How to beat the ads

My brown dress shoes didn’t quite survive the wedding we attended a few weeks ago. So, I’ve been glued to the computer, looking at new shoes.

I haven’t bought any. But the happy result is that now, all of my browser’s banner ads show pictures of elegant, brown, leather or faux-leather shoes. This is more pleasing to have in the background than the usual eye-popping fare.

It also has sparked an idea for making the web advertisements on one’s computer less painful to view – assuming, of course, that one’s ad-blocker doesn’t already keep everything out.

(1) One should choose something nice to look at.

(2) It has to be something one could buy (not, e.g., a fawn or Mt. Fuji).

But:

(3) It should be something that one has almost no desire to buy, so that it won’t distract one (much).

(4) Any specimen should look like any other.

(5) Corollary: the object should come in a standard color. And this color must be muted, not garish.

(6) Ideally, it should be a natural object. (Not a box of Brillo pads. Not a jug of laundry detergent. A transparent, full milk jug is better but not ideal; see, above, the third point.)

(This sixth point will be qualified later.)

(7) One should visit lots of merchant’s websites and click on pictures of the object. One should do this for several days.

(8) Voilà. This pleasant object, and nothing else, will appear where garish things once did.

I suggest looking at lots of merchant’s pictures of unadorned blue spruce Christmas trees. After a few days, your screen will be flanked by a lovely forest rather than by the Las Vegas Strip. If you can’t stomach anything to do with Christmas, browse cacti or cilantro or firewood instead. You get the idea.

Now I’ll qualify (6). You can get away with looking at artificial Christmas trees because they resemble the natural ones. Not all merchandise has this characteristic, however.

A sad realization for the boys

Out strolling, the boys didn’t want to go home just yet, so they begged to go to Kroger. “There isn’t much food there anymore,” I told them. (The store’s final closure is scheduled for this evening.)

They begged to go anyway.

So, we walked up and down the all-but-empty aisles. The boys were shocked. Samuel cried all the way home.

“I’ll only drink water now,” he said.

“Why, Sammy?”

“Because Kroger is closing forever.”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

A few remarks about my other sons, so as to be fair to all.

Daniel was treated to another solo outing (that is, without his brothers). Here he is at the zoo, with his Grandpa Scott. Notice how he’s leashed.

Abel has learned to scoot forward on his belly. When not impeded, he beelines for the cats’ plates. He overturns them and licks the pellet-food.

Today he seized the Trollope novel I was reading and tore its cover.

It was The Warden, which details the misdeeds of churchmen and reformers. A novel of enduring relevance.

I’d turned to it after reading Hatch’s Democratization of American Christianity (for the group).

(Jane Austen is a clergy critic, too.)

Of chainsaws

It’s Prime Day, Prime Day

Gotta get down on Prime Day

Karin bought herself a chainsaw. It arrived a few hours ago and I haven’t seen her since. I wonder what she’s doing with it, out in the yard (rumble, rumble).

I finished re-reading Out of the Silent Planet. I read from this handsome omnibus edition published by Scribner.

I have two complaints about this edition.

(1) The text isn’t always transcribed correctly:

• some paragraphs aren’t indented
• terminal possessive apostrophes are written with double quote marks, as in: suns” blood

This must have been due to a “find-and-replace” error.

(Earlier U.S. editions of OSP follow British convention. They use single quote marks to indicate dialog. Scribner must have decided to replace these marks with double quote marks.

Nothing wrong with that. But it seems to have been done in one fell swoop, sans proofreading.)

The error mars this three-book omnibus edition and various single-book editions of OSP issued by Scribner.

I don’t expect to find this problem in Scribner’s editions of Perelandra and That Hideous Strength. Earlier U.S. editions of those books, e.g. those of Macmillan and Collier, already USify the dialog, enclosing it within double quote marks.

(2) My second complaint is that the omnibus lacks the first thirty pages of Perelandra.

Maybe that’s just my copy. Probably not.

I noted, previously, that the baddie, Weston, is a longtermist. He thinks that humans’ most important task – which they should try to fulfill no matter how high the cost – is to colonize other planets before their own planet becomes uninhabitable and humankind dies out.

I wonder, did Elon Musk ever read Out of the Silent Planet?

Should we require all of our governmental officials to read it?

R.I.P. Western Avenue Kroger

STORE CLOSING

(A sign posted at our Kroger.)

Shoppers are invited to use the “neighboring” branch, seven miles away, on Ireland Road.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Nearer to us, at a distance of just one mile, is the much “Guccier” Martin’s Super Market. It shouldn’t be too miserable to walk to, after the heat dome has dissipated.

(I walked to Martin’s and back, in the heat, on Sunday; and when I got home, I promptly fell asleep.)

But I don’t think I’ll often stroll to Martin’s with the children – not even in good weather. We’d have to scurry over busy Mayflower Road.

There’s a crosswalk, but cars aren’t meant to halt there. They just slow down. And not every time.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I’ve almost finished reading Sense and Sensibility.

This is my favorite S&S cover painting. It adorns a Penguin Classic – but I’m reading from an old Modern Library omnibus.

A savage read!

Did you know that christianbook.com sells literary classics? (Only certain classics. Not, e.g., Sade or Céline. But still.)

I didn’t know, before today.

S&S is on sale now.

“NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE!”

Hot today, huh? I mowed this morning: it was only going to get hotter. I left ten percent unmowed. I felt like collapsing.

I lent the mower to our neighbor, and he mowed his lawn and felt like collapsing. When he returned the mower he told us about his recent excursions to Kroger. The security guard there embroiled himself in a dispute, and a half-dozen shoppers slipped away without paying. Another shopper loaded a hundred dollars’ worth of meat into his cart and fled without paying. Our favorite worker got fired for shoving someone in a dispute; he’ll get rehired, our neighbor expects. Our neighbor “almost got into it” with the butcher, then with the deli worker. Then he “almost got into it” with the worker who shelves the sleeves of bread (who’d nearly run him over in the parking lot). “Sounds like you need to chill out,” I told our neighbor. We like him, we get along great, but the better we know him, the more people he tells us he’s “almost gotten into it” with. He’s a chill guy, he assures us.

I worry that our Kroger will close down, because that’s something that happens to less-than-upscale supermarkets like ours. Please pray that it doesn’t close down. We love and need our Kroger.

Throw a kiss, Harry

Samuel’s first spring break. We didn’t go out of town, but we did take the boys to the local Bricks & Minifigs store. I’d never seen them more excited to be anywhere. It’s a pleasant store: clean; well-lighted; not overwhelmingly full of merchandise; inexpensive, as long as one can keep from going hog-wild.

The cashiers were a couple of sad-sacks. Not just bored: despondent.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The more time I spend with children, the more I marvel at the lifelikeness of Mary Chalmers’s Throw a Kiss, Harry.

Read it here. This is the bowdlerized version from the ’nineties. It’s the version familiar to our household.

The original version, from the ’fifties, is even truer to life: Harry’s mother casually threatens to spank him.

Whether they actually spank or not, parents’ll recognize how tempting (and gratifying) it is to threaten retribution.

Children are simultaneously so naughty and so adorable, so ornery and so affectionate. These are the truths that Throw a Kiss, Harry understands.

Inflation; remembering the Holocaust; I am a V.I.P.

Karin went to the grocery store. A man in the bread aisle turned to her.

Man: “It’s all so damn expensive!”

Karin: “It’s pretty bad.”

“This is my first time shopping in ten years!”

“It must be bad.”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

As I type, I am listening to a long phone message from the local superindentent of schools urging us all to think about the Holocaust. Appropriately, my mother-in-law just returned my copy of Maus. I’d lent it to her to read to her current foster son, a highschooler whose plan of care includes being read to. He’d been objecting, reasonably enough, to the children’s books my mother-in-law had been reading to him. I suggested Maus. He liked it at first but later refused to sit next to my mother-in-law to look at the pictures. “And it’s pointless to read a graphic novel to someone who won’t look at the pictures,” my mother-in-law explained.

Some future Holocaust reading (for me):

Our Nazi (reviewed here).

Diaries of Victor Klemperer (hat tip: my cousin-in-law Peter and his Facebook friends).

Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (this has been scheduled by my reading group).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Samuel chose me to accompany him to today’s “V.I.P. breakfast” at his school. The scholars ate fruit and cheese. The grownups had coffee and donuts. They sat at cafeteria tables with their children. I stood while Samuel ran laps around me. “Take me to your friends,” I told him. He’d guide me within five feet of this or that child. Then he’d laugh and run away. I couldn’t always tell whether the child was his classmate.

A few parents introduced themselves. “My child often talks about Sammy,” they’d say. Most parents just looked at us as if we were deranged.

One child (not acquainted with Samuel, apparently) had smuggled Lego bricks into the cafeteria. Samuel kept trying to run away to play with those toys. The mother covered the Lego bricks with a jacket. Samuel lifted the jacket to get to the Lego bricks. I dragged him to the picture-taking area. We posed with an inflatable donut. Samuel took me to his classroom. His teacher put him right to work, and I went home.

Behold him watching football, earlier this week, with his abuelos and his Grandaunt Linda (a rabid Chiefs fan).

A lifestyle change

A TikTok for the plus-sized. (Hat tip: Karin.)

This reaches deep into my psyche. I often dream that I’m searching the nooks of shopping malls for neglected fast food restaurants. (For more on shopping malls, see John Collier, “Evening Primrose.”)

🥨 🥨 🥨 🥨 🥨

The alluded-to lifestyle change is this: We’re placing our televisions under lock and key, away from our children.

’Bout time, I can hear you all murmuring.

No longer will I regularly watch TV with my wife, which I love to do. I’ll still view Hoopla and Kanopy and Tubi on my laptop. For special occasions (e.g., the World Cup), a television will be wheeled out for us all to view together.

The hoped-for gain is a reversal – or, at least, a slowing down – of our children’s barbarism. Daniel, especially, has been behaving like the titular character in the movie Bronson. This may be due to the arrival of his new brother, or it may be due to an excess of TV (or both). I’ll begin by trying to cut out TV.

Out, not down, because over time the safeguards have been eroded and the children’s dependency has become acute.

When Samuel was littler, I’d carefully restrict his viewing time. I believe what he viewed did him some good. He’d watch phonics videos; lo and behold, he learned to read. Other videos taught him countries, states, and capitals. A couple of years ago, he knew the names and nationalities of most of Brighton & Hove Albion’s soccer players – from viewing TV.

Then his preferences narrowed. He got hung up on the brands and models of motorcars, and then on Lego-building videos. Nothing wrong with those interests, but they crowded out the rest.

Daniel quickly learned the planets and dwarf planets … and, more than a year later, he still solemnly recites the planets and dwarf planets, and the numbers from one to ten. More than Samuel, he is drawn to purely sensory pleasure. Again: not bad in itself, but potentially limiting.

But much worse is how he behaves when he doesn’t get his “fix.” (Samuel, too.)

I hate to cut them off. Samuel has just gotten very interested in one of my childhood favorites, Captain Tsubasa (a.k.a. Supercampeones). (Or, to be precise, he is interested in its latest reboot, which has the same look and charm as the original.) He saves the show until night-time, along with certain snacks. Then he watches with utter emotional absorption. It’s as if he’s just now discovering TV as it’s meant to be consumed.

We feed our children

Another “dine-in” attempt – this time with Daniel and Samuel, at a Chinese buffet. It was a success. Buttery cabbage on buttery whitefish on buttery, spicy, sugary chicken, on buttery noodles, with dumplings. Daniel ate for free; Samuel’s rate was reduced; the boys mostly stayed in their chairs. You could see the calories rushing through their arteries and veins, draining away their consciousness.

Not the fetus’s, though. “ ‘Pip’ loves this food,” Karin said. “He’s dancing around.”

Daniel heard a very tiny baby crying in the restaurant. He smiled. “Meow, meow,” he said.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I’m sorry to admit, our sons have terrible eating habits. Daniel wakes up at 6:30 or 7:00 and begs for candy. (No, I don’t give him any.)

He may have finally turned a corner. He’s been asking for meals with more balance: today, peanut-buttered toast, strawberries, and Spanish rice.

Now that Karin is “in pig” (Nancy Mitford’s phrase), our WIC allowance has been raised: At the end of each month, we realize we haven’t claimed anything like our full share of vegetables. So, half-panicked, we go to the store and pick out avocados and other “costly” free items. This month it was dragon fruit, from Ecuador. I wondered if any of the fruit we looked at was descended, nearly or distantly, from Hoku’s parents’ farm.

August’s poem

What with “back to school” sales, Karin & I had a look inside T.J. Maxx. It was my first visit in a decade or so. Prices seemed conspicuously higher, and I was surprised to see so many fashionistas combing through the goods. The air was downright rarefied. The merchandise, as before, was not.

But I must give credit where it’s due. When one buys children’s “board” books, T.J. Maxx should be among one’s first stops. There were lots of marked-down copies of Corduroy – an appropriate ware, since that story is set in what appears to be the T.J. Maxx of its day.

Here is some store-art that tempted us.

Which brings me to this month’s poem, T. S. Eliot’s “The Naming of Cats”:

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,

It isn’t just one of your holiday games;

You may think at first I’m as mad as a hatter

When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.

First of all, there’s the name that the family use daily,

Such as Peter, Augustus, Alonzo, or James,

Such as Victor or Jonathan, George or Bill Bailey –

All of them sensible everyday names.

There are fancier names if you think they sound sweeter,

Some for the gentlemen, some for the dames:

Such as Plato, Admetus, Electra, Demeter –

But all of them sensible everyday names.

But I tell you, a cat needs a name that’s particular,

A name that’s peculiar, and more dignified,

Else how can he keep up his tail perpendicular,

Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride?

Of names of this kind, I can give you a quorum,

Such as Munkustrap, Quaxo, or Coricopat,

Such as Bombalurina, or else Jellylorum –

Names that never belong to more than one cat.

But above and beyond there’s still one name left over,

And that is the name that you never will guess;

The name that no human research can discover –

But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.

When you notice a cat in profound meditation,

The reason, I tell you, is always the same:

His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation

Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:

His ineffable effable

Effanineffable

Deep and inscrutable singular name.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Shopping

My Google Chromebook – cracked and dented after two years of harsh treatment (Samuel would use it as a stepping-stool, Daniel as an anvil/discus) – gave up its ghost yesterday, so I am blogging with my phone.

We trekked to Best Buy last night. The children gaped at the huge TVs. The computer salesman, who was urging an older couple to buy a higher-end device, may or may not have noticed us hovering (we were in his section some thirty minutes).

I cornered a worker from a different department. Sorry, he’s the only computer guy, he told me.

Amazing, I remarked to Karin as we left the store.

It’s been that way since COVID, she said.

Oh, dear.

I bought a refurbished machine through Amazon. It should arrive on Friday. Suppliers of refurbished Chromebooks receive very low ratings. The company I bought from has an approval rating of 88% – extremely high.

I don’t know how troubling this ought to be. A lot of “one star” raters complain, misguidedly, that they can’t install a Windows OS. How do you take off the Google, they ask.

One fellow quoted fire-and-brimstone verses, concluding: Vengeance is mine, saith the LORD.

Drafting today’s entry longhand before I tap it out may benefit the prose. Or not. Samuel is fascinated; never has he seen such long blocks of handwriting. He stares at the paper, draping himself over me, pinning down my limbs.

Daniel, who has removed his pants and diaper, races through the house.

Dress-up

Twenty-five days before Halloween and, already, we’re in the thick of it. Karin found a Where’s Waldo? outfit at Goodwill; Samuel wore it most of the day.

The costume got him lots of compliments on the street – drivers were queueing up to smile at him and to respect his right-of-way – and at the library. One of the librarians carried a Waldo book over to Samuel. While I was occupied at the checkout machine, Samuel sneaked into the back offices (he also performed this trick last week), but he was so cute, the branch manager scolded him just a little.

Karin bought Daniel a full-body outfit of a skunk (one of his “spirit animals”). He hasn’t tried it on yet, but he’s been dragging it around the house. My parents, zealous Goodwillers, bought Daniel a Superman disguise that would look swell on him were it not a costume for doggies.

Here’s a video of Daniel resisting bedtime.

Recreation and parks

John-Paul: “Karin, what should I blog about?”

Karin: “How good Howard Park is.”

It is good. It has a splash pad, a large playground, an ice-skating rink (in wintertime), valleys, hills, and a view of the river. It was redeveloped a few years ago, but we only recently began taking the boys there.

It’s also next to a trendy restaurant with loud live music. Acoustic covers of Savage Garden: that sort of thing. Alas.

The other day, we took the boys up a hill next to the park and across a footbridge to look out over the river. There were homeless people on the other side, resting. One guy – the coolest-looking one – lifted up his palm as if to say: Hey, man.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Another time, we went to a rather desolate park closer to our house. It borders a desolate apartment complex.

We were the only people there until an SUV pulled up and a little Hispanic boy got out. His mother (I assume that’s who she was) stayed in the SUV. The little boy played by himself. I was pushing Daniel on a swing. The little boy walked over and gestured as if he wanted me to lift him onto a swing. I peered over toward the mother. She wasn’t visible; the SUV was behind some play equipment. I lifted the boy onto the swing. He sat forlornly. He couldn’t get going. After a while, I pushed him and he swung for a bit. Then I helped him off and he went back to the SUV. It drove away.

Then some youths ambled over and asked Karin for dollars to buy sodas. She gave them some. She’s soft that way.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

We all walked to Kroger today (that, too, is recreation) and, while we were in the checkout line, a pretty, young, Black woman with classic basketball shoes opened her box of Outshine popsicles and gave one to each of her children and one to Samuel. Then, as she was leaving, she noticed Daniel. I didn’t know you had two children, she said. She went out to the parking lot, came back inside (we were still checking out), bought another box of popsicles, and gave one popsicle to Daniel.

Karin’s quiet birthday; a mermaid; return to Puffin Rock

Happy birthday to Karin: treasured wife, adored mother, possessor of immeasurable intrinsic value. Witty, dreamy, pretty, kind.

Somehow, Etsy knows that it’s Karin’s birthday and that I’m married to her.

Here, have some ads in your email.

Thanks, Etsy.

Curiously, a lot of the ads have to do with the Zodiac. But the ads don’t seem to know what Karin’s sign is. I don’t think she’s one for embroideries and wall hangings of Scorpio the scorpion.

It’s not that she doesn’t appreciate kitsch. She bought me this skeleton of a mermaid, for the Halloween season.

Tonight, we watched the final episode of Cat Hospital, and then Karin put on Puffin Rock for Samuel (and for the rest of us; we needed a change from Samuel’s YouTube videos). It’s been many months since Samuel watched this show, which used to be his favorite. He seems to have forgotten a lot of it. He resisted it at first, but now he’s deeply invested in the story. He supplies a running commentary.

Oona is so bad!

No, Sammy, Oona is good.

Oona is good. Mossy is so bad!

No, he’s just silly. And hungry.

Mossy is so silly!

Yes.

So, this bodes well. Lately, he’s been downright distressed when we’ve played his old shows or read his old books. He seems to have intense, nostalgic, none-too-happy reactions to things from his past.

But we need him to come to terms with the past, because soon it’ll be time for Daniel to be exposed to these shows and books.

Last night, I went out to buy milk; when I returned, Daniel had learned to raise himself into a sitting position. Since then, he has been practicing sitting up, and tipping himself over onto the floor. Thunk! His poor little head!

When in doubt

Thank you for your concern. We feel less sick – or I do, most of the time, once I’ve swallowed my medicine.

Karin says: You can tell them I have a lingering cough.

The last couple of days, I’ve pushed Samuel and Daniel around the neighborhood in their two-seated stroller, vigorously enough to give myself blisters. The afternoon goes more smoothly if I’ve taken the boys outside. Best case: they soon fall asleep.

A lot of parenting is just running out the clock.

I took them to the store today to buy more diapers. I’d forgotten Samuel’s diaper size, so I unstrapped him from the stroller, deftly pulled his pants down, and looked at his diaper. He thought it was very funny.

I congratulated myself for having raised such a good-humored and uninhibited child.

Then, I looked at the diapers on the store shelf and noticed that they’re categorized by the child’s weight. I needn’t have found out what his “size” is. (Even now, I don’t remember it.)

A weed is a plant out of place

Karin got one of her largest paychecks of the year and went “hog wild” – literally – buying such a huge hunk of “clearance” pork that I had to lug it through the house for her.

Said she: “I’ll ask Scott” – her new stepfather – “to smoke it for us.”

Nothing doing. Karin’s mom & Scott moved into a new house this weekend. They no longer have access to their smoker.

I’m all for putting the pork into various slow cookers and then shredding it and eating it with homemade “Alabama” sauce.

(See, I am become a middle-aged man who talks about his meats.)

By the end of the week, we should have the picnic table that I ordered through Facebook Marketplace. I’ve been fond of picnic tables since I was in high school. I and my dorm-mates used to enjoy suppers out of doors.

Karin & I tend to pursue our respective “home improvement” ideas independently of one another. Her ambition for the back yard, tonight, was to pull out weeds that no one sees. This was complicated by her confusion as to what is and what isn’t a weed. I told her about a passage in Jim Thompson that I read not long ago, in which Lou Ford’s defense lawyer tells him a definition that comes “right out of the agronomy books”:

“A weed is a plant out of place.” I find a hollyhock in my cornfield, and it’s a weed. I find it in my yard, and it’s a flower. … You’re in my garden, Mr. Ford.

I’ve been revisiting the nineties’ contextualist epistemologists, whom I briefly studied many years ago, in order to read the aughts’ “pragmatic encroachment” epistemologists (whose work I was downright oblivious to at the time). Keith DeRose, in a recent collection of old and new essays, is apologetic because his “Solving the Skeptical Problem” is such a long paper. David Lewis ends his famous paper, “Elusive Knowledge,” by saying that although he could have written it longer, and nearer to the truth, that wouldn’t have been in anyone’s interest. His paper displays a certain amount of formalism thrown about informally, together with casual references to guys named Fred and Donald in the vicinity of San Francisco, in service of a view with Chestertonian paradoxicality. An insider’s paper: important, but surely a pain to teach. A paper with weed-like qualities in just about any home garden.

An anniversary outing

Happy wedding anniversary to Karin & me – our sixth. My Aunt Ruth and her husband, my Uncle Tim, visited from Spain; they looked after Daniel and Samuel so that Karin & I could go on a little date. We went to Kroger and Goodwill. Because of the latest COVID surge, we got takeout instead of eating in a restaurant. We would’ve eaten at a park, but today was rainy. We took our food home and ate it in front of our guests and sons.

Uncle Tim liked Samuel’s murals (wall scrawlings). He kept talking about the pictures he saw in them. (Whenever he looks at a Rorschach test, he immediately sees dozens of pictures, I gather.) He wanted to take Samuel’s crayons and draw his own embellishments upon the murals, but we wouldn’t allow him to; Samuel can do with less encouragement.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I’m reading The Premonition, Michael Lewis’s COVID book, another of his tales of “mavericks” outperforming “experts” by looking at statistics and ignoring red herrings, social pressures, etc. The previous book I read by Lewis, The Fifth Risk, was about how the government keeps disaster at bay. The Premonition, so far, is about how it’s a wonder that the government prevents disaster at all, so unbudgeable is its bureaucracy. If a few brave statisticians didn’t do their statistics in obscurity, on their own time, in defiance of CDC orthodoxy, the country would crumble to pieces. The book has a couple of nice stories about George W. Bush and Barack Obama. In the mid-2000s, Bush read John M. Barry’s history of the flu pandemic of 1918, decided the country needed to prepare for another pandemic, and set wheels turning which generated a containment strategy. Then, in 2009, a swine flu was detected in Mexico, California, and Texas.

What’s the worst case? asked the new president [Obama].

Nineteen eighteen, said Carter [Obama’s lone holdover from Bush’s pandemic containment team].

What happened then? asked Obama.

Thirty percent of the population was infected, and two percent died, said Carter. In the current situation, you’d be looking at two million dead.

Bush was a terrible president, but I’m grateful that he read books.

Pre-sleep

My wife keeps accusing me of going to sleep while I write this entry. I am not sleeping, I tell her. I am just resting my eyes while I think how to make this entry brief.

We did some Christmas shopping at the mall tonight. Not brilliant of us, I know. The place was crowded with mask disdainers.

What with our still-recent bouts of illness, we would have been immune to most everything but the Omicron variant. Here’s to hoping we didn’t catch that.

A bedtime biography that Samuel enjoys:

María Isabel Sánchez Vegara, Agatha Christie.

This is quite the series. It has books about everyone from Ernest Shackleton to Emmeline Pankhurst to Ayrton Senna. Want to make sure your child grows up loving the right pop figures? Gandhi, Prince, and Bob Dylan, for instance? Read him their biographies (and play him their records, if you dare).

Holiday woes

You’d think that, during the holidays, I’d have found time to watch High Hopes. Alas, no. So far, my holidays have been as congested as my job days.

Today was the least taxing day in recent memory. Even so, I kept having to get in and out of the car. Karin & I traveled to:

(a) the doctor, for the removal of Karin’s stitches;

(b) the barber, for my haircut;

(c) Karin’s friends’ new house, for a tour; and

(d) Goodwill, for no good reason.

Yesterday, we drove to Michigan to go to church with Karin’s family members. They never showed up. It turned out, they’d gone to church in Indiana.

We were reunited with them at night. After the meal and the gift-giving, they asked us to stay for a quick game of Phase 10. This game did not end until three hours later. Phase 10 is supposed to be brief, like Uno or Skip-Bo, but last night it was more like Monopoly.

Between each hand of Phase 10, I loaded up a new plateful of crackers, cheese, and Christmas ham, in keeping with the seasonal gluttony. … Karin also has eaten a great deal these last few days. She has shattered her personal record of fatness. Today she began to address this plight. At Goodwill she bought a vinyl record of aerobics music, and, right now, she is marching in place while she watches the TV show My 600-lb Life.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

R.I.P. Carlos Muñoz. It’s the twenty-third anniversary of his death. I never will look much like “El Frentón,” and so today I decided to dress like Julio César Rosero, “El Emperador.”

En route to Aldi

“Mary, writing so much philosophy is distracting me from reading philosophy, which is distracting me from reading novels, which is distracting me from reading short stories.”

“Maybe it would help to distract you if I were to put on some more TV.”

¡PLOP!