The winter snow event turned out to be less than they were predicting right before it started, but it’s still enough to quiet the city for a few days.
Today: Organizing, cleaning, and the various small things I’ve had on lists for a while now. In particular wrangling Obsidian into something more functional and streamlined in a top priority.
Status: Shoveled the driveway yesterday so it doesn’t turn into an evolving ice sheet and now I’m feeling it today. With the move I stopped going to the gym and it’s days like this that it makes me regret it.
Reading: I’ve now finished both Blood in Winter and Gales of November, so I’m off the naughty list at the library. Both were good in their own ways. I will say, calling Gales of November the “untold story” of the Edmund Fitzgerald is a bit much. But it’s always a good marketing title.
Listening: Lots of Bob Weir, the Wolf Bros live recordings with Bobby’s gravelly voice meshes nicely with the coldness outside.
Last Watched: We were supposed to see Lord of the Rings in theaters for the 25th anniversary screenings, and while we saw Fellowship last week, we had to delay Two Towers and Return of the King until this weekend, which became watching them at home. Both were enjoyable, a fact really enhanced by the blu-rays of both being broken up in two. We watched the first half of both in the morning each day and the second half after lunch. Bring back intermissions is what I’m saying.
Eric Harvey: “Learning about reggae, or even Bob Marley himself, by listening to Legend is like learning about a big city by sticking to its downtown. You’ll no doubt have a good time amid the most publicly accessible art and cultural opportunities that require little work to access, but your trip won’t nearly represent the broader cultures and hidden treasures that take years or decades to fully understand.”
The winds made the bus feel like a ship at sea this morning. We’ve got cold and snow warnings everywhere, just need to get home before anything else hits.
Taming the Demon - Article from 2019 linked to in a recent Know Your Enemy podcast
Status: I spent yesterday cleaning up the email newsletter subscriptions. Feedbin helpfully allows you to subscribe to newsletters with custom addresses so I updated subscriptions to use one of six addresses (Substack, non-Substack paid subscriptions, NYT, Guardian, Guardian Sports, and General). Just need to make sure nothing got lost in the changes.
Reading: Gales of November, a history of the Edmund Fitzgerald sinking in a storm of the century is kind of apt right now.
Last Watched: The Testament of Ann Lee. I really wanted to love this movie and it has so much going for it. The costuming, the scenes, yet it falls so flat. It’s too long and too much of the movie cuts to either the same basic dance sequence or scene setting that could’ve been cut. By the third act all I could think about was the movie ending.
We’re promised a snow-whatever-fun-term-you-want-to-use this weekend which is liable to disrupt a state that simply does not have to capacity to respond to winter weather.
Today: Grading and small chores around the house. Ran to the big box home store for a coat rack to hang on the wall and everything outside was chaos. Costco gas lines all the way back to the end of the lot, grocery store packing lot mostly full. No thank you.
Status: The thought of hibernating in a blizzard is enlightening.
Reading: Hey, we’re done with Blood of Winter and can now fully concentrate on Gales of November, the recent history of “the pride of the American side,” the Edmund Fitzgerald
Listening: Lots of jazz, it just blends so well with cold weather.
I’m five pages away from finally finishing The Blood in Winter and I left it sitting on the table at home, so it’ll have to wait until this evening to be done.
Today: First in-class writing day of the semester, time to put pen to paper, at least for a short period.
Status: I like the house colder, alas I am alone in that respect, so I let the heat mellow during the day but kick on in the evening to accommodate normal heating preferences. The problem is when it does kick on, it kicks on for a while to bump up the temperature. When I’m in the office upstairs I don’t feel it I start to feel a bit sick and every single time that happens I forget that it’s just the house warming up.
Reading: I’ve read enough of Blood in Winter to say it’s a pretty good book on the beginnings of the English Civil War. Livelily written but with a huge cast of characters. The book does provide a helpful characters index but still, it’s quite a bit to keep straight.
Listening: Know Your Enemy had a good bonus episode with Matt Dinan on the issues of AI and teaching and I can’t say it truly answered the million dollar question of effectively confronting the new reality but it was nevertheless a good bus ride companion this morning.
It’s the end of the day and I’ve only just now gotten to this. I need to set up the Obsidian system I have on the laptop on the mac mini so I can easily do this at 9AM when I’m at the office desk.
Today: I really do wonder how many of those who claim they were hoodwinked by the University of Austin’s promises were genuinely naive and how many are just trying to cover themselves after the fact.1
Status: I spent the day organizing some things that have sat around for the six months since the move. The guest bedroom now have a TV and a PS3 that seems to have a dead WiFi card.
Reading: I’m 40 pages from the end of The Blood in Winter, which is now what I owe the library until I return it.
Listening: Pink Floyd’s The Wall. It’s a absolute shame Waters has gone completely off the deep end in the last decade or so.
Last Watched: The weather because we’re apparently going to get some actual winter this weekend. Hooray for 4-8 inches of snow and for the frigid temperatures that will keep the possibility of over an inch of ice well to our south.
Caveat that it’s not a real university by accrediting standards and technically can’t call itself a college in Texas. ↩︎
The cat demanded his treats this morning sounding like a beached whale and decided to not stop until he was acknowledged. So no sleeping in on the long weekend.
Today: The annual day off where people pretend to care about MLK Jr. but not actually grapple with or consider what he stood for or did.
Status: Far sleep, minus the wakeup, so not bad overall.
Last Watched: They’re showing the Lord of the Rings trilogy in theaters this weekend and next for the 25th anniversary. I fell asleep when watching Fellowship in the theaters when it first came out and never rewatched it or the other two. Now I’ve seen Fellowship. It was fine.
Status: I’ve started to remember to regularly take Flonase before bed and it really does help reduce the morning crap. The downside is when I forget, like last night, it kind of sucks the next morning.
Reading: I have two books overdue at the library and yet I read Le Carre’s Constant Gardener on the bus. Although in my defense, it was an ebook and didn’t require turning on the overhead light.
Listening: The classic rock from the bus driver this morning. First day back on the shuttle and I left the headphones in the office.
Last Watched: The Naked Gun, Liam Neeson version. It was fine, although putting the best joke about OJ in the trailer was a really terrible idea.
Slow start, largely brought on by the renewed annoyance that there’s simply too much out there to read and process.
Status: Grading syllabus quizzes and trying to clean out reading materials everywhere I look.
Reading: Made no progress on Blood in Winter, sorry people at the library waiting on it, but I did start the history of the Edmund Fitzgerald…that’s due today.
Listening: Have you ever appreciated how weird Sting’s solo catalog is? Because it is.
The lingering cold kicked any ideas of productivity yesterday, but did manage to organize some basic things and read about the worst season in TV history
Today: Lincoln dies and we talk about Oklahoma’s geology in lectures
Status: The Mac Mini decided it didn’t want to log in yesterday and it was looking dicey if it’d survive without a trip into recovery mode and a time machine backup. Unplugging everything made it work so at some point need to diagnosis what exactly the issue was.
Reading: Made no progress on Blood in Winter, sorry people at the library waiting on it.
The town on the other side of the road denied a zoning permit for a new mosque, citing zoning concerns, all the while social media posts and the public comment period were dominated by conspiracies.
Today: Wrangling courses and fully planning as much of the semester as I can and finally taking down the Christmas decorations after being gone last week.
Status: I’ve successfully avoided the flu this season but picked up the lovely cold that always gets me and it’s lingering, flonase, sudafed, and everything else be damned.
Reading: The Blood in Winter: England on the Brink of Civil War, 1642, Jonathan Healey. It’s been an engaging slog, but a slog nonetheless and it’s well overdue to the library.
Vespers are the evening prayers, said at dusk each day as a way of giving thanks for the day left behind. Religion aside, the idea of a meditative pause as darkness settles is lovely. So with the new semester, might as well make it a regular thing. 4 classes, 200ish students, one me and more trying to find a balance of teaching in the era of AI.
After a week away with family with arrived home to find the books we packed in our checked luggage were ruined due to water damage from being left outside during our connection. I shouldn’t be nearly as annoyed as I am given it’s four books but I’m mostly mad at myself for not doing the smart thing and packing them in the carry-ons.
At the same time it’s a depressing reminder that we’ve got basically four carriers and in many places less than that and because of that none of them have much incentive to actually care about customer service. My damage claim ($50 would buy a lot of goodwill) is likely to go unanswered as did my very committed desire to never fly American again. Because they know I’ll either have to come back or they’ll get another passenger in my place.
It doesn’t have the atmosphere of First Cow or Meek’s Cutoff. So much of this film could’ve been transported to any time and it would’ve been the same movie.
Another documentary that wants to remind you the 70s sucked. It’s supposed to be centered around 1975 but a good chunk of the material comes from other years. But regardless it’s fine.
The shooting, the sets, and the vibes are top level. The movie itself is the embodiment of slow cinema and not necessarily in the good way. It’ll get its nominations deservedly but it already feels like a movie that’ll be a watch and forget pretty quickly.
Daniel Craig continued to be the best thing about the film but it drags, especially in the middle. Still a delight, but not as delightful of a doughnut hole within a doughnut hole.
Not the worst of the Conjuring series but that’s not a huge accomplishment given all the movies since the first have been generally terrible. Add in the misguided attempt to redeem the Warrens and it’s a generally miserable movie.
