Quick roundup

Yesterday I made a lot of progress in the latest John McPhee book I'm reading while also doing a bunch of other things to cull my possessions and make way for the most recent influx of stuff from up North:

• I went through a box of papers from work -- mostly printed out articles -- and through out what I didn't need. Which was 95% of it.
• I offered a bunch of Russian books I had brought home from Moscow in 1998 for my dissertation research to professors (or their grad students) from UNC and Duke. I had rounds of this back in 2003 and 2009 on the occasions of moves from Wilton St to Linden Lane and from Princeton back to Chapel Hill.
• I threw away some old torn-up, ratty clothes, including perhaps my favorite garment of all time, a very light J McLaughlin blue and white checked flannel shirt I had picked up at a thrift store in 2006-7. It was so very soft and I had worn it often to work at Goldman Sachs at the onset of the big financial Crisis while the bank FTEs traded tales of how much they had spent on cuff links at Barney's. I also parted with the winter coat I took to Moscow in '98, which is close to useless here.
• I went for a walk and examined the flood plain behind Eastgate and the shopping center where Breadman's and the Tienda Guadalupena are, which excited neighbors had claimed 18 months ago was a failure of design by Chapel Hill Stormwater and its engineering partner. I couldn't tell if they were right, but it seems fine to me
•  I raked leaves out of the ditch above the pipe under the walkway from our yard to the LFA park. Generally I want to get this kind of work done while it is still cold out and pleasant to work outdoors. Once it gets hot raking sucks.

All in all, it was a good day of staying offline for the most part and not watching the news about bank rescues and wobbliness, which is far outside my range of influence.

At the end of the day, Graham came home and I took him back up to campus. East had won its second robotics tournament of the year, its third ever. He was very psyched.