Once again this past June, the AP World History Grading was virtual due to Covid fears. It has been announced that we are indeed meeting back in person in Kansas City for June 2022. But we thought that about 2021 as well so we will have to wait and see.
Well, I wasn't planning on hibernating from blogging for eight months. This is the longest I've gone without publishing on here since I started this thing in 2006. The sabbatical was unintentional and I'm not even sure why I paused for so long.
Guess I should spend the rest of this blog-year catching up. Even though I'm pretty sure no one reads my posts it makes me happy to publish. I find it cathartic. I shouldn't have allowed myself to lapse. May try to catch up a bit. So here's some shots from last Mother's Day as we got breakfast at Snooze A.M. in Oak Lawn...
The other day was a good day to take the T-Tops off the Jeep and roll under the blue sky.
This guy likes to steal bird seed from the bird feeder on our tree in the backyard. And if we forget to fill the feeder, he knows that the food is on our porch.
When you're trying to find a particular camera setting and your daughter comes over to help (because she doesn't think you know what you're doing) and you accidentally take a photo.
Tough whenever I have to visit Baylor Hospital in Dallas. This was where my Dad passed away. Tough memories when I walk around this place.
My daughter did not want to pose by the jeeps after Taekwondo. We always take a pic when a jeep parks by ours. But she did it because she's a good sport!
Jackson had a virtual robotics tournament Saturday. I thought playing Styx's Mr. Roboto was perfect for the drive to the school. Apparently not. Update: They qualified for the Regional Championship!
Got my second shot of the Moderna Covid Vaccine yesterday. I am very glad I got this out of the way. 24 hours later and I am fatigued and a bit light-headed but nothing I can't push through. I've taught in my classroom feeling much worse. Let's get this country vaccinated!
There were a lot of interlocking trails to choose from. We were only able try a few. They were very well marked. Much better marked than most hiking trails we've been on. I do think they need more signs warning hikers of their difficulty. We were fine trying anything, but we saw some other hikers about to enter a trail that we just left that didn't seem prepared for what they were about to face. There were plenty of trails of various difficulty.
Over Spring Break we made a quick day trip to Waco, Texas. We stopped at the Waco Mammoth National Monument. In 1978 some hikers came across some interesting looking bones coming out of the bottom of a creek bed. So they called over some experts from nearby Baylor University. It turns out they had found an amazing discovery of fossils.
Apparently, around 70,000 years ago, 19 Colombian Mammoths got stuck in a flash flood event and died en masse in that creek. Other fossils have been found in the area including those of a sabre tooth cat and a pre-historic camel. Paleontologists eventually built a permanent climate controlled building over the site to allow for continued excavating in a protected environment. President Obama would later designate the site a National Monument.
One of my favorite things to do is to head to the Half Price Bookstore "mothership" location north of downtown Dallas and spend some gift card money. I got to do just that last week on my birthday. My family was very patient and allowed me to browse at leisure.
The first place I head to is the clearance section. There's always treasure back there, classics for $2. I then systematically work my way through the store. It's a massive bookstore and can be overwhelming if you don't come in with a plan. I always have a list of authors or books that I'm looking for. But I also leave some time just to wander and browse.
I came away with seven books this visit. This should satisfy my reading requirements for the next several months. Here's what I came away with...
I drink two cups of Green Tea every day. I have blogged about my love of Green Tea. But when I reached for the box this week at the store it coincided with what I was teaching that day in my classes. Whole wars have been fought over this stuff. This week my class studied (among other things) The Opium Wars when the British began importing opium into China to trade for Green Tea because the Qing Dynasty only accepted silver for payment. The British didn't have silver but they had lots of opium from their poppy harvests in Afghanistan. So the Brits decided to try trading in opium rather than silver. When the Qing tried to shut down the opium trade after millions of Chinese citizens became addicts, the British declared war and won so they could continue the drug trade. Oh, and all this controversy today in Hong Kong is directly related to this war. History never stops giving gifts.
My son, newly teen-aged, is big into exotic cars. He's got posters of them on the walls of his room and he likes to play Forza, an X-Box game that allows him to drive pretty much any car he wants. Reminds me of myself at that age. Not sure what it is about young adolescents and supercars. I had this Alpine Stereo Lamborghini poster hanging in my room growing up for years. I don't know what happened to that poster. Maybe it's in the attic. When I did a google image search for it, it came right up and brought with it a lot of memories of yore.
Finally got my first shot of the Moderna Covid Vaccine. Despite being a teacher I was not on any priority lists. I had registered but never received the call. But then on March 2 our tool of a governor announced that he was declaring Texas 100% open. He was opening all businesses to full capacity and removing the mask mandate. Of course he did this on Texas Independence Day. And he did it at a Mexican restaurant.
This announcement came out of the blue. Everyone was shocked. It just didn't make any sort of medical sense. Texas currently ranks 48th in the U.S. in percentage of population vaccinated. Why would Abbott do this now? Well, it soon became transparently obvious. Abbott is trying desperately to deflect attention from his terrible job in handling our electrical grid during the Ice Storm two weeks ago.
Such a political move is cynical even by modern standards of political malfeasance. This decision went against the advice of all medical experts. But it mollified his radical base as he's getting ready for a run for re-election next year.
With the creeping realization that the masks may soon be coming off I realized I need a vaccine and I needed it quick. When I got home at 4:45 pm I checked my school email for some odd reason. And there was an email from our school superintendent saying that the county's vaccine hub had some extra doses if you could get there by 5:00 pm. I live about 15 minutes from the hub and I immediately drove like Batman to get there. I made it to the Vaccine Hub by 5:01 but they still had some doses and I got my shot with no hassle.
Whew. What a relief. Now I have to wait until the end of the month for the second shot. I called my Mom and she and my sister got their shot the next day at the same hub. My wife also went during her lunch break the next day and got her shot. All a relief.
Then last night our superintendent emailed that the governor had put teachers on the priority list for vaccines and they were trying to arrange for an employee vaccine event after Spring Break. But it's a lie. Abbott did not put us on the priority list. The Federal Government changed their rules at the direction of President Biden to put teachers higher up on the list. Biden, not Abbott. Geez, these crazy Texas Republicans won't give Biden credit for anything. They'd rather give it to the guy who did nothing to help Texas prepare for a terrible Ice Storm and then never cared to put teachers on the vaccine list.
Well, at least I got my first shot.
This is my Outdoor Peloton.
About 45 minutes after this photo was taken I ran over a tiny piece of brown glass that burst my rear tire. Some jackwagon had thrown his beer bottle on the road and man my tire blew fast, faster than ever before. I heard a pop and a loud hissing and within 30 seconds my tire was completely flat. Usually flats don't go that dramatically or that quickly. So I had to walk the bike the last mile home. At least I made it before the rains hit.
Broke out the City Light's Bookstore t-shirt today in honor of the great beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, founder of the legendary bookshop, who passed away this week at age 101. RIP LF. A legendary poet and purveyor of literature. He will be missed.
Just finished The Places in Between by Rory Stewart. This was the third time I've read this excellent book about Stewart's walk across Afghanistan two months after the Taliban fell. The cultural interactions are fascinating. Also, perspective is key. Afghani villagers often suffer through sub zero degree winters in mud walled buildings with no electricity, little heat and little food. Extreme violence is always lurking. Reading this during a Texas Winter Storm encouraged self-reflection. Now I'm focused on The Ministry For The Future by Kim Stanley Robinson which is blowing my mind.
Back to work today after a week off due to The Great Winter Storm of 2021. It wasn't the snow or ice that was especially devastating. Rather, it was the sub zero temperatures that wreaked havoc on Texas infrastructure. I've lived in Texas for 24 years and had never seen it so cold. Below zero temps are an extreme rarity in this part of the country.
The Texas electrical grid couldn't handle it. My Mom's house lost power and was dark for over 36 hours. I drove out on the terrible roads to pick my Mom and Sister up so they could stay at our house which amazingly never lost power. The Jeep made traveling these roads possible.
This grid failure exposed the fallacies of energy privatization and the greed of un-regulated capitalism. All the loss of power was entirely preventable. The grid was supposed to be winterized after our last big storm in 2011. But nothing was done. Now our Republican government officials try to cast blame elsewhere, unless they're too busy fleeing to Cancun to ride out the storm while their constituents literally in some cases freeze to death. But the Republicans have been governing Texas for 30 years. There's no one else to blame.
My family was lucky. We never lost power or water. We live next to a police and fire station so our neighborhood was not subject to the rolling blackouts.We had stocked up on groceries right before the storm. I had cleared out the mud and dirt around our water meter and had the water key ready in case we needed to shut down the water. I had gassed up both vehicles. We had winterized as much as we could. We had collected water in coolers and water bottles.
We had one pipe that led to the kitchen sink freeze up but we caught it early. I was able to put a small space heater, borrowed from my Mom, under the sink next to the wall which de-thawed the pipe before it burst. That little space heater saved us from a real hassle and expense. My kids got to spend quality time with their Grandmother and Aunt. We had a vehicle that could travel on horrible road conditions. We were lucky. Others were not.
A couple of weeks ago I finished Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses. The book is well known and is considered one of the great works of modern American literature. It won the National Book Award in 1992 and a big Hollywood movie adaptation with Matt Damon was made. I picked it up months back on the clearance shelf at Half Price Books for two bucks. What an excellent steal.
All the Pretty Horses is grand and epic although that kind of sneaks up on you. McCarthy lets the scenery slowly engulf you and the book becomes much like one of the epic poems of old. It was another one of those rare books that once done, I just had to sit in my easy chair and exhale.
I greatly enjoyed it. I live in Texas, but the 1940's west Texas described seemed almost as foreign and exotic to me as central Afghanistan. Mexico seemed a different world. This was a nice, powerful read.
So right now I'm reading a couple of books. I'm still plowing through Marcel Proust's Swann's Way in my long form way of reading four pages a day. I hope to be done with Proust by April at this pace. I'm also re-reading Rory Stewart's The Places in Between (hence the Afghanistan reference earlier). I'm also Kindling Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future. I'm sure I'll ruminate on those here down the road.
i know i haven't posted much here lately. maybe i'm just lazy. i can't even bring myself to properly punctuate these sentences. i'm not really depressed or anything. it does make me sad that one of my few committed readers, my Grandfather, died a year ago. hard to get motivated. i will try to do better. not that it really matters all that much. thanks for reading.
Well, 2021 has started with a bang. Trump incites an insurrection against the U.S. Capitol and gets impeached again with just a few days left in his term. Ah, 2020...the good old bad days. Anyway, here is the list of books I read in 2020. I should have read more but my eyes wander to the screen. Really need to work on that.
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
What Am I Doing Here by Bruce Chatwin
The Plague by Albert Camus
Ulysses by James Joyce (391 days to read)
Left Bank by Agnes Poirer
Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart
Polaroids From the Dead by Douglas Coupland
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights by Salman Rushdie
How To Be Here by Rob Bell
Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell
The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac
The Captain and the Glory by Dave Eggers
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (291 days to read)
I like to think I'm on top of things culturally. But most often I'm not, not even close. Sometimes I hear a great song on the radio that sounds fresh, new and...it turns out to be a ten year old recording. And I'm like, where was I in 2010 when this song came out that I missed such a great tune? You can justify missing it if it's an obscure song or deep track. But sometimes these artists or songs I "discover" have a decently sized fan base and the song was indeed out there on the radio. This happens to me all the time.
Anyway, here are some songs that blew me away in 2020. Some are songs actually recorded in the past year or so. Others have been around a long time and I only came to them (or they came to me) in 2020. And one (January Hymn), I had heard but never paid much attention to. Either way, these are my Top Ten Pandemic Songs. These are the songs that really captured my attention this year. Forgive me if I was behind on some of these!
Heaven's Nail and Hammer by M Ward
Dream Sea (Sheila's Dream version) by Brazzaville
Excuses by The Morning Benders
Only in My Double Mind by Centro-Mastic
Dream Girl by Anna of the North
January Hymn by The Decemberists
Living in a Ghost Town by The Rolling Stones
A thousand mile journey begins with one step. Getting rid of Trump would be an important first step. However, I feel that win or lose, he's caused great generational harm that will take decades to subside. He gave many people the permission to unleash their inner demons into the world. It's really hard to put the devil back into the hole. Many evangelicals have lost moral credibility forever. Evangelicals who supported Trump never have the right to talk about moral character in the future. But they will, of course and that blatant hypocrisy will further alienate anyone with a shred of decency.
