Shopping -- the non-big-box way

Avoiding the crowds

Yes, we did some shopping today. But we didn't go anywhere near a mall or big-box store. We needed a hall table for the house in Mesa, suitable for putting mail on, so it doesn't get lost. We found the perfect table at the Shabby Shack, our go-to used furniture store for the past year and a half. There's even a drawer, perfect for putting keys and other small items that might otherwise get mistaken for cat toys. The Queen Anne style and mahogany wood match the piano perfectly.

While we were there, we also spotted a replica of a circa-1910 river steamer (I think that's Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn on the seat), and a carpet runner for the foyer.

Meanwhile, yesterday, the cats "helped" to set up the Christmas tree. This is Lucky's first Christmas, and he has discovered how to climb the tree. Oh, goody.

It’s the most wonderful time …

Cat Herders Day is here again!

It is time once again to celebrate Cat Herders Day, the official holiday of Five O’Clock Somewhere, tomorrow, December 15. Those of my followers in Europe are already enjoying the holiday.

The holiday was originally invented by a couple in California who have made up other wacky, offbeat holidays to celebrate. The date for this one, I’m sure, is a reflection on how busy most of us are at this time of year, with shopping, holiday arrangements, parties, entertaining, decorating, cooking, wrapping gifts, shipping gifts, writing and mailing holiday cards, traveling, coping with nasty weather, and sometimes also finishing up an academic semester or term with the accompanying final exams or portfolios and the grading thereof. Even those whose households are devoid of felines may feel like they’re herding cats.

Then there are those who are literally herding cats. Perhaps they have a house full of the critters. Perhaps they’ve taken an interest in a colony of feral cats, possibly even going to the trouble of participating in trap-neuter-release programs to reduce population growth and improve the health of cats in the colony. Perhaps they volunteer for a local animal shelter, fostering cats who need more special care than they can get in a shelter environment or providing kittens with a highly interactive environment to help them learn the socialization skills that will help them to get adopted.

This year, I’ve set up an event on Facebook for Cat Herders Day. You’re invited to come and share the ways you will be celebrating the day. You may post photos of the cats you herd and share your own cat-herding experiences, or if you don’t herd any cats yourself, express your admiration for those who do.

Of course, the Byrnes cat herd is small, consisting of only two cats.

Dulce was adopted in January 1997 from the organization now known as Animal Humane New Mexico. She had been picked up as a starving stray in a blizzard in Edgewood the previous Thanksgiving. She has been living in the lap of luxury ever since, and after all these years, I doubt she has any memory of her deprived early years.

Scratch came last year from the City of Albuquerque Animal Welfare Department, and his beginnings were happier. Although he and his littermates were turned over to the shelter, they were placed in a foster home where they socialized not only with humans but with many other animals, so he was a totally friendly and outgoing young cat. Gerald hadn’t intended to adopt a cat, but Scratch picked him out at an event in the parking lot of a local sporting-goods store.

So my thanks go out to the cat herders whose efforts led to two wonderful cats ending up in our household.

How many cats is a three dog night worth?

Trying to keep warm

It’s a cold night in Albuquerque. It’s also a windy night. The predicted low is 24 degrees (Fahrenheit), and the winds are howling, gusting to 50 mph and sometimes even higher. According to NOAA, the wind chill means it really feels like 12 degrees or colder.

During the day, a wind gust of 78 mph was clocked in the far northeast part of Albuquerque, and the Sunport reported a gust of 53. Our storm door was flung off its hinges, and in the process, the hydraulic closing cylinder punched a hole in the front door. The result is that the door is letting cold air in, so it’s hard to keep the house warm.

I was listening to my favorite radio station on the way home from work, as my little Vibe was getting knocked all over the road by gusts of wind, and the DJ commented that it was going to be a “three dog night,” as a segue into a song by the band named after that concept.

For those who don’t know, the phrase comes from medieval times, when home heating was, to put it mildly, not exactly efficient. On an especially cold night, the humans in a house would derive extra warmth by having their dogs, often large ones, in their beds to help keep them warm. A “three dog night” was an especially cold one, as it required three dogs to keep the bed warm enough.

Unfortunately, all Pat and I have is a cat. And Dulce is not exactly a large cat – she probably weighs in at about six pounds. So she’s about a tenth of a large dog.

Now, we do have friends who could be described as cat herders. These friends have large numbers of cats on hand. And those cats are probably larger than Dulce – I’m guessing the average cat is 10 pounds or more. Also, cats’ normal body temperature is slightly higher than that of dogs, so maybe it doesn’t take as much mass of cat as of dog to produce the same amount of heat.

So I open this question up to the cat herders I know: If it’s a three dog night, how many cats is it?

Back from the dead

Well, I wasn’t REALLY dead, but I don’t blame you if you thought that I was.

How time flies. I’ve been working on all sorts of other things, and now it’s been more than a month since my last post (“Father, I have sinned …”). The truth is that my life has gotten filled up with so much going on (most of it, for a change, of a happy sort) that all I’ve had time for lately is more short-attention-span media. But I hope to get back to the blog on a regular basis now.

I was teaching two classes over the summer term, which is condensed, so more time per week is required for each class, especially with the vast number of papers I have to grade. Yeah, I’ve had students suggest that if I didn’t assign so much work, I wouldn’t have to work so hard either. But then they wouldn’t be getting their money’s worth for their tuition dollars.

We’re also still dealing with Pat’s dad’s estate. The Old Soldier died a year and a half ago, and some things are still up in the air. That’s been a drain, especially on Pat’s time.

Meanwhile, in the happy news department, this spring, we closed on a house in Mesa, Arizona. “Why?” I hear the two or three people who still follow this blog ask. Well, Gerald is attending college at Arizona State in Tempe, plus taking a few classes at Mesa Community College that count for the same credit but cost less than a third as much in tuition (gotta love community colleges!). Instead of sending him rent money every month, we will now be sending him compensation for household maintenance and fixing things up. Also, we will no longer have to pay for a hotel room when we go to Arizona to visit him. In addition, at some point Pat and I will be retiring, and we already know we want to get rid of the house in Albuquerque. If we keep the cabin at Heron, we will be able to migrate seasonally between there and Mesa. Finally, home prices in Arizona are in the basement right now, but they’re bound to rebound, at least some. So we may have an investment that makes money even if we decide not to use the place as a retirement residence.

The upshot of the home purchase in Mesa is that we’ve been directing a lot of time and energy to getting that house up and running, learning the ins and outs of agricultural-style irrigation, and furnishing the place. While I was teaching, we took some long weekends for whirlwind trips out to get things done. Then the break between the summer and fall terms was only two weeks rather than the usual three, so we had to pack a lot of activity into a short time span that included a quickie trip to San Diego for some touristing.

Furnishing the house has been fun. One of our friends commented on the short-attention-span media that it must be like right after we got married. Actually, it’s lots better. When Pat and I first got married, we had no money whatsoever, so we took what we could get, which was mostly castoff furniture that friends and relatives had no use for. For nearly all of our adult lives, we’ve felt like we’ve been living in a junkyard. With this new house, we have a fresh start. We can buy things that we specifically like, and we can make things match. We’ve bought a few new things, but mostly, we’ve been getting great deals on high-quality furnishings at used-furniture stores. Serendipity plays a big part with used furniture – we may not know exactly what we want when we go into the store, but I will find something that just feels right, such as the bedroom set with the magnificent headboard that is now in the master bedroom. We also now have a place worthy of some of the art that we have picked up from family over the years – an elegant ceramic black cat, a bowl of fruit carved out of African wood, a pair pictures of prancing horses, an R.C. Gorman print, and more. It feels good to get those works out of the junkyard.

Of course, the house isn’t perfect. It was originally constructed in 2000 with high-quality materials and workmanship, but one of the previous owners took out the original bedroom flooring and replaced it with the most God-awful, crappy, plastic pseudo-laminate, and didn’t even install it properly. So we’re now replacing it with high-quality engineered wood flooring, natural red oak. Actually, Gerald’s doing most of the work – that’s part of the aforementioned compensation for home improvements instead of rent subsidies. He got most of one room done by the time we had to return to Albuquerque, but since he’s taking a heavy course load this fall, it may take him a while to get all of the bedrooms done. Still, what’s been done so far is beautiful.

Meanwhile, now that we’ve got most of the time-consuming stuff out of the way on the house, I should now have time to return to the blog. Glad to be back.

We have a winner!

or, at least, we have visitor #100K ...

The lucky person who happened to be the 100,000th person to cross the threshold of this blog was a seeker of knowledge. He or she is a Road Runner subscriber from Cincinnati, using Windows NT/Vista and the most recent version of the world's worst browser, late Monday evening, on a search for "find out what part of speech rescue is."

For quite some time, I've wanted to visit Cincinnati. A very good friend of mine from high school now lives there (actually, just across the river in Kentucky), and I've been told that Cincinnati chili (pictured above) is a dish not to be missed.

I even know where I want to go to eat in Cincinnati. The very first year I participated in National Novel Writing Month, my attempt at a novel (it reached more than 50,000 words, but it never reached a conclusion) was not one of the mystery novels I have been successful with since then. It was an ensemble-cast action-adventure thriller, and the adventure began in Cincinnati. Since I've never been there, I researched the place and found out a lot of wonderful things about it. The railroad station is an Art Deco masterpiece that has been preserved as a science and technology museum, while still serving as an active passenger depot. The downtown area has been revitalized and is a hopping place day or night. And there are places to eat.

I looked at restaurant reviews. I had two scenes involving my narrator eating out. In one scene, he had a casual lunch downtown, and I found just the right place for him to chow down on the most authentic Cincy chili available (served over noodles, with cheese and onions on top). It was a bonus that John Madden endorsed the place on Monday Night Football the following night. For the other scene, my character needed a really classy place to eat, and I found an Italian place with great atmosphere and, according to the reviews I read, a chef who believes, as I do, that there is no such thing as too much garlic.

So, while I did have a couple of good suggestions from readers for what the prize should be, I have decided that Pat and I will travel to the winner's location and treat him or her to his or her favorite meal. Cincinnati was already tentatively on the itinerary for next summer anyway, since I want to visit my old friend. Assuming the winner comes back to claim the prize, I hope he or she likes either Cincinnati chili or Italian food -- although I wouldn't mind trying anything else the winner likes.

To be fair to both of the entrants in the contest, I will extend the same prize: Pat and I, when next in your neighborhood (or neighbourhood), will treat you to a dinner of your favorite local food.

Oh, and as for the answer to the question for which the winner came seeking an answer: rescue can be a noun, a verb, or an adjective.

Noun: The firefighters attempted a daring rescue.

Verb: They had only a few minutes to rescue the cat from the tree.

Adjective: The cat's owners thanked the rescue personnel warmly afterward.

Long and winding road update

One detour I wish did not have to be ...

A major section of the last route shown in the previous post is currently off-limits, and once it is no longer off limits, it may no longer be as scenic as it used to be.

The Las Conchas Fire in northern New Mexico began early Sunday afternoon, and within hours, it had consumed several thousand acres. This section of the road is now closed:

View Larger Map

The fire started at one of my favorite picnic spots in the mountains, the Las Conchas recreation area just past where Highway 4 (westbound) leaves the vast grassy area called the Valle Grande, a crater caused by the collapse, about a million years ago, of a huge volcano.

The fire has spread mostly eastward but also outward in other directions. The thumbnail photo above was shot by Lupita L. Tom-yepa at Cochiti Pueblo, about 20 miles southeast of the blaze, Sunday night. Pat and I were on the way south from Heron Lake to Albuquerque, and we went through thick smoke from Española through Pojoaque and on to Santa Fe. From Pojoaque on, we could see the flames erupting from the ridgelines. We were getting gas at Santo Domingo, near Cochiti, about the same time Lupita took her photo -- alas, that tiny picture does little justice to how scary it is to see such a huge portion of the mountains on fire.

As we were driving, we tried to get news on the radio about the fire. We tuned in to KRSN, Los Alamos' local radio station. The signal was poor; the smoke plume from the fire caused a lot of interference. But there was a live interview with one of the people in charge of fighting the fire, and he was reassuring -- while there were mandatory evacuations in parts of the mountains, people in Los Alamos and White Rock with respiratory problems should evacuate, but everybody else could stay put but be prepared in case of mandatory evacuations. I had a mental flashback, to the La Mesa fire in the late 1970s, with the late, legendary Bob Burns, patriarch and owner of KRSN, reassuring everybody with his gravelly but comforting voice. The station normally signed off at 11 p.m., but during that crisis, it was on the air all night. Bob is long gone, but he is fondly remembered.

We got fed up with the poor signal and decided to change from KRSN to Albuqueruque's all-news station, KKOB. We were just in time to hear an official Emergency Broadcast System alert that there was a fire emergency in Sandoval County. Well, duh.

Just over 11 years ago, I was cleaning out the guest room in case my folks had to evacuate because of the Cerro Grande Fire. They did have to evacuate a couple of days later. Now, we're cleaning out the guest room in case they have to evacuate again. This time around, there shouldn't be as much danger, since the Cerro Grande removed much of the fuel that would take the Las Conchas into the town. But still, the flashbacks happen.

More long and winding roads

Exercises in getting from here to there, or there to here

In planning for this weekend, we had a bit of a problem. I had to return to Albuquerque to teach my classes Tuesday, but Pat has to stay at the lake until his dockmaster duties end Wednesday. So we had to drive up Friday in separate vehicles; Pat took Enterprise with the fifth-wheel, while Dulce and I had Galileo.

Being in a larger, clumsier rig, Pat took a route that emphasized big roads and faster travel. According to Google Maps, this route is 166 miles and takes 3 hours, 11 minutes. That seems about right.

View Larger Map

Meanwhile, Dulce and I took a more scenic route. It's shorter in miles, but it's decidedly not suitable for bigger, clumsier rigs. Google Maps says it's 153 miles and takes 3 hours, 55 minutes. The time estimate is WAY off. This trip, Pat and I left at the same time, and while he had to stop for fuel and spent 15 minutes getting lunch, I arrived ahead of him by about the time he spent on fuel and lunch. On other trips, Gerald and I have arrived sooner via the scenic route than Pat on the big roads. My guess is that Google Maps underestimates the travel speed on New Mexico's state highways, some of which are unpaved but still can be traveled at a fairly high speed. Sure, I had to stop a couple of times to wait for some cattle to mosey out of the way, but, hey, that's part of the appeal of the back roads.

View Larger Map

Then for the trip home, I chose a route that I already knew was going to be more time-consuming, but that would also be fantastically scenic. If Google Maps had an option to select the most scenic route, this is how it would tell people to go. It's 193 miles and 4 hours, 8 minutes -- an accurate assessment, probably because none of the roads are unpaved. For out-of-state visitors, the reverse of this route is what I would recommend to get from the airport to Five O'Clock Somewhere; it provides the best of the best of scenery, plus a nifty bonus: the chance to stop at Viola's Restaurant in Los Alamos for lunch. On this route, it wasn't cattle but deer that I had to stop for until they decided they wanted to wander over to the side of the road.

View Larger Map

In case you're wondering, I hate freeways. I also dislike road construction. When a route involves both, I'd rather find some other way to go.

The Long and Winding Road

Not all who are lost wander …

The few people who frequent this blog might have noticed a lack of activity lately. That’s primarily because Pat and I have been on the road for most of the past three weeks. For a detailed travelogue, including pictures, you can look at Pat’s blog, Desert Sea, where he’s gradually putting up posts about the journey. I’ll just touch on highlights here.

The trip seemed to have two major themes: barbeque and detours. Just about every day, we had at least one great barbeque experience – when I travel, I want to sample the best of the local food, and we kept stumbling on great barbeque places. And just about every day, sometimes multiple times in a day, we ended up someplace we didn’t intend to be, sometimes because of road construction, sometimes because of our unfamiliarity with the territory, and sometimes because of a little of both.

Barbeque, May 2: OK, this doesn’t officially count as part of the journey, but we had lunch at JR’s Bar-B-Que in Albuquerque with the guy who was helping his buddy sell the fifth-wheel trailer we just bought, and exchanged a check for the title to the trailer.

Detour, May 2: Not a really big deal, but our favorite motel in Gallup had no non-smoking rooms available, so we had to spring for a suite.

Barbeque, May 3: Big Belly’s BBQ in Tempe, run by former ASU and KC Chiefs defensive tackle Bryan Proby, serves up massive portions of KC style barbeque. I didn’t have enough appetite for it this trip, but I’ve been told the giant potato is an experience I should have at least once in my lifetime.

Detour, May 6: This one was on purpose. On our way to the cruise on Saguaro Lake, we went to Arizona Cactus Sales to see what we might want to put into the landscaping if we buy a house in the Phoenix area – many of the properties we’ve been looking at have been bank-owned or otherwise neglected, and so the landscape is pretty much dead. We’d want to put in water-conserving landscaping, rather than recreating Scottish golf courses in the desert. We learned a lot about cacti and how to take care of them – which mostly means leaving them alone and absolutely not watering them or planting them anywhere water is likely to drain.

Barbeque, May 7: Right near our motel in Bakersfield was The Grill Hut. The menu is extremely limited (beef tri-tip or chicken breast, plus sauces and sides), but what they do, they do very well.

Detour, May 8: Trying to get from the Nimitz Freeway to Alameda Island is insane. The bridges that go to the island are not lined up with the roads the freeway exits lead to, and there’s road construction that makes things really “interesting” – such as semi-trucks turning left from an extremely narrow roadway bounded by Jersey bouncewall into another extremely narrow roadway bounded by Jersey bouncewall, during the extremely brief green-light interval of the temporary traffic light suspended from flimsy cables above the intersection, such that one truck takes three cycles of the light to complete its turn because of all of the other drivers who try to get around the behemoth and end up getting in its way, so it has to halt until they figure out that they have to back up to get out of its way. Apparently, “reverse” is not a setting that exists on the shift levers of most Californians’ cars.

Detour, May 10: Visited a friend on his boat in Marina Bay in Richmond, and then sort of got lost on the way out. Found the cheapest gas in the East Bay area, and also the mini-mart that was featured in the movie “True Crime.” Didn’t go in to see whether the potato-chip display had been moved.

Detour, May 11: Needed to do some financial transactions involving our credit union, so we used the credit-union branch-sharing network to find a participating CU in Berkeley. Google Maps got us there, but not back. We ended up taking a scenic tour of Berkeley and Oakland, including Chinatown, that we hadn’t intended.

Barbeque, May 11: We had already looked at our schedule for our time in the Bay Area and saw that the best time for us to hook up with family was Wednesday evening. My brother had the suggestion that maybe we could meet at Sam’s Bar-B-Que in San Jose, where our cousin often plays with a bluegrass band, Dark Hollow. As it turns out, the band was playing there that night, so my cousin saved us a table and we had a great time. The band played “Detour,” written by Paul Westmoreland and played by Spade Cooley, then subsequently by Patti Page and Willie Nelson, among others.

Detour, May 12: We had a coupon. We were hungry. We wanted seafood. Gerald’s Droid told us that Panama Joe’s atmosphere was “boisterous” but the noise level was “moderate.” I guess it depends what you mean by “moderate”; it was college night.

Barbeque, May 13: OK, we didn’t get to eat this, but our motel room was suffused with the aroma. We were right around the corner from the laundry room, which was also the housekeeping staff’s lunch room. Beneath the open window, they had set up a little electric grill, and the bulgogi smelled heavenly.

Barbeque, May 14: Free hot dogs and beer at the Alamitos Bay Yacht Club open house. Those folks are really proud of their new elevator, which is done up inside like a fine yacht, with wood paneling and cabin sole. We’ve been told that Black Magic used to be part of the Etchells fleet there.

Detour, May 14: Met Silver Girl and visited the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, then took an extended side trip to the Coyote Grill in Laguna Beach.

Detour, May 15: Sunday Brunch on the Queen Mary, followed by wandering all over the ship for several hours. We only got lost a couple of times …

Detour, May 16: Dropped Gerald off with the ASU sailing team for several days’ training at the US Sailing Center in Long Beach and made it out of the LA area with only one or two wrong turns along the way. Made it to Tempe, dropped off a couple of things and picked up a couple of things at Gerald’s apartment.

Detour, May 17: Less than an hour from home, we saw smoke rising and lots of red flashing lights up ahead. We got off the freeway onto Old Route 66 and meandered through the village of Paraje before getting back onto the freeway, which we then had all to ourselves until we got to the outskirts of Albuquerque.

Detour, May 18-20: You thought we were done traveling? Nope. First, Pat went to Los Alamos to pick up Dulce, who had been getting royal spa treatment at my folks’ house (dinner whenever she wanted it, an electric blanket to sleep on at night, and other general spoiling). Then we took the big truck (Enterprise) south to pick up the fifth-wheel trailer and learn how it works.

Detour, May 21: I had been scheduled to teach only one class during the summer term, but I was given the opportunity Friday to add another – this one on the West Side campus, where I haven’t taught before. Pat and I took a scenic drive to assess the layout of the place, and man, is it far away!

Today: No detours, but maybe some barbeque – chicken “wings” from JJ’s (they’re actually thighs, and therefore really meaty) should go well with the hockey game. Now I’m getting hungry!

Saturday sailing at the Butte

It's been a long time ...

At long last, I got in my first sail of the year. Pat had managed to sneak off to the lake a couple of times to go sailing with Zorro, but often it was mid-week, which meant I had to work. The one previous time I had gotten to the lake, the wind was just too fierce -- if the temperature had been warmer, it might have been good exciting sailing, but that day was just too cold.

Saturday, however, was much less windy. In fact, when we got to the lake, there was barely any wind at all. We joined Zorro and set sail on Constellation, hoping that perhaps some wind would fill in.

We had been drifting for about an hour when the wind did, finally, show up. It wasn't much, maxing out at probably 7 or 8 knots, but that's enough to make an Etchells go. Zorro had his handheld GPS, and we got up to 6.2 knots upwind and even faster downwind with the spinnaker up.

Pat was in charge of the spinnaker. He kept the trim up, and he's getting good at gybing the pole smoothly; that's something he and Zorro apparently practiced a lot the last time they were out.

Overall, it was a good couple of hours on the water.

We sailed until near sunset.

There weren't many other boats out. One friend had gone out earlier but gave up on waiting for wind and came in (his wife had chores for him to do anyway). Another came out late in the day. You can tell he's from Michigan; he was sailing in shirt sleeves!

Maybe, in between things like taking care of Pat's dad's estate and working on repairs (both boat and house) and various other tasks, we will have more time to sail this year.

New in the sidebar

Another family connection ...

Over in the sidebar on the left, you may notice a new link, Gab and Glass. This is the blog of my cousin Lanza Teague, who manages the Kerr Arts and Cultural Center in Kerrville, Texas. On her time off, she delves into family history and genealogy and creates works of glass art.

Her current (and second ever) blog post recounts the story of her quest for, and eventual finding of, a very special artifact related both to her grandfather and to the history of Kerrville.

The story left me wondering, how many other treasures are hidden away, under a tarp in a dark corner of a warehouse?

Happy Valentine's Day?

A gift that goes vroom ...

Five years ago, Pat got me a sailboat for Valentine's Day. This year, it's something a bit different.
And it's RED!
And this, too, is better than flowers or chocolates.

The good, the bad, and the ugly

Some thoughts about Home Owners Associations

Pat and I have been toying with the idea of buying a house of some sort in Arizona. Real estate prices in that state have plummeted, so there are a lot of good deals out there. The idea is that we would get a place close to ASU that Gerald could live in and that we could stay in when we go to visit him. By the time he graduates, property values will probably not have risen to the extreme levels they were at before the real-estate crash, but the house would likely have gained some value. At that point, we might sell at a profit, keep the place as a rental, or move into it ourselves – at least during the colder parts of the year. For summer, we’d retreat to Five O’Clock Somewhere up in the mountains.

Some of the properties we have looked at have been in neighborhoods where there is a Home Owners Association, or HOA. That can be a good thing, or it can be a bad thing, depending on the nature of the HOA in question. A good HOA will preserve or even enhance the value of the properties in the neighborhood, and it will provide a good return on residents’ dues in terms of services provided. A bad HOA can be a nightmare to deal with.

Among the HOAs associated with homes in Arizona, $100 a month seems to be about typical for dues. For that money, the HOA provides facilities and services, such as community swimming pools, tennis courts, open space, golf courses, clubhouses, and/or security. Some HOAs have lower dues, about $40 a month, and presumably the amenities provided are fewer as well.

And then there are the really bare-bones HOAs. We haven’t seen any of those in Arizona, but I was once on the board of an HOA that had one, and only one, function: to maintain and improve 7½ miles of private road leading into the neighborhood. No, I’m not on the board anymore, so I didn’t have anything to do with the current board’s disastrous decision to cut corners on costs by using cheaper gravel that turned out to be contaminated by millions of small nails, screws, and bits of wire. But back then, we were justifiably proud of our road. We heard many people call it “the best private road in Rio Arriba County,” and members of other HOA boards came to observe how we operated and how we managed to maintain the road with “only” $150 a year dues. (Dues have since been raised to $200 a year, but the board still manages to do a lot with very little – which lately has included paying for a lot of members’ tire repairs.)

Of course, services are only one side of the HOA issue. Many HOAs do more than provide services; they also have a say in what residents can or can’t do with their homes. This is seen primarily as a way to preserve property values; a neighbor’s activity will not negatively impact a place and reduce its desirability. These rules may be fairly loose, or they may be strict, and they typically apply to what can be stored in a house or yard, what activities can or can’t be done, what sort of landscaping is permitted, and changes to the house or other structures. The idea is that a person can buy a house in the neighborhood and not have to worry that the neighbors will disassemble junk cars in the front yard or paint their house vomit-green.

On the other hand, some HOAs rule with an iron fist. My brother Jer, of Muddled Ramblings, once lived in a neighborhood with a very strict and unreasonable HOA. He and his wife wanted to remodel the kitchen, but even though that remodeling wouldn’t impact the exterior of the house, it required approval of the HOA board. Another time, they wanted to replace a balky sliding glass door with an attractive French door at the back of the house. The board refused.

Jer’s neighbor had an even crazier run-in with the HOA. The neighborhood is on the edge of a canyon that is kept as a wilderness preserve in Southern California, where wildfires frequently sweep through in vast waves of destruction. The fire marshal had made an inspection of all local neighborhoods as part of an emergency-preparedness “triage” plan, and had declared that, in the event of a wildfire, this neighborhood was not savable, and that firefighting resources would be better focused elsewhere.

So the neighbor bought and installed a fire hose in front of his house. The HOA board went ballistic, ordering him to remove the eyesore immediately. He begged and pleaded and groveled, and eventually the board allowed him to keep the fire hose, under two conditions: that he keep it locked up at all times and that he not train anybody in how to use it.

The next fire season in Southern California was one of the worst on record. At one point, it seemed like all of San Diego County was on fire. Jer’s neighborhood was surrounded on three sides by wildfires. The neighbor broke out the fire hose and spent the next two days spraying water on all of the houses within reach. When the flames subsided, smoldering wreckage was all around, but Jer’s neighborhood survived. I never heard, though, whether the HOA board ate crow.

Meanwhile, back in Arizona, some HOAs seem to have more reasonable rules than others. It’s very typical to see rules on what color residents can paint their houses, restricting or forbidding parking of boats or RVs, or regulating landscaping.

There is one neighborhood in particular, where I would not want to live. The HOA has completely unreasonable restrictions, for example, on what colors house trim may be painted. If I want to paint my front door blue (a tradition in Northern New Mexico for good luck), I fail to see how that negatively impacts my neighbor’s property value, but blue is not on the list of permitted colors. That rule, however, is the least of the beefs with this particular HOA. The landscaping rules require that residents pretend they are not living in a desert. At least a certain percentage of the lot must be landscaped with water-hogging green grass (artificial turf is not allowed), and desert vegetation is forbidden, especially cacti. Saguaros are expressly prohibited.

That’s right, no saguaros allowed. In a neighborhood in Arizona. The saguaro blossom is the state flower. The majestic cactus itself is such an iconic symbol of the state that the very thought of Arizona brings to mind images of it, and it’s featured on state license plate. It amounts to heresy to prohibit an Arizona resident from having one as part of the landscape. If people don’t want to live where there are saguaros, they darn well shouldn’t live in Arizona, except perhaps in the northern part of the state that doesn’t have them.

On the other hand, there’s another neighborhood whose HOA’s rules are much more to my liking. Very few things are totally forbidden, although many do have to get approval of a special Architectural Compliance Committee appointed by the HOA board. This committee is very busy; it meets for two hours every other week. Depending on how reasonable members of the committee are, I might be able to live with it. For example, the HOA does have a list of approved colors that one can paint one’s house trim, but if a homeowner wishes to use another color, he or she can get permission from the committee. If I want to paint my front door blue, I can bring in a paint chip of the shade I want to use and explain how it will not detract from the appearance of the neighborhood, as well as the cultural background behind the color – this HOA seems to be very big on cultural heritage.

Other things that are forbidden outright by some HOAs are allowed in this neighborhood, again, with the approval of the Architectural Compliance Committee. Boats and RVs, clotheslines, auto maintenance, and more, are generally acceptable if they are not within view of adjacent properties or public areas, and if the means of shielding said view (shed, fence, or whatever) is approved by the committee. If the committee is reasonable about sheds, fences, and the like, I can live with that.

But the big thing that I really like about this HOA is its landscaping rules. This HOA understands the desert and respects it. Residents are encouraged to landscape with desert vegetation, especially species native to the Sonoran Desert, although other water-thrifty plants are allowed. The HOA has an extensive, detailed list, broken down by categories, of approved plants that a homeowner can plant. And yes, the saguaro tops the list in the “cactus” category. The HOA also has an extremely short list of forbidden plants that guzzle water, crank out vast quantities of pollen, or otherwise create a nuisance (palm trees over a certain height, pines, oleanders, junipers, and Bermuda grass). Any plant that is not on the approved list but not on that short list can be planted if – you guessed it – the Architectural Compliance Committee approves.

There is, however, one restriction on landscaping that I can’t quite figure out. Residents are not to have “unnecessarily unattractive shrubbery.” What the heck is that? I guess I can define “necessarily unattractive” shrubbery as, say, scrawny new plants that need time to fill out, or “unnecessarily attractive” plants as those that don’t have to be pretty but happen to be, while “necessarily attractive” shrubbery would be plants that can’t help being beautiful. But “unnecessarily unattractive”? My best guess would be something like obscene topiaries, but I’m not so sure. I guess I would have to ask the Architectural Compliance Committee.

Spam tombstones

When headlines collide, 21^st century style …

Way back, eons ago, when I was taking journalism classes in college, one of the courses I took was in page design. In that class, I learned about the dread “tombstone,” when two adjacent headlines on the page seem to merge into each other, conveying an unintended, often humorous and/or macabre meaning. With modern page-layout software, tombstones seldom happen anymore, since page designers have considerable flexibility and can make sure that two headlines are offset enough not to appear connected. But in the old days, that was not always the case. The headlines were written by copy-editors, who often knew only what typeface and size the page designer had specified, not where on the page the particular headline would appear. And if the newspaper was large enough to have more than one copy-editor, two adjacent stories could easily have headlines written by two different people.

Nowadays, tombstones don’t happen so often in a newspaper. Most often, it’s not two adjacent news stories, but the juxtaposition of a news story with an advertisement, since the news and advertising are produced in two different departments with little, if any, coordination between them. The most memorable such tombstone that I can recall came in late 2008. On the day following the election of Barack Obama, the Albuquerque Journal had published a front page making note of the historical nature of the event. A few days later, the Journal ran a reproduction of that front page, on page A4, in full, glorious color. On that same day, Macy’s ran a full-page, full-color ad launching its Christmas sales. Because of the way newspaper printing presses are set up, only some pages in a section can have full color, and the result was that the Macy’s ad was on page A5, directly facing the front page reproduction. Thus, page A4 had the headline “Obama Wins!” while page A5 had the headline “Yes, Virginia, there Is a Santa Claus!”

All of this is a roundabout way of announcing the newest addition to the links over in the sidebar on the left, naked in public and other things I didn’t know I’d be when I grew up. This is a blog by Harlean Carpenter, the Poetic Pinup, who is a fiction, but who is still somewhat associated with my brother Jer, of Muddled Ramblings and Half-Baked Ideas.

Harlean often comments about the vagaries of the English language, as well as about how people misuse it. I am afraid I will have to agree to disagree with her on punctuation associated with closing quote marks (she insists on being logical, while I must stick with the rules of American Standard Written English, even if said rules are illogical, if for no other reason than that I have to make sure my students produce writing that conforms with the standard). But most of what she says, I do agree with, and her observations go beyond mere grammar. I found myself especially amused (translated into tweetspeak, that means ROTFL) with her recent post on Why I Love Spam. No, she doesn’t enjoy junk emails any more than anybody else does. But she does look in her spambox on a regular basis. Maybe she originally did it to make sure that her email filter hadn’t accidentally sent some non-spam there, but now, she likes to look for the juxtapositions in which the subject lines of two adjacent spams accidentally make a humorous phrase. She calls these juxtapositions “chunks,” but really, they’re the same thing as the old tombstones. Here are some examples that she cites:

“Want those stretch marks to vanish?
Conquer the language barrier”

“Improve Your Sex Life!
Nursing Assistant Courses Online”

“Your kidney failure may
Earn generous revenue online”

“men have experienced bigger
Sprouts in as little as 5 days”

“Begin a rewarding career with
Secrets of scoring with women”

“When Wall Street crashes
We can keep your male instrument”

“Asbestos exposure is shown to
Enlarge your penis in a safe way”

“Express your feelings in an elegant way
Quit talking and start shagging”

So what’s in your spambox?

Parent or short order cook?

Which do you find more boring … this …

Or this?

Time and time again, I have heard parents complaining about how their kids are so picky about food – that they WILL NOT eat this or that or the other, or that they will only eat a select few foods that they trust and are not willing to experiment with anything beyond their range of familiarity. So, the parents moan, when the family goes out to eat, they have to go only to places that will serve what their kids like, and when the family is eating at home, the mom becomes a short-order cook, preparing one thing for one kid, another thing for another kid, separate from what the family as a whole is eating.

Pat and I never allowed Gerald to get picky – if he didn’t want to eat what we were eating, he didn’t eat. Funny thing is, he never really went through a picky stage, ever, and he has since taken not only to eating but also to cooking all sorts of intriguing foods. The gifted program at his elementary school ran a mini-restaurant that prepared a gourmet lunch every Wednesday as an alternative to the school cafeteria. He has also always enjoyed the cooking shows on television and been excited about the cooking techniques he has observed on them – at one point, he even considered being a chef as a career choice. Recently, he has become an expert on Vietnamese cuisine; one of his close friends is Vietnamese, and he’s now dating that friend’s kid sister.

Some years ago, my cousin, his wife and their two boys (then ages 9 and 5) came to visit us at Five O’Clock Somewhere. I tried to get the boys interested in helping in the kitchen – I was preparing chicken Kiev, (baked, not fried) so there were a lot of fun things to do such as pounding the chicken breasts with a mallet and using a rolling pin to smash crackers into crumbs. But they thought that whole idea was boring, especially the older one, opting instead to go to the living room and switch the television from the news that I was listening to, to an episode of Spongebob Squarepants that they had seen so often that they could recite all of the dialog in unison with the characters on the screen. Gerald and I ended up doing most of the work.

Then when we sat down to eat, the boys didn’t want to eat what was served, so their mother went into the kitchen to fix what they wanted – grilled cheese for one, a hot dog for the other. I was astonished that she caved in to their demands and that she would allow them to be so blatantly impolite to their hosts – as well as being somewhat impolite herself by presuming to go to the kitchen without checking in with me first (although that’s a gray area since I welcome people coming into my kitchen to help, and I enjoy what goes on when people who love each other are all cooking together. I have fond memories of Thanksgivings and Christmases when my mom, my aunt, Gerald, and I have all been cooking in harmony.)

Now, maybe my cousin’s wife decided that because we were family, she could go to the kitchen to do the short-order cook thing, and maybe in a more formal situation she would not allow her kids to snub the food that was served or presume to take over the kitchen herself. But I’m not so sure.

But then, I can’t really make my cousin and his wife (now ex, but still close to the family) out to be ultra-lenient, at least in today’s world. It seems that the vast majority of parents cater to their kids’ whims. At least daily, I encounter a parent who expresses frustration about her (or his) kid’s pickiness and laments all the time and trouble she has to go through to keep the kid satisfied. Usually it’s in an impersonal situation, such as a supermarket check-out line, where I can’t reasonably berate the parent for being so much of a wimp that she lets her kids walk all over her.

There was a television commercial that used to run often, featuring a mother and super-cute preschool-age daughter in a supermarket. The girl objected to everything the mother put into the shopping cart: “I don’t like chicken,” “I don’t like broccoli,” and so forth. In the end, the girl’s mother buys a sweet, vitamin-enriched milkshake-type product to make up for the nutrition the girl would miss by refusing to eat broccoli or chicken or anything else she doesn’t like. To me, that’s the ultimate cop-out. It provides a way for parents to say that they are making sure their kids’ nutritional needs are being met without having to make their kids angry with them, and it puts the kids in control of the family’s food-buying decisions.

Bullshit. Study after study has proved that the best way for the human body to absorb nutrients is to eat foods containing those nutrients, not to take a supplement that contains extracts of those nutrients or synthetic versions of them. Essentially, the nutritional milkshakes are simply a vitamin pill in liquid form. Kids may love them because of the flavor, and parents may love them because it keeps them from having to be the bad guy enforcing consumption of broccoli. Sorry, bad idea. Kids need to eat healthful food. It’s not just about the vitamins and minerals – which seems to be where parental concerns seem to reside. It’s about the overall healthfulness of the diet. A really caring parent will make sure his kid consumes healthful foods, no matter how much she protests.

Really, it’s simple. So long as the kid doesn’t have some underlying medical issue, it’s fine to let him refuse to eat what’s served. Eventually, he’s going to get hungry enough that he WILL eat it. Yeah, some highly principled individuals (such as Mahatma Ghandi) will go on hunger strike and risk death to make their point. But that sort of idealism is not what drives the average 9-year-old, so the kid’s determination will fade as the hunger increases. Refusing any food whatsoever may be child abuse, but offering only food that the child finds unpalatable is not.

Judi Dench - "Send In the Clowns" from Hey, Mr. Producer!

Used-book bookmark serendipity

Strange artifacts from other people’s lives

Pat and I seldom buy new books anymore. Partly it’s because we’re in a state of financial austerity, but even if we had plenty of money, we have found that used-book stores and thrift shops offer far better deals on reading material.

One side effect of buying used books is that sometimes there’s something extra in the book. Someone will read a book, or part of a book, and will use something as a bookmark that is subsequently forgotten, and so when the book goes to the charity donation bin or used-book store, the bookmark is left buried among the pages.

Sometimes the bookmark isn’t all that exciting. I will often find airline boarding passes as bookmarks in mass-market paperbacks, for example. The scenario behind that sort of bookmark is fairly obvious – so-and-so bought a copy of The Da Vinci Code to read on her flight from Albuquerque to Newark, she used the boarding pass as a bookmark, she read the book, and then when she was done (or gave up on it partway through), she decided she didn’t need to keep it.

Other bookmarks can be more interesting. A couple of years ago, one of my fellow participants in National Novel Writing Month was the proprietor of a used-book store. She had all sorts of tales to tell of what she had found within the pages of books that have come into her establishment. Her NaNo novel that year was based on one such intriguing item.

One interesting bookmark that I found was in a softcover copy of Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, which I picked up at the Pagosa Springs Humane Society thrift shop. This was a newspaper clipping from a newspaper in the South Pacific island of Vanuatu, giving details about the death of a young man on one of the lesser islands in the island group. The headline was “Erromango Boy’s, a Mystery.” The article – actually more of a news brief – detailed how the body of an island native (who was called a “boy” even though he was 27 years old) had been found alongside a road, a victim of a hit-and-run car crash. The brief quoted the island constable as saying the victim was “more than dead.” In the margin of the clipping, someone had written “I thought dead was all you could be.”

Now, there are many questions that could arise about this, such as, how does a newspaper clipping from a Vanuatu newspaper end up in a book for sale in the Pagosa Springs Humane Society Thrift Shop? Who clipped the article? How did she come to be in Vanuatu? How can I meet this person, who is obviously interested in language and usage, and who also seems to have the ability to travel to obscure places around the globe?

My most recent intriguing bookmark also came in a book from the Pagosa Springs Humane Society. A very long time ago, I bought an omnibus edition of three of Cleveland Amory’s books: The Cat Who Came for Christmas, The Cat and the Curmudgeon, and The Best Cat Ever. For several years, that book has sat on my shelf, waiting for me to have time to read it. A week ago, finally, I did.

Tucked into the book, marking T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Naming of Cats,” was a bookmark consisting of a strip of postage stamps, laminated together. Ordinarily, that wouldn’t be all that big of a deal. But these stamps were from the old Soviet Union, commemorating the 1980 Olympics, which the United States had boycotted, and which many other nations either boycotted or allowed athletes to decide whether to boycott, to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

The images on the stamps are classic Soviet art – chiseled, idealized athletes, two female, two male, participating in track-and-field events: sprint, pole vault, high jump, hurdles. Even if these stamps were created in the 1980s, there is a serious 1930s feel to the images.

Since these stamps were about an event that Americans were supposed to pretend didn’t even exist, it’s a mystery how they ended up in a book of cat tales in a thrift shop in southwestern Colorado.

The best of 2010

Highlights from a year that didn’t have many

Once again, Captain JP has issued a request for his fellow bloggers to submit their top 10 blog posts for the year. As my previous post indicated, this has been, yet again, annus horribilis, with too many disasters to count.

But I did find 10 posts that were, at least in some way memorable. Here they are:

I started the year with observations about astronomy, tides, and how Pat and I got into sailing, with A tale from the past.

Those of you who have known me for some time know about my love-hate relationship with photocopiers, including how a copier figured strongly in my novel Murder at the Community College. In February, I had an ironic experience, recounted in The copier temptation.

Also in February, Tillerman issued a challenge: Write about the worst sailing innovation ever. My contribution: Work.

In March, a fellow instructor at the community college, whom I also knew through the sailing club, died suddenly and unexpectedly. Then a week later, Pat’s dad passed away. The Old Soldier had lived a long life, and he didn’t want a fancy funeral – no fancy church service or procession or anything like that. What he got was a very simple graveside service, with his fellow veterans from the American Legion providing an honor guard to shoot a 21-gun salute and blow “Taps” on a bugle. He would not have wanted anything fancier. I reflected on his life in Sending the Old Man Home.

As it turned out, the Old Soldier had chosen a beautiful time of the year in Texas to die, and according to the people who follow such things, this past spring was one of the best ever for Texas wildflowers. Planting wildflowers along highways was a passion of former First Lady Lady Bird Johnson. We took many great pictures on the way home from the funeral, and I put some photos online in Thank you, Lady Bird.

May 1 was the most devastating day of the year. Our extremely dear sailing friend Marty Stevenson went overboard from the boat he was on as we were preparing to hold a regatta. I wrote about how much he meant to us in A few words about Marty. I had been planning to deliver those words at his memorial service. Unfortunately, his widow would not let me or anyone else from the sailing club speak. So nobody heard those words. Only those who read them in the blog or the sailing club newsletter ever received them.

On a lighter note, I did get into one of the more specialized cooking techniques that I know. I have known all of my life about Beer can chicken, a tradition I probably learned from relatives in Arkansas, but for many others, it was a novel method.

July was funeral time again. Another sailing fried passed away. This time, it was not so shocking; he had been in declining health for some time. And his widow and family welcomed me to speak at his funeral, In Memory of Richard Dittmar. It is good to laugh at a funeral, when it’s remembering what made us all so joyful about the person who is now no longer among us.

There was another memorial in July. My colleague had died in a car accident in June; his family and very close friends had had a small, private funeral. But long before his death, he had made his wishes clear to his family and partner: He didn’t want mourning; he wanted a party. So that was what he got. I summed up that party in Remembering Herman.

In September, we had car troubles. Babe, the Ford Expedition, has been increasingly having problems with electronics. As it turns out, the troubles that led to When machines rebel were not electronic but physical – the rear differential and axle essentially disintegrated – but at the time, it was easy to blame the computers.

Then I had another trip down memory lane, thinking about classic cars and beautiful times on a European road trip nearly 30 years ago. I don’t like big roads; I like little ones. I don’t like big places; I like little ones.

So 2010 on the blog was often melancholy or wistful. It’s been a rough year. I will very much miss the people who are no longer with us. But I know I will go on.

What my Christmas letter would say if I wrote one

I don’t dare actually mail this …

Those of you who know me well know that the past few years have been disastrous. 2007 was calamitous; at the end of that year, I hoped that 2008 would be better. It wasn’t. At the end of 2008, I desperately hoped that 2009 would be better – I even said that things were so bad that they couldn’t possibly get worse. Unh-unh. 2009 was so bad that, by the end if it, I was calling it annus horribilis, because of all of the disasters that had occurred.

And then 2010 was even worse. There were times I wondered why the hell I even bothered trying to survive. What was the use?

Pat and I used to send out Christmas cards, which I always chose carefully to express exactly what we wished for our friends and family, along with a letter telling of our adventures and accomplishments over the previous year. I worked hard to keep it honest – no “little Susie is the most accomplished violinist in the state for the third year straight” or “Butch became the first high-school player ever to be nominated for the Heisman Trophy.”

Unfortunately, the need to be honest clashed with the expectation that holiday letters also be cheerful and upbeat. For that reason, Pat and I haven’t sent out a Christmas letter for the past three years.

So … if we were to send out a holiday letter this season, what would it say? Let’s see …

Holiday greetings to all of our friends and family for 2010 and the 2011 New Year!

We’re sorry that we haven’t been in touch lately as much as we should. Life has been busy. If you wish to contact us, you can find our email addresses and cell-phone numbers at the bottom of this letter.

It has been an eventful year, although not always in a good way. Pat continues in his fourth year “between jobs,” so we’re not exactly financially comfortable. We’ve had to cash in retirement funds to pay off bills and fend off foreclosure, leaving us with nothing but Social (in)Security and the New Mexico Educational Retirement Board to fund our “golden” years. And the one-eighth of my paycheck that has gone, without any choice on my part, to the ERB, has been invested 20% with Bernard Madoff and 70% with companies represented by buddies of the governor based not on which was a wise investment but on who got the biggest kickback. Not exactly reassuring.

We lost a lot of good people this year. In March, Pat’s dad died. He had been in declining health for quite a while, but he had never made plans for that eventuality – he had never made any arrangements for his care in the event that he became incapacitated, or much of any other advance plans, other than making some extremely naïve assumptions about how things would work once he was gone. In this case, it was fortunate that Pat was “between jobs,” because if he had had a job, he would have lost it because of all the time he had to spend on his dad, both before he died and after.

For me, probably the most devastating event of the year was the loss of our dear sailing friend Marty Stevenson. On May 1, we were preparing to start a regatta when Marty went overboard from the boat that he was on. He was not wearing a life jacket. We were only a hundred yards away; many other boats were even closer. The Coast Guard Auxiliary was already on the lake, doing an exercise; they and the park rangers were on the spot within minutes. But Marty was gone. His body wasn’t found until three weeks later. Stand by for sermon: ALWAYS WEAR YOUR LIFE JACKET. ALWAYS. YOU MAY THINK YOU DON’T NEED IT. HOGWASH! IT’S BETTER TO HAVE IT AND NOT NEED IT THAN TO NEED IT AND NOT HAVE IT!

OK, stepping down from soapbox.

On to the next obligatory section of the holiday letter: accomplishments of the offspring. That area, too, has not been up to the typical Christmas-letter standards. Last year, the financial aid office repeatedly lost forms that had been filed showing that Gerald’s father was unemployed and that therefore Gerald was eligible for financial aid. Because of the bungling in the financial-aid office, Gerald was found in default of $11,000 tuition for the Fall 2009 term and therefore ineligible to enroll for the Spring 2010 term. We’re still trying to straighten out the records, but at least he was allowed to enroll and take classes in Fall 2010. Problem is, the financial aid office is still losing paperwork, and we’re now sending a barrage of faxes to replace the same forms that we’ve already filed that the office keeps losing, in order that he can enroll for Spring 2011.

On the upside, Gerald seems to have found some direction in his life. He’s discovered that he loves photography, and so that’s now his major. He does, however, recognize that photography is not necessarily something that pays the bills. He also loves nature and the outdoors. He has decided that he wants to become a park ranger, so he can work in a beautiful place and indulge in photography on his days off. Especially at the elite levels in such organizations as the National Park Service, rangers have to perform a wide variety of duties: law enforcement, emergency medical technician, resource management, interpretative services, archaeological preservation, and more. This summer, Gerald got his basic EMT training, so that’s a start on the park ranger track.

OK, now that I’m done bragging about the offspring, I’m supposed to talk about what the parental units are doing. Well, Pat has just stepped down as the commodore of the Rio Grande Sailing Club, and I think he’s glad to be rid of the burden. Pat and I both went to the US Sailing class in race management a month ago; Pat’s already certified as a Club Race Officer and is hoping to get certified as a Regional Race Officer; I hope to get certified at the club level, but I also passed the test for regional level, so if I get ambitious, I could also work on the resume component.

Meanwhile, I’m still teaching developmental English at Central New Mexico Community College. My job is to work with students who need to get their English skills up to the level at which they can do college-level work. On my darkest days, when I am most discouraged, it is my students who keep me going. I may feel like giving up, but then I realize, my students need me and I don’t want to let them down. And then when I come to class, one or another will say something, and it will cheer me up, and then the whole class session is happy. I have the very best students in the world. I am so lucky to have them.

Yeah, not exactly a conventional holiday letter. But then, my life hasn’t exactly been conventional lately.