Round up

So it draws to a close, this 2021. By the way, oddly enough, I just looked at 2021 and thought: is that a prime number? It surely looks an awful lot like one. The answer, per Google, is no. It is 43 x 47. Which is pretty dadgummed close to being a prime number in my book. But I digress, which may shock you.

2021 turned out to be a disappointment of a year in many ways. Not financially, mind you. My clients made money. I made money. Not only did I make money, I satisfied some long-held desires and now own such things as a new couch, window blinds, and an electric guitar. Also we pressure-washed our roof, which was very satisfying. Natalie has a new boyfriend and he is just lovely. Mary's book came out. (Readers who have not yet purchased one may do so here). Soon we will even have all of Graham's college applications in and that die will be cast. It was just the whole COVID thing that continued to suck, and the fact that politics remains fairly crazy and the government therefore largely subfunctional.

But in the most important category -- namely number of blog posts -- 2021 has been a triumph indeed. With so much of the year lived in a relatively monotonous, interior way, you might have thought there would be little to write about. And maybe that's true. Nonetheless, I wrote about it. I appreciate your continued and diligent readership. But now, it's time for tennis.

Back to Square 1?

It has landed on our shores quite firmly, this Omicron, as we knew it would. Last night CovidActNow showed cases per 100k in Orange County as having sextupled overnight. This morning I talked to Jamie, a neighbor and cardiologist as I was picking up my paper. He said that positive test rates for Orange County were at 25% (or maybe it was NC), their highest ever.

Once more, things are moving so fast that it's hard to sort out the data. Everything seems to indicate that, for the most part, Omicron is a pretty mild variant. But what does that mean for at risk populations? The elderly, those with real comorbidities? We don't know. My instinct is to slow down and let the data emerge so we can make informed decisions about taking risks. I think I'm not alone.

So therefore we are back to carefully titrating our exposures. That means going to the store less frequently and more mindfully, planning more. It also means being easy on ourselves and being sure to incorporate self-care, first and foremost exercise and considerate house cleaning and good communication. But also remembering how fortunate we are and doing some year end giving.

The Swarm

Up this morning on the early side for the first time in what seems like weeks, am working my way through my morning routine at a normal pace: feed cats, meditate while coffee brews, stretch, sit-ups, push-ups, read and drink coffee, read and drink coffee and eat breakfast... Was about to check email etc, but I know if I do that before I blog all is lost, because my brain is quickly overcome with the swarm of thoughts about other things that need to be done: tasks, scheduling, follow up, nudging this person and that person to do this and that, checking to see if x and y had been done...

Yesterday I reached down deep and pushed through the Economist's survey of Japan. I try to read as many of the long surveys as I can, because they really abide by the ethos of the slowing perspective of the world that is ultimately so fruitful. The most important theme of the piece is that Japan with its aging population, extraordinary debt load and long struggle with deflation, is more a harbinger of things to come for the globe than an outlier. And that Japan is doing better in many regards than people give it credit for, especially in its resiliency planning for the wide range of natural disasters to which it is subject (first and foremost earthquakes and tsunamis but also the odd hurricane) but also in keeping its aging population healthy and engaged.

In any case, the world keeps on turning. Graham continues to crank out essays. Natalie has almost confirmed her booking on a 6am flight out to California to see Stuart in 10 days or so. At first I was surprised that she was going so soon but then I realized that by the time she left she would have spent almost three weeks with us, which is plenty of a nuclear family for most people, and certainly for a healthy 21-year old figuring out her own path in life. Graham's passport arrived back from the passport agency so we've got all the documentation we need if we decide to travel abroad next summer, if the world is willing to have us.  

Bear Mountain

After almost a week of very diligently and patiently inspecting all aspects of George and Rob's house, today we set off for a mini-adventure up at Bear Mountain State Park, about half an hour up the Hudson. This is a park I had been past and near to many times over the years -- I remember in particular a lovely walk Mary in took in the nearby Harriman State Park on our mini-honeymoon almost a quarter century back -- I guess I had never been in this one.

It's kind of an odd place, close enough to the City that it basically feels like an extension of it, but with lodges and suchlike built in the WPA rustic style that you see in so many national parks. There's also a skating rink, which we parked near, and the trail we chose took us up over the rink, so that our hike was serenaded by the blasting of pop music, not all of it award-winning.

It got pretty steep pretty quickly and the trails degenerated at a similar pace. Turns out we would have been better off going up the trail with all those staircases, though we would have been cursing them soon enough. We ended up walking around this little lake to get in enough miles to call it exercise. Still, it was a good deal better than walking here in the nabe or around the graveyard and it effectively killed off an afternoon.

On the drive back, Rob discussed a range of wacky business ideas that we all agreed were nonsense. But that's pretty much par for the course.

Christmas bustle

Things are busy in the heart of the house with meal prep etc while I oscillate between hiding out in my room trying to get little things done and read. I am currently trying to generate momentum in William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine. Gibson -- and I guess a lot of sci-fi -- often takes a lot of concentration and focus to sort of get immersed into his world. This novel, with its steampunk alternate past with a lot of pretty much useless descriptions of fashion elements based on historical fashions themselves splinched together from various times and places. Hopefully the book eventually rewards the effort. 

Anyhoo, I've decided to come downstairs to be available to help with cooking and cleaning as necessary. Part of it is me getting sucked into the guilt cycle of "we were working so hard on dinner and you weren't doing anything." I have now offered to help but haven't been taken up on it, except for a little cleaning here and there between cycles of meal prep.

Pretty much all is in order, however. The presents are under the tree. Things are progressing. The food smells good.

I have now been drafted to work on the fake sausage for the vegan stuffing. 

Underfoot for the holidays

Up here at George's house in North White Plains/Valhalla/Greenburgh, NY (the municipality sitch is, in typical NE fashion, confusing). Omicron is everywhere around us, but we are trying to hide out and go into as few buildings as possible, which is made complicated only by our need for a little bit of food cheer and diversification and imperfect meal planning on the part of the extended household -- so we don't have all the ingredients we need for Xmas feasting. We hope that the diligent and disciplined use of KN94 masks and general minimization of exposure should protect us and, more importantly, the more medically-fragile members of our assembly.

We have historically been at the bigger house in Larchmont which is, sadly, no longer in the family. Sadly in general, but felicitously for Rob, who did all the work of taking care of the old house back in the day -- and it evolved into a ton of work just to make it mold-free and habitable and then ready for sale.

Our current house is quasi-open plan with cheap hollow-core doors, which makes for poor sound-baffling, which is certainly sub-optimal for things like Rob doing big Zoom calls for work (which makes it hard for the rest of us to think) or, it turns out, for us to watch 30 Rock reruns around bedtime. Apparently I in particular guffaw rather loudly, which disturbs Rob's wind down process. I've been trying to keep it down.

In general I have to feel for Rob. He has many particularities, but his life is clearly run by very well-established routines (juggling the soccer ball in the morning, watching CNBC with lunch, calling Mary Lee with George around 5:30) and then we just show up and sit around in the middle of it. Larchmont was much better designed for this than this house is. More well-defined, discrete spaces to retreat to.

Normally it would be easier to sneak out and, say, go to a movie. This year not so much. With collective discipline and more than a little luck, we hope to get through this.

Endemicity and the university

As we enter the third year of the pandemic and everyone seems inclined to believe that it's becoming endemic -- though the optimisitic read is that Omicron burns through the population, raises herd immunity and transitions the virus to a much less lethal state -- it seems likely to have major impacts on the shape of the US professoriate going forward. In short, it could well hasten the retirement of a lot of older tenured professors, clearing a path for at least two things:

• A rejuvenation of the faculty -- probably pulling it even further left and in the direction of interdisciplinarity -- with real risk to the integrity of the disciplines themselves. Though as relatively recent historical phenomena, maybe the disciplines were themselves kind of bullshit all the while.
• A continued rebalancing of the higher-ed employment model away from the tenure model and towards "clinical faculty," which will enable greater institutional nimbleness but also make it easier for conservative Boards and alumni associations to influence curricula. But listen to Grandpa Grouse up there. Maybe I'm hankering for it.

In any case, things will change. Some feet will walk, some heads will roll. Hopefully few will die.

Then again, whether the retreat amongst faculty proves statistically significant vs. the shaving of ~2% off of the US overall workforce participation rate that we've seen since the onset of the pandemic is another question. Could be that it's roughly the same. I think that the fact that the tenured population skews old relative to the workforce in general will be meaningful.

POSTSCRIPT:  A small unscientific survey on Facebook says that, based on anecdotal evidence, my prediction above is wrong. I'll still leave it up there because that's how I roll! It's a blog, dammit.

 

Holistic Financial Planning

For some reason I was going through my stubs of old drafts of posts that I hadn't published and found this one from 2006.

"Bundle CFP, Shrink, Trainer, Career planner. I guess that's what a life coach is supposed to be."

It's fairly remarkable how close this comes to what I actually do for many of the clients who ask the most of me. I don't do all of these things at the same time. Sometimes I am doing more, sometimes fewer of them. And while I am rarely technically a trainer for people we are often talking about workouts and what works and doesn't over time and how it all ties together. It was a fairly prescient post, except I never actually present myself as a life coach. 

Names on gravestones

I had in the past mentioned the very old-school Italian names on the gravestones here near Rob and George's house. Today near dusk we went for a walk in the graveyard. We hadn't gone 10 steps before Mary took out her danged phone and started taking pictures of this and that. I ended up walking alone. 

I myself took some pictures of gravestones so I could remember the most distinctive of them:

Ermelinda
Concetta
Severio
Angelarossa
Avrora
Righetta
Giacomo
Gennaro
Filomena
Nastesia

For the most part it's the women's names that stand out, most likely because we get exposed to a lot of the distinctive men's names via mob movies (though few of us know, say, a "Pasquale" in real life. But not the women's. They are terra incognita.

Earlier in the day I had been at a killer Italian deli where I snagged us sandwiches of pork loin with broccolini; soppressata, arugula and shaved pecorino; that kind of thing. The fruits of the Northeast.

Natalie wants to watch TV. Gotta hop.

In the North

Once more we have conquered the highways and made it to the north. A generally uneventful day on the road, save for the fact that we listened to the podcast S-town on the way up there. It was pretty amazing. 

Other than that, pretty much nothing happened. Oh yeah, except we were delighted to see that rotisserie chicken has rejoined the menu at Subway. That was huge.

There's still a big Confederate flag on 29 somewhere near Chatham, Virginia. The Trump signs seem to be dying back for the time being, probably because people are getting tired of mowing around them. I have no illusions about them being gone forever. We kept our yard signs out the whole Trump administration, what the hell can we expect?

Emerging from a gauntlet

Yesterday was one of those days: Rascal kept puking, Graham was sick, at work we had some internal squabbling over logistics and personality clashes, I was working through the details of an unfamiliar account set up and made a small booboo (thankfully it was for a personal account so my clients can benefit from me learning from my own mistakes), and I had to counsel a client about some marital challenges.

At the end of the day things got a little better. I thumped Adam in our first set (6-2) but he held on in the second (7-5), but generally I played well with the exception of an implosion in the second set where I double faulted three times in a row or something like that. That was the Christmas spirit shining through my racket. Then while Mary was at the vet I improvised a very nice dinner with the help of the internet. It certainly helped that I was beginning with a big hunk of meat (a pork tenderloin) and potatoes. Add garlic, dijon, and honey and it's hard to fuck it up.

This morning most everything is in order. Graham is better -- clearly he was having side effects from his booster shot the day before; Rascal is not puking. I've still got a couple of things to sort out, but I think we can drive north tomorrow.

A golden moment

So it's already 9:30 and I'm still sitting here in the arm chair in my study, the arms of which had the hell scratched out of them by the cats, necessitating its forcible retreat from the public portion of the house. The light comes in golden from the East about now, especially in winter, but it hasn't yet come around and settled on my screen. It's a nice time of day.

It's not that I haven't been working yet, mind you. I've already straightened something out on Paypal and sent a couple of emails to clients. And signed a contract for the LFA and did a little promotion of Mary's book and arranged logistics for Graham's booster shot this evening (which sadly conflicts with a robotics competition).

Yesterday evening Graham's friends Sam and Tyler were over "working on homework" at the dining room table because they couldn't find a good public place to set up. Actually they were also gossiping quite a bit about who got in where in the first round and kvetching about why Duke and Harvard wouldn't let them in based on their perfect SAT scores. It was a little annoying because I was tired and Graham had to do some college admissions stuff BUT it was the quintessence of high school and totes adorbs. We need to be sure to encourage Graham to do it again. With both an armchair and a couch and a desk up here in my study and another armchair in our bedroom, Mary and I can totally retreat to up here and let Graham and the fellas hang out and be the high school goofballs that COVID has sometimes made it hard to be.  

Resilience(y)

First off, I had to clarify the spelling of the title: "resilience" vs "resiliency". The latter has definitely gained the upper hand in the battle for primacy these days, but the former is really the default usage.

On to the actual content. After last night's deflating news from Tufts, I certainly had to struggle back to get into the flow. We were certainly hoping for Santa to come early, though in the back of our minds we know that Boston is an awful long ways away from home for a kid who has never flown alone yet.

So now we have to model resilience. Graham has to hunker down and produce some more essays this month. Oh well. It's not like getting in to college is the be all and end all of it. I had my struggles at Yale for sure, Natalie has had her own. Mary would have been absolutely lost at Michigan had she not been in the Residential College.

To his credit, Graham chose to receive the college news at a Starbucks with his friends Sam and Tyler. Though he got bad news, his strategic positioning one him the consolation prize of a free muffin, which the baristas said they would have to throw away if no one took it. It was a pumpkin muffin, with a rich vein of cream cheese running through it. Dairy allergy or no dairy allergy, Graham ate the hell out of that thing and showed no signs of an allergic reaction, at least while I was downstairs. Go Graham!

Up this morning crafting my day, I saw that I had a LinkedIn invite from the child of a friend who's a sophomore in the business program at App State who wants to pursue a career in sales. I love it. Nobody says they want to go into sales, but one way or another, everybody ends up in sales. Some people just get to the age of 50 or 60 before they realize it. I want to have coffee with this kid.

But first, I need to sell some of Mary's books (go here to get yours!) and then get on with my day. I'm kind of excited because for the first time in what seems like weeks I don't have to be focused on lake stuff or reviews for current clients and I can focus on building and maintaining my practice, including some continuing ed stuff for a professional certification. I need a bunch of hours by April 30. 

tick tock, tick tock

Today at 6 pm Graham has been told to expect an email from Tufts, so we are hopeful that this whole college-shopping thing will come to a close. Frankly, they had better let him in. The alum who interviewed him said "Let me know when you get in," which is something I would never ever ever ever say when interviewing for Yale. Just the fact that Tufts has guided us to expect an email exactly at 6 is something I would never do if I weren't setting up expectations. Not good practice.

It's not, frankly, that Graham is deeply in love with Tufts. It was fine, as were a number of other places we looked at. The fact that it's as chilly as it is up there is a negative for a softy like Graham, a kid whose instinct is to put on gloves to take out the trash when it's 50 out. The fact that direct flights from RDU to Logan are available at all times of day and that JetBlue is one of the primary carriers is undoubtedly a positive.

In any case, we shall see what 6 pm brings. I have a very full day between now and then, which is a blessing, so I won't be obsessing over it too much. I won't think about it at all, I promise.

The punchline: he didn't get in. On to the rest of this joyous process.

Mental health breakdown

Ok, hat was a bit of a deceptive headline, but then again as I am selling Mary's book these days (available exclusively here!) I need to up my marketing game. It's not that I'm having a breakdown, but rather that I will break down the mental health activity I've seen in the recent days.

Yesterday I twice offhand made reference to my own mental health adventure from three decades ago, first when leading an AA meeting (on the occasion of 30 years of sobriety), then again on a Zoom call with a handful of friends spread across the USA and Europe. After the first instance, a client reached out to me after the call and told me that her adoptive son had had an acute but scary anxiety attack at dinner before and asked if I could talk to him about my experience. We had talked quite a bit about this son over the last couple of years and I had spent time with him in June in a different context, so it wasn't entirely out of the blue. So now I am having lunch with him in an hour (she is buying).

Then after my noon call, a friend reached out and talked to me for 30 minutes or so about challenges he was facing. I was starving so I had to go eat. This was after Friday, when I found myself cast as a marriage counselor for a client couple where there are real money-related problems in the marriage. That one got a little testy.

All of this is outside of my training but in areas where I can provide limited professional guidance but pretty decent wisdom. And also connections to other clients who are mental health professionals.

But it all takes away from my ability to rest and recharge and fulfill my professional obligations to clients. But I guess it gives me material to fulfill my ethical duties before you, my hungry readers.

Crash course in small business

In recent days I may have mentioned that Mary's book had arrived from Germany and that our bedroom and the rest of our upstairs suite is now positively infested by them. It is true. Though at least they are not crowding out my new couch, which continues to hold pride of place of all the upstairs objects.

But it is an awful lot of books, so now we have to get rid of them. That's where you come in, my dear readers, in your natural capacity as customers. Just click right here and you can go get one of these beauties. If you live locally, select "Pick Up" rather than putting in your address and Mary or I will swing it by your house sometime. Or meet you in a dark and secluded location for a discreet handoff.

To be honest, it's not your money we need, it's the revenue. See, the thing is, we have a lot of expenses for this book. If you are not an art superstar, art book publishing now is a pay to play deal. We paid $30k or so to a company in Germany (Kehrer Verlag) and they designed and printed the book. They didn't do hardly any editing. That was all on me. But they did a fine job printing the thing. The pix look great. Mary agrees, which is kind of key.

So we are expensing that $30k and reducing our income. But if we're gonna do that, the IRS wants to see a good faith effort to make money on our part, lest we run afoul of the "hobby rules." For some reason the IRS doesn't want to let people just throw money away and reduce their taxable income. I get it, makes sense. 

Another thing the IRS wants to see is a concerted attempt to improve business methods, to be business-like. Mary has been packing books in boxes and running them down to the post office. That will get old quick. Soon we will have the postal service come and pick them up, like my neighbor John does with whatever weird crap he is shipping out that week.

Frankly, we're also gonna need to get a business bank account for this. Mary is gonna have to suck it up and come down to the bank with me. Otherwise all this will flow through our personal accounts and it will get messy.

But for today, I'm done.

Athens and Chapel Hill

Until last weekend I had never been to Athens, Georgia before, though I'd heard a bunch of course. Here are a few thoughts.

The University of Georgia likes to act as if it has some claim on being the first public university  because it was chartered before UNC (1785 vs 1789). This is complete and utter bullshit, and could only be put out there by a state that was founded as a penal colony. Georgians might point out that it was not really settled by many felons, but if you follow their logic on the university question, the idea that it was supposed to have been takes precedence. UNC built the first building and opened its doors first, so they need to just shut the hell up.

Athens has a downtown that is a good deal more usable than Chapel Hill's. It's a bigger city and it's not built on the spine of a hill, so it has a gridded downtown with more cool-looking bars and restaurants. It wins the rock and roll argument hands down, many more significant bands have spent a lot of time there than here. All in all, it's probably a better place to enjoy ones self while in college.

Though it has a lot in common with Chapel Hill, at a certain point in time their characters diverge. Right now, for example, Chapel Hill is one of the most vaxxed places on the planet, whereas Athens and its surrounding county are at ~50% vaxxed. The public schools there aren't very good, partially because there is a white flight county just across the way where people decamped. Of course, Chapel Hill's dirty little secret is that it itself is a white flight place in a sense, or, rather, it is a place from which blacks have been made to flee by relentless real estate pricing pressure and hypercompetitive schools. 

In many ways, Athens is more like Ithaca or Charlottesville -- it is the center of a region, whereas Chapel Hill is an affluent corner of a large conurbation. Also, like Ithaca, it is a good distance away from a major interstate, so it feels surprisingly way back in there.

Top of the Morning

A bit bleary today after leading an HOA general meeting last night. Graham stayed home from school not feeling well, Joan is also not well, even Mary (usually the most stalwart of us all) is displaying a little cough downstairs (not a good sign). I of course feel tired but then I always do, especially after a working road trip followed by the shit show that is our HOA general meeting, so it's hard to untangle exhaustion from disease. Particularly when I am listening to the tales of Kastorp et al. up at Davos, pontificating and perseverating over every symptom and the filigreed significance thereof.

Plus it was hard to go to sleep with my mind course racing from the adrenalin of performing for 70-80 neighbors on Zoom. Happily, afterwards I was able to curl up on my own private sofa and enjoy some TV, this time Netflix's Sex Education, which is starting to develop some depth and resonance as it moves past its somewhat silly premise into actually letting us get to know its protagonists. It is moving in the direction of a combination of Stranger Things (good-natured geeks and outcasts stick together) and The Breakfast Club (all teenagers are insecure oddballs when you look at them at the correct perspective), larded with plenty of instances of general good humor. I can work with this. 

Passing time with Kastorp

Back from Greenville and Athens, a pretty good few days of driving. I will spare you extensive commentary from my passage through generic Trump country, except to note of course the cancerous predominance of enormous pick-up trucks, the near omni-absence of masks in stores and a high point -- a billboard somewhere in northern South Carolina -- to the extent that that's not an oxymoron -- that proclaimed that Trump got 120 million votes. Out of 157 million, of course.

Mostly I was unable to pay attention to such trifles because my attention was riveted, riveted -- I tell you -- by my book. Something deep within me had told me it was time to take on one of Thomas Mann's longer novels. My office mate David convinced me that if I had to choose, and I did, it should be the 1924 The Magic Mountain rather than Buddenbrooks. I chose the older rather than the newer translation of the book because I liked the voice of the narrator on Audible better -- it is read by a dulcet-toned Scot. The book is 800ish pages long, which translates into 37 hours of narration, so in principle the 11 hour round trip drive should have gotten me a quarter of the way through. It did not. I had to listen to some music.

Which is not to say it is not a good book, engrossing in its own way. In the 7-odd hours I listened to, our hero -- Hans Kastorp -- comes to a sanatorium at Davos to visit his cousin Joachim, who is stricken by tuberculosis. Kastorp is not, or... is he? It's not entirely clear from the first 7 hours. No spoilers, please.

Much thinking and reflection is done in the book, much of it very relevant to both a long road trip and to passing through a pandemic. Considerations of such questions as the passage of time and the perception of the passage of time, and how such concepts as "eventfulness" impact the latter. Does eventfulness make time pass more quickly or more slowly?

Faithful readers of the blog will recall, of course, that we have discussed such questions here on occasion, how our perception of time seems to accelerate as we age and pass milestones, but how the having of children and (dare I say it) grandchildren offers us an opportunity to re-immerse ourselves in the anticipation of milestones that offset this acceleration.

Such as December 15, the date of college Early Decision announcement. And then, after that, Christmas. 

Hitting the road

Headed south to Greenville and Athens over the next couple of days to see clients, which will be my first time venturing out further than... Raleigh/Hillsborough/Saxapahaw/Southern Village since Labor Day weekend. At some level I'm still recovering from all the summer road trips, but I'm also kind of raring to see a little more of the world.

Finished Bojack Horseman last night. It was really quite something, highly recommended. I was very pleased to see that there was a little redemption in the end for our guy and all his core crew. The penultimate episode had been very sad and might have contributed to my getting up in the middle of the night before last, which I remedied with a Sonata, reading an excruciatingly boring book about the finer points about Social Security claiming strategies, and setting up on the new couch to sleep so I wouldn't disturb Mary. It slept just fine.

We had taken Mary's car in to Auto Logic yesterday for an oil change and for them to track down a suspicious smell somewhere in there. When my phone rang late yesterday as I was out walking, I was hoping for good news, instead I hear Bo's voice telling me "You've got something dead in your car." Sigh. It was deeper in the AC system then we had hoped. We'll find out where, but it will cost a little more than I was hoping for. Mostly I'm thankful for a good garage that OK'd the additional expense before diving in to trouble-shoot the issue.    

Graham goes out to lunch

Graham's high school has allowed students to start going out to lunch again, an opening in policy as we muddle forward in the age of COVID, surely a component of its new pro mental health program. Graham is embracing it vigorously. He went to the Pig two days in a row (on Tuesday because Deli Edison was closed) and is going to Deli Edison today. He is eating a lot of pork.

A little background is in order. For starters, Graham is rich. He has been earning allowance and also birthday and Xmas money here and there his whole life, plus he worked some at the lake over the summer. So he has money, but in some ways little appreciation for it because it has never been scarce for him.

What's more, he is skinny. At 5'9", he weighs a mighty 109 lbs. He was a little surprised that he didn't gain more weight over Thanksgiving, given how much stuffing he ate. Part of the problem is that he has internalized his mother's disciplined reading of nutrition labels and serving sizes over the years. For example, if we are low on dessert and he decides to hit the bag of chocolate chips for dessert, he will read the serving size (15 chips, for instance) and count out that many for himself. Which is a little silly from the perspective of his present size, though it may prove a good habit in the future.

It's also great that he is getting out and transacting with the world more. These forays to eateries are on top of the time he's spending at Triangle Chess on weekends, playing games with strangers for hours wearing a mask.

So it's all good. He can eat a lot of lunches before he gets low on cash and/or heavy. I do need to get him back to building muscle (raking leaves, for instance).