Post prandial musings

With good reason, I make a concerted effort to blog first thing in the morning. For one thing, that's when my brain is relatively fresh and ambitious so the early start allows me to share some of the very best stuff I can. By the time I'm at my desk I am off to the races, really a slave to the rhythms of my calendar, phone, task list, inbox and the markets, more or less in that order. The best days are full ones run off the task list and calendar and barely acknowledge the markets.

Here's what my set up looks like now. The painting in middle is by CHHS's own Joel Bergquist, the sketch to the right of it in this picture is by some UNC grad student. To the far right is a plaque presented to my grandfather in 1958 celebrating 22 years (what a random number!) of partnering with the long-defunct US Royal Tires. On the left are my Yale and Columbia diplomas. They look a little pretentious but they gotta hang somewhere and if I were a doctor or a lawyer you know I'd have them shits up there.

This is my fifth office in the last seven years. The building I'm in is swankier than my last one (where I had been in 3 places over four and a half years or so). It really doesn't matter where I am, so long as I have a door I can shut when I'm on the phone and an external monitor. It's all good. Though I must say that bringing a comfy arm chair in here where I could read peacefully without being subject to the lame pop music piped into the common area of our Industrious co-working space would add value. I should pop into the Re Store on the Boulevard and see what I can wrangle for cheap.

The Names

As I had mentioned somewhere a few weeks back, I had taken up Don Delillo's 1982 The Names a month or two back for a rereading. I had read it sometime in the early aughts, clearly before the inception of the blog because there's no review of it here. It had made a strong impression, primarily the tension between the seeming meaningless and interchangeability of the globetrotting group that form's the core of the protagonist's social set in Athens and the raw elementality of the murder cult that becomes his fixation. Given that I must have been reading this around 2002-2003, when I was first getting on airplanes a lot to earn money myself, I must have identified with the first part of the guy's condition, though the places I was traveling (St Louis, Charlotte, etc) were much less adventurous than his (Karachi, Amman...).

But somehow I totally missed that there was also a plot back in Athens, that he was employed by the subcontractor to the CIA and there was another spy that tried to kill him but instead shot somebody else. It's not hard to miss this thread, given the many pages of dialog in clubs and bars where the quotes are never attributed back to speakers, a high modernist trick (think Bely, Woolf, Doblin, Dos Passos, Gaddis probably Joyce too though I never read any of his fat ones). I'm sure I also did it because I was reading a few pages at a time before passing out at night because I was still in the early stages of figuring out how to earn a living in the private sector and was also a parent of a toddler so I was exhausted at the end of each day. 

The novel also features an awesome scene of seduction mixed in where the protagonist (whose name we barely learn by the end of the book) completely talks this married woman into going out in the street and having sex with him. Rare elementality.

I rarely go back and re-read books. There's always so much to read that I haven't read before. But it is good to go back and revisit ones that make a major impression on you at a particular time. Often it's hard to recapture the magic. But sometimes you can track down hints of what it was.

BTW, the Wikipedia summary of The Names is just awful and bears the hallmarks of having been written by a college freshperson. This blog post, at least, is written at the level of a junior or senior.

The bustle of falling leaves

It's easy to forget the way things accelerate as the weather gets cooler and the colors change. It's the perfect time to be outside and everybody wants to get together, resulting in a need for choices.

Yesterday I hosted a 40th reunion of our state championship soccer team out in the park behind my house. It was pretty well attended, maybe 22 people there including a few spouses and girlfriends. I also tried to invite people from surrounding years but only a few people showed up, which was a shame.

In any case, operating under the theory that you never know you have enough food unless you have too much, I ordered seven large pizzas. I actually meant to order eight but accidentally ordered only one of one of the variants because I was rushing to get everything set up. Which turned out to be a blessing, because when the dust cleared at the end of the event, there were four and a half pizzas left. I gave one to Warren, who was headed back to Raleigh, because I was a little embarrassed, was concerned that Mary might upbraid me for my profligacy and also wasn't sure I could fit that much in the fridge.

So tonight I have invited over a bunch more people to help us eat the leftover pizza. Which means we have to clean the house. Which is pressure we really don't need because Mary has to host the local Autism Society fall event in the park and our house is kind of in disarray because we are getting ready to have people come in to build us some bookshelves in the rec room and closets in the upstairs study, all in preparation for our December 12 fundraiser for Josh.

All this on top of having dinner out on the lake with Ken and Ellen on Friday night and then going to a fundraiser at Daniel and Andrea's last night for the Transplanting Traditions Community Farm. All of which meant that I for sure did not make it to any of the CHHS '83 40th reunion events, though I had kind of intended to.

I had better go downstairs and help Mary clean up.

Turning my focus

As I survey the various claimants to my attention, beyond the non-negotiables (reading, exercise, seeing people, sleeping, watching at least a little TV to let the brain shut off) there's a tension right now between language study on Duolingo and guitar playing. 

Duolingo is really easy to access and provides clear feedback in terms not just of points and rankings within these admittedly stupid, evanescent and entirely manufactured weekly leagues. It rewards consistency and effort in a clear and quantitative way and I make progress in these languages. It's also supposed to have a long-term cognitive benefit, at least according to one article I read. It is easily done while lying back on a couch -- though some exercises are better done leaning forward with two feat on the floor, the better to focus.

Playing guitar is, by contrast, much more amorphous. I have been stalled around the same chord progressions and finger-picking patterns for a long time. There are a million gurus on YouTube who claim to have a good system for people like me to make progress, but I hesitate to pull the trigger on them. In the end I do not practice consistently, play a few minutes a day, make no progress. But the payoffs to getting better seem so immense. To play and sing beautifully is breathtaking. 

The other hindrance is, obviously, the need to put myself out there and perform for others publicly and thereby expose myself to both criticism and acclaim. I guess I do it in some contexts, but performing music seems to be a particularly vulnerable act. Or, perhaps, solo acoustic performance is unique in this regard, distinct from being in a band where one can hide behind amps and bluster. To an extent.

Things I'm watching and reading

A few weeks ago I was delighted to hear that Sex Education was back on Netflix for its fourth season. I thought I had watched all of them, but I hadn't. I am now five episodes in and -- having read that the show's creators intend this be the last of them -- I'm husbanding and titrating them. It's just so good. As always, so much of the show is utterly implausible and has to happen at the artificially accelerated rate that lets shows and movies jam through things in short time periods, but I can suspend my disbelief and live with that because the show makes such an effort to develop multi-faceted characters. Maybe there are more shows like this and I just don't let them in, but I do try to watch a bunch of shows and don't find many this good. I will be sad when it ends.

For my top of the morning reading I continue to work my way through the Bible. After having skipped a bunch of the Old Testament, so much of which was just unbearable in its repetition, I have now finished all the Gospels. While acknowledging that the Book of John shows more leg than the other Gospels, I will say (as I'm pretty sure I've said before) that I am just not feeling it. I think maybe growing up going to church just makes it too difficult to engage with Christianity in a way not mediated by layers of sedimented aversion. I think maybe it's time to return to Abraham Joshua Heschel. I sent Natalie a copy of The Sabbath a few weeks back, she should have it by now. I'm eager to get her take on it.

In the car I'm listening on weekdays to James Clear's Atomic Habits, which has some good stuff but nothing as better than the one quote I heard at a conference in February: "You don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems." That is good. I scrawled that on a post it note and stuck it on my wall. On weekends I'm making my way towards the end of Deepti Kapoor's The Age of Vice, which probably merits a post of its own.

Back to the notion of systems, though. One of the initial premises of this blog was that I'd write no more than fifteen minutes a day and I've done that now. See ya. 

 

Problem solving weekend

This weekend was a little different than most. Graham was back for fall break, there was the doubles round robin, the mayoral candidates rolled out their bandwagons in the park behind our house... Amidst all of this I applied myself to some rare problem-solving around the house. I fixed the TV's bandwidth issues in the rec room, made some progress going through stuff in my study upstairs (though not enough, to be sure), moved a chair from our bedroom to Graham's room and took the one in his room back out onto the deck, thereby finally declaring the pandemic to be over from a seating perspective and so on. Some movement is better than none.

Saturday lunch took me to Durham for what was supposed to be an alumni football game viewing organized by my friend Steve. It turned out to have been cancelled, so I had pernil with rice, beans and collards at Boricua Soul. Highly recommended. I was astonished to see just how many people were out at the sports bar Tobacco Road for lunch. I think I don't appreciate what hard-core abstemious WASPs we are. The idea of going out to lunch to some random sports bar without a specific event to justify it is just inconceivable to me. 

In general, Durham was hopping.

Beneath the bridge by the ballpark there was a truck serving meals to the homeless. There were many people there.

Saturday night we were supposed to go see the new Scorsese film at the Chelsea, then I discovered it was 3 and a half hours long. Graham was a sport and let us change our plans. Instead we watched Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows. With movies like that grossing north of half a billion dollars it's easy to see how the writer community would have concerns about LLMs eating their lunch. The proverbial monkey with a typewriter could have thrown together that piece of nonsense.

The problem of the highlight reel

Participated in a doubles tournament this morning and did fine. I won some, I lost some. The winner of the tournament will represent the club in some spring competition, which I didn't realize when I signed up. I don't really want to play that much doubles.

The really good doubles players seem to place a premium on consistency and keeping the ball in play unless there is a clear opportunity for a winner. I see the wisdom in that. But it is pretty boring. I like to hit shots that make me feel like the man, shots that I can replay for myself internally when my head is on the pillow at night and look be enveloped with warmth. To do that I have to take some risks.

In singles it's just my risk and it hurts only me. In doubles it impacts someone else. Which is a pretty strong disincentive to playing a lot of doubles.

A Golden Moment

Mary and I are getting ready to do some work on the house that was deferred in our 2010 (or was it 2011?) renovation due to cost. Some bookshelves in the rec room and a couple of closets upstairs. We are using Bobby and Julie's son Thomas to do the work. Can't find a web site to link.

To get ready for this we need to cull some of our many things. Mary probably needs to do a little more than I do, but there's work for me too. Mary has been going through some of her stuff and in the process came across this little picture, which we had inserted in our seasonal mailing back then, back before this blog had sucked up so much of my writing oxygen. We had moved from 48 Wilton to 29 Linden in Princeton in the spring of 2003, that brings up a whole bunch of memories around the house sale which I may chronicle another day because it was before the launch of the blog.

In general this was a golden moment in my life. Graham had just been born, Natalie was cute as a button. We bought this bigger house (1850 square feet, 4 BR 1.5 BA) with so much character, if no central AC. In general I was feeling like I had made it and had acceded into membership in the New York suburban bourgeoisie, in many ways an astonishingly interesting group of people. There's so much talent, energy, and intellectual and cultural diversity hiding out in houses like this within commuting distance of the cities of the Northeast.

Professionally I was still trying to figure out how to settle in to the private sector. I was having too much stress at work and was picking probably some of the wrong battles. There were periods of horrible insomnia in the first year in this house. Then I had a breakthrough...

What YouTube laid on me

Man I need to work on my picking, first and foremost my Travis picking. Lest I lose track of these, here are two great Simon and Garfunkel covers. 

AI needs to practice to be in the game

For some time I've been meaning to read back through my blog, at least a little bit, to try to process and synthesize it and latch hold to some of the most salient points and themes. Of course I'll never read the whole thing. That would be ridiculous.

So here you have these AI large language models and you would think they might be good for a task like this. Read the blog. Think about it in relationship to other analogous bodies of work, say perhaps Samuel Pepys's diaries or Dooce's blog. I will confess that part of me was loath to open my kimono wide open to the LLMs, particularly after Sarah Silverman and others are filing suits against their creators for theft of intellectual property. Then again, hers is worth money.

ChatGPT wouldn't even approach the task. Google's Bard at first was fired up, even going so far as to say "I am excited to learn more about your blog and to have a dialogue with you about it" and asked some specific questions. But it really wasn't able to do much, quickly crawling back into its shell by saying "I am just a large language model and don't have the capacity to help with that."

I'm sure I could go back and be more concrete with it and coax some thoughts out of it, but I'm not sure that's the highest and best use of my time. Maybe. For now, it's time to pack it in and go have dinner with Mary.

Here's the original and undoubtedly most generative AI.

The strange absence of pitchforks

Yesterday I found myself musing on our small banking crisis this past spring, which may very well pop back up if non-quiescent inflation and economic activity forces the Fed to raise rates again and thereby push the value of long-term bonds further down. The Fed had to do a surprising and unappreciated amount this spring. I had a gander at the Fed's balance sheet a couple of weeks ago and though it has continued to let its bond portfolio run off and has shrunk its holdings there, it has grown back in other places, presumably in facilities it used to stabilize wobbly banks. But it is down by about $800 billion, which is nice.

Back in 2009, Rick Santelli went on a rage on CNBC and launched the Tea Party movement, famously turning to the traders at the Chicago Board of Trade and asking them if they wanted to bail out people who borrowed too much and was met with a chorus of nos. At some point in time it was estimated that 10% of the US population belonged to a Tea Party affiliate of one sort or another, and you know a bunch of them are Trumpers.

So why didn't people get worked up about the FDIC stepping in and making all of the account holders at Silicon Valley, Silvergate and Signature Banks? For example, Roku, which had about half a billion dollars at SVB, a quarter of its cash and ~5% of its market cap. Where was the outrage?

There are a number of things at work. CNBC's viewership is probably smaller as the media landscape has been more fragmented by the flowering of social media. The crisis was smaller and didn't grip the whole world in the same way as 2008-2009 had. When Credit Suisse, a bit of a basket case for a decade and change, was forcibly merged with UBS, there was a great chorus of yawns.

But also, let's be honest, we're talking about rich white people fucking up here, and the Gods of the tech world here. VCs and tech execs. That's who got bailed out this time and that seems like a good use of tax dollars, I reckon. Nevermind that the money will either have to come out of the Federal kitty or out of a higher fee from banks to the FDIC. In other words, taxpayers. When poor people and black people fuck up, it's an outrage, but this wasn't that.

Cry in the night

Around 1:45 this morning, the most plaintive of voices pierced our slumber, not once but 8-10 times. At first I thought it was a baby, but as my brain ascended through the layers of blear I realized that it was Leon, our shy cat. The most frequently heard and feared variant of his voice alerts us to the fact that his delicate tummy is out of balance and that he is leaving a little pukey present for us somewhere in the house, hopefully on the wood floor or a forgiving rug instead of upholstered furniture.

This was not that meow. Something else was going on, probably a raccoon, possum, fox or coyote out on the patio. Or George, the cat from two houses down who sometimes rambles in the night.

At any rate, by the time I got out of bed and went downstairs to see what was what the crisis was it had apparently passed and Leon was acting all cool and surprised to see me. But it took some time for both Mary and me to get back to sleep and my morning routine is delayed.

Near miss

On the way out to a fundraiser for Josh out West of town, Niklaus, Mary and I were cruising along Hillsborough Rd headed out of Carrboro when something moved in my peripheral vision off to my left and Niklaus started and gesticulated. I slammed on my breaks as a large dear went sailing over the front of my car. There was a light thump. 

I screeched to a complete stop as the remains of a small herd of deer crossed the road. My Prius battery got a good little charge. We continued on our way to the pretty well-attended function, where the food could have been better. Josh was in fine form.

When we looked at the car later there was just the faintest of dents. Over the years it has seemed like the deer have gotten a lot smarter about when to cross the road and when not to, but this specific herd apparently has not gotten that memo. I am happy not to have been the one to deliver it. 

Admissions

Having trumpeted my excellent comeback against Adam a week or so back, it would feel dishonest not to mention that he destroyed me yesterday, 6-0, 6-4. Neither of us has bageled the other like that in a very long time. He was crushing the ball deep into the corners, coming in to the net, and volleying well. No excuses.

I keep being unable to get to bed earlier. Try as I might I cannot kick the habit of watching some TV, however mediocre, from 9-10, then following that up with sports highlights and (the worst) some short videos which I get served to me by Facebook. Natalie correctly asserts that this is basically TikTok and I have no counterargument. Why I need an adrenaline rush of danger -- skateboarding, parkour, skydiving, death diving, trampoline tricks, last night it was British rally racing -- that I can't tell you. A suspicious amount of the content which sucks me in is sponsored by Red Bull or Monster. It probably doesn't help me sleep to get this energy bolus just before I hit the pillow.

In fact, it's not hard to look at this thrill dependency as the nearly exact opposite of yesterday's post about accepting limits and learning to let go of things. Olympia Dukakis character's classic formulation from Moonstruck, that men chase women because they fear death (which I think I've posted before but here it is again for your delectation), comes to mind. Since experience earlier in life has taught me the dangers of chasing women, I watch crazy guy shit before bed and end up not getting the optimal amount of sleep. Which is admittedly more about fearing aging than fearing death, but they're pretty similar fears.

What courses to stay?

Our lives to a considerable extent comprise a triaging or titration of influences and activities. There are endless voices out there in the outside world barraging us with ideas of what we should do: build muscle! focus on core strength! Reduce BMI! Work on flexibility! Focus on balance!

My buddy Mark, a physician, gave me a "prescription" for push ups maybe a year and a half ago when I was out in Seattle. According to it I was to do three sets of push ups -- starting at 10 -- every other day for two weeks, after which I was to add a couple. So two weeks 3 x 10, then 3 x 12, 3 x 15, and so on. I made it all the way to 3 x 25 before falling off the wagon, onto which I can't climb back just now, though I still throw in 25 a few times a week now.

With DuoLingo I just "won" the Diamond, or top league, which is to say I was in the top 10 (top 5, actually). My prize for that is staying in the Diamond League. Hooray. It is taking about half an hour a day but I do feel my common Indo-European strengthening as I alternate days of Italian, German, and Ukrainian. But should I keep on with it? I did read that it is good for offsetting cognitive decline in older people in one place. Then again, I just saw that I had written about this within the last couple of weeks so maybe the benefit is limited.

In today's journal there's a piece on how some "older people" are letting go of things (including books) and activities. I haven't read it yet but I probably will. Then again, periodicals are one of the other things I have been working hard in recent years to let go of. They flow through my house constantly, New Yorkers, Economists, Atlantics, alumni mags etc. Ultimately when the stacks get too thick I just have to put them in the recycling bin and carry them to the curb. Usually that conveys its own sense of accomplishment.

A lovely day

Onc couldn't really ask for a much nicer day than today. Sun shining, breeze blowing, mild temps. Sitting out on the porch now.

Mary made it in a little before midnight last night, still all revved up about the pictures she had taken but a little wistful about only figuring out how to scout for locations as she went along and opportunities she had missed. As for me, I'm just glad she's back. I feel more whole and would have slept a lot better had I not been experiencing some pretty bad knee pain while going to sleep. At length I found a comfortable position, but only after taking some more acetaminophen and writhing there. I only hope this does not signify that I'm moving towards a reckoning with the arthritis we documented already four years ago about this time of year. 

Yesterday I also learned that a friend's daughter is, at long last, getting married, though I also learned that she plans to have a destination wedding and just invite her friends and, presumably, family. On the one hand, this is America and this kind of thing falls squarely into the category of Enduring Freedoms. On the other, the whole cycle of life thing should in principle provide us 50-somethings with a stream of weddings to offset the ongoing litany of memorial services for our friends parents and even our friends, who keep getting picked off by the Grim Reaper. 

In Brittany in August David gave a lovely toast at the rehearsal dinner where he thanked everyone for coming to, and I quote, "our wedding." On the one hand, it was a bit of a slip because it was of course his daughter's wedding. On the other, the wedding was really an occasion to bring family and friends together, as are funerals, they just have a different tone. When we got married we had a little bit of an instinct to have a smaller wedding in a more rustic place, but Mary's dad wanted it to be closer to their home and saw it as an event to bring together people from throughout his life, and I get that. Our wedding was the first time I met Mary's cousins and aunts and uncles -- and the last time for some of them. I think we did it right for us and I do hope we get to go to a bunch more weddings soon.

A third

Today marks the 19th anniversary of this blog. Since I am 57, that means I've been at it now for a full third of my life. Or, if we accept the dubious proposition that my adulthood began at age 19 (there are arguments in favor of this -- that's about when my parents split up, signaling a clear end to my childhood if not my adolescence), I've been blogging for half of my adult life.

Rather than reflect on the evolution of the blog, which I've done before, let's focus on where I am today. Mary has been in Alaska for fully two weeks now and is due back late tomorrow. I'll be happy for her to get home. Judging from her credit card transactions, she was not consumed by a bear yesterday while photographing in the woods somewhere near Juneau and I'm grateful for that.

She's been gone a lot more than usual in the last year, first while her mother was fighting her last medical battle, then while her brother was, now on this photography trip, her first in a quarter century. So I've been alone at home a bunch. This has offered me greater than average freedom with regard to what I watch on TV and what I eat for dinner and has left me fully in control of a quiet (excepting neighbors and landscapers with leaf blowers) home during the day. This is all good, to a point, but the bloom goes off the rose quickly.

One of the themes of the last nineteen years has been me successfully trying to travel less for business, though even now I haven't fully gotten that balance right. Mary hasn't had that same fight. She's been on the other side, stuck at home taking care of kids, our very attention hungry cats and home while I was out earning money. It's unlikely that one trip will have exhausted her from the whole endeavor. Time will tell.

Some thoughts on freedom

I had lunch the other day with a Christian Republican. Someone I know from childhood, a really nice guy, I like him a lot. But I knew we were on different sides of the fence and wanted to explore that. I always mean to talk to more people I disagree with and usually underperform in so doing.

I don't have space to recount it all, but one thing did really strike me. His lack of concern for Ukraine on principle. His thinking was guided by realpolitik, by the idea that we had "poked the bear" by allowing NATO's borders to extend to where they were touching Russia's. He quoted George Kennan as saying this was a mistake. I remember early in the Ukraine war when Kennan's opinion to this effect was circulating the interweb, I reached out to friends in Eastern Europe and got a clear and resolute answer: Fuck Kennan. People in Eastern Europe appreciate the fact that they don't live under Putin's wing. Admittedly, these were educated people, the so-called "global elite." Maybe people out in the countryside who are struggling for an economic model (Viktor Orban's constituency) would have thought differently.

But at the end of the day we have to stand for and believe in something, and freedom has been the best idea we've had. Admittedly, freedom is a complex topic which means different things to different people and we are always tripping over our own feet trying to figure out which aspects of it the electorate and society wish to prioritize, but we're always working on it.

And make no mistake, as the US's status as sole superpower has been in retreat for the last decade, we see signs that freedom as a priority retreats with it. Even in places like Taiwan we see polls indicating that a good chunk of the population could acquiesce to dominance by the mainland. In the UAE polls recently indicated that people preferred stability to freedom. And so on. 

But the people of Ukraine have made their preference pretty clear, and if we abandon them it's all over.

Return to the quarantine groove

With Mary out of town I've been working from home and have barely been in to the office. In particular I've been digging spending ever larger quantities of time out on the deck, looking down at the lake and the critters in the back yard. Which raises the question of why I should go into the office at all, except to use the conference rooms to meet people, which is something I could easily do using a roving membership rather than having an actual office. 

One of the reasons I often cite is that the office offers the "absence that makes the heart grow fonder," i.e. that it's good for Mary and I not to be around during the day. And there's an element of truth to that. But there's no reason we couldn't just manage our boundaries better. Mostly I just don't like it when she vacuums and when she comes to me with lots of tech support questions. But she's been getting better about the latter and learning to manage more problems on her own. Surely I could be more intentional on that stuff. Of course, I don't really know all the ways I irritate her.

Yes, my finance library is at the office, but we're building new bookshelves downstairs so I'll soon have more shelf capacity. Plus I could get rid of some of these books I haven't touched for, oh, forty years or so. I could be just be smarter about holding on to books, which would honestly be nice to my kids going forward, as I reflect on the struggles of Rob, Beth and Mary in cleaning out Mary Lee's house. Mostly Rob. If we gave up the office we could save a bunch of money. And I would eat fewer crappy snacks and would generally be more likely to exercise regularly. 

7-6 plus some bonus material

Hearkening back to one of the original ideas for this blog, which was to chronicle goings on so I'd have a personal record of what happened at various points in time, for future me let me say that yesterday was a good day on the tennis court. Adam was up 5-2 and was serving. In a typical game for us, we went back and forth between deuce and ad a number of times, so Adam had at least a couple of set points. Some of them I foiled, others I parried. I broke him and we went to 3-5, me serving to him.

Often at this point in time I might crumple and fold, thinking somewhere in the back of my mind that 6-3 is a respectable outcome and we'll just start another set. But I stanched that kind of thinking and came back and beat him 7-6 and by a convincing margin in the tiebreaker. I did not psyche myself out or talk myself into accepting a respectable loss. It was a good mental performance and I hit the ball well.

Late in the day yesterday Graham texted that he'd like to come home today to get some warmer clothes. No problem. As it turns out, I got him late in the day so we could get some Thai food together, something that's never hard to sell him on. I remembered that, because of a pillar in the corner, there's a space behind his bed where his pillow keeps falling to the floor and getting dirty. We had been discussing possible remedies with him (maybe a small bookshelf?) but had only been able to get rough measurements ("it's one shoe deep") because he lacked a tape measure, so when I went to pick him up I took one with me so we could get precise measurements. The tape measure showed that the gap was about a foot and I was thinking maybe we could just wedge some bankers boxes in there, when my keen eye espied his laundry hamper at the foot of the bed. Upon closer inspection, it fits quite nicely, as shown below, and will guard against the dusty pillow outcome which is the main enemy here. This, my friends, is why they pay me the big bucks and gave me a PhD.