor. He said that when he joined the university some years ago -- and this is still a common practice there -- they put him on a bus with other new hires and took them around the state to introduce them to people.

Just now, I was reading an article about weather volatility -- basically how global warming will make the incidence of extreme weather events rise. Not just warm weather, but extreme cold snaps too. And, thought the thesis makes sense, and it is supported by data and well-grounded principles, this is the kind of thing that climate change skeptics eat for breakfast. Here's what they say: "See, the ivory-tower liberals don't really know anything, they just want to make you get out of your truck and into a little Japanese car because they hate America. They'll twist their story around however they need to."

But part of the problem here is that the universities are so distant from red counties and don't make much of an effort to bridge that gap. And because university business models don't encourage behavior that would bridge it, like sending faculty or even grad students out to rural high schools or chambers of commerce to give talks about what they do and the high-level state of their fields.

This is, of course, more easily said than remedied. The fact is that professors and future professors are competing with people in Stockholm and Beijing and Canberra to produce research that moves the ball forward in their fields.  Building presentations for general audiences is really the work of PBS and National Geographic etc. But they also lack effective footsoldiers and advocates, as they are squeezed for cash and need to focus on their own core demographics to survive.

But it is work that somebody should be doing. It is, frankly, the function of the pubic sector to do this kind of work that markets do poorly.

The snow

There is a lot of snow on the ground, and looking at the weather, it's not entirely clear that it will all melt out and then have the ground dry in time for people to be able to park on the grass out back for our fundraiser for Josh on Thursday. Oh well. We shall see. That is well beyond my control.

It has been an eventful snow.  Wednesday, the day of the big dumping, we lost power from about 2pm till midnightish. Natalie was at a friend's house, and at length we were able to convince her to ask her friend's mom to let her stay the night. Meanwhile, we were trying to figure out whether to make a break for my mom's house (she still had power). Around 5, we decided to do it.

First, we had to find Graham.  He had headed out at around 2 to enjoy the snow. We thought he was out back sledding, but his friends Ethan and Daniel informed us that he wasn't. So we had to call around. Turned out he was down at Ben's, showing good initiative on his part. He had walked down there and knocked on the door. Two thumbs up!

So we gathered stuff and started heading out to the car to drive to mom's, when I was approached by two neighbors, a mom and a daughter. Turned out the granddad (father of recently divorced husband, who was in Chile), a 95-year old guy on oxygen, was alone in his house a mile or so away at the bottom of a hill. They needed Subaru help. So we piled in my Subaru and went down to get him.

It was slippery as fuck. To make a long story short, the car did pretty well going downhill, and after considerable effort to get Pop-pop in the car with his wheelchair and a bunch of oxygen tanks, we headed back uphill.

This didn't go so well. At a switchback turn, my car slid side to side and just stopped making progress. So I had to back down the hill, between a bunch of parked cars, with poor visibility, trying to keep moving for fear I would get stuck again. We made it, and got Pop-pop back in his house, but it was fucking hairy, and the Grouse was sweating no little bit through all of this.

I left the car at the bottom of the hill and walked home. Graham was asleep already on the couch. Mary made a hearty soup on our gas stove. We ate by candlelight. I was asleep by 10. Pop-pop got through the night fine, I learned the next day, helped in no small part by the fact that his house was usually kept at 79.

In retrospect, I wish we had had Natalie walk home so she could have shared the memory with us.

Slow going

January has been a bit of an exasperating month.  I see that I blogged last about college financial aid applications, so I will not go deep into the details of my continuing logistical struggles on that front. I will say they are technical right now, involving file-size restrictions for efaxing things to a college that requires faxes or hard copy mailings. Had I known what a pain it was gonna be, I would have just stuck paper in the mailbox.

Arghh, enough of this whining. It is beautiful and white outside. The kids didn't really need three days off of school, but they got em. Last night we watched multiple episodes of Brooklyn 99.  It is a good show, not great, the main thing is that Natalie will come and sit on the couch with me. Which, given her pending disappearance from the house, is a big deal.

My other computer has finished, wheezingly, the simple task I had set for it, so I need to get back to work over there. One of these days I will fully transition to this new one.

Positive and negative

Graham and I are now alternating Deep Space 9 one night with The Blacklist the other. Actually, we are ending up watching The Blacklist more often, kind of because it is the shiny thing, kind of because James Spader is somewhat irresistible in the role of Readington, though the rest of the cast is pretty much from generic multi-ethnic casting 2018. Not that they are bad, it's just they are who and what they are.

I have framed this as "positive" vs. "negative" viewing, as DS9 typically ends up affirming our belief in humankind or, to be more precise, humanoidkind, whereas the Blacklist can get pretty durned dark. There is often a fair amount of killing. However, as Graham has pointed out, the last couple of episodes of DS9 got a little dark. There was indeed some murder, though it was in the end committed by a Vulcan who was annoyed at pictures of people laughing with friends, which is more or less understandable. And Spader is just a lark.

So, in the end, it is by no means black and white.

Early rising

Awoke early this morning, earlier than usual on a Saturday. In the run-up to our event a couple of weeks out, Mary re-initiated the theme of "I have to do everything" (pertaining to getting the house ready) and I got a little miffed. The depth of her lack of understanding of what I do, of what it takes to run our household, outside of the obvious, physical tasks (yardwork, cleaning, cooking, etc.) never ceases to astound me.

To wit, I endured a proctological exam from Yale this week concerning the financial details of running our household. The amount of money we spend, without doing much that looks expensive, is pretty astounding. Putting it in their buckets (they had a bucket for haircuts and toiletries but not for home maintenance) was a lot of work. They were obviously interested in the lumpiness of my income. Building a business as a small businessperson is a hard fucking thing. It takes a lot of effort over time to become sustainable.

So I am tired, it is Saturday, and it was not my intent to be up quite this early. But here I am, ready to greet the day. Now that I am drinking some coffee, it will get better.

I'm excited to meet with mom and a couple of people from the Orange County Democrats later about trying to flip Person County in the state legislature this fall. The county went 57-40 for Trump in 2016, a margin of less than 4,000 votes. It should, in principle, be doable.

The early daze

I've been reading Richard Ford's Between Them, about his parents and his memories of growing up. Good, but not his best work. Certainly not worth $26 for the slim hardcover.

It got me thinking about the kids' early years, and the function of this blog, which was partly intended to be a scratchpad for the experience of raising them. So I started looking over some of the early posts. Sadly, there wasn't as much direct description of being with the kids as I would have liked. Much of it was just me rambling. Hopefully if I read on into 2005, 2006, 2007, I'll find more about the kids.

Certainly the blog came to late to capture the early memories of Natalie, who was north of 4 by the time I got started. So it missed out on precious things like how when I would read her Green Eggs and Ham, she pretty quickly got so she could fill in the end of every line.

As in:
(Clark) "I do not like" (Natalie) "green eggs and ham,"
(Clark) "I do not like them" (Natalie) "Sam I am!"

She got to this point pretty durned fast. It was beautiful to see.

Recently Graham has been joining me in late afternoon walks, as I try to make sure he does something with his body on any given day. Today we went all the way around the lake for a second time.  Today he told me that, in telling him the story of my own complicated career path, in which I resented my mom pressuring me to become an economist, he had discerned vague pressure from me for him to become an economist. I assured him that I meant to put no pressure on him at all, and told him that it was great he could tell me that (as indeed it is).

The odd thing is that he would have heard that message at all. We have to be very careful in how we communicate with our kids, even when we are just trying to be open.

Labor market growing pains

In a number of contexts (dealing with our broker/dealer, at lunch sandwich place, at a Starbucks, at our pharmacy) I am seeing service standards slip of late, new employees who don't seem to know exactly what they are doing. This is generally reflective of growing pains as people enter/re-enter the job market. As consumers, we must be mindful and tolerant of this.