The Battle of Hoth 2021

 

 

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.

Some Pretty Horses

 

 

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. 

Not a lot...

 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.

The Books I Read in 2020

 

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)

My Top Ten Songs of the Pandemic

 

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

Birds Don't Sing by TV Girl

Excuses by The Morning Benders

Only in My Double Mind by Centro-Mastic

Be Okay by Ellen Once Again

Dream Girl by Anna of the North

Lorelai by Fleet Foxes

January Hymn by The Decemberists

Living in a Ghost Town by The Rolling Stones

 

Election Day

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.

Eye on the Ball

 

 

Another Saturday, another UTR tennis event. My son is really enjoying playing in these. And we are having fun with them. They are well run. The parents haven't been crazy...so far. It's been nice and relaxing and it hasn't taken all day...yet. Tennis has become one of my son's passions and I'm glad for it. He enjoyed playing soccer, baseball and basketball. He really liked basketball. But tennis, he's passionate about. And it's been fun playing against him and watching him play. 

Mask Up

 

Statues

I work in a town that still has a confederate statue standing in front of its county courthouse. It's an embarrassment. The reality is there are a lot of ignorant rednecks and racists who live in this county who protest angrily any time someone even suggests the statue come down. They threaten violence. The politicians often are cowed by their vitroil. 

Here is an excellent article from the Kaufman Herald about this racist history of the statue. Ironic because even the Kaufman Herald has this soldier in their masthead. 

http://www.kaufmanherald.com/around_town/article_7fffb15c-fc2a-11ea-acc0-b7518ddd1102.html

Terracotta

I can't get enough history documentaries. I really like this one about the Terracotta Soldiers of Qin Shinhuangdi. The discovery of thousands of soldiers in 1974 is one of the greatest archeological finds in modern history. This led to the discovery of Shinhuangdi's tomb who was the first emperor to unify China. He was a cruel leader and only a hard authoritarian would make a tomb of such spectacular size and scope. The tomb has never been opened because of the possibility that doing so would destroy precious artifacts within. It's a great story.

First Day of Fall

This year, the weather in Texas has been appropriate to the beginning of the Fall Season. It's cool and rainy. I find it so refreshing after a long hot summer. August is almost unbearable in Texas. 

Unfortunately, one of my favorite traditions that marked the changing of the season is no more. Live From Here with Chris Thile always began in the fall. The show was a harbinger of cooler temps, leaves changing color then falling and shorter days. Due to the pandemic, Minnesota Public Radio could no longer afford to produce the show. So, the show was canceled. Jackson and I greatly enjoyed LFH and we even went to see the show when they traveled to Austin a few years ago. They even played one of my song requests and mentioned my name on the show in a memorable episode. 

I am glad for Autumn. But I am a bit nostalgic for Live From Here helping usher in the season. 

New Finds of Old Stuff

I'm embarrassed to say, as someone who likes to think of themselves as a jazz aficionado, that I did not discover Erroll Garner's Concert by the Sea until 2004...when I was in my thirties. An older gentleman, who was subbing at the high school where I was teaching at the time suggested it. I had vaguely heard of Erroll Garner but was not familiar with this album. I was shocked to find that it was a huge seller. Released in 1955 it had sold over a million copies by 1958. 

The story behind this "accidental" masterpiece is a story in of itself. The concert was scheduled at the last minute and held in a concert hall in Carmel-By-The-Sea, California. It was not meant to be recorded for an album. It was recorded almost by accident. Garner's manager took the tape to Columbia Records who released it despite the sub-par recording quality. 

Errol Garner's playing was so spectacular it made up for any sound engineering deficiencies. Modern technology has done a decent job of improving the sound. The bassist and drums now are clearer than ever. Garner's mastery of the piano is so great it sounds like three pianists playing, not one. It is an amazing album.  

That's one of the things I love about music, regardless of genre. There's always greatness to be discovered. There's always amazing albums hiding, some in plain sight. I find this particularly true with my experience in jazz. I've been listening to jazz for over thirty years but I still "discover" brilliant stuff all the time. This year I "discovered" jazz guitarist Grant Green. How did I miss this guy? His Blue Note recordings are fantastic. 

The same is true for genres of all kinds. I love finding "new" stuff from years ago.

UTR

 

 

Jackson had his first UTR (Universal Tennis Rating) Tournament of the season this past Saturday in Rockwall, Texas. He did well. He won his first match then dropped his second match to a high school girl. But he played well and he enjoyed playing competitive tennis again. 

 

It was a beautiful day for tennis. 64 degrees at first serve. We have signed him up for several UTR Tournaments since KISD has the ridiculous and vindictive policy of not allowing any student who opted for At-Home Learning at any point in the school year to play sports for the entire year. Rumor is they may be re-thinking that policy but I'm not holding out any hope.

 

I'm just glad Jackson plays a sport that gives us options out side of school competitions. He had a lot of fun at this first tournament of the year. 

At Home Learning

I took the day off today to see how my kid's At-Home Learning was going. Due to the amount of Covid cases in our county we elected to have our kids start the school year with the Remote Learning option offered by our school district. As a teacher I had a first hand view of how chaotic the beginning of the school year was going to be. I wanted my son and daughter to avoid that chaos and start at home until hopefully the chaos would settle down. 

The year did indeed start out chaotically and I'm glad we made this choice. Our school district did make it tough for people to choose at-home learning. If a student chose at-home learning they are prohibited from participating in athletics the rest of the year. 

Fortunately my Mom and Mother-in-Law, both retired teachers, were willing to facilitate the online learning for our kids. They alternate days coming to our house to supervise their progress.

The year has settled into a rhythm and now we will soon have to decide if the kids return to campus for the second quarter or continue with virtual learning. Despite numerous class re-locations, a few quarantines and a few positive cases, for the most part the year has hit a groove. Of course, that could change in a minute. That's the mantra for the year: expect the unexpected.

Shields

 

I'm thinking of going as Andy Reid's face shield for Halloween.

New Mask Monday

 

 

Yesterday was New Mask Monday. My Weezer mask finally came in two months late. =w=

Symmetry

 

Symmetry 

A Longer Rainbow

 

When I finished Ulysses, I began tackling Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. Back in May, I predicted I would be finished by October 8, 2020. Ha. How naive I was. I won't be close to finishing by October. As of today I'm on page 448. I have 328 pages left to go! 

My routine, much like how I tackled the beast of Ulysses, is to read about 4 pages a day. So that means I have at least 82 days to go. So that would be around November 23rd...just in time for Thanksgiving Break. And that's if I don't get off pace. 

The prose of GR is dense. There's over 400 characters that come in and out of the narrative. There's numerous digressions that go down bewildering rabbit holes. I don't understand much of what I read. But I understand more of it than I did of Ulysses. And I am enjoying it more. I do find it fascinating at time. At other times...frustrating. 

I like this new model: reading a notoriously long and difficult classic a little at a time. This allows me to read other books for enjoyment at the same time. I'm also currently reading Utopia Avenue, David Mitchell's newest book. I also started re-reading Love Wins by Rob Bell.

Reading a tough work a little at time helps me not to become overwhelmed and overly frustrated. When I'm in the middle of a particularly dense section I know that I don't have much to get through if I'm only reading four pages. If a passage is particularly enjoyable I can wander past the four page mark at my leisure. 

I think I already have my next tough work in line after Gravity's Rainbow. I think I'm going to give Swann's Way by Proust a shot. I've read portions of Remembrance of Things Past but never done the deep dive of going all the way in. I have a copy of Swann's Way that I bought at the same library book sale where I procured GR. So that will be next.

Onward to November 23rd! 

Old Tech

 

I like old tech. This Royal Typewriter was my grandfather's. I've now inherited two of his former typewriters. I'm displaying them in my classroom as decorations. My students want to know where the screens are. Also, they don't seem to have wires with which to plug into the wall. 

Focus

 

Ava has been involved with Tae Kwon Do for the past six months or so. Even when interrupted by a four month shutdown she still participated via Zoom. She recently received her yellow belt. She really has taken to it although she sometimes doesn't enjoy it. It's hard work but it has given her a lot of confidence. It has been great for her physical fitness. The move to yellow belt really accelerated her level of confidence.